[leclerc2]

hello everybody,

i'm playing a H2H campaign and i was really surprised on how panthers were vulnerable to any american AT weapons. i got somle pantehrs shot from full front by light 57mm guns or bazooka from very large distances. one shot was 121m long and destroyed the panther.
from what i remember, it was impossible in CC4, and also in real life where 75mm had trouble to take down panther in this way.

i was also bothered by the fact that tanks almost all stuck in forest which limits a lot the attacking power of a panzer battle group.

mortars immobilize easily stugs. each time a stug was bieginning to defeat severly my opponent he used two mortars on the stug and always stopped it. He even destroyed one. It was impossible in CC4. i'm also sckeptical in real life.

i think that the game was corrected to balance the strength of armies. In real life german panzer groups had no match on the battlefield but were heavily cruched by thunderbolts, which is hard to reproduce in the game. that's why they made possible for a light gun to take down a panther from a front single shot...


what do you think?

[johnsilver]

57mm guns, if not ordered to fire will sometimes take it on their own initiative to fire at Panthers and yes they can/will destroy a Panther from the front. If you give a 57mm gun the order tire that same unit will say "we can't touch that" however as you have probably found out if have played vs. the AI. Same with the US 3" gun.

Moving any armored vehicle into wooded areas is a bad idea in the CC series. They just seem to get "tracked" at a very high rate.

Many German vehicles actually had thin "skin", or armor on the top. Stugs, Hetzers are often damaged by mortar fire, even tracked as you mentioned. If you play vs the AI, will notice those types of vehicles are especially prone to being destroyed by allied artillery fire also.

Many others know more about the game than I and have not played H2H since the "golden" days of microsoft days when everyone was playing CC3 and CC4 was brand new...

JS

[Stwa]

Good observation,

I see 3" AT gun take out Panthers all the time, but like you mentioned, I just allow the AT team to acquire the target on their own. Or in many cases, it is the AI controlling the AT guns.

[leclerc2]

thank you for confirming this fact.
i play in H2H.
it is very difficult to progress against a human player if a 57mm gun or a bazooka can take down a panther
from long range and from front.
in the beginning germans need to advance very quickly and to take a lot of risks against allied infantry regiments. my opponent now selects 6-7 bazookas in his battlegroups and doesn't even try to attack my panthers by the side or the rear, as it had to be done in CC4 or in reality. he just waits for my panthers to come around 100m, to support assault infantry and shoots them from the front.

now i have to be much more carefull and slow in my progress, or to accept to loose during each battle 3/4 panthers.
then the mission becomes impossible for germans...

[Tejszd]

If he is taking 6 or 7 bazooka teams then your infantry should be having an easy time.

[Dima]

bad data is always bad data no matter how one tries finding excuses...
57mm couldn't penetrate Panther with frontal hit with anything but APDS, not available to the Americans.
3inch couldn;t penetrate Panther with frontal hit at more than 200m with APCB and at about 500m with HVAP.

[Stwa]

Now that Dima mentions that,

I would bet I am seeing it on the Bugle maps, which are very small, and I assume the ranges not so great.

I am referring to 3" AT taking out Panther. Can't recollect if they were side hits or not, but more than likely so.

[johnsilver]

[platoon_michael]

Just trying to confirm here,
But when you say Destroyed,was it One Shot,One Kill?
And are you sure it was a shot totally dead on the front of the Panther?
Or did the Panthers Main Gun get damaged after the first shot from the AT_Gun and 15 shots later the crew panicked and bailed out?
If so you should of heard a nice little "Boing" when the rounds bounce off.
And if the first shot wasn't a Kill or the Main Gun Damaged was any of the Crew wounded?

[johnsilver]

The damage was not on the 1st shot, but several later and it took time. I was carefully watching the crew members casualties piling up also before it was KIA. It was 1st Immobilized also, as for the "boing" noise of a shot deflection? I almost always play with the sound totally turned off. The sounds of CC grew old years ago.

The tank was actually destroyed in this particular allied scenario (Ledenborn) am describing where I played as the allies and have had them destroyed when I played as the Axis, though have had the crews abandon the vehicles on occasion after taking a "peppering" of fire, generally they have sustained 2-3 member crew loss, immobilized and loss of the main weapon 1st.

One more thing also and this may not mean anything, but going to toss this out.. It seems the 57mm is in a location where the Panther has not spotted it also and most (if not all) times is not able to when the attack occurs, unless you can get infantry to follow the LOS from the rounds coming in from the gun.

Edit:

Yes, am certain it is frontal shots and also forgot to address bazookas.. You order them to attack Panthers from the fron and they will not do it, but they will pick up the target on their own occasionally and sometimes destroy one if you can ever manage to get one beyond raw recruit in your mod (not a knock).

[leclerc2]

thank you everybody who confirmed.
at least 2 times i had panthers killed by a front shoot by 57mm guns by a single direct shot. i have to say the distance was around 100m. at longer distance they usually immobilize them. the same for bazookas at more than 200m. in this case the defense plan of my opponent can hold  very easily as i cannot support correctly my infantry during the assault and a few machine guns combined with mortars can really make an attack very slow...

The 2 first days of the campaign i advanced slowly, and it's just for the 3rd day that i broke the frontline in several places. but we know that for germans, the 3 first days are crucial and those super 57mm and super bazookas make the mission impossible after the first hours of the game....

[platoon_michael]

I personally would love to hear the outcome of you GC.
I hope you keep us informed.

[schrecken]

what version release of Wacht am rhein are you playing?

[pvt_Grunt]

The US 57mm AT gun is a tank killer, put it in a concealed positon and set it to DEFEND and it will do the rest. I believe it has SP ammo, other guns have AP and HE. (Needs citation)

http://www.100thww2.org/support/77657mm.html

[leclerc2]

thank you for this very interesting document.
It seems that 57mm guns are efficient in flanck attacks against panthers.
but you only obtain ricochets when you attack them from the front with this weapon.
Immobilization by direct shots on the track are also possible.

to answer to platoon_michel, we are now in the morning of 4th day.
in the north, kullman and peiper defeated the ennemy and advance quickly
in the center advance is now much quicker with an allied battlegroup encircled.
Von fallois was stopped by a tank battlegroup counter attack
in the south, my troops are blocked on the first map.