Additional enemy units, units that im sure are a hellva lot tougher, smarter.....yeah im sure Hard is rediculous. Ive not even tried normal in this game but in the editor ive seen some nasty surprises that you get on hard and normal. The Russian Airfield bonus mission there is an Elefant, the last German mission, Borgs Last Fight, the Brits have Centurions.....yeah retarded for sure. On Seelow Heights and Bonus mission The Crossroads the Germans have a JagdTiger. idk how I ran into the Jagdtiger on Seelow but I know i saw it once, shit my pants when I did to, all I had was a T34/85...I wanted to capture it but the side is such butter I killed it dead

Lol Ill add to your trouble....Shurtzen, like on the Panzer IV, doesnt do anything to protect you either...Any hits and it falls off w/o doing anything and your tank will most likely die anyway =D If you have such trouble with teh base game just make a mod of your own =D I know I did, set shields to 80 and 100 =D THey actually saved my tank from a hit haha

The so called schurzen should give only sufficient protection to anti tank rifles and shaped charges. If there is really something that ads the schurzen to the tank armor when you shot it with shells then its pretty wrong as they are so thin that they should not have any real relevance. Particularly on the Panzer IV H as if I remember correctly got more or less just a mesh with some very thin sheet over it so shaped charges would fail to penetrate the armor cause of premature explosion which would cause the jet stream of the charge to loose a lot of its effectivness. So as said it should have realisticaly no effect on anti tank shells. That would be like claiming a thin sheet of paper might cause a bullet to richochet if the distance is big enough.

Lolz, im pretty sure the shurtzen wouldnt stop a shell but it always annoyed me how they were there and didnt even manage to stop a Shaped Charge and how 1 50 cal round can simply knock it off, they were welded on right? not like a little plastic model ive got where the bars holding it on are simply resting in little holes. So i just set them high enough to stop 1 hit then they fall off...of course my KV tank mod it took a big bloody tank hit to knock them off rendering the thing almost impervios from 50mm and lower and Panther rounds at about 70m and lower haha. Sadly I still lost a number of those KV mods to side shots from Panthers/Hetzers and anything else that was thrown at it when I went off to mess with something else.

The Schürzens on German tanks werent welded, they were simply resting as you described that they are doing on your little plastic tank. And they were designed to protect their weaker side mainly against the Russian anti-tank rifles which could penetrate the side of a tank.

However, the schürzens that protected the turret, were indeed welded in place.

~Zeke.