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Bozowans

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Everything posted by Bozowans

  1. I dunno how much this applies to Afghanistan, but reading Che Guevara's book on guerilla warfare made me think it would be cool to see some of the tactics he describes played out in a CM scenario. For him, weapons and ammo were precious and could not be expended lightly, so a lot of actions during the revolution were about swiftly attacking small, weak units for the sole reason of capturing their weapons and ammo. In a war like that, usually your sole source of weapons and ammo is from the enemy. Eventually, as their guerilla bands got bigger and stronger, they would graduate to trying to find and seize larger weapons caches from the enemy. Men were also precious and casualties were to be avoided at all costs, since the guerilla forces were always much smaller than the state security forces. They would hit enemy patrols or outposts fast and hard, take as much of their stuff as they could and then get out before enemy reinforcements showed up down the road. Then they would attack their reinforcement columns in these very long harassment firefights. The idea was not to simply hit and run, but to keep the enemy constantly engaged in a low-intensity firefight where they could never rest or relax. They would have several very small bands of guerillas (like no more than a dozen men each) attacking the enemy column with harassing fire from all four compass points at the same time. If the enemy column started attacking to the west for example, the guerilla team in the west would give way and fall back, while the other three guerilla teams in the other three directions would start advancing in order to constantly keep in contact. If the enemy suddenly turned north to attack the northern team, then the northern team would then fall back, and the other three teams would again start advancing again. These actions could go on for hours or days, and the enemy column could get terribly demoralized from the constant stress. I've never seen anything like that in CM before. Perhaps you could make a scenario where large numbers of AI government troops have to advance across the map to an exit zone, or maybe to a specific area (like to reinforce a base that you have under siege), and your guerillas have to interdict them en route. Your small bands of guerillas don't have enough combat power or ammo to attack and destroy them completely, but you get lots of points for causing casualties. Perhaps your guerillas can even have their own exit zone that they have to get to before the entire map is overrun by state security forces. You could have spies all over the map to warn you of their approach, and could coordinate ambushes with mines and IEDs. Then you fall back only to hit them again later. You could throw in a suicide bomber too for fun. It seems like something like that would be doable in CM, but unfortunately I have no idea how to design scenarios. You could make a whole campaign with that kind of material. A campaign based around controlling a guerrilla band would be awesome IMO. The campaign could start small, where you only have a tiny, weak handful of men trying to scrounge for weapons and ammo, but your group gets bigger and bigger with each scenario in the campaign. With each success, you get more and more recruits, and more and more captured material. Eventually your group gets big enough that you are putting entire bases under siege, and the final stages of the campaign are when you graduate upward to conventional warfare, engaging the government forces in open battle in the streets with your own captured tanks and other vehicles until the campaign ends when you overthrow the state itself.
  2. If you still have a copy yes I would love to try it! lol how do you do that? I've wanted to make my own scenarios for a long time now but it's hard to find the time for it. It seems like playing around in the editor can be an entire game in itself, and there are still a million other scenarios and campaigns I haven't even tried yet.
  3. It's been a long time since I've played this but I remember beating it by just attacking straight down the middle with everything I had in one giant wave. I tried going up the right and left sides like you did and it didn't work for me either. The right side has that little wooded hill and it's very difficult to get enough forces concentrated up there. I tried sending infantry up there and they got held up by bunkers and minefields and barbed wire and whatnot and the trees blocked my tanks from being able to support them. The left side had too narrow an attack corridor and I ran into a similar problem with not being able to concentrate enough forces in such a small area. So instead I massed all of my forces on the map into the big area in the middle, lining them up just behind the crest of that ridge going along the middle of the map. Then I called in a smoke screen right in front of the Germans, making sure to cover only part of their defensive line and not the whole thing. Then I went "over the top" with everything I had. The smoke screen blinded half the enemy force, allowing me to concentrate all of my guns onto the other half, dealing with them piece by piece. After I went over the top, I had the whole force halt on top of the ridge and start shooting. The open ground in the middle of the map allowed more of my troops to get LOS on the same things at the same time, so I could concentrate much more firepower. I was able to knock out a lot of the German bunkers and heavy weapons before the smoke lifted, and then I turned my guns against the other half of the German line. After the bunkers were knocked out and the enemy machine guns were mostly destroyed or suppressed, I had my riflemen charge forward in one big human wave attack, supported by the tanks and mortars. The Soviets seem to work best without a bunch of fancy maneuvering and you just smash the enemy with one giant sledgehammer blow. I took a lot of casualties but I ended up smashing the whole German line and got a total victory. I made a video of this mission a long time ago. You don't get to see the whole mission since I was just playing with video editing software to make a cinematic video but you can see my human wave charge across the fields and the final assault on the German trenches.
