undead reindeer cavalry

a bit like interpol hunting down some random guy who continued the good deed even after the condom broke?

i hear you and agree. i think we have arrived at the monstrous bottom-up vs top-down game design limbo. abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

it has an effect that weakens resistance in every single case other than the one in which both plates are face hardened. yea, though i don't think this is simulated in CMBB.

actually the 50+30 plate combination should perform better than 80mm plate as both plates are facehardened. the 50+30 FH plates resist closer to 90mm than 80mm. the problem is that facehardened plates get weaker by each hit and CMBB does not simulate this. two plate combo may also cause angled hits to penetrate better than expected, since the first plate guides the round towards 90 degree angle for the second. some types of rounds do better against FH armor, some worse. if the round doesn't have a cap designed against FH the rounds has likelyhood of shattering on impact even when it should penetrate. Soviet rounds tend to have only ballistics caps. add in poor quality of some types etc etc etc. the other side of the coint are the weak spots of StuG front, the shattering of the FH plates themselves after impacts etc. what's especially of note when comparing to Tiger I armor, are the numerous plates that give rise to more common edge hit effects (that lower resistance).

usually "overmatch" refers to round calibre vs plate thickness. the problem with 76mm is that it is overmatched by Tiger plate thickness. what's worse is that all 76mm rounds save one (IIRC) were of the type that perform badly against Tiger I's armor type. of course this has little to do with how borked the behind armor effect modelling is. have to agree with this.

my whole point is that there is no German 80 - 82mm plate just like there is no Soviet 76mm shell. it's far more nuanced than that.

Duke, the problem with eyewitness accounts is that they are usually too vague about important details. they are important of course, especially if we don't have better information. for example if we know from repeated field trial results that round X1 does not penetrate plate Y, and we know that round X2 does penetrate plate Y, we should be inclined to reason that a report of round X (X1, X2 or X3, we don't know) penetrating plate Y reports the use of a round X variant that is something other than X1. thus just because of a report of round X we should not insist that round X1 should penetrate plate Y in the game. what's more is that when we talk about something like "StuG IIIG upper front hull armor" we are talking about something that didn't exist as a single plate.

no, initial AP ammo is a bit ineffective. i'd dare to speculate that both the StuG 30+50 plate and the Soviet 85mm and 76mm ammo that are in the game are modelled quite OK. the problem is caused by the way the game has abstracted the considerable weak points of the StuG front. the other part of the problem is that the game doesn't have the more rare & powerful Soviet ammo types (i.e. ones tailored specifically to deal with things like Tiger I armor). when you combine these two you get the impossibility to recreate some historical results. the problem with these discussions is the apples & oranges nature. e.g. Tiger I side armor is nothing like StuG 30+50 front, even if by mm they seem similar. very different armor in many ways. in similar way there are considerable differences between different Soviet AT ammo of same calibre. all the possible combinations create different kind of penetration situations that aren't comparable.

IMO the slow ROF is not the real issue. slow ROF becomes an issue because the simulation has shortcomings with first shot hit chances (at minimal and normal ranges) and ability to spot non-moving non-firing enemy vehicles. likewise i think the TacAI auto-reverse is worse issue than some penetration modelling. things like IS-2 auto-reversing when spotting a Panther at a range where the IS-2 has the odds. ^^ btw i recall from my tests that the 85mm AA does penetrate Tiger I armor per the Soviet trials (kills from sides at >1000 meters). the strange thing about the 85mm AA is that i think i stopped using it after i got it without any AP in a couple of games. EDIT: i am not suggesting you should equate Tiger I armor with the StuG one. AFAIK Tiger I armor did better than it should in all trials by all sides. i don't think there are any proven or generally accepted theories why Tiger I armor was so resistant (it's not just hardness or such), it just was surprisingly resistant. where as Tiger I armor should resist better than expected, the StuG armor shoud resist less than expected (expecting that one does not expect the effects caused by combined plates etc).

