ArgusEye
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Posts posted by ArgusEye
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The player is not supposed to know [or at least recognise] *any* rules. The idea is to simulate, so to speak. This method has been in use for military wargames throughout the 20th century. I'm inclined towards a style in use in France and Germany in the '20s.Just one more point: almost all players who joined the Onion Wars campaign over the years were interested in playing tactical battles, very few were willing to put in some extra time, learn the system and do the planning, bookkeeping etc. If one of those players drops out, your campaign can be finished. Keep that in mind when writing the rules.
I'm tempted, but:If in doubt, why not start small and simple? Describe what kind of campaign you have in mind, then see how many players you can find. And only then discuss adding more complex rules. Begin with a simple system, a small map, few forces and a campaign that lasts only five turns. If your players stay with you, try something bigger.- If I limit the possibilities to an unpopular locale or timeframe, any prospective players might not show
- Much of the information would only be known to ONE of the players, so to throw an example on here would be giving away too much information.
So I'm going to limit myself to an outline sketch, and we'll see who shows up with piqued interest.
I'll supply a gridded terrain map of a (probably fictional) part of the Eastern front in (for instance) may 1942, with some villages and features like hills, forests, and whatnot. Let's say a sector of 25 km to a side.
The players then get a list of assets, probably two depleted batallions or so, with some tanks, AC's, artillery etc. but also wire, mines, phone line, signals units, field kitchens, maybe a field hospital - all the trimmings necessary to run a fighting force. These then have to be placed appropriately, in the area known to be under control.
Then the player will be interrogated how he wants his troops organised, what the standing orders are, mostly to see how fast reactions will be.
When the ammo dumps are dug, the phone line is in use, and the repair shop is ready, both players get orders from higher up. If they can make a good case, they can request divisional resources to achieve their goals.
Then they order their troops to move. I keep track, to see if the troops meet anything. Reports come to the player in much the same form as in RL. Any substantial encounter will be made into a scenario, and played out. Outcome and losses are recorded, and will be taken along to the further game.
I foresee infiltration groups running afoul of patrols, recon AC's meeting in in no-mans land, and highly concentrated spearheads hitting defensive positions. The added fun would be that instead of trying to 'score', one would have the bigger picture in mind. Sometimes the objective would be to get away, or to save the last radio car of the regiment. Even when you tactically win by ramming your spearhead through the enemy, you might find yourself wishing you hadn't because now your reserves have been depleted too far. That kind of things.
In principle, the tactical commanders are interchangeable. They only have to fight a single battle at a time. It is important, however, that the operational commander remain the same, unless some other player enjoys being dumped into a developed battle (which has its points of realism as well). The only important thing is to keep the sides separate.
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Thanks, interesting. Amazing that they didn't completely cave in with such bad leadership. Says something about the motivation and morale of the troops.
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76mm seems well modeled to me, the 85mm is probably undermodeled before early 1944 and overmodeled thereafter. I am more verbose in earlier posts of this thread. Others disagree with me.So what's the answer: is the 76mm undermodelled or not ?For that matter, is 85 mm undermodelled or not /
In game I wouldn't know, but you can easily test it by trying. In real life, the Panther would get bludgeoned to death if attacked from its front, but could take some T34s with it if it was lucky. If it presented any appreciable side angle, it would be a barbecue in seconds. If it was faster on the trigger, it *might* kill 1 T34. Is my humble opinion.What would have happened ? In CMBB (and in real life), a plt of T34-85 rushing to a frontal fight with a Panther at decreasing range, perhaps 300-200 m (admittedly one trying to shake off 1 plt of Russian infantry trying to grenade it)-- who wins ? -
I'm willing, all we need is players (preferably four, but two should be enough) who can agree on game (BB or AK), period (as in year), location (Libya/Baltics/Italy/Central Eastern Front) and houserules (some people don't like planes, or want mandatory exchange of passwords after games, or whatever).
Once we have that, we can get started. We'll see.
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Actually, I wasn't!Argus, I'm sure that you are aware that the Ukranian partisans were a very mixed bunch, not the uniform Rodina loving scourge of the fascists, as portrayed post-war.I've been reading up on the Ukrainian and Belorussian partisan movements, and I was quite surprised by how they worked. I always assumed they worked much like the Western European resistance movements, but that was completely wrong. Especially the fact that organised military resistance was waged against the Soviets until 1950 was quite eye-opening.