  4. That slave labor camp scenario sounds awesome. I'm gonna watch out for it. I wanna try that Texas shopping mall one too lol It would be interesting to see more hostage-situation type scenarios. Something like the Beslan school hostage crisis in Russia in 2004. The school had 30 or so terrorists and hundreds of hostages inside, and the Russians assaulted and stormed the building with special forces and army units using tanks, APCs and thermobaric weapons and it still took them hours to clear the building while taking heavy casualties in the process. A complete catastrophe IRL but I wonder if you could design a CM scenario to reflect something like that. It's not possible to trigger something to blow up using the editor right? I don't really know much about using the editor. But you could penalize the player very heavily for damaging any buildings. Most of the time when I see preserve objectives it's just a couple of buildings here and there on a huge map, like a mosque, that you can safely ignore or bypass. I don't recall seeing any scenarios that are entirely built around one big preserve objective. Or maybe a "don't cross this line" trigger? Forcing you to adopt different tactics like laying siege to the building at a distance, posting snipers all around the place hoping to pick off enemies without risking a big assault and so on.
  5. I think the building is supposed to be a hospital, so I don't think they would just flatten it with F-18s. Or you can imagine that they are held up in there with hostages or something. I do agree with you though. If that situation came up in a real conflict, they would probably lay siege to the compound with a large heavy force and not just charge in head-on with two platoons of infantry. If the defenders were a bunch of die-hards and wouldn't surrender, it's hard to imagine how long it would take to clear something like that. There are something like 130 defenders. It would probably take many hours to methodically clear such a place room-by-room even with a very large force.
  6. I remember arguing years ago that the Germans would fight mounted in the backs of their halftracks, yet people thought it was complete heresy to suggest such a thing. Of course you can't really do it in CM, but it seems like they would be pretty good firing platforms in reality. Only your head would be exposed, you can duck down if you take fire, you can brace your weapon against the halftrack's hull for accuracy, you're in an elevated position with a good view, and you would be a moving target. I mean, there are videos from Syria where they do just such a thing with the DIY halftracks they make. The Germans also had flamethrower halftracks so I don't think they would have been shy about getting in close to the enemy with those things. Yeah when I played that one, I tried being super careful, advancing very slowly and cautiously, trying to scout out their positions and so on, but when I finally launched the assault, I just ran into a bunch of empty foxholes and then lost the battle. Very frustrating! I wish they were more clear on that in the briefing. Funny thing is that they used to be placed even higher. They lowered him a bit in one of the patches or engine updates, I forget which one.
  7. I too love the Brits and their goofy gear. They might not have as much infantry firepower but they go through ammo much more slowly. Once you have fire superiority built up, you don't have to frantically rush the assault teams forward before you burn through the ammo. You can just take your sweet time. It makes an attack an almost leisurely experience. So after you've had your tea waiting for your arty to demolish the objective, you can sit back and have some more tea waiting for the infantry assault. Reminds me of that scene in "They Shall Not Grow Old" where a British soldier talked about using the hot water from their water-cooled machine guns to boil their tea on the front lines.
