Centurian52

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)

Yes, definitely. The North Korean kit would mostly be a repeat of CMCW or CMSF2. But the South Koreans have some really interesting kit that I really want to play around with (I'm a huge fan of the K2 Black Panther). It would definitely be another asymmetric warfare title, like CMSF2. But that's ok. CMSF is a lot of fun, and it would be asymmetric warfare with very different kit over very different ground. And it can always be upgraded to peer vs peer warfare by adding in Chinese forces later down the line (it's definitely plausible that the Chinese might intervene in a 2nd Korean War, or that the North Koreans would only feel confident in attacking if the US and China were already at war anyway).

Awesome! I'll get it set up as soon as I get home. You're definitely going to do fine. That position would be a tough nut for me to crack even against the AI. Just so you're not at a disadvantage in terms of technical knowledge, there are a small handful of differences in 1943 tank/anti-tank combat from the 1944 combat people are more familiar with. Your 88s and 75mm Pak 40s can of course penetrate my Shermans from the front at pretty much any range, just like 1944. But your 50mm Pak 38s, which are more common than Pak 40s at this point, will struggle a bit more. The Pak 38 apparently cannot penetrate the front of the Sherman's hull (in my experience, though perhaps shooting down from your hilltop position will nullify some of the angling that makes the Sherman's frontal armor as good as it is), and I have only seen it achieve partial penetrations against the front of the turret (not that it's safe for me to sit there and take it, since even non-penetrating hits will tend to inflict subsystem damage). But the Pak 38 has absolutely no problem penetrating the Sherman's side armor. I have no idea how effective German 75mm infantry guns are against tanks, because it has been a very long time since I have seen one of my Shermans get hit by a 75mm infantry gun. I believe those are intended to be used mainly for anti-personnel work anyway, though I'd be surprised if they didn't have at least some anti-armor capability (too low velocity to have a useful AP round, but they may have a HEAT round). You will also notice that your infantry don't have any Panzerfausts or Panzerschrecks. Those don't start appearing until late in 1943. I'm honestly impressed that they are so common by June 1944 given how late their initial appearance is. To sum up, you can set up your 88mm and 75mm anti-tank guns however you like. You'll want to set up your 50mm anti-tank guns for flanking shots. Your guess is as good as mine for how best to use your 75mm infantry guns. And you have no infantry-carried anti-tank weapons at this point in time.

Ok, how about Caltagirone? American attack against a German held town in Sicily. Plenty of tanks, artillery, and mechanized infantry for the Americans, and lots of infantry, anti-tank guns and dense urban terrain to hide in (on a dominating hilltop position no less) for the Germans. Which side would you prefer? I may have to wait until after I get back from work to actually get the game started up, but I'll PM you the password once I do.

I might be up for a fight in CMFI. I have at least a couple scenarios that I've been ignoring because they say "H2H only", and I'd be interested in giving them a go.

I don't know what, if anything, I can get away with saying. But progress is being made. I have no idea when it will be done, but I think everyone is going to be very happy with the final result when it is done.

I don't actually know. Someone may have mentioned that it was bugged in one of the threads around here, so maybe it can't be done for Swingfire for the same reason that it may not be working for the TOW. I actually haven't played CMSF2 at all yet. I played CMSF all the time back in the day, but by the time CMSF2 came out life was making it difficult to find time to play any CM games. When I finally got time again I was mostly playing CM1 (for the early-war content that hasn't made it into CM2 yet), then mostly CMCW and CMBS, and recently (a few months ago) I decided to do a comprehensive playthrough of all of my CM2 games starting with CMFI (I'm going in chronological order, which unfortunately puts CMSF2 towards the end of the line).

CMCW definitely did a lot to increase my overall evaluation of the Dragon. Though I don't believe it has ever been the case that the biggest threat to a tank was another tank.

Apparently they came up with a hack to get dismountable TOWs into CMSF2 (which I haven't seen for myself yet, since I just haven't found time to play CMSF2 yet), even though CM2 doesn't really have any way to account for dismountable weapons. Basically it just involved giving the vehicle crew its own TOW launcher and making the graphic for the vehicle TOW disappear when the vehicle was dismounted. Perhaps something like that can be done for Swingfire if being able to dismount it was such an important part of how it was used? I don't know how they could possibly hack together a way to have the control unit work at any significant distance from the launcher in CM2. But maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.

