shift8

Not really. For one, the reloading time of the drums is a mostly irrelevant issue, as it is completely silly to be reloading either magazines or drums under fire. Debating which is faster than the other in this situation is like debating the virtues of a tank that burns 10 degrees cooler when it explodes. Either way you are screwed. Also the Lewis could feed 97 round drums as well. Arguing that the Pans are more awkward to carry would be a valid argument also against bullet belts, and boxes of bullet belts etc. By that measure the Bren is some how better than the MG-42. The accuracy of the Bren I wont argue with, that is not disputed. Nor is its weight. Nor is its superiority over the BAR. The main problem with both weapons however is that they did not have enough ammo per magazine to be good lmg's. The additional 10 rounds in a Bren make it better than a BAR, but not much. Also the Lewis is significantly lighter than the M1919, considering that it weighs a half lb more than a 240B and only 3lbs more than a Mg42. One of the chief complaints regarding the 1919 was that it was too heavy to truly be a GPMG. The M1919 with the typical tripod is a 45lbs package. The Lewis would have been light enough to be used by each infantry squad, but much more capable than a BAR or Bren. Furthermore, there is no reason that the weapon could not have supplemented the BAR or BREN, rather than outright replacing them. If you want to argue the point from the standpoint of the A6 1919, I would thing were are still back to the same essential point: that there were in existing guns that could have been adapted much easier. Even then though, the A6 is still 32lbs.

I agree with this. Although I do see what sublime is getting at. The USA did have its cake and eat it to post war. However, the Sherman was hardly quantity over quality. It had equivalent or superior armor and firepower to every contemporary medium tank at any point in the war with the exception of the Panther, a tank that spent 60% of its time being repaired. When you consider that on top of this even the late war German armor was essentially 1/3 turret-less assault guns, Ill take Sherman's all day.

I get what you are saying here, but the BAR was not really a adequate SAW type weapon. Later one, GPMG's would be supplemented by squad autos, but that did not happen for a very long time in a practical form. The bar was not all that useful in that intended role. It had a tiny 20 rd box magazine, a really crappy bipod setup, and extremely awkward reload with no change in barrel. As a rifle, it was insanely heavy and awkward to use. Essentially, it performed less than stellar in both roles. The Germans being on the defense has nothing to do with the legitimacy of the GPMG. Virtually every army now has Mg 42 type weapons. They are useful in attack and defense etc. Also as a disclaimer Im not trying to crap all over the US infantry squad here. I am of the opinion that the US rifle squads had better overall firepower due to better distribution against German rifle units that are almost entirely dependent on their machine gun. The question remains however, why apparently superior designs were thrown aside. I mean, there is no reason you could not have had a squad with a Lewis AND a BAR.

Im going to face Kino and Stepp will face Art. Let me know if that works for everyone. If I forgot someone, please post. Once you guys pick sides and agree to a 2km to 2km (or larger) map, each player will submit their deployment order for their custom battalion to someone outside of their game. That persons will edit scenario with the aforementioned map (meeting engagement) with the selected forces and deployments for both players. That way nobody knows each others force composition or disposition. There will be one reinforcement every 30min. Phase One: Two platoons of infantry. No IFV's, Tanks, or APC's that have auto cannon. Must be exclusively infantry and light transport. Phase Two: 1 Company that is not Armored. (meaning NO tanks this round). You may also spawn 1 artillery asset of any kind. This includes any necessary spotters. Phase Three: 1 Company of any type. 1 more arty battery. Phase 4: 1 Company of any type. 1 More Arty Battery. Maximum Armor companies for the game is 1. This supersedes the "any type" clause. Each company for each round may consist of Up to 4 Platoons of any set of units withing the given round restrictions, regardless of their size etc. Platoons must be premade. So no cherry picking a squad from here and another from there. All platoons must be standard TOE. All unit stats must be Regular, Normal, +0. This is due to the fact that force sized are equal. Battle is 4 hours in length. Let me know if this works for everyone, or if you have suggestions.

That it did. The weight of the gun though is comparable to other lmgs, so I dont see how that could have been a factor. Barrel change perhaps, but the BAR has none, and both the Bren and BAR have insufficient magazine capacity to be proper squad autos. The net advantages of the gun seem to outweigh anything else.

Also please post your preferring faction, sorry I forgot to mention

As I ask this I am certain I cannot be the first person to have thought this, but why on earth was the Lewis gun not used in ww2 instead of the BAR in Bren. Been doing some googling to try to find any obvious reasons, but I haven't found any so far. It is similar in weight to other GPMG's like the MG42 25-28 lbs. It weighs only half a pound more than a modern M240. Has at least twice to more than 4 times as much ammo per magazine as a BAR and significantly more than the Bren as well. Decent rate of fire etc. Both the Bren and the BAR seem like massive steps backwards compared to the Lewis. Compared those guns the Lewis seems to alleviate every flaw the BAR and Bren are criticized for, especially ammo capacity. Does anyone have any idea why it was phased out? It smells political.

