GoodGuy

I remember that you mentioned that in some discussion about HE ammuntion. Parts of the author's conclusions and assumptions point to the right direction, but his conclusion/infos regarding the amount of rounds carried by a German rifleman, the bits about the amount of troops assigned to operate a MG and about the number of SMGs (MP 40, MP44 or StG44 if you will) issued per squad are a bit off, partially due to the fact that he bases his conclusions on Niehorster's 1939 TOE and on TOEs projecting the equipment level of Volksgrenadier-Divisions in 1944 and 1945, which were utopistic for the most part, as in reality the Germans had to manage the omnipresent scarcity of equipment and resources during the last say 3.5 years, especially during 1944 and 1945, even though the German armament industry's output had peaked as late as 1944 (partially due to streamlining or simplifying parts and weapons, which resulted in lower quality here and there). 1) Regarding the amount of troops operating a MG34/42, the KStN (Kriegsstärkenachweis, which was maintained by the OKW) entries for an infantry company (note: NOT a motorcycle company) from 1943/44 draw a different picture. I have several scans of the complete original KStN from 1944, for example, which indicates that the 3rd soldier had been stripped (somewhere between 1940 - 1942, I would have to dig for the pre-1944 KStN to give the exact date, but this info can be found in the literature too), because it turned out that the 2nd soldier could carry a sufficient amount of ammo for a bipod MG (LMG). It took more effort (troops) to move and operate a tripod MG, but these were operated in and assigned to MG-Batallions in the main, anyways. 1941 (H)MG-Company: http://niehorster.orbat.com/011_germany/41_organ_army/kstn_0151c.htm Still, by 1941 even HMGs were operated by 2 soldiers only, means by a gunner (pistol) and an assistant (pistol). An additional number of 6 soldiers and 2 drivers were meant to provide security for 2 HMGs and maintain a proper level of ammunition supply, all of these 8 troops were equipped with rifles. 2) Rounds carried by riflemen: According to German Army manuals (1939, 1941), each rifleman had to carry 6 cartrides (5 rounds = 30 rounds), with some additional 3 cartridges stored on the truck (15 rounds). In practice each of the 2 ammunition "bags" were filled with 30 rounds (=60 rounds), and many soldiers used their tommy-bags (haversack?) to carry some additional 20-30 rounds, prior to heavy engagements. 30-60 rounds used to be the standard layout, though. 3) The Volksgrenadier-Divisions were somewhat favoured when it came to equipping troops with the new StG44, there were quite some newly established companies whose troops were all equipped with either StG44, MP40 or Beretta (in 1944). Ammunition supply for the Sturmgewehr was critical though, as the projected production figures (200 million rounds per month) of this new and unusual round (7.9 mm) could not be reached. The projected figures of 400 million rounds (an utopistic figure from February 1944) were changed to a more realistic output of 120 million rounds per month in February 1945. In practice, this meant that even some Volksgrenadier-Divisions had to fall back to rifles too, as the MP40s were either employed elsewhere or as they did not have the accuracy/impact needed for engagements above 50-80 meters. On top of that, the industrial StG44-output was too low to a) make a vital change and to equip all of the new divisions. The demand to employ these new assault rifles, made by German divisional commanders was spot on though, as especially the US units actually had superior firepower with their mix of semi-auto Garand rifles, BARs and and MPs. The main thought for deployment within Volksgrenadier-Divisions, though, was to up the combat value of these (partially 2nd rate units, as many of them received little to no training or consisted of formerly dismissed soldiers) units, because it took less experience/skill to fire a StG and actually hit something. 4) Rifle cartridges had been changed prior to the war, in particular the charge had been reduced. You or someone else stated that in the discussion I mentioned above, too, and that's correct. The rifle rounds were then only required to provide sufficient stopping power (and accuracy) up to 200 meters (some sources say 250-300), so the Waffenamt had indeed lowered the specs. I believe this had several reasons and may involve some lessons from WWI, one was most likely the attempt to lower ammunition expenditure (which reminds me of the change made to the M16 employed in Vietnam, which introduced a switch that restrict the rifle to fire triple and single rounds only) and to lower allocation of resources (bullet charge, metal), another reason could have been the thought that the typical engagement would take place somewhere between 150 and 300 meters, obviously. Although LMGs and HMGs (and maybe even StG44s later on) were meant to deliver a suppressive rain of bullets, US troops showed that BAR rifles could be used to pick on troops way above 400 meters, with surprising accuracy. The bullet's velocity was the key here. There are accounts that German troops operated MG42s in a similar manner - firing single shots only, in Africa and in France (1944), occasionally. In turn, the Brits mastered ballistic area fire with their Vickers HMGs, up to 4.5 kilometers, with devastating effect. That said, TOW2's small arms are way too lethal. ........ ......... ...... I do like the author's critical article about the HMMWV's bad stand in Iraq, and that it should have been pulled out of Iraq a few years ago, though. http://www.angelfire.com/art/enchanter/guntruck.html

