Carl Puppchen

As to the point that using casualties adds spice, why not go all the way and use "random" for the selections. Now that adds a lot of spice

I would not only beware the jabos but also heavy artillery. The amis have lots of heavy artillery and if your tanks are bunched up 105 and 155mm guns can definitely ruin your day, not to mention naval gunfire. You need to spread out and not lump your assets together or all can die at once as you mention.

I can't speak for Jason C but these translate nicely into CMAK in the time frames listed. An early war listing would be great, especially for desert CMAK! Also the Italians! There is a whole thread on the early war CMBB under the general concept of how to deal with the 1941 T-34 and KV tanks since the German armor is relatively impotent in comparison.

I have been playing it and on battle 4 with no problems... it doesn't seem to be too much of a CPU hog either, not like the Tobruk Easter battles or something like that.

Agreed on theory vs practice. I get sloppier when I am playing with the tanks compared to the Marders. You have to be on your toes with the weak armored open topped vehicles. Sometimes we play late Friday / Saturday night tcp/ip after a few brews and it is SO hard to be patient with your vehicles... Unfortunately vs my standard human opponent of about equal skills I have NOT been doing well at all with Marders or Nashorns. They are just so SLOW to turn compared to turrets and at night / close range they are at a severe disadvantage. Every so often just to get even I take a Tiger or Panther and just clean up the joint, because you can just plop them up in a place with good LOS and start brewing up everything in site. But I do that very rarely because you don't learn anything AND it seems gamey because those tanks were rare and usually deployed as a unit, not parceled out "here and there" just to torment an opponent who is used to beating up on regular tanks (and whom I need to seek mental revenge against for recent losses). Best of luck!

I agree that you will learn more with Marders. You will also get the stuffing kicked out of you very quickly if you play a human and make any mistakes. My advice would be to start with some STUGS and then pick an occasional Marder platoon. The last few times I have taken Marder's the results have been terrible, once again I lack the finesse of the main posters in this area. Also it depends on terrain - if the terrain is open and you have marders on the attack you are in a difficult position. If the terrain has poor LOS which lends itself to the "keyhole" tactics listed above it is a different story.

One thing to note - unless you know in advance that your opponent has ZERO tanks, your "tank heavy" mix may have been prudent. If your opponent has a couple of Panthers your large # of churchills would be needed to knock him out. There is nothing more demoralizing than trying to attack tanks with infantry, especially if your opponent has tanks armed with cannister (this happens a lot with T34's on the Russian front). The churchills are fine for slow recon since they can take a lot of fire without going down - the brens and other HT's would have been in flames instantly when faced with 76mm AT guns or the 150mm IG weapons. Just make sure you have lots of time because they are slllllooooowwwww, especially over rough terrain. I totally agree with the on map artillery comment - there is a thread showing that off map artillery is not effective vs. units in trenches (started by me in the tips and tricks section). Best of luck!!

I am no Jason nor Joachim but I would highly advise being careful with Marders in an infantry supporting role. If the T34 is on overwatch you need to carefully move your Marders up while staying out of LOS. Then when the T34 pops up, you need to be there and pop up first. Note that he has a turret and you have to turn the entire vehicle - they will likely get off the first shot if you are moving. If you can SMOKE the T34 this will give you a chance to get into position - then when the smoke clears you can have it out. If you get lucky you will get in a first shot. Beware a human opponent will try to hit your marders w/mortar fire - they are very vulnerable since they are open topped. In general unless you are a stone pro I would be very careful with Marders - it is very unforgiving to use them because if you make a mistake in LOS they are dead due to their low armor and susceptability to death by HE firing. A tank such as a IV G is much more forgiving. This goes double for the Hornet or Nashorn with an 88mm gun, which is even more expensive making their loss even more heartbreaking. Using the platoon of Marders is a good occasional tactic from using the IV G platoon mentioned above but if you don't know exactly what you are doing the likliest action is that they are on fire, quickly. My personal recommendation would be to replace the marder platoon with a STUG platoon featuring the 75mm gun. These weapons are much hardier and can withstand HE and arty much better since they are closed-top. You get 3 with a platoon, as opposed to 5 tanks. The STUG is a much more effective weapon on the attack than the marder - on defense using 'shoot and scoot' techniques the marder is more useful. On occasion you can buy the 105mm STUG rather than the 150mm IG - the 105mm STUG moves better, in fact some people point out that it is 'gamey' that the 150mm IG moves at all given the massive size of the weapons and shells. There are whole threads of what to do with the half track - the short answer is "not much" until the battlefield is clear, or at least nothing in LOS.

