SimpleSimon

I actually did not realize the US was withholding the M-60 to designated weapon's squads and not handing them out as Squad-Automatic-Weapons. Awful idea.

Not much differently from 1945 either Bletchley. Apply firepower, then a little more, and once the heavy guns are dry, send some bullets. Then send men, but not prior to flattening the grid square. If you're using an Armored Division troop, apply all of the above, but send a tank between the bullets and then the man step. Tactically the US Army looked pretty good, and was second only to the Red Army in being subject to the least of post-war cuts and expenditure reductions-which were still quite substantial nonetheless. US Army Divisions had all of their artillery batteries augmented from 4 guns to 6 after the war, however some of the expansions in US heavy firepower were offset by Soviet improvements in their own artillery parks. So unlike the Wehrmacht US Infantry would be facing much more serious threats from counter-battery and preparatory fire this time around. The BM-21 is not a terribly sophisticated piece of equipment but God, they sure got a hell ofa lot of em! Much like the Wehrmacht, it seems that much American thinking was now oriented toward strong-point style defense which would hopefully nullify much of the consequence of the heavier fire by simply not presenting any target. Then of course the Armored Divisions would have many built in advantages against that but much like the conundrum facing the Panzer Divisions in 1944- how many of those do you have? You've got 7th Army. Group Soviet Forces Germany alone is seven Armies. What's the promise of defeating the Red Assault with strings of infantry in blocking positions and counter-attacks by Armored Divisions to plug gaps? If 1945 is any hint, it's not good-but there's room for frustrating time-tables and slowing down the enemy's advance. This was a big element of the REFORGER exercises after all ie: hold on until the cavalry arrives. In this frame there's quite a room for Combat Commands/Brigade Combat Teams to work around inside of. If Bill's force looks like the buffet table at the Shoney's that's because his force is a post ROAD (Reorganization of Army Divisions) command. IE: It's all Brigade Combat Teams, not Regiments. So the structure is closer to 2007, but the execution will still look more like 1945.

Love to see a module featuring or focused on French forces of NATO...

The key of issue is sort of the reflected by the depressing tone of thinking that went into design while the US was putting the M60A1 in service. ("We know it's a stop gap etc") IE: That there was no real solution as of yet to a Soviet Tank Army crashing through the Fulda Gap and that the best NATO tank forces could hope to achieve was likely to be a 1:1 parity or maybe 1.5:1 parity in kills to losses under favorable conditions. Unacceptable given the scale of the challenge. Desperation followed in the form of duct taped ATGMs on the back of M113s-literally the resurrection of the Marder and Jagdpanzer-and also the more promising stuff like the A10 and Apache but were still in limited availability...

It seems that the Soviets always made a certain amount of provision for losses due to mechanical failure/mobility problems, their thinking was still very 1945ish in the sense that you could make up for a certain amount of operational losses by just having heaps of spares everywhere. They weren't tested this time, but Red Army motor pools and maintenance depots proved absurdly good at keeping vehicles in service and minimizing downtime for mechanical issues in 1944. The T-34 was a pretty simple tank to be sure, mass-production "box tank" etc. It sure helped that the Soviets were still swearing off anything heavier than 40 tons and the T-64 wasn't much heavier than the generation of AFVs that came before it. Some returns were also had in the form of the deep fording-capability being standardized too, although certainly some horrifying new ways to suffer vehicle and crew losses could emerge from that...

Indeed, such a statement flies in the face of the facts about why the Rheinmetall 120mm gun was developed... The L7 could defeat many Soviet tanks, but western leaders seem to have been fixated on first-round kills and such and any Soviet tank a western tank had to engage in a protracted struggle with shifted the balance back towards the Soviet-side. Given that any scenario for fighting in the Fulda Gap granted the Soviets the favor of numbers not being able to guarantee that all-important first-hit kill was a slide toward doom. It would enable Soviet tankers that much more time to simply overwhelm NATO defenses. This is a big reason why tank design in the west increasingly shifted toward multiple-simultaneous engagement parameters-although the fruits of those efforts wouldn't be born out fully until after the Cold War. Then we could all sit around engaging in the endless circular arguments of performance of xyz amount of armor vs abc gun and round but...that'll be too boring for me lol.

