undead reindeer cavalry
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Posts posted by undead reindeer cavalry
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Unfortunately the back hand blow isn't going to work against an opponent more mobile than you with command of the air. The German advantage in the East in mobile warfare did not apply in the West. You also have to be able to trade space for maneuver room. If Germany allowed the Allies to breakout of the lodgement area there was no way of putting the genie back in the bottle.
the first part of back hand blow was done with leg infantry. the idea isn't so much your own mobility, but to force your opponent to over-commit their mobile units and thus cause logistical nightmare.
in France Allied air, naval and artillery had such an effect because Germans were packed up in a very small area.
i'm not suggesting Germans could re-create a full-brown back hand blow in France. i'm not suggesting they could push Allies back to the beaches. i'm thinking something like the first part of back hand blow (e.g. delaying battles that cause heavy drain on opponent's mobile units and logistics), with only tactical German counter-attacks, which might lead to a stalemate in France and buy Germans 6 extra months.
the only real problem in doing back hand blow would be troubles in coordinating actions. Germans failed in it in Normandy, though it mostly happened on army/corps level and with attacks.
the reasons why i think back hand blow might be good in France 1944, is basicly as follows:
- Allies prefer rigid deliberate assaults, maximizing the effect of their support arms. this means small combined arms rear-guards can stop pursuing Allied elements.
- Allies are active mostly during daylight. this is good for allowing leg infantry to hike back to the next defensive line.
- Allies are slightly shy on taking casualties. this would make German ambushes by small combined arms rear-guards effective.
- Allies are weak logistically. if they were forced to move their heavy full body out of Normandy earlier, they would suffer the logistical shortfalls a lot sooner and of course would suffer greater non-combat attrition as well.
- Germans had serious logistical problems in Normandy. much less so if they do back hand blow.
- tactical German counter-attacks have better chances for being succesful, as they don't face such massive concentrations of force.
German front would of course be a lot thinner than it was in Normandy, but Allies didn't make any use of it even in historical scenario once Germans were pushed back. the concentration in Normandy also played to Allied hands, as they were able to utilize their strong support arms to greater effects.
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I have a report showing during June, July, August the US lost 895 tanks (all types) and the British/Canadians 1535. Cannot verify this but it would seem legit that the Brit/Can lost more faced as they were around Caen by the main German armor. I'm assumig these are total write-offs - maybe but report doesn't say.
the subject is a bit complicated. while you can get US tank & SP losses up till the US definition of Normandy (e.g. anything starting with the break-out is not part of it -- so up to 20th August US loss reports), which is about 1200 IIRC, it's quite impossible to get the numbers for the other Allied armies and Germans.
if one would use the US definition, and blindly accept available loss reports of various sides, the German losses would be ridiculously low, around 500 tanks & SP. it's simply not credible and it's senseless regarding the true effect of Normandy battles on the German tank fleet (destruction of). likewise the British army losses for the period are not credible (obviously lagging).
my 3300 (IIRC) number was one based on the end of August or possibly even partly September (because some German and non-US allied reports for August or September simply do not exist, and they contain obvious lagging from the previous periods). it would also better fit my interests on evaluating the effects of the Normandy battles, as for example Falaise would be included, and the loss reports for various sides would match better. i strongly suspect Zetterling's number is based on similar time period and IIRC it was just some hundreds above my number (perhaps 3700, i can't remember).
anyway, the actual period chosen does not really change anything. Allies can lose thousands of tanks and it doesn't matter. no matter what sector the Germans would send their armor, they will never defeat the Allied armor arm in Normany.
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i think it's a great game, but so far i haven't experienced truly satisfying battles. i mostly play PBEM, so i haven't played that many battles yet -- so perhaps i have just had bad luck with scenarios.
i like to think & play big in wargames. this is surprisingly hard to do in CMBN. some of it is because of the bocage (well done BFC & scenario designers for achieving the claustrophobic feel!), but much of it is also because of the game engine itself. the game rewards & requires micromanagement, units are able to react & move very fast and some game events are quite random. sometimes it's great, sometimes it makes playing feel like work (not bad in itself, but the results often seem very dimishing).
all that said, it's a great game and i'm hoping that the different terrain in some of the scenarios of the coming module will change the way the game plays.
