[Are AT guns too fragile?]

23 hours ago, Erwin said:

Was surprised that the obsolete Pz 2 had so much production in 42 and 43 and the Pz38 in 44.  

I think in both cases only the chassis was still in production for their various derivative vehicles like the Wespe, Luchs, Hetzer, etc. 

I am personally surprised the Germans managed to squeeze out a little over 4,000 of the Panther in 1944 alone. It does not appear to have been as expensive as I thought it was. Then again that figure might also be Panther chassis stuff like the Jagdpanther, armored recovery vehicles, etc. 

[Are AT guns too fragile?]

1 hour ago, DerKommissar said:

The Tiger, as far as tanks go, wasn't a bad implementation of unrealistic requirements. The problem lies in that the niche the tank was set to fill was imaginary. Any original vision for it was lost during its long development. Germany ended up with another tank family that was difficult to manufacture and maintain, which was especially critical in the year they came in service.

One hundred percent. The concept of a "breakthrough vehicle" was strategically sound...for 1941. By 1943 the German Army could not hope to defeat their enemy, even if they rolled up whole Armies like in France in 1940. Germany no longer had the strategic reserves necessary to fully exploit those breakthroughs. After Kursk it became the norm for Panzer Divisions to achieve local breakthroughs in their sector, which the Germans would then fortify the **** out of and force the Allies to reduce them. This was just a delaying measure though, the actions were too small and too local and were designed to force delays in Allied plans over the minimum possible expenditure of casualties for it. They had no hope in reversing the war's direction. 

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What is the Elefant doing there? Why were 90 Porsche hulls even produced? Those were terrible, even-more-over-engineered, designs (hybrids?) that were rejected. Who was overseeing this Tiger I program that didn't notice 90 expensive beasts being built that weren't asked to be built? Another symptom of the large problem of unrealistic requirements and troubled development of armoured vehicles during a very time-sensitive period.

Because the tooling was available and the designs were already far enough along to escape the bean counters.  Nazi politics, desperation and "not made here" thinking were a major reason many designs were in production though I am not entirely sure of the nuance of. I'm bet quite a bit it came from the nature of Nazi party officials to just trust German industrialists to be working toward the Reich's interest and not for their own profit or to defeating competitors. 

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I'll admit that the blame on the interleaved suspension may not be founded. It's a nice concept. Why did no one else use it? Why were many of the tanks it was used on not successful? Like I said, it could just be bad luck. A lot of innovations the Germans put in their tanks were successful, but often not worth their price tag. The Allies would carefully watch them and try to make them practical.

War measures required a system of suspension that met "all of the above" requirements and was easy-enough to manufacture to keep overall vehicle cost down. You've got to build thousands of these things after all. The Tiger emerged from early war studies and by the time it was available the nature of the war had changed and its role was no longer prominent. Designing the plans and setting aside the factory space and making tooling for a production series is a major undertaking after all and it's not easy to change your mind if it turns out you made a bad choice. Everyone had this problem but for the Allies in 1941 and later the Nazis in 1943 it was a particularly acute issue. In the case of the Germans it seems to have been made worse by lack of oversight for the arms industry and Nazi incompetence, hence as you say, why Porsche made 90 hulls of a vehicle the Army did not end up wanting anyway. 

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A lot of things seemed apparent to the Germans during WW2, it seems that the majority of them didn't materialize. With unrealistic forecasts, you get unrealistic requirements, with unrealistic requirements you get unrealistic designs. They predicted they could afford excess during a time when they were on a lean budget. After the early successes of the war, they thought they could afford these crazy last 4 designs. 

The peculiar industrial controls of Nazi leaders combined with a dangerous sense of invulnerability after France to convince Nazi leaders their most urgent task was to balance the Army's and Industry's demands for manpower with each other (instead of making contingency plans if Barbarossa fails). I don't think the Nazis ever got around to their planned reductions in arms procurement, or to disbanding any formations before it became apparent Barbarossa had failed and a long war was on the backfoot.  I do believe a certain "complacency" set into parts of the armaments industry and the Organization Todt before Barbarossa. It is only my own personal theory that this was the time of the infamous "dabling" of many arms manufacturers in experimental ideas and weapons, which Nazi Party Leadership seized upon later for the infamous Wunderwaffe miracle weapons. 