i have to agree. besides theatres not directly related to Nazi Germany, there are also a lot of people who are mostly (if not solely) interested in the battles, equipment and such. Wages is most likely not interesting to them, as it does not deal with such subjects. yet in a sense it may offer some pleasurable extra depth even to people who are "only" interested in something like the StuG and it's daily usage at and around the front. knowing what it took to build that machine etc adds a whole new layer to it all.

simply put it explains the Nazi rationale, the strategic political-economical realities and difficulties, behind many of their big decisions. it answers many fundamental questions most books don't even try to answer. there's too much to summarize, so i recommend you read some Amazon reviews (or similar) to get an idea.

the victim idea is the nurture ideology. why is free will important? our needs?

he should have sticked to painting dogs and vases with flowers. it may have been more important to him that his own position in Germany was getting weak. getting some sleep would have helped as well. Overy has written a nice small book called "1939 - the countdown to war". it contains nothing really special, but it's a nice light reading about the last hours (days) before the war. a really short book, so nobody should buy it unless there's some compelling need to. a real eye opener is Tooze's "wages of destruction". anyone interested in WW2 should read that excellent book.

lol. also an artist wannabe.

i was trying to imply that the debate you speak of is caused by ideological & political motivations & agendas. some strong ideologies have made it a life or death question for themselves. yeah, that's a nice way to put it, though i'm not sure there is a need for that one word.

not so far from reality, considering how Hitler cancelled the original invasion of Poland at the very last moment and how he believed the invasion would not trigger a world war (not a big deal enough for allies).

most sociologists etc are taught the ideological belief that humans are born with blank minds. when e.g. violent behavior is just a product of the society, then it follows that violent movies and video games must cause violent behavior. we are rotten only because we grow up in rotten societies, they say. as counter intuitive as it may seem, not least because of the above mentioned ideological brainwashing we all enjoy, the 20th century, with the two world wars and a good number of genocides included, was 50 times *less violent* than typical pre-agrarian noble savant societies (that suffer no such evils as movies, video games and rock music).

it does, but usually the problem is that there are not enough orders (nobody coordinating actions), not that there would be too many orders. so your #2 example could still have that inefficient battalion, but this time there would be also another battalion + division level artillery barrage + some tanks + prior information about enemy positions.

it depends on the effectiveness of the commanding apparatus at various levels of the chain of command. if the higher levels are able to understand the reality on the ground and are able to issue orders in time, then in theory it should always add to the effectiveness of the units doing the fighting. it's because the higher levels can see the bigger picture, offer support arms, coordinate actions of units & by so doing combine the combat power of otherwise separate units and because they can utilize the higher level of training and experience of their commanders and staffs. problems arise when the two-way data flow can not match the tempo of the actions, or when those higher levels are not competent in their tasks. something worth noticing is that oftentimes tactical interests conflict with operational, strategic or political interests. this leads to orders that do not seem productive on the tactical level, but which supposedly, in the end, pay off on the higher levels.

i think they are labeled "CTRL" in Finnish. i tried typing capitalis with them but it didn't appear to work quite right, or at least i personally found the results to be rather confusing. perhaps my computer is broken and i need to get it fixed in order to sort out this highly embarassing problem of missing capitals.

i noticed a couple of mentions in the interwebs about panzer battalions being equipped with a type of radios that would not enable them to communicate with brigade hq. it's stuff like this that i am suspecting for their continued level of performance that was far below any expectations.

it's a filthy habit, i admit it, that goes back to the archaic era of computerized communication. back when fonts had a fixed width (well, fonts didn't even exist yet) and screen resolutions were defined not in pixels. nonetheless it's a poor excuse and i am sorry for the inconvenience and discomfort my incoherent typing and grammatical structure (if any) must have caused you. i don't know if it helps, but i probably know how you feel when i try reading German texts with those bizarre capitalization rules.

that's why i suspect there's more to it than seems obvious. usually green units seem to learn the most critical lessons within the first couple days of combat, but these brigades seem to never learn. naturally, but going small does help when the ineptitude is caused by the size of a formation.

