MengJiaoRedux

So if that formation had not been there, then MG might have worked as planned.

There's the failure of Allied intelligence to spot and/or identify an entire SS Panzer Corps deployed in close proximity to the landing zones of the First Parachute Division. Was this due to German use of landlines rather than radio as they fell back into the Hunnish Telephone Net? Suppose that Corps had not been there, as apparently was thought in planning the operation.

I'm proud of my TAC AI's most recent exploit. I had a platoon of engineers and two Shermans facing a Panther...well they had located it and it had no LOS on them though they were very close with a gate in the bocage and some bocage between them. This was in real time so -- hoping for the best -- I just gave the engineers (a lot of them -- well the whole Platoon by squad as fast as I could) an assault order. They tossed a fantastic amount of smoke onto the Panther went right by it and wiped out a passle of German infantry. Sensing an opening, I sent a Sherman off behind the Panther. anyway, eventually in the melee (so to speak) somebody blew up the Panther, though I'm not sure when. It might have happened right after the smoke -- indeed the first engineer squad might have smoked the Panther and blown it up in less than a minute. The only order I gave was an assault order and they seem to have taken out the Panther almost instantly. Not bad for TAC AI.

Classic. I enjoyed this thread immensely. The drama. The humanity.

Because some things were like that in SF?

Did you ever play CMSF? I have a hard time imagining anyone starting out easily with CMBN. I think I would find CMBN baffling if I had not played CMSF for years before I got to it. I have lots of habits left over from CMSF -- for example I can only play in real time and I don't bring up full platoons of infantry until I get some rough idea of where the enemy are and all my support weapons are ready to fire or are firing.

I agree. "Defending the functioning" is a strange way to characterize accepting that the game can't represent everything for every situation for every secong all the time. If there were some other game where WWII battalions were represented down to the last man and jeep and this game somehow represented every event exactly second-by-second -- well that would be some kind of thermodynamic wonder and what would be the point? Would most players ever watch every second of every event from all possible view points? There is in this case very little difference between the game effect of a perfect representation (about which people would still complain) and a very close representation which sometimes presents less-than-credible representations of events.

If Moscow was decisive then Tikhven in November was more decisive since it set the stage for Moscow. See for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Stelmakh http://www.armchairgeneral.com/rkkaww2/maps/1941NW/Leningrad/Tikhvin_Nov11_Dec31_42.jpg http://lbat.ru/tihk-1.php http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirill_Meretskov

I'll go with the Battle of Britain. When it started in July, nobody was quite sure the Empire was going to fight on. Then the BoB and Mers-el-Kabir convinced everyone (Roosevelt and Hitler especially) that the British meant business and they were in for the win and had no intention of surrendering.

The US was planning on going after Germany and stalling in the Pacific. So no Pearl Harbor might have led to a faster defeat for Germany or possibly some ill-judged early adventures. As it happened the round-about runs to North Africa and the Solomons in 1942 were accidently perfect for what the US was really capable of in 1942. Both were a strain for the US, but resulted in significant defeats for the AXIS. Pearl Harbor probably helped the US by keeping the US from landing in Mainland Europe in 1942.

It's true. They bugged me a bit when I first started playing CMSF but I got used to them and now I only occasionally shut them off. In a fast-changing real time situation, they are extremely useful. I often light up a formation to see how dispersed it is and the flashing when they get hit can help too.

I tried replicating that (in reality only moderately rare) event. I thought I got reasonable results with a 3-inch US AT gun versus Panthers, but I don't recall the details. They could knock out Panthers from in front though both in the game and in reality.

Nice review, though I agree he seems a bit unfair to vanilla CMBN -- I have to admit I feel about the same since CMBN:CWF seems astoundingly good fun. I liked all his screen shots of 6-pdrs killing stuff.

I agree that running a Brit half-battalion attack (like in the Scottish Corridor scenarios) is a lot more nerve-wracking than running a similar US attack mostly because you have to position your tiny mortars and Brens very carefully. On the other hand, to me, the Brits seem more agile and dispersed and able to avoid mortar fire, but this might be because my attack sequence goes: 1) scout 2) sections up to cover observers and Brens and mortars 3) engage with Brens and mortars 4) get ready to run from enemy return mortar fire 5) and then and only then send in sections to clear out the SS I also tend to attack on a much narrower front, sending up sections and then companies over whatever cleared approaches there are. A lot of this could be due to the terrain though. You can pick your safe spots more easily in the denser bocage. In more open terrain you have to keep rolling or die.

I get the message that I need to deal with the traffic jam when I see a traffic jam. It might be interesting if there was some way to assign a priority to formations. So for example an ordinary move would just be a move, but a "priority fast column move" would force the others to clear out and cause it to arrange itself in a column order and go by road as quickly as possible.

Awesome! I've just been working mostly with Fireflies and what not, but getting the Brens and PIATs into the thick of things is something I look forward to.

I've found the path-finding to be pretty miraculous. I look at a maze of bocage and give the orders to a mass of vehicles to go 600 meters (without checking) and they generally get there eventually one way or another. I do have to clear up traffic jams, but you can use those to shift priorities by backing out all the trucks and letting the tanks through (for example).

Yes. A very posh formation. There was a squadron for Belgian aristocrats and they took at least one bridge by dismounting and attacking at night with knives. Poor jerry! Can you imagine the insult to injury of being swarmed over by a squadron of dismounted Household Cavalry waving knives and hissing in French in the dark?

Yep. the Churchill can be a shock as I've found in a couple of board games. I had to do some reality checking since it was such a killer at 400-700 meters against PZIVs. Alas, I don't have CMBN:CWF yet.

He was taped after the war and it sounds like it was an actual mistake. ie not one he made consciously. Perhaps unconsciously he just didn't have the interest to do a fairly elementry (or isotopic?) visualization of the problem before he did the calculation. Between the tapes after the war and Laura Fermi's views of his bad tennis game before the war, it sounds like he just wasn't motivated to push himself any more at all, but that he was to self-satisified to see that about himself.

It appears he simply did not think the problem through. He was taped later having a hard time believing a small bomb was even possible, so either he was the greatest actor of all time or he was just not trying very hard either because he wasn't that interested in bombs or in Nazis or both. Laura Fermi thought he was just burned out with self-satisfaction and his sadly declining tennis game was her proof. She didn't like him much anyway.

My personal favorite (and not so far-fetched) is that the Papal Coup set up by Pope Pius XII and his international spy network comes through in early 1941 as planned and Hitler and co goes to Argentina on fat pensions and the Papacy stops the war in early 1941. Very embarassing for everyone.

They had 3. One was used to test the Fatboy...I mean Fat Man.... method. I think production was running at about enough plutonium for a bomb every other month in 1945-46.

Germany had plenty of top-notch quantum physists until they forced them to Emmigrate. Even Heisenberg (the last topnotch physist left in Germany) had to be rescued from the Nazis by the intervention of Himmler's mother.