Vark

Good, thought I was missing the bleedin obvious....again. another Big Red One scene comes to mind; quit bellyaching son you've only lost a Tiger, that's why you were given two!! Good to see his Tigers are bogging repeatedly, I remember the Korsun relief scenario on the CD, I just kept all my armour roadbound!! Does anyone know the chance to get smoke shells if you but Tigers individually?

Sorry, I'm the only one who is puzzled by Myglas' tactics? Why the head to head with the IS-2, surely recon with infantry then introduce the Tiger, has he not seen "The Big Red One"? Seriously, I've followed this AAR avidly, most tactics seem understandable but the Tiger gambit seemed a little reckless, or am I missing the bleedin obvious?

I remember a speaker from the MOD's Future Wars dept giving a lecture about predicting future conflics and strategic implementation. The gist of it was the shooting will start when countries have their water, food or fuel threatened, either to defend it or to claim someone elses, plu cest change! The thing that made me sit up were the stats on the water reserves in the Golan heights, who ever controls that controls the fate of Israel, I knew about the Water wars of the 70's but had not appreciated the vital nature of the heights. Nuclear weapons are the wild card, though they are linked to states desire to control/aquire resources, Bobbit's "Shield of Achilles" looks at some of the resultant conflicts when traditional states engage with trans-national groups. As for the Falklands, a refight with Type 45's not 22's providing fleet cover would be a very short affair for the Argentinians and there is a permanent RAF base there, not just a few Royal Marines and a recalled survey vessel.

I took a different tack, I looked at a situation that should result in a high number of bogging/immobilisations and ran a series of tests. 60 Ferdinand tank destroyers driving buttoned through thick mud at fast speed, the result after 30 mins was 29-34 immobilisations and 7-9 bogged (repeated the test 10 times). I have no expert knowledge if these figures seem realistic or not (if any Ferdinand grogs are out there, please reply) but they seem overly generous to me.

I'd date it late 42, early-mid 43, in the film the M6A1 rocket, for the bazooka, has the conical head, by late 43 the US had adopted the improved M6A3 with blunt nose and different tail fin assembly.

Dietrich, here's a good link from Mythbusters revisited about knockdown. Most of the accounts I have seen examined suggest the knockdown effect is as much psychological as kinetic. Rogue Spear had the climb obstacle option, which opened up far more tactical options. I also appreciated the fact that my elite squad used single shots, not full auto, as in Ravenshield. "Hey, I'm a super elite soldier, I'll engage that target at 200m with my M-14 with full auto fire", I guess that neatly links to the idea of knockdown, though to the firer not the target! The things missing from Ravenshield was the sight picture option, you only got a magnified view and the limitation with the weapon enhancements, I really wanted a scoped M4 with a suppressor, had to make do with the G36. Also would like a choice between AGOGS and red dot and and...damn I was meant to do some work tonight! If you want a truly brutal gaming experience try Konami's The Regiment, no choice of weapons, more scripted, but 5 mins to complete a mission, enemies playing possum, confined, low light environments, defusing booby traps and choice of picking up dropped weapons. Its Ravenshield's uncouth brother, weapons are battered and chipped, pools of blood spread from corpses giving death rattles and your team mates scream "shift your arse" if you are seconds late doing something. Graphics are pretty rough and the motion capture for the troopers running is comical, but when you shout out clear, your wingman realistically bounds ahead and covers your advance and you can break your AI squad down into two, two man teams. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zio4-iuCLZQ

"My only major gripe with Raven Shield was the deadly accuracy of the AI" What setting was that? On elite the AI is lethal and so fast its useless going round corners or opening doors if they are there. I usually put a burst through doors or used flashbangs to buy me an edge. On recruit they are easy to take down, slow on the uptake and pretty lousy shots. Rogue Spear on the other hand, suffered from lethally accurate AI even at the recruit level, fail to drop that Russian guard and he'd head shoot you from 100m, at night, in the snow! My main bug with Ravenshield was the lack of a climb option to get over obstacles, so my elite unit glided around as though on casters, oops a raise loading ramp, where the heck are the stairs!

Don't forget online FPS games are plagued with hacks and cheats, so the super-human reflexes of "those kids" you experience might just be zero skills based. Talking of realism, FPS gamers who talk about realism are a contradiction in terms, the very fact they can operate successfully, in the battlefield environment, with no military training, is unrealistic. Don't get me wrong, I play FPS's and love to indulge in stress-reducing slaughter but it is as realistic as CMBB was in showing the true nature of Eastern front combat. I play CMBB for amusement, I doubt the actual participants would have used that adjective. Steve, I like your wipe the hard drive 'death' penalty idea for FPS's reminds me of a John Hill interview in "Fire and Movement". He was asked "are your wargames realistic?" His answer was, and I'm paraphrasing. The most realistic game game he'd designed would rate a two or three out of ten. If both players were under the strict understanding that the loser would be taken out and shot he'd bump the rating up to a 6 or 7!! I think he was talking about "The Battle for Hue" board game.

