A Marder's impact is largely on battlefield economics. They are very cheap point wise and it gets very expensive for the Allied or Soviet player to trade Shermans, Cromwells or T34s for Marders. Unfortunately CM economics has two aspects, unit costs and rarity points cost. Under standard or strict rarity Marders use up points quickly and way out of proportion to their usefulness as a sound scenario purchase. Ironically the economics of the game favor purchases of the Panther. At least one letter model has a rarity rating of uncommon or better and while the point cost is on the higher end the quality of the Panther makes up for that. I note that the point cost for a stug in the game is more than for a panzer 4. An odd listing but there we are.

amazing

19:39 They are also now available in CM Final Blitzkrieg. Maybe it's been a thing with the steam release or they've been patched in recently. But they exist now.

all those semi auto rifles plus the belt fed mg is insane.

This amount of fire power back then and even today is terrifying considering volume of the bullets coming, as well as it being 30-06 bigger than even the 8mm Mauser and the 7.62x54r still in service today.

This has to be one of the better performances. The addition of the belt fed Browning makes a huge difference, really gives them the GPMG to make them punch above the regular line infantry, and everyone still has a semi auto plus the additional BAR. Deadly weapons, but of course the tradeoff really is the lack of platoon assigned mortars the regular troops get

Cool stuff. What sound mod is that? The bullet cracks and snaps sound really good.

That’s what I’m saying

The Nolan Ryan of hand grenade throwers.

This reminds me of my board questions when I was in the Army.

Thanks!

I'm a new Combat Mission player, so I'm still learning and my observations my not be worth much, but here are my thoughts. Perhaps it would have been better to put the smoke screen just beyond the objective (the Chapel). In this way you could have seen the objective, while it was obscured from the enemy. This would also allow you to put down suppressing fire on the objective with MG fire while you moved up to assault it. I'm not sure if the "assault" move command would have been better than a "quick" move, but it seems that might have worked better to get the flamethrower to burn the objective just before the pioneers move in for the close assault. With all that said, I realize it must be difficult to lay down an effective smoke screen. Maybe it needed to be re-seeded to maintain it. One final thought -- would it have been better to launch the assault from the worker's housing on your left flank? You didn't scout to, so it's hard to know. The smoke screen would be trickier because of all the open ground to cover to your front between the worker's housing and Pavlov's s House, but Pavlov's House itself wound screen you from enemy beyond it. Well that's my two cent with of advice. It probably wouldn't have made much difference.

969th like on the video, nice

Squad could be soo much better.. oh well, maybe in the future.

I think you should have used the assault command on the Chapel.

I love the jab at Fury. That movie is aptly named because that's what it made me feel. I have major issues with pretty much everything in that movie, not just from an "um technically" kind of way but also its messaging and story telling. Absolutely atrocious mess of a film that is only popular because it had the budget for cool effects and a real Tiger. But to give it some credit, at least it's not Hacksaw Ridge.

yeah, towed anti tank guns are win or die weapons

P..S. please add the name P.J. Jennings to your list of names. Thanks!

Can you give the name "Mystico" to ad leader of a squad in your next PvP game? It's the name of a character in a Monty Python sketch -- "the Amazing Mystico and Janet." Thanks! And thanks for the videos.

Offensive Marder tactic: 1. position Marder on far/reverse side of slope, to protect vehicle from enemy fire and detection; 2. dismount 1 or 2 men with optics to crawl to the top of the slope to spot whilst in relative concealment; 3. identify target type, range, azimuth; 4. remount Marder, crest the top of the hill and engage/destroy enemies until spotted; 5. retreat back to reverse side of slope once spotted to reposition/withdraw

My dad's brother was in 1st Hampshires and so so thank you so much for telling this story - all of which I didn't know. Brilliant!

In hindsight, the Germans "smashing the 7th Highlanders" was the indicator that you're in for some serious enemy tank-based firepower in this battle. It's interesting to see the kind of foreshadowing used in the mission briefings for this campaign.

Bit late to this party and only playing the Combat Mission demos. But I'm surprised at the lack of Allied air in this campaign. Especially as you're rolling up on 5th Army CP, I was expecting an air controller or similar to be calling for fighter bombers or even straffing runs against the every suffering Pioneer detachment. Lucky also perhaps that some of the warships supporting the invasion didn't take offense at your offensive Warspite and Valiant weren't far away around the time this attack gets started IIRC that is.

Does KZfaq membership have all the same benefits of Patreon?

I greatly prefer how graviteam handles towed guns

And the Germans thought they could invade Britain with modified river barges.

they have turkish uniforms. lmao.

Another excellent video.

In other words: WW2 bombing was mostly a excuse to massacre civilians at horrible strategic and casualty costs.

9:23 For some reason, that was far more funny to me than it had any right to be.

Is there a game similar to this one, or maybe this one for Android?

Dang that halftrack was funky

I have a real soft spot for the Marder III H from my Close Combat days. Lovely little sniper.

LET’S RAGE!! I haven’t been on Patreon in a while to vote on any polls but what a banger of a video. There are so many platforms in the CM series but the light chassis fitted with big gun has always been a quirky favorite of mine. Awesome video per usual.

I’d love to see a pvp game of the colossal crack scenario. The early phase with only the marders and wespes can get rough but fun.

I find that these are pretty cheap in quick battles so I end up using them a lot. I like setting up a whole bunch of them to cover all the different avenues of attack and then when the enemy picks one of them I bring the others in as back up.

Can a pac40 kill a bradlie?

Shame there’s no shoot and scoot order in the game.

Can we get more Combat Mission Fortress Italy Content Thanks for Great Work you put in these videos Hapless Much love <3

How fast can crew actually move the late ww2 towed AT gun? Maybe they just aren't trying hard enough.

I've found Marders to be very handy when I'm playing the Germans, and very frustrating when I'm playing the Allies or Soviets. The key to using them effectively really is just to remember that they are nothing more than self-propelled anti-tank guns, not tanks.

You see this sort of development in other countries as well. The Soviets with the ZIS-30 on the T-26, the SU-85 on the T-70 and the SU-100 on the T-34. The Brits with the Archer on the Valentine and the Americans with the 75mm on the M3 half-track. And like you explained, it makes perfect sense. A mobile antitank-gun, on an otherwise obsolete chassis that is already in production, as a stopgap until more specialized designs can replace them. As you explained, these are all perfectly effective, as long as you don't push them too far. Treat them like you would treat a normal at-gun.

It is quite strange to me that only the 3 submodels of the marder are present in game. Esp given within the campaigns present in the game, many variants of the II and III were present in theatre. This is I suppose because of time constraints of the devs maybe, but one I wish the games were more moldable so people could independently correct this deficiency.

The parallels to the evolution of German SP artillery are remarkably similar: the difference between the Marder II and the Wespe is almost entirely to the gun mounted. Of course, as SP artillery shouldn’t be getting exposed to direct fire, they didn’t need to evolve to be fully enclosed or armored past small arms/splinter resistance (at least, until the development of CBRN protection as a requirement, which only happened well into the Cold War).