Bozowans

German soldiers clear out buildings with StG-44s during Market Garden. German soldiers storm the town of Son, to re-capture the bridge and cut the highway.

Ok now I did manage to get the bug to show up again. Same building, same doorway. I moved a two-man FO team into the building alongside the other team from the previous post, and BOTH guys from the FO team stepped out the door into the street. It didn't go so well for me this time.... I wonder if this is a problem with certain buildings or if it's something that can happen anywhere, with any building? It seems like all of the CM titles have had trouble with certain buildings before, like with doors not working properly so squads try to run all the way around the building to use a different door instead, and then getting themselves killed in the process. I know I didn't accidentally tell the FO team to move outside the building. Here you can even see the radioman in the FO team briefly stop where he is supposed to - behind the other team already in the building: After the FO stepped out of the doorway into the street though, the radioman phased through the wall to join him outside the building. They sat there about 10 seconds before the tank shell came in. This was the order I had given to the FO team: This was all using the current Steam version of the game btw.

Never seen it with 3 squads simultaneously all right next to each other like that. That's pretty bad. I do see it happen now and then though. Very annoying but at least I can sometimes go through whole scenarios without noticing it or being negatively affected by it. It just happened to me again a little while ago in SF2. I ordered a five man team from a split squad into a large high-rise building. The lead guy ran into the building, through the opposite door and stopped out in the street on the other side. The building was large enough that it's not like there was a lack of space for him inside. Plus he was the first one in there. Here you can see where he first stopped, with the rest of the team filtering in behind him. He then started slowly creeping his way forward, further and further away from the building. He would stop, crouch for a second, then get up and move a few feet forward, stop and crouch again for a second, then get up and move yet again. As if he was lost and trying to find a spot to settle down but couldn't. Silly pixeltruppen. This is where he stopped the second time: And the third time: Eventually he stopped and went prone maybe 6 feet away from the wall and started getting shot at by several enemies at once. He probably took a good 30 seconds of fire but miraculously wasn't hit. I ordered the team to pull back behind the building again on the next turn. The lost guy in the street did not run back through the door behind him but ran around the side of the building instead. On the next turn after that, I ordered the team back into the same building again, same orders as before and without touching their target arc. I was hoping to see if the bug would replicate itself, but it didn't happen a second time. Pretty strange.

My apologies then. I know mentioning anything political here ruffles feathers, but it can be hard to avoid sometimes with the more realistic subject matter of these games. I will try to avoid it then.

It's an interesting point honestly. I still remember the sheer bloodlust so many Americans had after 9/11. How many times did I hear that we should "glass the middle east"? Too many to count. Some Americans still talk like that to this day. That was especially the case after the rise of ISIL in 2014-15. And then again just recently after the Taliban victory in Afghanistan. Back when ISIL was at their peak, politicians like Ted Cruz were saying things like "We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. I don't know if sand can glow in the dark, but we're going to find out." And then Trump said we should kill the terrorists along with their entire families. There was a poll around that time where 26% of Republican voters supported making Islam illegal in the US. People will argue about it on the internet, but I don't think people ultimately care much about civilian casualties, especially right in the middle of a front line combat zone like in a CM scenario. Drone bombing a wedding party might be different though, and certainly generates news headlines. Would dirty bombs really be that effective? They aren't nukes. Doing some cursory searching it seems like they would not really be that effective in terms of mass casualties. The most lethal threat would be from the blast itself. Few people would probably die but it would be VERY effective in causing mass panic and chaos. Radiation might spread just a few blocks to a few miles away depending on the size of the bomb, but most of the sources I'm seeing say that radiation would never get concentrated enough to kill people or cause serious illness. People are terrified of radiation though, so it would be the perfect terror weapon. If you include everyone exposed to the radiation as being a casualty, even if ineffective, then that number probably would indeed go up into the hundreds of thousands if not millions. In the financial district in Manhattan, a few hundred thousand people would be packed within one square mile on a typical business day. In Washington DC, all three branches of government are within two miles of each other. No one is going to return to work after radioactive cesium just got sprayed all over their office building. A dirty bomb attack would shut down entire cities for weeks if not months alongside collapsing the entire global economy. Just a single dirty bomb shutting down a major port city like LA would be disastrous. With all that going on, I don't think anyone would care if I blew up a mosque in CMSF2.