  8. I'm always torn on whether to try rushing the enemy en masse or not. On one hand, sometimes it can end up with me taking enormous casualties, but on the other, sometimes it works fantastically well and I end up completely overwhelming and overrunning the opposition while taking minimal loss. Each enemy soldier can only shoot at one guy at a time, so it is very difficult for them to deal with lots of guys rushing them from multiple directions, running over and through their positions and alongside their flanks as well. If you try engaging the enemy on a 1:1 basis, like having one fireteam creeping through the woods until they run into an enemy fireteam face to face, you are gonna lose. If you have an entire full-strength platoon aggressively and suddenly rushing that one enemy fireteam all at the same time, then things might be different. Of course, that doesn't mean you just wanna mindlessly charge into the woods though. You still wanna have an idea of where the enemy is and in what strength, so you wanna send in scout teams first, do small probing attacks, area fire into the woods in front of you for a while, and THEN charge in for a final assault once you have a good picture of the enemy positions. It reminds me of urban combat sometimes. I don't want to split my squads up into smaller teams all the time and spread them out inside urban areas. Instead, I want a much higher soldier density than normal in order to completely and ruthlessly overpower the opposition at close range.
  9. I take too many screenshots. From "House Cleaning": Assaulting the compound: Firing squad: Platoon HQ pokes their heads out to fire into the compound: The Charge: And here is my absolute favorite shot. Here is your action movie poster:
  10. Yeah something does seem fishy there. I also had a ton of guys around that building, some of them only 30m away but none of them were phased by the huge explosion. I was afraid that I would cause friendly fire casualties but it didn't matter at all. Thanks! To sing more praises, the scenario "Ambush at Al-Fubar" now works properly as well. I always thought that the previous version of the game had kinda broken that scenario. It starts with an ambushed Stryker platoon caught in a tight space surrounded by insurgents at close range, with shooting breaking out on turn 1. One of the US teams will always end up taking a bunch of fire at the start, and with the previous AI, they would always try to fall back immediately by running out the back door of their building. Since the position is surrounded though, they would always end up running out into the street in a single file line right in front of a huge group of insurgents, and the entire 5-man team would get mowed down one by one like a bunch of lemmings. Now they shelter in place like they should. Random screenshots:
  11. If I could only pick one thing, it might be an overhaul of the artillery system. There should be a "repeat" function for fire missions. If you want to call in another barrage on the exact same spot you did before, you should be able to do it without having to wait for spotting rounds and doing that whole lengthy cycle all over again. They should already have the information necessary. You should be able to adjust the length and intensity of barrages on the fly. For example, say I have a battery of four off-map howitzers. I call in a long fire mission with low rate of fire (harass) using only one of the four guns just to get some rounds flying near a suspected enemy position. Eventually I realize that the rounds are landing right near a huge group of enemies I didn't spot before. I should be able to quickly bring the other 3 guns into the barrage and then raise it up to a high rate of fire. All it should take is the observer yelling into the radio to "shoot faster!". But no, you have to cancel the entire mission and then call a new one and go through the whole agonizing process of waiting for spotting rounds (which the observer might not even see) all over again. You should not be so limited by the spotter's LOS to the target. For example, as it is now, you cannot call artillery onto the middle of a forest because the spotter can only see the edge of it at any one time. In reality it would be a simple matter. You can just call spotting rounds onto the edge of the forest where you can see them, and then once they are on target, you tell the battery to adjust to 100 meters back or whatever and then fire for effect. In reality, artillery observers sometimes walked rounds onto the target by sound instead of sight. I read a WW2 memoir a ways back where the author did exactly that. He walked rounds onto a target in the middle of the night when he couldn't see anything. He just knew Germans were assembling out there somewhere in the dark (engine noises), and then walked some artillery onto them by ear. He ended up hitting something too, evidenced by the loud boom and column of flame and smoke shooting high into the air. Artillery explosions are obviously extremely loud. It's not like you wouldn't be able to tell if a shell landed behind that building over there on the left if you didn't see the explosion yourself. You can also hear the shells loudly screaming through the air overhead and sometimes even see them, like little black sausages in the air. Soldiers tend to pick up pretty quickly whether artillery is incoming or outgoing, and experienced soldiers can often tell if a shell is going to land near them or not just by the sound of it in the air. It should not be that hard to call artillery onto targets outside of LOS. I kinda wish they would go back to the way it worked in the CM1 engine, where you can call artillery anywhere on the map, but it's just not as accurate if it's outside LOS. Or perhaps they could make it so you're not allowed to do the "point target" or "linear target" functions outside of LOS, and only allowed to do really wide area targets or something. The point is that being outside LOS should not matter if you just want to saturate a huge area (like a town or forest) with shelling. OK rant over. That ended up being longer than I thought it would be. Anyway, there are plenty of little nitpicks in these games that I can rant about. I would love graphics and sound improvements too. Someone else mentioned the glitchy shaders already. The shaders look really bad on my computer sometimes (especially if the scenario is foggy or hazy or at dawn or dusk) and I often play with them turned off. Those are only cosmetic issues though and don't affect the gameplay. I would much rather have the artillery system be more involved and realistic.
