MengJiaoRedux

You would think from the role-call of Nazi quantum physicists (that's Jordan and Heisenberg and...possibly nobody else...and even to keep Heisenberg, Himmler's mother had to intervene...) that the Germans would have had a hard time assembling a good team to do the work and build an A-Bomb. Unfortunately, Heisenberg, the only person to bother to do the calculation, was off by a factor of at least 100 in his over-estimate of the amount of fissionable material required. Significantly, nobody in the German bomb program checked that calculation and they assumed they had about a thousandth of the amount of fissionable material required while in fact they only needed about 10 times what they had. Planning for using fission assumed the "bomb" would weigh about 1000 tons or so. A ship-sized bomb. Apparently that was what they were working on sort of, though not very hard.

That's the spirit! I have a selection of Macs and PCs ready to start running this.

wow. I forgot all about this, but I have a dim memory from playing the demo last summer of a US crew attacking a Marder from behind. I can't remember how it turned out, but I remember being amused at the time.

This has been my experience as well. I was in some clannish French brigade in WWII Online. Once was enough. ARMA2 was sometimes rewarding in the summer of 2010 online as long as you stayed away from Coop. At least in a non-coop game you have some chance of putting a force together like you want and going after the enemy in less than 20 minutes without being told "don't touch anything" about fifty times by your fellow coop people. So yes! I'll almost certainly get Iron Front some time or other. And even try to play online a few times.

sounds like Beevor is becoming a minor industry and not doing his own work as well as he should. I think his book on Paris after the liberation is pretty good. But maybe that's all Artemis Cooper's doing. Apparently I mean Hon. Alice Clare Antonia Opportune Cooper Beevor. Opportune? And where is the Artemis for her pen name?

I was unclear. I'm staying away from books about anything more recent than the 1980s at least if I'm looking for plausibility. In the area of WWII things have gotten much, much better lately -- Frank on things in the Pacific, Glantz on Russia, Adam Tozze on Germany for example.

To give Clancy the benefit of the doubt, I think by that time he was something of a minor industry and the books were probably more or less produced and edited by committees that may not have included Clancy very often. Good sources are always hard to find. These days I console myself by reading official histories and staying away from anything more recent than the early 1980s if I expect not to suffer from puzzling over plausibility.

I actually read some Clancy about 20 years ago. It was about Armored Cavalry in Desert Storm. The US Army was quoted as having been handicapped by its use of 1-dimensional maps. I bought extracopies of the book since I could not stop puzzling over 1-dimensional maps. They sure would be a problem. Would they even be considered maps in any sense?

Those sound good. One of my favorites is Martin Blumenson's Breakout and Pursuit -- which is available online along with much of the rest of the US Army's Official History -- most of which is a pretty reveletory read (even the Papua New Guinea campaign has some cool details): http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USA-E-Breakout/index.html

I agree. I'm just getting back into the game, but one thing I recall from my early days of play is that Panthers had to be pretty careful about not getting suppressed and hit from widely separated firing units. M10s from around 600 meters with a range of angles versus suppressed Panthers did extremely well. For suppression, infantry and MG and mortar fire seemed to work fine even against Panthers and a Panther that can't spot the M10s shooting at it can't knock them out. I'm guessing a fanatical crew might not get suppressed and so they could target even under extreme fire, while lower morale or green crews might be suppressed by Panther shots hitting other tanks near by which would ruin their targetting chances maybe.

It has the word Panzer and I guess in the wargame alphabet that's word number one. Back in the 80s we had a rule that even when "just reading the rules aloud" you had to throw a foaming Hitler-fit whenever you said Panzer. It was worst in some SPI magazine Sicily game IIRC. The Herman Goering Panzer Division had lots of special rules and you had to throw a Goering joke in with the foaming Hitler-fit. I've never really felt the same about Das German Duetsche-Armoured forces since then. I say wiping the foam off my face.

At the moment, I feel the same way. However, once I get back up to speed I'll probably get back to doing what I did when I had larger forces which was to find the spot where things seemed to be happening in an interesting way and micomanage that part. Since I usually leave the battle running (continuous mode? I've forgotten the term), this leads to several layers of immersion: in a small fight, inside a larger fight inside an environment.

I'm getting back to this game after about six months. As I recall, it is the first case of a game that convincingly represents the US Army in the Summer of 1944 PLUS you get to see every single participant at the front edge of a battle PLUS you can edit things and build your own landscape and scenarios. PLUS it looks cool and the battles can be pretty interesting. On the Challenge side: when I stopped playing in August, I was happily running scenarios with roughly 2 reinforced battalions on each side. Now I'm working on dealing with a reinforced company on each side. There's definitely a lot going on in the game and it takes a while to get comfortable (again) with just how much is happening.

I haven't played the game in six months or so (just getting back to it), but I recall that it was useful to have infantry keep tanks under fire to keep them from spotting AT guns. Conversely, of course, tanks allowed to spot at leasure seemed to spot almost anything without too much trouble eventually. But that was long ago.