Interesting to note that in both the German "Men against tanks" and this US film the opposition are always equipped with out-dated equipment. Be it the leather coated Soviet tankers or the WW1 style 1918 storm trooper helmeted Germans with packs and bedrolls!! Does anyone know if the Russians produced similar efforts, I know their use of written threat updates was very efficient but what about the use of celluloid?

In the novel, Blackhawk Down and a subsequent TV documentary there was an account of a Ranger who had a grenade explode next to his head, when he was prone. He was wearing the standard Kevlar helmet but all his mates though he'd be dead, after the smoke and dust cleared he was shocked, deafened but very much alive! Look at this clip, to show the limitations of the hand grenade as a weapon Boris Yeltsin had fingers blown off when he tried to dismantle a stolen grenade and the paras, in the Falklands conflict, regarded the effectiveness of the L2A2 grenade as pitiful, "worse than useless" when clearing bunkers. In confined areas they can be highly effective but otherwise they are designed to shock and stun, the L2A2 casing was designed to fragment into approx 1,200 pieces weighing between 0.1-0.5g which will wound, rarely kill, unless the target is unlucky or in bodily contact with the device. Also, are the grenades modelled offensive or fragmentation grenades? I believe the offensive grenades have a greater blast effect and less fragmentation but since my only experience with these devices is that the guy I should have interviewed for part of my dissertation was killed by a WWII grenade I could be mistaken. Talking of the paras in the Falklands can you use WP grenades in CMSF to clear field defences? I often find wargame simulations of WP are much undermodelled, especially effects of targets under cover and morale effects, the operating instructions with the US M15 WP grenade says. "WARNING: All friendly personnel within the 56 foot (17 m) bursting radius should be in a covered position to avoid being struck by burning particles. The WP filler burns for about 60 seconds at a temperature of 5,000° Fahrenheit." On a lighter note they are very effective at destroying the opfor's washing machines!

Would it be possible/viable to use a third person to design a scenario whose force composition could be chosen by the two players and then selected by the third party designer. Given the random map generation tool it would not be too onerous for the third party, with an added bonus that reinforcements could be included, the two players would then play the downloaded scenario, just created. A mini campaign, comprising several of these surrogate scenarios, could then be crudely constructed so that objectives could be realistic. Perhaps the taking and holding of an objective, with the timetable of deployment, reserves etc affected by written orders from the players, communicated to the third player designer by email. It would in effect be a mini, bastardised wargame/CM Campaigns hybrid! No more, oh he has 800 points so if he must have, second guessing and it might also kill the invincible flank syndrome, though playing 1000 points on a huge map can help, although the placement of objective flags could be unrealistically linear.

Surely the al-Kabir incident in 2007 shows how redundant pre and post invasion thinking was about the aquisition of WMD's. Syria, with no real nuclear technological base comes close to developing a reactor, courtesy of N.Korea and the Khan network. The only reason that the West knew about this was due to an Iranian defector. If sanctions had been lifted on Iraq, as three members of the permanent UN security council wanted, how long before Iraq restarted its nuclear programme? A programme that was missed by the inspection teams in the 1990's by the way. Do you honestly think that if Saddam was still alive today, ruling Iraq, selling oil at the vastly inflated price of two years ago that the gas graphite reactor would have been built in Syria? What happens if the Iraqis had been as careful about opsec as the Syrians (no mobile phones, couriers for messages, screening buildings etc) and what happens if there had been no Iranian defector because the Iraqis could stump up the 2-3 billion the project needed and already had the nuclear technicians needed. The impact on the world oil markets, the day after Iraq announced that they had aquired/built a nuclear reactor would have been interesting. The causus belli was flawed because it had be based on substantive evidence, evidence that could easily be removed, by the time doddery Blix started on his inspection routine. The presence of curveball, neo-con self-justification and a host of other factors doomed the original reasons for OIF but its result has removed a very dangerous and often under-estimated player on the world stage. Now if the IAF can remove/delay the Iranian dash for nukes I can breathe a little easier in my bed.

Was that an animation of an Elephant TD halfway through the clip? If they can fire at rate 6 continuously I'd like to see the resupply chain, or is it that they can obliterate any target quickly they do not need to fire as many rounds as a standard battery?

