Horses & Transport

[Philippe]

I don't know about the other horse enthusiasts, but I still have vivid recollections of playing Panzerblitz when I was in college, and practically falling out of my chair when I realized just how omnipresent horses were on the Eastern Front. It's not so much that you fight with them (apart from the odd cavalry patrol and occasional raid), it's just that they're a very characteristic part of the landscape, and you run into them when you break into a rear area. If you take away the horses, it's easy to forget just how primitive conditions really were back then. On the Eastern Front most people were slogging through the mud on foot, and the heavy dragging tended to get done by horses. There simply weren't enough motor vehicles to go around. That's what made the American army so remarkable: they almost had enough trucks (though never enough gasoline).

[karch]

I have about 80% of books ever written about WWII ( ) and I don't recall ever seeing more than 1 or 2 pictures of horses along with any actual fighting positions.

Actually it's only a few hunderd books or so, but I really don't recall seeing any horses at the front line in the books. I'd say not putting ANY horses in is more because of the trouble of coding them, but the other reason is that there were so few of them that ever were in the front line, it would NOT be realistic to include them.

[Priest]

Hey Karch in response to your sig, you bought a Mac and then had no software, catch 22 don't you think

Back to the horsy thing. I am not against horses in the game, just as I am not against Mauses in the game, or any other experimental one-off what if vehicle. Heck I would love to see an Abrams in the game! Just to see ya know. I am not against any of it, but if Charles and Steve pop in and say "TOO HARD" then I say "OKEY DOKEY" because it is just an extra.

[Bruno Weiss]

Really? The horses were not that far away from gun positions, cause they had to move the gun out of the danger zone if necessary. And they were of course also used to bring the guns in position. Even under fire.

And what's the issue with the coding effort? All this can be abstracted. 4 horses in the units description, a change of the movment speed, maybe a small symbol somwhere to show that this gun is horse drawn. The same would work for carts.

Ah ya nincompoops, I'm not the one that put the kabash on the smelly lil critters, I was only attempting to enlighten you (in vein ofcourse), that everybody including the lil Rascals had already discussed this with BTS and after listening to days worth of historical analysis, and painstaking research data, as well as some very impassioned speeches if not groveling, they rendered forth their final and inevitable decision in an official communique. "NO!". And as we all know a BTS decision is final. Well, I guess maybe 10%, okay 15% have been reversed. But who's counting. In one or two of the dozen major threads this was discussed in, I actually argued in favor of the grass recycling beasts being included. Pointing out that when the animal was finished pulling the gun into position, it could then serve as dinner round the campfire. Little salt, some pepper, and poof! Got yerself a steak ever bit as good as any porterhouse.

But before long and as one might expect, the dialog from the peanut gallery drifted off towards the inclusion of Soviet women, Finnish reindeer, Hungarian Paprika, and all manner of crap of some sort which in the end were ruled non-essential to the scope of CM. That ofcourse, is the final, insurmountable, and Holy barrier to the novice bright idea or the master stroke of grog genius. {You'll shoot yer eye out kid}.

[ May 23, 2002, 08:28 AM: Message edited by: Bruno Weiss ]