Bozowans

I always play on Iron. Even on Iron, if you click on an enemy soldier then it will tell if you they are part of an HQ team or AT gun crew or whatever. It would be better if it just told you nothing.

I remember that in CM1, the game would fool you about the location of distant shooters. At very long range, you might get a "?" mystery contact that is several tiles away from their true location. Then after you've blasted that spot with area fire, you discover later on that their real location is 50m off to the right or whatever. That was a pretty cool way to handle the problem. Whatever happened to that? I've always felt that CM2 gives you way too much info about the enemy. Not just with the sound exploits, but with other things as well, like being able to tell who is an enemy HQ team and who isn't at 1000+ meters or whatever. Or the game telling you the exact moment that an enemy MG or AT gun position is destroyed or abandoned. Or always being able to tell the exact type of enemy tank. I liked how in CM1, your troops could mis-identify enemy tanks, thinking one is a Tiger when it really isn't or whatever.

Sometimes I think 4.0 works better with Black Sea, because the weapons there are so deadly that you want your men to always be mobile and fall back if they come under fire. Plus the infantry movement changes and the ability for them to take cover around building corners are big game changers. It doesn't make much sense for a bunch of WWII troops packed into a trenchline to abandon their positions and run around under artillery fire though.

A collection of images from the Black Sea Russian campaign: Ukrainian surface-to-air missiles streak across the early morning sky toward an encroaching Su-25 Frogfoot, shooting it down. A Russian soldier prepares to fire a mortar shell in support of an assault crossing of the Dnepr River. The assault begins! Russian BMP-3s cross the Dnepr river. Russian soldiers disembark from their carriers and advance inland under a smokescreen and the covering fire of their BMPs. An abandoned bicycle lies in a field swept by intense Russian fire. The dance with death.

Yeah that's pricey but I'm very tempted to bite the bullet and get it. Has anyone here read any of the other books on there? That book "Turning Point" looking at Stalingrad from the Russian perspective looks interesting.

Thanks for the recommendation. Seems a little hard to find though. It's not available on Amazon at the moment. If Battlefront makes another East Front game I wish they would skip 1943 and go straight for '42 instead, when the panzers were still grey and you had the most critical battles of the war, like Stalingrad and the battles leading up to it like Kharkov. I was playing Kharkov: Disaster on the Donets earlier and it made me want a CM game for that.

Ivan: "Hmmm, this big German tank just rolled right up to us! It's only a few feet away!" *scratches chin* Ivan: "Evgeni! What should we do? Should we run away?" Evgeni: "Nyet! If you put your hands up to your face like this, they can't see us! You see? It's working!" Ivan: "I don't think playing peek-a-boo with the Germans is going to help us!" Evgeni: "You have a better idea? Don't just stand there!" Ivan: "I'm thinking...."

One time I played a pretty extreme version of coop, where each side of the battle was controlled by a different big group of people. There were platoon and company commanders and so on, and each tank would be controlled by a different person. I was a company commander and had 3 people under me. It was absolute chaos and kind of hilarious, and honestly seemed more realistic as well. You had orders being confused or misunderstood, people arguing about orders or not responding, and then the collective trauma of seeing their units get blown to bits, and the overall morale of the group rising and falling with each turn. I never played any kind of coop with just one other person before. That actually sounds pretty fun.

If people are whining and demanding to see new content or screenshots, it means they are emotionally invested in the product and enjoy it and want to follow its development, which is not a bad thing.

Yeah this is definitely a product of modern movies. I remember this being one of the criticisms of Band of Brothers back in the day -- that the soldiers cussed too much and didn't really talk like that back then. I think at least one of the vets that the show was based on complained about it. Trying to look that up again I found this: https://www.veteranstodayarchives.com/2010/06/14/but-we-didnt-talk-that-way-by-randy-ark-staff-writer/ It seems a lot of veterans complain about it. Modern movies are written by modern people, so they make the characters talk like modern Americans and use modern slang. It seems the trend of American soldiers cussing a lot in war started with Vietnam and continued from there. And nowadays we have Quentin Tarantino movies where the characters drop the F-bomb every other word in every sentence, and US Marines who talk the same way. On the other hand, the WW2 generation was a bunch of religious farm boys coming out of the depression, so it was a very different generation than what we are used to today. Many of them would get upset if you used "unchristian" language. One interesting excerpt from that article: “The f-word was used, but not a whole lot, because our Platoon Officers and NCO’s would reprimand those who used it, and they knew that they could get extra duty for using foul language.” Now that's interesting. I had never heard of soldiers actually being reprimanded for cursing. I've never seen that in any movie.

