MengJiao

I have an experimental scenario with a battalion attack on a village. I finally got to the village with a relatively intact battalion. I shelled the place with whatever artillery I had left and then assaulted with 3 companies and the Pioneer Platoon and all the MGs following in. C company took the church, B company took the bakery and A Company captured a score of Fusiliers as they ran out of town. It looked like grenades were used in the big Church and the bakery since some of the Platoon level assault orders went right into those buildings. Elsewhere not so much since the Fusiliers were mostly running for it by the time the assault got to grenade range.

I think the infantry work fine, at least from my real time perspective. To do a proper attack you have to build up to a suppression and then the final assault should be a squad with good morale etc. Works well. Defense: once the enemy is almost on top of you, it is too late to do anything fancy. Either pull back or counterattack with a reserve. Just hoping that that hiding or getting your arcs right or being in a hole properly really doesn't work when you are relatively suppressed and the enemy is upon you.

As a real time player, if I get to a situation before it gets critical, I just have the larger surviving squads or teams take quick to safety. Once (during a rare moment as a German), I had infantry guns target the hole in the hedge that the pursuers might try to take. I also (again in a breif Teutonic mood) tried to have Nebelwerfers blast the pursuers on "immediate", but something went wrong with that and either the nebels or the werfers went elsewhere or never fired or both.

The radio net thing may never make it into tactical games. You'd need a whole new level of parameters focused on things before the tactical event and this sort of thing has to be handled by scenario designers at the moment. So I think all the Panthers I have deployed have been on some kind of radio net. I did deploy a demoralized batch of Panthers (low motivation, exhausted survivors facing a counter-attack), but they did just as well as the more motivated crews as did the demoralized M10s since both do best shooting from over 600-700 meters.

Ah, well Fireflies and 17 pdr ATGs and the Achilles (and Archer?) will be a lot of fun.

Yep. It is important to keep Panthers from spotting. Apparently lots of artillery or shots bouncing off or MG fire or small arms or mortars are more helpful than they look since they keep the Panthers from spotting the guns that are likely to knock them out. I think my favorite Panther massacre happened when the lead Panther fired smoke and backed up after a hit. the following 2 Panthers couldn't see past the first one's smoke and were knocked by M10 shots aimed at the first one as they turned to bypass the smokey one. I think the smokey one got away or just got immobilized.

Panthers are fine tanks, but they can be knocked out by a variety of weapons. The Shermans really aren't the best weapon for dealing with Panthers. I had an experimental scenario where about 15-20 Panthers would attack with plenty of artillery and infantry support. The attack would run out of steam but only if there was a long line of M10s in good positions. The M10 can kill Panthers as the Panthers manoeuver at pretty impressive ranges. Then artillery and Sherman fire can immobilize a few more. Finishing off the surviving Panthers in the objective village was a multistage process: 1) artillery and mortar fire and small infantry attacks to clear out supporting infantry 2) get spotters up to spot every Panther 3) keep up mortar and MG fire and targetting small arms to keep Panther crews from spotting and to keep them from re-crewing abandoned Panthers 4) Hunt down surviving Panthers with bazookas and 57mm AT and M10s and even Shermans

I think the Sherman crews seem a bit courageous. I had one Sherman that kept single-handedly driving right into a village right past 2 immobilized and one burning Sherman. I can't imagine how many Panzergrenadiers he shot. The problem was, I was trying to organize things elsewhere and every time I gave him a reverse or other order, I accidently stuck the waypoint in a field for which the only access was via the village. Unfortunately, I didn't figure this out until after he had seriously damaged the main defense of the village. In its wild rides the excessively courageous Sherman was hit quite a few times by all manner of weapons, but it was moving fast and there was a lot of smoke (a few times he drove through US artillery and mortar barrages). In the end I declared a ceasefire, and found the Sherman had only knocked out one STGIII and a few trucks. It's main opponent seems to have been 75mm infantry gun and some panzersheiks.

My Chimps are not impressed with the 88. It seems pretty easy to spot and in the bocage it rarely has much of a field of fire. In one experimental scenario, the 88s invariably got spotted and knocked out by any random batch of Shermans before they could do any damage. the German 75mm AT gun is another story. It usually does a lot better than 88s, at least in the Bocage.

They had to start somewhere and I guess they didn't want to start by modelling the strange and rare and ineffective. It seems like if you can get Shermans and Panthers and M10s and STGIIIs right, you have a good foundation and standard range of outcomes from which to expand your stuff later. there is a whole slew of German Halftrack types. That's cool. And plenty of armored cars. And trucks and jeeps. A lot of stuff really. And it all interacts convincingly.

