RSColonel_131st

I'll get you a screenshot of our current PBEM map. It certainly isn't as open as you show it here.

In a large town as presented by CMBB maps, line of sight can be very short. Of course you can keep your tanks 100m back, but then they often won't have anything to fire at.

When it gets hit by a surprise mine thrown from less than 30 meters away, the T-34 burns just as nicely as any HT. But for the price of a single german tank you get two HTs.

Duke, Thanks for the added detail on employing russian stuff. John, Also thanks for explaining the key difference between the 251's armor and the M3 armor. That gives the whole story a bit of sense to it. As for the reason why '43 sovjets have 20 second command delays and can't identify units very well - no clue either.

Oh, is it? Perhabs in open terrain where the russkies can shoot unseen with their 14.7mm ATR all day long. But in an Urban environment with LOS often less than 50 meters, there are no "unseen stealth shooters". I would actually argue that TANKS are just as easy to kill in those settings (close infantry attacks eliminate them just as nicely as any HTs). Some of you guys seem to have a GIANT chip on your shoulder along the lines of "If you don't play scenarios against humans, but QBs and against the AI, you suck". Well, the only thing that sucks is your attemp to dictate how CMBB should be played.

Sounds like massive human wave tactics, not very "pretty" but I can see it working.

Oh, and as for your other rant about QBs vs. Scenarios and everyone buying his own forces: Again, it is not up to you to decide how others should play the game. No one died and left you in charge of guarding this forum against the evil bad people who don't play CMBB the way you play it. It is unbelivale arrogant that you think you have any right to insult other posters who happen to have an opinion contrary to yours. And, like I said, it is against the forum agreement, so if you can't behave yourself in a civilized manner, find another forum. Kthnxbye.

'nuff said. Well, in this case you are violating the forum usage agreement you agreed to when you signed up here. Certainly in there is no provision/article that allows a poster to insult other posters just because you feel "the same whining crap" has been posted before. Who exactly made you the forum police? I suggest you pack up and leave this thread quietly now, after having the nerv to openly state that you feel like you have any right to be derogatory towards other posters. Do we really need to busy the mods with this? I don't think so, so say nicely goodbye and stop playing Forum Police.

For what it's worth, I think I just solved the problem. Me and my friend will try a "cooperative PBEM game" where we mail a savegame around, each of us commanding half of the german forces against the AI. That way we can use our favorite tactics and leave the stuff we don't know about to the computer. And coordinating an assault between two separate "platoon commanders" certainly will be fun.

Yes, no way! The underlying tactic is simple enough. Infantry draws fire, uncovers the enemy and assaults the last 30 meters; armored infantry carriers provide the needed heavy fire support. Anti-Tank Teams, ATRs and Infantry Guns stand by to support. One would expect, given that the russians have the same kind of engineer infantry squads (similar weapons, similar demo charges etc.), and the same kind of armored vehicles with mounted HMGs, that you could use the same tactics. In fact, I really don't understand why a 251/1 HT will drive right up to an enemy infantry squad and shoot holes in them all day long, while a M3 Scout (similar armor thickness, TWO MGs) craps his pants and waddles backwards to be taken out by 7.62mm fire. Or why a german 6-man engineer squad will spot the origin of incoming fire easily at 200 to 300 meters, and in the same settings a russian squad can be beaten up all day long without ever unveiling what hit them. Neither squad is listed as having Binocs. So, your post was unnecessary. The simple fact is that I would have expected, using the same kind of equipment, that I would be able to use the same kind of tactics. There is absolutly no visible clue that explains why the russians can not do this.

Do you ever post something that doesn't insult someone (in this case BFC)??? Don't use my post to latch your thinly veiled provocation on. I'm sure that there are certain advantages to playing russian side which a trained player will be able to exploit. But what I can not see is how anyone who's used to german infantry and armored vehicle tactics should use russian stuff.

I'm a bit peed off right now. Been playing a PBEM in heavy urban settings. Before this PBEM, I played mostly small QBs with german armored engineer platoons, same settings. In '42, they have six (small six-man) squads per platoon, one HQ, and seven 251/1 HTs. I found this to be a very flexible combination, where the infantry mostly scouts and close-assaults inside buildings while the HTs deliver all the fire support you need in the streets. Okay, so for this PBEM, I picked the russians. To try and remodel my tactics, I picked a company engineers (two platoons with 3 squads each) and 7 M3 scout vehicles (which cost about the same as the 251/1 HT and seemed to be about equal). Now, as it turns out, the russian stuff really sucks. Command delays of over 20 seconds for a simple movement order? They get pinned by MG fire from less than 200 meters but can't spot the enemy position? And when you bring in the M3 Scout for fire support, it RETREATS in the face of a plain boring MG42 and never even returns fire. Oh, got taken out as well by an MG42 salvo - in the first turn of LOS with the enemy. Somehow, compared to the german material I played with earlier, the russian stuff just seems to really badly suck. My germans would easily spot the enemy, move quickly and without delay, then bring in the HTs to pin and destroy. The russians are busy sulking around getting shot without ever spotting what hit them. Huh? I'm sure there are some excellent players who adapted to the russian methods. But I'd have never thought that this is such a night/day difference.