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I don't think the allies lost 4000 tanks in Normandy. I know for a fact the US lost less than 1000 mediums (Shermans and TDs combined), and would break even 1k only by counting Stuarts and such. Brit losses may have been higher, but not by any huge factor.
some months ago i tried to get a figure (for nth time) by combining various reports and got something like 3300 (IIRC) by end of August. Zetterling gives 4000 (again IIRC) but i don't have his book with me now and i can't remember what dates he used and so forth.
it doesn't really matter if it's 2000, 3000 or 4000 what comes to the point that Allies had so many tanks in Normandy that there was very little the Germans could do about it. no matter where Germans would concentrate their own armor, they would be more than matched on the Allied side. their best chance would most likely have been the opposite of offence -- to do some sort of back-hand blow, forcing the enormous mass of forces to uneconomical maneuvers.
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But, in the initial stages of the campaign the Commonwealth units were pitched up against the most combat effective German units, at least on paper, why was this? Was it the Allied plan that they fought the armour (they had more effective AT capabilities with the 17lber, experience etc, were these factors, not realities but factors in the initial planning?), or did the German response just mean they were the poor sods who suffered the attentions of the majority of armour?
it's good to keep in mind that the Allies pushed 9000 tanks and SP TDs into Normandy.
it doesn't really matter what the Germans do, the Allies have all bases cowered (they lost 3000-4000 of the 9000 and it didn't even make a dent).
initially Germans concentrated armor on the sector because they wanted to split the Allies in two.
then they concentrate the armor on the sector where the Allies are putting up a fight.
they also expected Allies to breakthrough and exploit towards east-southeast and did not expect a breakout shouldering the sea at west.
--- offtopic warning ---
personally i think this Allied plan (hold Germans at east and breakout at west) is strange. if it's existence wasn't somewhat proven by wartime documents i would say it's absolutely ridiculous to claim someone would make a plan like that.
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Vark, In my experience there aren't many people around who accept that the plan mostly worked, as YankeeDog seems to do. Indeed most modern commentators seem to reject that tieing down the German armour in the East was actually part of the original plan and insist that Montgomery invented that idea during the battle to cover for 21st AG's failure to take its early objectives and to make much progress.
on the other hand, if you read for example Canadian military journals, they are quite clear on how the Canadians triumphed in stopping the Germans around Caen. :confused:
it's quite common to see on boards like these the "looolz" about how one or two Allied battalions (supported by TDs) singlehandedly destroyed foolish death-rides of panzer divisions (which then grow on to become panzer corps in these legends). of course when one looks at the events in detail, it turns out the panzer div/corps is actually basicly 3 infantry battalions supported by a panzer coy. and that they happen to stop and push back enemy force that is the equivalent of full-TOE oversized panzer corps on steroids.
thus the discussions are usually counterproductive when they deal with operational level affairs, so it might be more useful to stay as close to the tactical level (in wargame terms) as possible. i of course myself most guilty in posting absurd theoretical blah blah.
i really like the op post (and the replies in the same tune) of this thread, as it was strictly factual without stepping into the murky lands of general evaluation of the actions and operations.
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When I relooked at 17th SS - one of the first large scale better units to engage (before 2ndSS Pz arrived) - I was amazed to see they had to no fausts and then saw the other problems so I thought I'd share.
some other key German units for the module suffer from the same issues. for example 12th SS is also very understrength with officers & noncoms and also suffers the infantry AT issue initially.
in my eyes the forces covered by the module fought the more interesting battles of Normandy. it will be interesting to see if CMBN scales up enough to portray them. i don't know what scenarios the module will contain, but there's sure a plentitude of good historical battles to simulate.
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it's probably related to drivers and/or Windows settings.
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i have the same annoying issue.
it makes no difference if you use FRAPS or whatever. i'm quite sure it's got something to do with OpenGL and drivers.
i could go the brutal way and just get the actual OpenGL buffer, but it's far too inconvenient and a BFC developer did make a warning about using too low-level stuff (might mess with DRM).
if i wasn't so lazy i might check driver settings. but i rather complain on a forum.
BATTLEFRONT, YOUR GAME IS FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED AND BROKEN BEYOND REPAIR!!!11 :mad::mad::mad:
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Click on a unit and icons for the rest of his platoon and his leader light up. That how I keep track of my men. If I click on the CO and a distant unit light us with a red dot in the chain of command I run the stray unit back to within earshot of his CO.
yeah the way the icons are used in the game is handy. i also like the way you can navigate the OOB with the bottom bar, as i sometimes like to play with the hardest setting without ever actually moving the camera (only rotating).
it would still be nice if there was some way to see the stuff without any clicking, but i don't consider this stuff important. there's other stuff to add and fix first.
personally i consider these first two WW2 CMx2 games just teasers anyway. the east front stuff will be the actual game.
