Surviving IS-2s ???

[Larry Reese]

Actually, I prefer armor facing and I'll tell you why: at the scale of this game (which I tend to view pretty flexibly anyway) the "retreat" rules make sense. This has been endlessly discussed but I'll put it in a nutshell here. On the scale of 250 meters per hex, in a buttoned up tank (particularly WWII vintage) you're going to have a really hard time localizing armor firing on you from say 1000 meters away. When rounds start landing close or glancing off that plate it will be very easy to inadvertantly turn and present a side or even rear shot to an enemy. This is not Combat Mission where each vehicle is uniquely represented on detailed terrain (with bogs! which I think CS needs to have, we don't have armor getting stuck like it did in reality, but that's another story). Communciation between and within tanks of this era was very problematic and trees, walls, small houses, streams, bogs, etc... will make any moving tank have to change orientation while moving inside the area represented by a "hex." Armor does not simply drive backwards and forwards like it's on rails during combat. In fact, many of the retreats would likely represent a tank backing out of "hide" or hull down position ("holy cow, those last two rounds were dead on!"), thinking that they have the reseverse slope, trees, buildings, whatever between themselve and the enemy and either misjudging that (turnint to early) or inandvertantly presenting a side shot while traveling to a new position (i.e. tank backs away, turns, drives past several building and an alert enemy gets a side shot as the tank drives past the break in two bulidings, bushes, rises in the ground, etc... I don't think the retreat means they just pivot and show their ass to the enemy (though of course, some crews may panic and do just that, but it would be a small number). Lastly, I think it is well to keep in mind that tanks do have to be pointed in the direction they are driving for the driver to do teh best job possible, and to attain maximum speed. To reinforce this, go get in your car in the driveway, paint over all the windows except a little slit in front of you and then try backing down your street as fast as you can while someone is shooting at you. Retreating as a result can also come about if a tank has gotten itself wedged against terrain or a manmade object and is stuck and has to maneuver to free itself. Despite popular opinion, tanks are not indestructable building demolition machines - there are places they can't go and things they can do, or should only do really carefully. One of my favorites is the APC that tried to drive through this old abandoned house at a fairly good clip and found out the hard way the place had a basement.

Anyway, in short, I don't consider it "gaming the system." As far as fixes, I think it would do far more for CS to fix one the largest glaring errors in the entire game: the highly flawed indirect fire system. For example, you cannot lay down effective barrages. Infantry can walk right up to the beaten zone, wait for their turn, and then walk through unscathed even though the enemy has kept that location under "continuous" fire. This, and some problems with the use of smoke in the system, are far more injurious to the realism of the game than retreats.

LR