MengJiaoRedux
-
Posts
89 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by MengJiaoRedux
-
-
In the following video you can see a heavy machine gun 34 firing long burst/continous fire while swinging the gun.
Look at Minute 2:15 - 2:17 :
He's shooting suppressive fire across a river (flat). I'm sure under ideal conditions traversing would be more or less a suppresive barage. But it isn't a death ray.
-
@JasonC:
i can not tell you how tired i get by repeating myself...
On 100 meters......i can just swing my HMG from one side to the other, in a horizontal way, to dispense accurately my burst in the way/area i like.
This way i not only supress more people i just have a higher propability to hit other enemies running in the same area.
So hard to understand?
I think everyone knows what your fantasy is, but I think that only works with fixed MGs that are part of an entrenched defensive scheme as in the 1st world war. Even then you really need barbed wire to keep the approaching enemy in your kill zone long enough to do the proper traversing.
-
It would do wonders if you actually quoted the post you are referring to.
I imagine it is the one about the lethality of dropping people on their heads.
-
The high rate of fire increases on high distances the hitprobability and on low ranges it does too....just by swinging the gun i can dispense the rounds into an enemy group....because of this i am not only able to let more people feeling supressed ...i am also able to hit more people per time frame.
Some people do not get this simple correlation.
The simple correlation does not seem to occur, probably because it is extremely sensitive to factors not in the game because they don't happen except with fixed MGs with interlocking fields of fire and even then only if you could perfectly time the traversing of the gun with the motion of the targets.
I suspect the traversing of a fixed MG would also provide much more suppression than killing simply because it would be a situation that any observer could visualize -- ie traversing a fixed MG produces the effect of a barrage, not a death ray.
-
The test does seem to be rather like testing mortality rates from dropping people on their heads from 66 meters compared to 100 meters . One might imagine dropping from the greater height would be 1/3rd more effective. But since being dropped from both heights will kill you the greater height gives only marginal benefit, if any at all. 600 men with no place to hide. Either use a MG42 or a Maxim on them, or have a group of officers casually wander through the crowd with their Nagant pistols in their hands. Technology doesn't play much of a role in the outcome.
This is the most sensible analysis I've seen in this thread and all the more so since apparently the real benefit of the MG42 was in suppressive fire -- dominating an area so that mortar fire could kill off the enemy.
-
If all else fails try a Rotmistrov (think what really happened at Prochorovka) - advance rapidly to close the range and try to kill the Tigers with close range shots. On second thoughts this might turn out to be as "succesfull" as Rotmistrov actually turned out to be in the above battle. According to Nipe 5GTA lost 400+ tanks trying to implement these tactics.
So maybe not unless you really are desperate!
5GTA only had t34s with 76mm guns, and they did stop the German thrust, so
they were successful, though not so much against Tigers.
-
Well First kudos to the designer.I like those defend to the last men type of scenario.
These are my results...At the end I was ambushing tanks with grenades lol..
Try it and post your results here:
I love this scenario. I have beefed up the Russians since I hope to persuade the AI Germans to simply run away and not do any fighting to the last man.
So far (in two runs)....the AI has played interesting games and not many Germans seem to have run away. I mean one does see them fleeing and surrendering but there seems to be a certain amount of fighting to the last man here and there.
-
Too bad that he's a bit of a German 'fanboi'. He makes a lot of sharp criticism of the conduct of Soviet operations which is sometimes deserved, sometimes undeserved. He's a man with a thesis, and he'll put his head inside an oven if he needs to.
For instance his insistence on how 'retarded' - or words to that effect - were the Soviets by operating on broad fronts in the offensive. "Broad" front offensives were meant to prevent the German counterstrokes: who were masters of the art of killing with 'backhand blows'. I doubt very much he would have heaped so much scorn on Ike - who was the mastermind behind the broad front approach, I think, in the Western front - as he did on senior Soviet generals.
It's true his analyses of anything Soviet are pretty cranky, but he is just plain full of resigned disapproval when recounting the wierdness of German behavior -- for example Model's moves to get troops out of commands he was leaving and into commands he was taking over. He spends a lot more time turning a jaded and mildly horrified if slightly amused eye on German administrative mental gymnastics than he does on the Soviets -- no doubt mostly due to his sources which are almost entirely from unpublished German documents. Years of reading that stuff must have had an odd effect on his judgements, but still I think his work is valuable and fun to read.
