SimpleSimon

This is an excellent table Doug. Note the very wide margins for German and Russian defensive fronts...much of this was due to the vast nature of the East which required everyone to fight more or less in strongpoint style rather than as a continuous frontline. Conventional trench lines fronts did exist near places like Leningrad though because of the static fighting and because the forests were so thick individual outposts would simply be overwhelmed if their flanks weren't guarded. The only thing missing from that chart is Regimental frontage, which is probably missing because of the tendency of Regiment-size formations (and their often misunderstood sibling the "Brigade") to vary more extremely than the others. Regiments were probably the most wieldy formation size that were heavily armed enough to not be irrelevant in large battles, which is probably why it was hard for the author to parse their usual frontline in any Army... they might be assigned the frontage of a Company one day or a Division the next.

It really makes no sense to me that Move's state turns into "Quick" if the troops on it start taking fire. I'd MUCH prefer they did the same thing in hunt and just defaulted to prone/cover.

Yes. Mainly because if a way had not been found to lighten the KV-1 the entire chassis would've gone extinct much sooner than it did. The KV-1 was an excellent performer on defense during Barbarossa but it didn't take long into 1942 and the Red Army's increasing experience to realize it was extremely unwieldy and mostly superfluous on offense. (Many if not most of the KVs the Germans ran into during Barbarossa were immobilized.) The T-34 was far more practical and just as well armed. In spite of how many tanks everyone built, most of the time tanks did not fight other tanks. They fought infantry and machine guns as if little had changed from 1916, while having a heavily armed tank with good protection counted for a lot it counted even more that the tanks show up to begin with and the KV-1 was rather good at missing its curtain calls due to its issues with reliability and mobility...most of which were symptoms of its weight. One perk the KV-1S earned over the T-34 for a short time was a proper commander's cupola which most T-34s lacked for a bit until the /85 showed up. Once the T-34/85 showed up though it truly was curtains for the old KVs as the remainders were relegated to rifle divisions where their mobility issues were not an acute problem.

Ask and ye shall receive.

Ahhhh I could use a little bit more to go on if I were to tailor my own suggestions to your taste, but Blunting the Spear in Red Thunder is the single most adventurous campaign I think I've played in CM but it's a bit daunting unless you're prepared to manage an entire battalion's worth of tanks and infantry. In Fortress Italy you should definitely play The Fleeting Moment because you'll never get a better chance to play around with the Italians, though it's a very challenging campaign and I have yet to beat it. You may want to grab the campaign unpacker in order to actually play through it because I found the 3rd mission in the campaign simply impossible to progress through as briefed. In Battle for Normandy it's a bit of a toss up with Scottish Corridor and Road to Nijmegan. Scottish Corridor is pretty reasonable to maybe even a bit easy as far as difficult goes, contingent upon learning how to walk the British Army's walk properly. It's a rather more doctrinal campaign like Blunting is. Road to Nijmegan is really varied and huge...and has outlets for you to proceed the campaign even if you get bogged down on a mission because the designers knew it had to be a challenging campaign since Market Garden failed in real life.

More than happy to see new Ostfront content and happy you guys are willing to tackle pretty dense stuff like the Battle of Berlin even. Don't hold anything back, comrades...

In the scenario editor look in Syrian Army > Special Forces they're near the top of the menu.

Steel Division 2 for operational level, and Unity of Command for the strategic level. /thread

The British and Russians seemed to manage that quite well enough. The Russians actually rather disliked their semi auto, the SVT 40 even.

It'd be pretty in-character to depict a French defense as being heavily armed...but badly deployed with lots of line held by nothing except rifle infantry or no one at all. Lots of cases of French infantry companies holding a hamlet or village and prepared to fight for that part of the map but not very hard anywhere else. Meanwhile when the French attack it might indeed consist of fearsome monsters such as the Char....but then their infantry don't show up for over 2 hours and not all at once and they still have 1km of map to cross on foot before they can catch up with the armor. A good campaign would be to depict the northern charge of the French 7th Army to rescue the Dutch. They'd be better equipped and led than the units in the south but would be facing a deteriorating situation as the front began collapsing for reasons outside the player's control.

^^^^ Assault is a way more useful command than it's often given credit for. The basic premise is a fire-and-advance functionality that will decrease or stretch the intervals between the fire/assault teams by how you space the waypoints. Placing the waypoints distantly isn't too effective for most attacks as the teams will usually find their LOS interrupted by terrain/clutter. It can still be handy though for moving the entire squad without necessarily exposing the entire squad at the same time. In that way it's sort of a "staggered quick" command instead.

