z-warfare

I wholly concur with Michael Emrys' description of demolition work against hedgehogs, because I have personally destroyed a hedgehog! It was a dark night somewhere near Meaford Ontario... Or was it Gagetown NB? In any case it required a few blocks of C4 or whatnot strapped to the centre where the I-beams were joined. It didn't take more than 10 minutes to set up det cord, use strapping to attach explosives, and attach fuses. Same procedure for concrete dragon's teeth, maybe a little more time for them due to strapping wooden boards to 'sandwich' the explosives against the cement. I believe such work should be within the scale of CM. On the other hand, it wasn't a matter of just chucking blocks at it, and it would not be something to do under fire. Last but not least, these were all freestanding obstacles, nothing sunk into the ground or anchored in any way.

I like to imagine that one day, CMx3 will use SOP's you can set for each unit from a fly-out menu, specifying categories of TacAI responses to different situations, eg Advance to Contact - Seek Cover - Hide - Engage Armour Only or some such. No orders outside of C2 would be a little more workable with this.

My feeling is that Engineers ought to be able to destroy small light bridges within 10-15 minutes. Nothing steel or concrete or stone, but just the little wooden truss ones.

I like the "perceptual"-vs-"objective" direction this is going in... In this sense, a "realistic" fog of war effect would be to have every tank identified as a Tiger and every gun identified as an 88mm. Super-Iron mode!

Falklands/Malvinas!!

It'd be nice if it was possible to place foxholes within buildings, representing some degree of reinforcement.

I'd like to chime in with praise for this as well, I've just started it as a PBEM. It is a gorgeous naturalistic map (and having looked up the location in Google Earth, seems accurate as well) and the battle looks to be very challenging for both sides. Sure it's big - but it's not so big that you lose sight of the potentially vital importance of each and every unit you have!

My personal opinion is that's the scale that Combat Mission does best. Big enough that you can have a plausible variety of assets to use, but small enough that you can actually manage everything.

I have only a vague "gut feel" sense of the C3 in CMx2 - but isn't parking one of these radio halftracks next to a command unit without a radio good practice? Won't they help with calling artillery, communicate spots, etc?

Just played it, super fun! 122mm & 152mm ROF doesn't seem so slow when there are 10 of them in a line. Edit: Gee it's tough as Germans.

Speaking of these two (very enjoyable) battles, does anyone have any advice about using the Vickers MGs in 'The Main Event'? They don't do much sitting on the ridge, and it's hard to get them safely into the town. In 'Sticking it Out', on the other hand, they can give halftracks headed down a slope a very hard time.

It's likely most of you have seen this, and it's been mentioned elsewhere on the forum, but it's a reminder of what they're "supposed" to do: The "Manner Gegen Panzer" training film, in 3 parts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8thWxRiALM

My uninformed, unresearched 'gut feel' is that: (1) 85mm AP could still have a relatively big bursting charge, and (2) It might not be the most efficient fragment-generator when it explodes, but would at least cause relatively few, relatively large pieces to fly much further than an HE shell. So maybe its fragments can hit troops fairly far away, although it is unlikely to do so. Why it is set off immediately by a tree, and not from bouncing off armour plate, I have no idea. FWIW, according to some googling, the 85mm AP in question may be BR-356, a 9.2kg AP tracer wi. flat nose & ballistic cap shell, containing 0.164 kg of "phlegmatized hexogen with powdered aluminum".

Oh yeah, and the next MG team along the line, same unit, same thing... carrying 100 12.7mm AP rounds for no apparent reason. Reminds me of a day at the range. "Everybody, check your pockets!"

Playing a CMRT QB and have a Maxim MG as part of a Submachinegun Bn. The gun's ammo is listed as 'empty', that's fine, i think they've been firing for a while. But at the moment the listing for the team says their ammo is: - 7.62x25 (282 rounds) fine, there are 2 SMG's. - 12.7mm AP (100 rounds) (???) - 7.62x38R (21 rounds), fine, gunner's revolver. - Grenade x2 ... There is no 12.7mm weapon of any kind in the QB. What gives? HAVE I FOUND MY FIRST BUG?

It did indeed, and was very fun.

Just wanted to chime in and say thank you all for looking in to this. Looking forward to national symbols for Red Thunder, even if they're a while coming.

This is sidetracking this wonderful thread, but I feel a Falklands/Malvinas game could be pretty good. Technically similarly-equipped forces, company-size night attacks, minefields, ground surveillance radar, some artillery but not overwhelming, different night vision technologies. Small scale but fierce.

Nothing to add to this, really, but I can't resist chiming in to say that having jumped to CMBN directly from CMx1 (and of course not having read the manual) I innocently assumed that guns could be 're-manned' by their crews (just like vehicles) after you told the crew to bail out. Taking cover away from a gun and then re-manning it once a barrage lifts seems like an obvious move, and I can't imagine guns on the Eastern Front without that ability.

I guess that makes them "smokejumpers" har har Maybe there's some kind of intensely smoke-dependent airborne tactics or doctrine we don't know about?

Dingo Mk1 to Mk1B had 4-wheel steering, but later versions were front wheel steering only. Maybe what you saw is a representation of the 4-wheel steering version? Do you think it's possible that instead of the right (outside) wheels absolutely not turning at all, they were just turning much less drastically than the inside wheels?

I think, but am not sure, that if both sides opt to skip night combat, that night battle is skipped and you do NOT have to 'make up' the battle at the end of the operation. In your case, it would become a 4-battle operation. Whether the individual battles are day or night depends on how many day battles go by before a night battle, which is a setting chosen by the operation's creator.

Something Panzer III-related? There seem to be clues at the right side of the picture.

Sometimes, when i can't sleep, i scribble notes of how a future CMesque game could work. Realtime, but with SOPs you establish in the setup phase and can alter during the battle? Maybe call it Close Mission, or Combat Combat? I can't run CMSF so i don't know what WW2 versions of that would be like.

Well, i don't know Russian, AND i don't want to know what it is.