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The Allies didn't try to jump over their heads. They saw what worked and improved on it. They had less families of tanks in production, for longer. Especially when their manufacturing was not yet at its peak, they stuck to very modern and simple designs. Simplicity was the goal, as opposed to making a dragon of a tank. At the end of the day, it's the difference of ideology. Germany was overly-ambitious to a very destructive effect.

Not at first though. In 1940 the Allies had a zoo of vehicles themselves, many of them of pre-war vintage that were now sharing space with more modern designs which were generally coming online from the various rearmament programs that were taking place in their countries. Desperation kept a lot of these vehicles in production, yes well after they were obsolete but the lesson of 1940 was a bad tank is better than no tank at all which explains things like the Grant, Churchill, Elefant, T-70, or Matilda II. This here FT-17 is not a good tank, but it's a tank none the less and 95% of what it's likely to run into at the front can't do jack **** to it. 

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This is absolutely true. Heavy tanks were always the rockstars of AFVs. They carry massive propaganda value, from the Mark VIII to the Char 2b to the T-35. They're big, imposing and very happy to be put in newspapers. The ideological war was also being waged, not just the military war. Stalin put his name on this new heavy tank that would beat the Tiger, a tank that Hitler had sent to Kursk under personal supervision. Churchill is also a good example.

It's also why these tanks remain symbols of all AFVs, to this day -- even if they did the least amount of work. A lot of the requirements for these designs were political. I think especially during the Tiger production, any practical requirements for the tank were overshadowed by the overbearing political requirements during its lengthy development period. The Tiger did rock the world, but not with its impressive performance -- but with its image of German superiority.

Indeed. 

[German sub mg squads?]

They're a major Ace in the sleeve when the time is right but it's got to be so right. Time it wrong and they'll burn out from casualties and ammunition exhaustion too fast to be useful again. Also they're no good in defensive roles, for which I find myself just using them in small scale counter attacks. Lack of standoff fire. 

[Soviet Mortar Usage IRL]

On 9/6/2018 at 2:41 PM, DerKommissar said:

An interesting tactic, I believe this quote's from the early war section, which is kind of weird. Saying that the Soviets DIDN'T use radios would be inaccurate.

Totally. 

On 9/6/2018 at 2:41 PM, DerKommissar said:

The paper also states that 82mm and 120mm mortars were often used together for pounding infantry -- and for counter fire, apparently.

Medium mortars especially have shorter ranges than most Russian  commanders -Regiment and above - would want to concern themselves with I would think. That said the necessities of the Eastern Front might well have forced them to reach down and manipulate elements that low on the pole as a matter of circumstance. Orwell observed in Spain that Generals were often the sole authority that could make use of local fire support assets, even if it was one rusty Brandt mortar and 12 rounds. 

[Are AT guns too fragile?]

On 9/6/2018 at 3:51 PM, DerKommissar said:

The Tiger is a text book case of over-engineering. Take the suspension for example, it's more complex than ordinary torsion bar and works well on paper.

Tanks are text book cases of over-engineering in general. You kind of expect that to come with any vehicle that weighs around 30-60 tons. The Tiger's suspension was complex, but interleaved road wheels were the only way you were going to achieve a vehicle that had both low ground pressure and acceptable dimensions in size.

The Tiger's sustainable off-road speed (16mph) was higher than the Panzer IV (10mph), a vehicle that weighed half as much as it did, and very important in the Russia the Land of no Roads. Additional perks were that the Tiger was less likely to throw tracks trying to pivot on uneven ground, and the Tiger's small dimensions relative to other heavy tanks made it easier to transport by rail. All in all for a vehicle that weighed 57 tons it still managed a power/weight ratio of around 12hp/ton. The IS-2 which weighed around 45 tons was only a little better. The Churchill only 9hp/ton and it weighed less than both of them! 

On 9/6/2018 at 3:51 PM, DerKommissar said:

Too bad the interleaved wheels get jammed with mud and snow. Tiger also had a long and hectic development, too. The Porsche version actually went into production, albeit very briefly -- which was MORE expensive, complicated and unnecissary.

Yes but that was a well known issue with the infantry's half tracks like the Hanomag, which used interleaved road wheels for years in Russia prior to the Tiger's development. If interleaved road wheels were really as bad as western sources always claim they were, then there's just no way that feedback wouldn't have reached Henschel and Sohn.  Their pros outweighed the cons in the circumstances. In fact it seems that the Panzer III's Christie suspension had much greater problems in the bad country of the East as it went extinct with that vehicle. The Americans didn't even use it on the infamously reliable (by the standard of other tanks) Sherman. 

