[Russian Winter War pictures]

i think 95% of Finns don't care about lost Karelian territories. it's pretty much just wasteland and Finnish companies do forestry (the only real business to do over there) over the border anyway. not to mention that most of Finland itself is uninhabitated to the point of being economic burden.

the ethnicity of the population of lost territories is not really a problem. quite a portion of them are Finns and Karelians (Finns) by ethnicity. and getting back the lost territory would not "unite Finns" anyway, as Finnic territories spread further East past the lost parts of Karelia. furthermore Russians already are by far the largest immigrant group in Finland.

[The Blitz myth?]

Originally posted by JasonC:

urd - I don't think size was the thing they underestimated.

they clearly underestimated the size, as they were surprised by it. they were just as surprised by the Soviet capacity to produce tanks & soldiers. you must be well aware of both things - you just seem to consciously ignore it, or at least play it down significantly, for some reason that is unknown to me.

And I do think they thought odds simply would not matter, that their superior techniques simply trumped all that.

they thought, and rightly so, that their troops would be of superior quality, but not to the fantasy land level you seem to suggest. they were very concerned about the basic realities of the art of war.

Which is wild magical thinking and irrational, in my book.

your book seems to include lot's wonderous things, like that Nazis adored Thelemites and such. in my book those groups were amongst the first sent to camps. for what it's worth to point out the obvious: Nazis idolized agrarian lifestyle.

It is going on a savor of things, a smell they seem to have, not on facts. I can back it up with quotes and parallels. "Kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will fall to the ground". Well, they did, and it didn't.

do you really believe that Germans weren't in for the destruction of the Red Army?

That war did not end, but there was no prospect whatever of China ever throwing the Japanese out, without outside assistance. I think Hitler thought Russia would be similar, once the European section with most of the population and industry was occupied.

most likely yes. can't see anything Magico-Mystical in it.

Hitler assumed support for the existing state would collapse after the existing army was carved up and defeated, and the disorganized remainder would either sue for something or lapse into ineffectual belligerence of the China variety.

together with the capture of most of the industry and reserve base, yes. can't see anything mystical with this either.

in my opinion it would be Magical thinking to plan to invade & occupy Siberia right from the beginning.

Which was a crazy underestimation of one of the leading powers in the world, with a sixth of world industry etc.

nothing crazy in it, if you bother to look at it objectively from their perspective.

But exactly the kind of crazy I think they had contracted. They thought people who disagreed with them made themselves weaker by doing so, because they thought they had the secret of power. Which is wild magical thinking. I am not talking about the Rundstadts and the Mansteins, but of Hitler personally and his circle.

you are putting it grossly out of proportion, choosing to ignore the rational answers for the whys & wherefores.

They did not intellectually understand the way mobile warfare succeeded.

And they thought superior technique and knowledge were their magical birthright, and others lacked them because they were inferiors.

of course that's why they, for example, asked Finns, whom they considered to be Mongoloids, to train them in sub-arctic farware because they felt inferior in that aspect etc etc.

you are jumping to conclusions that do not reflect known reality. you are overemphasizing aspects that are marginal. you take poetry for science. you don't even try to look at things from the viewpoint you are trying to explain, distorting things out of proportion.

Which was a bit of elitist wild magical thinking very much in the air at the time - not just in Germany.

IMHO 21st century is not that different from 1941. judging from the first 5 years, 21st century is perhaps even worse.

My point in bringing all of that up was merely to distinguish what actually happened at the level of professional understanding of, and development of, mobile warfare doctrine - on the one hand - and all the various misconceptions and oversimplifications about it all - on the other hand. The point was that the German political leadership had its own set of mistaken ideas about it (Hitler is not Guderian, he did not invent this stuff, he never really got it as all his later mistakes when he stopped listening to his generals abundantly demonstrate), which had serious consequences for how they prosecuted the war.

i agree about this.