While mostly true in the abstract, I think a lot of players will be surprised in the ways Soviet tech can prove superior to western equivalents just as the cases where Western forces will make a viable play with superior numbers rather than technical sophistication. Rarely will cases line up that ideally fit every stereotype that 40 years of badly written fiction implied...

You'll see something in between I think. After the Second World War pressure was low enough that Armies could start adopting the first and second generation Assault Rifles. The FAL, the AK-47, the M-14 etc. Despite being capable of automatic fire the thinking was still very much focused around screening the squad's "big gun" it's machine gun. And emphasis was placed on use of automatic fire from the rifle only in an emergency. Meanwhile the LMG/MMG/HMG began to be dropped in favor of the GPMG such as the RPD and M-60, although some stuff like the Bren and Vickers hung around for a surprisingly long time and the MG42 re-appeared as the MG3 because that gun was already a generation-ahead when it was developed. If you end up fighting distant targets you'll probably see situations develop little-different from 1945. With the squad's machine gun doing most of the heavy lifting and the rifle infantry occasionally taking pot shots at clearly visible targets. Most rifles of the day still used iron sights and the human eye did not evolve much in the years between 1805 and 1965. Inside of about 200 meters though you'll see situations which will more closely resemble Shock Force 2 though. Now that automatic firepower has been distributed throughout the squad as long as the range is close you'll see the sort of situations where mistakes made at such close ranges can be rapidly punished by a ready defender. Don't be surprised when you see situations that seem to fit most of the notions of 1945 but then look a bit more like 2007 in others. This is very much the in-between period of those points.

Everybody, wants to rule the world...

Reality is (reflected by this experiment) that tanks of peer tonnage and armament are likely to get lots of kills on each-other and it's going to be bloody. Even crew quality might much be softer than usual, someone's going to get lucky eventually and put a 75mm round into your tank somehow. In just about any example one could pull, Villers-Bocage, Prokhorovka, El Alamein, etc tank losses on both sides were usually heavy as long as both sides applied tanks. With the defender typically coming off worse in terms of permanent losses or losses overall. Tanks are not very efficient for defensive work, but they're usually the only way to stop another Tank Army. This is a big reason why the Panzer Divisions were constantly under-strength, because the Red Army wouldn't pause very long between offensives and just kept forcing German Commanders to commit them in order to save the Infantry Divisions and stop whole Armies from getting rolled up. The other reason was the frustratingly slow adoption of the Panther, on the other hand having one of the Division's tank regiments away from the war's biggest battles might also save a Panzer Division from total annihilation, and there was no hope of expanding the total number of tank Divisions after 1942 anyway. Nice job on the research Drifter.

You don't see the use for a vehicle which is impervious to small arms fire and high explosive fragmentation? Most reconnaissance during the war was performed by light infantry scouts-many of whom did not even have mounts let alone armored vehicles for the task.

It's a training film but any range that required you to lead the tank you were shooting at was probably not range you'd achieve penetrations at. It's certainly impressive how much of the rifle was essentially one big shock-absorber though. It's funny how much the helplessness of infantry against tanks is glossed over so cleverly. You are extremely unlikely to snap the track on any tank with a single .55 boys round and if you're a steady enough hand to actually hit the turret ring of a moving tank i'd make you my platoon's designated marksman. I'm not wasting my Company's Olympic Gold Medal shooter on an anti-tank rifle...

What is the rationale of the current mechanics Red Thunder governs air attack by anyway? It's inconsistent with the other games and its problem has nothing to do with whether the Russians used Forward Air Controllers or not. The whole thing is just really weird. They're far too responsive and controllable in the active phase, taking orders to point attack individual foxholes which they most certainly did not do in 1944. But that's not the worst issue with them by far. It's that they cannot be controlled at all or influenced in the planning phase that makes them an irrelevant feature. They seriously whiff attacks even when given a TRP based on some silly RNG value. They don't even try to attack sometimes and thus the RNG for them is so wide as to be pointless. You're better off just abstracting the consequences of their attacks by reducing target headcounts and placing some suggestive map craters in the editor. But man what a waste of a feature.