Anyway, the idea here is not to describe the Tiger as a good idea, just that the arguments frequently made against it by western authors are not adequately contextualized. The vehicle wasn't that irrational in ways, and many of its peers were worse in some respects. The Tiger was about the best you could make of having so many design demands fall upon a single chassis. You could argue that it was expensive and complicated and yes all those things are true but then when it comes to blunders nothing Germany did will probably ever beat invading Russia. Emergency situations usually force people to discern between bad choices and worse ones so *shrug*. 

On 9/6/2018 at 3:51 PM, DerKommissar said:

The Tiger was designed with expensive parts, and took a lot of time to manufacture. From my brief look in the manual, it looks like the maintenance was involved. How/were would one find parts to fix it? The T-26 was a budget tank from the start. Soviet doctrine being that tanks are meant to be replaced, not repaired.

More or less. All of those awful Vickers 6-ton knockoffs of the 1930s were budget designs. You couldn't present any world leader with the invoice for building  lots of a tank that was really modern and not have them balk at it. Except maybe Hitler. 

On 9/6/2018 at 3:51 PM, DerKommissar said:

The worst part is that they weren't really necessary for most of the war. That's why the production was low and its successor only came in `44 -- when they became necessary. Tiger II production began in 43. If the Tiger was such a good design, why begin replacing it after less than a year?

It was apparent where trends in armor, weight, and firepower in the war were going. 

On 9/6/2018 at 3:51 PM, DerKommissar said:

Funny enough, the Tiger II had worse reliability and many of them broke down before they ended up on the Eastern Front. Why not continue building Tiger Is? I always saw heavy tanks as the rockstars of tanks. They're larger than life,really cool in concept, great propaganda, yet unnecessary and sickly in practice.

Yeah but so much of war is about morale and perception. In practice no they didn't really work but skittish G.I.s calling everything from the Kubelwagen to the Panzer II a "Tiger" was happening for a reason. The Russians began the development of a new series of heavy tank after they closely examined a captured Tiger. For a vehicle that was all bark and no bite it seems to have had a certain tangibility that simply wasn't was anyone thought it might be. 

 

[German sub mg squads?]

Them and Russian Tankodestantniki are outrageously deadly on the assault. Only trouble is they burn through their ammo very fast, so it's advisable to use them only for the most decisive thrust of a given plan. They will last only one or two firefights before they need to resupply usually. 

[Are AT guns too fragile?]

On 9/4/2018 at 11:00 AM, danfrodo said:

Hear, Hear DougPhresh.  Well said.  Yes, Tigers are great fun.  But they are expensive, unreliable, slow, guzzle insane amounts of precious fuel, and bog easily.  They can't cross most bridges (why does the T34 85 have relatively light armor? -- because at ~30 tons it could cross most bridges, not bog, etc).  Otto Carius' book has him spending half his time trying to unbog his precious tiger.   In a CM battle, the Tigers are already there, have fuel and ammo, and are running.  Which is quite nice when I am the German side, I must say. 

On the other hand the Tiger could ford many of the rivers in Eastern Europe. In the context of heavy tanks the Tiger wasn't much worse about breakdowns than the IS-2 even. Weight isn't everything after all, the T-26 and L3 were notoriously unreliable tanks but they weighed a lot less than the war-average 25 ton tanks. The L3 weighs less than some American trucks. A lot of the Tiger's issues are overblown I feel. All tanks guzzle gas and bog easily. Issue is the Germans only built around 1,000 of them. Take that number and spread it over 3 years between all those Heavy Panzer formations and suddenly one realizes the chances of the average Vassily actually encountering one were around the same odds as getting struck by lightning. The Tiger's low population in a war characterized by battlefields stretching over continents and million man Armies makes it pretty clear that it was statistically irrelevant. No wonder Guderian fought tooth and nail to stop Panzer IV production from ending, or why the Panzer III was around for so long. There were enough of them to have a tangible impact on the war's strategy. 

[Soviet Mortar Usage IRL]

On 8/27/2018 at 11:52 AM, DerKommissar said:

How do you zero in indirect fires support without radio feedback? I think for the Soviets, for the most part, the answer was "you don't".

Radios would've been available to the battery commander, and the Battalion Commander would've been able to call for fire support. I can't imagine the Soviets frequently used mortars in planned fire since they're under the command of infantry formations, who will use them to respond to the sorts of emergent threats that the bigger guns missed or just weren't available for. This was probably where the PM-38 established its value, being one of the largest tubes available to the infantry in anyone's Army. A 120mm round will just excavate a slit trench or a foxhole, and the weapon had such great range that the Russians would use it to suppress howitzer batteries. 