In particular, the traditional *target* of German grand strategy is the fielded forces of the enemy. Which is a sound target to aim at. But a strategy has to be consistent in the effects it expects from the means it employs, and use all means directed at those effects. Aiming at fielded forces means expecting *eventual* odds achieved to matter. Run the enemy low on forces while you build your own, outstrip them, win that way. But it becomes less than sound when you don't try to build your own. You won't get a forces remaining ratio moving your way just by wrecking the enemy on the field, if he mobilizes as fast as you wreck him, and you don't mobilize anything yourself.

of course, but saying that Germans should know in 1941 what we know in 2005 isn't rational argumentation or thinking. THAT is magical thinking.

had Soviet strength been of the size the Germans estimated, Germans would have captured the industry base (& offhand reserves) in 1941 & it would have been, in practice, game over for USSR. i can't see anything magical in it.

Hitler thought mobile mech warfare made material struggle obsolete, that was its point for him.

Hitler was very concerned about material struggle. that's why he invaded USSR in the first place.

To replace a field of competition in which wealth, numbers, and odds all matter with one in which only an extreme of technique or skill matters. Thinking that was Germany's long suit, as a technological and military-theoretic leader. It is sensible to look for advantages that way, but it was magical thinking to expect it to make other factors just go away as unimportant.

i can't see how Germans would have thought other factors would have been unimportant.

There is no way the decision not to mobilize the economy can be defended (even if you probably are going to win easily, you won't lose instead if you mobilize), but there are ways it can be understood. This sort of delusion is one of them. Hitler emotionally avoided anything that smacked of material-struggle because it reminded of a hard previous war that Germany had lost. Yes he was underestimating the Russians. He also needed to underestimate them. Which is characteristic magical thinking, a wish dominating an obvious, objective interest. Presumably, to order economic mobilization as a precaution would break the shell of confidence he required.

avoiding pure long war of attrition is a must. Germany has no chances to win such a war.

if Hitler wanted to ignore all things material, then how do you explain his obsession about getting & holding material sources?

as for the mobilization of economy, you need to avoid unnecessary mobilization because it seriously hurts economy.

[The Blitz myth?]

Originally posted by Bigduke6:

1. The idea that Germany failed in Russia as a result of "bad intelligence" is a ancient canard.

bad intelligence about the strength of Red Army & Soviet economy is not the reason why Germans lost. it is the reason why the Germans started the war which they weren't prepared for.

Germans didn't start the war knowing the full strenght of the Soviets and just thinking it wouldn't matter because they were Occult Aryan Overlords or other such nonsense.

The Germans knew perfectly well the Russians would mobilize upon invasion, and they knew even better that the only state more willing to use totalitarian techniques on its population, was the Germans themselves. They knew Russia was a major producer of military materials, they knew the size of the population, they knew all about Komsomol and the parachuting clubs, and they knew Russia's economy was geared towards military ends in a way not seen in the west.

yet they didn't have a clue how strong the Red Army really was & how strong the Soviet economy was. Germans were extremely surprised by both. "who could have guessed", as Hitler himself said.

It is close to insane to argue that the German army had a legitimate right to expect that the Soviet military, if hit with big defeats, would throw up its hands and give up.

German goal was specifically the destruction of the Red Army. i don't see much of going for hopes of Red Army just giving up or Germans focusing in pure moral targets like Moscow or Leningrad.

So when you read about the Abwehrdienst whining in November '41 - yikes, 100 more divisions, where did THEY come from?

exactly, they were surprised. they had thought Soviets would have had a lot smaller forces.

ask yourself: How responsible was it to assume the Soviets would not mobilize every last tribesman and ore field to getting the Germans out?

it's not "would not", it is "could not". Germans simply didn't know the Soviet capacity.

The German leadership simply discounted the Soviet Union's military potential.

and not just the potential, but the very strength itself.

They looked at the Soviet chaos in Finland and Poland, and concluded "These Russians are idiots, we can destroy them.They have been purging their military and the Red Army has grown too much too fast. They cannot resist us in battle. We are superior, and we will remain so."

which was a rational well founded conclusion and also proven correct by the events of summer & fall of 1941.

The German army was betting Soviet Army would collapse after major defeats. That's Clauswitz in spades: destroy the main army, and everything else will fall into place.

they were after the destruction of Red Army, not just some major defeats.

