Bigduke6

KG_AGCent, Well we'll never know the answer but just for fun here are my responses to your comments, in a friendly sort of way. This turned out to be a long post, so if it's too much here's my short response: The Germans from mid-1944 had the Tiger II, which in tactical terms was a not whole lot less superior to enemy armored vehicles of the day, than modern tanks would be. If you put together all the Tiger II's produced two divisions' worth - i.e. say 500 vehicles or so - were fielded. Those Tigers had minor tactical impact and next to zero operational impact, and no strategic impact on the course of World War Two. Now for the long response: 1. Could modern tanks handle 1940s fuel? Yeah, I'm aware the Abrahms supposedly can run on almost fuel available today, but I doubt real seriously Aberdeen tested the vehicle using 1940s fuel. Hydocarbon processing has come a long way in the last sixty years, and a good of the advances are in fuel "cleanliness", by which I mean how much burning it in an engine will leave residue. Given the complexity and (relatively) high power of modern tank engines, I am guessing running those vehicles on last century's fuel would gunk them out pretty quick. 2. How long can a modern armor division keep its tanks mobile, assuming no support from higher echelons? Our notional two modern divisions in Europe 1944-45 for all their firepower would be only pretty small pieces of a giant front, and so their ability affect the war outside of the range of their weapons would be pretty limited, it seems to me. So they would have to run around a lot. The necessity of running all those modern tanks all over heaven and creation to get a more than local effect from their superiority woudl have to use 1940s roads, and 1940s rail. Your tanks are going to have all sorts of bottleneck problems as you're trying to push 70-ton vehicles and their support vehicles through a road net still mostly geared to horses, in Europe with European buildings. Even the thought of trying to move Abrams or Leopard II through the 1940s Reichsbahn is a nightmare scenario. Tunnels? Bridges? Partisans? You have the same problems if not more if you want to put the tanks on trailers to haul them from place to place, and in any case a modern divisin only has enough trailers, generally speaking, to handle the typical 10 per cent non-runners. So if you want your modern armored divisions to have more than a local effect, they have to move opertionally on their own tracks. Modern divisions don't even try that if they can possibly avoid it. Track life even on a modern tank is the hundreds not thousands of kilometers on good roads, and for practical purposes I'm talking cross-country. My opinion, if those two divisions of tanks spent a couple of months actually moving from place to place, without the support tail modern divisions have from corps and higher, they would run themselves into the ground. So would WW2 tanks, they were even more unreliable, but the WW2 solution was just to make more, they're cheap. Can't do that with Challenger or T-90. The West Front was hundreds of kilometeres long. Never mind trying to shift modern tanks operationally on the East Front, where the roads and distances were factors worse. 3. How effectively could a modern division defend itself against WW2 air and artillery attack? The answer is, obviously, incredibly well until the smart munitions run out, and then they're SOL. My point is, if you have say 1,000 tactical bombers unloading lets say 2,000 tons of iron bombs on the supply trains of one of our modern armored division's, how do your Abrams or whatever stop that? You only have have so many Patriots and Stingers, and WW2 aircraft were crammed with small-caliber cannon and 50 .cal just ideal for smacking helicopters. So okay, you knock down 200 planes from that 1000-plane raid. That means only 1,600 tons of bombs dumped on your supply trains which, since they're modern, have a whole lot more flammable fuel, ammo, and plastic than a 1944 supply trains sie. Also I wonder how modern firefinder radars would handle not dozens but thousands of incoming shells. Ok, you detect and destroy the first few batteries, but what if there are dozens sending indirect your way? 4. Who are the better soldiers, 1940s humans or early 21st century humans? Here you and I are in outright conflict. True, we both agree modern people get more training and education than 1940s people, and so the modern people have that going for them when you try and make them into soldiers. My point is, that's not nearly enough to counter several things people in mid-1940s had going for them, when it comes to judging their soldierly abilities. Here is a partial list: Accepting casualties: 1940s people fought in wars against with the background of WWI. The ethic was in wars some people will die, you hope you are not one of them, and sometimes you can't hope. A unit becomes combat incapable after losing maybe twenty per cent of its people, a good unit maybe can push that number to thirty or 40 per cent. Modern people in modern armies come from a "no friendly casualties" outlook, and so you can make a modern unit back off, usually, if it takes 1-2 per cent casualties. Sometimes less. Abilities to accept rigor: 1940s people had a much less sedentary lifestyle than modern people, and they were accustomed to far fewer creature comforts. Also the general population was far more rural. Most modern units think two weeks without showers and hot food is about the limit. I am talking not just modern grunts (although I have my doubts about them too) but the whole division. The grunts at best are 10 per cent of the force. Now think of the German and Russian infantry units, from general on down, every branch of the service, at Stalingrad. Toughness is a military virture. 5. "A People driving and maintaining todays tanks, aircraft and assault weapons are much more highly trained and motivated than any fighting force ever fielded." KG_AGCent, I have a good deal of respect for the U.S. Marine Corps, but on the motivation side that's propaganda contradicted by a lot of history. For instance, the average service time in a Roman Legion - a military formation that has kept a pretty good reputation for quite a while - was twenty years. The average Roman legionaire would laugh at a modern soldier's claim he was a pro after say eighteen months in the ranks. Think of a division of mostly illiterate gunnery sergeants, 10-12 years service on average, a whole lot more physically fit than modern gunnery sergeants, and convinced of their racial superiority in the bargain. That's a typical Roman legion. As to motivation, with respect, I suggest you read up on the S.S. divisions, for instance. No prisoners, absolute sacrifice, total professionalism, your entire life is the unit's property. Sure the motivation came from a pretty nasty regime, but if you look at the record of the S.S. clearing Warsaw and, for instance, the U.S. military in Baghdad or the Russian military in Chechnya, modern soldiers don't look so hot by comparison. As to unit pride, are you really arguing that soldiers in modern units have more loyalty to their fellows than, for instance, members of Napoleon's Old Guard? Thanks for taking the time to read this. [ January 25, 2005, 03:05 AM: Message edited by: Bigduke6 ]

