domfluff

I definitely think that shelling the woods with the assault guns at least could have been worth doing, and perhaps firing with the t34's on the move. The problem with a command push like this is that if you guess wrong, you can end up in a fairly sticky situation pretty quickly. I'm sure that you didn't need to take as many casualties as you did. Even in a command push strategy, recon is important - what you have here as team meatshield could have been a combination of armoured cars and scouts, with some on map mgs and mortars. The plan and line of attack would be the same, but with the intention of spotting any enemy antitank guns (which are the major threat), and suppressing or taking them out with mortar fire, assault gun he, or whatever. This is the role of reconnaissance in this kind of attack - probing, finding and engaging the main threats to the advance. Preplanned barrages are typically soviet for good reason, but they're often a gamble. Would it have made more sense to bombard the woods you weren't going through? Possibly. It might have made sense to target both, of course. When I'm attacking with tank riders, they're usually in the second wave. The first platoon of armour breaches the line and suppresses (sometimes under cover from the second platoon) allowing the second platoon to move, and drop off infantry to finish things up. Ideally, you're never shooting or being shot at from the back of a tank, any more than you want to be from any other kind of fighting vehicle.

Bonus points to the first person on the next stream who greets ChrisND with "Welcome back, commander"

It has some pretty severe limitations, and it's probably not going to get updated in future (CMSF might). In common with CMSF and even CMBN, the map design is worse than what comes later. Having said that. I enjoy it. It's different from everything else CM, and it's cheap, but it's probably the worst of all of them. I feel like it's worth it, but I could understand why someone would not agree.

Oh, quite right. When I have used aircraft in CMRT, they've mostly been the cheapest Stuka "strafe" option, which are very reasonable for the effect you get.

Randomisation I believe. You've very limited control over your air support in Red Thunder, so you're hoping for something useful to come of it. I think that tactically it's most useful for giving your opponent something to worry about, and perhaps to keep their heads down, degrading their movement. It's never something to rely on, and clearly it can backfire horribly.

Hello Hapless, came across your channel recently. What I really like about your presentation over others I've found on youtube are that the videos are short and you go into your planning in some detail. A lot of CM youtube videos focus on the "action" scenes, or are great and in-depth, but several hours long. For me at least, the point of a decent wargame is your plan, it's execution, and what happens when it collides with someone else's plan and everything goes to hell.

For finding opponents, The Blitz and The Few Good Men are two of the more popular forums - to give you an idea, the Drums of War Tournament currently running on The Few Good Men has seventy players, so there are plenty of people around. Multiplayer is well worth getting in to, but CM is very unforgiving. I'm sure that players would be interested in early war scenarios (I would), but I also imagine there are significant financial concerns. If I had to speculate, I would guess that the rough model would be to iterate backwards. This would allow for maximum reuse of assets between titles, so that each game can improve on the last. CMFI already has most of the units that would be required for Tunisia 1943, for example, but earlier in Africa would require significantly more vehicles, formations, etc. Jumping straight to 1940 or 1939 would be a much larger leap.

I think there's an argument that CMFI is the strongest of all of the CM games. Since it's mostly a little earlier, it avoids the supertank problem that CMBN has, and the environments make a huge change from the geometric puzzles of the bocage. CMRT also avoids the dominance of the big cats, by all sides having the ability to kill each other fairly equally. I've only recently started getting excited about CMRT and really diving into it deeply.

"Hey, hey Alexei... whatcha thinking about?""Oh, you know, war and stuff."

Mines can be spotted by infantry, and will get bonuses if they are Engineers or moving slowly. There's still every chance that they won't spot them though. The action spot contains a definite number of mines, so HE fire (or enough bodies) can empty the minefield, with time. Marking mines is not removing them - conceptually it's the engineers plotting a safe path, and laying tape or whatever to mark a corridor. Therefore, a normal "move" command is probably the best bet for moving through mines, but even then there is a chance of failure. I don't think different vehicle speeds matter, and I'm not sure they should either. Barbed wire "slowing" infantry I think actually means forcing them to go around. I believe you can destroy them with HE fire (you can destroy most things with enough HE fire), so that should be an option. Tanks will take track damage just as they will with running over walls - so it's possible to immobilise them, but you're usually okay.