Well, the Wehrmacht did precisely that - AND FAILED. Himmel! Betrayed by our own Clauswitz!

they did not do it.

That's not bad intelligence. That's an intellectual failure - an assumption battlefield results will inevitably dictate socio-polticial results. Clauswitz, it turned out, was not gospel when it came to the Soviet Union.

i think you are jumping into an intellectual failure here yourself

The German military leadership were responsible for making that leap, and they did not. By the time they got to Russia, they didn't really think intelligence mattered. They felt they had an unbeatable army, and the idea subhuman Soviets could do what the French and British could not was ludicrous - although of course in the end, that is exactly what happened.

of course they were responsible for the decision of launching the war, but they didn't feel they had an Occult Nonhuman Army. most of them were professionals who were concerned about very mundane and carnal factors of the art of war & economy. you are bying far too much into pure propaganda.

So don't blame intelligence. Blame the German General Staff. It was their army.

i am not blaming anyone. i have no personal interests buried in this subject. i am simply trying to have an objective look on the subject based on what i know about it.

But you can't argue that it was a giant mistake to invade Russia. The roots of those mistakes lie in irrational thinking by the German military leadership, NOT because of rational thinking queered by "bad intelligence".

i can't see anything so irrational in the German plan, if i look it from their perspective.

could you show me how they were being irrational?

[The Blitz myth?]

JasonC,

Germans simply underestimated the size of the Red Army. not because of bying into some silly occulto-mystical crap, but because they didn't have full intel.

German plan was rational and well founded if you look at it objectively from their point of view. they thought they had just destroyed the Red Army a couple of times.

no need to have Germans buy into some "numbers do not matter" nonsense, not to mention some occult crap. i am puzzled by this weird trend of looking for the most absurd of explanations instead of going for the obvious known ones.

[Steppe terrain fighting]

Originally posted by Bigduke6:

I would personally say the Soviets attacked in mass whenever they could manage it, and that the Germans held a clear tactical edge until mid-1944, but after that parity was approaching and by 1945 most likely in the average small action the Red Army soldiers were more skilled than their German opponents.

The logic is too many German losses, not enough replacements, untrained teenagers into the line, that sort of thing. Meanwhile the Red losses are tailing down, officer turmoil is falling, doctrine is getting stronger, equipment is at least at parity, and eventual German victory is an obvious joke.

that could have been written by me. seems like we agree

But you have to admit, Mongols are a fascinating subject. I try and weasel them into conversations wherever I can.

they indeed are, i have always enjoyed studying stuff related to the "godless Turanian hordes". i agree with your basic idea, but in my opinion you are applying it to a too wide group of people. most of Europeans not only couldn't care less about Nazi propaganda, but directly oppose it.

[Steppe terrain fighting]

Originally posted by Bigduke6:

What is it about "German" DNA that automatically makes a German a better fighter than a Russian?

nothing. it has nothing to do with genes. it has to do with things like training, equipment and doctrine.

The Germans in 1941 inflicted the worst military defeats in history on that same Red Army. I guarantee you the DNA in the Red Army soldiers did not change in 1944. Nor did the force ratios.

while Soviet genes did not change, they changed dramatically otherwise. force ratios did change a lot thru the war as well. so did great many other things.

So if the Germans are inherently superior, what changed so that an army of "lesser quality soldiers" - that's your term, ripped the guts out of the Wehrmacht?

of course Germans are not inherently superior.

a great many things changed. you can hardly compare Red Army of 1941 to the Red Army of 1945.

Barbarians by definition don't learn. Yet the Red Army did, and by the latter half of the war, the Russian soldiers were teaching Germans lessons.

exactly.

Don't forget that all these spiffy German histories that have convinced you and others

that's an unfounded expectation that doesn't fit me at all.

Bottom line: the German army invaded Russia thinking Russians were untermenschen, and Russian soldiers were bad soldiers. Wrong on both counts.

