A quick overview of the three Marder variants modelled in the Combat Mission WW2 games. See videos early with RU-vid membership: / @usuallyhapless9481 Or even earlier over on Patreon: / usuallyhaplessvideos
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.
If you can use them at far ranges you can rely on the velocity of the gun to help you get the first hit or two but even then you wanna be hulldown and even better in a keyhole as well with such a vehicle
I hate the marders so much, My friend is a really good german player and every time I played againts him i get destroyed over and over and over again. his favourite unit was the marder because its a easily moveable anti tank gun and could penetrate shermans from the front and could partial penetrate or full on knock out any t34.
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
Alfred Becker's creations are almost a German mirror of Percy Hobart's creations, and it's amazing to see what they came up with barring what they had on hand.
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.
SU-85 is based on T-34 chassis:) And in case of Su-85 and Su-100, the production of the tank itself did not slow down, so it was different from what Germans did in the sense that it wasn’t a conversion of an outdated tank chassis.
Zis-30 was based on the T-20 armored tractor (very different hull shapes, and two less return rollers per side), and as someone already pointed out, SU-85 and SU-100 were both T-34 designs.
My parents had a Marder in the garage when i grew up in Germany, he destroyed my first car twice and it took me almost all summer to repair the Marderschaden, they are cute but evil little furry beasts
@@usuallyhapless9481 thats basically it, problem is that they love chewing cables and building nests in cars. My ex girlfriend had a hole in her roof because one kept shitting on the same spot and it rusted through her Ford Mondeo. Marderschaden is a real thing
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).
I think this is a great assessment. Marders are most definitely predators, but they're ambush predators and that mustn't be understated. They thrive in defensive situations, especially in the case of a defence-in-depth where they can make their presence felt and then fall back to a pre-prepared position ready to do it again. Something that I think should be noted is that they all carry fairly few rounds, relative even to a standard towed Pak 40. In any case, 20 rounds or less of AP is something that needs to be carefully factored in to defensive planning - It's fair to assume the gun won't hit it's mark first time most of the time, especially at unknown ranges, which means that most engagements are going to be a 2+ shot affair, even if it only takes 1 to knock out the target. It's perhaps safe to assume it'll take 3 rounds per target; 1 ranging shot, 1 to knock it out, and 1 that bounces, narrowly misses, is intercepted by the target's gun barrel, or is simply a 'to be sure' follow up. When you consider this, you realise that one marder is going to struggle with more than 7 or 8 tanks simply due to a lack of ammunition. Therefore, counter to what seems like the obvious best practice, it's probably a good idea to go all in at some stage rather than continue trying to shoot-and-scoot. Sooner or later you'll find you've scooted, but no longer have any ammunition to shoot. At that point, the marder is perhaps better off being a big threatening target to draw fire away from assets you'd prefer to keep around - afterall, just because it's out of ammunition, doesn't mean the big 75mm isn't scary, and your opponent doesn't know if it's got any rounds left!
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 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.
I have been playing combat mission since 1.0 against the same opponent and it must be more than 20 years now. I always play the Germans or maybe the Italians and he plays the Allies. Since I like cheaper individual units and have a disregard for their pixel lives I take a lot of Marders and this video was a perfect distillation of what works and what doesn’t. I’ll bet I’ve picked thousands of Marders over the years to various degrees of effectiveness depending on how I’ve employed them.
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.
Yep yep yep. You know, it would actually be interesting to go over QB force selection from a points perspective. Even though the points are (somewhat) arbitrary, the choices the values push on players could be really interesting to unpick
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.
Side note, from my reading on Wehrmacht TDs from various books on German tanks and usage, they've got the crew numbers on the Marder II wrong. It had driver, TC, Gunner and Loader as standard for TDs of their period. Additionally nearly every period picture I've seen of the II had 3 men sitting up out of the driver's position in the back.
Doing some digging and it seems to me that perhaps the devs got confused by the still ongoing academic confusion I've run across regarding Marder crew numbers. Some sources say 3 across *several* models of Marder on the basis, as far as I can tell, of some photos of Marders with only two men in the back. Given the importance of target spotting and acquisition to a thin skinned TD, the fact that the given TOE and official number is 4 men, and that the Germans generally recognized how badly having a TC/gunner or TC/loader degraded spotting, my personal suspicion is that pictures of Marders with less than full crews are the results of combat and natural attrition. No formation is ever 100% of TOE, and this would also account for pictures where there are multiple Marders in frame with a mix of 2 and 3 men visible in the back.
Early SP AT guns and artillery were designed to be capable of demounting/re-mounting the gun from the vehicle, both for the lower profile and for recoil concerns, but later designs did away with this concept to simplify manufacturing requirements.
Close. Patreon gets more news and updates and polls for the Weapon Effects Shorts- mostly because it's easier to do all that in one place. But, it's correspondingly slightly more expensive. Both get videos earlier than normal RU-vid.
@@ku9305 very risky and inconsistent. Pause too short and tank won't fire, pause too long and they get shot. There used to be Shoot n' Scoot order in the earlier CM games, a shame that they decided to remove it.
It's very tough to get the TacAI to do what you want with things like this. It pretty much boils down to a very rigid 'pause here for 15 seconds' and then go, regardless of whether you spot or engage a target or not.
I wonder why the name Marder was reused for the IFV later down the line. Like why reuse the same name when it's a new vehicle like how the Panther is being reused on the Leopard's successor, especially since the new vehicles have different purposes than their past selves
It's especially weird because marder are named after an animal that likes to destroy vehicle wireing so it makes sense for a tank hunter name, but is weird for an Ifv especially one equipped with a 20mm
