Hapless

After a full year and a half I've finally finished CMBN's original Road to Montebourg campaign. Only took me a decade to get round to it after buying CMBN! Here's the full playlist, there should be a link in the top right of the embed you can use to swap between missions:

The AI doesn't care, but air power has immense psychological value against human opponents. IIRC it gets significantly cheaper as 1944 goes on. By Final Blitzkrieg a strafing P-47 costs 30 points. That's not bad for 8 .50 cal MGs and 2400 rounds of ammo, but when you consider that you can buy ten of them and an FO for the cost of a Panther... quantity has a quality all of its own!

Not much I think I can add on top of the last few posts. We know that CM aims for centre mass and we know that's both realistic and infinitely easier to code than using a thousand variables to calculate exactly where the gunner should aim. We know that for some German tanks, presenting a hull-down target means the centre of mass is shifted from the effective armour of the hull front plate up to the less effective armour of the turret mantlet and the vulnerable muzzle/gun barrel. I think the question has gotten to be: how does the player manage that? In one corner we have "expect to get hit, get into the open so centre mass is the better protected hull front"; and in the other corner we have "don't risk getting hit at all, play pop-up from a hull-down position". There's an argument for both, but I know which point of view I would rather my opponent held. Two things I'd add would be: Testing is good, but unless it includes ingame behaviour then it's of limited use (and if you fight from a static exposed position with the pause command overriding the (reasonably sensible) TacAI then I'd love to play you). Ideally what we would need are examples from actual games under ingame conditions when players are trying to win. And finally: no one complains about this happening to Shermans. There are elements of this discussion that feel a lot like "Invincible Panzer Syndrome" vs reality. Heavy armour doesn't exclude any tank from basic tactical principles- it's insurance against the worst case possibility.

Well, in terms of point-to-point possibilities, you can always draw a line with the target command- you can do that from movement waypoints so you can pretty much draw LOS from anywhere you like. The downside that it's not 100% accurate... precisely because you're drawing simple LOS from one point to another instead of dealing with the complex actual LOS of units in CM.

Also to consider: the main gun barrel is kind of a huge lever, right? Everyone who's played CM has seen tanks rocking back on their suspension when they get hit, even if it doesn't penetrate- that's the sheer kinetic energy being absorbed the mass of the tank. Think about the amount of force that will make a 55 ton Tiger I physically move, then apply that force to the chunk of precision engineering at the breech end of the main gun. Sure, the gun barrel is expected to be subject to and absorb extreme forces, but only in one direction (forwards/backwards for recoil). The system isn't designed to deal with extreme lateral movements. So even if what we see ingame is a non-penetrating, white hit-text gun barrel hit that doesn't look like it should do that much, there's probably something terrible that's happened inside the turret. That is kind of a quibble though. The question is whether it happens unrealistically frequently in Combat Mission. It probably does, but I'd argue that that's got a lot to do with players being more aggressive, less cautious and essentially untrained compared to historical tankers. Actual data on the frequency of gun damage from real games (ie. not setting things up in the editor) as opposed to anecdotes seems like a sensible way forward.

What Tiger? You were just rolling down the street when suddenly there was a huge bang and the turret filled with smoke, screams, shrapnel and blood. It would be nice to have more details on the actual engagement, but I seriously doubt the surviving crew were either still inside the Pershing or in any kind of mental state to do anything by the time the second shot hit the muzzle brake. It seems unlikely that they had any idea what was going on. But we're getting a little sidetracked from the main point. It might be profitable for people to start sharing turns when they take gun damage so we can see how often it happens and what common factors there are. Because I know it barely ever happens to me, nor does it seem to happen very often when I specifically try to do it to my opponents.

