Duckman

Thanks!

Sound interesting. Care to describe it?

I think we can assume North Africa is somewhere in the pipeline. I very much doubt all the Italian equipment was not meant for reuse.

Do check it out. I know some people don't like Ospreys because they are brief and some of them are written by amateurs, but Zaloga is of course a solid historian and this is an equally solid piece of research. It's quite unbelievable how the Panther myth has persisted when there really seems to be no factual basis at all. Totally agree on CC (and most other games) vs CM. The spotting model helps, but even more I think it's the detailed terrain and armour modelling which creates all those situations where stuff just happens. You can see that in the engagements depicted in the book as well. It's anything but neat and tidy, and there are multiple overlapping positions creating lots of flank and rear shots. Confusion reigns and it's all over in minutes, if not seconds. One of the main participants is a veteran American gunner in a Sherman positioned behind a stone wall with a good field of fire, who starts the engagement at Freyneux by knocking out several Panthers with side shots at range. An excellent example of how tactical and individual factors, as well as luck and chance, play a bigger part than stats. It could totally happen in CM.

Unbuttoned vs buttoned is a huge issue. I know the Israelis had (still have?) almost a "cult" of fighting unbuttoned, i.e. there is a very strong culture saying a real tank commander should fight with his head outside the turret. This has caused a lot of Israeli tank commanders death or serious injury, but has paid off handsomely in victories since situational awareness is a big determinant of success. I know the Israelis have, curiously as it might seem, shown a great deal of interest in German methods like Auftragstaktik but I don't know if the modelled themselves on the Germans when it comes to this as well. It should be apparent to any combat experienced tanker force not hidebound by doctrine anyway. Another big spotting factor is of course radio, again giving the early war Germans (and perhaps the late war Western Allies with their excellent and plentiful radios, including among the infantry) an advantage. External telephones for talking to the infantry were not primarily there for fighting tanks, but I'm sure they helped out in the odd engagement.

Interesting test. The Panther did indeed have very good battlefield mobility, even if it paid a maintenance price for those overlapping wheels. The broad Ostketten tracks copied from the T-34 also helped. I guess the penalty there would be road speed, which seems bearable. The end result of all these Swedish tests was buying lots and lots of Centurions.

Zaloga covers that very well in Panther vs Sherman, one of the better Ospreys. US Army analysis of battle reports concluded that by far the biggest success factor was spotting and shooting first, which given the status of WWII technology gave a huge advantage to the defender. This was far more imporant than any "Panther factor" which didn't seem to exist at all in the actions studied. It also helps explain why the Germans were so succesful early in the war when they usually had a "spotting advantage" through better training, ergonomics ,and crew size. Of course once the Sherman arrives the odds there are even. I think the game models this well. Put your tanks and other heavy weapons in decent positions where they have a chance to spot and engage first and you get results. This is very different from some mora abstract, stat-driven games.

1. France 1940 2. Arab-Israeli wars. 3. Stalingrad. 4. Barbarossa. 5. Desert WWII. 6. 1980s cold war.

Probably the best movie I've seen on the SS is Conspiracy about the Wannsee conference. It shows them (and the other participants) as evil but as real people with real motivations, kind of. Branagh is surprisingly good as Heydrich. The lack of German perspective movies is understandable but still kind of odd given the size of the market and the huge popularity of German soldier memoirs in recent years. Some of them are probably unfilmable for various reasons but a book like Koschorrek's Blood Red Snow or Knoke's I Flew for the Fuhrer could work in the right hands. There's also the controversial and very.....literary The Forgotten Soldier of course which is bound to attract a director someday. Peckinpah showed already in the 70s what a talented and ballsy director can do with harsh, unforgiving material like that. As for this one, some of the scenes look pretty good and hopefully it's not all revisionist claptrap. The trailer gives a so-so vibe but is hardly conclusive.

