Freyberg
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Posts posted by Freyberg
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9 hours ago, chuckdyke said:
Nobody is a murderer unless convicted in a court of law. That people get killed is unfortunately incidental in war. But here it is a hobby where we simulate warfare.
I think the topic of the morality of war is one I could only discuss with someone reasonably conversant with military history, face to face, while drunk...
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3 minutes ago, Almac said:
I always assumed, maybe wrong, that the soviets had swarming tactics and that is how their formations were meant to be played in combat mission.
I love playing the Soviets - and that's how I play them.
Having said that, 'swarming' to me is very difference from the earlier human wave assault. I think of it more like WWI Stormtrooper tactics - pushing forward relentlessly, en masse, to get up close, but through the weak points and the gaps, where possible, or overwhelming more isolated strongpoints to make a gap.
It's fun, it's aggressive, it's sometimes costly - it's not dissimilar from Blitzkrieg.
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9 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:
Funny how the British justification to destroy the town of Cleves sounds a lot like the German justification for bombing Guernica
I get your point, but I wasn't trying to participate in a moral debate - I just meant to suggest that 'nuking the whole place from orbit' (so to speak) was in fact a part of British urban warfare doctrine.
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"Then they came to me and they said, 'Do you want the town of Cleves taken out?' "
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10 hours ago, chuckdyke said:
But they had the Churchill infantry tank a bunker on tracks. They should have put in their trucks I should say lorries a bucket load of stens for urban combat. The Lee-Enfield had an adaptor for their hand grenades, so they could lob a grenade inside a building from normal hand grenade range.
The other thing with the British is that their style of war was 'slow and careful and don't get too many men killed'. The standard infantry company is not really intended for aggressive close assault.
Having said that, they have some very varied formations with different capabilities, some of them quite useful in urban settings - every scout section of 9 men has 3 Bren guns and 3 Thompsons; every MG Company section of 9 men has 3 Thompsons; and the Airborne sections have so many SMGs it's actually annoying.
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You're right that the British infantry squad is not designed for urban warfare - their bolt action rifles are OK at a distance, but they are at a distinct disadvantage in many settings. All the Commonwealth nations have HMG companies or similar - which are a must to support the infantry, whatever the setting.
In the late war, the Brits have Crocodiles and Wasps, which a deliciously useful in urban combat.
The Canadians have one of the best urban warfare vehicles - the little Fox armoured car, which has a .50 cal MG in a closed turret, which counters the main problem all other .50 cal armed vehicles have - the vulnerability of the gunner.
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Well, I'm impressed.
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31 minutes ago, Bufo said:
I have to admit I am waiting on Cold War far more than this module, but I am always open to killing some Wehraboos
Cold War sounds really great, but RT was my number one game for so long. I love playing the glorious Soviets - this module will breath fresh life into it bigly.
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On 3/12/2021 at 12:49 AM, Artkin said:
I never play CW because CMBN is so old....
You're not playing Rome to Victory....??!!
(rolls eyes vigorously)
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I always assumed flamethrowers would cause friendly fire - they should.
The rule against friendly fire with small arms is because the player lacks the fine control you would have in real life not to shoot your own men with a handheld firearm. For that reason, casualties to ricochets also make sense.
But a flamethrower is an imprecise, indiscriminate weapon, if you don't order your men to stand back when it's being fired, you should be court-martialed...
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That looks like Accelerated Assault - good Soviet doctrine
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On 3/9/2021 at 2:55 PM, chuckdyke said:
My pacifist inclined sister called the M113 a tank when she saw one. Your buddy is among good company.
I once saw an M113 trundling down the Eastern Freeway in Melbourne, and I remarked to my then wife, "check it out - there's a tank on the road."
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8 hours ago, chuckdyke said:
On Engine 4 in Battle for Normandy or Final Blitzkrieg units without a radio can't call in arty.
In CMFI, which is still the title I'm playing all the time at the moment, HQ units without radios can call in artillery.
I never bother to use them though, so I can't tell you how long it will take. I have found spotting duration and strike accuracy vary significantly between FOs and other HQ units, although that is not fully reflected in the initial call time.
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8 minutes ago, Bufo said:
In this case they have a rather fast runner since it only takes 1 min longer (takes 6 for them) to call than an FO with a radio (who can call it in 5)
I'd be interested in how long the spotting phase takes.
