Bozowans

Unless you were under Patton's command I guess. The dude really seemed to love marching fire. From his book "War as I Knew it": "Marching Fire: The proper way to advance, particularly for troops armed with that magnificent weapon, the M-1 rifle, is to utilize marching fire and keep moving. This fire can be delivered from the shoulder, but it is just as effective if delivered with the butt of the rifle halfway between the belt and the armpit. One round should be fired every two or three paces. The whistle of the bullets, the scream of the ricochet, and the dust, twigs, and branches which are knocked from the ground and the trees have such an effect on the enemy that his small-arms fire becomes negligible. Meanwhile, our troops in rear, using high-angle fire, should put out the enemy's mortars and artillery. As I have stated, even if we fail to put out the mortars and artillery, the most foolish thing possible is to stop under such fire. Keep walking forward. Furthermore, the fact that you are shooting adds to your self-confidence, because you feel that you are doing something, and are not sitting like a duck in a bathtub being shot at. In marching fire all weapons must be used. The light machine guns can be used while walking -- one man carrying the belt, the other man carrying the gun. The same is true of the Browning automatic rifle and, of course, as previously stated, the M-1. The 60mm. mortar, advanced by alternate sections, can do much in the same way. The 81mm. usually should support from one position."

I thought this was a neat little encounter from the last scenario I played: I ran a full platoon of Germans up to a stone wall and unexpectedly bumped into a bunch of Soviet stragglers hiding on the other side just a few feet away. Two Germans were gunned down immediately and a point blank firefight broke out. One of the Germans dropped down and tossed a grenade over the wall. The Soviet soldier tried to duck down but the grenade landed literally right underneath him. He went prone directly on top of the grenade, covering it with his body when it exploded. The rest of the Soviet troopers were shot pretty quickly, with no further casualties among the Germans. I couldn't be sure how many more of them were hiding behind the wall though, so tanks and more infantry were rushed forward in the next turn. The fight only lasted a minute or so in the end. I don't think I had ever seen someone toss a grenade at an enemy so close to them in this game before. He could have reached out and touched the other guy. Usually grenades are thrown pretty far and not very accurately either.

I just finished that same mission a couple days ago! I still haven't started the next mission yet. I seem to be a much more aggressive player than you. I took 70 casualties and lost several tanks but I forced a Russian surrender and got a total victory with 15 minutes to spare. They took more than 4 times the casualties that I did, losing 300+ men including around 40 captured and 16 tanks destroyed. Some of those Russian tanks were ridiculously well hidden and hard to spot, even after they had fired. I haven't played the WW2 games in a long time and I had gotten used to the open deserts and advanced optics of Shock Force 2, so it really surprised me to see my tanks blown to bits again and again by invisible T-34s. It was a lot tougher than the first mission. My useless AA half-tracks all got wiped out by the Soviet airplanes as well. Red Thunder is really interesting to me because the Soviet infantry get no real anti-tank capabilities like bazookas or panzerschrecks, so I can be much more aggressive with my tanks. I tried doing "thunder run" style maneuvers, just charging my tanks straight down the city streets at high speed and without infantry support, having them wreak havoc in the Soviet rear areas. Sometimes it worked surprisingly well. You can just drive straight up to enemy occupied buildings and blast them point blank and there's nothing they can do about it. When it came time to assault the objectives, I would lead with the tanks and have the infantry jog along behind, trying my best to use the tanks as cover. The Soviet infantry were mostly helpless and got slaughtered. Those T-34s were brutal though.

I get CTDs in all of the CMx2 games. They will all run fine but then CTD after an hour or two. It seems to have something to do with the shaders. If I turn the shaders off it works fine. Have you tried that? It's annoying but not a huge deal because the shaders look really awful on my computer anyway. Still, the CTDs happen even with the latest patches.

I don't know about Barbarossa but it would be cool if they skipped 1943 and went straight to 1942 instead; where the panzers were still grey and it was right at the height of the war with huge battles like Kharkov leading into the push to Stalingrad. They could make a whole game about Stalingrad and it would be cool. I would imagine that "Combat Mission: Stalingrad" would sell a lot more copies than Barbarossa as well.

I'm playing the 5th mission in the Russian campaign now as well. I seem to have gotten an absurdly lucky hit just now by destroying an Abrams with a single volley of 203mm shells. I wasn't even aiming at the tank either; I was aiming at the building in front of it. I was trying to destroy the buildings around the tank to open up more sight lines to it. The second shell in the very first volley of the fire mission just happened to overshoot the building and land directly on top of the rear deck of the tank. I couldn't see the tank at the time but I could hear that penetration sound effect. Once the dust cleared a few minutes later I saw it: So they can certainly be killed I guess. There are more tanks though and I'm sure that they will not go down nearly as easily as this one did.