  12. I just tried the House Cleaning scenario again as well. I played it way back years ago and got slaughtered. I still remember it from the Shock Force 1 days. The map is too small, you get little room to maneuver, and you're within RPG range right from the deployment zone, and it sucks only getting one .50 cal machine gun Stryker. I played it for a few minutes, took a bunch of casualties right away and saw a very lucky RPG hit take out the .50 cal gun on the Stryker from all the way across the map, all within the first few minutes. So I restarted and then tried to play it much more slowly and carefully. It took me a while but I ended up really surprising myself and got a total victory, clearing the entire hospital with only 2 dead and 5 wounded. So it IS possible to beat it with pretty minimal loss. I beat it by concentrating almost my entire force on the right side of the map, trying to focus on taking the hospital in smaller pieces. I had the 40mm Strykers blow some holes in the boundary wall so more of my guys could shoot into the compound, and then had the infantry advance in short bounds just a little bit at a time across the open ground. There was a pretty fierce firefight and all 7 of my losses were taken on the advance to the hospital. Miraculously I took zero during the final assault and room clearing process. Your Strykers can drive right up to the boundary walls and shoot over without really exposing themselves at all, which is very helpful. To the enemy they look like this: After about 20-30 minutes I had completely cleared the entire right side (east side) of the hospital all the way to the back of the map. The left side (west) was mostly untouched and still filled with enemies. Once it got quiet again, I had my infantry rearm and regroup themselves with the Strykers and then mass together for the final assault on the other side. The main hospital building is five stories tall, so I tried putting one full squad of infantry on each floor at the corner nearest my side of the map, then had them rush over to the enemy side all at the same time. Nearly my entire force was concentrated all on one building tile. Having five full US infantry squads all shooting at the same time from the same building section completely overwhelmed the opposition on the other side. Then I had the five squads (about 40 guys) start moving down the length of the main hospital building on the enemy side, stopping at each building section along the way so they could area fire into the next one for a while before storming into that section en masse. It doesn't really seem to matter what floor you're on when there are enemies in the adjacent building section. I saw guys on the fourth floor shooting down at guys on the first floor for example. So each enemy squad hiding in the back areas of the hospital had 40 guys all come charging into view all at once, guns blazing on floors above them and below. It was like a big wall of death moving down the length of the hospital. 24 enemy troops got wiped out in a couple of minutes. After a few more minutes of mopping up it was over. 49 enemy dead, 59 wounded, 17 captured.
