Bozowans

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. 

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.

Not taken away in a straight jacket, I mean i committed to actually purchasing A combat mission game. 
After months of playing the various demos (except the Red Thunder Demo that insisted I use an activation key), and watching youtube AAR uploads.....comparing versions, reading multitudes of reviews...and sifting  the useful from the useless, and as we all know, there is a lot more of the latter to be found on the Interweb sites.
I Really like the look of the Normandy theatre, lots of interesting and familiar battles I can relate to.  But I had to put that on the back burner for now as the multiple addons and big pack offers were pushing the price up ...just one more...just one more.....just... 
Anyway I then looked at the latest offering Final Blitzkrieg, the Demo again gave an excellent feel of the game and theatre, but it was too cold and too many trees for my liking. 
So it was off to look at the Red Thunder (on youtube because of the activation key issue)  that became my favourite, and I see it is a very popular theatre for support....and it had all the features anyone could want, troops riding tanks (contentious subject) and the flame throwers....plus all the campaigns and missions had already been designed with the AI keys implemented. And it had no DLC, so out of the box it was ready to go with all the content in it.....that was very tempting, But I kept coming back to the Fortress Italy theatre...
 
Fortress Italy....The very much overlooked theatre of many wargames, and the Unique makeup of the Italian forces in the game really made manouvering as a cohesive force a special challenge. Spotters without radios, operating old French Tanks alongside the might of the German forces, A combination that gave me that extra dimension when ordering forces around....The Italians never had any reason to fight, Mussolini or Hitler in charge of the military forces .....talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place.  With the varied terrain, different weather conditions in the campaign, changing forces depending on the timeframe.....it had just one thing missing....British forces...which is easily resolved with the Gustav line DLC that adds Commonwealth forces.  Looking at the Battlefront site there is the offer of the Bundle pack, And that is what sold it for me......Fortress Italy with Gustav line is the one I purchased today, and looking forward to getting some decent spare time for gaming. ...
Oh....and Hello everyone
 

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.

No, he specifically states that Germany had always suffered from a lack of oil, and it was this critical lack of a fuel source that hamstrung them. He doesn't make broad generalizations about resources, only how a lack of available and accessible oil reserves severely limited Germany's ability to wage mechanized war, which is true. 
This is a contradiction. If his main goal was Ukraine, then why weren't all efforts devoted there? Why was it supposedly second on his list if it was his main concern? 
Unless you are disputing all the various sources that state the opposite, this is unfounded. Germany had a very limited reserve of fuel from the beginning. He goes through everything, showing why Germany could only support the small amount of mechanized divisions it had, and why many were trying to reduce that number even more. They had no fuel reserves in 41, nevermind 44. 
This is a gross over-generalization that isn't even true until post-Stalingrad.
No good deed goes unpunished. Believe what you wish, I'm washing my hands of this thread. 

He says all of this in the video though. You just made his point -- that the lack of oil ensured Germany's defeat from the beginning. And he didn't claim that oil was the only reason they lost, just that it was a major one, and probably the most significant one when looking at the grand scale. He didn't claim that Germany was defeated after they ran out of fuel either. His argument was not that the Panzer armies ran out of fuel and then were defeated, but that Germany lost because they didn't have enough oil to expand their armored and mechanized forces and keep them going to the level they needed to win the war. They had enough fuel to fight the war, but not to win it. They only had just enough fuel to run what little tanks they had, could only keep some of them activated at any one time, and even had to downscale mechanization from lack of fuel. At a time when the Soviets were motorizing and mechanizing their own armies on a massive scale, Germany was having to re-equip some of their recon units with bicycles. In late 1941, fuel rations were so tight that Germany's largest truck factory had to shut down production at one point.
And then you have Hitler himself saying "If I do not get the oil of Maikop and Grozny, then I must end the war." Another one of the sources the guy used in the video said "The loss of the Caucasus would deprive the Soviet Union of half of its oil reserves and 80-90 percent of its crude oil production, refinery throughput, and pipeline capacity." So taking the Caucasus would have allowed Germany to expand their mechanization and offensive capability dramatically, while strangling the Soviets' ability to do the same, which could have been a major turning point of the war, or so he argues. The Germans did manage to take some of those oil fields, but were militarily defeated and driven out before they were able to make significant use of them.
You also made a claim that "for Hitler the Ukrainian grain had a priority over the oil of the Caucasus". Where are you getting that from? Certainly it was a major priority, and the guy in the video said that. He put up another Hitler quote in there that said the "raw materials and agriculture of the Ukraine were vitally necessary for the future prosecution of the war." So it's not like the Germans were only looking at oil and nothing else. Even if what you said was true, and that Hitler thought the grain was more important than oil, that doesn't make it true. That only says what Hitler thought. Not what was actually the most important resource.