And what's the purpose for using anti-reflection techniques in military applications, in particular targeting optics in heavy guns (e.g. flak 88) and tanks (e.g. TZF)? Reducing reflections???? It's the light-gathering ability of such (anti-reflection) coatings. You seem to think that the coatings just had the function to reduce reflections. In fact, the coatings provide for more clarity and allow more rays of light to pass through a lense (or a set of lenses, which you need for higher magnification levels). I think you're wrong regarding number of layers used in German equipment, and regarding MgG2 use. In turn, a few years ago, when I read about German vacuum technologies employed in optical devices, it seems that I interpreted/translated the shortcut "AR" as the chemical element Argon, a gas that is used in rifle scopes, for example. I'm not a physicist, so I thought Argon was used, after browsing articles and books covering this topic a few years ago. Most of the material is available in English, only. So, I just rechecked articles and books, and I learned that "AR" coating was referring to "antireflection" coating, not argon coating. Now, let's talk about your claims: There are even eye-wittness accounts (Allied veterans, I quoted one account on the first page of this thread, G.Green , Panzers at War", page 60) which testify that German optics were on a different level than let's say the ones in Sherman tanks. A similar or even better magnification level in US tanks didn't necessarily provide a superior level of clarity, even worse, it added a higher percentage of blur with each additional lense employed, unlike in the German optics which used different (or better) coatings and different pre-processing of the lenses. Let me quote the following work: (beware, it gets technical) During the African campaign the shortcomings of the US tanks' optics had alarmed US officials, so - as a result - the US put quite some effort into overcoming what I would call "optics-crisis". Later in the war, Sherman tank optics were somewhat better, but still did not match the quality of most (if not all) of the German optics. The US Army obviously knew that at least proper coating appeared to be vital for getting improved optics, thus they sponsored the conference. Pre-processing the lenses (which the Germans did it seems) may have been vital too, but I don't know if that had been part of the Committee's evaluation, too. The question is what the particular findings of this conference were, and when (and how) that showed on actual production models of tank optics. Afaik, even until 1944/45, US tank optics remained inferior, despite the introduction of optics with way higher magnifications. The Russians, in turn, tried to copy the German optics, and at least the ones employed in IS-2 tanks were really good (astounding max range). The footnotes in Mattox' work: The Japanese got all infos regarding coating and lense technologies, along with blueprints of military applications and weapons shortly before Germany was forced out of the war. Some tech-transfer attempts (like a disassembled Me 262 + blueprints aboard a submarine) either did not make it to Japan, or took several attempts (even with rumors about an alledged long-range flight of the only famed German long-range bomber using the route over Syberia). Whatsoever, the Japanese became the leaders in the camera sector by using the German technologies as foundation, although Canon and Nikon did not own the camera (and lense) patents.

