Grognard Questions...?

[GS_Guderian]

Hi there,

I know there might be plenty of those questions asked before and I even tried to pull some out off the achive but I failed so far. Actually I got lost in reading all kinds of other neat threads. Similar to the encyclopedia phenomena, you read all kinds of articles but the one you were looking up

Ok, a short explanation of my thinking.

I have been playing Close-Combat, mostly III (RR Mod) for years and actually never really looked deep into CM until a month ago. I never thought, that the 60secs turns could be fun, but after my first real game I noticed that the vast maps and great unit numbers cannot be handled by Real-time. Anyway, I must admit: I absolutly love the game. Especially from my professions point of view, German Panzergrennadier for some time now.

Now here are some questions, that I hope one or two of you guys are able and willing to answer:

Ammunition: I like the way you have to control your guys (Feuerzucht) and how fast you run out of ammo with "senseless" shooting. But why on earth don´t your troops fetch ammo from the dead.

Do they? I am used to grab all knds of handweapons and ammo with my Close-Combat groups. I know it was awkward how the MG 42 was passed over 50m because Schuetze Mueller died and maybe they were to effective in finding PpsH and Ammo along their way, but at least they tried.

My CM guys (Russian Theatre) don´t bother to search the dead (other then the ones in their group). Hell my guys even use captured handweapons from the scratch, how did they get them? Issued by the "Stabsfeldwebel" in the rear? Why don´t they grab russian handgrenades and a Mosin, if all they have left is a bajonet? I don´t demand them to use Panzerschreck and Flamethrowers (neat crew exploit from CC) but at least they could help me a bit.

Also, if one group within your squad is low on ammo, you oughta be able to interchange with the rest of your platoon. Put them close together and they equal it out? At least what I would order in that case.

Artillery Observers: An Artillery Observer is a trained soldier. Trained for the job of spotting and leading artillery fire. Why on earth should he only be able to lead the fire from ONE battery? Is it is personal battery? Will Major Figorov not let loose his rockets if Lieutenant Vilishenko asks for it? Just because he is the genuine Observer of another battery? I would love to see myself purchasing artillery rounds without observers. They could be added to support. Of course a skilled rocket man is better for the Nebelwerfer then a mortar spotter, but they can all do the job. Hell, even my training as a platoon leader including (Very basic) spotting and leading of artillery fire.

I can understand it to a certain point when the landline spotters are restricted to talking to their battery, but all most of my leaders have radios. I might even allow the obsever to use it, if I don´t want to call in the fire on my own. All (radio) obsevers should be able to call in all of the fire which is granted to my battalion, regiment, whatever. Maybe worse results because the battery officer must cope with a new voice, but let them fire!

Smoke Ammo:

Why can I either use smoke or HE shells with Artillery. How do they know what I want to use before they pile up the ammo?

Or do the XXX shots represent a certain time my artillery is willing to fire before changing positions? But the counter battery fire would almost always hit them, when I split the 2 x 36 rounds in half.

I think it would make much more sense to say:

Artillery type XY has 72 HE shells, and 36 smoke.

Use them or not.

Don´t make them smoke one time and HE another time. No magic in war, no?

Defense in buildings:

Is there a difference performance wise if I move an MG into a house and defend it, or if I was in there before?

I know there is thread about the possible firepower out of the windows, etc., but that´s not the point. When I am ordered to defend a house with my platoon (yes platoon, any building that is bigger then a ranger hut can easily house all of my men, especially two story and or cellar buildings), and when I have time for it, I will "fortify" the house. Just like barbed wire, roadblocks and mines, I would like to have a "fortified" building for purchase.

This represents:

- the wiremash, empty sandbags and alike in front of windows, only fixed on the top of the window frame. This allows to drop grenades out, but enemy grenades will bounce off.

- tables, cupboards and sandbags build nice fire positions in the rear of the room. The surroundings of a window can be strengthened by sandbags.

- all unnessecary openings are closed and blocked or boobytrapped.

- new openings are broken in to the walls, if possible to allow different fire angles.

- fire positions inside behind most likely entrances. Well covered with furniture and sandbags.