yep, it took a great amount of accumulated experience to finally be able to deploy corps and army level armored formations that would not collapse under the weight of their own body. slightly related to this all, i have already for some time tried to find some free brain processing time to think about and analyse the performance of the late German panzer brigades, possibly with comparison to the Soviet tank brigades & with an evaluation of the potential contradictions and similarities between German and Soviet experiences. there obviously was something that crippled the theorical combat power of those panzer brigades in most cases (e.g. PB 107th's relatively good performance during Market Garden seems to be one exception), but what exactly it was remains a bit unclear to me (and whether or not there's any contradiction with the Soviet experiences -- i'd like to note here that i understand that a part of the motives & causes behind these quite similar solutions were different between Soviets and Germans, especially what comes to the ideas discussed previously in this thread i.e. command & control of larger formations, and the differences in the internal structure of the brigades). the most obvious first thought is that the panzer brigades were simply manned by such untrained and inexperienced material that the performance of the brigades could only be expected to be very low. perhaps panzer brigades (in reality regiments) had too little flesh to survive the initial evolutionary battlefield pressure -- when a division has lived thru the attritional learning phase it's still big enough to continue to exist as a separate unit, but what remains of the panzer brigade is too little to be usable in any practical way and is better off being assimilated into a local PD. another thought is that brigades themselves performed relatively OKish (keeping in mind the quality of personnel), but it was the parent formations that caused the fail. e.g. because in many cases panzer brigades didn't have any recovery & repair elements, they were dependant on the parent formation to offer these services. if the parent formation failed to offer them the brigade would quickly disintegrate as the phoenix cycle of armored rebirth is broken and numbers from the temporary losses shift directly to the permant losses column (or long term repair column, when all but the most trivial repairs require transfer to distant rear service depots). but it seems to me things like these do not explain it all. it seems the brigades in most cases were clumsy and mostly caused a puff instead of a bang created by similar sized KG of a PD. comparing with the previously discussed weak panzer divisions, this is still somewhat surprising. on the other hand cases like the 107th, which had some experienced veteran personnel, might indicate that it's all about the incompetence caused by lack of training and experience, possibly combined with a lethal dose of simplistic or forced aggression, just like discussed in this thread. what interests me in the above is the theory of sound usage and justification for fielding these types of formations, the requirements set by them on the circumstances and parent formations and their value in comparison to the use of elements such as seperate battalions. in theory these panzer bat + gren bat + support coys brigades could be highly agile units with the combat power of a good sized tactical KG, even if lacking the long term operational durability. on the other hand the brigades were weak enough to require constant linking with their changing set of parent & sister formations, which is bound to increase friction if compared to how different battalions within a PD grow to act smoothly within the formation. yes and the combat part of things is the less important part of coordination and delay issues with large units. for example i was recently reading a war diary of a Finnish rifle company and here's a rough timeline for one action: 00:00: parent formation receives information about enemy attack at location X (several km away, this is taking place in an inactive part of the front) +15 mins: parent formation has made a plan and has briefed the coy's officers about the situation & mission +15 mins: everyone in the coy has been informed about the mission and the coy has assembled itself +15 mins: the coy is loaded into trucks +15 mins: the trucks have transported the coy into a start off point close to location X +15 mins: the coy unloads and assumes attack formation +15 mins: the coy attacks & routs the enemy force and the battle has ended most of the time is taken by things other than combat. with larger formations it becomes exponentially worse. for comparison in the effect of scale & arms, i remember reading a quote made by an US tank battalion commander in Normandy: he said that even in the most optimal conditions it would take five hours for his tank battalion to start moving counting from the moment it has received the order. in the real deal your whole green rifle battalion could have only a single waypoint and you would set it by first selecting the whole battalion in CMBB. i remember reading a Finnish wartime document in which a captured Soviet rifle division commader was asked for his opinion on why Soviets performed so badly. he listed things like total unablity of anyone to understand maps or how to use a compass. he gave one example in which one officer was 6 km (or 7, i can't rememver which one) away from the position he claimed he was at. trying to organize and coordinate divisional operations which such material must have been "challenging".