Yeah I agree with this 100%. I played some CM1 scenarios not that long ago and it was interesting to see how different it was. It's not just the fortifications either. Troops in moderate or light cover like trees and bushes can be very resilient against even direct HE fire from tanks. In CM2 by comparison, it's not that uncommon to see entire bunched-up squads get vaporized by a single tank shell. CM2 is just much deadlier all across the board, while CM1 is so abstracted that you get casualties very slowly building up over a long period of time. I've felt for a long time that the CM2 engine works better in the modern war setting than it does for WW2. The CM2 engine did start with Shock Force after all. The extreme deadliness of the weapons, the higher degree of control you have over your troops, the high casualties and even the higher numbers of KIA compared to WIA all fit with the modern setting better than WW2. Even that "infantry running away from artillery" behavior that everyone complained about until the recent patch was more appropriate for the modern setting. If there is artillery or HE fire hitting near my infantry in Black Sea, I would WANT them to run away ASAP because chances are they are gonna get turned into meat paste within the next couple of minutes regardless of whether they're in cover or not. Infantry squads are smaller and more spread out in the modern setting too so it makes more sense for them to move around. In the WW2 games though, it makes no sense for a huge line of dozens of infantry to immediately abandon a long trench line and run away just because some mortars start hitting.

Very nice that these are on GOG now. I still have my old CDs for CMBO and CMBB but I seem to have lost CMAK. They don't cooperate on my computer now though. The game's clock doesn't work right and I can't rewind or fast forward the turns. If I even try to rewind the turn, it breaks the game somehow. I wonder why that is. The movement animations for the infantry are messed up too. Other than that, the game runs OK. I can play through a whole scenario as long as I do it in real time and never touch the forward or back buttons. That means I have to play it zoomed way out the whole time and I can't really tell what's going on so the game really isn't very playable. CMBB also has an issue where the framerate is awful unless I alt-tab out of the game and then go back in. Then it runs fine. So many bizarre issues.

Weird stuff like this happens in all the CM games to be honest. It seems to happen most often when units are very close to each other. When I was playing Black Sea one time, one of my Russian BMPs failed to spot an enemy Ukrainian BMP even though it was right out in the open, right in front of it at point blank range (like 50-60m away). The vehicles just sat there for quite a long time doing nothing until I eventually had to bring up an infantry squad in the next turn to blast the enemy BMP with a rocket. The infantry spotted it almost instantly. I remember taking a bunch of screenshots of the whole incident because I was like WTF. Then there will be other times where something will spot an enemy under seemingly impossible circumstances and then blow it up with a crazy trick shot from miles away through a huge forest and out the other side or whatever. These games can be unpredictable like that. I think the devs like it that way.

The main single-player campaigns for Red Thunder have a lot of really huge battles and it can definitely be pretty overwhelming. It's better to play some of the smaller single scenarios first, but once you get to playing the campaigns, you might want to play the Russian one first. The German campaign follows a huge mechanized force and you have dozens of tanks and halftracks packed with troops to deal with. I found it pretty overwhelming to deal with such a huge number of vehicles plus every infantry squad having its own carrier. At least with the Russians, you have mostly infantry and can just move everyone forward in large groups. You don't even have to worry about casualties that much. You just drop down a giant artillery barrage and then start throwing waves of men at the enemy. Remember that you can double click on units to select their entire formation and move them all at once. So if you double click a company HQ, you will select the entire company and you can move everyone together with the same command. That can help quite a bit.

I've seen friendly fire happen a lot in these games when it's at night or dawn/dusk. I've seen squads hose down multiple friendly vehicles like that so I don't think it's a bug. The tank commander really should've buttoned up though. There are rounds cracking just a few inches away from his head. It's not like he would know where they are coming from. In real life he would simply hear a loud CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK right next to his head and he would instantly duck down out of reflex. I've always thought tank commanders are too slow to button up in these games. I've had guys get killed by friendly small arms fire as well. One time I had a guy crouching next to a hedgerow and he was hosed down by a long burst from a friendly tank at close range. It was at night, there was no other shooting going on anywhere on the map, and no enemies nearby for hundreds of meters. The tank just opened up on its own and killed him out of the blue. In retrospect it might have been a ricochet off the hedgerow berm that actually killed him since other people say that only ricochets can kill friendlies it seems. It was hard to tell though as he was killed almost instantly in a hail of bullets. I suppose it's possible that one of the first bullets passed through him harmlessly, hit the berm, then immediately jumped back and killed him within a split second.

And then Notre Dame burns up... coincidence?