Germans simply had faulty intel on how strong the Red Army was. they thought a number of times that they had just destroyed it.

i don't mean to offend anyone by saying that German soldiers were superior in quality (at least during the first half, definately not by the end of the war). i have no personal interests here. i do admire the qualities of Soviet soldiers, like their superior courage and determination, but IMO being a good soldier has other requirements besides being a hero.

For the next fifty years apologists for those errors have been calling Russians and the Red Army barbarians not normal human beings, so as to avoid admitting they went into the fight on such moronic grounds. Instead they cite panzer unit histories as "proof" of overall German superiority.

personally i haven't heard anyone say that Soviets would have been barbarians or a Mongolian Horde. perhaps i have a distorted view on the subject because i am a Finn, but in my personal experience the "European military establishment" have openly admired the operational art of Red Army of WW2.

Nazis thought Finns were subhuman Mongolians as well. so have the Russians. big deal. it didn't matter in military things at all. i think you are giving way too much emphasis on Nazi propaganda.

[Steppe terrain fighting]

Bigduke,

i agree with most of what you wrote, but the whole Nazi proganda machine was BASED ON that very 18th century nationalist / racist poetry mythology paraller that Soviet Union would be the Mongol Horde. i wouldn't read too much from it, especially regarding whole Europe - it just doesn't match reality. i really can't see what you are talking about, when you write about European military establishment: the European military establishment that i have known has ADMIRED the Red Army of WW2 for its superior operational art of war.

Soviets crashed thru German lines because Soviets managed to concentrate forces without Germans detecting it, while at the same time German lines had become too thin to properly support their military doctrine. then Soviet success followed from their superior doctrine of operational depth and exploitation.

that Germans were defeated by overwhelming numbers of lesser quality soldiers is no myth: it is a historical fact. that fact isn't contradicted with another historical fact that Germans were defeated because Soviets simply were superior on strategical level.

it has nothing to do with any racist or nationalist crap.

[Russian Armour in Autumn 1943...]

Originally posted by Panzer76:

This is with no AFV being hull down I take it?

yes, that's correct. a good point.

[What really happened to the Russians in 1941]

Originally posted by Egbert:

You do remember that Stalin purged his officers, right? He wasn't afraid of those too incompetent to lead a coup. The whole idea was to render the military an empty threat.

it's not just the Soviets, it's also the French, the Poles, the Brits, the Finns and so forth.

and Soviet commanders of 1941 weren't that incompetent. compare the example i gave earlier (Brits with Operation Goodwood in 1944) and note that Soviet commanders in 1941 attacked without infantry support (which is one of the main reasons behind the failure of Operation Goodwood) only when the infantry elements were unavailable (e.g. still hundreds of kilometers away). certainly Soviet commanders of 1941 were superior to Brits of 1944 in that (rather crucial) aspect (of the whole concept of Combined Arms Operations).

the most important reason i see for the Soviet operational failures of 1941, was that Germans were simply one step ahead of them on the tactical / operational level. Germans were great boxers with smooth moves, solid defence and a KO punch. Soviets were clumsy and Germans could see what they were up to. German commanders were experienced veterans by summer 1941. Soviets had the right ideas, but attacked like blocks on a board. this drove persons like Zhukov mad. when a Soviet commander did something a bit daring, something the Germans did not expect, the results were usually good (like a whole Panzer Division getting slaughtered).

of course i agree that Red Army was in state of total C3 chaos for the first half of the war in 1941 and that whole mech corps vanished because of lack of fuel and so forth, but for the most battles the Soviets were losing simply because Germans were better in the application on both tactical and operational level. not because Soviet commanders would be doing something entirely stupid. naturally there are reasons for why Soviet commanders were worse, like having too many units to command and so forth, but it takes two to tango. IMO Soviets got better thru things like starting to concentrate troops properly, not by suddenly having more competent commanders.

