Beta1

Its difficult to judge the elevations from then pictures but I would have been far more tempted to leave the priest back near that building where it looks (from the pic) that it could fire into the wood with the flag. I would have been more worried about panzershrecks than ATGs though on that map so would have tried to keep it as far back that way as I could and still be able to area target into the woods. Then after whacking 105s into the flag for a few minutes would have dropped smoke to cover the gap and moved onto the flag (I normally take the brits so I always have some mortars if only 2"ers around)

Yep, choose games a few months later when naval support is not available. Also are you using unrestricted forces? Its quite hard to get 14" guns into most games in combined arms ratios so try that. But unless he is defending the trick is to stay mobile. If he's spent 700 points on 14" guns you simply have to deprive him of a target. Going tank heavy is one thing but 14" guns often wipe out tanks anyway. I cant remember the time to fire a 14" gun but I bet its pretty long so dont stay still long enough for him to target you. If defending you have more problems but anyway try and stay mobile, if he has spent 1/3 of his points on artillery he's just given up most of his superiority on numbers. Try closing the range on him - that should suprise him, I dont know many attackers who like finding the defender going after them early in the game. If you can attack one of his flanks hard and fast you have a good chance of being able to break him and he cant use his 14" guns when your men are up close to his without wiping himself out. So if you can get a maop with cover move forward and stop him advancing early.

Very nice. Lucky for you that your opponent was nice enough to drive the priest right up to the flag where you could kill it though. Not sure about conscript level paras though. I have this picture of them being taken in through the recruitmnet office, a parachute strapped to them and then kicked straight out of a plane...

Your force dosnt sound that bad. The 20mm flaks should wipe M8s and ACs out pretty quick, esp if you back them up with fausts/shrecks

For what its worth, You've converted me to Hetzer fandom. The front armor slope is sooo nice. I still like the Comet best. No particular reason. </font>

In BO the crocodile is a great urban weapon. Apart from the ability to torch half a city with its huge flame fuel tanks its really hard to kill. As mentioned earlier if your going to bring armor into cities shrecks are one of the biggest dangers. An ambush from a long range AT gun firing down a street combined with shrecks covering the ambush point and any likely withdrawal routes can really ruin your day...

Bah those russian 85s just aren't as good as the german 88s though. And (when I'm using them) they are always hellishly inaccurate. Apart from the firefly I'm quite partial to a nice StuG or hetzer though. Except my last hetzer got its gun blown off by a 6pdr (that pissed me off)

How about a flamepanzer? As its based on the hetzer it should be impervious to SMG, just area target as far as you can inside the woods and set their hiding places on fire... Shame the germans dont have anything like the russian OT series or brit crocodile.

You can drop buildings with artillery but its not very effective as you need a direct hit with smaller tubes. With the really big stuff close miss is enough though. Mortar fire isnt very effective. Best way to deal with troops in buildings is direct fire HE. Get something with a 75mm+ gun in position to area fire on the building. A light building should come down in 1-2 turns of 75mm. Heavy building need a couple of firers to drop quickly or ideally a larger gun. 150mm IGs are good building killers are the 90-105mm armed tanks.

The old ammo drain option is quite a good tactic against SMGs. If you can (and your opponent is daft enough) try and get him to fire at you from further than his optimum range and burn up ammo. Alternatively as suggested above throw a unit at him to use up his ammo then hit him with a second attack. Not very nice but it works. And if your attacking and you have the time to rally your troops and throw them back its even better - his ammo dosn't replenish, your squads will rally and have another go.

OK so maybe some of the US 90mm armed things can kill heavies too. but the firefly still rules.

Firefly, everytime. The ONLY tank that can reliably kill german heavies. OK so its got paper thin armor but the 17pdr eats armor for breakfast.

Mortars, mortars and more mortars. If you can try and set up a fire base with a couple of decent mortars (3"/81mm/etc) with a good HQ spotting for them with good LOS to where you think AT guns may be lurking. As soon as you find a gun you can then call in very accurate and fast mortar fire onto the position. If the gun is not entrenched you often KO it within a turn, espescially if its in trees where the treebursts make the mortars more effective. You can also put the mortar with LOS to the suspected position and with a cover arc on it, that way the mortar will open up when the gun reveals itself rather than having to wait for the next orders phase. This risks having your mortar spotted and KOed with return mortar fire of course.

I've seen tanks push dead tanks around quite frequently, especially if they are blocking roads/bridges but I've bever seen a live tank push another live tank anywhere.

you men will not enter areas on fire, any units within the area will attempt ro run out of it ASAP, it will block LOS. Tanks will not enter it but whether they will hang around nearby I dont know.

A game I'm just finishing has consisted of 1 turn of action at the beginning when I lost a scouting HT, then 17 turns of silence as I sat on the flags then 2 turns of carnage as my opponent drove 3 tanks straight infront of waiting AT assets and had them all killed. Just waiting for the turn 30 file but its been, 90% nothing happening, 10% all guns up and firing.

I like them but the last on I took got wiped out by, yes youve guessed it, aircraft....

JAT - just a quick check - you havnt accidently turned the smoke off using the hotkeys? I did this in one game and spent 2 turns wondering why my smoke hadnt turned up...

the previous answers sum it up pretty well - the benefit of not having your defenders supressed by the attackers direct fire support weapons far out ways the fact your giving up the high ground. As for the cover it works very nicely if theres no cover for the attacker but sometimes having a little cover on or just over the crest is preferable as it becomes a magnet for all those panicing squads your shooting up. You let them get past the crest, open up and they run for the nearest available cover, which ideally you will have filled with mines, have covered by a load of high calibre HE throwers and have a 150mm+ artillery strike already counting in. Of course this might be slight overkill.

Forget being able to dominate the map with your tanks, as the americans you really need tank destroyers to protect you from armor then short 75 HE chuckers to blast out the infantry, no more smacking everything with the old reliable 88s.

A lot of Vice City and CMBO (I prefer BO single player although I play both PBEM) Been trying europa universalis 2 but cant get my head around it. Loads of medieval total war a few months back. Also looking forward to Harpoon4, really enjoyed Janes Fleet command but its seems to not work very well on my new machine.

At 50m a .50 will do a lot of damage. I seem to remember you can penetrate most light armor with a .50 at much longer ranges than 50m so gunshield probably wont be too much problem at that distance

Isnt there also an issue here due to the abstraction of squads in CM? I was under the impression that a suad marker in CM represented a group of men spread out over a range over tens of meters. Grasping at memory I seem to remember 20m being suggested somewhere but please correst that if I'm wrong. I have lost numerous squads to cannister rounds at close range (mostly courtesy of maroule...) and I cant help wondering how these rounds are hitting everyone on a front up to 20m after only about 20m of flight.... Thats a hell of a lot of spread over that distance...

Theres no way I want the AI setting my troops up. You only have to look at the mess it makes with its own purchases and positions to see you really dont want to let it anywhere near your guys. Unless your really trying to hamstring yourself down to its level.

not especially. Remember the game displays who owns which flag based on the information you can see, not the real result. Once the game ends then you see the real result. So if those 12 troops were close enough to the flag to stop it being controlled by you - and yes it must be under your complete control at the end of the game, with no enemy close, you may have seen the flag as yours but once the game ends it counts as disputed. Never sit back on a flag once its taken its too vunerable to a late counter attack depriving you of points. If you had the opposition so badly beaten that your opponent was going to concede 5 turns previously you should have sustained your presure and pushed him well off the flag. But thats just the way these things go. I had a draw turn into a narrow defeat due to one T34 sitting 75m from a flag that I had 2 platoons camped out on.