Again, burning buildings (to deny cover/clear lanes of fire) or even wheat fields (for cover) is a tactic mentioned in some historical accounts. The difference is that they had simpler means to set fire to an old building than we have. We need to "abuse" our valuable FTs for that, when in reality this was all part of shaping the battlefield. Same for buildings - while in reality you couldn't exactly "destroy them to the point right before they crumble" you could rig them with explosives. In any fight against a dug-in defense, where the defending side is assumed to have spent some time in their place, it would be REALISTIC to have options for "take down this building/set it afire" or "bobby-trap that house". That's what they did. The only thing "gamey" in CM is that we have to resort to use actual combat weapons for doing this.

Well...okay If formations and stuff are out, how about generic "platoon-wide" orders? For example, it would be nice to get all units in a platoon to mount/unmount their transports with a single click or two.

Preparing to take down a building is quite similar to rigging booby traps or command-detonated explosives. If I, as a german field commander, had the explosives at hand to prepare a building for demolition, I certainly would do so in anticipation for the enemy. no_one, do you know where I could find the Festung Breslau scenario? Sounds interesting.

Google for the LOSAT program. That's the kinetic penetration missile mentioned above, and it seems far better at what it does than any hollow-charge warhead.

Yes they would. Somewhere in an account about Manstein, I read about "sealing their flank with a wall of fire" - I think that actually refered to open fields. Also, accounts of Festung Breslau, for example. Many buildings there were set on fire or demolitioned to deny the enemy cover, or to clear fields of fire. Not gamey at all. Just applied combat engineering.

Seconded. For me in CMx1, associating commands with keypresses works well because of the labels "F=Fast, M=Move, A=ADvance" etc. Associating commands with the geometrical position on the keyboard is a bit less "direct".

Are there any factors that decide how quickly a building becomes "fully on fire"? Does more Flame-Thrower usage help with that? Mine take a bit long.

I thought I'd post a screenshot, but now the autosave has been overwritten...oh well. I find that in urban combat, my FTs do quite well, as long as it's only a few enemy squads on the other side of the street, and they are busy shooting at my own infantry. The FT should never be the first target they get to see. If the enemy is busy, I will walk up the FT team from the center closer to the wall of their building, and upon visual contact they will grill the bastards on the other side of the street. As for routed troops going into burning buildings - was the building really "fully ablaze"? I found that at the beginning, the big buildings just "burn on the outside" (that's the visual representation of it) but eventually will catch fire trough and trough, and then it should be impossible to enter. In a certain way I still think it's funny that in most cases where I use FT against infantry, the building catches fire in a single flame burst, but if you use FT against buildings (area-target) you often need all 9 "shots" to start a fire. At the end of the day, it still is amazing how much tactical freedom you have in this game. If it was used in real life, you can try it in CMBB.

Anyone else experimented with this? Seems to me it can take as much as a full ammo load or two from a flamethrower to set fire to a big, heavy building inside a city. Then it takes another 10 or 15 minutes for the fire to really spread. But once it has spread, you have denied the building to the enemy (and yourself) for the rest of the battle. I did this today with a free-standing tall building that was closest to my flag, because I didn't want a close-in firefight "across the street". As a result the enemy had to run over open ground and got hacked to bits by my MGs. Arguable the random generated map today was really favorable for this tactic, but it certainly warrants further usage. In a similar note, using a lot of flamethrowser against infantry during my recent urban combat battles, often the buildings will catch fire easily "by accident" (in fact far easier than "area targeting" them). Which means you might end up denying yourself the next cover/movement location.

I guess it could actually be a step toward realism - if there isn't too much micromanagement needed for the subordinate units. After all, any real company commander works "realtime", but then, he hasn't the need to control every tank, vehicle and squad in it's smallest details.

I guess the appriorate penalty for a player who sacrifices his troops pointlessy is to give the remaining troops in the campaign lower morale?

Opps. Very valid point. OTOH, how does the AI do it in current operations? These require a minimum of force preservation as well.

At any rate, I would think that while maintaining the current force levels in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US doesn't have the option of invading Syria anyway. It's all hypothetical. Rice may hiss and booh at the Syrians, but there aren't enough boots on the ground to present a credible threat of invasion. There's always the Airforce and Navy, of course, for other kinds of nasty things.