  13. I love those videos. The new patch is really good so far too. The only complaint I have is that they still haven't fixed the trench bug, where unspotted enemy trenches are still clearly visible to the player. That's annoying, but I am really loving the way the AI works now so far. I just finished one scenario where you get a company of British light infantry attacking a small town held by a full battalion of poor quality green Syrian Army troops. Aside from some air support, I didn't get a lot of heavy weapons to blast them out of their buildings, so it mostly came down to classic fire and maneuver tactics and assaulting the enemy up close. With the AI now being more reluctant to just run away only to get mowed down in the open, the Syrians defenses were mostly just static, with the men cowering in place and putting out sporadic fire until I got close enough for them to surrender. I took a LOT of prisoners, more than 100 altogether, which I'm pretty sure is more prisoners than I've ever taken in any CM scenario I've ever played. I probably could have taken more but the extreme heat slowed down my advance considerably. It did feel more realistic than the way the game played before, with my troops slowly advancing from house to house, engaging in brief firefights before dragging out another big group of prisoners, sometimes full squads at a time. Then on to the next house. Some of the fighting in the town was very bloody and difficult though, with stubborn pockets of resistance here and there. The enemy was just so numerous that I had a lot of difficulty at times. It seemed like nearly every building had guys in it. I lost about a quarter of my men, with 12 dead and 30 wounded compared to 200 Syrian dead and wounded alongside the 100+ prisoners. I've never seen an entire 1/3rd of an enemy force surrender before. And because this is the screenshot thread: This was one of the more deadly streets. There were multiple Syrian squads down at the end of the street, some with good keyhole positions putting out deadly fire for quite a long time, including RPG fire that caused a lot of casualties among my men. I couldn't get close enough to deal with them. At one point I brought up a sniper team to take shots at them, but my crack sniper lost a duel with some guy with an AK. The scenario ended with a bang. On the final turn of the scenario, I dropped a 2000lb bomb directly onto the roof of a small one-story building at the end of that street with an RPG team inside. Miraculously, one of the guys survived. After the boom, I saw him pop up out of the rubble and take off running toward the rear. He didn't make it far before he was shot. Then the enemy force surrendered. In the end, I only got a minor victory because of all the casualties I took. I was supposed to be below 25% casualties, but I ended up taking 26%.
  14. I've only played one scenario with the new patch but I'm agreeing with this so far. I just played the "De Hinderlaag" scenario and I was surprised at how tough it was. I got a minor defeat, unable to dislodge the Syrians from the objectives completely. Even though most of the Syrians were green or conscripts, I found that I couldn't just blindly shoot at enemy-occupied buildings until they ran away anymore. I got some enemies out in an open field to run away, but most of the guys in the buildings were stubborn and didn't wanna leave their good cover. I could suppress them easily, but there were such large numbers of them that I couldn't deal with them all in the time allotted. They had about 200 men against my 60. I found that I usually had to either blow up the buildings or assault them up close with infantry, either killing them or making them surrender. I got a couple Syrian squads to surrender, but it just wasn't enough. I waited too long early in the game for fire support to arrive, and then didn't have enough time to clear the objectives. I ordered a last-ditch rush toward the objectives at the end of the game, but I was only able to partially clear them and I took too many casualties. The Syrians didn't even take 50% casualties. It was a really fun scenario honestly. I'm gonna have to change my tactics and try it again.
  15. I think the reason they don't want people modding the game is that they're afraid it would undercut their profits - that people would buy fewer games and modules and whatnot if they can just get new theaters and armies and time periods to play with for free. If someone could add in their own units and vehicles into CMRT so that it looks like CMBN, then fewer people are gonna pay $60 for CMBN, plus another $70 for the two modules, and then another $20 on top of that for the vehicle pack.
  16. This reminds me of something I read in a Soviet tank rider's war memoir. I think the book was just called "Tank Rider" or something. But anyway, he was describing repeated failed attempts at capturing a German-occupied hill. The Germans were dug-in up there with barbed wire and trenches and so on. Soviet infantry were repeatedly ordered to take the hill, but as they climbed up there they would fail to get through the wire or whatever and then get shot up by machine guns and then come running back down again in disarray. Eventually a platoon of T-34s were brought up, and they were ordered to repeat the attack with the T-34s in support. Well, as the tanks drove off from their start line toward the German hill, before even taking any fire, all of the crews decided to bail out of their still-moving tanks at the same time and then run away. So there were a bunch of empty T-34s driving toward the German positions. The tanks got destroyed. That made me laugh out loud when I read it. I'm sure players would not react very well if that happened to them in the game. In the same book, the author described some of the soldiers playing games by running across the street in front of a German tank, trying to bait the gunner into shooting at them. The German gunner would never lead his targets right and he would always miss. There was no tactical reason to do it at all, but the soldiers were bored and had fun by running back and forth across the street trying to make him shoot. How do you make a wargame when people act like that during real wars? Sometimes I think that you even get too much control over your units. I kinda miss the days of CMx1, where you had those long command delays, especially with Soviet early war tanks with no radios, where it might take more than a minute just to get them to start moving.
