Tiger tanks in the Eastern Front, what some crews had to say.

[Andreas]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Mattias:

Oh, and this was not in any way intended to argue against your tests Germanboy and Guy, just to clarify my line of thought!<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Sorry Matey - but you must be confusing me with someone or somefink. I never did any tests.

[Guy w/gun]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Mattias:

Germanboy and Guy,

Read you both load and clear, I figured your tests where based on long range gunnery over a "clean" field. And running it the same way I would most likely encounter the same results as you.

However, my original "test" never intended to cleanly dissect the mechanics of the game. It was set up to test the CM engines ability to simulate a real life engagement I had just read about in the book that I mentioned in my original post.

[describing it as I remember it, I can't find the exact description now]

It took place somewhere in the Baltics, in the spring of 1944. Two tigers manned by experienced crews where faced with between 20 and 30 enemy AFV's, mainly T34's but a number of SU-122/SU-85 types where also spotted.

The opponents sighted each other at a distance of just under 2000 meters. The Tigers began to close the range moving, stopping, shooting and then moving again. They got as close as 400 meters before reversing again. For about 30 minutes the engagement raged back and forth like this before the remaining Soviet vehicles retreated. 20 Soviet were KO'd or abandoned while the Tigers remained capable of fighting, both were pretty battered, on of them immobilised, but they won the field that time.

The story does not say anything about the actions of the Soviet side, how they maneuvered, if and how they fired smoke or tried any kind of special tricks.

I am pretty sure that your successful "counter attacks" with the Shermans can be attributed to the terrain in which you fought. It allowed you to execute a broad front advance over terrain that was uniformly passable at high speed for your tanks. There were no other Germans nearby, real, suspected or just feared.

In the real battle I imagine that there were large sections of the battlefield that was clearly impassible by trees or rugged in a way that prohibit rapid straight movement, even for a T34. real life terrain also pretty much always obscures the LOS more or less, seldom if ever could all the Soviet vehicles fire their weapons in concert.

etc etc really... There is literally a world of a difference.

I would love to be able to read the Soviet perspective on this particular engagement, and indeed the dozens of other engagements described in the book.

Oh, and this was not in any way intended to argue against your tests Germanboy and Guy, just to clarify my line of thought!

M.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Right you are Mattias. The original test was to observe the accuracy of Tigers at long but historicaly accurate ranges. When I played the allies, I did so just for fun . Your right, terrain is almost never completely uniform, there was no threat from anything other source other than the Tigers, etc. So playing as the allies would have little to do with real tactics used by the Soviets.

But it did point out an interesting quirk of the Tac AI. Instead of constantly popping smoke and meandering the tanks around as the AI did, I just rushed the Tigers. In doing so I lost fewer tanks and knocked out the cats.

[Mattias]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Germanboy:

Sorry Matey - but you must be confusing me with someone or somefink. I never did any tests.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Right, sorry, I was thinking of the Commissar.

M.

[Tero]

Originally posted by Germanboy:

IF geocities works for a change, that is...

Sort of off-topic remark:

It would seem that if you take a look at the URL by righ-clicking and copying from properties the pic will show up on and off afterwards as it is in your HD cache.

Could it be that with all the web worms about some of the servers have disabled most or all Java script features for good measure.

Back to our regular programming.....