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Good experiment. Perhaps in real life daisy chain mines are mainly expected to slow, rather than deny, the movement of vehicles? I hope the survivors at least got a four day pass...

Lord save us! Not another Pantherturm mod! (Just kidding.) It looks great, especially for 'just goofing around.' While we're on the subject of creative modding ideas- has anyone ever done a mod of the Panthers during the Bulge disguised as American M-10's?

Great picture. I think the camoflaging foliage is a tad skimpy tho.

No, its gun isn't drooping and the turret is on straight. Weird. Perhaps the scenario designer put the water there after he put the AC there.

Knocked out vehicles can get pushed off bridges by other vehicles, and end up sitting on the water. Perhaps someone is targetting a KO'd vehicle in that picture? It's a yellow line.

Great movie for anyone who likes the Lee/Grant tanks. Did anyone notice the cast-hull Grant prototype (it's called the T-something, I forget what number) knocked out on the battlefield in the first part of the movie?

Welcome, Mat 69. On the squad level it doesn't matter, but when you look at the platoon, company, and battalion level of these different types of units you'll see they come in different structures and with different types of organic (belonging to that unit) support weapons. Also some of them have their own distinctive uniforms. If you are playing a historically accurate scenario, the type of infantry you find yourself facing could also be a tip-off to other facts- for example, Volksturm are unlikely to be fit or very experienced at all, Panzergrenadiers may well have a lot of halftracks in the area, etc, etc.

Engineers, like any kind of infantry, have no ability in the game to detect buried (non-daisychain) mines. All engineers can do is eliminate ones that have been discovered by being stepped on or driven over already.

Also, beware the German vehicles with 'nahverteidigungswaffe' (sp?) in the later part of the war. It's sort of a grenade launcher which will effectively mess with any close-assaulting infantry. Don't send your squad to ambush a tank where several other tanks may appear close by. Not only is it 'physically' dangerous, but the squad may simply just surrender when it sees so much enemy armor so close to it. As you may know, medium and especially heavy MG teams can panic or destroy light armor. The LMG's carried by German squads can kill halftracks at close range. Vehicles like the sdkfz7 series flakwagons are great targets for sharpshooters and even just riflemen. SMG squads are likely to get a kill on an unbuttoned vehicle commander if they ambush from close range. The wound would probably look like a sharkbite... If you are facing Marders, check to see if it's the type with thin front armor. Those are vulnerable to HMG's even from the front. Nice way to kill a good enemy asset. I had a jeep kill a Marder once in CMAK; I only dared to do it 'cause it was misidentified as a sdkfz250/10. Often all your infantry can do is to influence the enemy armor's behavior, by keeping his tanks away from cover, or getting them to turn away from your approaching armor, etc., rather than actually killing them. NUB, I'd be interested to see you post a description of your first infantry-vs-tank kill here. Bonne chance!

Soviet war correspondent Vasily Grossman at Stalingrad: Sometimes, the trenches dug by the battalion are twenty metres from the enemy. The sentry can hear soldiers walking in the German trench, and arguments when the Germans divide up the food. He can hear all night the tap dance of a German sentry in his torn boots. Everything is a marker here, every stone is a landmark. from "A Writer at War" Of course, Stalingrad was atypical.

Looks great!

Looks awesome! It seems that some of those images link only to imageshack's home page.

Yes, you have to be careful, or your tanks may plot courses that expose their rear (I can't think of a better way to say it) to enemy fire. Very frustrating to watch. Sometimes elevation changes can cause it as well as obstacles. I remember I used to play Close Combat and sometimes the AI would have the enemy tanks swarm around like bees, regardless of facing. Must be hard to program.

Pretty convenient way to bring home a Christmas tree! I've seen an M60 MG used to cut down a tree, c. 9" wide or so. It's all good training.

George Mc, That is a very interesting combat memoir, and it contains a reminder that not every SS man volunteered for it, and that all sides did indeed commit war crimes. (Not to make an equavalence between the Allied project and the German one as a whole.) Did you notice, though, that the contact email address on the introduction page of the site uses an acronym for one of Hitler's titles? Grofaz- Grossester Feldherr Alle Zeit (I may be misspelling it.) It would appear that the site is run by someone who admires or identifies with Hitler, and I do not trust any such person who sets himself up as an editor of historical material. (By the way, I'm playing Schwerpunkt Glowaczow right now, and it is awesome!)

Very interesting. I like the method of withdrawing one flank, so the pursuer is fired upon by the remaining flank as well as the withdrawing one.