  17. That's interesting if you were unloading on them at very close range and still had that much trouble. I usually have pretty decent luck firing MG34s/42s at buildings. It's like the high rate of fire and sheer number of bullets hitting the building makes it more likely that at least some of them will penetrate. Maybe I had forgotten just how tough they made some of the buildings in CMBN though lol It's been a while since I've played CMBN. Would be fun to try that scenario myself and see if I can pull it off. That's the one campaign in that game that I haven't tried yet.
  18. How far away were you when you first started shooting? Firing at heavy buildings at very long range doesn't do much sometimes. It might not even suppress them that much. Like RockinHarry posted, the closer you get, the more likely shots are to penetrate. And how far away was the enemy when they shot up your own guys inside the same building? My guess is that might have been why you had so much trouble approaching the buildings, and then your own guys got wasted instantly the moment you got inside. You might have been trying to shoot at them from long range ineffectively, and then once your squad finally made it inside the building, they got hit by counter-fire at very close range. I haven't played that scenario though so I don't know. Maybe I'll have to try it. In my own experience, the best way to deal with buildings if you don't have heavy weapons or tanks is to just get in close as quickly as you can and shoot them up as much possible with as many men as possible. Use smoke, suppress them as much as you can during the approach or whatever, but you don't really have to storm the building itself. You can even halt in open ground in front of the building as long as you outnumber them heavily and have fire superiority. The idea is that the moment an enemy soldier pops up at the window to take a shot, you have 30 guys or whatever right outside the building that will all instantly return fire. If your guys are all just 50 meters outside the building, the enemy will probably be dead within seconds. The enemy might open up on one of your squads and cause a casualty or two, but you should have two more squads right there next to them that should take them down. Sometimes that alone will be enough to clear a building.
  19. Those gigantic Russian radios have always been in the game though. I remember watching my guys lug those huge things around in the default Russian campaign.
  20. It does make sense that a PPSh could be called a burp gun because of the high rate of fire. It can shoot 900-1000 rounds per minute. The old PPSh sound effects from CMBB even sounds like a 'brrrrrp brrrrrrp'. That article mentions soldiers in Korea calling them burp guns. The term certainly does go back to WW2 though. Looking into it a little bit further, it seems there was even a firefight called the "Battle of Burp Gun Corner" during Operation Varsity in WW2, where a bunch of glider pilots fended off a German attack. It's kinda hard to find detailed information about it, but I found an article (https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/2019/01/21/the-birdmen-of-varsity/) that again repeats the claim that burp guns were MP-40s. It said, "In nearby farmhouses, enemy soldiers relentlessly fired their MP-40 submachine guns—nicknamed 'burp guns' for their rapid rate of fire." It went on to say that the battle was named the "Battle of Burp Gun Corner" by a journalist from Stars and Stripes. This still makes no sense though. Could MP-40s really have been such a dominant part of that fight that the battle would be named after them? Why not MG-42s? Something seems fishy. The MG-42 can vary from 900-1500 rounds per minute, so it's not that much different from the PPSh. The MG-34 gets 800-900 per minute, so also not that different. It should have a brrrrrrrrrp sound. The MP-40 only fires 500 rounds per minute, so it should be more like a pop-pop-pop-pop sound. Also, the officers carrying MP-40s would likely not have been firing them very much. They would be busy communicating, directing their men and observing the fight. It doesn't make sense that there would be all these relentless volleys of MP-40 fire that drowns out everything else. When I Googled MP-40s, the first video result was this: There is a guy halfway through the video who praises the MP-40 for its SLOW rate of fire. He said it was a good SMG because it's simple and fires slow enough that it's easily controllable and doesn't need a mechanism to toggle between semi-automatic and fully-automatic. It only fires fully-automatic, yet slow enough that you can still squeeze off aimed single shots if you want. That doesn't really sound like a