SimpleSimon
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Posts posted by SimpleSimon
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I'm willing to accept working with some of the most outrageously huge forces in the game because I think the biggest scenarios in the game are just the coolest...but there's tons of micromanagement and the arguments that most of that is both very exasperating and potentially outside the scope of the game aren't wrong. It'd be nice if some sort of mechanisms began appearing to allow delegation of some things to the AI sort of like what Steel Division 2 has with its "smart orders". At the very least, i'd love to see a "follow" movement order for formations that simply copy-paste's the leader's movement path onto the rest of the formation's units. Blunting the Spear and scenarios like Hot Mustard are just too much fun for me to see as entirely dispensable though. Unwieldy and dense to be sure but...it was a big war after all.
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Highly situational...but against tanks? The answer is there isn't much you can do right. Infantry under attack by armor stand a chance against them in basically just dense forests and towns and a bloodbath is still likely. A certainty if they're supported by armor or infantry or both.
In towns it can be useful to break squads down to teams if lots of the buildings are small but large hardened structures like churches with stone/masonry construction can be pretty resistant and a full squad in the building can be great for dealing out lots of damage and while their own coherence.
Don't be too harsh on yourself in a melee with armor. It's going to be a bloody affair probably no matter what you do.
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A little bit of abstraction is probably necessary to better emulate the nuance of things like key-hole shots from a hull down position.
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I don't see what use a surrender order would be personally. I would much prefer all men simply continue to be present until they can't if nothing else to stonewall an attacker. I totally agree tho. Units in the game are way too willing to fight to the death regardless of motivation and experience.
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It's $35 dollars for two campaigns, a bunch of scenarios, and new units. Didn't seem like a bad deal to me.
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Most of an XO's duties take place outside of the game's scope, but using them as liaisons and medics are good ones. In a battle these would generally be the things actually expected of an XO until...well...his CO got killed.
If you're crazy like me they frequently end up pressed into recon too.
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I think they expect too much of the Garand really more than relying too much on it. Don't get me wrong the Garand has its circumstances where its a far superior weapon to a bolt action rifle...I just think those situations are not universal. Some would disagree and their arguments would not be unconvincing. Crucially I think where the Garand shines brightest is in defense, where its high rate of fire can allow even draftees to rapidly punish attackers for even the smallest mistake.
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10 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:
But if you don't really use the Garand anyway, why is an american-style OOB without the Garand so interesting? Genuine question, I'm not trying to be annoying here. Just curious.
Browning machine guns, the M2 mortar, the BAR, and the bazooka are all still organic to the formation. Those weapons are the chief tools of an American ToE in reducing an enemy position.
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It was outrageous to me that the Germans had so many tubes and so much ammo for them. That was really where I drew the line and realized the scenario was rigged. Since the briefing alludes to a huge rocket artillery bombardment that clearly didn't happen I felt tricked and this was the first mission of the campaign. I didn't continue the campaign for years until the campaign extractor became available so I could examine closely how ridiculous it was and it only got worse from there as I figured. The Russians, for a crossing a river in bad weather against a sector of front that has been static for months get....some SU-76s and the battalion mortars... Where's the Division artillery with its generous compliment of ZiS-3 or 120mm PM-38s that were standard issue for this kind of unit and the mission it was tasked with? Why do the Germans have so much support and so many men? You wouldn't think this was Operation Bagration. One would be forgiven for thinking the mission took place in 1941 on the Vyazma front...
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On 12/3/2019 at 4:30 PM, Bulletpoint said:
My experience is very different. The Garand is great until about 150-200m. The LMG42 could be expected to dominate the Garand from 300-600m, but it doesn't, really, as far as I can see. It's very imprecise in this game, and only becomes really dangerous at ranges where the Garand also shines.
Main thing for me when attacking is just that the men spot what's shooting at them. I don't care if they shoot back and would mostly prefer they didn't until I can sortie up an M1917/19/M2/Forward Observer to their position. Once I have a weapon that can overmatch or at least meet the peer-German weapon it's facing off against then the guys can join in. This isn't always what I do and it's mostly dependent upon the timidity of the defense. It isn't always preferable to divide up weapons elements and it isn't always preferable to leave them on overwatch. I'm crazy enough to see M2 teams as mainly assault troops/w a mortar than a mortar team with assault weapons, you know? Potato-poh-tah-to.