[Are AT guns too fragile?]

Well the problem with JasonC's argument to me is that there is no reason a video game shouldn't make use of the flashiest and biggest. It's exciting to roll a pair of Tigers in a counter attack against a British rail head, and the capabilities of those vehicles make for a playable scenario with multiple courses of action. Which is possibly again why scenarios focused on the Germans tend to just work without modification. In fact the German campaign in Red Thunder is the single best campaign in the whole series to me, and accomplishes that without excessively packing the defender. The maps are large, the timers are long, and your force has a good mixture of units from tanks to armored infantry, engineers, anti-aircraft, and on-map artillery. As a result, your Battalion's actions all break down into Company level events independent of, but not unaffected by one another. It's brilliant really if a little unwieldy. 

That said I think the ratio does need to be taken in the other direction a little but I guess small scenarios are easier to make than larger ones and the terrain maps now included in the games make it very easy to cut out a section of map and make Platoon or Squad level scenarios. 

[IED Mechanics?]

On 8/22/2018 at 4:58 PM, Erwin said:

Words to stay alive by.  (Most) players want to enjoy themselves and not have a horrible experience playing a game.  IED's work well when it's either obvious where they may be located (eg chokepoints etc) or the player has been warned re their deployment (eg: to avoid a booby-trapped area).

At worst, designers should ensure that the player has sufficient men so that he can survive losing a squad or two to IED's and still accomplish the mission "satisfactorily" - ie have a good game experience.

I think so. I'm all for the inclusion of IEDs in the games but the abstractions they're based on can end up producing some pretty weird scenarios if they're overused. By IED near miss 2 I think we can be reasonably sure the area is covered with them and your force needs to avoid just about all the roads and chokepoints (probably not reasonable given the terrain) or just wait for EOD/Engineers to show up (beyond the scope of the game). 

[Are AT guns too fragile?]

34 minutes ago, General Liederkranz said:

"Why did I get demoted and put in a penal battalion? All I did was disobey a direct order, leaving the neighboring battalion's flank in the air and exposed to a counterattack"

Oh didn't you know comrade i'm writing this to you from the Gulag they put me in. Pause. It's a video game. So this isn't a valid response to my criticisms. 

34 minutes ago, General Liederkranz said:

You seem to be echoing many of JasonC's concerns about "the typical case," and I think BletchleyGeek had a good reply to that in the same thread: 

No one is forcing you to play the scenario. As I noted, you can even hit "Cease Fire" and it'll still advance you to the next battle in the campaign.

No one is forcing me to buy CM's products but I do anyway and will continue to do in spite of how rude and careless its scenario designers insist on being. It's really refreshing for me to know though that in the 3 years since that topic was had and argued literally nothing was ever done to fix HF's problems and I have no reassurances that the next Red Thunder module will have incorporated any of the lessons learned. If your response is "there were no lessons we got it right" then just write "cuz history" in your next post to save yourself some trouble so I know to just /ignore list.  I'll just go on posting around here minus your stubborn denial. 

 

[Are AT guns too fragile?]

47 minutes ago, General Liederkranz said:

You can see my response there. Have you played it? I found the rockets, with a 15-minute delay, plenty useful. It's entirely realistic that the mortars would be on-call to the infantry as they advance--maybe they were used earlier along with heavy artillery in the prep fire, but that's mostly over before the scenario starts (and in contrast to Apocal, I found it pretty easy to call in the mortars--there are plenty of German positions that are "Reverse Slope--No Aim Point" but that's just fine for calling indirect fire). Would the Soviets *want* to make an attack this way, with the preliminary bombardment having failed to do much damage and infantry lagging a few minutes too far behind it? Probably not. But did they do it sometimes? Surely. Things go wrong, and CM often pays particular attention to the occasions when things didn't go exactly according to doctrine.

Ok let's go with that premise that this is an attack gone wrong in the biggest and most meticulously planned operation the Red Army has ever conducted against an pummeled, immobile enemy on a sector of front that hasn't moved in weeks. (This is really not how we should be introducing the Russians to a new player.) Why does the mission fail you if you call your attack off upon the very early realization you will have that the pre-mission bombardments have not worked, the German defenses are intact, and that pushing ahead even if you completely disregard your own casualties is literally impossible because your entire force will be Rattled by the time you've expended your first Company (the game should shatter them before that even). It doesn't help that the scenario designers cannot come up with a consistent set of guidelines for scoring or incentivizing the player's decisions. 