That's actually really interesting, since I was unsure if the small scout and recon teams didn't get tired as quickly as squads did. Since they're usually not carrying lots of ammo or heavy weapons this makes perfect sense.

Completely...but mainly because of the quality of surveillance technology these days that makes any sort of fixed structure or defense much riskier than a mobile one. Firepower wasn't really the controlling element of that...siege guns are one of the oldest weapons in warfare and maybe even the oldest kind of gun period and plenty of them were around in both World Wars. Guidance as you say though, presented a major problem because now a Fort could be hit directly and quickly and surveillance ensures that it can't hope to just hide either. The main thing that kept Forts around through the first half of the 20th century was the major time investment that would've been necessary to properly reduce a well built Fort, which could still be considerable. Now? Everyone's going to know where it is and drop a bunker buster on it in the first hours of an invasion.

In my opinion, Fort Vaux, Fort Douaumont and the Battle of Verdun laugh at the idea that fortifications were entirely useless in the 20th century. Eben Emael would've certainly proven a major problem to the German advance in 1940 if it hadn't been captured in an airborne coup de main that nearly failed and Guderian reflected how fortunate the German Army was to have never tested the Czech's fortifications in the Sudetenland, which were actually more modern and more comprehensive than the French Maginot line was. It is true that gunfire could reduce any fortification...but that was dependent upon both weight of the fire and even more importantly time. Modern Forts like the French ones at Verdun enabled 500 to 1,000 men to frustrate and impede the movement of entire Corps and it's hard to imagine a better kind of economy-of-force especially when so many of these countries were just too poor to afford Panzer Divisions. When Patton made his snide comments about Fortifications being "monuments to the stupidity of man" he very crucially failed to realize that the Westwall wasn't designed to stop anyone, just to look good on newsreels. The Maginot Line meanwhile was out-of-date, undermanned, cut off, and attacked from behind...and still presented an enormous problem to the attacking Germans until the French government surrendered.

They're staged. The actual game isn't nearly so exciting and really isn't all that realistic either which makes me pretty sad because I wanted some proper Battle of France too...but it won't be very worth your time from Post Scriptum. Board games on the subject proved to be more interesting. If the French had planned to fight in 1940 like they had in 1918 they would've done much...much better. The Allies always liked to obfuscate the history by claiming that defeat in France was merely a matter of "shaking off" 1918 when if they had remembered what they learned in 1918 Germany would've been facing a much more serious opponent. Allied armies of 1940 in France were actually inferior to what they were fielding in the previous war (the BEF was a tiny fraction of its planned size) and most French units were not equipped with the assigned allotments of weapons from small arms to artillery. (Almost no one had sub machine guns. French infantry division had less artillery than equivalent German infantry divisions.) Whereas the minor problems are often overstated like the British having lots of bad tank designs...which crucially ignores that at least they had tanks and most of what they had unlike the French could defeat German armor. The French Air Force meanwhile was comprised of more than 50% reconnaissance aircraft...the army man's dream. It turned into a nightmare though because around 1/3 of the available aircraft had no engines. A good write up for the Air Force's problems exists here... https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2018/07/26/french-air-force-1940-analysis/ All of this is why I really want to see more games set in France because most people's image of the Blitzkrieg is still heavily influenced by now outdated and problematic sources like Strange Defeat. Much for instance continues to be made of the silliness of the Maginot Line yet the Maginot Line was the only thing that worked at all as planned in the defense of 1940. While it cost around 3 billion Francs the completely useless naval base at Mers-el-Kebir cost 36 billion Francs and turned out to be a much larger white elephant... Holding out for a Combat Mission: Case Red will be a torch we'll all be holding out for a bit longer it seems.

I think most of the bunkers on the Westwall were built by the Todt Organization. In true Nazi fashion I would not be surprised if the stated protection offered by most of those bunkers was in fact much lower than claimed...the objective was to win Hitler's favor and/or look good for propaganda reels. Ironically the people who ended up most convinced about the Westwall's much overrated strength seem to have been the French and Americans rather than the Germans. Wehrmacht Generals certainly never bought that the idea that the Siegfried Line would hold any determined attack off and were pretty openly dismissive of it. Note that the M2 Howitzer and other artillery pieces gave a really disappointing performance against the bunker. Howitzers and artillery are just the weapons these bunkers are designed to protect against, as many of them were designed during a time when few tanks mounted guns heavier than 40mm and many were armed with little more than machine guns. Plenty of the project even under the best conditions sounds like it was badly mismanaged in all the usual ways Nazi incompetence ensured. The infamous dragon's teeth structures turned out to be unable to defeat bulldozers just burying them with mounds of dirt after all...