[Russian Armour in Autumn 1943...]

ok then, redid my limited test, though only with August 1944 runs this time. run the test only six times, so a considerable error margin does exist.

at little over 2000 meters, two veteran IS-2s (no bonuses) had a 75% hit chance per turn. worth noting: with the slow ROF, it translated into a first shot hit in 33% of the runs.

the LOS tools gives initially a 11% hit chance (14% for the Panther), then later it climbs up to 38% (42% for the Panther). because of higher ROF the Panther pings more, but rarely causes any damage. IS-2s eventually scare the Panther, possibly due to the commander debuttoning itself & getting himself killed - didn't look for that yet.

with the ~75% hit chance per turn, getting a hit from 2000 meters is clearly no problem for two veteran IS-2s. they do get hits if they open fire, and their fire seems likely to freak out the Panther, thus making it withdraw from its position.

the problem is that in real live game the IS-2s will auto-retreat once they spot a Panther at 2000 meters (they don't do that in test fires, because i can give them a target command right from the beginning). this is likely to make it hard to make the IS-2s open fire at the Panther.

the second possible problem is that it appears that the 122mm ammo may not damage the Panther the way it perhaps should - didn't record a single KO from 2000 meters. please note that my previous similar test included runs at early 1945, which should give the IS-2s the flat nosed APBC.

BTW i run simultaneously test fires on little over 1000 and little over 1500 meters. at those ranges the IS-2s won the duel on 5 out of 6 runs. worth noticing IMO.

[Russian Armour in Autumn 1943...]

Originally posted by Panzer76:

Not to mention that the IS2 would run out of AP ammo before it would hit the Panther...

no it would not. hitting the Panther is not the problem.

[Russian Armour in Autumn 1943...]

i found some time to do some limited testing and it appears that at 2000 meters two IS-2s have an upper hand over a lone Panther. at those ranges IS-2s are quite safe, while 122mm hits freak out the Panther.

unfortunately it would be hard to use this tactic in live games, because TACAI forces the IS-2s to withdraw when facing a Pather at 2000 meters.

122mm didn't seem to have any special results on Panthers, even with the flat nosed ammo (tests both on fall 1944 and early 1945). perhaps it isn't modelled at all. or perhaps i remember wrongly what i had read.

at 1000-1500 meters the result was dice rolling, both having about 50% chances of winning.

EDIT: did some quick googling, and while i didn't find a "first hand" source, i found a number of pages (amongst others battlefront.co.nz and battlefield.ru) claiming that IS-2 should be able to KO Panthers at 2500 meters. in my tests i didn't see a single KO from 2000 meters, only panicked crews. hitting the Panther wasn't a problem, the problem was that hits rarely penetrated at all.

EDIT2: came up with a post by Rexford at TankNet, which says that the 122mm APBC should penetrate Panther hull at 2875 meters. :eek:

[ May 06, 2005, 07:10 AM: Message edited by: undead reindeer cavalry ]

[What really happened to the Russians in 1941]

Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />

the reason why the Poles, the French, the British, the early Soviets etc, or even the Western Allies in 1944, had such vanishing Corps is not because they all would have been substandard: it was because their performance was standard while by the standards of the day the Germans were truly superior.

Prove it. </font>

[Russian Armour in Autumn 1943...]

Originally posted by CousinPablo:

I recently played an armour v armour quick battle as Russian infantry (1 company) supporting armour (3 T-34-85s and 2 IS-2s).

Terrain settings were huge map, farmland, flat and no trees.

Germans had some infantry, a number of Stug III late models, and a Panther. I gave the computer a +2 bonus.

i haven't played any long range IS-2 vs Panther duels in CM, but i remember reading that by summer 1944 Panthers had real lousy armor quality & that the 122mm shell could open up Panthers like tin cans at 2500+ meters without actually penetrating the armor. and bit later you should get the flat nose 122mm round, which was a real Panther killer, able to penetrate Panther's armor at those same 2500+ ranges. 122mm rounds should do a lot better against Panthers than what it seems like on paper, so don't be let pure numbers fool you. i haven't tried it in CM, but i think IS-2 should do fine if you keep 1000-2000 meter distance to the Panthers. no doubt accuracy will be a problem, but you should be able to force the Panthers to withdraw from their king of the hill positions, thus making it a lot easier for the T-34s to close in.