-
Sure glantz does a great job of describing what happened, but not so great at conveying "conditions", or the human aspect of the war.
Glantz's real problem is that he doesn't write very well. He conveys insights by cumulative impact. If you just keep reading and re-reading Glantz, eventually the conditions and human side comes through -- not that Glantz makes that easy -- but he puts in so much that sooner or later you begin to see a lot. My favorites are all the STAVKA comes to visit and where are you? Stories -- Phone calls, teletyping, Army Commanders not at their HQs etc.
-
Besides that, I find it a work which is clearly derivative from Ziemke's Stalingrad to Berlin - the structure is strikingly similar - but offering more detail by identifying accurately German units identity, locations (and their timing) and general plans and postures. In that regard is useful. Again, since he's using German documentation, very often the information he gives about names, places and timings about Soviet units and actions are quite wrong (as wrong as the German intelligence estimates). He gets right what Front was pushing in what direction, and not much more.
A lot of later work is based on Ziemke's work. -- Even Glantz (who of course footnotes his sources very well). There are at least three good things about Ziemke:
1) it is based on a close reading of German Army-level war diaries, so it is accurate about German readings of the enemy, German communications, German intentions and squabbling.
2) The basic analysis is good for somebody writing almost 50 years before the Wages of Destruction came out
3) Ziemke writes very well and has a wicked sense of dark humor that is entirely appropriate for an account based almost completely on unpublished German Manuscript/microfilmed original documents
-
Especially the over engineered German vehicles, wonder how accurate the optics of a Tiger were, after a non-penetrating hit on the turret?
Yes, it just gets worse and worse. Even if no 152mm shell hits the Tiger, apparently the Russian anti-tank rifles could do some damage to optics.
I imagine myself spending a lot of time in CMRT sheparding Tigers through minor problems so that the Su-152 can take a fair shot.
-
You gotta love the Soviets
But you have to wonder how exactly all that worked. CMRT should give some idea. I plan on Working my way down from the 152mm and so on, though you have to wonder about getting close enough to hit with such a gun and rate-of-fire.
-
After the war the Soviets exaggerated their losses to justify their actions and strengthen their claims. Now the Russians try to do the opposite, because of national pride. It is that simple.
On the other hand, maybe there are different kinds of data. The really huge losses seem to be based on demographics which in turn are based on what is probably an unreliable census (call that the 1950 loss statement of about 26 million total including civilian and non-combat losses). Next in terms of size of loss is the most recent loss-by-loss tally (call that the 2003 statement -- 13 million) -- but this seems only slightly more reliable than the unreliable census since it is really a matter of deaths over some period for anyone associated with any Soviet armed force and so includes non-combat losses.
Finally, there is the official 1993 loss tally of around 8-9 million permanent combat losses (killed, captured and too-wounded to return to combat ever). This 8-9 million figure has some advantages in relating to reality since it fits within the smaller range of census numbers and is roughly equal to non-combat losses in that scenario plus it is only about twice the Axis losses on the Eastern Front. All of which seems reasonable to me.
-
MengJiaoRedux,
If you're interested in Russian losses, am sure you'll get quite the education from this page long thread at The Dupuy Institute. The subject is Soviet losses, and there's quite the discussion, by a former Soviet military personnel record archivist, of the methodology used for sorting out losses by category, avoiding double and triple accounting, sources of loss datas and how they were cross checked. Krivosheev's declassified numbers compared with other figures and more. When the thread was put up in 2003, the now-Russian archivist said the count for privates and junior leaders had gone only through "O," working alphabetically.
http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/ubb/Forum5/HTML/000051.html
Regards,
John Kettler
Yes, so it is odd that more recent books like Absolute War and more recent Glantz books are trending toward much lower combat losses (killed, captured, too-wounded to get back to fighting). The problem may be that, if you look at the extremes (the dubious census figure of almost 200 million Russians -- Absolute War suggests that is off by 10% at least which means total Russian population losses would only be around 12 million AND you have to fit the combat losses into that (plus 4 years of stressed population growth -- say 4 million). If other (non-combat or civilian) and combat are roughly the same then that's 8 million of each which seems to be the number that recent trends point to. Meanwhile at the other extreme, from the point of view of Russian formations asking for replacements (in Glantz) -- for some reason those are nowhere near what you would expect -- implying once again, that the heaviest Russian losses were in the big encirclements of 1941 when whole units vanished.
