Glider

Not stupid... you just hope that he will make mistakes, because if he makes absolutely no mistakes you are dead no matter what you do Well, its only my experience, but I fought against bunkers in all three CM incarnations and they never seemed to cause me enough trouble to justify their cost. I mean, an 82mm mortar and a halfsquad of infantry can kill an 88mm concrete bunker anytime... when you drop smoke before them they can't move, they have to wait for the smoke to dissipate. And their field of fire is very narrow when you are close. Once your halfsquad or any unit that has at least hand grenades manages to pass out of that field and flank the bunker - it is irrevocably dead.

It all depends... recently I launched a Soviet assault against a German position. My force was infantry-heavy, SMG/LMG teams mixed with pioneers (for ammo depth and AT work). German infantry was unable to stop them so 4 Panthers advanced to within 100m (behind the crumbling German line) to support their grunts. Pioneer assaults killed two of them. And that is exposed infantry assaulting defending panzers. What I am saying is this... if your opponent makes a mistake, if you use them wisely, they can be enormously useful. Of course, same goes for the AT bunker but, for me, it is much more vulnerable, inflexible, static... the gravest dangers you face are attacks from unexpected directions and such attacks make AT bunkers useless.

I'd take a pioneer platoon over an AT bunker any day. There is simply no substitute for AT-capable infantry, and pioneers are only such infantry Russians have.

I don't think we need to fear cheaters as much as people who play many other games must. The CM learning curve is so steep and the amount of time needed to be able to just play the game so great that we need not deal with most of the five-minute attention span average teenage cheaters... besides, where is the satisfaction in cheating/beating someone who (on the average) says: "Well done, that was a real trashing" However, those few cheaters we have/will have are bound to be damned persistent types, playing CM for years and changing nicknames and clubs when caught.

That is fascinating stuff... you take mediocre officer corps, weed out all those showing any initiative, arrange public trials to cow the remainder, provide surviving officers with non-professional NCOs and largely uneducated staff. The result - they are capable of handling infantry divisions but when you give them a 1000-tanks unit they will manage to lose 900 of them in a few days practically even if Germans are firing duds.

So, Jason, if I interpret you correctly, you are saying this: Before the war, under ideal peacetime conditions, favourable weather, months of preparations, no enemy, all tanks checked and rechecked before the event - the Russians were capable of conducting a large-scale armoured exercise. But only barely and with probable occasional embarrassing failures. When conditions started stretching their command&control capabilities beyond that point (far beyond, in fact), under Luftwaffe attacks, with higher HQs in total confusion, rear areas sliced to ribbons by German motorized columns and with orders to make that attack yesterday things started to fall apart, and so badly that in many cases corps commanders lost 90% of their 1,000 tanks in 48 hours, most of them to non-combat causes.

Well my Serbian is more than a bit like Russian and it has the word "desant"... there is not a truly equivalent word in English but people who perform desants, i.e. desantniki would be performing "forceful debarkation" or "debarkation under fire"... that is the closest I can get

JasonC, this all seems very, very convincing. What is your opinion concerning the main reason for "the disappearing act" Soviet tank corps seemed to perform so well? Most of texts I read indicate that they ran out of fuel, ammunition and even most banal spare parts. But why this happened? The Soviets held large-scale manoeuvres before the war, they must have been aware of logistical requirements.

To me tankodesantniki sounds like a tank-desant-troops combination. "Desant" meaning landing/debarkation...

Don't you think that the screenshot at the top of this page shows that this can be done?

Hm, this is the first time I saw the CM code abused. But, as J_Powell said, altering TCP/IP game data flow is something completely different.

Wiggins, you linked only thumbnails... there is no link to bigger pictures, at least I can't find one.

Technically, T-26 is a tank (no criticism of Nightwish implied ) I thought that Nightwish was a "symphonic goth metal", though. I have seen topics go off tangent but this one really takes the cake

A little CMBB test showed following (I probably missed some vehicles): PSW 222, PSW 222 (late) and PSW 234/1 armoured cars are firing at air targets.

Some (not all) German 20mm gun armoured cars are definitely firing at aircraft.

Yes, though halfsquads are more brittle than squads a dispersal as good as this one outweighs that shortcoming by far. Effectively, you would need at least one crack sniper, 4 crack 82mm mortars, a HQ spotting for them and two SMG platoons, preferably vet or better to have at least a chance against this position. Obviously armour with HE capability would change this equation but that is for defender's armour and AT guns to deal with, not a single inf platoon.

No objection, except for tediousness.

Just wanted to highlight another possible use of halfsquads.

I never thought that halfsquad defence could be made into such a fine art, that was one of the most useful posts I saw, ever. Just one question, you seem to find the assault elements (short-range halfsquads) almost useless except as ammo pouches. Why are you not using them as, say, a last line of defence, deployed at the defended objective with 50m covered arcs? Used like that even their short-range firepower could be useful.

I already said that this was a (wrong) conclusion I drew from the fact that my inf units were heavily outnumbered (despite about equal number of tanks and support weapons) and that at that time I overran 6 or more of your inf units in our other mirror game - which all turned out to be halfsquads. I checked our AAR files a bit: Game 1 (you played Germans) you had (in the last turn: 33 halfsquads and 11 full squads, or 33:22 ratio or 60% of your entire inf force divided into halfsquads. Game 2 (you played Russo-Romanians) you had: 16 halfsquads and 25 full squads, or 16:50 ratio, or 24% of your entire inf force divided into halfsquads. That said, I want to add that I never criticized this tactics (or you) as unacceptable. In fact I repeatedly stated that our games were not the main issue here. I just did not like the fact that halfsquads appeared to be more effective than full squads... which might start forcing people to split larger proportions of their armies into halfsquads, thereby reducing the fun factor of this game. P.S. I apologize for a possible +/- several per cent error, I counted the squads and halfsquads only once.

From my (even more limited) experience this seems to be right. When you start forcing them back it is very diffuclt for halfquads to recuperate. However, in a platoon vs platoon close-range fight, destroying a platoon of halfsquads will waste so much of your full squad platoon's ammo that it will be at the 'low' level after the fight.

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That is just the "feeling" I was talking about. You are facing, for instance, three platoons of infantry defending a big patch of woods. You throw at them artillery, mortars, HMG fire and direct HE... an amount that absolutely should be sufficient to break/rout most of three platoons. But, because they are divided into 21 inf units instead of 12 some of the halfsquads always remain unsuppressed. Redwolf also says that your support fire will cause less casualties thanks to smaller size of halfsquads.

He used them locally. Anyway, I will send you files and you will see what I mean. You never had to use just HMGs to interdict approaches to an important location, a hilltop, flag, good observation point? What do you use, 203mm FOs? Even on-board mortars cannot respond in time to infantry charges. Everybody. In woods off-board artillery is not accurate enough and direct HE weapons and HMGs have no LOS. That leaves only infantry.

Yes I do but I am not sure how would they help anyone. My opponent, Wiggins, already said in this thread that he had not used halfsquad forces globally and the FOW would prevent you from seeing much anyway.