For a systematic comparison of the US and German armies see Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance, 1939-1945 by Martin Van Creveld. It's been a while since I read it, but the basic conclusions are that there were major problems with US training and replacement policies which hampered effectiveness and contributed to things like combat fatigue. The Germans on the other hand managed to keep a very good, experience-based peacetime training program running for most of the war even of cracks started showing eventually. German replacement policies were also much better thought out. Towards the end of the war the US had fixed a lot of the problems (even if some of them reappeared in Vietnam) while the Germans were, understandably, cracking under the strain and also from increased political and bureacratic meddling. For most of the war however the German system ran remarkably smoothly and contributed significantly to the much-vaunted German small unit effectiveness.

While the comparison is tempting I don't think it quite holds up. The 1914 BEF was a small, veteran police force. The midwar Reichswehr was a cadre force intended to become the nucleus of much bigger army once the restrictions of Versailles were lifted. Each man was trained to assume a position two ranks higher than his actual one to facilitate this. So once Hitler came to power and conscription (which had deep cultural and political roots in Germany and France, unlike in the US and UK) was reintroduced expansion was easier than it seemed thanks to the previous work of von Seeckt and others. The US and UK, on the other hand, introduced conscription much later and had to start from very small prewar army nucleuses (next to microscopic in the US's case) which meant there were major bottlenecks. The French and Soviets had huge peacetime armies of course, but those were mostly destroyed in 1940-41 leaving the Germans with by far the biggest trained force which gave them much-needed depth in the years to come. As for other factors, the Germans themselves coined the term Materialschlacht already in WWI and it certainly holds for WWII as well. Germany's chance for victory in both wars was a quick knockout punch, something recognized by German military planners already in the 1800s, and once that chance passed with the failure of Barbarossa (or the Schlieffen plan in 1914) they were more or less out of options. It should be said however that there weren't a lot of other attractive strategic options once they chose war, and they did come close to winning with the fall of France, If a few political chips had fallen the other way in 1940 or 1941 they might have pulled it off.

Even late in the war a lot of captured German soldiers were, to Allied dismay, found to have quite a lot of experience and even peacetime training. (This actually goes for both world wars.) The Wehrmacht also had a sensible replacement policy (unit replacements, as opposed to the infamous American individual replacements) and managed to keep units fairly cohesive and training standards fairly high until late in the war. The Western Allies, meanwhile, started from much smaller peacetime armies and were playing catchup. In the air and on sea it was very different, and the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine entered their death spirals (high losses leading to reduced training, leading to even higher losses, etc) much sooner than the Heer.

In aircraft there were notable problems with both finishing and quality, particularly engines, towards the end of the war. Of course an aircraft is more of a precision instrument than a tank, but it's a good guess it would happen there as well. There were alsodowngrades to save materials and simplify production which sometimes resulted in what could be termed "monkey models", e.g. the last Panzer IV version lost its hydraulic turret traverse and went back to hand cranking! The funny thing about German production is that the huge investments in production were coming online during the second half of the war, when materials and skills shortages really started to bite.

Here's the source: However, in the summer of 1944, the problem of the poor AP performance disappeared. The performance of the D-25T gun of the JS-2 against the German tanks improved dramatically. The reports from the front described cases where the BR-471 APHE round 122 mm projectile fired from 2500 metres ricocheted off the front armour of a Panther leaving huge holes and cracks in it. This was explained by an interesting change of circumstances in the Summer of 1944. The Germans experienced a shortage of manganese and had to switch to using high-carbon steel alloyed with nickel, which made armour very brittle, especially at the seam welds. The first encounters of JS-2 tanks with the Germans also showed that the front protection of its hull was not impenetrable. From http://english.battlefield.ru/tanks/10-heavy-tanks/19-js-2.html As you can see it happened already in mid 44, so it would very much be a factor at the Bulge and espcially since most of the German armour was new production.

Whoa, that really is a huge boost from the sabot! As for late war German armour plate, it really was appallingly bad in some cases. I think the Soviets tested some Panthers and were amazed.

As for postwar developments, once squad members get automatic (or even semiautomatic) weapons the firepower equation changes a bit with less need for an ultra-high ROF MG. The WWII German squads built around the MG 34/42 had a four-man MG element with three designated ammo bearers, and this obviously becomes a less attractive tradeoff if every squad member can carry an automatic weapon.