22 hours ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:Really challenging.....The terrain is properly tricky and timing your moves is very important.
In my first attempt things went very wrong on this front and my units were cut down piecemeal fashion.....I'll do better next time.
I'll be giving that scenario a swing soon since im really drawn to the Brazilian scenarios more than I thought i'd be. I love the idea of American-style ToEs….but minus the Garand. I can imagine i'm probably about to pay for my preference for the M1903 in a Meeting Engagement with German forces though.
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Oh gods what i'd do to play some rounds with Kotin's monster. For the most part by Operation Bagration there weren't many left. I don't think a single formation of them even existed by that point though they were still around occasionally as command vehicles for SU formations. Probably a good choice for a command vehicle because of the roomy turret. By 1944 all I can find is that one formation near Leningrad was still a KV-1 unit but they converted to IS-2s before the summer ended. If BF ever gets around to a Kursk or Barbarossa module for Red Thunder you'll certainly see em then and lord knows im holding out for it.
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Ohhh boy time to beat this horse.
Your first mistake is to play Hammer's Flank unmodified which is a mistake we all made. It depicts an extremely difficult, effectively brain-dead attack on a prepared and unmolested German defense that's foolish to challenge without more support, in the given weather. For many Hammer's Flank was their first ever play with the Red Army...and it's a terrible introductory that's overly scripted, overpacked with units and features a misleading briefing.
As for the Red Army, remember that the engine portrays "bad" visibility misleadingly good for the player and Red Army infantry squads often don't have binoculars. Everyone's shooting at what they can see with their plain eyes and that isn't much even in good weather. Remember that the squad will report it can "see" and "engage" an enemy if only one man in the squad can actually do that. Most of them probably can't see anything and the only sure solution to that is to close the range. They may even have line of fire but again the game will report an unobstructed line of fire from the one man who actually has it.
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Infantry would've had the weapons either from simply pre-war issue or priority for assaulting formations. The SVT-40 and SVT-38 were both pre-Barbarossa weapons and in fact neither were much liked by the Russians who felt they were complicated and expensive. Notice how most Russian factories switched to SVT-40 production by 1941...the same year as the German invasion per Soviet re-armament plans. The invasion threw all of that off and any factories not overrun had to switch back to Nagant construction because they could get out more of them faster. For a number of years Russian conscripts might well see themselves at the front without a rifle at all so the SVT dropped lower and lower in priority until it became apparent it wasn't crucial anymore and the Red Army expressed clear preference for sub-machine guns for its march into Europe.
The kiss of the death for the SVT-40 seems to have been the 7.62x54r cartridge that was standard in Russian arms. The rifle certainly never would've been adopted had it not made use of this round, but it's a rather heavy bullet for a repeating rifle and this usually required a complicated operating mechanism because you couldn't just manufacture the rifle really heavy, or it'd never be accepted into service. Garand originally designed the M1 for a .276 round after all and in the end the Army pressured him to design the M1 around the .306 round...which took some tinkering and caused some problems that were not worked out until just before the war. Then the German's of course had the G41 fail in 1941 producing a battle rifle so notorious for stoppages and failures that the weapon's actual rate of fire was usually lower than a bolt action rifle. The British can hardly be faulted for seeing most of these problems with pre-war rifles and just sticking with the Lee-Enfield...
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If you have a clear line of fire for all of your men and are about 200ish meters then yeah all those Garand's fusillading an individual target will work about as well as a machine gun, I just don't think those are the circumstances my infantry find themselves in most of the time in CM.
Certainly though, in urban environments and/or defense the Garand's ability to pour out fire is more important than individual marksmanship. If you're going for marksmanship there's not much difference between the Garand and the Springfield. If what you need is suppression though than you'll need the Garand.