Yeah I agree 100%. It would be pretty awesome to see a bunch of Hueys flying in, bullets pinging off of their sides as they drop troops into a hot LZ. Or how about commanding a battalion of ARVN troops with M41 tanks as they advance across terrain blasted into a moonscape by B-52s? The battles would certainly be a lot more evenly matched than in Shock Force, as the North Vietnamese were tough opponents, competently led and sometimes able to outright defeat the US in open battle, like : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ong_Thanh I don't expect to ever see a CM game cover that but maybe years from now there will be a good realistic CM-style or maybe Graviteam-style game that does. There have been plenty of popular Vietnam games over the years, so I don't think it's too much of a niche.

I always thought Vietnam would be pretty cool as well in a game like this. You have a lot of different units and factions and toys to play with, from US forces to ARVN and then PAVN and NLF. Maybe even throw the French in there as well. Lots of weapons, from WW2 stuff to '60s and '70s Cold War stuff. You have good variety in terrain, with jungles, forests, flat coastal plains, open fields and rice paddies, and the central highlands. You've got mountains, river deltas, villages, firebases, towns and cities. It was a really long and complicated war with a lot of savage battles and long campaigns with high casualties on both sides. So it's fertile ground for wargaming I think.

I'm sure Battlefront gets tired of working on the same WW2 and modern war stuff all the time. You know what the next great CM game will be? Combat Mission: Star Trek! There are loads of Star Trek nerds that play games with ship battles and obsess over the technical details of phasers and torpedoes and warp engines and whatnot, but where's all the ground combat? It would be perfect for CM. Picture Bajoran resistance fighters hiding out in the hills, fighting the Cardassian occupation forces. Or Starfleet troops battling the Jem'Hadar during the Dominion Wars. Or how about Klingons? The only issue is that melee combat would have to be introduced, so the Klingons could use their bat'leths.

A fierce close range firefight erupts between Russian soldiers and a Ukrainian HQ team. Suddenly, a shell from an overwatching T-90 detonates over the heads of the Ukrainians, killing one of them instantly. The other man managed to fall back, but didn't make it far before another shell detonated over him, killing him as well. Those tanks are nasty.

But you get loads and loads of StG 44s to play with! I suppose the heavy tanks are my biggest problem with the late war. IS-2s are cool and all, but those guns are so big that they'll vaporize an infantry squad in one hit. It's even worse in Black Sea, where if an infantry squad sticks their heads out for even a second, they take a super accurate air-bursting tank shell right in the face from miles away. When those things are around everything else kinda goes by the wayside. I love the light tanks and armored cars in CMFI.

I would absolutely love some early war content, but why dislike the late war? Too many super heavy tanks?

Very good choice there. The Italians are my favorite. It's like playing a WW1 army almost. I had a lot of fun with that campaign where you have to counterattack the American beachhead in Sicily with masses of Italian infantry with lots of rifles and lots of little French tanks.

That's indeed an annoying issue when it happens. The squad AI really should be less likely to run away, and far more likely to stay put and cower for long periods, especially if in cover. Can the AI not detect when it's in cover, like if it's in an action spot with a trench or foxhole? If there was a huge battle going on all around me, with deafening explosions and tanks rolling at me, I would not want to stick my head up AT ALL, much less get up and run around. I would be trembling and pissing myself at the bottom of my hole. I posted this in another thread but if they wanted to make the AI better at avoiding HE fire, they should make the AI duck and cower BEFORE the artillery shells start landing around them, not just run away when shells start hitting. Arty shells are loud and sound like a freight train flying through the air. Sometimes you can even see them, like little black sausages flying overhead, and hear the report of the guns firing in the distance. After some experience, you can tell if rounds are gonna hit near you or not, and you can tell the difference between incoming and outgoing. If troops are walking along a road, hear the *thump thump thump* of guns in the distance, and then hear the shells ripping through the atmosphere toward them, chances are they will all freak out and scramble for the nearest ditch before the rounds start landing. Mortars can be really quiet though and are very dangerous because of that. The weird thing though is that in CM, troops already seem to know when artillery is gonna hit nearby, because you can hear them yell about it. They will shout "Achtung, artillerie!" and whatnot as soon as off-map artillery starts falling into the game world. Why can't they make the troops duck down and cower then? If they're moving, and hear shells coming in, they should cancel your orders and cower. That would fix the whole issue right there.