A ) B ) You might be clutching at straws if you're trying to suggest that the gun barrels of all tanks from all nations suffered fewer than 3 frontal hits in the entirety of WW2, whether there was anyone there with a camera to record it or not. C ) The greater point is that assuming that it never ever happened ever in WW2 does not mean that it wouldn't happen in CM, even if CM was 100% realistic (which it isn't). Battlefront can only provide the tools for the players. If players decide to reverse towards the enemy, they run the risk of getting their engine knocked out. If players let the enemy shoot at the front of their tanks, they run the risk of getting their main gun knocked out.

It might just be a perspective problem. Looking at it sideways- how many times do US players run up against Tigers in Combat Mission? A lot, right? Because Tigers are cool and popular. But its shockingly unrealistic. That Pershing-Tiger engagement there is 1/3 of all the times the US Army fought Tiger Is in Western Europe. The Americans basically never fought Tiger 1s in the entire period covered by CMBN and CMFB up to the end of the war. It's a historically negligible event. But in games, of course, it happens all the time. Leaving aside the fact that we've already seen enough photos spread out around the threads to show that gun barrel damage is more common than US-Tiger engagements in the historical record, it stands to reason that any reliance on "it seems like a rare event in real life" is about as effective an argument as "my panzer's mighty armour should let me do whatever I want with it." The bottom line is that the enemy has to be shooting at you to damage your gun barrel. If you've put your tanks in a position where they're getting shot at, either accept the risk or work out where everything went wrong.

It's a lot harder for your troops to desert when they can't leave their vehicles. Plus, if the troops never leave their BMPs, they'll never see all the fancy consumer products in the average European house that only the party elite seem to have back home. There was an article floating around here somewhere with words to the effect that the Soviets were historically willing to accept a tactical disadvantage to gain an operational advantage (look at some of the terrain they attacked over in Manchuria, for example).

@Ithikial Regarding KG Benpark... that smoke on the intersection is blinding the enemy as well, surely? It might be worth punching some scouts across to get eyes on that park across the road. That way you've got a bit of a recce screen going and you can better judge Elvis' intentions over there. Throwing more men across that road and threatening Jaegermeister from the north could be another option- applying some pressure there might relieve the other flank some- but I don't know how sustainable it would be once the smoke clears and it becomes more difficult to reinforce them. You'd also lose a lot of flexibility because it'd be much harder to switch KG Benpark to another axis. And finally, for the truly crazy... bumrush down the road while you have the smoke. He's not going to expect you suddenly appearing in his face like that. If you can get a toehold that close to Jaegermeister you'll be forcing him to react. Obviously a roll of the dice, but fortune favours the bold, right?

That's some pretty impressive hearing: being able to identify the engine noise of a distant enemy tank over the sound of your own engine. Maybe it's the same kind of ridiculous myth that keeps generating unrealistic expectations about the effectiveness of German heavy armour.

That is a nice hulldown position.

Well, depending on how things pan out you might not necessarily need to actually destroy the Panzers. The terrain here is so dense that they need infantry support to avoid being picked off by AT teams (which he won't know you don't have) or simple close assault. If you can clear the enemy pixeltruppen away from sidestreets on a Panzer's flank you might be able to compel him to pull it back simply by creating a threatening situation. Plus... Sturmovik has 20mm cannons right? Bet the top armour of plenty of German tanks doesn't react too well to those.

Panzerfaust teams for the Soviets? Very nice!

I just stick a load of screenshots together... it takes a while! I have considered making some kind of database, but it's a pretty daunting, time-consuming enterprise. Even more so if done accurately and comprehensively.

I feel like the ammunition types might go some way to identfying the rifles- there's German, British and Italian in there. No.3 looks like a Sten with the magazine on the bottom instead of the side.

Awesome! Looking forward to my pixeltruppen counterpart's (mis)adventures. Berlin looks fantastic, if a nightmare to fight through.