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yeah, something for the countours would be really good.
it would be cool if something could be done to make impassable terrain easier to spot. i still sometimes don't know if infantry can pass some part of the map or not. sometimes this leads to very frustrating events in PBEM battles.
it would be nice if there would be some visual way to see how units are connected. if not by CMx1 style lines, then perhaps by slight differences in the color tones of the icons. i mean both in/out of command information and a way to tell different units from one another (like with different colored counters in some boardgames).
it would be nice if infantry would have more stances and actions. for example hiding behind a wall so that only upper half of head is visible. peeking around the corner of a building (or similar terrain feature). dash & duck behavior. etc.
i realize none of the above is "just" graphics.
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Remember that most of the stuff described in the history books is at the higher level because that's what official records documented better. That and most historians tend to examine larger chunks of a battle or campaign.
If you read first person accounts from people lower down the food chain you will see things like "at 0600 we heard some activity in the copse of trees to our north where an attack had come from a few days earlier. Battalion fired mortars at them for 20 minutes. Afterwards a recon patrol moved in and found bodies and debris that hadn't been there the day before". This isn't a real account, obviously, but it's the sort of thing that often is found in first hand accounts. There might only be one or two such references in an entire book, taking up maybe less than a paragraph in total length. This is the sort of stuff that's totally within CM's scope.
Of course, in real life such preemptive artillery often nixed the enemy's attack entirely because in real life they often had that option. Since CM is a game that option isn't viable since the game is rather boring if the attacker doesn't show up
that's very true.
the sickening thing about speaking finnish and having unhealthy interest for WW2, is that 90% of finnish war diaries (and all sorts of related wartime documents) are scanned and are freely and easily available online. for indirect arms you get the diaries of down to individual batteries (artillery) and platoons (mortars).
a book covering the actions of just a single division, covering a couple of months of actions, could never come even close to the amount of information covered in the documents. books give you only those vague remarks about how positions of this or that unit got shelled during the night, or how the supporing artillery fired x thousand shells during the day (mostly on sectors x and y).
when one looks at those wartime documents, you get stuff like a single artillery battery firing at dozens of targets during one day (the exact individual targets, the number of shells fired at them etc). as you can easily have tens of batteries (or battalions) of artillery, and of course great number of mortars, covering a sector of one division, the number of different fires and different targets is absolutely incomprehensible.
this might lead one to the conclusion that CMBN level "round 1" arty fires at startup areas may have been fairly common, and at least a lot more common than history books would suggest.
on the other hand, the same digitized documents cover infantry company and platoon diaries (and of course higher level ones) and it's quite rare to read about cases where attacking finnish infantry would get shelled in CMBN style round 1 fires. but perhaps it's just the rigidity of Soviet artillery or sumfink (i haven't read the diaries that cover the actions against Germans at far north).
btw if anyone is interested to see how a single battery fired, here's one example: http://digi.narc.fi/digi/view.ka?kuid=2783843. it's in finnish but the format should be self explanatory. date, time, target (most are predefined call signs, TRPs), the number of shots by each tube in the battery. "seuraava" in blue top bar takes to the next page if someone is interested for some reason.
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yes, it's very very cool.
to make it super madly cool, please tune down some of the randomness in spotting.
as i have understood it, there are also some bugs in how some vehicles can spot infantry and that it's being fixed, but if that is not the case then fix it.
in 1.0 some spotting anomalies ruin the relative spotting coolness a bit.
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I'm not so sure. The quote was dealing with a Canadian attack on Carpiquet airfield east of Caen. Looking at Google Earth or Maps doesn't tell us whether the modern wooded areas near Marcelet are the some ones that were there in 1944, but any wooded area east of of Marcelet yet west of the airfield area is going to be pretty close.
The fire against the assembly areas was conducted at Division level by the Germans in this instance - way outside the scope of the game - but the same arguement could be made about US forces calling in Naval gun bombardments. No matter what scale these types of fires were conducted at, we would still expect to see their effects in our smaller scale slice of the big picture.
i made a map that shows the area and intial actions:
on the bottom is a modern google maps satellite image. on top of it is an aerial recon photo from 1944. on top of it is a sketch of the actions. on top of it are some comments of mine. different layers do not match 100%, as i didn't want to put too much time into this, but it's pretty good.
the yellow "assembly areas?" blob is my guess of the assembly area of the Canadian forces (they assembled in the villages west of the start line). they were shelled by Germans starting on 3rd July and continuing throughout the night.
the red blobs are the wooded areas south west (today) and east of (back then) of Marcelet. these were shelled by the 12th SS at 5am (Allied time) on 4th July. it happened at the same time, or just after, as Allies started the attack around the start line, with supporting barrages from naval fire + 21 regiments of artillery + regiment or two of tanks + other stuff.