I did make sure not to launch the big charge until I had spent several minutes shooting up the German lines as much as I could with every unit I could. All tanks on line firing, and lots of area firing on the trenches with as many units as possible. The Germans did have a few MGs still alive when I did the charge, enough to cause casualties, but not enough to pin down my entire force all at once. I remember the mines being pretty nasty too, but still not enough to halt the entire advance. My breakthrough point was right in the center of the map. I have no idea if what I did would still work if I tried it again though. I probably got lucky knocking out the German Stugs without losing any of my own tanks. Or was it just one Stug? I forget. That kind of attack would probably fail horribly if I had lost too many tanks. Tanks always seem to do the most killing in CM by far. You certainly pay more attention to troop quality than I do. I need to remember to check that kind of thing more often. It's a good idea to probe with the bad troops and save the good ones for assaulting. It always seems like the #1 thing for winning fights in these games is to just put out more bullets and more volume of fire than the other guy. When it comes to infantry tactics, sometimes I feel like the hardest part is just finding spots to put everyone where they have LOS and can shoot. I don't even think that cover and concealment is really all that important. I just try to find a way to get as many guns firing as I possibly can. It doesn't matter if your guys are wide out in the open if you are consistently out-shooting the enemy the whole time. It can be tricky with the WW2 Soviets though because you usually have to get in close to get that fire superiority with all the SMGs.

I beat the Bunkers Burning scenario a long time ago with a giant massed attack straight up the middle of the map, almost human wave style. Not on my first attempt though. This was probably not long after CMRT first came out years ago. I remember trying to play like a western army at first and slowly creep my way up the flanks with small detached units but it didn't work. There was just not enough room to maneuver on the flanks and I couldn't bring enough firepower to bear. So on a second attempt I massed my whole force together just out of view of the Germans, brought down a smoke screen covering up maybe half the German line or so, then told everyone to go over the top in a huge mass. I wanted to concentrate as much of my force as I possibly could on crushing the Germans not currently covered in smoke. Ideally it was supposed to be like 100% of my force concentrated on maybe 50% of theirs. I was able to knock out most of their bunkers and heavy weapons within a few minutes, then when the smoke cleared, I could shift fire and concentrate on the other part of the German line. Once the biggest AT threats and bunkers were dealt with, I had the tanks and infantry just charge ahead across the fields. I wanted the flamethrower tanks to get in there fast, and the infantry to get into grenade and SMG range. It worked surprisingly well. The Germans were overwhelmed with too many targets at once and eventually collapsed. I have a hard copy of that book. I might have to dust it off and look at it again.

I thought officers IRL would sometimes use tracer rounds to tell units where to shift fire right? I don't know how common that is/was though. So most of the men in a platoon or company might not know an enemy is there, but they see the officer spraying tracers at that spot, and everyone steadily shifts fire over to that spot even though only a couple of people in the whole platoon or company knows an actual enemy is there.

I say try the default Russian 'Crossing the Dnieper' campaign. I did that one first and I really enjoyed it. It was challenging at times but I didn't think it was ultra difficult. There are some interesting scenarios and the big amphibious river crossing was fun. I don't have the battle pack add-on though. I would be interested if someone else who played them can say if it's worth it.

Young people work longer hours than any other age group. They work longer, get paid less, sometimes have multiple jobs, and with the rising cost of living, are priced out of things older generations enjoyed. They are also expected to retire later than previous generations. Many young people are not too optimistic about the future and don't even expect to be able to retire at all. The generational divide among wargaming is interesting though. It doesn't surprise me that that might be a source of conflict within the community. Most people are pretty friendly and helpful, though I haven't done much PBEMing myself. I wonder what the average age is among forum users here. It kinda surprised me when CM Cold War came out to see so many posters who were active duty military during the time the game takes place in the late 70s or early 80s. That was before I was even born.