Yeah they don't explode when hit in real life. It's like shooting a metal tank full of water. It just punches a hole in the tank and the fuel starts leaking out. They don't explode in the game either. I saw a WW2 flamethrower demonstration in person once. They are also much more silent than you might think. There is no big WHOOOSH sound like you hear in movies. At least not with the small backpack flamethrowers. Flamethrower duty would still be very dangerous though because you have to get very close to the enemy. It's very hard to use them in CM for that reason. My flamethrower guys either get killed before they get close enough, or the enemy gets killed by other means before they get close enough. So they're useless either way. Even if they don't explode, it would still be really awful to have to carry one in a real war. You can run with them but they're very heavy and awkward to carry and you probably won't be able to react or take cover as quickly. If by some chance you manage to get close enough to use it, then your exact location is instantly broadcast to everyone around you for a mile in every direction, like a giant beacon that says SHOOT ME.

I don't think I would want to see this coming down the street

Okay that's interesting! Thanks for doing that test. Kinda makes me want to get into scenario design. I've played the CM games for a long time but never made any maps or scenarios for it. I still haven't played most of the CMSF scenarios, but most of the ones I've seen give loads of points for destroying enemy units and for occupying objectives. If there are preserve objectives, I haven't seen any yet that are worth so much that they can cancel out an entire Red force surrender and all other objectives. It would be very interesting to see a scenario that the Blue force can still lose even if they wipe out the entire Red force.

So is it possible to lose a scenario even if you force the enemy to surrender completely, just by blowing up too many buildings? I thought that if one side surrendered, they automatically forfeit all objectives. Even if I take massive losses, I've still always gotten Total Victories if I've forced the AI to surrender. In a more evenly-matched battle of course (or if the timer runs out), losing points from collateral damage might be enough to tip the scale away from you, so it's good to be careful. Like you said though, it's hard to balance things in CMSF. It's usually not even a question of whether the Blue force loses or not. It's just a matter of how many losses the Blue force takes before wiping the Red force out completely and forcing a surrender.

Does collateral damage even matter all that much? If you destroy so much of the enemy that it forces them to surrender completely, you still get a Total Victory even if you destroyed some of the buildings you weren't supposed to, right? At least that's what happened in the most recent scenario I played. I wasn't supposed to blow up the civilian houses on that map, yet I blew up some of them anyway, and I still got a Total Victory just by wiping out the enemy and forcing a surrender. The points I lost from blowing up buildings didn't really make much difference. That's my rule when playing these games. When in doubt, blow everything up.

Here's a lucky shot. I was just playing the U.S. Army, trying to be extra careful, advancing very slowly and cautiously, using dead ground to move troops forward and hull down positions for every vehicle and then everything went horribly wrong. I parked an M1 tank in a hull down position along the side of a road when a Kornet opened fire on it. Here's the view from the ATGM position at maximum zoom: The missile missed the tank, flying right over the top of it. It continued to fly for another 40 meters through the woods behind it until it just so happened to slam into a tree RIGHT in the middle of an infantry squad moving through the woods. The infantry were in dead ground behind that road embankment and were not even visible from the ATGM position, and I thought they would be safe moving through the woods. The missile miraculously flew past several other trees just so it could hit the one right in the center of the squad. One man was killed, another incapacitated, and every other member of the squad was wounded except for two. The next turn I tried to pull the tank back and hide it behind some trees, but part of its turret was still visible and it was knocked out from the front by a second missile. I guess you really don't wanna mess around with those Kornets.

I know I've been playing too much CM when I'm driving around and see a field and wonder how many hundreds of meters there are across it, or whether that building way off in the distance is within rifle range or not.

I was looking through my old screenshots folder and couldn't remember if I had posted these anywhere. An advancing Soviet rifleman stopped to take a shot with his Mosin at a German AT gun across the street. The view from the gun: The gun fired and the shell flew through the wooden fence, between the guy's legs, then through the front door of the house behind him, and then finally exploded against the opposite wall. The shell was flying mere inches from the ground. That was one lucky bastard! The gun crew was not so lucky considering what happened to them a few moments later. I thought that was one of the more unusual shots I've seen in these games.