Ok lets reiterate all who are interested. Please post a +1 in here if you are good to go. Probably start this weekend. Once I have the full player list, I will make a new post with final rules and who is facing who.

ok awesome

Battalion at this point. At least one side needs to have a full battalion with a brigades supports like arty. I also prefer that we use the standard battalions, not equivalents in points. Parts of the appeal to this for me is doing a realistic square off of real world unit oobs. This will of course not be necessarily balanced, but I wasnt really going for that per se. Although it depends on what people want. If people do want to have more custom units, I dont think there should be any restrictions on units types, just point levels. This is one of the reasons I like using the standard battalion OOB's plus supports, since it has its own limits. I also think we need to keep the rules here as simple as possible. The most complexity the greater chance we have of not following through. Also I have an idea that may cut down on lagg etc. What if we do roughly a battalion each, but we have the units deploy in waves instead of en mass. Players would have to use standard battalion OOB's, but could choose what companies to field first etc. Battle would be done as a meeting engagement, with a modified QB map of at least 2x2km with scattered and mirroed objective points. Reinforcements could come in waves every 15-30 minutes for the full 4 hours of the battle. The size could even scale, so that the battle increases in tempo as time goes on. Edit: We could allow for 15k per player, custom units. Each reinforcement wave would have a point limit, with that last one having no limits so any excess can deploy. First wave would be smallest, with each successive wave being larger. Meeting engagement. 4 hour time limit, with last reinforcement appearing by the 3 hour mark at the latest. First wave would be relatively small, like a reinforced platoon each. 2nd wave is a company etc.

Fuel would only really be relevant at the operational level. Fairly unlikely that a tank runs out of gas in the middle of a fight.

So do we want to do this as a Set Piece attack defend, or a meeting engagment?

Also, this may in fact need to be scaled down a tad. I tried putting an American HBCT on the map last night and it was utterly unplayable. Wish we had that 64bit exe lol. It might be possible to do this as a series of battalion sized battles until the larger OOB of a BCT is exhausted.

How about this. We get a even number of people, and split those interested into pairs. Or if we have an odd number, some people can play more than one game. Then we separate into teams. The team that wins the most of the individual battles is declared the winner or loser of the "offensive." Winning for the attacking team would be the equivalent of a breakout etc. The setup rules for each game will be the same, so that each battle is roughly equivalent, but with different terrains. Each terrain will need to be at least a 2x2km. This way we can homogenize the results, but each game can be played independently it doesnt get too unwieldy. Forces would be 1 Brigade for the Attacker, and about 1/3 -1/2 of that for the defender Hows that?

Also with this many people interested Ill probabaly do more than one game.

Not so much real time, but would you do in game turn based? I generally prefer that to PBEM but didnt think anyone else would want to.

You shouldn't. There were exactly ZERO Tiger tanks on the American front in Normandy. They were not encountered AT ALL until after Normandy and at that point German armor was in a state of disrepair due to casualties. There were only 1500 Tiger tanks produced in ww2, spread across the years it was used and across a continent. They were rare, no matter who you were. Also he is talking of Confirmed combat record of Tiger encounters. Doesnt mean something didnt slip though the cracks. Its a moot point though. Generally speaking, German armor should be though of as a force comprised of 1/3 Panther, 1/3 Pz4, and 1/3 Assault gun. Some tiny minutiae after that is Heavies. And appears that this post is redundant. Thats what I get for only reading part of the page lol.

I am looking for someone who would be willing to do a extremely large CMBS battle on a very large map. Brigade strength, as a general idea of what I mean. We would be using the mission editor to make custom forces instead of the QB editor. We would also pick a map that is very large, and also easy to run. Additional details to be worked out either via PM or discord.

@Everyone who is still talking about spacing with infantry. Spacing and formations are of most relevance in situations where firepower alone is your only real protection. Things like the wedge and the line (and their associated spacing) are meant properly distribute firepower and reduce casualties by spacing people as far apart as the terrain will allow without breaking both line of sight and communications. They are not magical ninja cookie cutter laws of nature that must be observed. In fact, they are almost never observed in any situation where cover can be found, except in the most abstract sense. In other words, the place they are of real import is really only when you are in the middle of a open field and have nowhere to hide. If you can cover, it almost never makes sense of have some of your men NOT in cover simply so they can maintain some arbitrary formation or spacing. IRL, people bunch up however they need to to get under cover. This is both natural and tactically correct in 99.999% of all situations. This is one of the main reasons I dont really care about the visual spacing of the troops in CM. Most of the time formations are not observed anyhow, as terrain dictates how a unit moves. And the effective vulnerability of the units is essentially the same. Like Vanir said, if you up the spaceing youd have to unnerf the HE. Tends to imply its already balanced out.

no prob, that dude makes some great stuff.