I think it would be nice if there was a button to toggle between the three different stances for infantry - prone, crouched, or standing. Sometimes I just want my guys to sit or stand up so they can see and shoot over LOS obstacles in their way, yet they stubbornly stay prone no matter what you do. This is an especially big problem on maps with a lot of tall grass and crop fields that block LOS for prone soldiers. I just finished a scenario where I had to attack a strong line of dug-in troops across flat ground completely covered in tall grass and crops. There was simply no way for my infantry to shoot at the enemy. The ground was completely flat, so whenever my infantry stopped moving, they would automatically go prone down in the crops and lose LOS, yet whenever they start running again, they are completely exposed and get shot at by the enemy, who could see practically the whole battlefield while crouched upright in their foxholes. There was no high ground for my infantry to see over the crops and establish a base of fire. It was just run forward, get shot at, drop down and then lose LOS, then run forward, get shot at, then drop down again. No one could fire without getting the "reverse slope - no aim point" thing. My infantry did very little shooting throughout the whole battle. The main purpose of my infantry in that scenario was apparently to do nothing more than run around and draw fire and reveal enemy positions for my tanks to shoot at. My tanks and other vehicles did about 95% of the killing, since they were the only ones who could see above the tall grass/crops. If that was reality, my infantry would have been firing toward the general direction of the enemy the whole time they were advancing, yet the game engine just doesn't allow for that. This whole problem would be solved by just a simple button that told infantry squads to crouch. If they just poked their heads up over the crops, they could easily see the enemy and fire back at them. Problem solved. I've also encountered plenty of scenarios where I wished my infantry could stand fully upright to fire over obstacles like I see all the time in combat footage.

Trying to think of a few more I've seen like this... There was one time an enemy ATG in CMRT fired at one of my tanks, missed, then the shot flew several hundred more meters and then straight through a window my forward observer was looking out of, killing him instantly. That made me pretty upset. Another time I saw an ATG fire at an infantryman standing out in the street. The shot flew between his legs and then through a building, exploding against the opposite wall. Very true. I especially like to do that in the modern warfare titles, since every single squad has their own APC with thousands of rounds of extra ammo. That way I can just light up the entire battlefield, shooting at everything in the general direction of the enemy. Shoot enough bullets and you're bound to hit someone eventually. In that CMBN scenario I was just playing where the tanker got hit, the American positions are really hard to shoot at, because I can't target them through the tall grass and agricultural fields they are hiding in. Telling my men to shoot at the ground in front of them, I know at least some of the rounds will overshoot right into the US positions.

They are definitely annoying. I'd say this guy got off easy though. Wounded just light enough that he gets to spend some comfy time off the line perhaps, but not heavy enough that it's anything more than a little pain in the 'arris. That kinda reminds me of something I saw in CMSF2, where a Syrian ATGM just barely missed my hull down tank, flew past it and then slammed into a crop of trees way behind, taking out a bunch of my infantry moving beneath them. Yeah I'm sure this stuff does happen way more than we realize. I almost missed that tanker getting hit. I was about to hit the end turn button and go back to the command phase when I decided to take one last look at things and spotted that.

I saw something very rare so I made a short video of it. A bullet ricocheted twice and then still ended up hitting someone. A bullet fired from a Thompson ricocheted off a building, then ricocheted again off the back of a Panther turret 65 meters away, then flew high up in the air and then plunged down right into the backside of a tank radio operator hiding in the bottom of a ditch another 30 meters away. It gave him a light wound. What are the chances of that? I included the view from the US soldier with the Thompson as well. If only he knew he ended up accidentally hitting someone completely out of view and way off to the left of what he was aiming at. Seems he was probably killed shortly after firing though. Posted in the general forum since this kind of thing is not unique to CMBN. Being able to track individual bullets and see where they go is one of the interesting things about CM. Anyone else see rare stuff like this? Could be any CM game. It's always amusing seeing things like a stray bullet falling out of the sky and landing at someone's feet from a completely unrelated firefight on the other side of the map 1000 meters away or whatever.

