DDave wrote:Well yes, that's all fine and dandy. The russians did not have anything resembling the german Sdkfz 251 for their mechanized corps however, but they did have a lot of tanks. The german Tiger tank played a role in the war, they created the fear of panzers that you mention above. Allied troops saw Tigers everywhere, mistaking the PzIV for a Tiger and so on. The russians had the T-34 in huge numbers. That is not evident in CEAW. Or are you all building a lot of tanks when you play the russians? Or the americans for that matter?
'Tank fright' existed long before the Tiger, during the 1940 German breakthrough at Sedan a French officer reported shells landing near his position and that he thought that they might be tank shells (they weren't, the German tanks were still picking their way through the Ardennes). The report was taken to mean that German tanks had crossed the Meuse and there was large scale panic in the French lines, such that the French units preparing to move against the German engineers building bridges were so shaken by the sight of troops streaming past, heading for the rear, that the attack was cancelled. All this from just the mention of tanks, because the troops felt defenceless against them.
Later in the war Allied troops feared the Tiger and that fear magnified the number of Tigers that actually existed, but they still stood their ground, as they had weapons to fight back, when the Tigers got close enough, and in close fighting it was the Tiger crews turn to fear the results. Infantry tactics when confronted by tanks was to hunker down, use fire to strip the enemy supporting infantry from the tanks, then deal with the tanks at closer range if they pressed into their lines. Tanks were feared, but no longer were invulnerable to infantry attack, in close quarter fighting when alone, without infantry support.
The Russians may not have had a Sdkfz 251, but later in the war they weren't towing most of their guns with horses, as the Germans had to right up to the end of the war, because the Allies (East and West) had the trucks to be practically fully motorised, something the Germans never achieved.
Oil reserves limit the amount of Armour, or Mech units you might chose to build, especially as Axis, if you build too many of these units you may run down your oil stock.
But "the Soviet Union had 25,664[2] or 25,481[3] armoured fighting vehicles on 1 June 1941 before it entered the war." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_tan ... rld_War_II