I've been getting back into CM lately after a long time and I haven't noticed that issue before. That's unfortunate. When I read the patch notes for the 4.0 upgrade for the first time and it said the AI would "proactively avoid incoming HE fire", I got excited and thought that they would duck down and cower from it better, not just get up and run away like that.
Maybe this has already been discussed ad nauseam on here, but whenever I read memoirs or eyewitness accounts from the war, soldiers often say that you could hear incoming artillery shells from a long way off, and sometimes even see them flying through the air. After some experience, you can start to tell if an incoming shell will land next to you or not, so you know when to take cover. That seems like the best way to fix the issue. Troops in CM already seem to be able to tell when artillery is coming in, because you can hear them yell about it. They'll shout "Incoming! Take cover!" and so on. Instead of running away, can't they make it so the troops proactively hit the dirt and cower before the shells start landing? More experienced troops should be better at it of course. Once they hear shells whistling in, veterans should be smart enough to know when to keep their heads down at the bottom of their holes, and not break cover and run out into the open. If you have a movement order going on, and the troops detect artillery coming in, they should cancel it and cower. Conscripts and green troops could just ignore the incoming shells, and only react to them afterward.

Great screenshots, Bozowans!

The great human wave attack on Hofen! From the scenario "Day of Attrition". This is supposed to be one of the opening German attacks on the first day of the Bulge.


 
In this scenario, the Germans get two battalions of Volksgrenadiers and not much else. I think they have around 700 men in total. They must cross huge areas of open ground and capture two cities with little artillery support and no tank support, and no vehicles except a few trucks. They have some HMG platoons and some mortars, but their greatest asset is their enormous numbers of MP44s. Some squads are outfitted almost entirely with MP44s. So I figured my greatest chance was to attack en masse -- a giant human wave to cross the fields and get within rifle range as quickly as possible, so I can use the superior firepower of the MP44s.


 
To my surprise, the advance goes much more smoothly than expected. Many of the American units are overrun and annihilated, and I take many prisoners.



 
German troops overrun and destroy a battery of AT guns, gunning down the crews with their MP44s:

 
German troops fire at retreating US infantry:

 
About halfway there, some of the Germans halt while they wait for a smoke barrage to come in and cover the final assault on the town. They come under US artillery fire, but for the most part, the Germans are advancing too quickly for the shells to zero in on them.


 
I managed to storm the town and drive the Americans out with ease, but before I could reorganize and move on to the next objective, the game seemed to bug out and it seems I'm unable to finish the scenario. All the movement orders for my whole force stopped working all of a sudden and nobody will move or even fire at the enemy. It's like my army is a bunch of robots and someone hit the killswitch on them, and the whole force shut down all at once. Very strange thing.

Yeah same here. After playing CM for a long time, it's hard to go back to other RTS games, since I constantly want to rewind and watch what happened. It's fun to be able to zoom down to eye level and analyze every single little bullet impact and ricochet from as many different angles you want.
It's hard to say what the best CM game is. They are all pretty much the same game anyway, but each one plays slightly differently since the army organizations are different. If I HAD to pick one and only one, it would probably be CMBN though. It has the most content for it. 

The great human wave attack on Hofen! From the scenario "Day of Attrition". This is supposed to be one of the opening German attacks on the first day of the Bulge.


 
In this scenario, the Germans get two battalions of Volksgrenadiers and not much else. I think they have around 700 men in total. They must cross huge areas of open ground and capture two cities with little artillery support and no tank support, and no vehicles except a few trucks. They have some HMG platoons and some mortars, but their greatest asset is their enormous numbers of MP44s. Some squads are outfitted almost entirely with MP44s. So I figured my greatest chance was to attack en masse -- a giant human wave to cross the fields and get within rifle range as quickly as possible, so I can use the superior firepower of the MP44s.


 
To my surprise, the advance goes much more smoothly than expected. Many of the American units are overrun and annihilated, and I take many prisoners.



 
German troops overrun and destroy a battery of AT guns, gunning down the crews with their MP44s:

 
German troops fire at retreating US infantry:

 
About halfway there, some of the Germans halt while they wait for a smoke barrage to come in and cover the final assault on the town. They come under US artillery fire, but for the most part, the Germans are advancing too quickly for the shells to zero in on them.


 
I managed to storm the town and drive the Americans out with ease, but before I could reorganize and move on to the next objective, the game seemed to bug out and it seems I'm unable to finish the scenario. All the movement orders for my whole force stopped working all of a sudden and nobody will move or even fire at the enemy. It's like my army is a bunch of robots and someone hit the killswitch on them, and the whole force shut down all at once. Very strange thing.

