Duckman
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Posts posted by Duckman
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On 2/5/2024 at 2:58 PM, Artkin said:
Don't be fooled! The topography of the southern part of the bulge was absolutely insane. Especially in II SS Panzerkorps' sector.
I agree that Kursk is underrated for variety. The bulge was almost 200 kms across and had everything from the pancake steppe above to rolling hills and a mini Stalingrad at Ponyri.
Personally I prefer smaller scenarios but those can be set anywhere. Not every action at Kursk was a battalion sized fight of course.
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It's Kursk.
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20 hours ago, Thewood1 said:
The comments about terrain are way over generalized as is the concept of battles in the Pacific and Korea. Korea is mostly hilly open terrain, with a few areas of dense forests. Korea was all about hills, rivers, and urban fighting. The Pacific as a combat theater had a lot of non-jungle combat. In fact, some of the largest US Army urban battles of WW2 were fought in more urban environments around Manila. A large number of the island battles for the USMC were not in densely forested jungles. The British fought large battles in Burma in urban and built up areas. The Hurtgen forest and the Ardennes can be handled in CM so I would imagine it could handle jungles in a similar more abstracted fashion.
If we could just combine units from Downfall with Red Thunder, you could do the majority of Korean battles today.
All true, but we all know which the real crowd pleasers are when it comes to Pacific battles and it's not Burma, China, or even the Philippines.
As for Korea it's an excellent fit just like you say, as are the early Arab-Israeli Wars.
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I've played a lot of flight sims, RTS games, and some paper wargames but the big one that eventually led to CM was Close Combat.
I was a superfan and played all the old versions. CM is a lot like the CC you dreamed about back then, even if can't totally match it for simple charm. Of course both have some distorted ASL lineage.
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Interesting discussion. The armies of 1914 have gotten too much stick, for reasons that have been mentioned in the thread. Pre-WWI armies did understand firepower and had by and large drawn the correct lessons from previous wars, most of all the Russo-Japanese War which was the real dress rehearsal for WWI (including the naval part).
There were some hard to solve problems though:
- Artillery firepower was well understood but supporting the advance was not. There was too much reliance on the infantry doing it alone.
- The armies of 1914 dwarfed all previous ones and were largely composed of reservists. Tactics suffered and prewar obeservers commented on clumsy tactics during maneuvers. This was probably the source of a lot of the mindless rushes.
One major problem was that the lessons of recent wars were mixed. In Manchuria the Japanese attacks had succeeded in the end despite horrific losses, which led to the not unreasonable conclusion that offensive tactics won battles and wars if you simply had the guts. However unlike may other theorists who were proven wrong (remember the many deaths of the tank?) the assumptions of the pre-WWI generals were put to the most brutal test of all.
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Very interesting discussion. I always thought the T-72 was the main Soviet tank but it seems I was wrong.
Between Two Fahrbahns is my favourite scenario, prolly because I'm a defensive player.
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I have the 1.0 CMBN + CW bundle. It worked fine when I first used the Upgrade 4 code to redeem CMBN and then the bundle (1.0) code to redeem CW.
Thanks for finally getting the game on Steam!
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7 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
As it so happens, the costs of doing a Barbarossa game would exceed the cost of any other WW2 game I can think of. Why? Because the biggest single expense is on the modeling of vehicles and forces. There's very little in what we've done so far that would be applicable to Barbarossa. For less effort we could make a mid-late North Africa game, which of course would make some people happy and bum others out. Especially those who would rather see Finns and Hungarians fighting on the Eastern Front, which is something even easier to do.
Interesting about the costs, I've heard various opinions over the years.
How would the Finns and Hungarians be easy? Because they have so little equipment?
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3 minutes ago, Pete Wenman said:
The one bit of kit that would have given us a chance to beat the Soviets - tea anyone ?
Ah, I see it now (at 2:04 in Platoon Tactics Pt 2). Clever! I knew the tanks had them but of course you need one for the squaddies too.
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18 hours ago, Combatintman said:
And more ... the legendary BV on the inside of the door of the FV432 plus the extremely rare FV-432 with the Rarden 30mm turret.
I was wondering about that one, it looked like a Warrior but too early of course. What's the BV?
12 hours ago, domfluff said:What we should see is the full CVR(T) lineup, which is pretty exciting.
Those are really cool. As for burning wrecks, recon assets tend to do poorly in games but their tiny size should help them. I think they show up as fake Soviets here (along with more moustaches):
The tone is a bit darker, with one squad tragically lost as their APC gets stuck on a fallen tree.
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Chieftains, moustaches, squaddies with SLRs… it’s all there:
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Mistake, pls delete.
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Yesssss! My dream was confronting the Red Horde with a troop of Chieftains, partly because they're cool but also because they fit my lethargic playing style. And now it's coming true!
The Canadians are a nice bonus. I assume they're bringing their Centurions and their own accent(s) for the speech pack.
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7 minutes ago, BornGinger said:
There have been conflicts on other places than Asia after the end of WW2.
Sure, but I don't see the Ogaden or Yugoslav Wars selling many copies even if both had T-34s.
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Arab-Israeli Wars really is the missing piece between the WWII and modern game series and would fit the engine perfectly. Hope to see it some day.