Hey, anybody ever hear of a book called the Diary of Anne Frank? Yeah, I know it's an obscure one. The reason that girl, and countless others like her, were murdered is because her family was turned in by Dutch collaborators. Surely our brave, plucky Dutch SS man would have been horrified to hear about that sort of thing. Which he never did. Wink, wink. By the way, that website with the anti-partisan badge describes the anti-Nazi partisans as "terrorists." Well, that sure straightens out my thinking on the thorny issue of Nazi occupation. Is there no Canadian Nazi Party? Well, I bet there's some kind of party going on up there, because, correct me if I've got the details wrong, the Canadian Airborne Regiment was disbanded in 1996 for its ties with right wing extremist groups. But heck, that's ancient history, anyway. And Stalin? He just can't catch a break in this liberal media these days. At least we've still got Kim Jung Il in North Korea, holding up that good old-fashioned Stalinist system. God bless 'em! (Oops, can't say that...)

When I played that demo I remember one of my PZIV's spent pretty much the whole game in ROUTED status because of many many ATR hits- not bad work for the dumb old AI.

For a second I thought Gross & Klein was the manufacturer... In CMBB I don't think I've ever seen them knock out anything tougher than a T-26 or BT-7 type jalopy.

I saw a documentary about Operation Anaconda in which an apparently crude log and earth Taliban MG bunker survived a cannon run by a US jet fighter! A good argument for the (at least potential) toughness of these kind of positions. Certainly harder to kill than a tank, in some ways.

I for one would prefer to see gun crews in the game armed with smg's and rifles, and to fight as infantry if they lose their gun. Can you picture a gun crew in any serious assault, or at Stalingrad, or in an airborne unit, just say, "Well, our gun's knocked out. I guess we can go home now." Maybe put them at Low Ammo status. Bidermann in his book "In Deadly Combat" writes of doing infantry-type tasks while his AT gun was not in use. Incidentally, speaking of chance events, I once had a gun crew in CMAK reduced to just one man, and not abandoned. Only time I ever saw that happen.

Isn't all this what the Human Wave command is in the game for? I don't see it mentioned much on this forum, but it's there.

A tripod-mounted machinegun comes equipped with a Traverse and Elevation mechanism. (We called it the "T&E" for short.) This may be what some people are referring to here. It clamps onto the gun and the crossbar of the tripod, which itself is marked like a ruler, and has wheels with numbers on them which you can turn to aim the gun at pre-set (area) targets, so you can hit a piece of landscape even if it's obscured by smoke or during what the Army refers to as "Hours of Limited Visibility" or what sensible people call nighttime. You make a Range Card if you're in a defense, on which you write the T&E settings for various targets. (You can't read it at night, so remember how many clicks of the wheel to turn, etc.) You can remove the T&E to use the gun flexibly on its tripod pintle mount. I never knew pintle mounted MG's on vehicles had anything like that, though.

Thanks, Tiredboots. At that price I'll get it now too. Hell in a Small Place sounds good. (As a book.) I'll recommend a few other books which mostly don't touch so much on CM-type information, but might be interesting to anyone fascinated by WWII- A Soldier's Legacy by Heinrich Boll- Hunger and despair on the Atlantic wall, then on to the Eastern Front. (A novel) Is Paris Burning? -Well known, all about the liberation of that city. Says panthers have 88mm gun, but otherwise good. By-Line: Ernest Hemingway edited by William White- Includes a couple of Papa Hemingway's articles for Collier's magazine about the drive to Paris, and a good one about an attack at the Siegfried Line which reads a lot like a CM after action report. OK Joe A novel. French guy translates for US Army during liberation of France. Translates at trials of black GI's, who, not surprisingly, always get hanged. Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte (I just started reading it) A novel. Italian captain/ journalist wallows in mind-bending moral horror everywhere from Rumania to Finland. He meets Sepp Dietrich, etc etc. Interesting random stuff like German boxing champion Max Schmeling's description of his brief experience as Fallschrimjager on Crete. Stinky dead horses a big theme so far. Liberators by Potter, Miles, Rosenblum. Black tankers of 761st Tank Bn kick ass in Europe.

Wow, ex-fascists in the service of colonialists with US-supplied weapons versus Soviet- armed indigenous Communist insurgents who learned their skills against the Japanese! Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose, nicht wahr? ...um, I don't know why I wrote that, but it was fun to write. The books sound morally incomprehinsible, but certainly militarily very interesting. Anyway, does anyone have an opinion of the recent book Tank Rider? It's by a Tankodesantnik, Soviet tank-mounted infantryman, and it looks pretty interesting, but still kind of expensive last time I looked.