Gotcha Steve, I though it had been a tete a tete encounter, not an online 'discussion'. I do remember a series of very combative discussions on a military form between myself and a soldier, but after a month we had some really productive discussions, after we had sized each other up and both compromised, just a little in our views. I always wonder what happened to him as he was training on Strykers and going to Iraq, then nada. As for the culture argument I've always suspected that the post Iraq situation came about for two opposite yet linked cultural dynamics. 1) The belief that US can do can be a substitute for a shoe string take down of a country, so we have arrogance in abilities and a sense of cultural superiority. 2) The genuine belief that the Iraqi's were similar to Western people, that they really were like us but just dressed funny. Remember we come from a culture that if one dares ro suggest a culture is 'superior' in any way will immediately attract accusations of racism etc. We are so loathe to discriminate, in the true sense of facts leading to decisions, that instinctively we allow a 'relativism' to creep into our judgements. This fueled a belief that the Iraqis would hail us as liberators, fight the good fight, party for a few nights and then sit down and organise a civil society, as had the former communist countries. I cannot count the number of times that soldiers accounts have stated how shocked they were at how the Iraqis behaved, the expection that the US was to be a magical solution finder to all problems. So we are back to point 1 again. If the only previous experience most Iraqis have with the conquering country is firstly culturally dubious, ie Hollywoods action films and TV shows, that accentuate the US can do everything meme and secondly experience of what must have seemed a supernatural opponent then expections, for the Iraqis will be unrealistically high. I do not ascribe dark motives to GWB, that is the territory of the IPDers, as far as I am concerned, but I do think he had a touching if somewhat naive belief about Iraq and Arabs in general. Rather like the Reagan situation where he was being demonised by the press as a war monger and anti-Russian but said that he wished "aliens from beyond the universe" would invade earth so that the two super-powers could come together, banish their differences and kick some serious green butt! Final point, I do think it is very unwise to start making judgements about an on going operation. What happens if, in ten years time, Iraq becomes a model for democracy, has shattered the Iranian Mullahs power by acting as a cultural firebase and people all over the world are posting pictures/movies of their Iraqi holidays on Flikr and Youtube. How many of the "oh darling it really is the cradle of civilisation, you MUST go there" crowd would ever admit to having move-on org posters in their attic? Sure it could spiral out of control and be the end of civilisation but that avenue of thought is well lit and well trod.

'How can those arrogant infidels (remember the crusades) think we even want them to change our crappy regime?'. So Lethaface I take it there is no time limit with the 'conquerors challenge' A) Norman Invasion, totally changed certain aspects of English society so inhabitants had to change as well. including supporting the new structures. Feudal society demanded that the population be ready to 'support' military actions when called upon. Roman Empire, very good at co-opting races invaded into actively fighting for them C) Crusades were a Western response to Muslim aggression and the locals crappy regime was little different from the Crusaders. Rich overlords, often outsiders, dispensing rewards and justice in a seemingly random fashion with 99% of the popualtion unable/unwilling to control or determine their destiny. As for invading after DS forget it, their was no UN sanction for such an action, contained in the original resolution authorising force and the Arab allies would have deserted us. Secondly the force structure was to fight a ground war not occupy a country, so no change there then!

My god Steve hope you have a copy of the latest DHS handy, seems like your SSGT was one to keep an eye on!! That was English sarcasm, lest anyone respond Surely you should have done a brief conversation recce and seen what he was like, then move on to more fertile brains. What is the point in showing your supposed superiority to someone who obviously was radiating insecure professional disorder (IPD) unless you too were showing early signs of IPD? Sure, if you were a civilian involved in a Hollywood-esque confrontation with the military with lives at stake and the clock was ticking then argue the toss, but what did you gain except knowledge that extremists exist in the military, Timothy McVeigh anyone. Sorry, when it comes to conversations I am a mercenary, I always want to leave richer than I was and although I do not suffer fools gladly at least I've learned to not be so obvious about it.