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Meh. Fixation with the Garand has led to misleading ideas about the firepower of US infantry, which mainly emerged from the many kinds of Browning machine guns which were often detached to Platoons to make use of. The Garand is great....but if you try to treat as your chief source of firepower I believe you'll find it's out its league against the most likely opponent...the MG34/42. In fact belief in the Garand's superiority turned out to be a dangerous illusion that the war broke hence all those panicked attempts to push the M1919 into use as a SAW and why US infantry tended to horde BARs in excess of authorization. Luckily the M1919 and M1917 were so plentiful that Officers frequently let Platoons or Squads have em. The Garand definitely had a role to play in the "Typhoon of Steel" American troops were often known for...but the majority of that was plentiful allotments of assets normally reserved at the Battalion or Regimental level in most armies. Only the German Army tended to be as cool about releasing very heavy equipment to very low ranks.
I personally use rifle infantry for screening my heavy weaponry...and little else. I guess much of it is playstyle but tbh I don't find much difference between the Garand and Springfield the way I play. I don't expect rifle infantry to achieve much outside of grenade chucking range and usually task them with that in mind. Screen my mortars and machine guns and trench raid enemy positions once close enough for which the grenade is the tool of choice. The boys could be armed with pitchforks or claymores for all I care.
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A hunt command more like a "Seek and Destroy" that will ignore distant contacts or events outside a set range would be pretty nice.
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9 hours ago, landser said:
+1 and sums up my thoughts succinctly and I've said here before that I would always play Iron if the on-call times were detached from the skill level setting. I hope that CMx3 goes this route. But still, I play on higher levels sometimes because I like how the spotting works. But in the largest scenarios and campaigns I tend to bump it down. A campaign like Devil's Descent though is always played on Iron.
One thing I've found that helps missions is to chose area bombardment for Field Guns and Howitzers and allow them a wide area so that their corresponding tolerance for error is much wider. Shots end up in the selected area more easily and you can get to business sooner. Point bombardment in CMWW2 only really works if the FO has an entirely unobstructed line of sight.
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The people's army require merely the will of Marxism to crush fascist tanks Comrade.
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I also should point too that, you should not be afraid to disregard my own or the advice of others if you want. Don't be afraid to experiment and try out things with the game you might not have thought of as "optimal" or whatever. Evaluate your situation and do what you think would work best and if that didn't work, reload and try something different. In some ways the game has some vague puzzle mechanics going on, and in a macro sense you're often trying to find the right piece for a given situation.
Oh yeah also put your camera at ground level as much as possible. It's easy to get stuck up in the heavens peering down upon your pixeltruppen wondering why things aren't going according to plan when a ground level perspective would've made it clear that the terrain is/isn't masking something or someone.
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On 11/21/2019 at 9:35 AM, Heirloom_Tomato said:
1. Resist the urge to split your forces. Attack the smallest possible force with the largest possible force. It doesn't matter what title you are playing, WW2 or modern, fire superiority wins. Every time.
This. Depending on the side you're playing being the only modifier for how much of your force you split off if any and what you task them with. The chiefest means of safety is in numbers and your units need to able to support eachother mutually in order to overcome challengers.
On 11/21/2019 at 9:35 AM, Heirloom_Tomato said:3. Don't underestimate the usefulness of a long duration light or harass artillery mission. Arty keeps heads down, which prevents them from seeing you move. They are also great for area denial. Nothing worse than thinking an arty mission is over, so you start moving your men up and then a round lands in the middle of your platoon. Most light or harass missions will give 15+ minutes of firing time. You can cancel the mission as your men get close to the objective and use any remaining rounds to pummel any strong points.
Also this. Leave no rounds unfired. Use medium or heavy bombardments of 2 or more guns for defense or emergencies. When attacking you'll get more bang for your buck running long missions that will assuredly depopulate a grid reference of anyone dumb enough not to be in a tank or bunker.
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They're underpowered if you ask me. The tank was the war's most decisive ground weapon, and there's a reason Russian Tank Armies crashing through the Fulda Gap were among the greatest fears of Western leaders until the Curtain fell owing to the fact that honestly, there wasn't much you could do to stop a big enough horde of tanks. The Russians knew that just as well as the Germans who knew it before everyone else in 1940.
10 hours ago, Kaunitz said:- broken fortifications (in reality, there was not much a tank could do against infantry in a foxhole/trench, other than trying to "burry" it by spinning around over the foxhole or throwing grenades from hatches; in CM, you can just lob a few shells at the infantry, job done)
Tanks were literally designed to defeat infantry fortifications. It is legit their most basic job which is why so many tanks were armed with nothing but a machine gun or fixed gun in a casemate. Frontline fortifications were overrun all the time by tanks and yes usually by them just bombarding the enemy position until the enemy was dead.
