MengJiaoRedux

I've been using quick more often lately, but usually as a quick adaptation to things. I play in realtime so I often give a platoon-level move command just to get things sorted out, then as things get clearer, move a squad or a tank forward in quick to a relatively sheltered point and then scout more carefully from there. So large formations are moving along steadily in move and the probing or scouting elements are moving quickly at times and then slowing down to look around.

I did the first Road to Montebourg scenario -- getting off the beach and into some trenches and bunkers under the fire of 2 MG42s. The US has MGs as well and some mortars and my impression is you have to spend more time making sure your MGs and mortars are suppressing the enemy, though US squad firepower seems okay for final assaults. Getting pinned seems to work to keep a squad from getting massacred until you can get them some support. Over all things seemed more intuitive. You can let your squads assault until they get pinned and then work on suppressing what is keeping them pinned.

the demo charges work. I vaguely recall putting the BLAST line on a tiger from behind and around a village corner and it worked fine.

Into a burning ring of writhing Johnny-Cash-like figures? On the other hand: 1) I'm not that interested in flame-throwers, particularly if they require special writhing animations. 2) I do however like all the (slightly surreal maybe?) aspects of representing warfare as extremely violent (or what is the point? you might as well play one of those games you can find on Steam where the soldiers are "toys" and the whole thing has an extra layer of "comedy") 3) I've just been re-reading Robert Graves' Good-bye to all That. He repeatedly suggests the monstrous comedy of warfare and then exhibits horrific incidents that he witnessed in WWI as grotesquely comic. 4) So in general Combat Mission (with or without flame-throwers) seems to be valuable as a representation of war as well as a simulation and a game 5) But still, I'm not that interested in flame-throwers (unless CM does WWI and we get poison gas writhing as well) Oh...After reading Gromit's post...even more serious: I have some things I can say in defense of playing war games (and in many ways CM is the most virtuous of the games I play in that it is as strictly realistic as it can be and still be playable): 1) I'm a trained historian and archaeologist -- I've seen plenty of skeletons and interpreted their lives and deaths -- pretty and not-so-pretty 2) I've always been intrigued by the technical side of war -- I was a professional analyst of it for a bit even 3) I've always been thankful not to have been in a war 4) but a bit guilty too since the world is a dangerous place and has been for a long time (and I've been very lucky) 5) and yet in some ways I've pretty innocently played war game since I was very young 6) I'm sure there is a Freudian-aggression-self-defense-sublimation dimension -- but as Freud also says "All true pleasures are infantile."

It's true. I had a whole scenario set up so that half-a-dozen tigers would do their worst against a hastily fortified village. As I pretty much expected, six-pounders and demolition charges gave the tigers a hard time, though they did inflict some serious losses on the defenders.

I was thinking the light rain would give infantry some advantages and work better than say, making the tank crews conscripts for example. The Tiger that got into the village and was immobilized was not abandoned by its crew and inflicted most of the losses that the defenders suffered before it was blown up by a demolition charge.

I made a simple, small scenario wherein six Tiger Tanks and some support attack a British army infantry company which has 4 57mm AT guns (in June so only 2 APDS per gun) and some PIATs and some demolition charges. The company is hastily entrenched (sandbags and hedgehogs only) in a village in the bocage. So tanks spotting infantry and AT guns is going to be crucial. I made the weather light rain and this seems to have had the result that Tigers cannot spot infantry or AT guns in any kind of cover. The results went fairly historically I thought: one Tiger immobilized and then blown up by demolition, two immobilized and abandoned and three support Halftacks knocked out before the AI germans withdrew. The British company had 34 killed mostly by the one Tiger that penetrated the village and was ultimately blown up.

As I mentioned above, I've played RT and only RT since the early days of SF. I recall the shift as being somewhat traumatic, but now I really have a hard time even remembering what WeGO was like. The crucial element may be that I stopped playing against other players about the same time I started playing SF. RT can definitely keep you juggling against the AI and if you get bogged down micromanaging one thing or another then things can go bad elsewhere. So I guess it is in the interests of an interesting soltaire experience more than anything else that I only play RT.

I haven't been able to go back to WeGo since Shock Force. You can save the real time game periodically and take a look at things, though of course each run is an alternative universe. I guess I like that aspect of real time as well.

Diagonal Walls and roads!!! I used that in the editor right away. totally excellent.

There's Garland's Unknown Soldiers. Garland died recently. I saw his book at a house of a friend of his. It's pretty dense and Garland didn't join the 45th division (157 regiment) until after sicily. http://unknownsoldiersmemoir.com/

I seem to remember a thread somewhere that suggested that one could restore one's faith in reality in this situation by imagining the shell was a dud.

I agree that the Eastern front isn't covered by masterpeices such as Martin Blumenson's Breakout and Pursuit, but it more than makes up for this via an excess of surreal, nightmarish horror so extreme as to approach the horribly comic. The weary, but horribly funny tone in Ziemke's Stalingrad to Berlin captures this aspect of the Eastern Front very well. I recommend Ziemke's book even though it is from the mid 1960s and has little in the way of Russian sources -- again there is a way it gets made up for in a round about way in that Ziemke's sources seem to be mostly the German daily army-level summaries.