I've been playing about with the LAV TUA from the NATO module and noticed a few things. The first one is almost certainly an animation error, the other two might be bugs depending on how the TUA works- I'm not 100% sure. It should all be pretty easy to replicate. 1. The driver's hatch seems to rotate on the wrong axis when it opens, flipping sideways instead of up: 2. I couldn't get the TUA to spot targets when aiming to the left or right using a target arc, but it would instantly spot targets when facing directing at them. It looked to me that gunner couldn't see through the optic on top of the launcher and could only see to his front. 3. The commander reloads the missile turret from his hatch in front of the launcher. It seems like it would be easier for the loader to do this through the much larger hatch at the rear of the vehicle, which is presumably there for this purpose. Both the commander and loader exit the vehicle via the rear ramp with the loader exiting first, so he's surely sat exactly where he needs to be to reload through that hatch.

In all likelihood it is a radio, yes. I just got overexcited about the possibility of a secret flamethrower. That said... the box looks suspiciously similar to this:

I was thinking that radios are few are far between in the Soviet army and it didn't seem like it should be assaulting an AT gun (plus there's a tiny bit of fire on the right). Maybe they're more common by the end of the war? The Soviets did have the ROKS-2 flamethrower with the projector mocked up as a rifle and the pack with the fuel had a canvas covering to make it look like a rucksack. Apparently the concept was to keep the flamethrower operator inconspicuous until he started setting everything on fire for maximum shock effect. Seen as though they dropped it for the ROKS-3 it was probably as much of a waste of time as it sounds.

Very nice! Concerning the central Soviet pixeltruppen in the top pic... is he carrying his platoon's soup canister on his back? Or is that a poorly disguised flamethrower pack?

... if you play as the Germans! Don't think I've ever had an Allied tank with a destroyed main gun. Obviously this has a lot to do with German anti-tank weapons slicing through Allied armour like a knife through hot butter but acknowledging your tanks are fragile makes you play them better. On the other hand, the mythic allure of superior German armour might encourage people to play more aggressively and recieve a face full of subverted expectations when they inevitably get damaged.

This is the point of zeroing. Because that is exactly what they are doing. It's pretty pointless to compare real world data for Tiger 2 and ingame data for the Sherman 76 (Have you got a link or reference for the Tiger 2 accuracy stuff?) It would more useful to compare the ingame Sherman accuracy once zeroed to the Tiger 2 ingame accuracy once zeroed. The Sherman gunner's main optic is 4x IIRC, so it looks even smaller! Im not 100% up on my Sherman fire control and gunnery mechanics, but I don't think firing the gun is going to change the gunner's point of aim... so why would the gunner voluntarily aim somewhere else once he's on target? Finally... in theory you could increase the deviation to make the guns less accurate to simulate the gunner "shifting his aim" or "targeting different points of the tank", but a) how do you know that BF hasn't already done this? and b) It's such as an edge case. This setup- one tank plinking another 2000m which isn't allowed to shoot back on a flat map with no cover- is an accuracy test (which I understand is what you're testing) but it's not an accuracy test that takes into account likely battlefield conditions. What you're effectively testing is the maximum accuracy of the Sherman vs the Tiger 2, but there's no indication that this is relevant to actual gameplay. If the Sherman doesn't survive long enough or isn't exposed for long enough to get that maximum accuracy- or the Tiger 2 is smart enough to avoid getting plinked like this- then does it matter?

There could be hundreds of shots outside that area: if they miss the Tiger completely there's no record! I assume that everythings aims at the centre of mass of the target because it's less likely to give the game engine an aneurysm. This makes sense on a lot of levels and not just to avoid stressing the engine, it's a ridiculous rabbit hole that vomits forth far, far more problems than it would ever solve.* *For example: "Shermans are targeting my Panther's lower mantlet shot trap in 1943 but they don't know about it yet because they're never seen Panthers before" vs "My Shermans are still aiming for the lower mantlet shot trap on late version Panther Gs even though I found this intelligence report from a month earlier that shows they knew all about the mantlet chin".

Because casualties matter less and the ground objectives matter more, arguably the attacker has to spend more time and effort completely clearing the ground objectives to get his points.