- all stairways are barbed wired or blocked with furniture, story to story movement only by ladders. (Obviously this is rather impossible in concrete buildings, but with thin and wooden floors you can easily drive holes from celler to attic. Ladders can be pulled up or down, denying easy access to intruders).

- the cellar will be strengthened with balks (if you have much time and material) to sustain artilley strikes.

Etc., etc.

You see, there is a hell of a job a platoon can do to your house, if you let us

Anyway this could and should make a real difference in defense and without proper preparation it should be harder to defend a building!!!!!

Mining houses:

It was a common way to defend a town with mines, boobytraps and other means of explosives hidden in house you willingly leave to the enemy.

Once inside he looses men to grenades attached to doors or mines attached to stairways. Just like a normal "minefield".

In other words, why can´t I "mine" houses?

Blowing up houses:

Another way of fighting in urban areas was to prepare large stacks of explosives inside certain buildings. Like the corner building of two streets. You are almost certain the enemy will use it in it´s advance. As soon as the whole group, platoon is in. You blow it up.

Could be represented by engineers who are with a certain radius of such a prepared house.

You buy the "explosives" place them like a minefield, and any pioneer within a vicinity of 100...200m (length of the fuse cable?) will detonate them as soon as infantry is detected inside. Result just as if a SU-152 blew the house up.

Prisoners:

I know some things have to stay abstract, but sometimes I end up with 2 companies of prisonders. Unguarded, standing in the rear.

I disliked the concept in CC and it ain´t better here. Taking prisoners costs men, one of the reasons some leaders refrain from taking them at all. :mad:

Fighting with ATG/IG:

Is it only me or is it impossible to tell a gun to just shoot ONCE (1 shot!!!!) and then immediately move out of the position. I know it´s the same concept as in CC, you tell the group leader to attack. He will do as good as he and his men can do. But it´s simply annoying.

My ATG opens fire, sometimes gets of a second shot, rarely a third. Often the enemy tank is killed after 1-2 rounds, but they won´t stop. Heroically they look for the next target, but sometimes the are facing 10-20 tanks.

Why don´t they stop? Why don´t they move?

Especially in Defense an ATG Crew would prepare several fire positions, to switch after a few quick shots. Right now I trade my guns one for a tank (If I kill it), a good quota? Yes, maybe, but I would still like to have my men survive.

It can´t be that hard to rush backward 10-15m with a 45mm cannon. Especially if your position was prepared and the "retreat way" cleared.

Smoke:

If I see it right smoke lasts like 2-3 minutes. Even without wind. What kind of use does it have then? Is that because of performance problems?

Where is infantry smoke?

Right now pulling your troops out of a position is their death. You might as well give "Halte-Befehle" like the GröFaz himself. There is no way to cover your retreat, other then calling in mortar smoke. A little silly to do that every time you want to pull a group back.

In most of my Defense/Offense games the Defender died in his position or ran panic stricken to got shot. The principle of no "Interleaving" (Verzahnung) with the enemy can´t be used.

Pulling back troops should be a little bit easier with infantry smoke grenades. And even that smoke would last longer then 2-3 minutes.

[Sergei]

Originally posted by GS_Guderian:

I never thought, that the 60secs turns could be fun, but after my first real game I noticed that the vast maps and great unit numbers cannot be handled by Real-time. Anyway, I must admit: I absolutly love the game.

You have been assimilated...

[flamingknives]

That's acmilated.

Ammunition:

Scavaging ammo and weapons from casualties is in there, but abstracted. It tends to be quite unusual to lose your squad automatic weapon. The rest is something that may be addressed in CMX2 (the new engine under development)

Artillery observers:

That's the way it is at the moment. The artillery system isn't fantastic, but until CMX2, it's what we've got. BTW, your platoon leaders don't have radios, unless they're late war western allies, and these won't necessarily reach artillery positions. Even company and battlion leader don't necessarily have radios for talking to the arty or the authority to do so.

Smoke ammo:

As above

Fortified buildings.

Perhaps in CMX2, otherwise it's a limitation of the engine.