rapid-firing burp gun to me. I'm gonna go ahead and make the bold assumption that every one of these sources about WW2 burp guns are wrong. Burp guns were really MG-42s (and 34s), but when Korea came along, the slang shifted to mean the PPSh, because it made a similar sound. Perhaps this meaning continued into Vietnam, and the term must have been used to refer to other SMGs that looked similar to the PPSh as well. The Vietnamese were known to use MP-40s mixed with PPSh-41s and whatever other SMGs they could get their hands on. If you look at the Wikipedia article for the PPSh-41, there is a photo of a captured NVA MP-40 alongside a PPS-43 and a K-50M, the Vietnamese variant of the Chinese variant of the PPSh-41. So all of these weapons would have been lumped together by the Americans until "burp gun" just meant "generic SMG that isn't ours". Then the WW2 burp gun somehow got retconned into meaning the MP-40. Maybe decades after WW2, someone was reading accounts from WW2 soldiers talking about burp guns, and they thought, "Burp gun? That's like one of those SMGs right? Must have been an MP-40 then." And then that got repeated over and over and over again ever since. Then once people started thinking burp guns meant MP-40s, they would read the original accounts from the war and think that MP-40s were much more important than they really were, since why else would the soldiers talk about these "burp guns" all the time right?
  21. This reminds me of the US Army slang where they would refer to "burp guns" among the Germans, but I was always very confused about what weapon is actually meant by that. One of my old WW2 books (I forget which one, I think about the Normandy campaign) mentioned American soldiers talking about burp guns, but then the footnote said it referred to an MP-40. The footnote said something along the lines of soldiers calling them burp guns because the Germans "relied heavily on automatic fire from MP-40 machine pistols, which had a very high rate of fire and had a distinctive rapid 'brrrrrrrrp' sound." Yet that sounds more like an MG42 to me. The MP-40 doesn't even fire that fast. As we all know here, machine guns were the primary weapons in German squads and that's probably what soldiers on the ground would have been hearing the most. Yet the book made no mention of MG42s, although the soldiers kept talking about "burp guns" all the time. That made no sense to me so I thought the book might have been wrong about that. Why would MP-40s be so important to talk about all the time but not MG42s? Upon searching Google for "burp gun" however, I find results that are almost entirely about the Soviet PPSh41. I see headlines like "Firing the Iconic PPSh41 'Burp Gun!'" This made me even more confused. On the second page of Google results I found a site (https://ww2db.com/weapon.php?q=8) which repeats the MP-40 as burp gun thing. So which one is it? The whole thing gives me a headache. Some of the Google results suggest "burp gun" just being a generic term for an SMG. It kinda makes me think that during the actual war, none of the soldiers on the ground would have had any idea of what was going on around them, and every enemy automatic weapon was a burp gun regardless of what it was, just as how every tank was a Tiger or whatever.
  22. So here is an example of the problem I was talking about on the Stavelot map. The problem affects these two white buildings highlighted here, just off the town square: Here is a close-up. As you can see I have men stacked up right in front of the doors. Neither the front nor the rear doors are functional for these buildings, and it seems the only way in is to go through the inside of the adjacent buildings. Also, this is not the only building type affected by this bug. Some of the really narrow buildings on this exact same block are also affected by this, but for now I'll just point out these. Here are the movement orders I have given. I had two separate teams try to enter the buildings side by side at the same time to illustrate the problem. When I hit the big red button, both teams ignored the doors and then started running off to the right: They circled around the corner, made a U-turn, and then entered the adjacent building at the end of the block. Naturally, this meant that they ran right into the bullets of the Americans across the street. So as you can see, it can be a bit of a game-breaking bug when it ends up like that, especially when playing a long campaign where every casualty you take matters. Luckily I save the game at the beginning of every turn anyway just in case something like this happens. I have multiple other examples and screenshots of this happening to other buildings on this same map as well.
