Centurian52

I think I've mentioned before that I strongly disagree with this one. You can't implement realistic tactics without area fire. Without area target you can't maintain suppression on enemy positions when the enemy takes cover and your own troops lose the spot, you can't conduct recon by fire, you can't use speculative fire on suspected enemy positions, and you can't use fire to deny an area that you think the enemy might want to go. Fire is a tool with a lot of uses. Only one of those uses is aimed destructive fire against clearly identified enemy units. If you disallow realistic tactics then what's even the point of playing the game?

I think all the fundamentals are still more or less the same. So as long as you treat his tanks and ATGMs 2,000 meters away with the same degree of respect that you are used to treating tanks and ATGs with in WW2 at 500 meters I think you should do fine.

Hmm, maybe. Especially if you've never played any of the modern or near-modern CM games before, and even more so if this is the era he's specifically trained for. I definitely felt some differences going from modern back to WW2, but I'm told the shock of going from WW2 to modern is much greater. I'm guessing you're playing as the Soviets (presumably what Dave is "trained for" is fighting as the US)? You'll definitely want to watch out for the American artillery if that's the case. It's much more accurate and comes in much faster than WW2 artillery. And whichever side you're playing as, "effective ranges" are less of a concern than in WW2. Generally speaking if you can see it you can shoot it. That's definitely true of the fully modern titles, in which 1 shot 1 hit is almost a guarantee. In the Cold War you might encounter some distances in which your tanks might have a less than 50/50 chance of a first round hit. But you certainly won't encounter any distances in which the chance of a first round hit isn't dangerously high if you're on the receiving end (certainly won't get as low as a 10% chance of a first round hit).

I think I read somewhere that PBEM++ doesn't work with the Mac version.

You may have had an influence. But I only have myself to blame for getting myself in so deep . Anyway, I haven't had cause to regret it so far.

Of course this means that I now have five ongoing PBEMs (or at least I will @Vacillator once our game finally gets going). I really shouldn't accept any more until I start finishing some .

No, of course not. But even on the weekends, when I can theoretically get in more than two turns a day, I'm still not likely to check my email for notification that I've got another turn waiting for me any more than once an hour or so.

I'm not sure it would be so unfair. I'm a longtime Combat Mission player, but I'm still an H2H newbie. I'd be up for taking the Soviets for a spin against a human US opponent.

I've had no issues with PBEM++ so far, but none of my games are finished yet (3 ongoing, 1 not started yet). So I wouldn't have noticed any issues that only come up at the end of the game yet. Loading times haven't been an issue for me. I don't know how long it takes the turns to upload, but considering that I can really only keep up with a couple turns a day or so consistently I can't imagine upload times of 20 minutes being an issue. I'm not sure I'd notice even if it took an hour (for all I know my opponent might not have even gotten around to looking at the next turn yet).

I think the answer is to make it togglable. I think generally speaking you want transparency on when you're issuing orders to troops in buildings. But when you're reviewing the action for the spectacle it might make sense to turn it off. I do something similar with trees. Tree-trunks only when I'm issuing orders through forests, and trees fully on when I'm watching the replay.

Wikipedia says the "effective" range is 6,800 meters. Though I suspect they meant "maximum" range. The thing is that an effective range is always a bit subjective. Just how effective do you expect "effective" to be? I believe German recoilless rifles will generally be capable of firing clear across most Combat Mission maps. But there are no modern fire-control systems in WW2. So if by "effective" you mean "a greater than 50/50 chance of a first round hit" then I'd guess it's almost certainly less than 500 meters. But I don't have enough direct experience using German recoilless rifles to be sure. Generally speaking armies in WW2 were content with much lower hit probabilities than we would consider acceptable today (I remember watching lots of 60s and 70s training films shortly after CMCW came out which repeated with amazement that the M60 had a 50/50 chance of achieving a first round hit at 1500 meters, while we would probably never accept anything less than a 100% chance of a first round hit at any range with a modern Abrams). Since we want to meet your standards of effectiveness, the only correct (if somewhat unsatisfying) answer is that its effective range is whatever range feels effective to you.

I don't think there's any way to disable it right now. We could request to make building transparency togglable as a new feature in a future update, the way trees are currently togglable. But there's no guarantee that it would be feasible (every new bit of code risks conflicts with old code, potentially introducing new bugs), or that they would find time to do it even if it is feasible (they have limited resources and lots of other things they are also trying to do).