Attacking SMG troops in the woods is no joke that’s for sure. Reminds me of trying to clear Soviet SMG squads out of the woods in Red Thunder. Not pretty! Sometimes there’s not much you can do without heavy losses, especially if they are deep inside thick woods. Then the fighting is man-to-man without the aid of all those fancy fire support doo-hickeys. The only things I can think of: 1) Fire into the woods from multiple angles rather than just straight on. Sometimes you can use HE fire to blow up trees on the outskirts of the woods, allowing you to fire farther inside. Very useful if you have a lot of tanks with a lot of ammo. Might not work if the enemy is deep in the woods though. 2) Like Dynaman said, when your scouts get mowed down and you know when and where the enemy will start shooting, park the rest of your men just outside that spot, and have them target the ground in front of them. Some of their shots will go high and fly into the enemy even if you’re not aiming right at them. Sometimes this alone can break the enemy and make them fall back a bit, or at least suppress them. 3) Sometimes I like to have my men crawl forward through the woods instead of run. When they’re running through the woods, they have very poor spotting ability, especially to the flanks. Sometimes they will run right past an enemy and not see them. At least when crawling, troops seem more willing to stop and open fire when they see something. 4) Advance on a broad front with overwhelming numbers. If the enemy has a platoon in the woods, send a whole company in there. Have one squad fire blindly into the woods in front of them while another crawls forward. Then have the crawling squad start firing and then leapfrog the other one.

You realize that TIK cited all of those books in the video you're arguing against right? They're right there in the bibliography. He's cited those books before too. Since you seem to be an expert on the subject with more than 20 years of experience, as you said, you might want to find the passages in those books that debunk the whole thing right? I mean, you could debunk TIK's whole video using his own sources. That would be pretty cool right? This is true. Germany was reliant on coal, but then why could they never come close to matching the industrial output of either the Soviet Union or the USA? They couldn't even match either one, much less both, despite the Soviets being utterly devastated in 1941 and having to relocate a lot of their industry. Since the Germans were converting a great deal of their coal into synthetic oil, an expensive process, the oil would have, of course, been more valuable to them than the coal, otherwise they wouldn't go through that expensive process. I haven't had a great deal of time lately, but I was reading a little bit about the Allies' Oil Campaign of WW2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_campaign_of_World_War_II There is an interesting passage in there (emphasis mine): "Despite its successes, by the spring of 1944 the Combined Bomber Offensive had failed to severely damage the German economy or significantly interrupt production of a vital item. The oil campaign was the first to accomplish these goals.[32] The US strategic bombing survey identified "catastrophic" damage.[20] Of itself, German industry was not significantly affected by attacks on oil targets as coal was its primary source of energy. And in its analysis of strategic bombing as a whole the USSBS identified the consequences of the breakdown of transportation resulting from attacks against transportation targets as "probably greater than any other single factor" in the final collapse of the German economy.[33] Several prominent Germans, however, described the oil campaign as critical to the defeat of Nazi Germany. Adolf Galland, Inspector of Fighters of the Luftwaffe until relieved of command in January 1945, wrote in his book "the most important of the combined factors which brought about the collapse of Germany",[34] and the Luftwaffe's wartime leader, Hermann Göring, described it as "the utmost in deadliness".[19]:287 Albert Speer, writing in his memoir, said that "It meant the end of German armaments production."[4]:412–4 It has been stated to have been "effective immediately, and decisive within less than a year".[35] Luftwaffe Field Marshal Erhard Milch, referring to the consequences of the oil campaign, claimed that "The British left us with deep and bleeding wounds, but the Americans stabbed us in the heart."[36]" So it seems that even some of the Germans themselves thought that oil was the main reason they lost. Albert Speer suggested that their synthetic oil production was essentially the only reason the armaments industry could keep going. While the nation itself relied on coal for most of its energy (electricity and so on), the armaments industry is singled out as being critically dependent on oil. This pretty much backs up what I said earlier, and the points made by Anand Toprani and in TIK's video, that oil was what allowed the Germans to keep fighting the war, but the lack of oil is what stopped them from winning it.

