Profile of squippy

It may need to be changed, but IMO objecting that AA isn't feasible don't work. It is inherently the case that going or not going a tier limits what options are available to you. This is no different to, say, skipping T2 and finding yourself suddenly in need of AT guns. You took a risk and it didn't pay off, that's how it goes. Similarly for commanders, you might conceivably choose a commander because you already know your opponent skipped T3.

It's perfectly reasonable to argued back and forth over it is worth it's cost, of over cooldowns, etc., but the basic fact that prevalent air power might push you to field AA units to actually do AA rather than AI is not a Problem, IMO.

You keep trying to explain the virtues and utility of counter-attacking to me. I have not suggested it has none; only that PREDICTABILITY definitely has flaws. Moreover, what I have described is nothing like an elastic defence; it's more akin to the Roman practice of building a small fort at the end of each day's march.

You claim German counter-attacks were "often" rehearsed; but the counter-attack on Carpiquet occurred no more than 24 hours later; they probably couldn't even have conducted any recon, let alone mocked up models and assault courses or whatever, even assuming they could concentrate troops so rapidly that they had the time to spare.

The only way this makes sense is if the counter-attack is assumed to be aimed at an enemy that is still disorganised from the previous day's fighting. But if you are being so predictable that the enemy already knows to prepare for this specific thing, that isn't likely.

The alternative is to "hope" that the attacking opponent is going to "impale" themselves on the spikes of your defense rather than to follow up on the previous successful attack and exploit your weaknesses. If one is in a powerful fortified zone, rigid defense can be applicable but most frontage in WW2 were much weaker.

You still seem to be missing my point. I'm not making a generalised, principled criticism of the counter-attack; I'm saying that if your doctrine is predictable to this degree, then the defender does in fact know just where to defend, because that's always the place it most recently attacked: it knows exactly where to place its spikes. Nor is this a "rigid" defence; it's a very flexible one, in which you establish a defensive position on top of every advance, but then strip it down and move it to the next position you take.

Frex, cribbing from Wikipedia....

Despite growing misgivings about the effectiveness of immediate counter-attacks, Kurt Meyer ordered the SS to retake Carpiquet.[24] Units from the 1st SS-Panzer Division prepared to counter-attack Carpiquet from Francqueville with tanks, artillery, mortars and infantry.[27]...
Shortly after midnight, the first of the SS counter-attacks began and although thirteen tanks had been lost the previous day, the 10th Canadian Armoured Regiment and the mortars of the Cameron Highlanders, defeated the attack and inflicted many casualties...
...the 1st SS-Panzer Division (Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler), which counter-attacked on 5 July, lost c. 20 tanks.

So, they lost 13 tanks in the defence of the initial attack, and a further 20 tanks in the failed counter-attack. Arguably they would have been better off not launching that counter-attack at all, and maintaining some kind of force-in-being that could intimidate further allied advances.

As above, if they have "other orders", they will not sweep. A move or A-move counts as another order, so they will simply pass by. However, neither they nor other nearby units which can see the mine will step on it. You can just tell you engineers to 'Stop' near a mine, and having nothing better to do, they will clear it.

S-mines are charged at an even 15 munis per quarter, but you have to have the whole 60 in the bank to order the laying, I believe. IME, laying has been pretty tight in each quarter.

I don't know, I thought that sort of thing was fairly thin on the ground, to my eye. At least, I was expecting more of it. That's part of why I listed Western movies which I thought were similar in tone; I don't think they were any more triumphalist than something like A Bridge Too Far; they simply dealt with the situation for the most part.

At the very least, our western perception of the USSR is in large part a propaganda stereotype of a massively centrally directed society. But the movies, made in this period by people still who still were formally trained as Communists, doesn't present that sort of image at all. Quite frankly, the degree of direct "insubordination" displayed in several cases would never have been tolerated in a Western army at all.

This was essentially what I found intriguing about them, and why I didn't include later movies like the 2013 Stalingrad, which, while good in terms of imagery, I saw with a translation that was virtually useless, and which had little or nothing to do say about the social relations among soldiers and officers and civilians. The fact that these movies were made under the auspices of the USSR, rather than under the influence of a modern Hollywood style, is what makes them interesting as historical documents.