LemuelG

I support the addition of foliage camo. Not at all confident it'll happen.

Hey guys - first time back in about 6 months - saw the article on RPS and swung by. I made a thread once about increasing US AB platoons to three squads which I remember 'winning' decisively, I hope y'all didn't forget! =D Looking forward to the new kit; a bit of a shame that I can't see any flamethrowers in the new stuff.

Pumas should not have been used in any kind of static overwatch with their paper-thin armour (only just enough on it's flanks to stop 7.92mm AP ammo from >30m, the frontal plate could resist 20mm AP). A tactical bungle - own it rather than blaming the game because an obvious error came back to bite you. And I think there is no point complaining that your unit would not ignore your ordered arc - again, only one person to blame for that (the person who set the faulty arc).

Thanks for the utterly patronizing and worthless advice. For what it's worth, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is serving my 'gaming needs' quite well at the moment - Battlefield 3 is out soon... there's plenty of stuff out there making a play for my money, another WWII RT tac-sim coming out etc - if BFC shares your bogus attitude, then woe is them. We all know this 'feature' sucks and is wrong, we all would like a fix (I have seen Steve say as much). Better sooner, I say - I didn't start the thread, but I'll add my 5c while it's going.

Not my game bud, if it was everything else would be on hold until this is fixed. I would not try to nickle-and-dime folk for new units etc when the mechanics are currently broken (yes, broken - unable to adequately SIM what it is supposed to), while saying "any changes to the current mechanics will have to wait for the next 'full' title", yeah right - I hope they come to their senses, as I do really like this game aside from the broken-ass tanks.

The issue needs to be addressed in this game, not the next. The issue is irksome enough to be a top priority for me. Maybe BFC don't agree, maybe they wont get any module sales out of me... their call.

Be careful what you wish for. There are many a fine prospective tactical engagement over the years which 'AI' promptly ruined within seconds. I would much rather see the current plan system fleshed-out more.

The Wehrmacht was well aware of this, and could basically set the amount of recruits released by each Wehrbezirkskommando (defense district headquarters). OKW was obliged to release the necessary replacements for Verfugungstruppe campaign-losses, but could effectively pull the hand-brake on further expansions - so long as as the potential Verfugungstruppe recruits were eligible for Wehrmacht service in the first place. It is in this context that SS-Brigadefuhrer Gottlob Berger came up with a number of schemes for aggressive expansion, the first of which involved utilizing several groups of men exempt from Wehrmacht service: the Totenkopfverbande (concentration camp guards - I think we are all familiar with the work of that organization) and their war-time reinforcements (Reinforced Totenkopf Standarten) in particular. 50,000 men of the Allgemeine SS were later called-up as 'Reinforced Totenkopf Standarten'. By such methods they were able to flesh out several large formations in time for the outbreak of war. The Waffen-SS is born. Hitler himself restricted any further expansion, still seeing the Waffen-SS as an armed state police, perhaps expecting a short war and weary of spooking the Wehrmacht, who find new ways to confound Berger; soon it becomes difficult just to replace battle-losses in some units when OKW limits the Waffen-SS formations which they recognize officially. This is (Aug '40) when Berger proposes to Himmler that all ethnic Germans suitable for service (1.5 million-ish) in south-eastern Europe be directed to 'volunteer' for the Waffen-SS, as the Wehrmacht has no authority over them. Various methods of persuasion were applied - one may draw their own conclusions from this statement by Berger: "if a minority is even passably well led, all will volunteer; those who do not volunteer will have their houses broken up". At the end of '43 25% of the Waffen-SS manpower was 'racial German'. Berger turned also to those known to the SS as 'Germanic' in occupied Europe; Belgium, Holland, Norway - 125,000 signed-up. Berger also looked further afield, effectively following German advances across Europe: There, the short version of Waffen-SS recruitment strategies. Quotes from The Order of the Death's Head, Heinz Hohne.

I think you mean Vlasov.

Browning's remark to Horrocks as they observed the assault: "I've never seen a more galant action"... or Dempsey to Gavin after hearing reports of the 82nd in Nijmegen (Hunner park and Waal crossing): "I'm proud to meet the commanding general of the finest division in the world today"... To make blanket statements about allied soldiers lacking initiative, and officers not leading from the front is absurd and plain wrong.

US executed 141 men from 42-45 (across all services and theaters). Only one was for desertion, the rest for murder and rape. The Empire executed around 340 Commonwealth soldiers for a variety of offences (treatment of Indian soldiers was not always on-par with say, Canadians or New Zealanders). The Soviets... well I have no hard numbers for them, who's counting? Over 400,000 served in penal battalions, and in July '42 Stalin ordered summary shooting of any soldier who broke in the face of the enemy. The brutality of the bolsheviks is a topic in itself, millions were murdered over the course of the revolution/civil war/WWII, where does one start? Not sure about Japan. Can't imagine it was any better than it's insane pals. Spot the difference - it's not just a stark contrast between codes of military justice, but the societies from which the armies were formed.