Yeah that was an extremely tough mission. I played it months ago and beat it but took heavy losses. There were such huge numbers of Americans defending the town that it seems impossible to not take heavy losses. I had the King Tigers that you get from capturing Stavelot in the previous missions, which helped me get through a couple of tough spots at least. I took the southern approach as well. I tried to wrap around the town, enveloping it from the south, hoping to get around the US flank and rear, but the US defenses were much denser and extended out a lot farther that I thought they would, so it ended up kinda turning into a brute force push straight into the town anyway. It seemed like every building had guys in them, plus foxholes around them with even more guys. Some of the enemy armor tucked away in the town was hard to deal with. For a couple of them I just had my King Tigers brute force their way up to them and blast them point blank. Others I managed to flank with my infantry and hit them with panzerschrecks. I wonder if attacking from the north instead would be better or worse. I didn't want to go too far off road because of the mud, but maybe it would be worth the risk. The horrible visibility means you can move around unnoticed and pick your approach, but the moment you bump into someone and the shooting starts all hell will break loose. They will see you and cut you down in seconds. It seems the most you can hope for is to move forward slowly and carefully and have as many of your guys as possible in good positions, stationary and ready to return fire before the shooting actually starts. In a normal CM scenario, I try to spread my infantry way out and have them probe the enemy defenses all across the map to figure out where they are, weak spots etc. Then I take out their heavy weapons with my own tanks and artillery etc, then regroup and concentrate everyone together for the final push. That doesn't really work in this scenario though. It's a big map and you can't really afford to spend ages sneaking and probing around in the dark. If you spread too far out, no one can support each other either. So I tried to keep my forces concentrated together. If I had to try it again though, I might consider keeping my forces even more concentrated and densely packed than before. There are huge numbers of Americans, but they are spread all over town and can't all support each other in the dark, so if I keep my own forces densely concentrated and focused on one spot, I can achieve local superiority and punch through that one small part of the US defenses and then keep going into the rear or start rolling up the enemy lines from there.

Good hit! It looked like the bullet didn't penetrate the armor, but went into an open hatch? That must have been a lucky shot. Was it from the side or rear? Was he shooting at the exposed commander? I've never had much luck with AT rifles myself. Probably more just due to the late war setting. It's common to go up against Panthers and Tigers and you aren't gonna do much against those. Unless they're unbuttoned, but then even normal small arms fire can get them to back off or kill the commander outright.

The Kurdish YPJ might want to have a word with you. Someone needs to make a YPJ campaign for CMSF2.

What exactly was it you didn't like about Cold War? And the original campaigns for CMRT? Is it just too many units with too much going on and no other reason? The campaigns for CMRT were pretty huge. I liked them but I remember it being a pain sometimes to move all the units around. I enjoy huge battles but I have to be in the right mood to play them. You sound like you would like CMSF2. You are good with modern warfare since you liked Black Sea and you like small and medium-sized battles, so CMSF2 sounds about right. The maps are usually smaller than the other CM games and you mostly get platoon to company-sized scenarios. Shock Force 1 was the first game they made with that engine, and the engine could not handle large maps back then. IIRC, CMRT was the first time that larger maps (and thus larger battles) were allowed in the engine. SF2 just takes all the original smaller scenarios and campaigns from SF1 and upgrades them with the better engine and new AI plans and whatnot, so it can still be very fun. It also has a ridiculous amount of content. For WW2, I might suggest CMBN. It also has a lot of smaller maps and smaller battles. The hedgerow fighting can feel like a bunch of small, self-contained little tactical puzzles to solve more than the huge slugfests that you sometimes get in the other titles. It also has Market Garden as a bonus.

Tanks. One of the biggest weaknesses of Soviet infantry is their almost complete lack of AT weapons. Everyone else has things like bazookas and panzerschrecks that make you keep your distance. Soviet infantry usually doesn't have anything except grenades. Some of them might have AT rifles but they're not that common and mostly useless against anything other than light vehicles. If you have tanks, sometimes you can afford to be aggressive and drive them right up into the Soviets' faces and blast them point blank and they can't do anything about it. It can be fun to drive right up next to an enemy occupied house and blow it up, since you can almost never do that in the other CM titles. In the Fire and Rubble module, the late war Soviets sometimes get captured panzerfausts but I'm not sure how common they are. For my own infantry, I like to split them down to small teams and spread them out as much as possible. Their job is to mostly just spot things for tanks to shoot at. If they see anything or run into a nest of resistance, they halt or even pull back while my tanks and artillery are called up to deal with it. The infantry only begin advancing again after the enemy positions have been thoroughly plastered by HE and MG fire. Firefights in this game are usually determined by who can put out more weight and volume of fire than the other guy. If you have no tanks and have no choice but to fight them at close range, you can still beat Soviet SMGs if you find some way to put out more bullets than them, like by sheer weight of numbers, but tanks are always best.