Actually, after installing the Dual Core Optimizer AND the AMD Cool + Quiet driver, the unpatched game was running smoothly (i had low FPS before), even when using FF game speed (where animations were still skipping, but rather in a neat and almost fluid way) or encountering "large battles". With the patched version, the frame rate is still ok, but the FPS rate seems to drop tremendously when heavy scripting is involved or if many units populate the battlefield (means if more reinforcements are joining the fray). Also, maps with lots of environmental effects (animated sandstorms, sound FX) seem to have quite some impact on game performance. I've got an AMD Quad Core 940 X4 and a GeForce 7600 GT - so it was really surprising that the DUAL CORE optimizer seemed to act like a fix, but since the unpatched version got extremely fluid fps-wise at one point, it must have improved something. I don't think that it's my video card (although I know it's not exactly the newest Nvidia thing on earth ) which is slowing down things, since the game worked like a charm at one point. It must be the program code, maybe the fix for the memory leak/savegame bug is causing this, I don't know. My FPS aren't as low as 1-2 fps though, they're still around 15-19 fps during large battles (which is still sad). I used to have 30-38 before the patch, though, with occasional breaks (tiny freezes) when moving around the cam like a madman, due to the limits of my video card I guess. I quit playing TOW2 because of this. Also, the low amount of content (number of missions) and the technical deficiencies (AI code, program code - memory handling) are rather disappointing. I don't think I'll buy a 1.0 version of a BF game before checking the feedback in the forum ever again. So I wonder, is this going to be fixed or not?

But then I'd insist on putting in that 600mm mortar "Thor" or even the 800mm rail-gun "Gustav". ;-) http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=183_1243099583 I've seen a Russian veteran on TV, he was inside one of of the Forts, and IIIRC he said that more than 5 shells were fired, so he might have been in Fort Stalin or Fort Molotov, as part of the Russian garrison when the 800mm shells hit the fortress. He said that it felt like being on a ship, or like during an earthquake, as the whole structure trembled from impact. He said that some comrades went nuts and that this kind of shelling was extremely demoralizing, as they initially believed the Fort would be a nut too hard to crack for the Germans. Back to the "unusual theater"-suggestion: Yeah Romania might be an interesting theater. My granduncle fought (and died) in Romania, which wasn't a pleasant place to be for a German Landser: The Romanians changed sides overnight (the Russians didn't trust them though, and treated Romanian units as POWs as well, afaik), turning Romania into hell for the Germans. Romanians in their back and the ever-charging Russians in front of them... I've heard a German vet reporting stuff like as yet friendly Romanian battalions suddenly attacking them in the middle of the night, with him and a bunch of survivors running through a grainfield, with MG tracers traveling over their heads (pretty much in Forrest Gump fashion). They then had to run for several days before finding a German unit. My mother's neighbor was a Kradmelder (dispatch rider - motorbike), he tried to escape, made it from the border to Moldavia all through Rumania to Budapest (Hungary) just to get picked up by an officer to join a Kampfgruppe and to be encircled by the Russians. He had already dropped most of his uniform, as he thought the war was over for him. The officer didn't consider him to be a deserter, so he was "lucky" - well, still had to fight again during the last days of the war in Europe, so absurd. As to the Italians joining the Allied side, quite a few Italian units let the Germans pass through their control zones, when they were retreating to the next defense line - out of sympathy, as quite some of their commanders had fought with the Germans in Russia or elsewhere, and other Italian units just knew their equipment was no match for the German heavy weapons. Actually, the Germans were ordered to disarm them.

While his problem can be traced back to user access control, the freeze/crash at the end of a mission still appears on my system, once in a while, even WITH the patch installed. The game would just freeze or even crash to the desktop. This happens let's say like with a ratio of hmmm something between 1:8 to 1:15 (one crash per 15 succesful missions). It might be more frequent, but since a battle is pretty time-consuming, most people will save and continue the next day, so it might not be noticed. Saving a game works like a charm with the patch now, though. It looks a bit like there's a higher chance that the game freezes at mission end when I ran (and closed) a lot of other programs before launching TOW2, means if the memory is fragmented. I'm not a windows programmer, so I don't know if XP's memory management is good enough to avoid fragmented memory areas. Btw, I still can't access options.exe on my system. Why?

I forgot to reply to this.... I can confirm this, frame rates are jerkier now, 3ghz quad core (AMD X4 940). It's pretty much as choppy as with the unpatched retail version now, again. Either installing the AMD dual core optimizer or the AMD Cool+Quiet drivers (i can't tell which one may have improved things, since I installed them both before restarting TOW2) gave me a significant performance boost -> with the unpatched retail version. Maybe the boost came from the dual core optimizer, as TOW2 doesn't use 4 cores. After this patch, things got somewhat jerky, especially at FF game speed, where it used to be rather smooth before the patch. What happened there? I can't find that detail in the readme? What are you reffering to in particular, and which OS? I would have expected that a correction for the game, which aims at depicting guns and vehicles with historical accuracy, would be executed by the devs, not by some modders. Questions: Did the patch correct long range-accuracy of small arms fire? I haven't had time to check that with the patch, but before the patch ... running infantry struck by the 6th or 10th bullet fired by a machine gun at a distance of around 700 meters was pretty ridiculous. AT guns are still "sniping" at least, killing crawling soldiers at 500-700 meters. Do you intend to set the ranges/accuracy of guns and optics of German tanks to historical values? (as outlined in my posts in the "TOW2 sniper war?"-thread)