In WWI the German army executed 48 men. By the end of WWII 20,000 men had been executed, 75-80% of them for political crimes: desertion and Wehrkraftzersetzung (undermining fighting spirit). I guess that's one way 'to get more out of' your guys.

Concrete cable-pylons; grain silos; CASTLES. And yeah, great game all-round, it is natural for grogs to have a long long shopping list - but it's a great game outta-the-box. Noticed Achtung Panzer had a demo for Op. Star out finally - is the best of the rest, am curious to see how it stacks-up (by that I mean... does it have MP yet?).

I admit I am prone to making glorious cavalry-style assaults if I am given 251s and a bit of armoured firepower, it's a gamble that can pay off - I mean, it can be worth the risk if you think you have local fire-superiority, sometimes better taking the chance of a bolt-from-the-blue than making your guys run across a large open space covered by enemy MG and mortars they'd all die crossing anyway (admittedly more something for the steppe than the bocage). You could save lives and claim the initiative in one fell swoop; that's not to say you should cruise down the road in column looking for trouble - you gotta know what you're getting into.

So if I bothered to offer a number of late-war examples of German troops braving their own MGs and mortars, so desperate were they to surrender; or whole battalions breaking and fleeing at the mere rumour of attack; or German officers being forced to resort to capital punishment to get local attacks moving, will it matter? Will it balance out their finer performances and force people to admit that no, man-to-man they were not at all superior to the allied forces? Or is it really just the Ubermensch thing again? Don't believe the hype, there were a number of allied formations who bested everything the Germans could throw at 'em - and on numerous occasions when the Germans could boast local superiority in men and material. This logic swings both ways... suddenly it looks otherwise, but then why bother with childish games of what-trumps-what? Frankly it's disrespectful to the men who fought on both sides - I doubt many German shutze felt this way - some did, but then some were irredeemably delusional and racist SOBs as well... all you need to know is that the German army was already immensely experienced by the time the US entered the fray in Europe, they had a right to do OK from time to time. They did, not good enough.

The Sherman is Super, glad you noticed. Soon I shall start petitioning for them to be able to fire indirectly as well

And we can reasonably scoff at their claim when with the awesome power of hindsight we are able to confirm that there were actually no Tigers or 88s at that location on that date - your rationality is not keeping pace with your scepticism - what if, in fact, we confirm that yes, there was a s.Pz.Abt there, or a heavy AA battery nearby, and little else? Is it logical to assume that because some allied soldiers were prone to exaggeration/mis-IDing, that these particular men are? Or that you are a superior arbiter of what exactly defines the term 'hedgerow' than these men who fought there for a month and practically spent the entire time living/fighting in the side of one hedge or another? When guys who are in fields completely surrounded by hedgerows on all sides say "it was a hedgerow" you might as well believe it... seems pretty reasonable to me. I wont submit to this type of madness, I am quite happy to take their word for it (on this subject).

Yeah, everything was the same (dunno how much abstracted cover 'dirt' gets you, but that's what he had) - the marksmen's assistants tended to crawl around a bit after their buddy got zapped - I think my die-hard found himself some decent defilade somehow; I didn't pay a great deal of attention to the topography. Since he did eventually die I assumed that it could have happened at any time, he wasn't invincible after all - definately looks like an anomalous result, but I can't be bothered testing too far into it.

I have been theorizing - due to the high trajectory of a Sherman gun it may be possible to find a hull-down position which a high-velocity German gun can't target, while you lob shells at him at your leisure. I have experimented (with no decisive results so far), you are maybe right to be paranoid

I tentatively agree - there was that one test that went forever with one single guy surviving forever (five minutes, an eternity in a firefight)... one sniper team ran out of ammo shooting at him, it was a bit sad. Other times they seemed to do great, with the decisive result coming after the first couple of rounds of shots (both starting marksmen on one side being killed). I might have been expecting the SA rifles to have a slightly better ROF as well. There were encouraging signs - the tendency to prefer shooting at other marksmen was very pleasing.

