Maciej Zwolinski

1918 tactics with 1915-trained soldiers are going to be fun to watch.

Sniffed around where, if you don’t mind me asking? I ask because if your assessment is accurate then something has definitely gone wrong with RA armour. Hang on, is is not how we are supposed to use tanks in Combat Mission anyway? Infantry in the front to spot&make the enemy fire positions reveal themselves, tanks at the back, as far as the LOS/effective range of weapons allows, preferrably keyholed, APCs/IFVs as battle taxis, out of LOS most of the time. This is what I have read in the many tactics threads on this very forum.

Interesting account name. Something tells me he is not a fan of Kherson.

Apparently an anonymous Ukraininan source has told Washington Post the Novofedorivka attack had been done Ukrainian Special Forces. Of course this may be just a new alternative explanation to confuse the Russians. [Edit] Others beat me to the news.

What do you make of the Russian claims that the UKR forces are suffering significantly heavier losses than the RUS in the Donbass fight? This claim is being repeatedly made, at least by Strelkov. If this is correct, then the automatic assumption that RUS attacks are "frontal and costly", i.e. costly because they are frontal should be changed somewhat. They certainly are slow and require huge expenditure of ammunition, but if they protect RUS infantry, which is their most precious resource at the moment, this change of tactics is not evidence of stupidity, but quite reasonable adaptation. As opposed to men, RUS post-soviet stockpiles of 152mm ammunition are an almost unlimited and almost free (except transportation costs) asset. AFAIK, this is possible, the "bite and hold" tactics of 1917 (which I see as almost direct analogue, exchaning observation baloons for drones) did inflict more casualties on the Germans than on the British, and the Germans found no direct counter to them. Their indirect counter was to take advantage of the slowness of this method and prepare a counteroffensive, which is a whole different kettle of fish; as far as I can see, the UKR have yet to find a method to deal with RUS defensive artillery concentrations which would allow them to attack in the face of determined RUS opposition. On the other hand, Strelkov does not directly see the extent of UKR casualties and probably relies on RUS reports. He may be completely wrong. What do you guys think?

That may be the reason for the Ukrainians getting and starting to exercise SEAD capability. ATACMS is more vulnerable to SAMs than HIMARS rockets, so some cleaning up before ATACMS strike makes a lot of sense.

The Ukrainians seem to have large numbers of MANPADS. Do the current missiles not work against drones? I have read that particularly the Martlet LMM is optimised against them.

This is incredible. Reads like a scene from the future in "Terminator" where the human guerillas have a few minutes to strike and then hide before the killing machines arrive. Fighting like this could indeed reduce any offensive action to a modern equivalent of WWI trench raid, and if both sides do this to each other, then they are just fighting back and forth over the same small pieces of terrain. Has anyone proposed a way to break this stalemate? The only thing that comes to my mind in that situation is a massive air bombardment of the enemy artillery and having a ton of PGMs on call to immediately respond to any artillery which survived the air strikes and reveals itself in defensive fires. One more thought: are AFVs used (and/or useful) at all in this kind of fighting?

On the Polish twitter there was information about protests by soldiers of Ukrainian 93 mechanised and 79 airborne brigades rotated out of line, who voiced their dissatisfaction with the conditions in which they had been fighting (lack of support, bad leadership). They had been fighting very hard, so some morale problems probably were bound to happen sooner or later.

This is reportedly for the 4th Tank Division - Kantemirovskaya. I suppose for non-elite units it would be worse still.

Could you be persuaded to release your Germans (ordinary Heer Germans as opposed to Totenkopf) as well? Your Totenkopf SS men look, for want of a better word, gorgeous. Even the most common Feldgrau uniforms look really good. It would be great if we could upgrade the Heer to the same standard. Thanks, Maciej

If I may have a suggestion, please finish the Sumpfmuster first. It is a real beauty of a camo and sorely needed. Great mod by the way. Thanks, Zwolo

If this was an APCR shot, then highly sloped plate would have resisted differently and proportionately much more than vertical. The diameter of the subcaliber penetrator is equivalent to 20-30 mm round, which means that the plate would be substantially undermatched (less than 50% thickness: diameter) in which case the slope effects would be magnified. I think that BR 365P should not go through upper glacis of Panther either. Maciej

This indeed seems wrong. Panther upper glacis has 80 mm at 55 degrees and should be proof against Soviet 85 mm. Unless this penetration occurred through a flaw in armour or somesuch there might be a mistake here. Which is slightly worrying because T 34-85 vs Panther is such a common match-up for the period of this game that if it is not represented right, the impression of realism could suffer considerably. Has any of the beta team or developers confirmed this? Maciej

Nik, I think two steps are needed in order to make this a historical, or at least less ahistorical, mod. First is easy - leave the trousers unmodded. Heer soldiers wore camouflage trousers only as part of the winter reversible camo suit with parka and a pair of trousers (or if they themselves comissioned the trousers from some tailor - effectively a real-llife uniform mod). The winter combination would be too warm for Italy or Normandy. Second part is more difficult - you would need to somehow try and paint over the buttons, pockets and the belt. I do not know enough about modding, alpha channels etc. to tell if there is any way to do it and have the mod look halfway decent, but the real life camo jacket had none of those, one would wear the feldbluse and the webbing underneath it. Here the only exception would be private purchases where an officer or NCO would pay a tailor to produce a feldbluse equivalent usually from a camo tent material (the picture you show above is either such private purchase or a re-enactor's kit itself historically not accurate). All the best, Zwolo

Apologies for resurrecting an old thread, but with the initial release out of the way and the work on the Commonwealth probably well underway...is this still on? Will we get the camouflage uniforms for the Wehrmacht guys when the SS is added? Thanks in advance for the information. Zwolo

No, for the SS combat units it was not. Most of those guys wore camo smocks. Same goes for the paratroopers. Surely feldgrau tunic was standard for the Wehrmacht units but that is not my point. The point is that Battlefront will be making game models for German soldiers in smocks anyway when they will be doing the SS troops (or so I hope) - and I am wondering if it would be much efort to retrofit those models into the main game for a few Heer units like snipers, recon teams and forward observers. If it is not too much trouble, they could put it in a patch - there usually is a patch for the main game after a module comes out. And snipers/recon did wear camouflage often, even though the average solder wore field grey. Maciej

Gents, On the basis of the above I assume that the British/SS module will add a model representing a man in a camouflage smock. Unless all the SS camo in the game is pea dot pattern which would be a tad unhistorical so it will probably not happen, and would not work for FJ anyway. Would it be possible at that time to patch the camouflage smock model into the main game as well so that it could be used for Heer camouflage? The shape of SS smock and Wehrmacht smock is almost the same, they only differ with regard to the pattern. Great visual enchancement and also historical, as I am sure you know of all places Normandy would be where Heer camouflage clothing was used in the most significant numbers (maybe apart from Kursk). Any thoughts? Maciej