I think Gpig's sketches are terrific and keep them coming. As to the the squad in a defensive position, the East Front was pretty big. I bet what Gpig drew happened in RL. See, Red infantry left to its own devices would automatically dig a trench, starting with indvidual holes and then expanding the next guy down the line. You don't wait for orders, if you are left alone you must dig, period. The intermediate state between individual foxholes and a single trench is larger holes connecting 2-3 individual holes, the connections being determined by who's faster with the shovel, what dirt is where, who just had his vodka ration, and so on. Thus IMHO Gpig did a fine job rendering a Red Army squad defending a half-finished trench in a woodline. Molodets!

On the modern tanks in WW2, basically it would be like having a couple of divisions equipped only with basically a super Tiger II. You can kill everything, nothing can touch you. But you can still lose a war, because there's more to war than having the most uber-tank. First, there is fuel quality. Modern tanks from what I have seen are pretty picky about muck in their diesel. WW2 diesel was pretty mucky, compared to the modern peacetime stuff. There's your first batch of maintenance casualties. Second there is support. By this I don't just mean spare parts, whichi its own problem, but all the other stuff that goes into, well, making a modern tank division go. Tanks wear out fast just by using them. If I was in command of a WW2 front and I knew the enemy had two divisions of tanks of Merkavas or Challengers or whatever I couldn't touch, I would just retreat wherever the uber-tanks advanced, and advance wherever they weren't. Let the enemy play fire brigade with his modern tanks until they break. Hey - that's the recipe for fighting Tiger II. My situation vs. the modern tanks gets even better if the modern tank divisions have to use WW2 supply channels. 'Nuff said. Second to finally, a 500 lb dumb iron air bomb on target will trash a modern tank just fine, if it hits. Just look what the Iraqis or the Palestinians can do when they get 50 kg of plastique in the right place. Stack your P-47s or Stukas and let them have at the modern tank assembly areas. Finally, those tanks may be modern, but the people inside them are no more intelligent, enduring, or technically skilled than 1940s humans. Those modern tankers still would have to sleep, eat, get letters, etc. So obviously go after that. And if the people in those modern tanks are REAL modern people - meaning they just don't want a meal and some sleep during a war, they have to have three hots and e-mail and the modern PX you're going to have huge problems running those two armored divisions.

