76mm

I don't see toggle buildings or toggle doors on the hotkey list, or are those suggested new features? Also, how do I preview orders? Finally, my waypoints can't really get much shorter, just across a street and into a building, or across a street, around a wall, and behind another building, etc. But the action spots are so far apart that I can't get troops to move to the particular spots I want them to. I guess most of you guys figured this stuff out with CMSF, but I've played very little till now, especially urban fights.

I'm still trying to get up to speed with CMx2, and played the Venafro scenario in CMFI for some urban combat. I play WeGo exclusively. So far it's not going well. I guess I have two main issues: 1) When I try to have a unit enter a building, they seem to completely ignore windows and even sometimes doors, so to enter the building they will end up running out onto some side of the building where they are completely exposed to fire. Result: Lots of bodies. 2) Same kind of issue with position behind walls, etc. The action spots do not allow very much finetuning with positioning, and if I try to put a team behind a wall or something, first they might take some crazy route to get there, and then the don't really position themselves the way I want. Results: Lots of bodies. Any tips for urban combat?

Actually, even more so...at least tracers are generally only visible from the rear--how do you miss a huge whoosh of flames??

Very nice tactical workshop, thanks!

John the book is on Amazon...

John, I don't have time at the moment to go through all of your links, but agree with you on the point above. To some extent I am conveying my understanding of how Russians view things. For instance, most of the Russians I've spoken with don't understand why the US and Britain didn't invade France already in 1941--they just don't understand the logistical and other challenges involved.

Where to start? The only thing I find extraordinary is that someone could complain about the "dislocation" to our war effort due to Lend Lease while the Sovs were fighting and dying in their millions, with their homeland destroyed and overrun. Our help was certainly substantial, but that was the price to pay to keep the Sovs in the war, which was the war-winning issue. If not for political reasons, we would not have had to invade Italy or France at all, and just let the Russians overrun the Reich. I speak with Russians more often that I probably should about the war, and from my experience their universally-held opinion is that the Western allies deliberately delayed opening the second front so that Russia and Germany would destroy each other, and that ultimately we only invaded so that the Sovs would not sweep all the way to the English Channel. They also think that Lend Lease only started in earnest once it was clear that the Sovs would win. Their opinions of the importance of Lend Lease range from completely meaningless to helpful but not necessary.

hmmm, Market Garden, wasn't that a cute but futile little operation involving a couple of airborne divisions?? Bring on the real deal, the obliteration of Army Group Center!

Contrary to popular belief, simply reading Russian at a basic level is not very difficult; many of the letters are the same in English and Cyrillic, as are many military words: For instance: tank = танк brigade = бригада corps = корпус army = армия front = фронт general = генерал etc etc. Of course reading whole sentences quickly gets more complicated.

John, I hadn't seen those, pretty cool. The captions identify the relevant tank brigade and often where the picture was taken. Once you can read the Cyrillic letters, all of this is really easy to translate: "tank brigade" is "tankovaya brigada", "tank corps" is "tankovy korpus", place names are usually simple transliterations, etc. Also, you probably know that you can expand the pics to some extent by saving them to disk and opening them in your favorite graphics program, but you can't expand them much before they become heavily pixelated.

had to point out this page in the website John mentions above, with Sov tank unit symbols, for the groggers out there: http://www.wio.ru/tank/oz/oz-en.htm Hadn't seen those before...

Thanks John, took a quick look as well, and it looks good.

dsf, thanks for the tips, I've ordered both Krivosheev's and Goncharov's books.

Thanks. Whew, looks pretty dense. But it might be helpful for something I'm working on, so might need to pick it up...

dsf, thanks for that link, but what kind of info/data does that book cover? Just tables of loss data? To what level of detail?

I have Minsk 44 but don't understand what data you are looking for. What sector? What dates?

Yeah, but sometimes it's hard to figure out where to put the accent...I'm still not sure with Bagration.

There were several other Sov operations named after Russian military leaders, for instance the Sov counter-offensives after Kursk were called Operations Polkovodets Rumyantsev and Kutuzov. Also, for what it is worth, at some point (not sure if before, during, or after Operation Bagration), Stalin called Rokossovsky, the Sov general in command of the front on the south face of the battle, his Bagration. I don't fully understand the reference, maybe because both Bagration and Rokossovsky were non-Russian (Georgian and Polish, respectively).

Bill, so your ISU-122s are in the woods? How does it work with tanks in the woods, is there just an increase chance of immobilization, or what?

Yeah, I might want to start with some smaller scenarios, although generally I prefer the big ones!

I think you've answered your own question about what my "problem" is. I guess I'm lazy, because I don't particularly enjoy having to rewind, replay several times from various angles to figure out what is happening for every vehicle . To me it falls on the tedious side of "time consuming and painstaking". That said, I'll try the various tips in this thread, particularly the text describing what the unit is doing and tracers and see how it goes...

It sounds like Vein (?) has some sort of animated text and tracer mods that sound like they'd help a lot...anybody know if the existing mods will work with CMRT or if they'll have to be updated?

Baneman, thanks for the tip about tracer mods, I haven't noticed any tracers at all...

My point is that to do so without targeting lines takes about five times as long, which for me makes it rather tedious rather than interesting. That said, I will try your tips, maybe they'll help to some extent.

womble, you ask repeatedly if it matters who has killed who on the battlefield. For me, the answer is definitely yes, in fact it is the whole reason I play--to watch the individual duels and mini-dramas play out as the battle unfolds. Right now I feel like my units are firing into a void, and the defending units are likewise zapped from the void, and it is very difficult for me to figure who did what. It is not so much about specifying the targets, although sometimes I like to do that as well. Fizou, I am playing WeGo, and I think it was very different because of the targetting lines (incoming and outgoing). Miller41, thanks for the tip, I'll look for those vidoes, it sounds like what I need.