i think you have a point in that something like the attack of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles towards the hangars could make a big CMBN battle. map 2 km long (EDIT: perhaps 3 km, i don't remember how close the heights were and if south or south-east of the airfield), Marcelet at the other end and the western end (EDIT: or perhaps eastern end, or up to the heights) of the hangars at the other end. perhaps 800 meters wide (or over 1 km, depending on the location of the heights). duration 4 hours. initial German barrages at the start line could be in the game. (EDIT: or perhaps even down to 2 hours if German barrages are not in the game, and as abstracted/simulated result the Canadian battalion arrives piecemeal in parts as reinforcements per JasonC's idea) could even be an interesting fight. Canadians with a battalion of infantry, a company of tanks (perhaps arriving as reinforcements to simulate historical passivity) and lots of artillery. opposing them is perhaps a platoon of infantry reinforced with a couple of HMGs and mortars + later reinforced by some panzers at the south-eastern (or southern?) highground. this would of course require some tweaks in the future patches (HMG fire effects for example), so that the Canadian battalion doesn't simply overrun the opponent in 30 minutes.
still it would be pushing the limits of the game, i think. but i agree that in some case barrages at assembly areas can fit the scale of CMBN battles.
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someone needs to wake up lemon. this thread requires some IS-2 meta pics.
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i don't think fires targetting assembly areas fit CMBN scale too well. the scale of CMBN battles is so small that the fires against assembly areas would have already taken place before the CMBN battle. if fires against assembly areas were to be simulated, it would be better to have them in as pre-battle casualties.
i am speaking theoretically. i am not suggesting development time should be invested in this.
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just in case someone doesn't get what i mean: if CMBN would check spotting ten times per second, then the M1 has 282 times greater advantage than Panther per each individual "dice roll" (96-48 vs 0.33-0.16, or 48 vs 0.17).
if M1 fires only once and Panther keeps spotting indefinitely, the advantage would be nullified in 28 seconds and in 56 seconds Panther would have twice the advantage. this is why casino wins in the end.
the game also wins if it, and the developers, has means to manage the issue. if it doesn't do it well, the end result is that different parts of the game have different levels of randomness. it would make some parts of battles extremely random while others barely random at all.
hopefully the game handles this well, but i fear the game doesn't have enough "dice rolls" for the small percentage stuff and thus we get some unintuitive randomness.
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what comes to what i wrote about suspecting things about how the game engine handles "randomness" internally, let me use another example to make the point a bit clearer.
in the spotting duel test the Panther had 100% higher chance to spot, yet the 3% difference in the end results of the duels was of expected scale.
now another scenario. you have Iraqi T-72 that has 48% chance to hit US M1. you have US M1 that has 96% chance to hit the Iraqi T-72. now you make them duel it out, which one hits first, and you run the test 50 times. while we have the same 100% difference in chance to hit, do we expect 3% difference in the end results?
there's a huge fundamental difference between these two scenarios and i really wish is that CMBN engine design has methodology to deal with this and what we see in the game and trials like those of this thread are just statistical abnormalities.
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the test results are in my opinion absolutely compareable to the results of the previous test.
the results seem very different to me. :confused: in previous test Panther had 100% higher chance to spot than Sherman. in this second test the chances are equal. if you run a third test, will Sherman have 100% higher chance to spot?
by the way i can conclude that...50 tests show reproduceable results and you do not need to run 2000 tests... ;-)i guess you are talking about scores of spotting duels? the results of those duels are so random that 50:50 results are expected (it's just about flipping the coin with such small dataset). please notice that you had 53:47 result in the previous test where Panther had 100% higher chance to spot (so 100% difference in chance to spot lead to 3% difference in outcomes). then compare with the results from the second test. i find it hard to conclude anything other than the difference in the chance to spot has almost nothing to do with who wins most of 50 such duels.
so i guess what i am saying is that it might be more productive to ignore the outcomes of the duels and just look at the data you get for spotting from the duels (what is the chance for a tank to spot the opposing tank, per second).
