A good map maker is worth his weight in gold.

Great job! Its people like you that keep the game alive!

Great job on this very life like map. Now. Now are all these maps used randomly even if I'm playing combat mission cold war? I noticed that on red thunder and cold war had a same map or 2 shared between playing both games

@@decimated550Might be justified for those two.

Darling! :D Well done Melchett. Thanks for letting us watch.

Good game gents

Yeah, always surprising to see a Sherman survive... well, anything.

@@usuallyhapless9481 Are you playing this on wego or are you playing this live head to head ? Are you able to give small orders on the fly to your men or are you relying on the AI after you've set your one minute moves?

30:56 Last Stand of the Scouts! Died with honor

Well, I like both UH and yours editing style ahahah

By 45 even on the eastern front this problem should have been present for the Germans I'd think. Having looked into Soviet wartime metallurgy, it seems the problem was being heavily studied by 42. By 43 there was both scientific and industrial efforts to come to solutions. By 44 some factories were getting very consistently high armour quality, but that still meant the front lines were very hit and miss, with even tanks in the same company having wildly differing armour quality. By 45 however, at least by Soviet claims and the limited data I've seen, it appears consistency had massively improved. Most factories were able to produce quality plates at least most of the time. I believe the percentage I saw was 60-80% consistent quality, up from ~30-40% even up to late 43, early 44. I'd speculate it took so long due to the organization of the soviet industrial effort, where making changes to tooling, equipment and process was only done if absolutely necessary, as it slowed down production significantly until the factory had adjusted. They also kicked out changes in phases, allowing factories producing new equipment to fully switch, while older equipment was still produced at others. While this is understandable, it's somewhat of a self fufilling prophecy (if you make lots of low quality tanks, you're more likely to lose tanks, which requires you to build more tanks, which makes it more difficult to improve tanks, as demand remains very high)

@@thepinkplushie this may be entirely true and seems like it is so, the documents/archival sources where very western centric mostly interviews and interrogations of German officers and industrial staff of how they viewed allied(American) armor. Only really referencing the eastern front to draw comparisons. From what I’ve gleamed from the reports is that American tanks where much better protected than the Allies thought they where. I think the report mentions that they wanted to do a follow on study of this but couldn’t find enough examples of Shermans that had frontal impacts of long 75s or short 88s. After the war I am pretty, though I have no source I can relate to that the Allies did fire a long 75 at the Sherman and it cut through out to about 800m but they might have had good ammo and not war time production. I do remember a addendum that told of the long 88 being able to punch through at 2km even with very poor ammo. It was more out of pure Kinetic energy than anything else. I am not sure and I think all of this might be lost to history, I do find things like this fascinating! The paper says the Sherman’s armor couldn’t stand a chance against the long 75 but in reality it was much more muddy.

@@masonm9316 Makes sense they'd try it. That said, I know the Americans often used their own guns of similar power and calibre in range tests to approximate, due to a lack of captured German guns and ammunition. This is something the Soviets had to do less, as far more tanks were captured on the eastern front than the western. I find it highly believable (and sources I've read seem to agree) that American armour rated far higher than it was given credit for (and still is). Likewise German armour tends to be overrated in some aspects. The Germans did a great job adopting effective plate sloping with the Panther, but the Tiger used a pretty conventional design and was used far past it being outdated on the field. Likewise though the Panther's armour pattern was exceptional for the time, the weld quality and metal quality wasn't up to snuff even in '43 and continued to decline until the end of the war. There's many pictures of German big cats that were hit by large Soviet rounds that didn't pen but burst the weld lines. And that's not even to talk about the spalling, which seems to have just gotten worse and more common as the war went on.

One of the rarely discussed aspects of the war was access to materials like vanadium, molybdenum, and tungsten. The main delay in German Turbojets was not so much orders from above, as a lack of alloys to build turbine blades. Making the high-temperature spinning components from simple steel would result in so an engine would fail after ten hours of use. To type qualify a pilot in a twin engine ME-262 with 20 hours flight time would eat four jets before you even got to combat. Tungsten is needed for both machine tooling to make tank armor, and as a component of AP shells - meaning by the end of the war the Panzers need to choose between making tanks or ammunition.

@@MrChainsawAardvark To put in perspective how dire it was for the Germans, even the allies had tungsten shortages to the very end of the war. Demand was sky high and many of the largest tungsten operations wouldn't be completed until after the war. Germany didn't have easy imports from around the world like the eastern and western allies. The Soviets were wise to focus tungsten and other rare resources on armour and tooling rather than shells in my opinion. The T-34-85 and IS-2 both had "good enough" killing power (the later easily disabled most German tanks even when failing to penetrate). The western allies had a steady tungsten supply, though not as much as they needed to fufill all the requests. In the end all sides were rationing AP ammo, especially HVAP/APCR.

Can't be terrified if you're dead

I think after the first engagement with A1 being the General, I would have tried to flank that bocage before committing.. and disengaged till I had better Intel. But hell was a great battle.

v4.03

Yep. Usually on my friendly forces... of course.