The Federal Republic of Erusea would like to know your location I for one, welcome our fictional and semi-fictional opponents sure as I am that i'm a minority viewpoint on that.

The RNG is strong with scenarios the larger they get. That's part of the reason why, unwieldy as they are, I would never advocate the removal or exclusion of those multi-company behemoth scenarios. There's some major butterfly-effect stuff that can happen by making some surprisingly minute changes...or nothing may change at all. That's the best part to me. I've been able to turn some played out scenarios into big surprises again with some clever and relatively easy changes to AI plans and timing, though the plan editor is a bit more daunting than the rest of the scenario editor's tools and it took a bit of trial and error to sort of figure exactly what was happening when I programmed it. I still get things wrong occasionally but honestly "Charlie Company never showed up" was a thing that could actually happen during the war so the learning process is amusing none-the-less.

If you're prepared to learn even a little bit about the scenario editor the scenarios (and campaigns if you use the unpacker tool) become endlessly replayable. It takes quite a bit to figure out how to construct entire scenarios and campaigns from the ground up, but not all that much effort to figure out how to swap units, support, and spawn areas into scenarios. Now that some of the modules have pre-baked master maps it couldn't be easier. One thing I did recently was create about 3 different permutations of Hot Mustard by adding a unit of M10 tank destroyers and giving the Americans a few extra machine guns. In another case I swapped out the Tigers for a fairly regular mixed brigade of Panzer III and IVs and compensated the Germans for the loss of the heavy tanks by giving them 4 FW-190s to soften up the American defense lines and attack their HQ. All of these modifications to existing scenarios took me all of about 10-20min to arrange, just remember to save your scenarios under a new file name or you'll overwrite the original scenario (you don't need to worry about the campaign files).

Main thing you get from a planned bombardment is reliable execution of complicated and detailed fires because the math and organization is conducted at high levels, so you have few cases of things like batteries engaging the wrong target, commencing or lifting their bombardments too early or too late, reduced instances of fratricide, etc. Certainly you are right to highlight that this makes for outrageously heavy bombardments all falling with great accuracy on select parts of the front. Pretty important stuff if the infantry have been instructed to adhere to scrupulous movement plans and advancing too late would mean the defender is given time to reorganize or advancing too soon means your men advance into their own fire. Heavy bombardments can essentially perform the same job as combat engineers by degrading and removing entrenchments and fortifications but without exposing valuable engineers even if they do all that a bit less thoroughly than engineers would. Certainly none of this is anything special, any Army with a modern staff system should be able to do it and for plenty of Armies where education was rather poor and qualification and standards correspondingly low it may well be the only option. Giving the 1942 Italian Army a doctrine similar to the Americans idea of fire support would not have worked very well for them though even if the tools existed to make it happen. Talent was relatively uncommon in an Army where many Officers were in charge because they bought their commission rather than earned it... The nature of fighting the Pacific in combination with the collapse of their transport and logistics meant that the Japanese essentially had to revert to the trench warfare tactics of 1915 in order to so much as survive since none of their own support systems were getting through American interception. It is the inevitable and basic reaction of a defender facing an opponent with overwhelming advantages in heavy firepower for which the only way to reduce casualties was to use ground for safety. Most Infantry Divisions had guns heavy enough to pulverize basic or improvised defenses. From there only the most thorough forts could ensure protection from Corp or "Strategic" guns in Stavka parlance. How many Fort Vauxs or Poznans or Maginot Lines can possibly exist? On Iwo Jima Mt. Suribachi was a formidable and entirely natural defensive position that there was no way to bypass, and Okinawa had been allowed extensive time to heavily fortify with concrete bunkers and shelters. Due to their own objectives the Allies had a tendency to select major offensives in regions where the terrain suited the defender, such as at Monte Cassino. On the Eastern Front few to no such notable set piece features existed other than say, the Pripyet Marshes and German defenders had to just hope they didn't happen to be the guys to end up under the impending avalanche of 122mm, 152mm, and 203mm guns. Eventually cities became the only viable defensive terrain on the front...with horrifying consequences for the inhabitants...

Really? You can't imagine what use there would be for a cross country capable 40 ton battle-tank with a 125mm cannon, machine guns, night vision and thermal optics in a modern battlefield otherwise?

In the case of the German Army research is usually pretty easy since most of the German Army's field manuals and handbooks were written by experienced Officers and instructors with lots of practical fighting experience under their belt. This may sound like a given, but in many armies the quality of instruction and advice printed or otherwise could be pretty dubious at times. Some armies printed entire booklets of nothing but Our Dear and Perfect Leader's quotes and anecdotes and were full of otherwise worthless advice for fighting on a battlefield much less a modern one. The consequences of all this though have been for the history and military history communities to fixate on the German Army and its details to the omission of others simply owing to the wealth of easily accessible, quality information printed by it and on it. This has the effect I think of causing game designers to try and make every Army play like the Wehrmacht even if completely outside a given Army's "character" so to speak.