Since you agree with me that it's an intentionally dysfunctional scenario and that CM often has those scenarios it looks like I was right about Hammer's Flank being a good sample of a wider problem with bad scenario design. I have my theory as to why, and i've said it. Next time I play Hammer's Flank i'll catalog the changes I made and underline how easy it was to make the scenario much less scripted and much more interesting. I'm sure this does frustrate some members of the community, especially the ones who designed the scenarios because they put a lot of work into it but since they didn't put that last fraction of effort in to ensure the scenario played well and rewarded the player's agency, including his right to walk away from a loaded scenario, they just wasted all their time as far as i'm concerned. They're not wasting mine too. If they're going to be indignant towards the feedback then I welcome them to be so and if they don't like my tone then too god damned bad. I'm a paying customer who's sick of seeing defects in the product I bought. All whinging about it does is highlight who's scenarios I need to crack open in the editor before I make the mistake of wasting any of my time playing them. Bonus points for groundless claims of "historic accuracy". 

[Are AT guns too fragile?]

9 minutes ago, General Liederkranz said:

Similar concerns about Hammer's Flank have been raised, and I think convincingly answered (including by one of the designers), in an earlier thread:

And then even more convincingly struck down on page 2 by Apocal for reasons I agree with him on. Has Joch designed many other scenarios in the CM games? I think I know which ones i'll be cracking open first with the editor from now on. 

[Are AT guns too fragile?]

4 minutes ago, sburke said:

to make this a more constructive discussion it might be worthwhile to see how you'd design the scenario. You'd noted above how you've edited a few.  How about editing a RT scenario and doing a comparison?  It is all well and good to critique design but you've painted a broad brush about how many of them "get it wrong"

I actually used the Campaign Decompile tool and modified the opening mission of Hammer's Flank. It was some months ago that I did this and I did a playthrough but didn't store it. I'll be doing one again as an AAR sometime to illustrate how much better that mission can be with some simple fixes in player support and mission timing. I didn't even, but should, fix the objective scoring too. 

4 minutes ago, sburke said:

I left everything after the but off as it isn't relevant.  Don't take this the wrong way, but you have 9 posts on the forum and have made a very broad claim. 

I'm also a long time customer of Battlefront and war games and a post count is not a good measure for determining the value of a community member. So it's difficult to see exactly how you can frame a comment like that a "right" way at all. It's a forum and feedback is what it's for. My experience with these forums is that they frequently end up as echo chambers for a select minority of pig headed bullies who want to lobby the developers to make products for them that confirm their narrow ideas. I am eager to be proven wrong. 

4 minutes ago, sburke said:

No one here really knows your background, knowledge, experience etc etc.  There is nothing really to evaluate your feedback.

Gate keeping is a good way to prove me right. The values you have named are the hallmarks of an honest community, not a toxic one. Which will the CM forums be I wonder? 

4 minutes ago, sburke said:

The designers (both the ones who are doing stock scenarios and campaigns for BF and those producing user made content) as a group are all over the map.  Some are extremely knowledgeable and well versed in Eastern Front history and tactics.

Many are not. Their work will speak for itself more frequently than I should the scenarios "speak" in ways that imply anything but knowledge. 

4 minutes ago, sburke said:

Some just like bang em up tank engagements with some real beasts.  In terms of the Hammer campaign I think it is a compilation with a couple designers (that is a guess, it was a long time ago developing RT).  There isn't necessarily consistency as to design of each scenario in the campaign.

Quite, but the German campaign in that game was much more consistent in its design and played better. I have never felt it required editing of any kind. Was it designed by the same team? 

4 minutes ago, sburke said:

To see an actual comparison of a scenario and how'd you'd consider changing it would make this a more clear cut perspective.

I'm working on Fortress Grosshau in Final Blitz right now. Kari Salo's scenarios don't usually need editing though, often being really fun and playable right off. I'm rebalancing that scenario mostly for fun and not really function anyway so next time i'm in the mood to play Red Thunder and see what I changed i'll make an AAR or something. It'll happen sometime, I don't know when but since i'm not looking to prove some kind of silly grognard cred to the community and don't much care what they think of me I don't know when that will be. 