Moreover, if you read carefully, in say Glantz and Army-level German sources, a certain number of Russian units supposedly wiped out (in German accounts), are back in action in less than a month. All of this seems to me to imply that Russian combat losses have been systematically overstated in most sources.
-
Any of David Glantz' books.
Also, a comedy classic:
http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USA-EF-Defeat/index.html
This was written from German army level war diaries mostly and is weirdly funny. It's like Glantz with a vicious sense of humor. Wonderfully written.
In defense of Glantz, I have to say, he doesn't leave anything out. Once he gets going it all goes in. I've been re-reading the big Leningrad book and, well for better or worse, it is all in there. After a while it is a hypnotic experience, with Russian losses steadily dropping (these days he guesses there were 2 million Russians captured in 1941, down quite a bit from everybody's favorite 3 million estimate of yore). Plus, he used to guess 500,000 Russian casualties for every failed Russian offensive -- which sounds good, but if you add it up that's three times as many people as were in the whole Russian Army, so maybe the more recent and much lower casualty figures that he gives in the more recent books are more correct.
Absolute War also gives lower Russian losses, noting that people were counted as missing from multiple organizations by multiple organizations and that there probably weren't that many Russians to start with.
-
Glantz, glantz and more Glantz.
You can't beat Glantz. One of the wonders of the first two books of the Stalingrad trilogy (soon to be 4 books apparently) are the phone calls from STAVKA and amazing tales of Soviet foul-ups and (eventually) triumphs.
But I really like Absolute War:
And as ultimate background, The Wages of Destruction is a must:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/aug/12/featuresreviews.guardianreview16
-
heh... I hadn't heard that JU-88 story before. Classic There were also additional problems that came about later on when Allied bombing was taking a toll.
Tooze is good on the effects of Allied bombing on industrial production. He says (as you might expect if you had not read the strange versions of history based on Speer's apologetics) the bombing caused major problems right away.
-
I agree. By 1945 those armies were getting a whole lot of nowhere. What's worse from the Japanese point of view is that it was not going to be possible to bring more than a small fraction of them home to defend the main islands. The reason being that most of their merchant fleet and navy was resting quietly on the bottom of the ocean. Make no mistake, an Allied invasion of the home islands would have been no picnic, but the outcome was more or less foreordained. One way or another, Imperial Japan was going down.
Michael
All of those armies and the Soviets had to be handled in the final negotiations, so while they might have been militarily unimportant, dealing with them and keeping out the Soviets were things that potentially gave the
Japanese a lot more leverage than the Germans had in May 1945. For that matter, didn't the German army in Italy sign a separate cease-fire? I guess so. A complete surrender actually:
-
Eh. The U.S. de facto accepted less than unconditional surrender from Japan. So it wouldn't surprise me if they would have accepted something less than unconditional surrender from Germany.
Mind you, it probably would have had to of been something pretty close -- something they could call "unconditional surrender" in front of the cameras.
Japan still had lots of barginning chips when the time came to surrender -- for example big armies in China and Indochina. It's not too surprising that they got some minor concessions (such as -- and this might be the only one -- keeping the Emperor). Japan was still occupied and totally controlled by the US for a time.
-
The war was over for Germany when winter hit in 1941 !!!! and the Germans had not at this point taken Russia - the Germans basically stalled, went on the defensive, and lost when on the offensive and Russia simply had to build up their forces with no threat of defeat and then use their forces when they felt like they were ready to push Germany out of Russia at their leisure and then go into Germany.