Yeah, I actually did that myself a while back with 'The Fleeting Moment' campaign in CMFI. I felt that it was too easy, and it just didn't make sense for the Americans I was facing to have such low experience. So I bumped up their experience to normal and renamed the campaign to 'The Fleeting Moment(edited)' so that I could preserve a copy of the original. I ended up creating a campaign that was impossible for me to win. But I was ok with that. IIRC the Italians got absolutely pasted during the Axis counterattack in Sicily, so I ended up getting a more or less historical result (I still ended up performing better than the historical Italians). It was a PITA though, and I haven't attempted to edit another campaign since then.

So I think this isn't so much a case of Combat Mission incorrectly modeling reality, as yet another case of people having incorrect expectations of reality. Just like all the spotting complaints.

I think they're probably both pretty good at long range. So I don't think the range would be much of a factor in which one I'd choose. One of the benefits that LMGs provide over other types of automatic weapons like SMGs or assault rifles is that they can provide stable and accurate automatic fire at long ranges (though not quite as stable and accurate as tripod mounted MMGs or HMGs). Something you might notice in the modern titles is that your assault rifles provide accurate fire at long range, and automatic fire at close range, but only your MGs can provide accurate automatic fire at long range. One thought that did occur to me as far as Bren vs MG42 accuracy is that I believe it was a point of doctrine for the Bren to use semi-automatic fire at long ranges in order to make it difficult for the enemy to figure out where it was (it blends in more with all of the rifles if it's firing single shots). Perhaps firing single shots with the Bren at long ranges led many gunners to believe that it was more accurate than other MGs, when in fact most MGs are that accurate. It's just that most MGs are rarely used to fire single shots.

In any case I'm guessing that the differences between the Tiger's optics and the T-64's optics aren't so great as to make it unlikely that the Tiger might spot targets first just through sheer random chance (whether we're talking about the real tanks or the game tanks). And even if the T-64's optics really are significantly better, I would still expect an experienced and alert Tiger crew to spot faster on average compared to a relatively green T-64 crew (crew experience matters both in reality and in the game (the Soviets often have lower experience levels in a lot of scenarios, which may account for why so many people are so frustrated with their spotting abilities even though the T-62's optics really shouldn't be that much worse than the M60A1's optics)). There's a limit to how much an experienced and alert crew can make up for inferior optics of course, especially as we move into the modern era. The most alert and experienced crew in a Tiger, or even in a T-64, is extremely unlikely to spot targets faster than even a relatively green crew in an M1A2 SEPv2 Abrams. Eventually the influence of technology overwhelms the influence of factors like skill. But among tanks using more or less the same technology for their optics, I would expect skill, alertness, and even luck to be the dominant factors.

This is a conversation I've had with my dad (he's a philosophy professor). When is it fair to blame someone for their actions, vs when do the circumstances around the action (mental health, broken home, etc...) add up to the point where it is no longer fair to blame someone? My father considers himself a pragmatist, so it should come as no surprise that his answer is that you should direct moral blame against someone when it works. His view is that the purpose of moral blame is to change a person's behavior. Humans are generally social creatures, so having a bunch of other humans telling them that they shouldn't do a thing should generally make them less likely to do that thing again in the future. Healthy humans are usually very uncomfortable with a bunch of other humans strongly disapproving of their actions. He uses a thermostat as an example. If the room is too cold, you adjust the thermostat. If the thermostat is broken, then adjusting it won't work. So there is no point in trying to adjust it. If someone does something that we think they shouldn't do, we leverage moral blame to get them to stop doing it (and to deter other people from doing it in the first place). But if a person's brain is broken to the point that moral blame is no longer effective at getting them to stop doing the thing they shouldn't do, then there is no point in blaming them for doing that thing (I believe our discussion at the time was mainly about mental health). So, when do the circumstances around an action add up to the point that it's no longer fair to blame a person for their actions? According to my father, it's when the circumstances around the action add up to the point that no amount of moral blame will be effective in deterring someone from doing that thing again under similar circumstances. So, by this logic, can we blame the population of a country for their actions? Maybe? I think there is some precedent for aggressive ad campaigns saying "you shouldn't do the thing!" getting the population of a country to do a thing at lower rates. I doubt there's much we can do to change the behavior of the Russian population, simply because I don't think western media has enough penetration into Russian society. In any case, moral blame is certainly a much fuzzier concept for populations than it is for individual people.