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However, given that you accept that defensive lines in real life (which were attacked and broken through) can be much larger than even the largest CM map, how do you justify the statement that "players wouldn't be expected to fight through lines as deep as usually encountered in a CM scenario"?

Where? What part of the line? When? If you're pursuing a background in law of some kind I suggest you save the money and drop out of school. It isn't working. What i'm talking about is when I try to play a scenario only to find that the exits from all of my deploy points are covered by planned fires and that I cannot maneuver around  because of impassable terrain like thick forests or creeks. 

Take objective B, the back of a 2000 meter long map with 3 companies of rifle infantry, their under supplied mortars which will arrive late, and 4 Shermans/SU-76s. If it's supposed to be believable that recce missed the number of Germans comprising the defense or the heavy guns they've got sighted over meticulously thought out lines of sight, or the large craters that were left by what was clearly Corp guns trying to plink the recce, it's not. When I hit "cease fire - total defeat" because all 4 of my tanks were knocked out by bogging, mines, the Pak40s and I took over 100 casualties and see that not even 500m behind my deploy is an entrenched, reinforced company of infantry supported by what must be their *entire* Regiment's mortars (fully supplied!!!!), mines, bad weather, TRPs, and a whole battery of Pak40s I think we have a problem here. The mission briefing might make some excuses like  "you don't have any artillery because it was busy suppressing the enemy's guns or firing all day" but it sure doesn't look like that, if the scenario designer even bothered to explain why an asset you could normally expect per those lovely ToEs he cites isn't here today because hell with it. That's what i'm talking about. 

[Are AT guns too fragile?]

1 hour ago, Josey Wales said:

Ok now I understand where you are coming from in regards to over concentration of defensive assets in that an attacker should have a 3 to 1 advantage as a general rule of thumb.

As for defence in depth I can give an example where the German outpost positions at El-Alamein were 7km in front of the main line.

Ah but how does one quantify those numbers? An infantry company attacking a Panther over an open field outnumbers the crew of that vehicle outrageously, and yet for some reason I don't think Charlie Company will be coming out on top on that one. There is a lot going on behind a simple headcount that some of the scenario designers seem to anchor their designs on. 

At El Alamein the German defense line was over 50km deep, but that does not mean it was of the came composition at every point, or that the defenders always had the luxury of time and geography the battle afforded both sides. Too much effort is spent trying to iron down the paper composition of these Armies when the reality matched the theory a lot less than one would think, especially the further East you went from New York. I'd say only the U.S. Army ever actually had an abundance of full strength units even, heavily implied by how large the American Army's non-infantry formations were. The British less so, since by the end of the war they were cannibalizing non-critical but arguably still essential units like London's anti-aircraft batteries for infantry (politically unpopular owing to the V-weapon attacks).

The Germans struggles in manpower shortages are well known, and they had to make tough choices between all kinds of essential jobs none of which could afford an empty space, like factory shifts, the infantry, pilots, the Reichsbahn, etc. They all won and lost at various points and it was mainly through the talent and tight organization of German bureaucrats that ensured that balance didn't collapse much sooner than it did in 1945, before the load on the whole military-industrial complex was finally overwhelmed. 

In Russia the solution to the manpower crises was simple, send everyone to the front. The Red Army dominated the situation owing to the immediacy of the threat and very real possibility of total defeat. As it was the Red Army never felt like it had enough men and the voracious appetite for large formations was so single minded that even the factories had to fight not to have their workers all conscripted and sent to the front. The farms be damned, men can earn their ration fighting at the front. 18 hours shifts were the norm in unsafe, damp, dimly lit, cold warehouses with a nice groggy stew made of water and pine needles for lunch. Dinner is a rotten potato if you're lucky, nothing at all if you don't like that. No one's left to till the farms.

In China the food is around, somewhere. I think the "General" who's really more like a local Warlord is hording it all. He wants to sell it on the black market so he can afford a Mercedes after the war. Doesn't matter anyway since if you're a male of military age (subject to wide interpretation by Chiang's Officers) you were probably press-ganged into the military years ago to fight the Communists. Still waiting on that rifle and uniform by the way. 

In Japan your food is victory. Want to eat? The Americans have it. You'll have to ask them. You may want to take your helmet, if you ever manage the energy to grab it after all the fits of dysentery. Let's face it back around Smolensk the argument over whether military units are full strength or not became largely academic. In many Armies you were well off if you got a pair of boots and a rusty rifle. 

[Are AT guns too fragile?]