I don't know about the split squad technique. Sounds a bit "gamey". For practical purposes you can move your guys right to the edge of the building and then give a quick "run" order to the street and into the corner of the next hex. You can move from there. One of the desert maps that came w/CMAK (I think) had a town and how they got around this was to put a courtyard in the middle of lots of the buildings. This way you could walk through the interior of the buildings w/out being exposed to enemy fire. Sometimes it isn't obvious whether you will be blocked or not if you move the move "arrow" along the edge you can see if it is blocked or not. I didn't realize that this is only a problem w/heavy buildings - you can cross between squares on big wooden buildings? If so, I wish I'd known that a long time ago Not to sound too gamey but for practical purposes how this is settled with my usual opponent is the "rubblin" tactic of pre-emptorily leveling buildings known to hold infantry. Best of luck!

Wow that Italian WW2 site is interesting! Not that I believe everything on there, but it is very interesting to see it from the Italian point of view.

Does anyone have any photos or links r/e the Italian truck mounted guns? I am familiar with the 2 pounder portee and even the US ad hoc weapons but never heard anything about the Italian truck mounted weapons in the depictions of desert warfare I have read. I am sure they are legit since they are in CMAK just found it odd that I had never heard of them nor even seen photos in the various desert books I've been paging through since I was a kid.

I haven't had my CMAK troops "rematerialize" their weapons. I had a recent HMG crew that had been captured that I was able to bring back under my control and they did not have their weapons for the remainder of the game. They were "unarmed". Just my experience.

I haven't had my CMAK troops "rematerialize" their weapons. I had a recent HMG crew that had been captured that I was able to bring back under my control and they did not have their weapons for the remainder of the game. They were "unarmed". Just my experience.

I played a desert battle (night) in CMAK as germans and my men in a trench surrendered to enemy tanks and infantry. But I had men hiding in brush in front of the trench. When my opponent walked my guys off the board they walked right into my hidden guys and I got them back under control. At this point they were all unarmed and I used them as regular troops to try to hold an objective. I have also seen HE rounds take out large numbers of vehicles - 5 crowded half tracks from an 88mm Tiger shell in one instance (it was a city). I also setup an 88mm gun behind a building and my opponent "rubbled" it. The rubble fell into the adjacent hex and took out my gun. I was angry - it was the key element of my defense! I also blew up a priest in cmbo by shooting at adjacent infantry - the kicker was in the "kills" section it said 1 priest!!

I played a desert battle (night) in CMAK as germans and my men in a trench surrendered to enemy tanks and infantry. But I had men hiding in brush in front of the trench. When my opponent walked my guys off the board they walked right into my hidden guys and I got them back under control. At this point they were all unarmed and I used them as regular troops to try to hold an objective. I have also seen HE rounds take out large numbers of vehicles - 5 crowded half tracks from an 88mm Tiger shell in one instance (it was a city). I also setup an 88mm gun behind a building and my opponent "rubbled" it. The rubble fell into the adjacent hex and took out my gun. I was angry - it was the key element of my defense! I also blew up a priest in cmbo by shooting at adjacent infantry - the kicker was in the "kills" section it said 1 priest!!

It is fun to play on the AI maps from time to time. Generally we agree not to use "heavy" trees because sometimes a map will be created where you cannot bring vehicles to the objective. Another option is to use the maps that come with the game - you can select a map from any scenario in the "quick battle maps" folder and there are lots of web sites where you can download more maps. Make sure you are picking the right TYPE of map for the engagement you are selecting - such as meeting engagement or allied / axis assault. It is fun to try to do the impossible, especially against the AI, as mentioned above. You might have a chance to do something when you would get slaughtered against a human. If you play in good spirits your opponent will offer you a "cease" fire if you try to play an unbalanced game and it starts going the wrong way...

I think that we will replay the scenario and try playing it out a while longer. Can't say without trying it whether or not 2 forts on the left flank will be enough to move the "sticks" forward, as in football terms. Certainly, after game one, it was not a good thing that my opponent could have (but didn't) resetup his forces behind my forward units and given me a reverse crossfire. It was this particular anomaly that caused me to put this thread on the message board. In the other operations that I am playing I am still concentrating my forces but trying to move up everywhere to some extent, even pushing forward trucks and guns to the extent that I can do that (usually at night) without getting them killed. Either that or driving them off the board. Don't know if that helps but still trying to get the hang of what makes the cmak / cmbb operations move the lines forward, depending on forces and overall size of the map. I am aware of the historical outcome from the first attack on Tobruk. In general, Rommel attacked w/insufficient forces, couldn't make a significant penetration, and moved into siege mode. Do you think that taking the 2 left flank forts would move the front line, if your other guys stayed at their original posts? Has that been your experience? Just wondering.