60mm mortar round meets MG42 HMG team.

Actually I believe the main CM Pro customer is the UK MoD, not the US DoD.

I think it's going to be an operational level game set in the Pacific Theater featuring space lobsters armed with all of the Soviet Union's stolen DShKs.

That's my experience too. They stop when they trigger a mine on hunt, but not when they just see mines. I usually don't have time for slow though. So I use hunt with the aim of limiting casualties, rather than outright preventing casualties. I generally use slow to move troops out of an already detected minefield when I don't have engineers available to mark the mines.

I'd go with hunt. It'll wear them out, but I believe their situational awareness is a bit better with hunt, and they'll stop moving if they hit a mine. They'll tend to start running after hitting the first mine if you use move, so you'll be more likely to get mass casualties.

It's the best answer that's available. The people who are working on it genuinely don't know when it will be done either. But they're working on it.

I didn't forget it. Logistics are part of the operational layer.

I have never been inside an actual tank. So all of this is based on watching episodes of The Chieftain's Hatch, and playing Steel Beasts, Enlisted, and another game that I can't quite remember (games which restrict/can restrict the player's view to the internal optics of the tank). But, based on that admittedly limited and entirely virtual experience I believe the quality of the internal optics of most WW2 tanks was probably about on par with the M60A1. That requires some qualification. WW2 tank optics come in two flavors. There are the interwar designs that mostly relied on vision slits (mostly forward-facing, but sometimes there's a side or rear-facing vision slit). And there are the designs which came out either during the war or shortly before the war which used periscopes (often rotatable) and which gave the TC a cupola with full 360 degree periscopes/vision ports. The prewar designs with mostly forward-facing vision slits have atrociously worse visibility than the M60A1. It is impossible to see anything that isn't inside a very narrow arc to your direct front without sticking your head out of the tank. These feel practically impossible to operate without being turned out most of the time. The designs with periscopes and a 360 degree cupola have pretty much identical visibility to the M60A1. My impression is that WW2 seems to have more or less perfected the periscope and cupola, and there really wasn't much more to be done to improve visibility until passive night sights and thermal optics came along in the 70s and 80s (and now apparently external cameras and large CCTV screens). Visibility with periscopes and a cupola is still objectively bad, but it feels like amazing visibility compared to vision slits (visibility is much better if you turn out, but it's possible to operate while buttoned up). Unlocking the Panzer 3, after spending a while playing with the Panzer 2, in Enlisted was a huge eye opener. It felt like a massive upgrade, and not because the armor and gun were better. The armor and gun were better, but those felt like very minor improvements compared to the huge leap in situational awareness. The jump from vision slits to periscopes and cupolas felt almost as big as the jump from periscopes and cupolas to thermals and CCTV.

I can highly recommend this approach to viewing battles. I play with the icons turned on with an overhead view while I'm seriously reviewing the action and giving out orders. But I save every turn specifically so that I can go back and view a whole battle for the spectacle (bit cumbersome doing it that way, so it sure would be nice if we got a full battle replay feature someday, but I'm pretty sure Steve has shot that idea down). And when I'm reviewing a finished battle for the spectacle the icons, landmarks, and objectives are off, the trees are on, and I stick to ground level. It really is a very different way to view the action. The one downside is that now most mainstream Hollywood war movies just can't hold my interest anymore.

At the risk of straying too far off topic, I believe those higher estimates have been called into question. They apparently include some very dubious categories of "expended" rounds, such as rounds fired outside of combat. Modern rounds-fired-per-casualty rates are probably higher than Napoleonic rates, since modern troops are more dispersed, in duller uniforms, with better cover, and have adopted fire tactics other than destructive fire aimed at identified targets (recon by fire, suppressive fire). But even so I believe the most plausible estimates are still in the low thousands. The huge uncertainty over modern rounds to casualty rates is why I went with Napoleonic figures. Actually I believe CM Pro can track the ammunition of various calibers expended over a battle, so it would be interesting to hear from anyone who's played CM Pro how Combat Mission rounds to casualty rates compare with the real world estimates.