Mining buildings:

ditto

Blowing up buildings:

Can be done to an extent by pioneers within 30m, but not remotely.

Prisoners:

Taken in assualt were often just waved to the rear for following troops to pick up. If the enemy can get a single man near the prisoners, he can liberate them and you lose the extra points for having captured them. So it's a good idea to put a guard on them. There are accounts of a single soldier/AFV guarding very large numbers of prisoners, as the PWs knew that to carry on fighting from that position would be suidcide.

Towed guns:

If you rotate them away from the target before firing, they'll take some time rotating back and will only fire one shot towards the end of the turn, at which point you can order them to stop firing.

An ATG against 10-20 tanks will lose in real life, not just in CM. There is a problem with 'Borg spotting' (if one tank sees the gun, they all do) but this is being fixed with CMX2.

Moving towed guns:

CM assumes that all the ammo etc. is being moved with the gun, which slows it down. Tractor vehicles are your friend here.

CMX2, with more detailed representation, may fix this.

Smoke:

It is somewhat castrated in CMX1, possibly due to hardware considerations. If you read the manual, infantry smoke is deliberately omitted to avoid ahistorical overuse.

Pulling back;

You need cover to pull back. If you start running away without making the enemy shooting at you keep his head down, your going to be in trouble.

[Wicky]

In the scenario editor it's possible to create booby trapped buildings, you firstly place mines then put a building on top.

It works similarly with guns, pillboxes and even tanks. etc

[GS_Guderian]

Thx for the quick reponses, looks like CMX2 will be my friend

[flamingknives]

Get in line

[GS_Guderian]

Another question:

Do Pioneers work against barbedwire?

Can you blow it up?

Sad enough, that you can´t boobytrap it, because even covered wire is penetrated by enemy infantry without damaging the wire, it seems!?!

[flamingknives]

Nope, you can't hurt wire, or roadblocks for that matter. You can put wire on top of mines though, which counts as boobytrapping it in my book

[GS_Guderian]

Well,

it´s not that important anyway I guess.

Hopefully HE shells and Pioneers can do harm to wire in later versions.

Without proper Infantry smoke grenades it seems to be hard enough to attack positions behind wire. As long as the defender has a decent amount of firepower you will loose many men. Fair enough for now, I suppose.

Just love to lay kilometers of wire

[JasonC]

Ammo - only the shells are absolute totals. Infantry and MGs reach "low", not out. A unit on low ammo is scrounging for it. They will fire once a minute to defend their immediate surroundings. Units with real ammo can fire 6 times, sometimes faster in close.

Use a shortened arc after you get low. A good rule of thumb is to put the unit on a 100m covered arc, maximum, as soon as the ammo counter hits 10. If they have SMGs 60m or so works better. Set you longer arcs with this in mind - you won't need all that much time to fire it off. Pace it over the enemy rather than over the whole battle. You don't need lots of ammo remaining after the enemy has no men remaining.

The main thing to avoid is long range fire against men in cover, because that burns ammo faster than it burns through the men shot at. The better the enemy cover, the closer you have to be to making shooting at them pay. If in doubt, MGs can use a rule of 10m times the listed exposure, as a maximum range to fire at that kind of target. 5m times exposure works better for typical squad infantry. Adjust for tactical realities, those are rules of thumb.

Incidentally, there isn't much ammo on the dead anyway. They are only a fraction of those engaged, in awkward spots and scattered around, they fired off much of what they brought etc. And the living are using theirs. Also, we are much more frantic about firing small arms than the real participants were. A typical basic load often lasted an infantryman a week, or 2-3 days in actual combat. We fire it off in 10 minutes. The shot less often because they saw the enemy only occasionally etc.

(My x2 suggestion on the subject is to reduce ammo consumption somewhat vs. targets in cover - roughly, square root of exposure as the chance of using an ammo point).

"An Artillery Observer is a trained soldier"

Armies have elaborate ownership structures over supporting fire. You don't have an FO, you have an artillery module, representing dedicated support by a battery with a unit of fire etc. The CM system most closely approximates actual German practice in WW II, which had dedicated batteries in support of particular front line battalions. They might call the whole parent battalion occasionally if that was the tasking, but they could not reach outside their ownership chain. All the guns were spoken for elsewhere. Arkos tasked the guns from corps level and division. A front line commander was simply told what he would have available, and it was 4 ranks above his pay grade to change it.