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actually i havent understand what blackcat wanted to say at first so just for my understanding... do you want to say that cmbn tank combat behaviour is only completely random (not related to any real world behaviour) and that you could not get any reproduceable logic even if you run 1000 test... ? If that is true than it would be really gamebusting... ?!
the idea is that each time you roll a dice, the chances that you roll 1 are the same. it doesn't matter if you have rolled 1 a hundred times in a row previously. the chances are the same for each roll.
spotting a tank (for example) is different. crews are trained specific scanning techniques for spotting targets. the chance that a crew spots an enemy tank in any given second increases by every second they do scanning. it's a bit like if you had four boxes and one of them contained a cake -- each time you open one box the probability that you find the cake from the next box increases.
what i mean regarding the game is that i suspect it works in some areas by the dice method, not the cake-in-a-box method. this is why there's a huge variation in results for example in your spotting test, as with bad luck the Sherman may never spot the Panther during the 30 minute battle (while it may spot it on the first second if you are lucky) -- each time the game "rolls the dice" to see if Sherman spots the Panther the chance of spotting remains the same.
i don't mean that there wouldn't be logic in the game or that it would all be just randomness. i just mean that there's so much randomness that you need to do those 2000 tests to have good statistics. and because of the same reason it's almost irrelevant when you play the game (you would need to play 2000 battles to see the difference, just like when running tests).
i don't mean that the game would be broken. i'm just pointing out that there's so much variation that it's practically impossible to draw conclusions even after running 50 tests.
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results:
Panther spotted sherman faster: 26 times (52%)
Sherman spotted Panther faster: 23 times (46%)
1 draw (no ones can see the other for one minute)
if you ignore the duels and just look at spotting times, you get something like this with your data (this is of course not accurate):
the chance of spotting the opposing tank per second:
Sherman: 1.6%
Panther: 3.3%
hm looks like my 3 tests before this one are now revised... with about 50 testing runs the panther even overcome the sherman... I wonder why my 3 tests before this one all favored the sherman ?
i suspect CMBN randomness does not have memory (or methodology simulating one), which leads to the casino effect Blackcat talks about. it's not how many things related to tactical combat work in real world, so you get the strange randomness and variation you are not intuitively expecting.
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URD - Um, methinks AGC has more like 500 AFVs at the start of Bagration. A lot of them are StuGs in independent formations or spread through the IDs 10 to 30 at a time, to be sure. But the turreted ones in PDs are a tiny fraction of the total. Also, several PDs arrive from AG South in a matter of days, some with up to 200 AFVs apiece initially.
the operational worth of the AFVs is much lesser than the numbers would indicate, as the AFVs are spread and arrive piecemeal. but yeah, going does get rough when Soviets choose to or must attack German AFV units.
the level of German mobile unit concentrations is quite different from Normandy, though i suppose allies have partly themselves to blame for that (the attitude in running most ops would no doubt have been called defeatist & trotskyite by Soviet higher commanders). considering something like the 5.PD vs 5GTA battles, it would probably have turned into recreation of the battles around Orsha on Moscow-Minsk highway if Soviets had faced something like what allies faced in e.g. Goodwood.
That the Russians still managed to lose more AFVs -and even men - in their biggest operational success of the whole war is something of a scandal, and not frequently commented upon.haha, well they didn't have the luxury of op. Lüttich. it's probably counterproductive to hint at something like this, on a forum with demographics like this one has, but the allied ops in Overlord were not exactly amazing either. even with Lüttich the AFV loss ratio is ridiculous, especially considering the odds.
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URC, gosh that thin air was tough for the Soviets! Over 2,000 AFV;s and 600,000 killed, wounded and missing from thin air, must have been the elite air elemental detatchment! Either that or hitting thin air was a result of a masterful maskirovka operation,
the whole AGC has roughly 100 panzers when Bagration begins. average sector defended by a German infantry division in AGC was 30 km (Glantz). most Soviet fronts had 15-20 km wide attack sectors. armies 6-12 km.
in Normandy it was quite different. though by Cobra it's about the same or even worse, i suppose. too bad about the silly suicidal German counter -- the operation might have gotten interesting if it hadn't happened.
I really don't thing the Falaise Pocket and the destruction of army group centre can be compared, to be honestyeah, i was commenting on the posts made about Bagration.
a detailed comparison between Overlord and Bagration / Lvov-Sandomierz might be interesting.
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While allied weaknesses also mattered for early war German successes, the operational skill shown in German direction of the "big chess" of the whole war is readily explained by noticing that they let Kasporov play the opening, then shoved him aside to let your uncle Guido play like a fish for the rest of the game.
i couldn't agree more with you. though i'd add a cat to your scenario. every now and then the cat jumps on the table and messes with the pieces randomly.
the problem is that one could continue your list almost endlessly down to division level commanders.
17. SS-panzer Grenadier-Division
in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy
Posted
yes, but not so much on the actual battlegrounds and my impression is that the effect mostly that of caused delays. as an example of a counter-quote:
Maj.Gen. Stadler of 9th SS PD: "the use of artillery by the British was definitely much more powerful and oppressive than enemy air superiority".