Other Cold War conflicts are so-so fits (Korea), too one-sided (Desert Storm), or way too obscure (Indo-Pakistani Wars).
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19 hours ago, Combatintman said:
Which army-sized research team is going to do the TO&E research for that lot for every single year spanning the game time span? One of the dramas with the CMFI expansions was the additional TO&Es for a two-year time frame for a theatre and forces that is a lot better documented than the Cold War period.
I think this is where you use all the community volunteers who can't program, paint, or do anything else useful but who have some skillz in the useless facts area. I count myself among those.
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The Arab-Israeli Wars are a perfect fit for the game system but I don't think the developers are interested. Same goes for the Indo-Pakistani Wars which actually saw a lot of tank combat.
As for earlier wars, tactical early and mid WWI is notoriously difficult to simulate but anything from 1918 onwards should work fine.
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The Panther gets a lot of stick but not putting extra armour on it (apparently at Hitler's request) would have fixed a lot of the mechanical issues. It was also, unlike the Tiger I, well suited for mass production. The Tiger I was the most expensive German tank, a real luxury item that nonetheless did get some results on the battlefield. However with so few produced I doubt they were a huge drag. The Tiger II was not a great project but at least suited for mass production (basically a bigger Panther).
As others have noted there is a good case that the Germans should simply have stuck with the Panzer IV and StuG. That would probably have worked, but the bigger issue was manufacturing. Only one German tank factory - Nibelungenwerk in Austria, one of Göring's megaprojects - had a proper assembly line. The materials shortage also started to bite fairly early with e.g. lower quality steel having a substantial effect on actual performance.
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16 hours ago, domfluff said:
I think "the BMP was a failure" is a tricky sentence to claim, since it's never been used in the context for which it was intended (i.e., rolling into West Germany with the Soviet Army).
Iraqi BMPs were hugely outclassed by Desert Storm, certainly, and they were (among many other things) the wrong tool and doctrine to fight in Afghanistan with. 1973 I'm less clear on, but clearly is not the Soviet army, and by most accounts none of the operators were employing it as per Soviet doctrine, which makes it a hard thing to judge.At least the Syrians seems to have pretty much followed texbook Soviet tactics in 1973, which was also the combat debut of the BMP. It ended badly but as always sources are frustratingly limited when it comes to the Arab side.
Howewer there does seem to be a consensus that fighting from inside the vechicle wasn't much use since it was too cramped and the gun and armour were too weak, with the last two complaints perhaps suggesting unsuitable tactics (Soviet, Syrian, or both). Average engagement distances on the Golan may have been longer than what was expected ion Europe but I haven't seen any data.
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3 hours ago, domfluff said:
Doctrinally through, there seems to have been significant debate on correct usage of infantry transport over the years, and that doesn't look like it's being resolved any time soon. How much you fight whilst mounted, when you dismount, and what the fundamental purpose of the vehicle is has been debated up and down the spectrum. [...]
Certainly the field manuals tend to talk about various options - dismounting before the objective, on the objective or past the objective - in the latter case, the attacking force would attack on and through, and then isolate and screen the objective, allowing the infantry to clear up. Some of the techniques discussed, especially the US Cold War stuff around the M113 formations seem... ambitious, looking at them with a CM lens.There certainly was a doctrinal difference, with the West Germans and Soviets going for vehicles the infantry could (at least theoretically) fight from while the US chose the battlefield taxi route with the M113. The BMP seems to have largely failed in the fighting role in the Arab-Israeli Wars while the M113 ironically turned into a fighting vehicle with the ACAV variant in Vietnam. However the very different circumstances prevent a direct comparison.
As for various tactical options, that would also depend on the terrain. In open terrain tanks will lead, when assaulting a built up area the infantry will dismount and lead, etc.
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Great! I'm getting this, and looking forward to a WWII super bundle as well some day.
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Very happy to see CM Cold War on Steam.
Now let's do the WWII titles! :-)
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I'm guessing this will be followed by a couple of Nato modules just like the other modern games. Leo 1, Chieftain etc should be good.
After that who knows? Personally I hope the inclusion of the M60, M48 and T-55 point the way towards the 1965-75 period and the Arab-Israeli, and perhaps even Indo-Pakistani, wars. And there's WWII crossover potential with the Super Sherman!
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The Osprey book Osprey World War II Infantry Tactics - Company and Battalion by renowned expert Stephen Bull has some info on frontages:
QuoteAccording to the textbook a [US infantry] battalion was capable of delivering "a powerful attack" on a frontage of 500 to 1,000 yards. [...]
Under normal visibility phase lines were commonly 1,000 to 2,000 yards apart. Objectives could be expressed in terms of specific locations, or directions, and were commonly allotted to individual companies.
Of course those are ideal circumstances with a full strength unit, and some situations (notably urban combat) would be much denser.
From what I can find even late WWII attack frontages were significantly smaller, demonstrating the increase in firepower and support weapons between the wars. Cold war frontages were much wider but that's hardly a 1:1 comparison given mechanization.
The year to come - 2024 (Part 2)
in Combat Mission - General Discussion
Posted
It's not available on the App Store any more. It was actually a nice little game, only two scenarios but much better than other similar mobile offerings.