I don't know if the morale penalties for splitting squads carry backwards from CMRT (and therefore CMx3), but split teams seem to be more fragile? Regardless, it's still a great idea, since the purpose of the element is frequently one weapon (e.g., the LMG), so adding more rifles to a Bren gun doesn't make the Bren gun any stronger. Splitting into teams also allows for finer control in terms of directed fire ("you guys shoot here, you guys shoot *here*"), and fewer casualties in the event of everything exploding.

Yeah, but I want to hear what *he* says is happening,

Sweet.

Schwerpunkt, surely?

The me262 wouldn't be impossible for the time period, but I don't think it had any success in ground attack. Also, it's not in the manual...

Since it pops in and out at different distances (since it's presumably a LOD bug, rather than strictly a model bug), it's not even going to be obvious all the time with the model that seems to have the problem.

Yup, looks like a LOD bug to me

Assuming you're talking about the Drums of War Tournament, I has thought these were just concealed by the long grass... I'll have a look though.

Unsure of the doctrine here, but inferring from the game: US Glider infantry are mostly the same as their leg infantry. The paratroopers are also pretty similar in practice, replacing the BAR with the M1919. Since the BAR isn't a light machine gun in any real sense (it's fine when adding to the volume of small arms fire, but it can't operate by itself at all), this means that the distinctions between the assault and support teams should be more pronounced. Fallschirmjager (using Normandy as the base here, since a lot of different formations would be called "Fallschirmjager") have larger squads than the usual German formations, and therefore can split into three groups. Two of these groups are centered around MG42's and the third usually has the SMG's and MP44's. Usually, any FG42 is paired with one of the MG42's, rather than going with the third team to make three LMG-fireteams.

SIGINT failure, presumably. Might have to be more careful around unsecured nets.

That's really interesting, and I hadn't considered the position of the squad leader with the MG team - and from memory that's even reflected in the doctrine, no?

Cheers, that definitely makes sense. Grenade management is a large chunk of it. Doing the above has definitely improved my CW game - the three man bren team is the minimum possible, and naturally the lmg is the point of the team, so dropping off almost all the rifles doesn't result in a huge drop in effective firepower. The manoeuvre element is large enough to split itself again, and five rifles plus sten is more than sufficient against a team the bren is suppressing. Obviously ad hoc splitting can and should be done, but I think it's useful to see how the squads look when they're used as intended - splitting a scout team off the panzergrenadiers, for example, leaves you with an unsplittable six man team with two mg42. That's not necessarily a bad idea, but in most situations I think you'll get more from two mg-focused fire teams, which also means that scouting needs to be handled by the squad as a whole, rather than a tiny, dedicated part of it.

I was trying to work out how you would end up with the Commonwealth squads split historically, with a three man Bren section. This led to learning a few things, which I thought might be useful to share. Comments appreciated, particularly if anything is inaccurate. Doing this with Commonwealth sections seems to help me quite a bit in moving them around effectively. Grenadiers: German Grenadier squad centre on a single MG42. They can split once, so to get to the historical doctrine of an MG42 team and a manoeuvre group, the best option seems to be a simple "Split" command, although this leaves the MG42 with a team of four, not three. Panzergrenadiers: Panzer Grenadiers also split with a simple "Split" command - Panzer Grenadiers use the more modern fireteam approach, of two four man teams, each centered on an MG42. Commonwealth Section: Commonwealth sections can be split historically with a "Split" command, which will create three teams, and then two of the teams can be re-combined to form a three man Bren team, and a six man + leader manoeuvre element. This element can use the Assault command, or split off men as a Scout team or Antitank team, as appropriate. US Squads: US squads are complex. The best way to get the historical split seems to be to create a "Scout team" first, and then an "Assault Team", which should create the historical BAR/Assault/Scout elements that the US used in WW2.

I'm using CM Helper 1.6.3 Beta, and it's practically instantaneous (within seconds). CM Helper does occasionally screw up when it crashes or encounters unexpected things, and it's sometimes worth uninstalling (and deleting anything under Appdata), but if you let it do it's thing it usually works perfectly. I haven't experimented with the alternatives (since CMHelper works fine for my purposes), but there are a few other options around.