Well, by around Dec 1941, it must have been clear to everyone with access to relatively complete information outside of Germany, that Germany was out of good options -- they had large armies in the field and lots of captured territory, but their railroads had already been falling apart for years and access to critical resources such as oil was only going to get more and more restricted. By early 1942, no realistic Axis plan (including Japan's) envisioned anything more than holding the Allies off until they negociated. The Germans had one more throw at the oil fields in Russia --a wild and flailing grab in the summer of 1942 -- and the Japanese tried for a similar last-minute decisive battle at Midway in the same time frame. In fact, you could probably isolate the critical moment as the destruction of the German thrust at Tikvin in late November. This prevented the isolation of Leningrad and kept the Finns relatively quiet. So in a sense the War in the Pacific started just after the Germans started losing. Of course the war in the Pacific was entirely separate in many ways anyway and it had its own very odd logic.
-
I recall when Panther first went into action in '43 the AAR report sent back to the factory strongly recommended the gunner be given a second wide field of view periscope to augment his high magnification gunner's sight. Panther never got the second gunner's optics but it did get a forward-looking roof periscope for the loader (Tiger I got the same). So there apparently was a chronic issue with German tanks having not enough eyeballs looking downrange. PzIV the gunner could theoretically flip open that forward port and peer directly into the outer world for an unobstructed field of view. But I wonder how often he really did that.
Didn't Shermans have an extra wide view sighting periscope? In the turret? Which would make them much better at spotting PZIV than a PZIV in any configuration would be? At most ranges?
-
Yes, it's the distinctive chit-pull activation and command-control mechanism of Panzer Command and its descendant, the Grand Tactical System, that make those games so excellent for CM op layers, despite the limitations.
I looked over a lot of possible boardgames to use when CM gets to the Eastern Front. Very few seem to have the right scale. Many of the ones that have the right scale use generic/geomorphic maps. The only other one I really think would make a great CM companion is Streets of Stalingrad (also company level counters, 500m per hex). But I'd want to wait first and see how CMx3 improves urban fighting and/or adds features and objects that would make S-grad maps and scenarios work well. The unit density issues mentioned in earlier posts are also a major issue there.
I'll put in a vote for the Grand Tactical System, though I've only played Where Eagles Dare and Bir Hakeim.
One thing I'm interested in simulating in CM on the East Front is that moment in various accounts where the Russians send in their armor "too soon" and it gets bogged down. I find this a little hard to imagine. it seems like it would happen if there was not going to be a successful clean break through rather than a matter of timing.
-
Best tactical game ever? Castle Wolfenstein hands down.
Ok. That's funny.
Yep. The combat mission series is the best tactical game ever.
I played a board game (Panzer Grenadier) recently. Or I tried to until I found that the PzIVs had twice the armor rating and twice the friepower of a Sherman.
CMBN has cured me of a need to relive other people's Panzer fantasties.
-
Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys: didn't they include tomahawks as req'd pieces of kit? As well as starting a credo... (Someone insert it, with its frontier-speak grammar.
)I don't recall. But according to Wikipedia, Remember Baker so impressed the local indians that when they chopped him up they took his head and showed it around in triumph until the British Army made them clean up the mess and bury all of Remember Baker's parts in one place.
Which in frontier-speak might run:
Remember where you put all of Remember's members!
Though perhaps that had to be conveyed in sign language or even Frontier-French.
)
Too many difficulty levels?
in Combat Mission Red Thunder
Posted
This reminds me: a few days ago i was looking for kid shows for my kid and there was Chuck Norris: Ranger: Texas Ranger: Walker: Taledega Nights.
Chuck was shooting at a bear. at least I think that was happening in the script. On the screen there was Chuck looking at his rifle in disbelief and there was the bear looking bearish, and then Chuck and then the bear and then Chuck using the scope on his rifle and then the bear (cue bear: furious!) and then Chuck checking to see if the rifle had fired or worked or was hooked up and then the bear: still an angry bear. then some people looking relieved or amused or something.
I tried to imagine (during Peppa Pig) what happened with the Chuck Norris sequence: they had the bear footage and they had the Chuck hates-his-rifle footage and they needed to wind up the episode so they increased the drama by splicing together two totally unrelated strips of film.
Oh! And I play on Veteran Difficulty. I think I almost always have. Since, oh, 2007 or something.