I was happy to see the tank at all. I may have never noticed its targetting problems.

Good Question. Sicily is pretty dramatic. As usual I'm more interested in seeing what the Eastern Front will look like, though of course Alfred Schlemm's Luftwaffe infantry corps managed to get bounced out of both Nevel on the Eastern Front and various places in Italy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Schlemm

Claims of damage and kills are notoriously inaccurate in many areas. In some cases it is possible to check them very exactly (for example, claims by u-boat captains of sinkings and tonnage -- and Barkmann's claims can be checked pretty well for that matter) and several things come out: 1) There is a lot of motivation to overclaim -- a truck becomes a Sherman and a 2000 ton Lake steamer becomes a 20,000 ton troop ship 2) Every explosion in the general area of the enemy has a good chance of being interpreted as a hit 3) The worse your side is doing overall, the higher the chance that your own side's propaganda machinery is going to take the inflated claims and run with them But the mystery is why anyone wants to elaborate on and emphasize the inflated claims 70 years later. Especially when the reasons for the original inflation are understandable and the demonstration of their baselessness is not actually problematic in itself. It's as if people not only need heros (which in my book is anyone who rises to the occasion), but heros of a certain kind -- fantasy heros, who not only do what has to be done, but somehow (more or less magically) exceed the possible. So its not enough to face the enemy and hold the field, you have to annihilate them (at least in somebody's imagination) and thwart their plans (somewhat redundant already) and survive to repeat the process. Surely far too high a standard for any heros I have ever known -- who were thoughtful men still clearly marked by what had happened and not interested in any elaborations -- as indeed Barkmann himself might have been under all those layers of narrative and propaganda fo all we know.

As I remember it I got CMBB and thought it was the best game ever and then I waited eagerly for CMAK and thought it was even better. Eventually I bought the first CM, but by then I was playing Operation Flashpoint (the original..essentially ARMA 0) mostly. So CMAK: clear and fond memories of the Grant Tank. Not much else, oddly enough.

I agree. Moreover in some ways his early, very cranky, hand traced maps (as in From the Don to the Dneistr) are better than his maps transferred from microfilms of German Army reports or other sources, though I'm always amused to look at Glantzian German maps and realize that the 5th Panzer Army is better known as the 5th Tank Army. Also, in some ways, the Glantzian non-historical narrative with big undigested glimpses of Vatutin (for example) and STAVKA trying to figure out what is going on, works like some Gravity's Rainbow-cum-Kurt Vonegut-style surreal novelization of say Little Saturn. I'm currently struggling with After Stalingrad and I'm reading it more like somebody eves-dropping on STAVKA rather than somebody who expects a well-written history book.

The internet can be disturbing, but 2 out of 3 of the threads (the one here and the Axis history one) were enlightening and well-written for the most part. I have to confess (or since I've been reading Alan Brooke) I am not ashamed to confess that I did not read much of the Armchair General thing at all.

Oh dear. And that thread points at this (proportionately less productive?) thread: http://www.armchairgeneral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88250

It's a classic. I was astounded when I read it originally and I'm even more astounded now. A lovely carcass from the depths. Or to quote the poet Meng Jiao: The carcass of a thousand battles rises from the waters. And: Above the gorge, one thread of sky, In the gorge, ten thousand corded cascades. Above, the splintered shards of slanted light, Below, the pull of the restless roiling flow. Broken souls lie dotted here and there, Freezing in the gloom of centuries. At noon the sun never settles above the gorge. Hungry spittle flies where the gorge is dangerous, Trees lock their roots around rotten coffins, Rising skeletal and up-right swinging back and forth. As the frost perches, the branches of the trees moan, Soughing mournfully, far off ,yet clear. A spurned exile's stripped and scattered guts Sizzle and scald where the water boils up. Life is like a tortured, twisted thread, A road on which we balance, following a single strand. Pouring a libation of tears, to console the water sprits, They shimmer and flash an instant upon the waves. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meng_Jiao

I agree the Glantz and House Kursk was a disappointment. The really strange thing is that the prose and the maps are much better than the average Glantz that I've seen, and yet, of course, the maps and the prose in Kursk are pretty bad. Still, however painful it is to get through Glantz, in many cases he lets you get a clearer idea of what was going on.

I had such nostalgia for this thread. And here it is!

Glantz can be heavy going, but there are amazing moments. After Stalingrad has lots of gems like transcriptions of phone calls from STAVKA and reasons for refusals of Guards status. If you take Glantz and Earl Frederick Ziemke's Stalingrad to Berlin you get a summary of German army level reports (and maps from them in Glantz) and a smattering of glimpses of similar information from the Russian side. You have to use both because there's almost no Russian-based info in Ziemke and Glantz tends to provide more Russian-sourced information (mostly because it was rare up until he started to work).