I'll use them as makeshift medics, have them stay back to provide comms for the mortars, move up to be another FO, or (when I'm being very sloppy, and even then only in the most dire of emergencies) use them as an extra assault team.

I think I saw LindyBeige's video years ago. If he was the only one to ever bring this up, I don't think I ever would have made this thread. It was really James Holland who gave me the kick to start taking another look at this. I vehemently disagreed with LindyBeige when I first saw his video, but I had warmed up to his arguments a bit by the time I started reading James Holland. I'm betting that even if both assisted loading and overheating made it into the game, the MG42 would still come out ahead. Combat Mission may not be representing them perfectly, and assisted loading and overheating may close the gap a bit, but I doubt the game is off by all that much. Don't discount how much of a difference assisted loading would make though. Yes, it would speed up the reloading of the MG42 a fair amount. Having a bit of help can really speed up the loading of a belt-fed weapon. But for a top-loaded magazine-fed weapon the difference is night and day. The gunner doesn't even need to lose his aim. I'd highly recommend watching April 9th (Danish war movie, search for either April 9th or 9 April). Mostly because it's a really good war movie that I recommend to everyone at every opportunity, but also because that first battle scene gives a really great demonstration of how quickly the assistant can reload a Madsen (which is also a top-loaded magazine-fed LMG, like the Bren).

I think there are a number of problems here. 1. The graphical representation of the terrain is far from perfect, so there is not a 1 to 1 relation between the battlefield you are seeing and the battlefield your pixeltruppen are seeing (though if you want to have a slightly better idea of what your pixeltruppen are seeing, it helps to turn off all of the icons). 2. People tend to lack direct experience with trying to spot similar objects under similar conditions to our pixeltruppen. They generally don't live out in the countryside. Those that do live out in the countryside tend not to spend their time looking for people hundreds of meters away wearing dull clothing, or looking for vehicles hundreds of meters away with dull paint schemes. Even fewer people have any experience with scanning the countryside for dull colored people or vehicles hundreds of meters away through periscopes or vision slits. Hapless actually has a great video demonstrating this last point. At about the one minute mark he gives an excellent demonstration of how difficult it is to see out of a BMP-2 using Steel Beasts (playing any vehicle based game which limits you (or which gives you the option of limiting yourself) to viewing the world through the vehicle's internal optics, such as Steel Beasts or Enlisted, will instantly make you much more forgiving towards the spotting ability of your tank crewmen). 3. People routinely underestimate how much more difficult tasks, which are very simple out of combat, become under combat conditions. Not only spotting, but also marksmanship and basic decision-making all suffer severely under combat conditions. It's easier to provide numbers for marksmanship than it is for spotting, but hopefully this is enough to illustrate how strong of an effect combat can have on normally simple tasks. The book War Games: The Psychology of Combat, by Leo Murray, claimed that soldiers are about 1/6th as effective with their fire in real combat compared to realistic exercises* (I've lost my copy so I can't provide the exact quote and page number). Keeping in mind that accuracy in realistic exercises is already much less than accuracy on a shooting range, where soldiers are firing at fixed targets at known distances from stable positions. In the Napoleonic era (because I have access to better data than for more modern eras), an accuracy test of assorted smoothbore muskets resulted in one hit for every 4-5 rounds fired (21%-28% hits) at a target roughly the size of an infantry company placed 320 yards away from the shooter, while in real combat somewhere between 200 and 500 rounds tended to be fired for every 1 casualty inflicted (459 rounds for every French casualty at Vittoria according to R. Henegan, 224 rounds for every British casualty at Hougoumont according to Mark Adkin). That's a difference of 40-100:1 between a shooting range and combat. Again, I'm using marksmanship because it's easier to provide data for it than it is for spotting (and because I'm always happy for any excuse to pull out any data that I happen to be keeping in my back pocket), but it's still very relevant because many of the factors that make hitting targets more difficult in a realistic exercise compared to a shooting range, and in real combat compared to a realistic exercise, will also make spotting more difficult. 4. Last, and probably least, maybe the spotting system in Combat Mission isn't quite perfect. *I should mention that the book never specified how much of the estimated sixfold reduction in fire effectiveness was a reduction in the accuracy of the fire, and how much of it was a reduction in the volume of fire (because soldiers were more suppressed by the cracking of real bullets).