Do you have a source for your claim that Germany didn't ration oil in 1941? You put that claim in bold even. You've been vague with the sources you've been using in this entire thread so far. According to the sources I've seen (In TIK's videos, he's mostly just quoting directly from books as far as I can tell. He uses the money he makes from videos to buy more books, then makes videos on those books.) Hitler himself ordered severe rationing of oil in 1941. Their economics minister said the economy was receiving less than 18 percent of its peacetime oil quantities. Before that even, in the early days of the war it seems you needed ration stamps to get access to any kind of oil (like cooking oil). And what exactly do you mean by not being "fully mobilized for war" even in 1941? Germany had already conquered most of Europe by that point. You make it sound like Germany was in happy peacetime mode with few problems at all. You mean not fully mobilized compared to the Total-War-Entire-Country-At-Arms-Facing-Complete-Annihilation Mode they were on later? And what do you mean by "bad management of industry and bad policies in general"? That's very vague. What policies? You're also comparing Germany to Britain, which is not a good comparison because Britain also lacked essential supplies of oil. At that time, almost all of the oil in the world was coming from the USA, Venezuela, and Russia. Anand Toprani argues that Britain ceased to be a great power not during WW2 or after, but before WW2 even began, due to their inability to achieve energy security with the dawn of the oil age. Britain had to import all of its oil, and was under U-Boat blockade itself. Nazi Germany, in order to win the war, had to defeat not only the Soviets, but the USA as well, which would have been impossible without Germany achieving its own energy security. Now, with the claim I made on mortars, I got that from the thread's favorite Youtube guy. Look at the chart at the 21:40 mark: This is a pretty good question and I'd like to do more research on this myself when I have more time. Petroleum is found in practically everything today. The global economy is hopelessly dependent on it and would utterly collapse without it. I imagine it would be less so back in the 1940s, but to what extent exactly? For war production, oil would of course be very important, not just for gasoline for vehicles and tanks and planes, but for the production of the industrial infrastructure itself. For construction equipment, road building, for the production and maintaining of machines used for producing other machines, for machines for producing weapons, and for chemicals and explosives production and so on. Germany was probably the most powerful industrial country in the world in 1900. What changed from 1900 to WW2? Was it because Germany lost WW1? But Germany's infrastructure was pretty much intact after that war, and that war was devastating for the Allies just as it was the Germans. And then the Great Depression was a worldwide thing. So could it be the dawn of the oil age then? If Germany was awash in cheap oil like the USA was, I think things would have been very different.

Ok, watch this video: This is a seminar by the same guy who wrote "The First War for Oil: The Caucasus, German Strategy, and the Turning Point of the War on the Eastern Front, 1942." That was written in 2016, and he wrote his Ph.D dissertation on this, so he's not just some internet Youtube guy. I found it to be pretty interesting. He's a specialist in energy geopolitics and served as a historian with the US State Department and US Central Command. He argues that yes, Germany lost mainly due to oil, and the turning point of the war was not Stalingrad, not Moscow in 1941, or anything like that, but that Germany lost the war right when it was winning -- in the middle of 1940, when Britain refused to surrender and end the blockade. WW2 was an industrialized war of production, not of manpower. In fact, the numbers between the Allies and Axis were not really all that different. But comparing the economies between Germany and both the US, Britain and the Soviet Union, it is by no means a contest of equals. It's like comparing an 800 lb gorilla with a chimpanzee. It was never going to be a fair fight in any way. I thought it was pretty common knowledge that the Allies were able to massively out-produce the Germans, producing several times the number of tanks, planes, artillery shells, ships, and so on. Why? Oil. Germany was, of course, a mostly horse-drawn infantry army and had relatively tiny numbers of tanks. From June 1941 to the beginning of 1943, what weapon did the Soviets massively increase production of more than anything else? Mortars. Because they were facing an army of mostly infantry and didn't feel the need to massively increase production of tanks and anti-tank weapons, because the Germans were never able to produce tanks in significant numbers (because of, again, oil). The Germans had loads of men already. Nazi Germany was one of the most militarized countries in all of human history. When looking at it in terms of oil, it's remarkable that the Germans managed to even last as long as they did, but this was because of their synthetic fuel plants. They allowed the Germans to fight the war, to tread water so to speak, but not to win it. When those were bombed to oblivion in 1944, Nazi Germany collapsed along with it.