I still can't launch options.exe .... I know i can edit the ini files, but I don't wanna dig in there each time i want to change something. I get the hour-glass for a second, when I try to launch options.exe, but nothing happens, the options window won't come up. (.NET installed) So does anyone else have this problem? Sneaksie!

Well, mission works fine, my ally's (yellow) artillery immobilized a german tank right at mission start (without me seeing it in the heat of the battle), so the tank was halted just behind a hill where i couldn't see it. I searched the whole map, killed inf survivors, tank crews, and finally found the german tank: It had been immobilized OUTSIDE of the mission area, though, so my tanks couldn't go there.... and I couldn't get to the top of the hill either, as the top was right outside the mission area. It took 5-10 minutes to find a way to fire at the tank. Saving works fine now, no crashes when saving yet, no CTDs right in the middle of a game either.

I installed the patch and tested the first US mission, because I figured all the savegames are gone (at least not showing up in the list). I can't finish the first US mission now, i can't seem to find the trigger anymore. All Germans dead.

Maybe it's a language problem: You cannot view/select OTHER maps when you created a 8 player server, if you decide to play smaller maps (4 player map, 2 player maps) with the players that actually JOINED (in my examples host + 3 people, or host + 1 player). YOU HAVE to leave the server and HOST again, each time - to create a server with the corresponding max amount of player slots. This is annoying. Getting it now? My request was to make it possible that a host can select ALL maps, and maybe you could just ADD a check routine that checks if the right conditions (for a given map) are met (minmum/maximum number of players?, slots locked?) before the OK/START button can be pushed. Don't make people leave and re-host a game, each time they change their minds (to play a different map). Thank you!

Well, but the current spotting mode makes it impossible for tanks to spot let's say AT guns (which are positioned in the open !, like in the mission featured in the demo - i forgot the scenario name) beyond let's say ~700 meters, so even with a clear LOS ("attack ground" line/arrow is all red) the tanks CANNOT SEE beyond that range, which is unrealistic. In the demo, the 2 AT guns on the hill (at the end of the valley) can't be spotted by the player's tanks, even if they moved as close as 500 meters (I would have to measure the distance, I am estimating here right now) towards the AT guns. The tanks get hit without ever knowing where the gun fire came from, and without ever being able to spot THEM, although they're not camouflaged/concealed. The reason may be that those AT guns are positioned in spots with thick grass, but i am just guessing here, you might be able to provide an answer here, Sneaksie. Grass can't cover AT guns that weigh 700 - 1300 kg, seriously. Tanks should still be able to spot them at medium/long ranges. I think it's rather a decision to make the scenario design more thrilling than anything else. That's what i meant with unhistorical ranges. German tanks could spot targets at >2 km, when having an unobscured LOS, and they used to hit with the 3rd or 4th shot at ranges between 1300 and 2000 meters. (As I described in the "TOW2 is a sniper war?"-thread.) I actually do that. But new players will struggle with that. Also, why don't you let the user decide whether he wants his units to act independently or not? HOLD always on is annoying, for most users. Yes I know that, but the forum didn't let me edit my post when I figured that I should have explained it in detail. The formation won't be memorized when you select an entire infantry squad (for example), this is disturbing in cases where you don't want to create groups, or where all the number-keys/group keys are already occupied with other groups. The formation should be memorized for any given formation selected/grouped by the user. That's what i meant with clickology, the game features a certain amount of clickology, and where some of the click-fest could be reduced/abolished easily, by tweaking game design/UI design, or your politics.