Well, those are are first-hand accounts from men who fought in the heart of bocage-country (all different men), I feel there is little choice but to take them at their word - if they say hedgerow they probably mean it. These anecdotes are by their nature, unusual - being memorable and remarkable enough to recount in a description of combat makes them such - therefore we hear about the time soldier X got hung-up in a hedge with an MG shooting at his butt, but not the numerous times he left his hole and hurdled hedge Y to go take a crap in the morning. The facts are simple, those paras had to cross numerous hedges in the first desperate days, they had no copious demolitions or rhino-tanks to assist them - the description of a trooper moving-out on D-Day morn' as being like "running an obstacle course with all those darned hedgerows" is, I think, probably quite typical of the way they went about it, climbing, crawling, bush-whacking - I don't doubt that some of their officers would have had them forming sufficiently tall human pyramids if they came upon a truly impassable obstacle. The idea it can't be done is not worth contemplating, don't under-estimate a determined human-being. At the risk of repeating myself - I'm A-OK with things as they are if designers use gaps to allow movement (I like the way there can be truly indomitable hedges, but they should be rare) - whether I imagine them climbing or pushing-through, it doesn't matter so long as they get to the other side. I want this to be the accepted Dogma of scenario-design, if I don't get any gaps I'm taking my toys and going home

I had myself a little sniper duel. Two two-man 'sniper' teams with their respective battalion commanders on opposite hill-sides. Map 300x400m, distance 400m apart, spread across map, snipers in each corner, HQs spaced evenly across middle - straight shots are 400m (ish) and corner-to-corner just under 500m. No wind, veteran teams and normal motivation, all plain dirt terrain. US assistants have no binoculars, Germans do. Is that proper? Will the Brits get the 20x telescope? Do German snipers have the special ammo effective for aimed fire to ranges out over 400m that they did in reality? At this range range only marksmen fire. I cease-fire when all marksmen on one side are eliminated - including assistants who buddy-aid scoped rifles. case 1: ends after 3.5 minutes; US takes 7 casualties, German none - US marksmen die quickly, assistants killed while aiding. Strong appearance of marksmen favouring other marksmen as targets. case 2: ends after 4.5 minutes; US 1 casualty, German 7 - same story, different side. Still looks like snipers are favoured over HQs and assistants. case 3: ends after 10 minutes; US 2 casulties, German 9 - the last German assistant holds out for five minutes after his pals are killed, otherwise it is the same story - he has good luck I guess. case 4: ends after 3 minutes; US 7 casualties, German 2 - Germans win this time. Result appears to be decided by which side kills the other's original marksmen first, usually this happens within a 2-3 minutes max; not every shot hits, but a 500m first-shot kill against an opposing marksman isn't particularly unusual by the looks of it (it happens a few times in my tiny sample). There definately appears to be a targeting-bias against opposing marksmen. Good, I think this is good... there's no point holding-up a soldier like Hurtzenauer and demanding every German marksman shoot like him. As it is, 'snipers' can spot, engage, and kill with reasonable efficiency from ranges outside most other small-arms fire. Short of making them some kind of mystical ninja I'm not sure what else is needed. I would like to see some sort of field-craft/camouflaging - for defending/ambushing units, purchased and applied before battle; and also for recon/snipers at-will in the field (i.e. the German sniper's camouflaged umbrella adorned with a bit of shrubbery). But that is not just a sniper issue, it concerns everything and is a massive tactical deficit in this game.

Nordyke, Phil. Four Stars of Valor: The Combat History of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment in World War II. Zenith Press. Kindle Edition. Humans find ways. Whether or not hurdling/climbing/pushing-through is sensible when it is being observed by the enemy is irrelevant to it's possibility. I guess we've all observed circumstances in which guys will take lengthy detours through multiple kill-sacks to move around an unbroken hedgerow - ideally I think there might be some kind kind of 'climb' order, a bit like 'blast', but with climbing-over instead of blowing-up; it would be lengthy and troops would be vulnerable in the process (and as with many orders, abandoned if fire is sufficiently heavy), it is fatiguing and not applicable to vehicles. I would also like to see my guys climbing up trees when asked.

This must be erroneous, I thought every second German in Normandy was a sniper. A fine tactical compliment to the many hundreds of Tigers present.

I can happily live with the status quo, so long as designers remember to leave breaks in their hedgerows. Bocage that can't be passed at all by infantry is frankly, incongruous, annoying... and not at all realistic. Yeah I said it, soldiers navigated through hedges without demolitions or bulldozers. It was done, very often. I don't care if cows are routinely foiled by it - they can't climb, and are several times the size of the average human, incapable of co-operating and using tools, etc etc. There is no sensible case for making bocage impassable to infantry, unless you also create a section that has a small gap to represent a spot where soldiers can force their way through, or climb over... oh wait - they exist, please use them often when designing your maps. Do it for the AI, if not the player. I see no need to encourage people to try and drive tanks over bocage - you can have it, with a very high chance of bogging or incurring damage to your running-gear.