stoat

Dietrich's Probably Not a Counter-Reactionary Saboteur Rating slips from 18% to 4% right before your eyes. For comparison, Emrys has a CRSR of 68% (how else do you suppose he survived the ancien regime?) and by all accounts Affentitten should have been put to the wall ages ago.

The Stuart is a Tier III tank, so it's above the recruit threshold. You'll never rack up a big kill score in a Stuart, but the general opinion of this tank is still high, and I'm inclined to agree. Your purpose is to scout, maybe damage some tracks, and then die horrendously, but the repair costs are very low, and all of the technology is pretty good. I recently fought a standard battle with the M3 and located two enemy tanks and scored no hits before getting killed, but still got 200 experience and 3000 credits, while my tank required only 400 points to repair. A +2600 credit exchange is not a bad deal, despite the vulnerability.

True enough, but if you compare only the first battle result to a stand alone scenario, the ratio is still higher.

When you start out you can play in a "recruits battle," which only allows Tier II tanks and below. In "standard battles," the purpose of light tank is to sight as many enemy tanks as possible before exploding catastrophically.

Setting the Napoleanics aside, I would say that CM has inherent within it a higher attrition rate. How many QB PBEMs end with 40-50% losses for the attacker and 80-90% losses for the defender? In a company-vs-company size battle, these losses are egregious and, as I would believe, unrealistic. In the CM battle rectangle, a player has no ability to stage a withdrawal or fighting retreat except in the very largest of battles. Thus, with our backs to a very real and arbitrary wall, the defender always fights to the death and the attacker always presses on without regard to losses. Strongpoints can't be bypassed (e.g. you can bypass a house or patch of trees, but not a village), and the attack can't be postponed for further artillery preparation. Thus, more casualties occur while engaged in small arms battle than would realistically be the case. P.S. I still find it odd that the death-per-casualty ratio is higher in an operation than in a scenario.

It sounds like a bad day, such as when all of the enemy armor passes through your minefield without effect, or when you realize you've been conned into playing a Rune scenario. On the other hand, in my own experience the M10 seems to be less accurate than the M18. That said, it's also my opinion that the M10 is the better platform in game terms, of only because of survivability. You could always try playing with some halftrack-based TD's. Then you would long for the days of the M10. Towed TD units are another option, though I would recommend these only for a static defence.

I wouldn't have recommended it for a two player game. If the defender can take out a lot of the armor, he should do very well. If the attacker can fully utilize his armor, he will do very well. There's an awful lot riding on a handful of panzerschreks.

First off, singularize 'scenarios.' That was my first and only official scenario. Secondly, you're playing it wrong. The whole damn thing is designed to reward edge-huggers. Thirdly, and this one is directed at Emrys (spelt-but-not-bolded, yes?): copy and paste is the way of my generation. Who really expects us to do any sort of work to get ahead? That's what our over-involved parents and the internet are for. And it's certainly easier to believe than some other excuse like 'originality.'

I have to believe that this board shares that one thing with your favorite chair: it's full of old farts.

I just meant the sparsely inhabited stretch full of banjo players between Yorkville and Wedron. My sister and brother-in-law live on the Kankakee just above the dam in Wilmington, and the kayaking there is not bad.

Do you mainly stay up in Lake County, or do you ever make it down to the more...deliverance-y...part of the river?

California is desperate for nurses. If you want to make a good salary right out of school, complete a nursing program in three years and head west or southwest.

This has been going on for ages. In Hungary, armed Gypsies are patrolling walled off portions of cities because the police won't help them and they're tired of fire-bombings. Slurs, physical assaults, miscarrieges of justice, it's all good in Central and Eastern Europe.

Don't you dare include me in your hippy dream collective, Deirdre Barrett. My nocturnal visions are the result of day-old Taco Bell topped with diced tomatoes straight from the bulging can. The bulge indicates freshness.

You're quite obnoxious with this stuff, aren't you? My point was merely to state where my own interest lies, you crusty poltroon. I bet you only like this stuff because you find it easy to make the sound effects as your yellow water navy weathers the porcelain maelstrom.

My Innertubes are all iced up. Of course you are the only one who's ever had an interest in naval warfare on the Black Sea, so I'll just pack up my Vifor class destroyers and head home.

No one wants to hear your prattling on about MFPs or the sinking of the K.U.K. Wien by MAS.9 in the Bay of Trieste when you were but a wee poncing lad. It's near Christmastime, and even the elves of drudgery and boredom should be otherwise occupied.

That seems to be a common form of evening entertainment for those native to the Central Ohio area.

It's a bad year for the corn, especially when compared to the previous two harvest years.

I got smacked with some of this last year at school. It was really nasty stuff, and looked exactly like Windows Security Software. However, you couldn't right click on this icon in the taskbar, and it was doing things that WSS obviously wouldn't do. I can see how people not as aware of their computers could fall victim. I had McAfee with a couple of anti-malware and anti-spyware add-ons, for all the good they did. Every time I tried to run a system scan I would get a blue screen. I forget the name of the virus, but it was pretty cutting edge when I had it, and it apparently even affected Macs (I almost root for Mac-infecting viruses). Malwarebytes and HijackThis cleared it up.

Yeah, it's an editor option. I know a lot of desert scenarios were designed with arid ground, and it may be possible that it's a function of battle date. I'm not sure, but do '43 battles take place on arid ground? CMAK isn't on this computer so I can't check.

Try setting your desert battles on "arid ground." This may give you more of the look and effect you're looking for.

I'm not a huge fan of the reconstructed sharpshooter's pit. I was at the battlefield in Petersburg a few years ago, and they did something similar with the tunnel entrance at The Crater. It made it look hokey. I also dig the omnipresent parking lot that appears in a few photos. Lord knows tourists can't be arsed to walk.

I have Wings of the Luftwaffe, and it is an excellent technical-type reference. If you wanted to know where the flux capacitor bypass distribution trunk indicator light in the cockpit of a Dornier Do 217 is, it's numbered in a cross-sectional view on some page of this book.

I remember reading Artyom Borovik's The Hidden War back in 2003, and wondering how much of the Soviet's story we were going to repeat. There are some very pertinent sections in the book, a couple of which I still remember. A high-ranking Soviet officer discussed with the author, just before the Soviet pullback, the mistakes the Soviets had made early on. He said they had tried to enter every village and bring the revolution to everyone, when in reality the locals just wanted to be left alone. The villagers were just as likely to fight the mujahideen as they were the Russians, but the Russians forced their presence on the people, met resistance, and countered it with bombs, which turned the population against them. The officer said that the establishment of autonomous regions would have solved many problems, but the Soviets insisted on pulling everyone together under a central government. We're not fighting the same war, but there are a lot of similarities. The Soviets owned the villages by day, the Afghans by night. The Soviets had serious problems with groups moving across the border with Pakistan. Divisions within the Afghan population made self government impossible. The drug trade was pervasive. It's well worth a read.