The Passage - Combat Mission: Red Thunder

The Briefing for the Germans says that you have High Ground with good Cover to engage Enemy Tanks on the Long Range and you have to get your Halftracks in Fast for the Lakeshore. Both is definatly a fast way to die as Axis. After 14 Turns i quit.

You dont have high ground. After first Turn Enemy Armor in well covered Positions can kill your Tanks/Halftracks like sitting ducks in the Open with no Cover at all.

Missleading Briefing, Enemy can shoot your uncovered Setup Zone on Turn #1

Good balanced. But fo both side You need very carefully think about your tactics and carefully observe elements of landscape.

Lots of fun with a great map. The Germans need to engage the enemy at range so they need to get an early start with good visibility. The Soviets on the other hand need to close on the objectives. If they can do that it will be very hard for the Germans.

Very unbalanced since the Russians can basically destroy the Germans in a matter of minutes if not played absolutely perfectly by the German side.

As it is, this is a very unbalanced scenario. To balance it up you would just have to swap the Germans Panzer IV's out for Panthers or Tigers. I think this would be very hard to win as the Germans as it is now.

Some interesting, long range duels.

The Soviet setup zone has LOF to the German movements, the Soviet tanks can be placed hulldown, while the German units, if the player would follow the briefing, would move on a silver platter.
The German briefing also suggests a completely unrealistic, gamey rush forward without recon.
The player following the briefing would result to sit in tactically completely worthless woods, totally dominated and under fire of over a dozen T34.
Even worse: the briefing suggests to take the high ground with the PzIV to dominate the battlefield. With one problem: CM's T34/85 model is invincible to the 75/L48 gun already @900 m (3 - 5 penetrations necessary)!

I have nothing against unbalanced battles, but then the player should be clearly informed which side has the much harder task!
And what is the best map good for, if the briefing is tactically complete and utter nonsense?

The only chance the German player has: ignore any sort of tactics and rush ALL his forces into the woods at the lake and hope to be faster than the opponent. The worst kind of CM-meeting engagements.

...over half a dozen...

Could be shorter

Good tank battle but scenario author misleads the german player into wasting his precious grenadiers by trying to rush to the objective only to get easily picked off by long range sniper T34/85's.
The Germans are fairly outgunned sadly but sure it is do-able with a bit of luck.

The German Pz.IV are completely inferior to the T-34/85. Hit accuracy of the Pz.IV is terrifyingly bad. A Pz.IV needs 7-8 shots at 1000 meters until it hits once. The T-34/85 will be on immediately 1100 meters hit my Pz.IV crushing.

The scenario seems well balanced in terms of starting forces and objectives; but there will inevitably be a large armor duel, and the winner of that duel is likely to dominate the battlefield thereafter, given the nature of the terrain.

Simple but effective little shoot-em-up!

Axis are outgunned and outnumbered. Decent map but terrain suits the better weapons of the Russians.

Played Germans. Challenging to get to key ground to defend/seize the objectives without losses. Apparently the US had some challenges as well, but I think that the German challenges were more significant.