In the Russian army, small forms of support were layered as organic weapons at the various echelons, from battalion to army. The army level controlled most of the guns, parcelling them out as entire regiments to various component divisions, depending on the operational plan.

They typically delivered quite inflexible fire according to a centralized fire plan. In CM terms, "map fire" ordered on turn 1 and delayed by hitting "Q", to schedule it to land at the designated target starting at the designated minute. The in game delays for all the larger FOs reflect this and are meant to. You buy a number of low quality FOs and plot their fire on turn 1. You can walk them off the map if you want to, the fire still lands as scheduled. The "observor" himself has nothing to do with it.

A few real FOs with time to fire more like 5 minutes can support "reactively" - 82mm mortars from battalion, 1-3 76mm field guns from the div arty battalion closest to the regiment, 1-3 120mm FOs from regimental or added heavy mortar formations. These were supporting from 1-5 km away typically, quite nearby compared to western artillery practice.

The communications gear itself has nothing to do with it. But incidentally, radios were tactically quite scarce in WW II, and had ranges measuring a handful of miles for the portable sets. Enough to raise battalion, that is about it. More powerful radios with 10-25m range existed but were less than portable and specialist equipment. Also, their uses were restricted by enemy listening in and, in the case of the Germans, directing counterbattery fire by radio direction finding. Most communication at the CM scale was by runner, and certainly all downward communication was.

In the US and British armies, it was possible to call for fire from units beyond those in dedicated support, including ad hoc fire requests from quite junior personnel. But the target had to justify it. And frequently the only result was that the most aggressive FOs monopolized far more of the fire than conditions in their sectors warranted, while others starved.

Ammo expenditure requests systematically exceeded the ability to supply the guns. As a result, battalions were typically put on shell per day rations, which doled out at least some support to the units they were actually meant by higher HQs to be supporting. Meanwhile, artillery commanders allocated fires among subordinates by moving batteries on the map and shifting their shell rationing and resupply.

Higher HQs occasional requisitioned everything for mass shoots designed for operational effects, or ordered all guns in range to counter-concentrate against a corps level counterattack. But the average captain in a run of the mill fight could no more expect to call on a whole corps of artillery, than he could expect the whole air force to visit or a tank division to ride over the hill to his rescue.

If you want to simulate a case where there is significant arty support, you just give that side 3 FOs of some type or other and dial up the shells per FO. Then a whole battalion fires when you want it to, for as long as the scenario designer wants, etc.

But the CM limits aren't far off for average levels of support. The real war variance was higher, from fight to fight. But e.g. US 105mm batteries would fire 3 missions a day at the CM scale, 155s maybe 2. Mortars wouldn't fire even 1 per day - they didn't get resupplied with ammo regularly enough. (Germans did, for maybe 1 module per battalion per day).

"Will Major Figorov not let loose his rockets if Lieutenant Vilishenko asks for it?"

The Major will tell the Lieutenant that the Party requires him to fight to the last man where he is. Lieutenants don't give Majors orders in the Russian army. If the Major fired his rockets because a Lieutenant told him too, a whole passel of generals would eat him for breakfast. Those rockets are part of the Big Plan for the Big Push Next Week.

"Hell, even my training as a platoon leader including (Very basic) spotting and leading of artillery fire."

You are spoiled rotten by modern communications, modern firepower arms, opportunity-pull delegation of authority, complete lack of ammo limits in logistically unconstrained wars, etc. The men who fought WW II did not have it remotely that good.

Smoke Ammo:

Why can I either use smoke or HE shells with Artillery. How do they know what I want to use

You had some plan presumably, and didn't keep it a secret. CM is forgiving and doesn't require you to announce it or put it in a sealed envelope before set up. There is no absolute limit on one shell type, the army orders what the front line requests. The overall limit on number of shells is total thruput to the guns, overall expense, and the voracious appetite of the things, which fired the rest yesterday and will fire more tommorrow.