  23. I've been running into this same issue in the Kampfgruppe Peiper campaign in CMFB. In Stavelot there are some very dense areas with narrow streets around the town square where I had this issue. There are obvious doorway textures on the front of some of the buildings, yet these doors apparently don't exist because my squads will ignore them, and instead run around the block to the other side or perhaps go into a building a few doors down and then make their way through from there. The buildings affected are in a big row like what Warts 'n' all described, so maybe these are those same Dutch buildings. I remember running into this issue in CMBN as well, but it's been a very long time and I couldn't tell you what type of building or what mission it was in.
  24. Now part two: As all that gunfire was going on with the two American half-tracks, two more half-tracks were coming up the road behind them, making four in total. Right when the first firefight was ending, the two new half-tracks opened fire down the road. They didn't even see the Stummel right in front of them, but were instead shooting off to the right side of the road where they saw muzzle flashes from the firefight (where my shot-up HQ teams were). Some of my forward troops had already turned around from infiltrating the city and were rushing back to the sound of shooting behind them. They were about to lay a devastating ambush along the road. Now that the Americans were shooting, my troops along the road suddenly realized what was right in front of them and then opened fire. Seemingly every man in this entire squad threw a grenade, and then a panzerfaust was launched: These guys have no idea what's coming: See if you can count how many grenades are in this picture! The half-tracks go boom. Both remaining half-tracks are completely destroyed with all hands lost inside. After such a shocking few minutes, everything fell quiet for a while. My troops went on without their commander back to their original mission of infiltrating the city, and were eventually victorious.
  25. Here's one of the more crazy close-range firefights I've ever seen in these games. This post might have spoilers for the Kampfgruppe Peiper campaign for anyone that cares. I was the Waffen SS attacking into Stavelot in the early morning hours, with the skies overcast and visibility almost at zero. You could walk right up to enemies and not see them even at point blank range. As the battle began and my forward platoons were fanning out toward the city, my company HQ and most of the company's half-tracks were kept back a bit. I thought they were all safe back there, silly me! Before long, I could hear American vehicles moving down the road out of the city and directly at my positions. I wasn't expecting them to counterattack or just brazenly drive straight out at me so I didn't know what to do at first. The vehicles drove right past my forward troops and none of them saw anything, although I could see the sound contacts coming closer and closer. An American half-track packed full of troops suddenly veered off the road, turned right, crossed right in front of a Stummel just meters away, then drove straight at my two HQ teams hidden behind a line of bushes, one of them being the company HQ: The half-track smashed down the fence between the two HQ teams and then kept going, and the GIs in the back got up and opened fire into the backs of my HQ teams, causing two casualties straight away: One of the HQ teams spun around and returned fire: Seconds later, another American half-track appeared out of nowhere, following behind the first: Like a firing squad, the men in the half-track all turned in unison and mercilessly gunned down the entire HQ team. A rifle grenade exploded in the middle of them. My company commander was killed instantly, and at this point my jaw had pretty much hit the floor. One of the first casualties in the battle was my company commander, and he was calling in a bunch of artillery at the time so I had no way to cancel. This was probably the least likely thing I had ever expected to happen - my company commander gunned down in a drive-by shooting at point blank range right at the beginning of the battle. I would soon get my revenge however. The American half-tracks had drove right into the midst of a column of German half-tracks strung out along the road. They turned and started shooting: The US half-tracks both halted and the men started bailing out under heavy fire: A short but intense firefight ensued, with the Americans shooting and tossing grenades in every direction while under a murderous crossfire. The American dismounts were cut down to the last man, although both of their half-tracks managed to escape and drive off into the darkness. Only the drivers survived. I lost a half-track gunner or two but nothing else. Stay tuned for part two!
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