McIvan

I can post only from personal experience as a New Zealander, but I would back up Stalins Organist that it is not viewed (here) as more than a mildly derogatory short-hand reference for all South Africans in the same harmless sense as "pom" or "limey", or "yank" or "kiwi" or "aussie" for that matter. "Saffer" is another one. I cannot imagine that JonS was going out of his way to offer gratuitous insult. Your post is essentially a mildly hysterical over-reaction in search of a target. [ June 13, 2007, 09:17 PM: Message edited by: McIvan ]

They are slightly inferior woods, nothing more or less than that.

In game terms, the distinctions would be: Ammo load....more AP and less HE with the 76mm tanks. Inferior HE...the 76mm round has less effect than the 75mm round. Less MGs. Less MG ammo.

Ivan SKAVINSKY SKIVAR, you infidel :mad: Are we getting the cream of the Muscovite Tsar, then?

All I can see is a relentless display of nastiness toward a good-natured if mistaken eccentric. Don't you have anything better to do?

HEAT is high explosive anti-tank, otherwise known as hollow charge....consists of HE with an inward cone in the head of it, the cone is lined with copper (usually). The shape of the HE sends a jet of copper (in a funny sort of not-metal but not-liquid either state) in the direction of the cone's centreline. That jet is travelling fast enough to penetrae quite a lot of armour. It is a very useful round because it isn't dependent on velocity. Specially good for low-velocity field guns etc, not so much for high-velocity AT guns since their standard AP round is usually better anyway. It does however have some HE effect along with its penetrating metal core, so situations arise where it can be useful. It is also better against sloped armour....the jet doesn't bounce or shatter, for example. One slight negative is that the pentration will be relatively narrow indeed. There is probably less "behind armour" effect from HEAT than from normal AP. However a 75mm HEAT will usually suffice to knock something out.

Coming back somewhat on topic, I (via another forums post) ran across a description of MMGs being fired direct from the carriers... Australian Armour in the Middle East Where did carriers such as this, with Vickers mounted in the front where the Bren would normally have been, slot into Allied formations? The Vickers does not strike me as easily removable and, with the cooling jacket hooked up to the radiator, it seems set for sustained fire from the vehicle itself. This is what I was thinking of when I made the original post btw, but I then kept coming up with all the pedestal jobbies when searching.

I have noticed that a lot of people use AP to refer to anti-personnel, specially people whose native tongue is not English.

Well, taking fire from behind will do that. Six minutes to regroup is nothing in real life terms, although it's an eternity on the CM battlefield.

Andreas is on the money....it's a representation of the squad close assaulting the Tiger. Who knows what gear they had? What it doesn't represent is an actual hand grenade being thrown from a distance.

Happy to play on the Sovietski side. Or whatever I'm well used to combined arms battalion sized battles. Unfortunately work and real life would get too much in the way of anything more, although it sounds fascinating.

Thanks Jon, much appreciated So the 7 carriers per platoon is only for the Motor Bn? Or for all MMG battalions? I've been thrown off track here, I think, by having played a lot of Campaign Series: West Front...where the MMG carrier is a separate little vehicle, rather than a carrier plus a dismountable vickers. Made me think of it as a Bren Carrier with a vickers poking out the front.

Where did MMG carriers slot into the commonwealth OOB? Everything I search on them gets muddled into a general description of universal carriers in which MMG sections rode, so I am none the wiser as to their actual role. As far as I know, they weren't just a portion of an MG battalion being toted around in a Universal Carrier, they were part of the motorised infantry component of an armoured division, being mobile MMG support. Is this correct? Does anyone know how they operated in practice....mostly firing from the vehicle, or mostly dismounted...ie what was the doctrine?

I sort of agree about the AI orders, especially when you've almost reached cover and your men proceed to sneak all the way back across the open ground they'd almost finished with. But other than that it's not so bad. Squatdog your second set of examples is interesting. I cannot see why a vet squad with a double morale leader would flee from a conscript squad at 120 metres from only one burst (that's all five secs would allow). You didn't say what terrain your boys were in...but I presume they were advancing in the open from the description. Open terrain is very vulnerable, but I would still expect your boys to take more than one burst. The possibility that occurred to me was that a sniper took a shot. There is a big morale hit from sniper fire....that can panic and/or rout a squad on the spot. Alternatively (or as well) you took fire from units that you haven't id'd yet under fog of war, such as MG's further back. Despite the occasionaly silly AI sneak order, I like CM's morale modelling better than any game I've ever encountered.

When a unit becomes aware of enmy moving close with the intention of ending that unit's life, it will quite often rally and commence firing in an act of self-preservation. Presumably the guy has to have an SMG....I really can't see him supressing two squads otherwise. At close range, an SMG is quite capable of suppressing two squads....a bunch of SMG magazines being shot into the not-very-safe over of a wheatfield would scare the hell out of me. Also possible that it went "fanatic". I would call you unlucky, not that the morale model is broken.

Pardon me for asking, but was it ever resolved whether or not Spiers murdered those prisoners?

I do do that, with some limited sucess. Once reasonably closely engaged, I find that the fact of turning and receiving fire from the rear (which is going to happen at least a couple of times if you're on slow advance orders) overcomes the morale benefit from the advance order. You can sometimes get troops away. The best solution, I find, is to put them on a rise and sneak them away for a short distance before switching to fast. Sneak is my preferred method of breaking contact, not advance.

I didn't have to....I just logged in using my Frag nick and pw. If it isn't working for you, then I guess you'll have to (re)register..

Artie, who runs the overall WaW forum, is looking into removing the right hand column to let the posts spread out a bit more.

It's practically impossible to conduct a real life fighting withdrawal in CM (or, at least, what my vision of one is). If you put anything well forward, you should really be prepared to lose it OR get it exposed and routed while the enemy are still some distance away, so that your squad has a reasonable chance of surviving the retreat and rallying later on.

There is, it seems to me, a dramatically increased chance of surrender from the mere fact of an enemy unit being behind you.

That is probably the default "go-to". You can, iirc, amend which board you end up on in your profile. The Fragment board is in the forums section to the left...

I concede your point, Jon...that last para of mine was a bit of an add-on.

Veteran's stories are of course self selecting. You don't get to read the myriads of (short) memoirs that would have gone something like this: "I had three months of basic training, got shipped to France. Two days later on patrol I got shot through the head by an HMG firing on fixed lines". Instead you get to read the ones who survived and more than likely managed to doa bit of counterbalancing. They are also statistically more likely to be from units that suffered lighter casualties than average, simply because there are more survivors to write memoirs.

I've never given the possibility of an opponent cheating a moment's thought. The WEGO system makes it very difficult. A welcome change from other games.