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stoat

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Posts posted by stoat

  1. [ben Stein deadpan] Big Brother must be fought tooth and nail at every turn. [/ben Stein deadpan]

    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.

  2. Well apparently starting out using the M3 Stuart is a deathwish. The option to use it with Recruit level is greyed out. So I started using the other light ones with better results. At least now I have a fighting chance.

    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.

  3. It's not really. In any one battle, the fraction of 'knocked out' men who end up KIA vs WIA is the same. But men in the wounded pile can return to action, where at the end of the battle, they might be okay, wounded or killed. The men in the killed pile however stay there. The net result is that the number of men in the killed pile continually increases, while the number of wounded can go up or down since men are removed from it as you go along, possibly faster than they are being added to it. So as you fight more battles in an operation, the ratio of killed to wounded weighs ever more in favour of 'killed'.

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

  4. It feels kinda hokey, pretty lame starting out with the light tanks getting slaughtered by medium/heavy tanks. I don't know, only played for an hour so far. Makes me miss tanking in RO.

    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.

  5. 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.

  6. Seriously; an M-10 vs a Stug at 52M and he misses his first shot (the Stug didn't, of course)! This from a veteran crew in a hull down position. I could understand this occurring at 400meters or more due to mediocre optics (compared to German equipment). Most encounters in this battle were under 200meters with much the same results (no first round hits save one). Were the M-10's actually that lousy?? Just blowing off steam, but I'd still like to know why they were modeled this way.

    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.

  7. Stoat also designs crappy CMAK scenarios to which Boo will attest.

    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.'

  8. In the McHenry County part. I live just up river of the Algonquin dam so there isn't much of a current. It can get kind of deliverance-like when there are crazy water skier's on the river. I try to go out early in the morning before all the motor boats come out.

    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.

  9. 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.

  10. I think he is one of those weird dreams that we are having collectively due to eating some ragout before bedtime that had gone a little "off". But he comes with a mother figure as part of the package. Needless to say, their relationship is not a healthy one.

    Michael

    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.

  11. Black Sea ... I find your ignorance appalling ... if typical.

    MTB/MGB actions were uquiqutious lad, ubiqutious. Give me some Dog Boats, some F Lighters and a couple of S Boote for escort and it'll by Gawd BE the Med ... just see if it won't.

    Or perhaps a flotilla of Vospers going up against some Coasters with a Voorpostenboote escort off the Hook of Holland.

    Joe

    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.

  12. 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.

  13. "Arid ground" - is that an option in the editor? Because for QBs, I do not see any option to set ground type. I only play multiplayer quick battles, nothing else...

    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.

  14. 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.

  15. Wings On My Sleeve

    Capt. Eric 'Winkle' Brown

    Apparently he flew 500 different aircraft!

    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.

  16. 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.

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