21 minutes ago, sburke said:

LOL I'd be a little wary of that one.  The losing side will always find some rationale for losing that couldn't possibly be because they were out thought and out fought.  That is particularly true for an army that looks on their enemy as subhuman and inferior.  There has to be some other reason they won right?

 

Just as the winning side will always act as if their own troops were super heroes who bit down on unspent casings and smoked V stamped cigars. Yes they conquered those beaches all by themselves and not with the considerable support they received from hours and days of naval gunfire, aerial bombardment, and an entire Corp dedicated to the catering, housing, and health of those men thus ensuring the high turn around rate of wounded, sick, skittish G.I.s with a tendency to describe as every loud bang as an "88" and every MG42 the whole dang Where-macht! If your point is that field accounts of war need to be taken with a degree of caution you'll get no argument from me.  

It's just not just one or two accounts of Allied supremacy in firepower that speak to me but the picture as a whole, which in my opinion many self described "military historians" frequently miss. The forest for the trees if you will, or the smoking craters that all used to be those trees. Reading many accounts is less important than thoroughly understanding those accounts, in a manner similar to how lawyers and accident investigators examine evidence. First hand accounts of the war are a valuable source but taken by themselves and at face value 100% of the time they suffer from all of the associated problems as a witness testimony in a court room. Witnesses' accounts of the war are not really lies, rarely ever in fact. What they tend to be is...inaccurate. Suffering from skewed perceptions, incomplete awareness, or mistranslation as often the case for foreign accounts.

The scenario designers are frequently wrong how they portray the Red Army than the others, but this is because sources for the Red Army are both in limited supply and of poor quality. The Russians are notoriously tight about their archives and western sources are frequently based on outdated information and "memes" from the Cold War or even worse, German veterans, who's description of the Russians could hardly be described as "in good faith". On the other extreme, because of thorough and open the Germans were about their own military forces (conspicuously selective on recall when the Waffen SS, or Einsatzgruppen come up) we have very good information to construct scenarios for the Axis, though even with German forces it should be taken with caution. Field reports were frequently "modified" because of Nazi Party politics or colored by culture/race/wealth biases. 

 

[Are AT guns too fragile?]

32 minutes ago, sburke said:

I think you guys are having at least two different discussions.

Agreed. 

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ToE and standard doctrine will give you an idea of what you MIGHT run into.  The realities of war mean that you could possibly run into anything.

Also agreed. I do not expect the scenario designers to totally give away the secrets of their plan. Just that they enable the player to solve problems. Even a scenario that restricts the player's options can be perfectly valid, as long as the expectations placed upon the player are suitably reasonable. Can an entire battery of Pak40s covering a T junction ever be reasonable? Sure. It could happen, sometimes the Germans just really want that T junction. It's no fault of the player for suffering heavy casualties then as long as they are either not expected to continue, or will be receiving reinforcement and support in the coming missions.

For instance the Market Garden campaign in Battle for Normandy. It's much more reasonable to expect a defense in depth because in hindsight we know how hard the fight was over Hell's Highway. Montgomery's plan was boneheaded since it called for a predictable, narrow attack toward obvious objectives. With the historic context in mind frustrating scenarios are a reasonable thing to expect but here even the campaign designer wisely and cleverly enabled the player an "out" they allowed them to both continue playing the campaign and organically solve the remaining scenarios too. After failing...I think 3 missions in a row? The campaign moves to an alternate script where the player is reinforced, and resupplied, and the mission timers are doubled. Bang. You've experienced the history of the doomed Market Garden operation, and now you can solve the campaign scenarios on more reasonable, playable terms that do not resort to the historic vs playable false dilemma excuse. 

 

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In terms of actual scenario design you have a whole other issue.  A designer has to take into account that the AI is a worse player than most humans (I would say all but I'd have to caveat myself in that ).  Because it can't really react appropriately nor do any of the myriad things a human player might do to present a better defense the designer is typically left with only one option and  that is to beef up the defense.  This is the primary reason it is so hard to balance a scenario for the different sides against the AI much less HTH play.

The AI is very passive yes but the player is an all knowing and omnipotent God who can see every inch of the battlefield and instantly respond to detected units. Realistically neither side should have access to the speed of action or information that they do and in that sense the AI's passivity really isn't all that egregious. It can be worked around and the better scenarios do that with randomized placements or providing the player with substantial support. Either of these options have the effect of randomizing the AI's defense, which makes for a more credible scenario all around really. In many of the scenarios i've fixed I frequently go with the later than the former, since I play as Allies a lot and expect to have access to the legendary supporting arms that German sources so frequently ironically lament were turning so many men into "Heroes". 