Go ahead and make that video, I'll watch it. I'm having trouble buying this. You're saying that a lack of reserves, essentially lack of manpower, was as equally important as oil? Why? The German army outnumbered the Soviet army in 1941 -- the most critical year of the war. And I don't believe superior numbers in raw manpower are anywhere near as important as the ability to field large numbers of armored and motorized divisions. Not in a war like WW2. I'd like to read that "The First War for Oil" article myself, but it seems to be locked away in one of those scholarly journal databases you have to pay a subscription for. Maybe I can get access to it from my university. It's an interesting discussion but I'm having a hard time buying a lot of the arguments in this thread. Like "decisions win or lose wars, not oil." Really? Okay, well the decisions one makes depends on the economics of the situation. The reason Britain was able to maintain such a huge empire in the 19th century was because of coal. They were like the Saudi Arabia of coal at the time. They were the only country capable of powering such a huge fleet. They didn't just decide to be a big empire all of a sudden. WW2 was the age of oil. You might ask, "If oil is so important then why did the Germans not go straight for the Caucasus from the very beginning? Why advance on a broad front and go to Moscow?" As someone else mentioned in this thread, Hitler believed that if you kicked in the door the whole rotten structure would come crashing down. They weren't planning on a long war and having to make a specific thrust toward the Caucasus like they did. They didn't plan that far ahead, but they still needed oil to win the war, and it would have been impossible to win a massive, years-long industrialized war of annihilation without it. Again, as Hitler himself said, “Either I get the oil of Maikop and Grozny, or I must put an end to this war.”

Yes, you're right, but you're getting into Hitler's long-term goals for invading the USSR, when the topic of the thread is not necessarily why the Germans invaded the USSR, but why the Germans lost the war. Yes, they wanted to turn themselves into a settler-colonialist state, turning Ukraine into a bread basket for the German people, but that would have taken many years and decades to accomplish -- "Thousand Year Reich" and all. With the British blockade, the lack of oil was a far more pressing and immediate concern. The German economy was receiving less than 18 percent of its peacetime oil quantities, and suddenly had to meet demand not just for Germany, but for all the new territories it just conquered as well. Several German generals estimated that they had only a few months of oil left, and needed to act fast to capture more. "The occupied territories would drain Germany's meager petroleum reserves within a year unless the Third Reich took immediate action to expand its supplies by invading the Soviet Union" according to the author of "The First War for Oil: The Caucasus, German Strategy, and the Turning Point of the War on the Eastern Front, 1942."

Did you watch the whole video? Because I think you've been misrepresenting some of his arguments. I agree that he used a bit of a clickbait title, and yeah he started off with an attention-grabbing simple one-liner like that, but he goes into detail about all those points for the next 45 minutes. For instance, not having enough troops to take and hold the Caucasus. Yes, but why did they not have enough troops? Because of oil. They were in an oil crisis and were on a time limit so to speak. They needed to capture the oil fields as quickly as possible in an all-or-nothing effort, but did not have enough armored and motorized divisions to make it work. Marching on foot or bicycles across the vast expanse of the USSR was never going to work. Oil was absolutely necessary. If Germany was a big oil power and they had dozens of large, well-supplied motorized and tank divisions then yeah, maybe they could've done it, but they didn't, because Germany didn't have enough oil to maintain such a large motorized force. Meanwhile, they were now at war with the United States, the largest oil power in the world. Up until 1945, the USA had produced over 60% of all the oil in human history. Bad management, incoherent German leadership, strategic or operational errors in this campaign or that, in the end, didn't really matter toward the outcome of the war, because Germany was doomed right from the very beginning. Germany needed to become an oil power in order to win, gambled on it, and lost. And you didn't answer my question about why you think Hitler thought grain was more important than oil. Where did Hitler say that? Food is important yes, and they would have needed to take Ukraine before the Caucasus (because it's right in the way for one thing), but the logistics network needed to bring food, gasoline and other supplies back and forth across vast conquered territories with poor infrastructure and rapidly changing front lines also depends on oil. The "logistics and vast material superiority of the Allies," as you said, also depends on oil. Oil is the underlying resource that makes everything work. Without the oil, you're not even gonna get the food. I'm not saying you're wrong, but the guy in the video posted a bibliography including about 13 books and 4 articles, along with a lecture about the importance of oil in grand strategy from the Harvard Kennedy School.