Sven, I think there is no perfect solution, but in general the more lead you can send skywards, the less of a pain aircraft are. I just got finished playing the Boots and Tracks Death of the Titans Scenario (and a lot of fun it was too) and I think I am probably not giving things away by saying that I was Germans with a bunch of panzers, I had a Wirbelwind (4 x 20mm) There also was an airplane buzzing around, and since it was 1944 I figured odds that was the Luftwaffe were pretty low, so I parked the AA vehicle as far away from the action as possible. A couple of turns later a Hurricane indeed made a pass and attempted to bomb the Wirbelwind, which was fairly well hidden (I thought) but at the same time ignored several other armored vehicles. The bombs missed big time, more than 500 meters, althogh an unlucky infantry squad got bracketed and died outright. The Wirbelwind shot back, obviously. So far so good. Eventually a Sherman popped the Wirbelwind, and two turns after that ANOTHER Hurrican dropped two eggs on one of my main fire positions, taking out one panzer, immobilizing a second, and killing the TC in a third. (They were pretty close together.) Lesson: If you have AA pointing towards the sky, the airplanes tend to leave your other stuff alone.

I am a little leery of more, and more complicated, unit reaction routines. I doubt it is possible to create artificial intellgence to support them. Take for instance the "seek hull-down" command, is there any one out there that uses it? I don't, like most players I look at the ground, pick the best hull-down spot, and hunt, contact, move, or fast move up to depending on where I think the threats are, and what I want to do with the vehicle. The "hull-down" command can't do that as well. This is one of the reasons the A/I has trouble in the attack; it is using a relatively dumb brain to choose hull-down positions - at least against most human opponents. (That's my impression of the A/I anyway.) My point is, the human brain crunches the information that goes into making a "where do I hull-down" decison far better than a PC/MAC. After all, it's TCs and drivers that pick hull-down positions in real life, not the on-board computer. So I doubt CM2 will be able to match the human brain on that one. My worry, therefore, is that attempts to impose more limitations in order-giving, unit responses etc. will translate to, in practical terms, a bigger orders menu with commands similar in utility to "hull-down." The result might be, I fear, stupid unit behaviour. By this I mean "stupid they wouldn't have done that in real life" and by which I definately don't mean "an accurate replication a stupid RL mistake." The first is bad for the game, the second, obviously is good. This is why I tend to lean towards a 2-3 minute turn, although certainly I don't insist on it. That forces the players to think more in terms of orders not tweaking, but at the same time gives him full opportunity to add the power of his (hopefully) human brain to what the game has the units doing. Just my opinion. As others have pointed out if you are brave enough to get away from the uber-crack and elite- troops and play with greens and conscripts, you are well aware CM can force you into thinking 2-3 turns ahead, because your units can't react faster than that. [ January 20, 2005, 01:55 AM: Message edited by: Bigduke6 ]

Steve, Well I guess I disagree with you there, I would say a longer turn would be more realistic on grounds CM gives players far more control over their troops than the RL company or battalion commander has. Maybe I'm not thinking outside the box, but it sure seems to me a 2 or 3 minute turn would solve a bunch of "problems", most associated with super-intelligent squad and indivdual vehicles behaviour due to player micro-managing. But as you have pointed out there's not much fun in a game where you give orders and then watch a 30 minute movie you can't influence. I have lots of fun with 1 minute. Actually, that is a pretty good definition of why CM works. There is a real-live war movie in progress on your computer, and only way you can influence how the movie goes is by applying proper tactics, and so the game forces you to think like a commander in actual combat.

My thanks to the BF crew for the great info on this thread. It is so interesting and intriguing that, after having read this forum for about four years, all this talk of CMX2 convinced me to actually register and make a comment. My comment is, I bet the turns get longer. Turn length primarily is a computer horsepower function, and there is more of that now than when CM. That would at a swell foop (or something like that) automatically reduce borg spotting problems, increase realism, undermine micromanaging, and even possibly get rid of the section skirmish line technique. (I can hope.)