I am unable to see this documentary thus far, but luckily there's plenty to read.There was a fascinating documentary on BBC 2 years ago that revealed lots of previouslu suppressed reports, where Red Army units had as much to fear from the Ukranians, in certain areas.
Quite a bit of that is counterculture. The Germans are constantly bringing up their national shame in musea, television, books, endless monuments, and some people get irritated and start being contrary. National Socialism is pretty much dead, misplaced nationalism and plain xenophobia are common and mistaken for Nazi ideology.I certainly know for some of my living German relatives Nazi ideals are far from dead, just dormant.
Same goes for most units. The Germans did not have clean hands anywhere on the Eastern front.How many supported their aims is a topic for historians, though units like the 6th Army seemd more than happy to carry out ethnic and racial cleansing. -
Drama queening aside, have you no curiosity? Would you not rather know the fine details of what was tested? Are you not perplexed by the large differences in accuracy reported by the Isigny crew and the British for the 17pdr APDS?
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It must be horrible to have these conspiracies against you.
Now, when are you going to come up with factual arguments?
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URC, I apologise for not responding to your find earlier. What you have found is a report, but I'm not looking for that kind of report. You see, this is a transcript of a summary of results - which is a valuable source in and of itself. The problem with this report is that very much is left unsaid.
As so often, these reports are written by military men for military men, and it omits much of the information necessary for delimiting the applicability of the results. What I've been looking for, and it has been very hard to find, is sets of documents by the proctors and test designers, who explain the technical details of the test itself. That is quite rarely available.
Take, for example, the second link in your post. This is the famous Isigny tests. There are many references to original research papers, but all I've been able to find are quotes about them, and books containing them which are still classified. (This might tell you more about my searching skills than the availability though!)
In the Isigny tests, they got 4 or 5 Panthers together, and shot them up as described in the link you posted. It is unclear, however, what these Panthers had been through. They were made in a time that the Germans had trouble getting alloying materials, which made their temper extremely sensitive. If any of these things burned, their armour would have been severely compromised. The documents don't specify whether -and how much- this had happened.
There are plenty of opinions about the Isigny tests alone, which could be judged as to their factuality by just finding the complete documentation. Were the Panthers substandard? Had they burned? Was the 17pdr Sabot so inaccurate because it was just a bad batch of projectiles? Was the test biased in favour of the 76mm by its shot sequencing and target choice? All these points have been brought forward, but without more complete test documentation we cannot judge.
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In a scenario either one can be equipped with up to 100 rds. Fast as a mortar - not quite.
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Agreed; but in the case of the systematic alienation of the Ukrainians, the Heer is not to blame. Atrocities were also committed by the Heer units, naturally. It was not enough to look worse than the Soviets. Many Ukrainians could remember the Holodomor, and you have to be pretty bad to top that. Initial German repression was less severe than the Soviet repression they replaced, which was an undeserved bonus for the Krauts - and they blew it.ArgusEye, I think the German army was too complicit with the Nazi ideology for it all to be blamed on the leadership, he who drinks with the devil etc etc. Certainly, senior German Army leadership was malignly influenced by competing Nazi fiefdoms but also seemed to be more than capable of cocking it up on a regular basis.
It's hard to see how the contemporary Germans didn't see through it. The power of what the people around you find acceptable is shocking in the extreme.Interestingly, go to an exhibition of Nazi art and you see that the vision of Germany's future depends on which Nazi commisioned the work. All in all a very depressing couple of hours, enlivened by some dreadful Italian pieces whose only merit was that they were colourful, the German stuff would have been laughable if t were not for the underlying message and reality they exposed. -
It is a bit misleading to speak of one consistent Nazi policy, or either of one consistent Nazi ideology. Where Fascism and Communism were grounded in a few original, well-reasoned texts, Nazism had little more grounding than the ramblings of Mein Kampf. Most of the Nazi elite had quite different ideas about how the new Reich would look in the end. The romantic rural idea was popular in the press, but Goebbels was looking forward to a modern metropolitan Germany, Himmler had feudal ideas about using the lesser races as beasts, and so forth. None of which was adequately founded in reality to be a viable base for policy.
With such people at the helm, even a perfect army could not have achieved victory.
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I think either of the small howitzers [M1927 or M1938] would fit the bill. Neither is as fast as a mortar, and they don't usually get 60 rounds, but they are cheap and relatively movable.