Hi Wodin! Yeah, I know you like the AA-Series . Well, I'm not like you, but there's a chance that you miss an event or that a certain unit needs micro-management in a vital moment, so that's where half speed comes in handy. Being able to pause the game and issue orders (you can't do that in Close Combat) is a nice feature, too. The amount of units is usually manageable, but the friendly Infantry AI is sometimes so hmmm let me call it unclever (they tend to behave like klutz soldiers quite some times, running into their own nades when assaulting, crouching or standing where they were ordered to go to prone position), so that they need extra micro-management in those moments. It's been like that in TOW1 too, so I don't know if they're going to patch it. Some of the issues and features of the game: Spotting (pls see the "TOW2 is a sniper war?" thread) - where one part of the deal is the fact that i.e. AT guns can spot you but you won't be able to spot them at ranges ~/+ 800 meters (i.e. in the demo mission) so that you have to send infantry as spotters, unrealistic (high) lethality of small arms fire at long ranges (not sure if this is going to be patched), unhistoric short ranges of German tank guns (see same thread), the current memory management (which is being addressed in the first patch, though), Design (UI and Game Design) decisions which are showstoppers in a way: a)Hold is always OFF for all units, you have to issue a hold order to each unit (you can group units and set them to HOLD position though, so it's manageable, still involves a bit of click-ology). It's the other way around with Games from other companies: HOLD will be always OFF in those games, unless you enable "move/charge at will". b)The type of formation won't be memorized, the type has to be selected again each time you re-select a given unit, -- The game holds some bugs, but once the memory/savegame bug is fixed, I wouldn't say that the other bugs have potential to make the game unplayable (the savegame bug has that potential, though). There are CTDs, but they may be caused by the memory-bug. The 3 campaigns are somewhat short. Around 5-6 missions for each side (3 sides). The mission editor is really powerful (complex too, though), so there should be quite some user scenarios, once mappers got familiar with the tool. Someone's working on a Mod, too, it seems. The release version is not exactly a really solid game, but it's still fun to play - if you don't find the silly features or shortcomings too disturbing. Friendly infantry and trenches, 2 ingredients that don't mix? (pls see threads with bug list) TOW 2 is a good step forward, compared to TOW 1, especially visually, but quite some issues that could be experienced in TOW 1 already (especially with infantry behaviour) are still present in TOW2. The game carries the most realistic approach (regarding armor penetration, weapon sounds, and destructable environment compared to other 3D - RTS), but it's not fit to hold a candle to industry (RTS) standard features - in quite some fields: Friendly/enemy AI behaviour, handling of commands and user interface, just to cite a few examples. Check out the Bug report / suggestions for improvement threads, to form an opinion.

I don't think that you understood what I was trying to say. Example: If I host a 8 player game, but only 3 players would join, I could not just LOCK the 5 empty slots and choose a 4 player map, BECAUSE the 4 player maps are ALL greyed out. I would have to ask the players to leave, then I would have to host a game for 4 players. Now let's imagine 2 of these 3 people would be pissed off (so they won't show up), and that only the last remaining player would join, I'd have to ask him to leave for the second time, BECAUSE I can't select 2 player maps, if the limit had been set to 4 players. Do you get it now? С наилучшими пожеланиями

I found an issue in Multiplayer: If you select 8 players before you host a game, you won't be able to pick other maps (except for that one 8-player map for "Domination" mode) and even the 8-player map will be greyed out when a different game mode - i.e. king of the hill, attack/defend, - is being selected. Examples: Let's say the host creates a game for 3 players, but only 1 player would join, then he can't just lock the empty 3rd slot and play a 2 player map, since only the 4-player maps and/or the 8 player map will be selectable (depending on game mode). The host would have to ask the other player to leave, so that he could recreate the game with a 2 player limit. In other multiplayer games/interfaces, you can just close slots that aren't needed, with the host still having access to ALL maps: The host just sets the number of players allowed to play once, and people then don't have to leave in order to choose smaller maps (meant for less than 8 or 6 players), simply because locked slots would be taken into account by the hosting modules of those games: the max player limit will be a) overwritten according to the host's selections and won't influence visibility/availability of maps.

No impassable terrain involved, I chose the sm_001 map (map from the 2nd training mission), and the Kasserine Pass map for another Battle Gen mission. Ok, you say several directions...., what's the time frame for the AI sending out units? Does the AI usually start right away? Does it need certain units (i.e. halftrack, daimler or similar vehicles)?