I think it's a lot to expect of World War 2 artillery to show the kind of accuracy we tend to want in a CM scenario. Point-fire was a really novel technique and even if the math was worked the guns doing it often needed a very long time....a period measured over days, to hit the aimpoint. Siege guns for instance were often used to plink individual bunkers and forts...but they took a lot of time to do it and often flattened the entire surrounding area in the process. For anything larger than mortars I almost always use area-bombardment in CMWW2 since the corresponding error space is wide enough to allow the mission to commence in a reasonable period of time. Fires in WW2 were conducted with little regard for precision anyway and the preference was clearly to just smash the reference point. The heavier the guns get, the less reason you have to show much finesse with them I think outside of endangering your own troops. Airbursting 155mm or 122mm rounds will absolutely depopulate a wide area and General Purpose fire will demolish structures, destroy equipment and even damage tanks. It's verges on inappropriate (but certainly not against any kind of rule) to use such heavy calibers trying to plink an individual tank or bunker in a timed scenario. I mean at least I think it's unwise in a 2 or 3 hour timeframe but that's just me. To be fair, the Italians had virtually no methodology for the tactical fire we typically see in CM due to a lack of field telephones and radios and while the Italians had a wide selection of impressively heavy guns and field pieces they are best utilized in the pre-planning stage of a scenario rather than reserved for later in point fire. The games sort of abstract this already by limiting the heaviest guns to FOs and Battalion Commanders and forcing long preparation times on both which softly directs the player to use them in the planning phase. The Syrians can do tactical fire...but generally would do this by TRP or again, battle pre-planning stage. But since both the Syrians and the Italians are almost always on defense we are rarely able to see the full capabilities of their support in action. Plenty of ways exist to design scenarios that play into the strengths of planned-type fire support we just don't usually see them playing the Americans, British, Germans, etc all the time. If the idea is that planned heavy fire is always inherently inferior to responsive fire control and detailed forward observation though I can imagine Marshall Zhukov or Ferdinand Foch pretty openly laughing at that.

I found Insurgency Sandstorm really disappointing myself. Technical issues aside...wasn't really that original again. Basically a mod for the first game with few distinguishing or interesting new features. One thing that really annoys me in these games is how trivial the differences are between all the guns. Minor adjustments in DPS, recoil, etc are often the only distinguishing characteristics and since most of these games concentrate on twitch shooting w/high lethality none of it matters anyway. In many of these shooters only the machine guns overheat...but assault rifles and sub machine guns with their thin, tiny lightweight barrels never do for some reason. Aiming with a mouse is so easy and suppression or exhaustion so non-existent that sniper rifles reign supreme and are invariably the best guns in any of these games. Nothing ever jams or malfunctions so things like drum magazines can't be featured for reasons of balance. Grenades, explosives, and all kinds of supporting weapons are either very weak or friendly-fire enabled or both so actually using any non-gun weapons is the path to a kick vote. Every gun can have a high-zoom scope with zero penalty of any kind for using it but iron sights are featured anyway...for no reason. Nobody wants you to camp...but capturing objectives often requires you to do just that. Nobody wants you to stay in back and support your team...they'd prefer you rushed down the obvious street killzone with the rest of them to give enemy snipers easy kills. The games wants you to flank enemies and outmaneuver them but most of the maps are constructed with narrow and restrictive choke points and invisible walls forcing you to run right into defenders ready to shoot you down. It's really silly to me how just about all of these games have so many mechanics and rules that aren't just arbitrary but actually at odds with each other and this problem runs across the board from action shooters to realistic ones.

I don't know if Fortnite and Overwatch are good per se, I think they both have great ideas though and it can't be denied that they're successful. My issue with multiplayer shooters is just that your experience is too tightly bound to what everyone else is doing. It makes them highly unpredictable experiences and i'm not always in the mood these days for that. Exciting, but uneven. Another crucial problem is that player counts for most of these games are unreliable and will definitely peter out into irrelevance as players move on. I'm not interested in investing in a game that will essentially cease to function a year or two after release because the next big hit sapped out all the players. Bots are more than welcome in multiplayer shooters and reading that they're in Tannenberg is encouraging me to try it. I played Operation Flashpoint back in the day too, and found the ArmA titles to be not very satisfying. So is the community releasing enough content to make ArmAIII worth my time now? I will definitely look into mods featuring campaigns and single player scenarios.