I definitely oversimplified a bit. The Tiger's cupola provides 360 degree visibility, but there are large gaps between each vision block. So it isn't uninterrupted 360 degree coverage. While each crew member doesn't get their own cupola, I believe they each have their own fully rotating periscope (except possibly the driver, who may just have a fixed periscope or vision block to their front (I'm not fully confident about my knowledge of Tiger optics)). I haven't seen the view from inside the T-64. But the periscopes in the T-62's cupola are much closer together, providing a much more contiguous view. The T-62's cupola does not provide a full 360 degree view all at once (the periscopes just cover a wide frontal arc, rather than going all the way around), but it does rotate. And I've heard that the T-34 often just used polished metal (and sometimes not even all that well polished) in its periscopes rather than proper mirrors (apparently this was a result of rushed production, rather than an intended part of the design?). And there are definitely significant differences in gunner sights from one tank to the next (markings, magnification, field of view).

It certainly seems unlikely at this point that the Chieftain will hold up better against 125mm or 115mm HEAT or APFSDS rounds than the M60. Though maybe once we have it in CM the various unusual angles that it might get shot at from in dynamic combat will show that it's actually more resilient than the youtube simulations suggested (maybe its frontal armor can bounce a 115mm APFSDS round if it comes in from about 30 degrees to the left while the tank is in a hull-down position that is tilting the hull up a bit to put the upper front plate at an even more extreme angle...or something). In any case, I think one of the first things I'm going to do when we get the module is set up a Chieftain and an M60 on a shooting range and see if I can't find something that the Chieftain is more resilient against than the M60. It sure would be a shame if it turned out that all of that extra armor was nothing but a waste of steel and hp/ton. But based on what I've seen so far, my current guess is that the French and Germans probably had the right idea with their light armor/high mobility designs in the AMX-30 and Leopard 1.

Also it looks like your German tanks have an FO team nearby that may be assisting them in making the spot. Units in CM that are in communication with one another will share spotting information. That FO team looks to be in the same formation as the tanks, and probably has a radio, which means it is probably in communication with the tanks.

Both the Tiger and the T64 are using unenhanced optics. Visibility out of either one of them relies on fundamentally the same technology, periscopes and vision blocks. Both provide the commander with a cupola. Neither has thermals or CCTV screens. So on the face of it I would expect their spotting ability to be more or less the same. But, as others have pointed out the Tiger has more crew members to assist in spotting. And, probably more importantly, spotting in CM is random. There is a chance that a given crew member will make a spot on a given target in a given amount of time. But there is no set amount of time in which the crew member will make the spot. This is realistic, but it does also mean that you need to run your tests more than once in order to get any sort of meaningful results. Each time you run the test it will take each tank a different amount of time to make the spot. After ten or so tests you will start to get a somewhat reliable average of how long it takes each vehicle to make the spot. The fact that it took the T-64 longer to make the spot in a single test could very easily just be statistical noise.

On reflection you are absolutely right. My inner voice was telling me that I was probably saying a bit too much when I was originally writing my comment, and I really should have listened to it. I have edited my comment.

I don't think so. The Chieftain hasn't gotten its newer better L23 APFSDS ammunition yet in the game's timeframe, so it's still using the L15 APDS that it had when it first entered service in 1965. I believe that performs better than the M728 at certain ranges, but not better than the M735. In practical terms the chance of hitting a point on the T64 that it can penetrate should be exactly the same as for the M60, though it may be more accurate than the M60A1. They aren't that slow. Their mobility certainly doesn't stack up well compared to a modern tank. But I really don't think modern standards are the right standards by which to judge Cold War equipment. The M60's mobility feels about on par with a WW2 medium tank to me.

So I'm not the only one. I'm doing CM as a whole. I was including CM1 in that, but decided that really was too much (though getting a taste of early-war combat was really interesting). But I'm continuing with just CM2, starting from Sicily and with the intention of going all the way to Black Sea (and at a pace of 10-15 scenarios a month, I'm well aware that this is going to take a few years, but maybe that means more NATO armies will be present in CMCW by the time I finish WW2?). I'm currently at the tail end of Sicily, battling my way towards Troina. Although where I'm really currently at is a pause on my chronological playthrough while I focus on testing things that are not set where I'm currently at in the timeline . Unfortunately I haven't found any easy way to sort my scenarios in chronological order. The system I've come up with is labor intensive, and required renaming all of my scenarios with the date they were set in 'YYYY-MM-DD Original Scenario Title' format. After they're renamed sorting them in alphabetical order automatically puts them in chronological order. It sure would be nice if a future update would add a button to automatically sort scenarios into chronological order based on the date in the scenario data...

I was just about to comment the same thing. (the rest edited out)