SimpleSimon

I could just lack some context here...but the StuG only has around 25-28 rounds of HE for its main gun. It's not designed for prolonged combat and not very good at suppressive fire since it lacks a coaxial machine gun. The MG34 on the roof is really just for self-defense since the gunner has to expose himself to fire it. The Ausf D used to have more ammo....but no one liked that version since the short gun it had couldn't defeat tanks easily. The Ausf G came around because the infantry desperately needed more anti-tank capacity but the StuG suffered a commensurate loss in its usefulness as an Assault-Gun because of this due to the larger size of the StuK L/48's shells and the need to stock more AP rounds. This was a particularly acute problem in the Wehrmacht too because supply lines were so stretched most tanks probably couldn't expect ammunition for days or maybe even weeks at a time. Would a resupply mechanic for tanks in the game be nice? Sure. Is it absolutely critical for us to have? I don't think so. 

And like, don't get me wrong Freyberg, there's a lot of validity to your point and this view that it wasn't clear cut. I'm intentionally being dramatic to illustrate a point and kind of get across a certain "zeitgeist" about the era that's been lost to time I think. The Germans particularly lamented that as the war went on the Panzer Divisions seemed to have lost their ability to inflict "tank terror" on formations of troops better led and less shocked by the appearance of armour. So while enough tanks might still penetrate the line it was no longer guaranteed that the entire front might collapse in a single decisive blow as it had in 1940 or 1941. Men triumphed over machine on a number of occasions before, during, and after World War 2.
I just think that people don't realize when they're applying reasoning and thinking that has been taught to them by generations of games, movies, media, etc much of which is actually just self-referential (or mindless repetition of propaganda) and not really grounded in any kind of fact or truth. Here it's the idea, frequently implied by fiction and wielded by the propaganda of reckless, irresponsible leaders that bravery and persistence will always triumph over the superior numbers and weapons of the enemy. It bugs me enough for me to take my own stance on it, but it is not meant to invalidate yours since I also believe there's plenty of space for subjectivity on all this...
 

Games and movies have spoiled us a lot nowadays. It's important to understand that in 1940 not all that many people on Earth had ever seen a car before much less an airplane or a bulldozer. 
So you're a lowly Private in a poor nation's Army on some god-forsaken flank, you're barely literate owing to the fact that a higher education was mostly beyond your family's agrarian background as local villagers and things like telephones and photographs are a real novelty when you happen to see them on rare visits into a town. 
In your foxhole one awful, unfortunate morning the enemy's fire is particularly heavy, there's way more smoke than usual but instead of the usual callouts and sporadic bursts of rifle fire a terrible noise starts to echo from somewhere behind the mist. A methodic, clacking noise of metal accompanied by deep, guttural rumbles that seem to rattle the entire countryside. The ground, literally, begins to shake as the silhouette of an enormous moving block of steel and fire emerges laying waste to all before it. Where ever it looks the same place suddenly disappears violently into a cloud of thunder, dirt, and intense heat. Men from positions in front of you are fleeing already, in vain as it mows them down with fire...or maybe even runs them over as if they were ants. It didn't take long at the front to learn about what this thing is, but nothing anyone told you about it could really prepare you for it because fact is, you've never seen anything like it. It's an actual monster of the Biblical kind and whether or not God or man made it doesn't matter much because it's the worst thing that's ever happened to you. You've got a rifle, maybe some grenades, and the uniform on your back. The officers already ran away....think you're really capable of earning that medal? 

The only aircraft allowed to conduct free-roam flights were recon flights, who were incidentally quite good at locating German defensive positions (artillery and HQs were the most conspicuous targets on the frontline, but other defensive positions were often located as well). IL2s did not attack or conduct any part of their mission in the search-and-destroy manner as practiced by western air forces though. Rather, they struck known and potential enemy positions passed down to them by a staff of planners at Air-Army HQ. Staff at Air Army HQ used recon obtained via their own flights, and passed information to their own squadrons from this. Substantial communication and co-planning was performed with Red Army command staff as well, so intel obtained by Army formations was also usually passed to squadrons to further verify the target. 
A good number of flights for any air offensive might well be directed at enemy airfields and a smaller number for rear-area logistics such as railheads and bridges. Red Pheonix Rising lists that for Operation Bagration around 12,000 sorties, usually consisting of Pe-2s and Tupolevs would be used for this mission. However over 50,000 sorties would be made against frontline positions by the IL2s during the Operation. 3,000 sorties alone were directed at the west bank of the Berezina River on the first day of operations. Not only should we be seeing the IL2 and Pe-2 in game more often, they should be able to attack specific targets. What they should not be able to do is respond to any kind of calls placed after the planning phase. During the planning phase however, the player should have way more rights than he does to wield the VVS in support of his troops. 
The way RT is right now few scenarios use the VVS, and usually only one or two planes meekly strafe random positions on the map before just flying away with most of their ordinance unused... 
 

Frankly, the ability of infantry to close assault still-mobile tanks without any anti-tank weaponry is not particularly realistic under any circumstance. It was hardly ever done in reality.

It's funny to think back to The End Of History where the Soviet and Arab ability to fight was totally disregarded and then look to the past few years in Syria and Ukraine showing that when motivated, they can make it work. A Russian Brigade Group (Regiment?) in Syria or Ukraine would have been decisive, looking at what they've managed with Battalions. Imagine Syria receiving modern Russian weapons at the rate they did in '73.

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.  

Ask and ye shall receive. 

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...

^^^^ 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. 
 

^^^^ 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. 
 

The trick to assault is to place the waypoints CLOSE TOGETHER so they will leap-frog effectively. Doing an assault command where one team dashes out of LOS of the second kind'a negates the whole premise behind one team dashing while the other lays down covering fire.

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... 
 

It's $35 dollars for two campaigns, a bunch of scenarios, and new units. Didn't seem like a bad deal to me. 

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. 

If you have a thing for obscure weapons CMFI has them like no other title. Most obscure is the T32 37mm mountain gun. Before I was assigned to texture it I didn't even know such a weapon existed!
 

Why after so many cm modules and patches is surrendering units so poorly adopted  in game? Almost every unit seems to fight to the death no matter how much fire is poured onto them or hopeless the situation. Also I don’t get why there isn’t an option to voluntarily surrender a unit? It seems a huge faux pas for a battle simulator like the cm series. 
it often affects the outcome of a fight when you have to commit so much resources and time smashing the hell out of a building or wood etc when you know that unless they are fanatical or extremely motivated troops, they would throw down their weapons than be annihilated to a man . It should definitely be an option that you can surrender a unit in a hopeless situation. 
i thought it was written into the code that once a unit suffered x-amount of casualties or the force as a whole had lost x-amount of units/morale that units would surrender more readily? 

It's $35 dollars for two campaigns, a bunch of scenarios, and new units. Didn't seem like a bad deal to me. 

It's $35 dollars for two campaigns, a bunch of scenarios, and new units. Didn't seem like a bad deal to me. 

It's $35 dollars for two campaigns, a bunch of scenarios, and new units. Didn't seem like a bad deal to me. 

It's $35 dollars for two campaigns, a bunch of scenarios, and new units. Didn't seem like a bad deal to me. 

You should not see bunkers as a unit that gets a lot of kills or that can withstand anything, you should see them as an obstacle that forces the enemy to use a disproportionate of firepower or a lot of time to counter; and as with any obstacle, placement is everything.

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. 

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. 

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...