I laughed at that scene but not in the way one might think since I knew it'd ruin what is actually a pretty good show for some viewers too caught up in petty details.

The controller is manufactured overseas unfortunately and they're taking much lower priority in available shipping space over critical supplies. I have the X-56 myself. I wouldn't blame people for sticking with the older models though, i'm not crazy about the self illumination feature. I'm overall very pleased with it though. With DCS especially i've found a job for literally every button and switch on it and I think the swappable springs for the joystick are really cool. It does have a bit of play in the stick out the box, but that doesn't bother me much. The throttle is super-fine though, and has the benefit of optional split levers. Also there are complaints about early wear and failure of some of the stick's rheostats but I have yet to encounter this and I use mine pretty heavily. I have no doubt it's been happening to people but it doesn't seem unduly flimsy or weak for such an affordable HOTAS.

Well infantry attacks were by no means abnormal operations-despite the findings of the Royal Artillery after all, it was agreed that heavy fire by itself was usually not decisive. What I'm just noticing these days is that broken scoring mechanics and map context are really corrosive to the scenarios often more-so than balance. Like Hammer's Flank drove me nuts in base but really it'd be easy to fix by just relieving the player from the insanity of having to capture and clear an entire 2km map covered with overlapping entrenched MG42, flak, and anti-tank positions with some mortars and gun carriers. "Just reach phase line alpha and you can progress. If you're nuts and really want that medal then go for phase line beta but I warn you Comrade, Stavka gave you no artillery support and you will not be rewarded for such reckless conduct in our Army as you would be in the Fascist Army." Infantry did a lot during the big wars, it's just that it didn't usually look like how it looked in a movie or pop-history book. The frontline was generally way more permeable than maps made it look. German withdrawals were thwarted all the time by Battalions of Russians appearing-literally-right behind them. This is what I see really. Little in the way of firing and maneuver at the same time, more usually maneuver today, fire tomorrow if you get what i'm saying. This is why the Germans valued weapons like the Pak 40 and MG42 so much, because of the value they got out of restricting enemy movement. Not because movement itself was dangerous but because if allowed unchecked the end-result of the maneuver would be an Allied force in a position from which they could fully apply the mass of their firepower. That's why the Allies didn't value such individually potent weapons like the MG42, they saw the whole mass of the platoon mag dumping on the four of five guys left of a squad who miraculously survived the 25pdr and 4.5 in fire that was falling on them.

There's way too much small arms fetishization if you ask me. HE-Frag was the overwhelming contributor of the combat casualties of both wars. Something in the realm of 4/5 of them. The Royal Artillery conducted research after the Great War showing this and in spite of the new weaponry of the next war records from casualty clearing stations on both sides still bore that out in 1945. This is a big reason why there were so many delays replacing the Lee Enfield and ultimately why it wasn't replaced until the war ended. Riflemen don't kill much, they need their weapon more for personal protection so they can reasonably sit on ground and call it the property of His Majesty and back that by a visible symbol of force. The overwhelming majority of what you'll run into can be stopped by a .303 round, and if it can't than a FAL or M-16 won't do you much good either.

Call an ambulance! But not for me!

It's more than a little annoying to me that IL-2 1946 still has things like night fighters and carrier operations that none of the current IL2 games have. Carrier ops require really high fidelity and lots of new flyable airplane models so I get why that's been on the backburner but man Great Battles has the freaking 110 and Ju-88 fully modeled but that's it. No radar sets, no Kammhuber Line, no searchlights etc. I'm getting really tired of 30 years of P-51s myself and I don't blame anyone for looking at the recent sims and just feeling like they don't offer much. DCS has searchlights and director controlled AAA by the way, but of course anything you want to do with that game requires you to shell out some serious money.