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50 minutes ago, Bufo said:
You can see on the picture that he doesn't have comms to the company HQ because of the lack of communication tools. How is this possible?
There's always runners and so on - a fire mission in these circumstances is going to take a while...
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8 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:
...Communist Parties were seen as legitimate political movements in Western Europe. In the 60's US politics were criticized and the conscription was loathed at least in Amsterdam. Sentiments were much the same in Eastern Europe I learned here. They didn't like the USSR. My scenario would be an Urban Vietnam in Europe and supported by special forces.
There were some very militant communists in Germany and Europe in the 1970s - a module including European Communist insurgents would be seriously quite interesting.
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On 3/5/2021 at 11:46 AM, Schrullenhaft said:
Modules that would probably be unlikely to be made, but would be cool if they did show up:
5. France
Yeah, I don't imagine France will be a module, but as a Francophile, I would love to see it
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17 hours ago, chuckdyke said:
I just wonder why in CM the indirect fire assets are immune.
CMBB (and the other v.1 titles) had a lot more models and were great games for the time, but the models, game mechanics and TOEs were much much simpler - I prefer the current game by far.
It would still be possible to set up a similar scenario with some of the field guns the game does model - like the German infantry guns... -
On 3/2/2021 at 4:32 AM, chuckdyke said:
It was a clever idea; you get to an alternative fire position quickly. To reverse for the final set up is not much of a problem.
I've found Archers a bit fiddly to use in-game, but they're certainly not an inferior AFV.
Anything with a 17pdr is best used with maximum stealth, since nearly every Allied vehicle is vulnerable to any German tank from PzIV upward; and since 17pdrs are usually hunting Tigers or Panthers, the trick is to be just outside the edge of LOS, stationary, waiting for a glimpse, which hopefully is enough for a single kill-shot.
Archers can do this as well as Fireflies and Achilles, they're just take a little more practice, with the whole reversing thing...
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On 3/1/2021 at 1:32 AM, chuckdyke said:
I would like to see scenarios in which artillery can be attacked.
There was a fun scenario in CMBB based on the idea of Soviet tanks attacking a battery of howitzers.
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21 minutes ago, MikeyD said:
And BFC politely refuses. I may be overstating his opinion but I believe Steve's policy from the start was basically 'If NBC/WMD then no Cold War'. Not including it was (as near as I can tell) a stipulation in agreeing to move forward with the project.
OK - well that's about as clear as you can get
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3 hours ago, MikeyD said:
I saw an article just last week recounting how close the US got to inadvertently initiating a nuclear exchange in 1984.
This reminds me of a discussion a while back on the merits of We-too vs RT play, and (sorry I didn't look it up), I think it was you MikeyD who pointed out there are two different ways of playing Combat Mission, which can sort of be exaggerated to 'chess with tanks', and 're-living the gritty horror'.
Of course most of us are somewhere between, and I understand that the designers of this particular title may lean toward the 'chess with tanks' part of the spectrum and would prefer the title lean that way also, but there are a lot of players (myself included) who lean somewhat towards the 'living the horror' side. I didn't experience WWII, but older relatives did, and I want both to understand the large scale historical, technological, tactical and other factors, and also to gain a feeling for things like the chaos of house-to-house fighting, storming fortified positions through mud and pouring rain, and so on.
Combat Mission for me is both fun and deeply educational. I was a child in period CMCW; I don't have military experience of that period - but it was nevertheless a frightening reality. It's educational (and fun) to test the capabilities of each side's various pawns, queens and rooks; but it's also meaningful and educational (and, dammit, it would exciting and fun), if the game were to allow players to understand the horror that might have been.
Forget reason and strategy; no plan survives contact; nuclear or chemical warfare could very easily have happened. This customer politely requests BF consider incorporating some aspect of that
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It would be fun to have semi-post-apocalyptic landscape option - defoliated trees, heavy overcast and so on - just for the really adolescent players like me
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As sandboxes go, I would actually really enjoy this period.
I would like to see it include the Wehrmacht though - I'm not terribly interested in silly things like the Maus, but the Germans had some interesting and more sensible designs on the drawing board at that time too.
It would be fascinating to see things like the T44, early Centurion, E-series panzers and so on - but I'd buy any game Battlefront might make...
2 MG Halftrack!
in Combat Mission - General Discussion
Posted
Shoot from further away...