PvK

My sources give: Official strength in tanks per platoon: '41-'43 Pz III: 5 '41-'42 Pz IV: 4 '43 Pz IV: 5 Of course, usually in practice there would be fewer than 4 or 5 actually available. PvK Edit: formatting data - grr ;-/ [ October 26, 2003, 11:46 AM: Message edited by: PvK ]

I tend to think more time favors the attacker rather than the defender, but as has been said, mainly because too little time can force the attacker to move wrecklessly in order to reach the objective on time. In most situations, I think low (or any) time limits don't make much sense from a realism point of view. Very rarely would it be more important to capture an objective in 15-30 minutes, than to keep men alive. However a short time limit can get players to move their forces into quick action, for players who prefer that sort of thing. PvK

I seem to recall from discussions after CMBO came out that yes, there is less chance in scattered trees, and the most chance in normal woods. However, the scattered tree chance still seems high enough to worry about. PvK

Yep! I typically bump up the time limit on CM scenarios, because I don't like being artificially forced to charge headlong into destruction without proper caution, and there is almost never a good reason for the time limit to be so low. In this case however, no amount of time is enough to take the objective without historically unacceptable casualty levels. Unless maybe you could trick the AI into wandering off of its defenses. PvK

It doesn't sounds like we are winning. A few of us have managed a technical win versus the AI when we have foreknowledge, but I expect even these wins are coming at the price of heavy casualties. What the winners seem to be doing is sneaking troops and armor through the bushes and forcing an assault up the road to the church. I consider my solution to be historical and appropriate. Be cautious, and give up as soon as you determine they are dug in and too strong to assault. Then ask for a proper assault force with artillery support, and wait for nightfall. The original scenario takes place at dusk anyway. That is, mod the scenario to take place at night, allow 60 minutes for the assault, and to include two 105mm arty spotters, and set them to start of the scenario by bombarding all around the church. It would make sense to replace the recon infantry with regular dismounted infantry, but that's not so important. Wait for them to fire off all their ammo, and then advance carefully. This is what I think a real commander would do, and I managed to not only win, but keep my losses minimal. (I took 11 casualties in the first scenario and inflicted 16. Then in the second I took 19 casualties and inflicted 126. My total friendly KIA was only 7.). PvK

How about using the Covered Arc command to specify engagement range? PvK

I have to agree about the trench model. Seems like as long as the enemy is in the right direction relative to the trench (that is, they're not close enough and in the right direction to fire down into the trench), then units in the trench should be nearly invisible and invulnerable to direct-fire attacks. Essentially, they should be able to go "heads down", without the usual penalties of Hide or Crawl. It's also very slow moving along a CMBB trench, which doesn't make much sense to me. It shouldn't be any worse than "soft ground" to run along the bottom of a trench, and if it's a good prepared trench, it could be as good as a road. PvK

EM is for "enlisted men", I think. Sub-NCO's.

Ach! I just tried this one (extreme FOW, no adjustments, default AI/Soviet position), and ouch. The 20-minute time limit is also silly, but many CM scenarios do that, I guess to force immediate action. I should just add 60 minutes or more to all scenarios before playing them, since I don't like being forced into reckless moves for an artificial time limit. However, in this case, I don't think the extra time would have helped much. I sent infantry carefully forward, and managed to get into some advanced positions without getting shot. I then engaged in a bunch of ammo-burning suppression/attrition, assuming foolishly that for once the briefing from HQ would not be a parody of what to expect. Instead, as usual, I was being ordered to sacrifice my men to take a building objective in 20 minutes from a superior enemy. The Soviet force is in several ways stronger than the assaulting German force. Fortunately, my cautious advance discovered this before my men were committed to a massacre, so we were able to call off the assault after taking only a few casualties. I hadn't seen any sign of anti-armor defenses, so I cautiously brought up the AFV's and they were able to wear down some positions, but then one of my halftracks got ambushed by an AT gun that the infantry hadn't noticed, and the tac AI unfortunately didn't reverse it a few meters to safety for whatever reason, so it sat there and took five or six hits in a row until it was knocked out. Except for losing the halftrack, I'd call it a draw or minor advantage to me, since the situation was extremely dangerous, and I got good intelligence on the enemy position and weakened it, and took only a few casualties. Now the thing to do is to call in a bombardment, then maybe do a night assault with a reasonable force. PvK