Are you talking specifically how operations function within the parameters of cmak or are you making a comment regarding the realistic elements of the scenario? I don't understand. Since we cut off the first day's scenario at 20 turns it isn't a likely outcome that the perimeter forts would be captured given the amount of ground to cover vs a human opponent. Based on my understanding of the way operations work, even if I took a frontier fort on the far left it wouldn't have redrawn the lines and all my guys would have been frozen forward (I could drag them way back behind the original start line or leave them in place) w/limited or no resupply. I would have had to move forward on a broad front to move the line forward. From a realism perspective, I agree that you need to take the perimeter forts, that is why I concentrated my forces to bear on a point to drive forward and then flank the others.

We played until about the middle of the second day and then stopped. I did not take the full perimeter post on the left.

Thanks for replying. The people that create scenarios work hard for everyone and I'd just like to say that I appreciate the effort. In this scenario I attacked on a narrow side on the left flank and penetrated across the anti tank ditch. I pretty much held steady everywhere else across the map. We ceased after 20 turns in the first game (as recommended in the brief) and then we started over. That is when I noticed that all my units up front were not resupplied and they were "locked" (i.e. they couldn't be moved from their position unless I dragged them way back to the starting zone then I could move them). My opponent noticed that he could resetup his guys way forward (in the rear of mine across the AT ditch) but he didn't do this for realism reasons (we try to play in the spirit of the game and avoid too many "gamey" tactics. Of course my nickname is "puppchen" because in the first cmbo the puppchen was only 26 points and it absolutely dominated the battlefield at that rate. They moved it up to about 60 points in cmbb. So a bit of gamey stuff is OK from time to time ) In retrospect that may have been a good tactic for penetration but it was a bad tactic for operations in general. I probably should have concentrated on one side but moved everyone else up as far as I could across the map. Right now we are playing 2 operations: - desobry - gemmano In desobry I am on the offense (I always play the axis) and am penetrating on a broad front, although I am massing my mobile assets (Panthers) on one side of the town. In gemmano I am on defense and am anxious for opportunities to hold flanks forward which will cause my opponent to have difficulties moving up. Basically he has to clear me out of the flanks just as I do in desobry. In both of these operations the effects are less dramatic than your operation because your front is immensely wide. The desobry and gemmano battlefields are teenie tiny in comparison. On one other random note I setup a thread to test performance of cmak and see if adding RAM speeded up cmak performance. I used this scenario as a benchmark since it was taking about 6 minutes or so to run a turn, depending on what was going on. The thread is in the "tech talk" section. here is the link http://www.battlefront.com/cgi-bin/bbs/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=8;t=004423 Thanks again for your efforts designing the scenario! I guess all things considered I would probably put something in the german briefing to advise advancing on a broad front. Just my 2 cents. [ May 29, 2004, 10:38 PM: Message edited by: Carl Puppchen ]

You mean Jan 1944, right

The 37mm gun was useful in the pacific because it shot a mean cannister shell. It was also easily man portable. In the west, not so useful.

I agree that Allied tanks are more effective in CMAK than CMBO. I posted a thread on that topic. In general, the "slug it out from long range with Tiger and Tiger II" isn't really that much fun. It is better to try a mix of combined arms, try buying some AT guns and hopefully the terrain will allow you to make use of them. Or try to concentrate your forces on a flank and get a mismatch of forces (defeat your opponent piecemeal). I try to buy some of the cheaper tanks like Hetzers and STG's along with AT guns to try to fight it out when the enemy counter attacks and use my better weapons (Panthers, Tigers) on the offensive. Don't forget that the 'faust and 'shreck infantry AT weapons are in the German's favor, and tank hunter teams can be a good bargain (a lot of time the infantry tend to be stingy shooting off their fausts, in my opinion). The defender has a lot of advantages. If you can fire from cover, still, at a moving attacker you are going to do some damage. Ideally you can back up after firing before the return fire mauls too much. If you are always buying King Tigers and your opponent is buying Pershings that is fun for a while but the "uber" tanks make for a slugfest game. Try some of the cheaper tanks and AT weapons for fun, throw in some artillery, and try to fight the battle on better terms (concentration, terrain) than your opponent. But in general if you rush forward with German tanks you are going to get mauled against a competent opponent. This happens rapidly in CMAK when compared with CMBO.

I played the cassino scenario that you referenced. The map was beautiful and it was a fun scenario to play. I think it was balanced in favor of the germans, but of course they dished out a lot of damage in real life before they finally retreated. If someone could take that map from the battle and turn it into an operation that would be a good start, in my opinion. Once again whomever designed that map did a bang up job.

As far as Aberdeen, they are trying to raise money to put all those vehicles under cover. You can go here to contribute. http://www.ordmusfound.org/ You can also "adopt" a vehicle. Also remember that Aberdeen is a working facility. I think they are trying to test an armored humvee there right now.