10 hours ago, Kaunitz said:- borg-spotting/area-fire which helps tanks a lot (the main weakness of tanks was their limited vision; this weakness is inexistent because players can let their tanks area fire at targets the crew has not spotted)
Tanks have built binocular vision and radios, these are a pair of two honest to god superpowers compared to Private Timmy and his Mk1 Eyeball and outdoor voice.
10 hours ago, Kaunitz said:- almost total lack of anti-tank close combat means (in most formations, AT grenades come in ridiculously low numbers; there are neither Molotov cocktails nor mines to be carried on the men - satchel charges are only available to dedicated engineer units).
Infantry anti-tank assaults are usually described as heroic events and as a result those are the ones you hear about the most. The reason you hear about the successful ones is because you rarely hear about all the times that failed and the attacking infantry were murdered by the tank's wingman because in reality infantry close assault on armor was a suicidally dangerous thing for infantry to do before shaped charge projectors showed up.
10 hours ago, Kaunitz said:- Also, I'd sometimes wish that "underpowered" AT assets would actively attempt to stop "overarmored" tanks by actively targeting their tracks. I prefer an immobilised tank over a tank which has been hit by a deflecting shell (with a tiny or inexistent chance of penetration).
Most AT weapons are hard enough pressed to hit the tank they're shooting at to begin with unless it's very close to them by which point it's more than likely curtains for your Pak40 crew. Do you know how big something even the size of a Tiger looks in a sight at 500 yards or 1000 even?
Biggest problem with tanks in CM is that they're overused. Too many scenarios have them and then further that problem by then having too many in the scenario. They're too commonly encountered in most of the games and this sort of a has a fatiguing effect on players after a while but really I think they're too easy to kill or disable in most of the games. In reality there wasn't much 99% of men in an army, armed with a rifle and spade, could do against 30 tons of cannon, machine guns and murder and everyone knew it. During and after the war it was apparent that the only thing that could stop a large enough army of tanks was...another army of tanks and if you don't believe me brew yourself up a coffee and grab some reading on the Fulda Gap and an order of battle for Group Soviet Forces Germany.
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Something really peculiar to me is the major fixation on arms and hardware that these analysis have. Like don't get me wrong arms and production were crucial but like, there's never any mention of the problems like the mass famines that broke out everywhere or the politics behind apparently irrational decisions that were none-the-less entirely rational to impress coalition partners, keep alliances together, or push neutrals off the fence.
Absolutely none of the powers could afford to completely disregard their civilian economy or war production would just halt. Yet because so few historians have sought to highlight the importance of this we're stuck with all those awful English histories of the war emphasizing battles and tanks over nations and people and then yeah you get stuff like this. I guess Tooze's book is hard to digest for most.
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Keep in mind that the Communist movement was itself split by internal dissent and altering viewpoints on Marxist theory. The ideology's evolution did not end with Marx, or Leninism or even Maoism. The often attached criticism that communist movements are inherently violent disregards that developing nations are often violent places, and it ignores the violence the Liberal Democracies inflicted upon South America or Africa for centuries through their own colonialist and imperialist policies whether directly or indirectly.
Names like Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Kautsky are not frequently thrown around in the west, Kautsky especially turned out to be a major critic of the Bolsheviks and their violence, warning that it would undermine and damage views of Marxism worldwide.
I very much agree with the sentiment that the world Marx had in mind is closer to today than 1917 or 1948. His ideas have thus far not proven correct, but only thus far.
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Pick a gun, ship, airplane, ration kit, piece of equipment, whatever that you want to criticize and another that you want to defend with some short commentary. Try to provide informed, objective commentary about why the given weapon is your example or even just things you think most don't know and feel free to disagree and reverse a previous post's selection. I'll start with two to get the topic going.
