Some screenshot frenzy. It's been a nuisance to access those .tgas, since I lack a good viewer with tga capability (had to load them up one by one, print screen and paste into MS Paint for conversion into jpgs, duh).
Two BT-7s, one of them with a busted engine, popping some shots at enemy panzers in a half-hearted effort - luckily, there was a T-34 nearby to help them out and scare the living beejesus out of the Fritzes. I mean, blow them into kazillion tiny bits.
Meet Ruskie the sniper. Hidden in a snug little shrubbery he's accounted for 23 enemy men down. Here you see him almost getting jumped by a hostile tank - luckily for Ruskie, the 45 mm AT gun crewed by a critically wounded crew managed to knock the tank out with one of their last three AT shells.
And the knocked out tank - the sniper used up his two scavanged nades on taking out the crew as they emerged from the burning hull.
The Wolvering making good use of its powerful gun - at a distance of roughly 500 m, fairly safe from enemy small arms fire. This one time the TD proved its worth (350 points, compared to Shermans 200/220/250 - depending on the model). The brewing Sherman was taken out seconds after the engagement started (taken out with the first shot fired), the other one is going to be hit in a second, the shell is going to penetrate the base of the hull and the crew is going to die - the tank will be later re-crewed with four chaps from a Stuart I left further back.
And the Jerry on the receiving end. The Panzerjaeger IV in the back has already been knocked out and the Jagdpanther in the foreground is harmless, save for a hull mounted MG - guns in this game have a tendency to be one
of the first elements of a tank to be knocked out (I'm guessing it's the targeting system, which zeroes in with pin-point precision on the central point of a target, and since TDs have the gun mounted somewhere near that point of the silhouette - that's that; you can even see the point where the mounting's been penetrated, screwing up the gun).
And a testimony to the oft absurd difficulty levels - in a mission where you're told Germans are pressed into defence, surrounded, they actually emerge with a force superior numerically and qualitatively. Here you see these three tanks slaughter my initial force of three squads of infantry backed by 3 Stuarts and a Greyhound [or whatistsname] all with measly 37 mm cannons. Oh, one half of one squad managed to survive, just because I placed them on the far end of the deployment zone. And the 'zookas? Well, no good for these schurtzen-clad mofos- the only thing two 'zookas managed to do was to take out a gun on one of the PzIVs, before being hosed down by hull MGs. Oh, and when some reinforcements arrived, they'd spawned 200 metres off these three, and one Wolverine had been taken out in an instant - since new units appear on the map with their weapons not loaded. Secks. Quite a frustrating mission, like most in the game (pre-uber patch veteran difficulty). By the mission's end I'd been so numbed that it didn't matter if I lost another squad or not - it's only the captured PaKs that mattered, since they were my only ticket to victory. And when it finally came I was unimpressed. Quite sad, since the game's heralded as the uber-tactical strategy, but where's the tactics in no-brainers like missions where you'll almost certainly get slaughtered real bad, no matter what you do, or missions where you'll use up all the arty/air support and then carefully pick off stupid trigger-driven zerg forces charging off their defensive positions, straight into your (always) not-clear LoF.
I guess this game blooms in multiplayer, where you don't have to stomach the irritating (lack of) AI.