Bulletpoint

Sounds great. One more thing I was thinking about was to maybe remove the German AA units. Especially the open topped ones. They end up just sitting back at the starting line, not playing any part in the battle.

First time I hear this.

Spotting in CM depends a lot on distance, and it's nearly impossible to spot enemies in buildings unless you are close, they move, or open fire. That's why I suggested you drive your tanks much closer. Even a weak German tank could get to about 180m distance from suspected infantry, and with KT's you can drive very close to the enemy held building. Then they will spot the enemy. Don't get so close that he can run out and grenade your tank of course.

We agree completely. If the attacker can bring sufficient HE AFVs, it limits the defender's options. A couple of teams in the outer layer also delays the attack, though. And sometimes they can be keyholed or set up in clever ways that limits their HE exposure. Then you can open up, cause some casualties, and then force the opponent to find and move his tanks to the spots that can direct fire on that location - meanwhile, you pull back the team and let him waste his HE on a now empty position.

Seems we lost contact with KG Peiper.. Hopefully @theforger was not discouraged by the feedback?

Since the village is not very deep/layered It seems you could move up your tanks on various sides of the village to make sure there's a LOF to each house. Not many places for your opponent to hide. Also you could move the tanks very close to individual buildings and just spot and machinegun enemy infantry that way. As long as you make sure you keep facing the front to the buildings, you should be ok.

This is very true. But if he does that, then he basically just skips one of the phases of the defence by letting the enemy close in unopposed. Once you have a foothold in the village, you then switch to house clearing tactics. There are some situations where you just can't really do anything to dislodge defenders - for example if they hide in big building complexes where there's a central building surrounded by other buildings. The only real way to clear those is to overwhelm them - surround the pocket of resistance and then rush in as many teams at the same time as you can, from as many directions as possible. Brute force and high casualties. Ideally, flamethrowers should be just the right tool for those situations, but unfortunately they don't work like that in this game - they are unable to target into a building through another one. Area firing at the building between you and the target only makes them fire into the floor.

I rarely play games with that much heavy equipment, but I would say you're on the right track. First step is to locate and dismantle the AT guns, and box in the TDs, as you have done. The next step is to dismount the grenadiers and have them approach the village carefully, supported by some of your heavy tanks. You probably don't need all four Tigers to keep the Hellcat in check, so assign a couple to the attack. So, what you do is to use HUNT to walk closer and closer to the village. This gives your opponent a choice of two equally bad options: If your opponent holds fire, you get closer, and get better and better chances of spotting him. Also, you build up your base of fire, so that when he actually does reveal their positions, he will get a lot of fire in return. If he opens fire early, you will take negligible losses because of the distance, and your Tigers will spot and destroy his firing positions. Also worth remembering is that the King Tiger is one of the few tanks that can survive even M9 bazooka rounds (frontally). It's not without risk, because the gun can get knocked out, but you can use this to break through some of those nasty situations where one bazooka team and a MG can dominate a street. I should add that all this is a very general outline, and that the actual tactics depend a lot on the geometry of the concrete situation. Often with village attacks, there are some crucial locations/buildings that are the key to taking the place.

You're aware vehicles can't ammo level, right?

Was that a swipe at me? I've done plenty of testing in this game. But my time is limited, so I asked if it had been tested before - no point in re-running a test somebody else already did.

Thanks for testing it out. What was the range?

Has that ever been tested ?

Assault is not connected to shooting. It's basically a mislabeled command for doing bounding overwatch. But yes I would like to see a grenade throwing command too.

Ok, how's this for a solution to the problem of the chore of moving up reinforcements: You get one hour to clear the first village. You're told in the briefing that reinforcements will arrive at the village after one hour. If you don't clear the village by then, the reinforcements could appear suddenly in the middle of enemies. This would represent units falling into an ambush. You then get another hour to clear a number of objectives such as bridges etc. Next round of reinforcements will arrive there. Again, if the bridge is not clear, your reinforcements are seen as ambushed. As long as you tell the player about this system in the briefing, and you mark out the zones where reinforcements will arrive, I think the player will accept this.

I just found a post more than a decade old (from 2008!) saying that a road movement feature had long been in high demand even back then: "But what about stuff like convoy driving (we still don't have a "follow me" command)?" https://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/5811/combat-missions-wrong-left-turn-uncanny-valley

Oh, I'm sure she often played Cm

Where have all the flowers gone? Long time passing...

I'm impressed you finished it. I have been working on it for many evenings now, and I don't think I can get through to Stoumont. Not only because the defences are tough, but also because I'm just burnt out mentally at this point from all the movement clicking. But yes, a very interesting and in many ways extremely well done scenario.

I believe many 'war heroes' were just lucky fools. Till their luck ran out. In a war of millions of people, there will be many who are foolhardy. We remember the luckiest ones.

StuGs are pretty tough, but Mark IVs are paper thin.. They are a bad matchup against a Sherman.

But is it reasonable for a WW2 plane spotter to call in a plane and have it hit the second floor of a certain building in a village? I sort of understand the procedure for calling in artillery with maps, coordinates, spotting rounds, etc. But airplanes?

True, but Peiper wouldn't have needed to call up every single halftrack and say "Feldwebel Schmidt, your orders are to drive forward 90 metres, then turn 45 degree to the left, then drive forward 50 metres, then turn 45 degrees to the right..." etc etc etc...

Well, in the game, you can order a plane to strafe not only a specific building out of a whole village, but actually have it hit the exact floor. And unlike artillery, there's no risk that a point strike on a building will go astray - it will appear, and it will hit what you click on. That's what I don't really understand.

Thanks, I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. Are panzergrenadiers more expensive on a pr. man basis though? I was under the impression that the game calculated price mainly based on the weapons carried, so there's a basic price for a soldier, and then a rifle adds X points, and an MG42 Y points, and a Panzerschreck 20 points? In that case, the Pz Grenadiers wouldn't be a waste of points as such.

We both know those krauts don't hold a candle to the King's Own Royal Regiment...