General Liederkranz

I don't know exactly about CMBN campaigns, since I haven't played through them, but it depends on whether there's a combination of lots of fortifications on one side, and lots of off-map artillery on the other. Therefore, generally any campaign that involves you making lots of set-piece attacks will be much easier. The Troina Campaign in Fortress Italy, for example, is much easier with the bug because several of the battles are big US attacks. The Germans will get out of their trenches and run around when you shell them with your copious artillery. The first battle in the Soviet campaign of Red Thunder is similar. A human defender can mitigate the effect by using "Pause" commands, but the AI can't do that--and that's the only opponent you can have in campaigns. On the other hand, the effect is much less noticeable when there isn't much artillery, or there aren't many fortifications. There are plenty of scenarios like this, where the bug would have almost no effect.

It would be neat if in addition to radio contact being lost when units move, C2 links also broke when the HQ team fired their weapons. It would add an incentive to keep HQs with tight covered arcs. I've always thought it was a little gamey to order my platoon leaders and their radio operators to lay down fire while *simultaneously* calling in artillery. This would get even more interesting if combined with a command system like the one @LongLeftFlank suggests. In other words, if the limit of units available to be commanded decreased when the intermediate HQs were moving, firing, or suppressed.

I guess there could be different actions if the "stop" was caused by enemy fire or spotting an enemy target. But that would get complicated to understand and predict.

I like that idea for vehicles, but there would be problems when you're using "Hunt" to make infantry advance cautiously and take cover if they're shot at. In that case you probably don't want them to get back up and start walking again in 15 seconds or whatever, since most likely the same MG that stopped them will just open up again.

But don't use "Hunt" for moving into position, even though it may seem like the right command (and it did to me at first). Once they spot something they'll stop and dump all their remaining orders, including the pause and the movement command to get out of there after the pause!

This is an interesting finding--thank you for doing the tests. It seems to me this could make sense, given that gun crews in CM can't temporarily abandon their guns, as they might in real life, to take cover in nearby buildings, trenches, dugouts, etc. One could think of this endurance as an abstraction of them doing that, then jumping back on the gun when suppression slackens off. By contrast, if infantry runs for cover in that situation, the game can literally show it happening and we can order them back up again when the situation is safer.

Assuming you mean a typical small wooden house, I'm not sure one is better against small arms/MGs, but the foxhole is often better protection from direct-fire HE fired from the same elevation, because the round has to hit the ground right near a hole to inflict casualties. In some cases you can't even manually target the action spot where a foxhole is located because it's on a reverse slope. The building, on the other hand, offers a nice aiming point that tanks or guns can easily hit, and a perpendicular surface that will detonate the shell. If you're taking fire from a higher elevation, though, the building might be better. And against mortars, the building is definitely better. But you also have to consider that a human opponent will often preemptively area fire at important buildings, whereas you can put foxholes in unexpected positions. As @Michael Emrys says, it's "highly variable"--which makes the cover model more interesting than in, say, ASL, where a foxhole and a wooden building are both simply +2 TEM. In my experience most tanks (e.g. 75mm or so guns) can knock out wooden bunkers and kill everyone inside with one or two shots.

Ah, I see I didn't look far enough back in the update thread, where this is old news.

I got an email an hour ago with my download link, and it works! I'm surprised there's been no official announcement and no one else has commented yet so I feel like something must be wrong. . . I was able to download and activate, but now dealing with the familiar Mac black screen problem.

I don't think this is correct. My understanding is that in addition to the ordinary spotting cycles, when units take certain actions like firing, or move into view of each other, there's an automatic spotting check outside the 7-second cycle. I know I've often seen units spotted the moment they open fire, rather than a few seconds afterward.

Yes, I find this is really important--and also, the Stuart has a radio and two of those crewmen are in the turret. The T-70 packs a punch against infantry or light armor but it's short on MG ammo, has a low ROF for the main gun, is slow to share info, it's hard to maintain C2 with, it's not great at spotting, and it's generally inefficient in "soft" terms despite its reasonable "hard" factors. A lot like the early T-34s.

I’ve noticed that too, and I think it afflicts all Soviet vehicles, not just the T-34/85. At least I think I’ve seen it on 76mm T-34s too.

Were many used in Army Group Center in the summer of '44? I thought that they were mostly phased out in in '43-'44 in favor of Panzerschrecks. It seems like they'd be analogous to PaK 36s, Pz IIIs, or KVs--surely some were scattered around during Bagration, but not in large concentrations so not covered by the game.

Thanks! This is helpful. Perhaps the ASL and CM designers simply interpreted this info, or info like it, in different ways.

Thanks for the details on this, it's interesting. From a realism perspective, this seems odd, because I know I've read the infantry regiments normally found Cannon Companies useful only when they could be tied into the divisional artillery's fire control net. So it's odd that the Cannon Coy howitzers are more flexible and quicker than the divisional artillery, especially when they're on their own.

That’s all I’ve been able to find online too. I don’t have any books on halftracks, but I’ve learned a lot about SPWs reading this forum!