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That's the thing, rule discussions must be avoided like the plague. Just like the PC game doesn't discuss rules, and is purposely obscure about the underlying mechanisms, so too does the Kriegsspiel version I proposed.
When I say 'set up a comm net', I mean the player to indicate which units share frequencies, and where he wants the X kilometers of phone line he has to be laid. This is important to see which forces could or could not react in time to enemy developments, and whether or not communications can be cut by shrewd operating. The ref must keep track, not together with the player but for him.
Discussions of the sort you mention are never fruitful and should be avoided. You get what the ref says you get. If the repair shop turns out four trucks today, but your Tiger is still under repair, then you don't have the Tiger today. The shop does its best.
Thus compartmentalised, discussion and rules-lawyering is mostly eliminated. The only thing one needs is a trusted ref. Nobody likes to be jerked around, after all.
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An anecdote from the memoirs of a German hauptmann:
'I knew we had lost the war when the intelligence officer inspected [the first T34 they had killed] with awe and curiosity, and wanted to know all about it.'
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In principle, that is a nice idea. But Narva fell in late 1941, with its harbour mostly intact. It wasn't used much. This peripheral supply route is shorter, as you say, but it first runs over contested waters, and then along a rail line which is the front line at the point of deepest German penetration. It is too vulnerable to use until the Germans have progressed beyond the line Petrograd-Stalingrad. As such, it is a very useful route once the German conquest of European Russia would have been complete. The idea is nice, but it brought the Germans very little. With hindsight, I think it is obvious it had better been left alone.Placing an emphasis on AGN, on the other hand, would probably mean the early capture of Riga and possibly even Leningrad, along with several other minor Baltic ports. Then if—and admittedly it's a big if—those ports can be quickly brought into operation, supplies can be brought in through them and the logistical lines from Leningrad to Moscow are much shorter than from Warsaw. In the long run, I don't know how practical this strategy would have been either. It's still a long shot and I for one would not want to start a war counting on it.
It's been tricky to get believable figures, so I have to rely on scholarship of a mr. Kamenetsky, who states that productivity under German rule increased due to decollectivisation, then sank back to Soviet levels when hundreds of thousands of men were deported for slave labour in Germany and the decollectivisation was stagnated by the Germans. The amount of food extracted is stated to be similar. The Germans did not starve the Ukrainians any more than the Soviets did.The problem with that is that if you liberate the Ukrainians instead of oppressing them, you have to feed them. You also have to find food for your army and its horses that now cannot live on the food you would have been stealing from the Ukrainians. The Nazis had practical as well as ideological reasons for starving the Ukrainians.The Germans themselves were aware of this. The German analysis bureau of their economic ministry appealed in quite strong terms to the Führer and Reichstag to reverse this ideological policy because of what they saw happening. It's not just monday morning quarterbacking.
Roosevelt had been angling for a provocation for a long time, but the Germans had actually adhered pretty closely to international law at sea. Roosevelt already did some questionable things with his lend-lease deliveries, making himself de jure proper targets. Regardless, the closest the Kriegsmarine got to strangling the British was in 1943, when German tactics were getting more misguided and the Americans were already in open warfare against them.I will stick my neck out and say that I don't believe Roosevelt and the US would have permitted that to happen. The US Navy would have entered the war at any point that it looked like the Germans were going to win that battle.Bigduke, I quite agree with your analysis of 25 december, but I think this quote:
might be a bit too easy. It is good to remember that the Red Army was about a million trucks ahead on the Germans (more than half from lend lease), and they had the rubber for tyres and the fuel to run them in a logistic role. This takes a lot of the burden that the Germans needed to put onto the railways. Also, the railways the Germans had improved could be used by the Soviets - and they were good rails...Does this mean the Red Army somehow were actually better at logistics than the Wehrmacht?As for the discussion about air harassment versus partisans, the Germans themselves express that only in France did the Jabo's get 'thick' enough to outweigh the problems generated by partisans. On the Eastern front, air power never came close to causing the same damage as partisans.
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Bert, I couldn't really find what I meant there. But it's a large site, maybe I just missed it.
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I agree with Michael. The only possibility for Germany to win would be a perfect execution of a better plan than they had.