M1 Garand: War's best rifle and also its most overrated. Proved difficult to adapt for multi-role use especially as a marksman rifle. Grenade launcher setup for the weapon was so despised it was frequently discarded in the field and M1903 Springfield used for it instead. Complicated mechanism for loading 8 round clip made it difficult to extract partially loaded clip and reload weapon and exposed weapon's internals to dust and fouling. Rumors proved untrue, but existed nonetheless, that the weapon's "ping" was giving GIs away.
Also, Garand thumb.
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The Tiger I tank: Much maligned interleaved road wheels in fact effective solution for keeping vehicle's volume and size lower than other heavy tanks (if not its weight) which was important for shipping it via rail. True most bridges could not bear the tank's weight but the Tiger could ford most rivers with minimal preparation (less than an hour when properly equipped). Attacks based on the vehicle's expense are true but ignore that manpower was a greater expense and the Tiger promised to and did cut losses down of precious tank crews.
2nd Example
FG42: War's other best rifle was also its most expensive. In fact prototyping proved to be so difficult because the original design used too many valuable metals like chrome nickel steel and then manganese and then when manganese got too valuable simple sheet metal was used. The sheet metal proved too weak and failures resulted in early production models. Ingenious design of gas-operation system also needlessly complicated by desire for select-fire operation. In the end only around 6,000 were built.
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Brandt (M2) Mortar: Greater effective range and accuracy than most light mortars even if heavier. Uncomplicated to setup and use. Light weight and small round meant weapon could be fired from almost anywhere with minimal preparation, entirely man portable.
Simon reviews WW2 shooters. Hates all of them.
in General Discussion Forum
Posted
So I tried 3 different World War 2 shooters out right now from a variety of developers and...none of them are any good. Where to begin?
Post Scriptum - Huge empty maps of boredom. Run for 30mins and die instantly. Squad and spawn mechanics are excessively and needlessly complicated proving an obstacle to any kind of engaging gameplay. I was constantly advised to "stick with my squad" who were very good at dying and not very good at capturing or killing. Yet when I decided to just avoid them and go off on my own I not only achieved more kills but died less which was pretty crucial considering the awful and arbitrarily long respawn delays killing any sense of pace or excitement. Around every corner the game has some stupid arbitrary rule for why you can't fire something or drive anything and I don't get what exactly the game is going for by any of this but since I thought I signed up for a video game and not the actual damn Army this last bit proved the last straw for me. Refund requested after 4 hours of play.
Hell Let Loose - Slightly smaller maps of more focused action. Sadly uses the same kind of "no touching" rules as Post Scriptum on everything. Didn't make it past two hours, refund to be requested.
Battlefield 5 - Excessively random. Game is unable to decide if it wants to be a simulator or an action shooter which is why some guns have realistic damage and others suck for no reason. Be a sniper or a bunny hopping sub machine gunner because nothing else is any good thanks to tired damage-per-second rules. Nobody makes use of teamplay mechanics since they're not rewarded fairly which is a shame because they're good ideas. Class system is excessively restrictive to gameplay and entirely needless. (What is it with these shooters and trying to control how I play all the time? Get out of my damn seat!) On the plus side has a single player component, but it's terrible and boring linear campaign sequences with lots of pace killing cutscenes interspaced by whack-a-mole action shooter segments that rob the plot of any consequence or identity. Has the most promise of the 3 with more content...still don't find myself playing it much. The only one that i'll settle for without a refund, but still kind of difficult to recommend.
If this is the state of World War 2 shooters I think i'll be sticking to CM. If I were to underline a problem running between all of them, it would definitely be an overall lack of unique or engaging gameplay mechanics since all of 3 of them are anchored on simply copying the success of past titles. Conservative design permeates all of them. Post Scriptum was originally a mod for Squad, itself the highly mediocre sequel to Project Reality and both it and Hell Let Loose are functionally not much different from Red Orchestra and this would've been fine in 2008 but now they're just reskins of games I already played in college. Battlefield 5 is of course a Battlefield game...and may well be the weakest entry in the series because of a poor sense of identity. It wants to be a high minded and complex game with original ideas but doesn't want to get too far from its 2002 action shooter basics like health bars and cone fire and this is very frustrating because what could be a very fun and engaging shooter is held back by its desire to be "safe" and service fans.
tl:dr boring bad shooters getting creamed by Fortnite and Overwatch for obvious reasons. Go play one of those two if you want to play good shooters.