"Aye, and there's the rub" as the great man once said. The preponderance of German armour coupled with uber-tank killers means that the Russian struggles, if he has picked a realistic force composition for a game. In most engagements the Germans should have next to no AFV's if 44-45, unless you are generous and allow a few Stugs, a heck of alot easier to dispatch with infantry. I'm sad that the campaigns version of CMBB was scrapped because it might have been a shock for the German player to realise just how rare it was to have tanks. The preponderance for playing armoured engagements with German uber cat Fire Brigades or armoured reserve battles is understandable (they are exciting, we have Tigers we want to play with them syndrome) but they paint a completely false picture. The Miniatures Page (TMP) had just this debate running about the realism of force composition on wargaming tables and the thread was dominated by WWII and tank v's infantry stack ups. The common thread was, we know it's not realistic but people like to see lots of tanks, especially German ones! What no AT grenades in SF, why? The TOE of US units look pretty thorough why no AT grenades for the Syrians, they had them in 73 and 82. No, do not allow the ramblings of this sub thread to get in the way of the latest installment of "They have Tigers, don't they"

Interesting screen shots but I'm at a bit of a loss as to a response. The Russians had poor infantry anti-tank capability, those units who had captured panzerfausts were ok (sadly not modelled in CMBB) but otherwise you had to close to a suicidally close range. My point was that the Russian infantry anti-tank capability, in CMBB, is often over modelled Borg spotting does count heavily against employing proper tank stalking tactics, but the German schrek/faust anti-tank capability was because of a shortage AFV's. The Russians have copious amounts of armour in 44-45 and should use this to destroy tanks, not have to bit flesh against steel. Question, what were your anti-tank rifles doing when the halftracks were 50 metres away?I've lost countless types of halftrack to the AT rifles at ranges close to 200m, and don't mention the 12.7mm HMG's. I do think the obscuration/damage effects of molotov cocktails are poorly modelled though, given their record, but how far can you throw them?

DAF, agree whole heartedly. The mines on a string are represented as daisy chain AT mines but are poor at their job, hopefully CM 2 will present more realistic effects and outcomes of armour close assaults. How are AT grenades (RKG-3 etc) simulated in Shock Force?

DAF, I redid Joachim's test veteran sapper v's buttoned Panther. Flat terrain with only a tile of brush to hide the sapper. The differences to the original test were the sappers approached from the Panthers 6 o'clock and they ran at the beast. End result the Panther normally pinned the sappers as they found it hard to predict the Panthers path, even approaching from the rear the Panther spotted them 5 seconds into their approach. Repeat of test with two veteran tank hunters (one had one RPG). End result Panther killed 80% of the time (ran test 10 times). The RPG tank hunter sprinted rear right the other TH rear left, the RPG team threw their grenade whilst running at a range of 25-30 metres and NEVER missed. The most likely result was an immobilisation and a shock result which allowed them closing to finish off the tank with grenades. Even if the Panther managed to pin the RPG tank hunter team the other team seemed more than able to KO with just grenades, often with a mobility kill first. So I would say that Russian tank hunters are over modelled, try throwing a 1.2kg grenade whilst running, in a perfect arc, at a moving tank so that it strikes as close to 90 degrees as possible! Finally try taking out a buttoned Panther with just hand grenades, I know it simulates close assault but surely the TC does not always forget to lock his hatch, in these circumstances.

Buttoned does not mean blind and 10 o'clock puts the assaulting pioneers quickly into the arc of the Panther's hull machine gun, given the AI's turning to face any threat reaction and the slow pace of the pioneers. The turret only has to rotate slightly, and the vegulity-thingy s-mine mortar will pin the squad quickly. The 75mm plus coax will then finish off what the other weapons started. How is this a fair test of Russian tank-killing capability?

A little brazen moving the first Tiger with the commander unbuttoned, shame the pioneer squad was taking cover. If it had been effective would you have ordered it to attack the Tiger? It's hard to estimate the range from the screenshot (3rd shot turn 11) but it looks as though the Tiger could be in range of a satchel charge, or are the sprites magnified? Hope the big cat bogs, mine always seem to when moving in such damp conditions! If it is out of range then perhaps split the squad and take a shot at KOing the commander with one half squad. I've given up all computer games for lent and your AAR's are both a source of sustenance and torment!

First of all thanks for yet another professional AAR, they are most entertaining. Second: Tigers in the fog, soon it will/should be bogged Tigers in the fog, force him to move the beasts and you should get a terrain induced mobility kill!! Third: get some fire on the tanks and try to KO a commander, use an expendable. Forth: when playing do you use realistic size for the icons and blow them up for the AAR's? Finally, good luck and may the computer generated dice roll well for you!

Thought this was of interest as it shows the dispersion of a German section/squad in an assault, the use of smoke and the correct role of the LMG. I wonder will CM2 ever come close to representing the different tactics of the nationalities? http://www.realmilitaryflix.com/public/250.cfm?sd=56

You see the same in the recently released Youtube footage of the alpha version of the British Forces module. The sniper in the footage with, what I think is an L96, ejects the case and then works the bolt. Then gain the GMG seems to be ejecting beer cans, so I guess these little niggles will be fixed.