They will do it occasionally. I'm never sure what gets into them since I usually notice the rifle grenades uselessly arc-ing at inexplicable targets.

Your methods sound good to me. I'm always getting sucked in a bit too fast when I attack. It goes like this. I think "Hey, that's a good spot for a forward observer. " so I send up the observer and then whatever miscelaneous stuff is at hand: breach teams, bazooka teams, MGs, ammo teams, the XO group, a few tanks. This mob runs into the enemy and then the main infantry companies have to hurry up to get them out of trouble. Then I get that straightened out and the main battle begins with all my stuff all jumbled up.

they can do that if you give them a support plan. And even without one, they will fire at areas where they spot your stuff, even if they don't see very much.

The next installment is going to be quite awesome. This one is good too, but Epson and Goodwood and Jupiter (are there two operation Jupiters?) and Bluecoat are going to be brutal.

I assume when the machine is off, the men are all in Nirvana, or maybe in the Hell of the Demons awaiting the Botisatva Avoleskaya.

Sounds odd. They turn up in the editor and I don't do quick battles very much so that's news to me.

It's there and it works pretty durned good. In fact it tends to give the US something of an excessive advantage when I put it in my experimental scenarios, though this might be for reasons that have nothing to do with the AT gun itself, but rather with the fact that if I put in the 3-inch AT: 1) the US is defending 2) the AI is attacking 3) I position the 3-inchers before the battle 4) they always get sandbag defenses 5) I check up on them, bring them ammo, fire smoke, bring up MGs to cover them etc. Under those circumstances the 3-incher is the ultimate weapon -- so much so that I find the 57mm much more fun. When you go hunting Panthers with the 57, you are out on a limb.

I agree. I play in RT and I just plot a move say 800 meters away and eventually vehicles find a way there. Sometimes the route is surprising and sometimes I stop them and send them somewhere else (safer usually) to think about the errors of their ways. Lately I've started thinking ahead in terms of where there might be congestion and then stopping say tank platoons short of where they might need to change their timing or go individually to get through.

There probably has been some over-estimating of Germanic weaponry in war games. In my family, I traditionally played the Allies or the UK or the Russians or the Chinese or the Persians or the Punic Forces against my father or brothers who always had the superior side (they weren't as interested in the games and demanded to be the Germans or the Japs or or the Romans or Alexander the Great etc. etc. or they would not play). I was traditionally the better player, but I can tell you from decades of experience, Persian or Punic or Chinese or US Army gear has been shockingly under-rated for a long time. The turning point might have been in about 1979 when I gave Alexander the Great a fatal reception at Granicus or it might have been in one of those many games of the 1980s where German tactical flexibility was supposed to save them from 3 times as many Russians with twice the armor and firepower. Ooops. Or maybe not. Anyway, its still refreshing that the Allies still have some stereotypes to blast apart with the incredible ability of the Sherman to take a few hits.

Well, I'm looking forward to seeing the Firefly and the Achilles and the towed 17-pdr in the game sooner or later.

Ronco? You mean Ronson? I think the Ronco lighter is the one that also is a desert topping heater and a mosquito repellant.

Having run roughly the same scenario a half-dozen times against a score of Panthers, I don't have much confidence in the Sherman's ability to slug it out with Panthers. The M10 seems to do much better. I tend to hold the M10s back under cover and send the Shermans as far around to one side as possible. Only a cross-fire seems to guarantee a satisfactory number of Panther kills. Of course, up close, in town even a 57mm has a chance at a Panther kill, but I've stopped the AI from letting the Panthers drive all the way in to the town/objective.

I've played a lot of CMSF and learned the editor and I'm apparently an eternal noobie, so...I recommend learning the editor and working on problems in scenarios you build yourself. For example, I wondered how well the US 3-inch AT gun would work and I deployed it in a medium-sized scenario and had the AI attack while I ran the AT-guns. You can work on any problem in the game that way and often surprise yourself too.

I don't know about the actual demographics, but the Norman take-over (which became official in 910 AD IIRC) seems to have preserved at least some village institutions that disappeared in the rest of France. There was some regional council that functioned in a Pagus (country area, also related to Pagan, ie a rustic person) that the Normans preserved through the period of maximum social breakdown around 1000 AD (when the progenitors of what would become the aristocracy siezed local power in most of France). In Normandy, local power seems to have remained less aristocratic and the pagi (latin plural I assume of Pagus) continued to function. Which may have some relation to why there is bocage there. Those would be field boundaries and ritual enclosures (which is how I assume the round enclosures on high ground might have originated) going back to the Neolithic and not messed with by aristocratic power at least around 1000 AD.

I think there are cases where the infantry (or crew) can engage, but the gun is too low or otherwise unable to target (maybe out of ammo or still limbered?).