The great human wave attack on Hofen! From the scenario "Day of Attrition". This is supposed to be one of the opening German attacks on the first day of the Bulge.


 
In this scenario, the Germans get two battalions of Volksgrenadiers and not much else. I think they have around 700 men in total. They must cross huge areas of open ground and capture two cities with little artillery support and no tank support, and no vehicles except a few trucks. They have some HMG platoons and some mortars, but their greatest asset is their enormous numbers of MP44s. Some squads are outfitted almost entirely with MP44s. So I figured my greatest chance was to attack en masse -- a giant human wave to cross the fields and get within rifle range as quickly as possible, so I can use the superior firepower of the MP44s.


 
To my surprise, the advance goes much more smoothly than expected. Many of the American units are overrun and annihilated, and I take many prisoners.



 
German troops overrun and destroy a battery of AT guns, gunning down the crews with their MP44s:

 
German troops fire at retreating US infantry:

 
About halfway there, some of the Germans halt while they wait for a smoke barrage to come in and cover the final assault on the town. They come under US artillery fire, but for the most part, the Germans are advancing too quickly for the shells to zero in on them.


 
I managed to storm the town and drive the Americans out with ease, but before I could reorganize and move on to the next objective, the game seemed to bug out and it seems I'm unable to finish the scenario. All the movement orders for my whole force stopped working all of a sudden and nobody will move or even fire at the enemy. It's like my army is a bunch of robots and someone hit the killswitch on them, and the whole force shut down all at once. Very strange thing.

Lefties hate the IDF?  I'm a lefty and have immense respect for the IDF (I've even been to Israel twice on business, amazing place, visited Masada).  That doesn't mean I agree with all Israeli policy, or all my own country's policies.
Stringing up lefties?  You mean the ones who believe in an evidence-based world, not fairy tales?  The ones that know that climate change is real, as is evolution, and the world is not just 6000 years old, and that people with non-white skin are also people, as are women?   You mean them?   The ones that know that war is real and real people die in them (which is totally cool as long as it is not one's own precious self, yes?)?  The ones who actually know history because they read books instead of watching TV all day?   You mean those folks?  Some of them have a full lifetime of interest in military history and therefore love what CM offers.  Keep your insults to your f(*&ing self.  Let's stick to CM on this forum, there's folks of many differing views of the world here.

I've been getting back into CM lately after a long time and I haven't noticed that issue before. That's unfortunate. When I read the patch notes for the 4.0 upgrade for the first time and it said the AI would "proactively avoid incoming HE fire", I got excited and thought that they would duck down and cower from it better, not just get up and run away like that.
Maybe this has already been discussed ad nauseam on here, but whenever I read memoirs or eyewitness accounts from the war, soldiers often say that you could hear incoming artillery shells from a long way off, and sometimes even see them flying through the air. After some experience, you can start to tell if an incoming shell will land next to you or not, so you know when to take cover. That seems like the best way to fix the issue. Troops in CM already seem to be able to tell when artillery is coming in, because you can hear them yell about it. They'll shout "Incoming! Take cover!" and so on. Instead of running away, can't they make it so the troops proactively hit the dirt and cower before the shells start landing? More experienced troops should be better at it of course. Once they hear shells whistling in, veterans should be smart enough to know when to keep their heads down at the bottom of their holes, and not break cover and run out into the open. If you have a movement order going on, and the troops detect artillery coming in, they should cancel it and cower. Conscripts and green troops could just ignore the incoming shells, and only react to them afterward.

I've been getting back into CM lately after a long time and I haven't noticed that issue before. That's unfortunate. When I read the patch notes for the 4.0 upgrade for the first time and it said the AI would "proactively avoid incoming HE fire", I got excited and thought that they would duck down and cower from it better, not just get up and run away like that.
Maybe this has already been discussed ad nauseam on here, but whenever I read memoirs or eyewitness accounts from the war, soldiers often say that you could hear incoming artillery shells from a long way off, and sometimes even see them flying through the air. After some experience, you can start to tell if an incoming shell will land next to you or not, so you know when to take cover. That seems like the best way to fix the issue. Troops in CM already seem to be able to tell when artillery is coming in, because you can hear them yell about it. They'll shout "Incoming! Take cover!" and so on. Instead of running away, can't they make it so the troops proactively hit the dirt and cower before the shells start landing? More experienced troops should be better at it of course. Once they hear shells whistling in, veterans should be smart enough to know when to keep their heads down at the bottom of their holes, and not break cover and run out into the open. If you have a movement order going on, and the troops detect artillery coming in, they should cancel it and cower. Conscripts and green troops could just ignore the incoming shells, and only react to them afterward.