[Are AT guns too fragile?]

1 hour ago, Josey Wales said:

So now you've thrown a separate argument into the mix.

My response to your original post demonstrates by using an example of divisional organisation, that your assessment of AT guns being too common is incorrect.

Full strength Panzergrenadier Divisions on defense is in fact not correct, when and how often were units ever full strength on any front? The assets covering sectors of map in this game are overpopulated with that knowledge in mind. Way way way overpopulated. If the scenario designer's intent was to portray a full strength unit, this surely would not escape the "Soviet commander", who would better support the "player's" attacks with that mind. As it is too commonly the scenario designers give the player...some mortars a pair of half tracks to fight what is an over concentrated defender that has somehow not already attracted the fire of every Division gun for days.  Nothing is believable or historic about that. 

 

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It also demonstrates that your assertion that "Players are usually not informed enough to realize that no one would realistically expect them to fight their way through defense lines as deep as usually encountered in a CM scenario. " is also incorrect because in reality lines were deeper than can be shown on a CM map and that they were indeed attacked.

Where? When? What lines? Your reasoning is so nebulous that I can't even consider what you're on about here as an argument. By your own definition sure, whatever. I will not engage with your further if you persist like this though. 

 

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To address your latest assumption, if you do not think that divisional organisation effects the Order of Battle for a given scenario and that in turn does not then effect scenario design then you are talking nonsense as I am sure one of the many scenario designers will point out to you. If you think the scenarios are unrealistic perhaps you would like to give specific examples so that the designers can address the accusation.

Hammer's Flank. The entire campaign, especially the river crossing mission and the attack on the village on mission 3, feature massively overpacked defenders w/supporting fires and armor of their own that the player is supposed to negotiate....with a handful of SU-76s and 3 mortar teams that appear as reinforcements so you can't use them in the planning phase when they most certainly would've been available. More scenarios with these issues exist, the litmus test for them is easy. Any time you play as the defender and you possess enough assets to legitimately inflict more harm on the attacker by attacking him first, the defense is over packed and the scenario is badly designed. Bonus points for including cited works the designer didn't read or didn't understand. 

 

[Are AT guns too fragile?]

Precisely none of that has anything to do with scenario design. 

[Are AT guns too fragile?]

Issue to me is that the guns are usually too common than that they're too fragile or not. It's not uncommon for many of the game's scenarios to have 2 Pak40s covering a 500x1500m map with spare heavy AT assets. Players are usually not informed enough to realize that no one would realistically expect them to fight their way through defense lines as deep as usually encountered in a CM scenario. 

[Discussion of Soviet Offensive Tactics]

You should know that a number of Red Hammer's scenarios are deeply flawed in setup, and do not allow the Soviet player sufficient flexibility of action or the assets necessary to reasonably affect the designer's idea of the play through. 

On 7/6/2018 at 12:48 PM, DougPhresh said:

Is it just a matter of pushing up the machineguns and shooting the Germans off their positions?

More or less. The idea with Allied play, especially the Soviets and to a slightly lesser extent, the British, your aim should be to position your units so the Germans must engage in a straight up brawl with your men with no particular advantage to their side and after a receiving a severe preparatory "beating" from your own fire support assets. Whereas with the Russians you'll probably make greater use of "pre planned" fires in the deployment and leave relatively little in reserve except mortars. With the Commonwealth you can be a little more flexible and withhold more in reserve to deal with emergencies. 

[Breaching and Cover system]

I can't prove it but i'm pretty sure that walls will in fact deflect "low power" rounds like SMG and pistol ammunition better than lighter structures. Some of those churches in Battle for Normandy seemed near unassailable with small arms fire and I would frequently find myself needing to bring up a tank or engineers to reduce them. These days if I see that one is in the objective zone I am most definitely assigning a Division or Corp gun to it. I'll take my chances with The Almighty...

 

[Soviet Mortar Usage IRL]

You should almost never actually see the mortar teams "on map" when playing as the Soviets, except for on particularly large maps where it fits the abstractions. A couple of the scenarios get this wrong though and feature the mortar teams much, much closer to the frontline than they'd ever be, and with completely insufficient ammo (cough cough HAMMER'S FLANK) to execute the given plan. 

Usually the mortars would be considered too valuable an asset to risk close to the front, and the teams were armed only to defend themselves from surprise attacks or by stragglers.