Steve is absolutely right. US doctrine in WW2 was very capable. Also, the doctrine never really put the tanks in a infantry support role. This is a myth that has been propagated but is actually refuted by reading the actual manuals themselves. The following is a excellent video that explains this, and it is done by a current US Army Tank Company Commander

Proof is in the pudding, I think. Historically units concentrated well beyond the "standard" doctrinal concentrations. They also at time concentrated well below that. It entirely depends on both the terrain and how many troops both sides have to throw at a problem. Yes, you generally want to have as much dispersion as possible. BUT, that is often a luxury dependent on how much force you will need to repel and assault, OR how much ground behind you you can afford to give (allowing for the defense to be further in depth etc). Just because your weapons can reach out 1km doesn't meant you will have enough firepower to resist the weight of whatever comes your way. Or you might. It just depends. As the other post showed, ww2 frontages were quite a bit more dense than a platoon per kilometer. Same thing can been seen in any reading of most ww2 campaigns, particularly any offensive. Although reading your post I am not sure you got my point, since you said that the battalion would most likely crush a platoon: which is what I was saying. The textbook frontage has always been sort of a useless cookie cutter misnomer in my opinion, since the situation will always dictate. If the enemy sends xxx troops into an area, you will need to put a sufficient number of troops in the area to stop him: regardless of the "ideal" frontage. So If I have to stick a entire company in the space of 1km or even a brigade to have enough firepower to accomplish an objective, so be it. Event he example you gave was a company per km to resist a brigade per km. Which was kinda my point, that you cant sit on a platoon per km if the situation disagrees. The only true limit on troop concentration is physical space. This is why there are tons of historical examples of (see above) of troops concentrated much denser than a company per km. If we were just generalizing, the textbook definition is ok, but I dont consider a scenario unrealistic simply because it is "un-average"

Keep in mind however that the space a unit can theoretically hold is predicated as much by the weapons and fields of fire as is the enemy disposition etc. For example, you arent going to hold that grids square very long with one platoon if the enemy sends a battalion through the same space. Concentration of troops is entirely dependent on a nearly infinite series of factors, not least of which how many men you expect to have to deal with.

Hey, if anyone is interested in a huge game a HOI4 I will be starting one. The time frame for each game will be 4 hours every saturday starting at 5pm EST. All nations are up for grabs, except the USA, which I will be playing. But you can apply to Coop USA if you desire. At a minimum, we need players for the following nations. I would like to see about 12+ players though. -USSR -Germany -UK -France Sign up will be on a first come first serve basis. If there are enough players and several people want the same nation I will lump them into Cooping that nation. You must be able to meet the time requirement. As in, you need to show up at the specified time every Saturday. We will probably not be able to wait on you because of the number of players. Especially if you play one of the the big 3 -USA, German, USSR. I will be making steam group for sign ups, and so we dont have to clog the CM forum up with this for too long. So in your application please apply as so: -Steam name -Nations desired in order of preference

Agree completely, all good points. Going to use this opportunity to make some points about game mechanic modeling: For those of you who think there is something overall broken with the way infantry is modeled, you need to remember that when something is wrong in a 1:1 sense that attempting to go for a 1:1 simulation to fix it is not always better from a end result perspective. There are game companies that all the time attempt to model things too close to 1:1 and the end results as actually LESS realistic. The reason for this is that when you try to model something purely 1:1 you have to work from the bottom up you are banking on the idea that the sum of huge number of independent 1:1 mechanics will give your a final 1:1 result. However, this is predicated upon actually having a perfect model of all of these things. This is why in sim game development many mechanics are done from the TOP and move down to the cause mechanics. An Expert on something CAN know the general end result the game should have. Im going to give and example from a totally different game in order to make my point here. It fits well with this debate because the infantry in RTS games are similarly complex. In the flight sim DCS world, there was an update back around 2012 IIRC that added what was called a "Advanced" Flight model to the missiles in game. No doubt, the new model was much more sophisticated than the older missile flight models, although it was still not perfect from a physics stand point. Missiles with the new AFM were suddenly subject to a litany of forces that had not been applied to the older model. HOWEVER, the new missiles were still using the OLD guidance system. The end result was missiles that were far less effective and far shorter ranged than they would have been in real life. Despite what might have seems like a overall upgrade, since the flight model was improved and the guidance static. However, it was a NET back step in the realism department. This was because once you start trying to to make something work 100% based on physics you have to get EVERYTHING right or you will get just as bad results as you might have gotten if you hadn't. The combination of what is still 1960's era guidance programming with a much closer to reality physics model meant that the guidance system was horribly inefficient at managing all the new variables it was confronted with, which resulted in BVR combat being so castrated it was essentially reduced to WVR. As a caveat to all that, there is a balance to be stuck between the real-world mechanics and the desired end result. I am not at all talking about "gameplay" here, but purely what realistic end result should occur. SOME mechanics can be modeled and SHOULD be modeled in highly linear 1:1 fashion because their nature is either simple enough or limited enough that there is not good reason not to. OTHER mechanics such a infantry are so incredibly complicated in terms of the number of geometry aspect that some aspects of them must be reduced to mathematics, and as Miller stated, the players ability to infer with his imagination what sorts of things the computer is actually simulating. -AGAIN, this doesn't apply to all mechanics. Nor does it apply equally to all aspects of the infantry, since some parts of them are in fact 1:1. This does not mean that there are not legitimate gripes to have with this game. If you look at some of my other posts you will see that I think there are some problems with the game (although few). So in summary, there is a nuanced balance when it comes to the exact procedures used to get a desired results with any game mechanic.