The general staff was counting on the wrong things when planning Barbarossa. They planned an operation which was to mimic the early successes against the European powers. They wanted to encircle, demoralize, and disorganise their enemy. Which initially worked great, but the Soviets did one important thing different from what the Germans expected:
The Germans expected that the Soviets would commit all reserves to liberate their encircled forces, thus being able to wage a Blitzkrieg and force the Soviets to commit to an Entscheidungsschlacht. Instead the Soviets hung out their encircled front troops to dry, and fought a delaying action all the way to the first winter lines. This parried the original German plan, which was to overwhelm the enemy, pierce through his defenses and grab the strategic targets behind his army.
The Germans had greatly underestimated the tank forces of the Soviets, resulting in much less mobile advantage than they'd hoped. The original three pronged attack was meant to develop any prong only when and if it could break through. As it was, all three only plodded through dogged resistance, and none of the three was able to take its objective.
A war of attrition was unwinnable by the Germans. They didn't have the economy or the manpower for it. It was clear from the beginning that only a war of maneuver was winnable. And even then we're in what-if country.
If the Germans had dropped the Northern prong early on, and concentrated on either Moscow or Stalingrad, they might have achieved at least one of these objectives, and weakened the Soviet economy enough to make an attrition war unwinnable for the Soviets as well.
If the Germans had mobilised their economy to a war footing earlier than Barbarossa, they might have staved off the stalemate a few more months and have had a chance to get a little further.
If the Germans had liberated Ukraine and installed a puppet government instead of treating the populace as sub-human along Nazi lines, they might have had a well-positioned ally with a lot of manpower.
If the political elite (especially the GröFaZ) had not interfered with Räder's plans with the Kriegsmarine, Britain might have been starved into peace, freeing up a lot of troops in the West, which might have helped the East front efforts. And ended the strategic bombing.
If German troop morale had not been undermined by glaringly stupid Führer-commands, opportunities on lower operational levels would have been better exploited, gaining some offensive advantage.
But if not, the Soviets would grind down the Wehrmacht until nothing was left. Which is what happened.
As illustration, an anecdote:
One of my older colleagues used to work for an Italian producer of combat helicopters. During the Yeltsin era, the Mil helicopter factory courted them to see if there could be cooperation. A knowledge exchange junket was organised.
There had been speculation among the Italian engineers regarding the rotor suspension. The Soviets built those really small, as examples from Afghanistan wreckage showed. There were some wild theories about how the Russians had achieved sufficient dependability from the unit, because the Italians used units five times bigger.
The Russian engineer answered this question by shrugging and stating: 'We have expendable comrades.'
The Soviet way of war makes a lot more sense when viewed with this in mind. As long as you keep enough of your army intact to keep going, losses don't matter too much.
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Ziploc, I don't think it was as much a turning point as a point after which all doors were finally closed. The initial push had gone beyond expectation, but the Red Army didn't die as the Germans had expected. The hope had been that the Red Army would suffer such catastrophic organisational failure that it would never be able to fight again. This didn't happen. Instead new elements were raised, which turned out to be pretty hard fighters for low quality troops and materiel. They even tried to push the Wehrmacht back in the winter of 41-42. This was unexpected. Given the fact that the Red Army was recreating itself leaner and meaner, and it was growing quicker than the Germans were killing it, the better generals in the German general staff agreed that if the Soviet war economy could not be collapsed before winter, the Wehrmacht would be at the Soviets' mercy. The Germans were losing troops, especially trained ones, faster than they could be replenished. They were burning through their strategic materials too fast to sustain the war for too long. And with the Nazi doctrine of war as a way of life, gearing the economy for war was a political impossibility.
JasonC, the IS2 did not have a rammer. It was not a self propelled artillery piece. All sources contradict you. Furthermore:
The life of a crewmember depended very much on not being inside the tank when it brewed up. Once you've been hit one time, the enemy can repeat that. You have to hope your next shot will make you safe again, but before that's ready you might have to wait a long time. You're inside a priority target. Other machines are along with you. They can and will take care of the threat. Whether or not you bail. Your life does not depend on killing the threat. It depends on not dying.If your life depends on KOing the other tank, you stay and fire.By the way, let's play spot the rectangle!
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Yes, reliable players are a must. And given the response thus far, I doubt we could get anything substantial going. These things always end up taking months at the least, and people dropping out eats away at the fun.
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Oh, and I forgot to say: I also think the 76mm could penetrate 80-ish armour at 300 meters. It squares with sources I found before, at least.
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Nice find! (and thank you!)
