RawRecruit

How long did it take to change the Thompson over from .45 to cream splurges as the Americans were clearly prototyping in the pre-war documentary 'Bugsy Malone'?

Probably been mentioned before, but how about pauses between commands. So, I could say 'advance for 20 metres, pause for 20 seconds and then advance another 20 metres'. This would allow coordination of platoons when advancing across open ground. You could also make the time paused a little variable, i.e one Sgt counts 1..2..3.. while another counts 1 elephant 2 elephant 3 etc.

How about the ability to blow anything, not just bridges. If you have engineers they could rig a couple of those buildings just outside your MLR when on defense. Troops boot door in...storm into building...building goes sky high... :eek:

Hadn't considered an earlier misidentification. I think that the StuGs gun should cope with any Valentine, though, going by the armour charts. I suppose that the TC just thought two successive hits were enough...and quite rightly so!

In a PBEM I've just had a StuG IIIG pop smoke and reverse from a duel with a 'Valentine?' tank. My first couple of shots missed. They scored a track hit and a lower hull penetration, both with 'no serious damage'. Now, I've never duelled a Valentine before, but the StuGs 75/L48 is surely a match for it?

Don't know if they changed air support in CMAK, but in CMBB it is random when it shows up, and yes, there is a chance it won't show up at all. Interesting point about an opponent having air support, too. Does the engine model aircraft vs. aircraft, or do they leave each other alone?

Is the FO moving? I believe that you can't target if the FO is on the move or hiding, or panicked, etc. Pretty much has to be stationary and sitting comfortably... There are no restrictions on FOs so that they must deliver on the first turn that I know of.

Thanks! That's a golden wee nugget! Guess I'm just going to have to bite the bullet (or shell!) and learn the hard way, though...through getting severly dealt with by the vets out there until I know better!

Hmmmm. Quite complicated. The major problem that I've had, and the one I guess I'm trying to solve without hours of extensive playtesting that I can't really afford, is choosing armour or AT assets in setup. Eg. if I've got a QB in May 1942, I now know (from painful experience) that a PzIIIJ short will barely scratch the paintwork of a T34...but what about a PzIV? And in July? The mind boggles... :eek: I can already hear the answers, though...better fire up the scenario editor...!

Bone_Vulture, thanks for the figure. This is kind of what I was after. As stikkypixie, says there's no substitute for experience, but there must also be a rough formula for working it out. I was just thinking about making a database to help myself roughly gauge what has a reasonable chance against what, and by that I also mean AT guns, which throw another heap of data into the mix! Once I've been playing the game long enough I anticipate that this will be second nature, but for now...!

Is there a rule of thumb to work out how easily a gun can kill a tank using the armour pentration values and the armour charts? IOW, how much higher(in mm) should a penetration value be, compared to the target armour, to reliably kill the said target? I assume that if the penetration value equals the armour at the same slope then you've got a slim chance of killing the target... I know there's some colour coding in the game, and that's easy to understand for big guns and weak armour, but I get a bit lost when trying to figure out the many different PzIII/IV marks versus T34 variants over the different time periods.

Don't know about money...maybe the prestige of topping a league would be enough motivation for most serious players. In a league system you could play 'home' and 'away' games where 'home' is you defending and 'away' is you attacking. I'd certainly be interested in that.

And when you're comfortable playing against the AI make sure you try out playing humans. I'm about halfway through my first few 'play by email' games and they (my opponents, that is) have added a whole new dimension to my enjoyment of this fine game.

Only time I've managed to use FTs on the attack is during night battles when they can approach quite close while remaining undetected. Of course, I also had an OT-34 rain fiery death on my own troops at night through misidentification :mad:

I actually quite like the idea of the gutsy CO leading from the front and showing 'his boys' how it's done. However, about suppression and the 10 man squad versus the 4 man squad, is it easier to suppress 4 men than 10, say with a single MG mounted on a tank? Smaller target I agree, but I would assume that 10 men would be a little too spread out to cover with a single gun and would have more available bodies to lob grenades, demo charges, stones, insults...! Plus, surely ten men would be able to come at an AFV from too many angles for it to cope with. Being an 'armchair general' I can't really say how it would work in real life, so the above is just some thoughts. If there is any good reference material around about how infantry worked on the smallest scale then I'd really like to enlighten myself somewhat...!

I'm just trying to rationalize why the game might model HQ's being better tank killers. My original thought was along the lines that the platoon CO would probably be very experienced or well trained (particularly in the early Wermacht) but you would also have a spread of vets in amongst the squads that would have as good an idea of how to go about getting a tank (or anything else for that matter!)! It's a small point, but I'd like to know why I'm sending my CO to possibly get wiped out, thus destroying my command lines, where a squad should theoretically have as much chance of success (...or getting themselves dead... ).

And I suppose as these guys get pasted then they are replaced by the most experienced members of the platoon squads, thus maintaining the higher quality!

I've been reading some of the forum threads about ways to kill tanks with infantry and a lot of posts suggest that the HQs are more effective with explosives etc. Is there a historical reason for this? Who were the four or so guys that made up the HQ and what were their roles? Apart from the probably obvious answer that one was the Platoon CO, were they just ordinary grunts assigned to protect the big cheese?