[One Tough Cookie]

Originally posted by flamingknives:

Interestingly, the T90 is a heavily modified T72.

yeah, just like T-80 is based on T-64 (though the differences are greater). T-90 isn't necessarily better than T-80. like T-72 is cheaper than T-64, T-90 is cheaper than T-80.

[One Tough Cookie]

Originally posted by MikeyD:

I believe the T64 made it out of (present day) Russia proper but definitely stayed in 'Soviet' hands.

yes, i think that's true.

As to 'more advanced', was the T64 advanced in actual warfighting ability? Or was the T72 just simplified from a production standpoint for cheaper manufacture?

comparisons get muddy when you start comparing different variants, but basicly T-64 had better armor, faster autoloader, more ammo...

[One Tough Cookie]

Originally posted by Glider:

In fact I think you can take T-64 as the first T-72 model. IIRC, T-64 was more advanced than first T-72 models but was never exported outside USSR.

yes, T-64 was more advanced and came to service before T-72.

Originally posted by MikeyD:

I recall when the T64 first showed up in (then) East Germany a LOT of NATO equipment suddenly became obsolete. Good bye Jpz Kanone, to name one!

did T-64s ever appear outside USSR?

[One Tough Cookie]

Originally posted by flamingknives:

The relationship between the T72 and the M1 strikes me as being similar to that between the T34 and the M4. The T34/T72 are the less advanced, but were also introduced 6 years earlier than the US Models.

i think T-72 vs M1 is usually seen pretty much like T-34/76 vs Tiger. the problem of course is that originally M1 had a 105mm gun that couldn't punch thru T-72's armor at longer ranges. it was only after modernizations that M1 could get an upper hand over unmodernized T-72s. even then it wasn't like the T-34/76 vs Tiger situation of WW2, and a modernized T-72 should offer a good match still today.

[infantry smoke]

i have suspected that CM just doesn't show things like smoke grenades, but that they are in there. for example in tank hunter teams the other fellow uses smoke grenades to blind the tank while the other fellow uses HE.

[reality check...]

Originally posted by Kurben Uberhund:

Among your calculations is good to remind yourself, How on earth the Finnish troops repelled soviet armoured assaults.

that's a huge subject, but a simplified answer would be: by isolating the Soviet tanks from the infantry that was supposed to support them. if you do this, have Soviets attack just with tanks in a map with lots of woods etc, you should be able to destroy those tanks quite easily with your infantry.

I must say the finns in this engine have great disadvantages.

i don't agree with you. for example in reality Finnish infantry was quite shaky and withdrew a lot, while Soviets usually fought to the last man both in offence and defence. that was good from the Finnish viewpoint, because Finns lived to fight the other day, while Soviets died a lot.

if Finns have disadvantages in Combat Mission, it is because in general defending infantry is in disadvantage against tanks in Combat Mission. it's not just Finns.

And then methods: by sachel charges, molovs and and mines.

Panzerfausts, Panzerschreks, AT-guns, massive artillery fires, Stukas, tanks (captured Soviet ones and German StuGs)...

But realism takes a hit, when winning by finnish infantry seems hard.

it WAS hard.

[T-34s running away....]

Originally posted by Andreas:

Oh well. Once everyone who thinks the game is broken has collected the pieces of heaven that just fell down on their heads, let's take a deep breath and test it instead of jumping up and down and complaining how badly broken the game is, shall we?

the game is not broken by this thing. it is just partially ruined by thingS like these. it is annoying to see these silly design decisions in this otherwise heavenly game.

i haven't made tests about this, nor am i really planning to, but i have seen my tanks more than enough not shoot or just back off (usually to fatal direction) while at the same time having light tanks charging at the same Nazi SuperPanzers with no second thoughts. it is an absurd situation. T-70 the Ultimate Tiger Killer.

it doesn't brake the game, it's just that annoying design flaws like these tend to brake the illusion of being there. it's just like having to remove the molotovs in scenario editor etc.

all that said, CM is an absolutely stunning game of its own level & i would buy it again any day even if it had ten times its current price.