My Russian is *far* too bad to read this quickly, so could you tell me: are these the ranges that they expect one-hit penetrations, the ranges at which they expect to chew through the armour, or the ranges at which fire begins to have effect on the machine?
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No, not at all. Onion wars works on a much higher level. It has purchasing, which I intend to avoid. It is highly abstracted on the operational level, which I also intend to avoid. The idea of what I propose is the operational action on the regimental level. At most.
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Bigduke, the remark about the shell dropping out does not come from a report, but from a Romanian manual about maintenance of the IS2 (which is remarkable, because I cannot find Romanian use of the thing anywhere), named
Manualul Tancului JS - 2
cunoaştere şi exploatare
wherein the Romanians state that with Yugoslav ammunition, the gun can be loaded at any angle, but with old style ammunition, the barrel has to be level or lower. That's all the notes I have on it, if you want more info I'd have to re-order the microfilm. It might be easier to get for you, given your greater proximity to the source.
For the rest I find myself agreeing with most of what you say, except for some little points:
Either Potapov or Ogorsky states that this was due to production problems with the 100mm, necessitating the 122. I also read something else pertaining to the choice, but that's too fuzzy now, I'll have to look it up.They actually considered installing the better-perfoming 100mm gun in the Stalin, and nixed the idea because that would have meant less Stalins with a less-powerful HE shell.
True! But bear in mind that the Krauts already had trouble crewing the tanks they had, and fuel was an even bigger problem. A whole bunch of extra tanks standing around on factory parking places would not have done the front any good. Keeping crews alive with more survivable tanks was sensible from the German perspective.That's that many fewer German tanks overall, and corresponding reduced German flexibility as they have to include big heavy tanks in their inventory, and net result that many more sectors along a 4,000 km. front where the Soviets can concentrate their armor, against no German tanks at all.It was as von Rundstedt said: if the Germans didn't win the war by autumn of 1942, there was no more hope of victory.
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The concept is pretty simple. It's basically the Kriegsspiel version that along the lines of the von Moltke school - but simplified, because we're no full-time officers.
What I was thinking: the ref makes an overview map, with all the appropriate landmarks, and gives an order of battle to the general in charge. Indications of enemy forces would be supplied in much the same form as his real life counterpart would have received. The forces he has start out on the map, in a position determined by the ref. Then the ref asks him where he wants to send his troops, put fieldworks, headquarters, how he wants to organise standing orders, comm nets, repair shops, scouting, AA, transport, muster areas, etc. When the orders come back, the ref tracks all changes until either the orders complete, or there is an encounter with the enemy. This encounter is then built as a CMAK or CMBB battle (depending on where this is all taking place), which then has to be fought. Both sides of this battle report their (and their opponents') losses, and send the ref a screenshot of the summary. That gets taken into account when setting up the rest of the operational level action. Lose a sniper? One less sniper. Burn a Tiger? One less Tiger. Lose a vet tank crew? The replacement crew will be green or worse.
The guy doing the operational level has to have fun doing logistics. The tactical guys might get different orders than 'score more points than the other guy'. Sometimes the goal of a battle will just be to escape with as many men as possible.
Interesting?
Who's up for an experiment?
in Combat Mission Campaigns
Posted
Player 1 wants to send a team to capture some enemy troops for interrogation. He chooses to use half a Recon B company without support, but with M5 halftracks. He assumes a swamp to probably be lightly defended, therefore this seems a good snatch spot.
Player 2 has indeed not fortified the swamp, but has some patrols there, consisting of a single radio car and one platoon of infantry, spread out over two kilometers. He has a radio net that includes some other AC's, as well as the rest of the infantry company. Their standing order is to come to assistance upon contact.
I then design an appropriate CMBB map, with the appropriate troops, and because of the situation of player 2, he will get reinforced with some AC's at turn 12, and with extra infantry at turn 20.
The objective of Player 1 is to get one of his units either to capture an enemy unit or to have one of his units to 'touch' an eliminated enemy unit. This last thing because the pixel troops are much too fanatical, and surrender a bit late. Then he has to extricate himself.
The objective of Player 2 is not explained to him at the beginning of the battle, all he knows is OMGWTF he's being attacked!
After this battle is concluded by the tactical types, the results are reported to the ref (me), and there is a reckoning on the operational level. Direct interference by the operational commander *during* a battle seems unfeasible and even unrealistic. When I read reports about fighting in Italy, I read responses from regimental or brigade level sometimes measured in days.