There is an interesting paper I read a long time ago called Increasing Small Arms Lethality in Afghanistan: Taking Back the Infantry Half-Kilometer, by US Army Maj. Thomas Ehrhart. https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a512331.pdf You might find it interesting since it goes into a lot of detail about modern infantry doctrine and weapons. It argued that U.S. infantry have been very under-powered for the type of fighting they were doing in Afghanistan. Back in the early 20th century, the U.S. went into WW1 with a professional army and a doctrine emphasizing marksmanship and accurate volleys of long-distance rifle fire. They used bigger rifles and bullets that could hit things pretty effectively out to 500m, and be very lethal even at 1000m. Going into WW2, Korea and then Vietnam, the U.S. had gotten used to dealing with large conscript armies on a very different type of battlefield, and doctrine shifted away from marksmanship and moved toward fire and maneuver tactics, with the emphasis on putting out a high volume of suppressive fire at shorter distances. Current U.S. equipment, training, and doctrine are optimized for fighting on level terrain at ranges less than 300m. According to that paper, "Not only is the current U.S. infantryman less equipped to kill his enemy than his World War I predecessor, he is carrying far more weight than him." The 5.56 ammo used these days is less lethal and less effective at long range. In Afghanistan, the Taliban liked to park themselves up on mountaintops and just plink away at distant U.S. infantry using heavy machine guns (like the DShK with those giant 12.7x108mm bullets) and mortars, and the U.S. infantry down in the valleys would not be able to put down effective return fire. The heavily-laden U.S. infantry could not effectively maneuver in the rugged terrain and high altitudes, and would often have to sit there helplessly until they either pulled out or called in big guns and air support. CM seems to simulate this kind of thing pretty well. Weapon ballistics are what these games do best IMO. Sometimes I'm surprised at how under-powered my infantry is and I find myself relying very heavily on my vehicles and big guns in order to do anything. I remember playing many Shock Force scenarios where my U.S. infantry are getting sniped away or getting hit by DShK fire at long range and my infantry are helpless to do anything about it. Or maybe I'll pour thousands of rounds of 5.56 ammo into a building only to realize that it had little effect. I don't know much at all about British or the other NATO forces though, but they seem to be pretty similar to the U.S. I haven't played with the other Western forces very much. At least with the U.S, their vehicles and artillery and air support is their biggest asset. The infantry is there to be bodyguards and scouts for their vehicles. Once the infantry spots something, the vehicles roll up and destroy it. With the Syrians, it seems their best tactics are to either ambush the enemy at close range, or snipe and harass them at long range and then relocate before they can call in those big guns. Getting into an extended firefight at medium range is what Western forces are best at. They carry loads of ammo and their good morale and high volume of fire means they will always get fire superiority eventually and win. With the Syrians (especially the uncons/insurgents), running out of ammo can be a big concern, so you want to either harass and ambush or hit the enemy as hard as you can as quickly as possible with everything you have, to try and overrun their positions.

I love the camera work in that. A lot of stable, wide angle shots and no nauseating shakey-cam like you see all the time in modern film-making. You can actually see what's happening. Looks like an interesting movie too, I'll have to check it out. I don't get to see a lot of East German anti-fascist films.

I totally agree with the artillery thing. A while ago I read a memoir of a company commander in WW2 and he described walking artillery fire onto distant enemy positions just by the sound of it. He hit something too because he saw something really big blow up on the horizon. Artillery is obviously really, really loud and you can hear the shells flying through the air. Experienced soldiers can often tell where a shell is gonna hit before it even hits just by the sound it makes in the air. They'll know whether it's incoming or outgoing, and they'll know if they need to take cover or not. I don't care if artillery called in outside of LOS is inaccurate because sometimes you don't need it to be accurate. Also, for years I've wished they would add the ability to adjust the length and intensity of fire missions in progress. If I order a long, slow harassing mission on suspected enemy positions and accidentally start hitting a really important target (like a huge infantry concentration that I didn't know was there before), I want my FO to start yelling into the radio to keep firing and speed it up. I can't do that though. I would have to cancel the mission and call in an entirely new one and wait for spotting rounds to hit a target they were already hitting just a minute ago.

No mention of CM: Stalingrad? Any early war east front stuff would be good. Instead of going back a year to 1943 for their next east front game, I wish they would skip a year or two and go back to when the German tanks were still grey. I'm just tired of seeing yellow German tanks in every game. Also I love playing as the Soviets. Charging into battle with waves of tank riders into a gigantic artillery barrage is an experience you just don't get anywhere else.

I take it that means Shock Force 2 is doing well then? It's a shame to hear about the decline of wargaming. I'm quite young myself and it makes me wonder what wargaming will look like decades down the line (if it doesn't just die out). CM is like the dream wargame I had when I was playing with little toy soldiers and reading history books as a kid. I was amazed when I first saw CM with the 1:1 soldier representation and all that. Seems like one big cause of that decline would just be the sheer number of games there are now. It's like we're living in a golden age of video games where there are thousands and thousands of them to choose from. Someone else mentioned Paradox games like CK2 and EU4, and just those alone can suck hundreds of hours of your life away from you. I've spent way too much time with just CK2. Then there's all these other countless genres that I want to try out now and then. On top of that, people tend to work longer hours these days for less pay, and at least in the USA, the vast majority of people here live paycheck to paycheck or are outright in debt. So who has time to sit down and learn how to play complicated wargames? Gamers these days seem to demand infinite replayability for the cheapest possible price and the lowest possible effort, and it's easy to find some cheap game on Steam for a few bucks until you get bored of it and then go on to the next cheap game. It doesn't seem like there is really any answer to that.