That's pretty much it. The other major belt fed LMG was the M1919, which is 2,5 kg heavier and has a tripod in most versions. As for the tactical impact of LMGs, already at the Somme German after action reports mention how the Lewis gun was a pest because even a small group with one could set themselves up in a house or trench and turn it into a strongpoint in no time. Standard MGs like the Vickers or Maxim were too heavy and bulky to accompany the first waves. With the MG 34/42 you get that on steroids: it's compact enough to sneak in anywhere, has a very short setup and redeploy time with the bipod, and endurance with the belt feeding.

Wiki has a pretty good answer: The MG 42's high rate of fire resulted from analysis concluding that since a soldier typically only has a short period of time to shoot at an enemy soldier, and muzzle rise quickly throws off initial aim, it was imperative to fire the highest number of bullets possible in the shortest time to increase the likelihood of a hit before the recoil overcame the inertia of the gun and pushed the aiming point upwards. The disadvantage was that the weapon consumed exorbitant amounts of ammunition and quickly overheated its barrel, making sustained fire problematic. Thus, while individual bursts left the weapon as highly concentrated fire at 1,200 rounds per minute, the Handbook of the German Army(1940) forbade the firing of more than 250 rounds in a single burst and indicated a sustained rate of no more than 300–350 rounds per minute to minimize barrel wear and overheating, although the excellent quick-change barrel design helped a great deal. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MG_42 This seems to explain why they kept increasing ROF, from about 600 RPM in its MG 30 ancestor to 1200 for the MG 42. The idea was burst fire, and I assume this was taught to gunners although actual practice might differ of course. I also remember something about the US fiddling with the idea of copying the MG 34/42, but this came to nothing (which was actually better than the severly botched Hispano 20 mm copy) and larger numbers of 30 Cals were fielded instead, somw with bipods. Experienced units also acquired even more automatic weapons informally..

True, but looking at films and photographs (which have their own problems as source material, of course) the only times I've seen spacing according to regulation is when troops are near the start line or on some kind of approach march. Of couse that may be due to various reasons, but you do get the impression they tended to bunch up more. E.g. these: look quite typical of the photos I've seen of troops in position.

Frontages were quite small in WWII. There's a list here: http://balagan.info/infantry-unit-frontages-during-ww2 As you can see company frontages were as little as 275 m in attack, and I assume that's for full sized units.

It will be a while until infantry is modelled on par with tanks in this and other games. Having said that, the entire game is a bit "compressed" meaning things happen at a higher than ultrarealistic speed for gaming purposes. The already cited "pushing too hard" effect also adds to this. What I can see perhaps helping infantry is if spotting becomes even more decentralized (final death of the Borg) and microterrain improved further. But I think infantry are already more survivable than in the bad old days of blatant Borg spotting when tanks would simply spot and mow them down from across the map (anyone else remember Close Combat?). Other things that I sense may be issues, but which go beyond my knowledge of the game engine, are perhaps upping the protection of hard cover (stone buildings, log bunkers, even foxholes) a bit more and having a look at the effectiveness and speed of artillery. But those are hunches more than anything. Arty modelling in the game is already miles ahead of the competition and fosters good habits, unlike so many other games. But again foxholes, especially with overhead cover, is something that could perhaps be looked into in that context.

Thanks for the reply. The late-war Italian module sounds really cool and yup, definitely time for an update. :-)

Yes, it's a really annoying question but someone had to ask it. I vaguely remember a road map somewhere but I can't find it, and I have equally hazy memories of an east front battle pack? Is there any more info, or any info at all?

I think games in general underestimate the effects of crawling. It is very tiresome, and even more so with gear and weapons over uneven terrain. So kudos to CM on that issue. While on the subject, I think games also tend to underestimate the effect of mud and especially for leg infantry. Simply crossing a muddy field with gear is tiring and very, very slow.

The most underdeveloped area of the game by far is fortifications. They don't mesh well with the terrain and don't look appealing. Given that they were such a major part of defensive tactics this is a shame. There has to be a better way to both simulate and represent foxholes, bunkers, and everything in between. I'm sure there are good technical reasons for the above, but right now it stands out like a sore thumb in a game that is otherwise so advanced both graphically and simulationwise. Fortified buildings would be nice too, if we're in wishlist mode.