[What really happened to the Russians in 1941]

i totally respect (nay, i adore it) the desire to have discussion that aims at objectivity (and especially if it contains wild speculation as well), but now that the discussion appears to have waned, i'd like to point out that some of the strong claims made about the Soviet commanders + the desire to isolate the issue from greater context of WW2 (and even beyond) are very similar to the typical claims made in "nationalist flame wars" and Western Allied revisionism in general.

the basic stereotypical claim is that Germans weren't superior, that their some specific opponent was just criminally incompetent and truly inferior at that specific period of WW2. to say something else means that one is a simpleminded Nazi fanboy, clueless of actual realities of the art of war and totally ignorant of the many failures of the Germans.

here, on this thread, one is given the picture that Soviet commanders of the early war were criminally incompetent, the worst of the worst and that by standards they should have fared a lot better against the Germans and failed only because they were Galactically stupid. this is of course totally out of larger context and the realities as experienced at the day back then. it's not that the Soviet commanders were criminally incompetent and totally sub-STANDARD. they were not that much worse than the Poles, French, British etc, it's just that the Germans were truly superior by the standards of the day and they didn't fall much short from revolutionizing the application of operational art of war. no, the Soviets performed pretty much as was the standard of that day. of course that standard had to change fast under the evolutionary pressure caused by the Germans. and indeed it did change and by the end of the war the Soviets had become what the Germans were during the first half of the War.

just to put things in perspective even further, look at the later blunders (considered important victories by many Western Allied revisionist fanboys) of Western Allies, like the July 1944 Operation Goodwood. in Operation Goodwood the fresh 2nd Army attacks German lines, trying to push thru, the British VIII Corps with three armored divisions spearheading the attack (the largest British armored operation to still this very day?). the British have the numerical odds, and the armored arm of the VIII Corps is not just numbers on the paper but real armored divisions. and unlike the Soviets early in the war, the Western Allies by now have air superiority and huge air arm and thus the German lines receive unimaginable beating served by hundreds of heavy bombers and the like. what happens? you get the supply problems, you get the counter-productive anti-reality reports of victory, you get fatally wrong interpretation of intelligence data and most of all the British VIII Corps gets mauled pretty much like the Soviet Corps on this thread. the armored divisions of the VIII Corps lose about half of their tanks already on the first day of the operation and by the third day it's all over after having managed to advance seven miles. this while having numerical superiority and absolutely mindblowing air arm - both something the Soviets did not have. and of course it's 1944, so you don't have the "excuse" of early war unpreparedness etc and you don't have half of the tanks of your Corps breaking down already before the battle due to technical problems.

the reason why the Poles, the French, the British, the early Soviets etc, or even the Western Allies in 1944, had such vanishing Corps is not because they all would have been substandard: it was because their performance was standard while by the standards of the day the Germans were truly superior.

[T-34s running away....]

Originally posted by MikeyD:

"partially ruined"

Well... That's a tad harsh.

What it does is make the game frustrating for people brought up on shooter games, where the approved form of combat is to charge forward with both guns blazing.

on the contrary. as it is, Combat Mission supports mindless charges forward. for example this very "feature" discussed here manifests only if you try to have some fancy tactics - if you just charge mindlessly towards the target you won't experience this "feature".

i don't mean that CM would be partially ruined just by this flaw. it's all the small flaws together that ruin it partially. flaws like the one discussed here wouldn't be frustrating if it wasn't purely just a simple decision on the designer's part.

still, CM is the best there is.

[An interesting (?) Russian WWII website]

Originally posted by Tero:

One curious omission though: the cease fire between USSR and Finland took effect Sept 5th and Novosti does not mention it even in passing.

many Russian sources ignore Finnish campaign totally. in some cases it didn't even exist officially. they claim some of the slaughtered divisions never were in Finland etc.

[T-34s running away....]

it's one of the more absurd design flaws in CM, underlined by an armored car that has no objections to charging a column of Tigers. the whole "feature" is totally counterproductive as is.

it's frustrating that such a brilliant game has been partially ruined by silly design decisions.