"Or do the XXX shots represent a certain time my artillery is willing to fire before changing positions?"

No, they are not using shoot and scoot. They are still in position, there are other units with their own requests but they are not remotely firing all the time. A single battalion of field artillery can fire off 100 tons a day. Divisions get about that much. Artillery has huge surge firepower, but can't remotely keep it up, in supply terms. The armies fired hundreds of millions of large caliber shells as it is, many times the number of men wounded by them. But no army could afford 10,000 shells per man, which is what is would take to fire whenever anyone asks for it.

Defense in buildings:

Is there a difference performance wise if I move an MG into a house and defend it, or if I was in there before?

None. If you want to simulate a fortified building, just make it a heavy building rather than a light one. A large heavy building holds a platoon naturally, without any tactical crowding, provides excellent cover, and fully blocks LOS to the back positions. If you want to make it harder to enter, put wire along some of its faces.

As for urban demolitions, it wasn't all that common. A few boobytraps are not remotely as dangerous as a real minefield. Sure, AP mines should be allowed in building tiles, but it is not a glaring ommission. As for wiring a building with tons of explosive, they did not do it. Explosives are useful. If you want to just represent clearing a field of fire, then put rubble there at the set up.

PWs are rare in CM. When they occur, you can guard them or not. If you don't and you move all friendlies out of LOS, they will escape and revert to the enemy side. It isn't hard to "guard" them during the same firefight. They are men who gave up voluntarily, not men held under duress. They'd far prefer the war be over.

Fighting with ATG/IG:

Is it only me or is it impossible to tell a gun to just shoot ONCE (1 shot!!!!) and then immediately move out of the position.

No, and it isn't realistic either. You can use guns in a stealthy fashion if their caliber is low and the range is long. The enemy simply won't spot them when they fire. He will get only a sound contact instead. That is a realistic way to "snipe" with guns, but for the large calibers it requires very long range. Any large weapon is going to be picked up when it fires, if there are enemies left in LOS. Which is realistic.

And no, they didn't trot the gun back into hiding like it was a sniper's rifle. They might only have a single man at the gun, but if they wanted to get out of dodge because of incoming, they left the thing where it was. In CM that is called "abandoning". Your men will do it often with no prompting from you. It is quite frequent to lose a gun but none of its crew, or only 1-2.

If an ATG kills a tank and the crew survives, with 1-2 men wounded or not, it has done very well. The average ATG was toasted without killing anything. (You can tell - there aren't enough dead tanks to do around for it to have been otherwise).

As for firing with 10-20 tanks in LOS, um, you don't have to commit suicide like this. Keyhole your gun positions. Not right in front of the whole world, but a narrow angle between these woods and that house, crossed with another gun's own narrow angle, so enemy vehicles have to cross gun A's sight picture or gun B's. One of them sees a flank. It fires, the other remains hidden. Only enemy along a narrow pencil from the gun that fired might see it.

You can use wide LOS with stealthy shooters, like ATRs or MGs or light flak. Or you can use a wide LOS onto reverse slope, isolating the enemies that just crossed the crest from their 9-19 friends behind. But if you put the gun in a wide open spot with view of the whole world, then the whole world will see it when it fires, so it will fire approximately once. That is your choice, not in the nature of ATGs.

"Why don´t they stop? Why don´t they move?"

Why would they stop? They just announced their position to the whole world, on your own explanation in view of 10-20 enemies. They try to take as many of them out as they can. They know they are spotted and reply fire is seconds out. The gun is a write off, the only question is what it takes with it. They will abandon the gun as soon as the fire gets hot, and kill what they can until then.

"smoke lasts like 2-3 minutes."

81mm mortar smoke, yes. Tiny shells, 1 lb of payload. If you want smoke that lasts, use much bigger shells. More expensive though, since they could do a lot more as HE.

"Where is infantry smoke?"

In the gamey ASL kit bag where it belongs. Never was historical. Actual use of smokescreens was usually for large operational purposes like crossing a river. The idea that every WW II infantryman threw smoke grenades before he crossed a street is sheer fantasy.