I'm curious about something I hope better-informed grogs can help with . . in the board game Advanced Squad Leader, there's a halftrack variant called the SPW 251 sMG, which unlike the ordinary 251/1s carries two MG42s--there's the normal pintle mounted MG, and another, hull-mounted, MG-42 that the game gives extra firepower as an HMG. You can also dismount the pintle MG as a tripod-mounted MG-42. According to the ASL designers' notes, each PzGd company (gepanzert) had two in the HW platoon. As far as I can tell CM doesn't have this vehicle; instead you just get ordinary SPW 251/1s carrying infantry heavy MG teams. Accounting for different game mechanisms, the big remaining difference is there's no halftrack in CM with a hull-mounted MG42, which would be something useful to have if it existed. Does anyone know if this is an accidental or deliberate omission in CM, or a mistake by ASL (which is after all based on 30-year-old research)?

Apparently it's Soviet/Russian doctrine that the squad leader is an integral part of the BMP crew (or at least, that the platoon XO stays in the commander's seat in one BMP and directs the other vehicles after the platoon dismounts). I learned a lot about BMP spotting and extra crew members from this post and those following (including a helpful test): Also useful information:

I also rarely split Soviet squads. I think I notice reduced morale when split, but it's not terrible. When I do split, I try to keep the teams close together, and as I recall the penalty is for being split AND unable to see the squad leader. Their lack of an Assistant leader is a definite handicap when splitting. I find the Assault command to be a little slow for the Soviets, because they have 3 leapfrogging teams. But in v4 you can recombine the squad, giving you just two teams, which move faster. I do split off scout teams. In open terrain, where the scouts are unlikely to encounter enemies close-up, I find it's better to split off an assault team first, then the scouts, then recombine the assault squad with the leftover third team. This leaves you with a nearly complete squad with LMG, squad leader, all the SMGs, and a few rifles, plus a scout team with rifles (instead of the SMGs you'd get if you split them off directly).

This is why I think the current model is a reasonable compromise. In many scenarios--especially by midway through the game, if not at the start--tankers would have some idea what's likely to be the biggest threat. If BFC were going to model what round is loaded, wouldn't they have to provide a way to change the default depending on the situation? If your T-34 has a suspected enemy armor contact and then you tell it to peek around the barn to get a line of sight, surely the commander knows he's going tank hunting and will have AP loaded. Even if you just know that there are enemy Mk IVs in the immediate vicinity, it seems like keeping AP loaded would be the right choice. But micromanaging this, or programming the Tac AI to do it, would be a mess. (On the other hand, by the same reasoning I'd like it if AFV ammo loadouts could be customized a bit in scenario setup. In cases where the US used M10 tank destroyers for infantry support, for example, I assume they wouldn't go in carrying the standard 13 HE and 38 AP.)

I *think* this is the only official BFC explanation of why there are so many SVTs in CMRT.

They can weight-wise, but in games they don't (I think it's 75 rounds per carbine vs. 104 per Garand), I assume because those who carry carbines aren't expected to use it much. I know in the game I see SMG rounds bouncing off buildings more than rifle rounds do, so I assume that would apply to carbines as well?

1) For small arms, it's in the manual. For lighter vehicular ordnance and guns (up to maybe 40mm), and for heavy weapons, it'll be listed in the UI, just under the silhouette of the vehicle/weapon. Anything heavier than that, I think they don't tell you because the assumption is it can reach anywhere on an ordinary map. But there is a little bit of flex in these values; bazookas and Panzerschrecks, for example, can fire beyond their listed ranges in some cases, especially if they're uphill from the target. 2) those are quick commands for (respectively): Pause, Stop, and Evade. The manual discusses them briefly but not in a lot of detail. A useful thread on the Evade command:

Also, US and German stragglers both suffer from less flexible command. They don't have XOs at the company level, so their leadership is fragile, and they don't have Assistant Squad Leaders, so splitting the squads weakens them more. And since they have four squads per platoon/section, they're a little clumsier if you want to keep them in C2. In general it seems to me that German straggler units suffer more--since their squads never have inherent MG42s, which is a bigger loss, whereas the Americans only lose BARs, and even then only in some squads (it seems to be randomized). And the Americans also still get radios at the platoon/section level! It seems to me the stragglers, often as not, represent not beaten-up infantry units, but all the other hodgepodge of forces that ended up fighting as infantry in the Bulge--cannon companies without their howitzers, AT companies without their ATGs, non-combat engineers, supply units, cooks, drivers, clerks, etc. Hence the high numbers of carbines (and the reduced grenade counts) -- but there were still plenty of radios and even a few BARs and Thompsons floating around. The M1917 HMGs instead of M1919 MMGs also make sense since they were more common in the rear areas, lots being issued to engineers (I have no idea why?) and to the battalion HW companies and I think HQ guards. I don't get the lack of bazookas though. Also, a full-strength straggler group is 226 men, while a US infantry company in the game is something like 160. So the straggler group seems to me more like the remnants of a battalion (and probably not an infantry battalion) rather than a company. Man-for-man, you can get a lot more firepower, and a lot more nimble C2, out of 226 Americans in other formations than you can out of the stragglers. This seems especially important for the 60mm mortars--the only way to use them for indirect fire is to keep the Group HQ back with them.

I assumed that it's a matter of coding the .50 as an "AP" weapon and then coding all "AP" weapons to fire at armor, without taking into account whether they can penetrate. I know I've seen .50s fire at other armor, I think including StuGs--are you saying in your experience the only immune targets they'll attack are Panthers? Also, while it seems the answer here is that the M8 had been unbuttoned, another possibility that occurs to me is, might your infantry in the first case have been carrying 7.92mm AP (picked up from a halftrack or something)?