It's not too hard to find footage of guys running pretty fast with a Pak 36

This is all really interesting, thanks for taking the time to write all this stuff out. Since you've actually done this stuff, would you say the call-in times in CM are realistic? Like in the modern titles, it surprises me that US forces can accurately bring in off-map mortars anywhere in just 2 minutes flat. What's the fastest things can be called in? Or is there a lot of variability depending on what conditions are and so on.

I've always wanted something like that. You could call fire missions on targets outside of LOS in the CMx1 games, yet they removed that in CMx2 for some reason. I read a WW2 memoir a long time ago, written by a company commander, that described walking artillery onto a target using sound instead of sight. It was in the middle of the night and they couldn't see much, but they knew Germans were out there assembling for an attack somewhere (from the engine noises and whatnot). They called in artillery, listened for the boom, then walked the rounds closer to where they thought the Germans were. To add one more thing, I think it would be nice if you could adjust the intensity and duration of a FFE on the fly, without having to call it in all over again. Like if I call a light or harassment mission onto some suspected enemy position, then later I see that the rounds are landing right in the middle of a huge group of enemies I didn't see before, I want to be able to change the mission to a heavy one. I want the FO to be yelling into the radio to fire faster instead of one round a minute or whatever. I'm not sure how something like that would be done in reality though. It would also be nice if you could repeat a fire mission onto the same spot as before, without having to wait for the spotting rounds again.

Not saying the US Army was outright terrible or anything. They did what they could with what they had. But certainly bad relative to my own expectations and pretty much every other depiction I had seen. Coming from games like Shock Force 2 and growing up in a culture that glorifies US soldiers as a bunch of heroic supermen, it's interesting seeing the US having a tough time during a period that really wasn't very long ago. Even other WW3/Fulda Gap games seem to have a tendency to depict the Soviets as endless red hordes that charge forward and get slaughtered by the vastly superior western forces. I like that CMCW chose to have the two different alternate timelines, showing the huge difference going from the 70s into the 80s. Sometimes the US can do very well and cause a lot of damage, but other times I've seen the US get rolled over like they were little more than a speedbump. I knew very little about this period of history though until recently. I didn't even realize that the Soviets had an edge over the US in some areas. Several months ago I had been reading about Cold War stuff and wanted to learn more about it. I tried playing games like Flashpoint Campaigns and WinSPMBT because it had a lot of WW3 scenarios and I wanted to see what that would be like. Funnily enough, this was just a few weeks before CMCW was announced.

My go-to strategy as the US is to hide units behind buildings or some other hard cover like a hill, wait for the Soviets to pass, then shoot them in the side as they go by. This way you can eliminate their numerical advantage by shooting them one by one as they turn the corner, and at the same time avoid their tough frontal armor. Your biggest advantage as the US is that you're almost always defending, so you can set up ambushes like that frequently. For the first mission of the NTC campaign for example, I picked the "spoiling attack" option instead of the hasty one, allowing me to deploy behind those mountain passes. I figured it would be a bad idea to just deploy all the tanks in a line and slug it out face to face. The Soviets had to advance through those passes to win, so I put almost my entire force hidden behind the reverse slope, hugging the sides of the mountain, then shot them in the side as they went through. I ended up taking almost no losses. I still haven't played that much of CMCW, but it's been very interesting. I had no idea just how bad the US Army was back then. I played one scenario where I was defending on good ground and still won, but took heavy losses and lost even more tanks than the Soviets did, even though I was defending. I was not expecting that.

Trees are not indestructible. I see them get blown up all the time. They can be tough and soak up a lot of hits though. The big tank guns like 122mms can blow them up in a couple hits I think. Even small arms fire can damage trees, but it can take a long time and hundreds of bullets. Order a bunch of tanks to target light at the same spot in a treeline for several minutes and you will see the trees get chewed up by MG fire. Or if you really want to see trees get blown up, load up one of those soviet training scenarios in CM Cold War and plaster the woods with the ridiculous amount of artillery they get. I think the tall bocage in CMBN is indestructible though unfortunately, except to engineers with breaching charges or tanks with the bulldozer things. I've seen them take direct hits from huge airplane bombs with no effect.