"There is no way to cover your retreat, other then calling in mortar smoke."

That is just a poor choice of defending locations. Try a crest line. A wood line. Out the back of the block. You defend in places where a short movement can break LOS. You don't wait for the enemy to get LOS to your retreat route - if he has a fire lane about to cut in behind you, it is time to get out. For that matter, if he has HE direct fire weapons pointed at you, and a full ID (targeted by anyone e.g.), it is time to get out. If you see a spotting round, it is time to get out. You don't wait until the enemy is on top of you, and you don't defend from two isolate islands of woods in the middle of a flat, open field.

[junk2drive]

Thank you GS_G for getting Jason to post.

Good stuff !

[slysniper]

You have just come over from CC game, it is easy to see these weaknesses mentioned, but You have gotta love the strengths in this game system.

Enjoy GS_Guuderian, let alone can you play with more than 15 units, you have a endless supply of

maps and you do not need to be a computer genius to create one. That makes this better than anything else just because of that.

[GS_Guderian]

Originally posted by junk2drive:

Thank you GS_G for getting Jason to post.

Good stuff !

You are welcome

[GS_Guderian]

Originally posted by JasonC:

Use a shortened arc after you get low.

It wasn´t about getting on low, but thx for your tips. i absolutly love that you get low, when you fire forever.

Incidentally, there isn't much ammo on the dead anyway. They are only a fraction of those engaged, in awkward spots and scattered around, they fired off much of what they brought etc. And the living are using theirs.

Sometimes they have all of their load, because I killed them before they fired a shot. I don´t mean direct hit by arty, we all know that you won´t finde much afterwards.

But if the LIVING are using theirs, hell why not the enemy living? Where is the difference, especially when my men are using Ppsh anyway?

If a group takes ammo from their own (even during attack, not defense in a trench!) then shouldn´t I be able to at least get something out of an overrun position? Or when I advance over the 2 beaten companies that just failed to assault me?

The communications gear itself has nothing to do with it. But incidentally, radios were tactically quite scarce in WW II, and had ranges measuring a handful of miles for the portable sets. Enough to raise battalion, that is about it.

I get your point, but when I "buy" 3 x 105mm Arty Support from my regiment/division, those artillery guns come from the same artillery regiment (most likely). The officers all know each other, the batteries fire positions aren´t to much scattered around (they are here to support me, obviously they are all about the same distance away)

Major Figorov would be in charge of battery 1, while 2 other majors are in charge of the other ones. Lieutenant Vilishenko is one of the spotters of the artillery regiment. One of several. Today he is tasked to work for me (as the battalion commander who was admitted for 3 batteries of 105mm). He is not tasked to work for the artillery battery, and even if we say, that Russian Doctrine was that stiff, let´s make him the exclusive spotter of the day for battery # 3. Now his two comrades, both lieutenants and his friends in the rough days of war are also with me. They all carry the same low quality radio equipment to reach the batteries in the back. Now if those two other lieutenants die, and I order my brave Lieutenant Vilishenko to ask for the shells of those other two batteries, what will happen?

This is the elaborate story I meant. I just feel that it is more then awkward that Arty Support is lost, when the observer is lost. Landline spotters ok, maybe the only rocket spotter, too, but if they are all the same type?

You are right about the fire plan arty for Russia, it helps avoiding the trouble, but in Defense I love to work with a few target zones.

As for wiring a building with tons of explosive, they did not do it. Explosives are useful.

In special occasions they did. It was a very common defensive strategy in the defense of eastern Prussia. Dammned to defend every meter of earth the defenders of e.g. Breslau did make use of that tactic intensivly. The pioneers picked a building most likely suitable for an enemy HQ to move in, cornerhouse, good cellar, etc.. Explosives where hidden, right after the forward lines were foced back and the house was left to the enemy. After some spotting to make sure the house is in good use, they blew it up.

Btw. Breslau had tons of surplus exlosives left since it was manufactured there until the city got surrounded.

I am aware that this is not the common everyday tatctic like barbwire, but it could be rather expensive aynway.