<blockquote>quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by Gpig: As for map direction enlargement, you CAN do this in the editor. You have to hold down the SHIFT key (I believe) if you want the map to extend in a different direction. Anyhoo, it's in the manual there someplace. <hr></blockquote> Thanks Gpig! It seemed like there should be a way to at least use the reduction and enlargement in the other directions - that can acomplish some of what I was talking about. PvK

I imagine these ideas have been brought up somewhere in this huge forum history, but here are some requests for map editor enhancements: It'd reall be nice to be able to cut and paste large sections of map. Being able to specify which direction to extend or shrink the map would really help too, to make scenarios want a map that uses part of a previous map. Right now, it only seems to extend or shrink from the north and east edges, which greatly limits the ability to do so. Finally, it would be very nice to be able to start a new scenario based on a saved game file, to at least get the map in its current state of damage including all the craters and building damage, and hopefully the wrecks, too. This would be great for making scenarios set on prior battlefields, and especially for human-moderated campaign games re-fighting in the same area. PvK

I thought my 300 MHz Celeron with 64 MB RAM and a 16 MB Voodoo Banshee video card ran the game quite acceptably, with few problems. I also ran it on a 433 MHz Celeron laptop with no video accelerator on a liquid crystal screen, and it ran ok but the video was not particularly great. Certainly playable, though, as long as I wasn't trying to play very long on battery, and I made sure the laptop had enough ventilation so it wouldn't overheat! I tried on a 200 MHz Pentium MMX with a 16 MB Voodoo 2 or Banshee (don't know), and it was unplayable, however. Better systems give better results. 700 MHz with TNT 2 is pretty nice. 1.4GHz Athlon with GeForce 2 is another order nicer. But, the 300 MHz Celeron with Voodoo Banshee was ok for me. PvK

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Vanir Ausf B: The problem is that the M10 can penetrate the hull of the JPz IV with AP. In fact, in my limited testing it penetrated the upper hull and superstructure consistantly at 500m. The TacAI apparently is aware that tungsten is not useful or not needed, because it always fires AP even with 5 tungsten rounds on board. So why does having the tungsten lower the kill chance? Still dunno...<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Probably the AI ammo selection code is different from the to-kill estimation given to the player. If I were in an M10 faced with a Stug IV, I'd probably fire tungsten myself, because I'd figure it was most likely to be the model of Stug IV that for some reason isn't included in CM, which has thicker armor. <g> PvK

There's also the question of how "more likely to bog" is best measured. These tests measured in terms of time (turns). But it could also be measured in terms of distance. If a tank is bogging less often in broken ground and mud, how much slower is it moving, and what is the relative difference in distance between bogging events? Apart from the seeming bogless reverse issue, the other one that bothers me is the Hunt move being faster than the Move move - if the Move move is slower, why is it "less alert"? PvK

I'll admit I've never seen any mention of buildings being a bad place for infantry to take cover against HE. I'd be fascinated to read any such references - can anyone provide some? While I don't doubt that it's possible in CM for units to not take losses when a building collapses, my experience so far has been that inf in buildings take very low losses in buildings from direct fire, but then frequently take multiple losses when a building comes down, which it inevitably does after a few HE hits. The problem I have with this is that in reality, I think houses would tend to fall down in stages - it's unlikely for the whole thing to tumble at once and trap multiple people, I would think. While a building falling down might hurt or trap some men sometimes, I think that would be less dangerous than HE explosions themselves, and this seems to clearly not be the case in the game - the falling-apart building is way more deadly than the bombs and bullets. Yes, I can see that if a house is being destroyed by HE fire, that the men should and would probably get out. However I think that infantry are much faster and mobile and intelligent about how to do this than is shown in the game - they're not a mass of guys in one spot who only move as shown in the game. In other words, I think men would scramble to safe corners and so on quite quickly, and usually be able to make the presence of a house at their location a strong defensive advantage rather than a trap, most of the time. The player shouldn't necessarily have to micro-manage where the men move, and the AI shouldn't have to even move the guys out of the house - I'd just reduce the chance that so many guys will be lost, because this sort of defensive scrambling seems to me to be beneath the scale of the game's infantry units. Guys will scamper behind what's left of a crumbling edifice, and it's more likely to be a benefit that there's a house, or the remains of one, at their general location than if they were in the open or in light cover. At least, that's the way it seems to me. PvK