Which is not what I said. I advise readers to be cautious of Guderian's account of history, not to avoid it. Whole books have been written about his lies (Wolfram Wette's is one) and there are few real historians, military or otherwise, who consider him a trustworthy source. It'd be pointless to tell people not to read him since a whole generation of western war histories-many of them them written during the Cold War-cite him and other German Generals after they were released from prison. For being the "losers" of history they sure got to control quite a bit...

The entire first 1/3 of the book is about the Low Countries phase of the invasion. Horne's book does not discuss the actual campaigning in France for much length, it is mostly preoccupied on French politics leading up to the Battle and is scant on details. Shirer's book is the other big work in this light and while I subjectively sort of like it it isn't very focused on the fighting and Shirer's account overall is very melodramatic. It's a bit too emotive/sensationalist to be a credible research. A good read-but not for everyone. Guderian's account is the one we've all read before-whether or not we think we have-and his version of events controlled the whole narrative of the battle of France for many decades. He participated in many battles and made some fairly interesting observations of the fighting-mainly ones that confirmed his many prejudgments-and at one point personally manned a 47mm anti-tank gun in an attack. (The gun was captured and he was using it against a Char tank which it failed to stop.) It can't be said enough that he is more than a little bit of a shameless self-promoter and major prima-donna about his role in the battle. He carried some major grudges against fellow Generals in the Heer and OKW for opposing him about mechanized forces and later took it out on some of them by chairing a tribunal which he accused colleagues of being July 20th co-conspirators. He sentenced fellow Generals and Staff to death on trumped up evidence to save his own skin. When you read his book just keep in mind that he was a very unscrupulous actor and many historians urge caution about citing him.

Yeah Mikey, because you can't really get rid of them, which makes them really "over-powered" in a game mechanics sense. I lean toward barbed wire not only because it was more common but also because it abstracts a "removable" minefield. As for QB balancing I can't say. I always use the scenario editor. One place I tend to find the game's mines more appropriate is near map edges, which not only discourages a bit of the edge running stuff but also adds a bit of narrative context by implying that your attack is happening where it is because the sectors to its side are impassable "here's why".

It'd be cool if engineer skill level affected things like the quality of mine removal but sadly the fact that mines are never truly 'removed' leaves them a bit overpowered as a game mechanic I feel. They should be used with great caution in a CM game. What isn't used enough I think is barbed wire obstacles. Those are more binary and oddly people only ever seem to use them in way that makes them worthless ie: 2-3 bound together in an open field where they restrict neither movement nor enemy fire. They should be strung out in places like forests or low ground where the enemy might try to maneuver through out of sight of a defender's heavy weapons. There should be enough of them to seriously and actually impede attacker mobility. Scenario designers seem to use them in a way that frequently makes them ineffective.

Most certainly not. The strap is just for carrying. The rest is a spade for firing from the ground.

Personally i'm holding out for the appearance of Hungarian and Romanian troops in one of the CM games one day but I doubt i'll see em. The Hungarians especially had a large assortment of domestically manufactured armored vehicles, (the Toldi, Turan, Zrnyi etc) while both of them have large stocks of those old Skoda and German World War 1 field artillery tubes still around that I want to try out. It'd be especially cool if more of the guns would start appear as on-map assets too but *shrug*. I kind of want people to get a better sense of how "the infantry" usually fought, but most of the CM games seem oriented around Panzerkrieg stuff. Rolling armored thrusts up the main axis of advance etc. Exciting stuff, but not what most guys were doing lol. Fortress Italy's American campaigns were a good example of what i'm talking about ie: the infantry-artillery slugout... Infantry who appear under-gunned were usually expected to operate with substantial support-hence why so many Armies were marching around with bolt action rifles. It's just that only the Americans and British could usually make that support materialize while the Russians could take advantage of their "light" troops to whip around the mostly permeable Eastern Front to just appear behind the enemy. That's the other environment where light infantry get along well, where no frontline exists...