And no, they didn't trot the gun back into hiding like it was a sniper's rifle. They might only have a single man at the gun, but if they wanted to get out of dodge because of incoming, they left the thing where it was.

I don´t doubt that they abandoded the gun to hide (too bad you can never take the gun back after that, in CM), but a 37mm ATG or a 2 pounder is very well maneuverable by it´s crew.

And the general order surely wasn´t to get into one position and fire from there until dead or ammo gets low. It´s a common rule of combat to change your position after you fired. You can tell tanks to do so (or at least try it) but not your ATGs. That doesn´t make sense to me, really.

I am not talking abou a 100mm late war ATG or a heavy AAG.

"smoke lasts like 2-3 minutes."

81mm mortar smoke, yes. Tiny shells, 1 lb of payload. If you want smoke that lasts, use much bigger shells. More expensive though, since they could do a lot more as HE.

The smoke still vanishes to fast, no matter what caliber imho.

"Where is infantry smoke?"

"There is no way to cover your retreat, other then calling in mortar smoke."

And yet, infantry smoke grenades existed.

I never said, that those guys should have eneough to cover every crossing of a street.

I don´t mind them having strict historical rarity on those either.

But NONE!!!! is even more ahistorical.

[flamingknives]

Smoke is definately too transient. For an example (not too germane to CMBB, but anyway), 9 3" mortar bombs/minute ought be enough to maintain a 500 yd smoke screen.

However, it's much easier and faster to co-ordinate an attack in CM than in real life, so it all balances out.

The 2pr. ATG isn't as maneuverable as the calibre might suggest, since it has a specialised traversing platform rather than the more common split-trail type. That's why portees were introduced to conduct shoot and scoot.

[huhrlass]

hi guys, when is combat mission coming out with a second version? just curious

[stikkypixie]

Here is the official stand on smoke (from the pdf-manual):

Designers Note: Infantry smoke grenades, a source of smoke

commonly found in other WWII games is not available in

CMBB. Our research shows little credible evidence that this

type of smoke was used regularly at the squad level in WWII

for tactical purposes. Instead, it appears to have been used

for signalling mostly, and we have therefore decided to

exclude it from CMBB to prevent its potential unrealistic

overuse.

[JasonC]

"I am aware that this is not the common everyday tactic"

So make it a scenario special only. Put a TRP on the building and lock it. Put a 210mm FO at the back of the map with 4 shells (one "flight").

[GS_Guderian]

Well,

unfortunately I am seldomly interested in scenarios. I played thousends of Close-Combat games to compete against another human, not the AI.

Thus I would like the ability to "buy" something like that. Nothing of real importance, but I bet more houses were blown up that way, then Panzer IIJ fought on the eastfront

[V]

Originally posted by GS_Guderian:

Artillery Observers: An Artillery Observer is a trained soldier. Trained for the job of spotting and leading artillery fire. Why on earth should he only be able to lead the fire from ONE battery? Is it is personal battery? Will Major Figorov not let loose his rockets if Lieutenant Vilishenko asks for it? Just because he is the genuine Observer of another battery? I would love to see myself purchasing artillery rounds without observers. They could be added to support. Of course a skilled rocket man is better for the Nebelwerfer then a mortar spotter, but they can all do the job. Hell, even my training as a platoon leader including (Very basic) spotting and leading of artillery fire.

I can understand it to a certain point when the landline spotters are restricted to talking to their battery, but all most of my leaders have radios. I might even allow the obsever to use it, if I don´t want to call in the fire on my own. All (radio) obsevers should be able to call in all of the fire which is granted to my battalion, regiment, whatever. Maybe worse results because the battery officer must cope with a new voice, but let them fire!

Good points, hopefully BF.C is planning to do something different in the new CM.

[GS_Guderian]

As you mentioned the new CM Engine, is there a chance that more then 2 players will be able to play?

I know the game concept isn´t about clicking feast Command & Conquer style, but maybe 2 on 2 or 3 on 3 could be a neat thing. Like a coop-modus, where you didvide your Inf battalions among the players. Or one guy leads the tanks to battle, while another coordinates the foot troops.