malfuriouspete

For the record, I just recently installed this game from GOG, it's been working fine for me. Even the fog is running. Now, I'm running it on a laptop (less than year old) and definitely not a top of the line gaming rig.

Back when I was playing CMBB religiously, Poor Old Spike was nice enough to email me a set of his PDFs for tactics, armor penetrations, gun stats, etc.. I still have them and read them from time to time when I want to go back down memory lane

I may be on the second to last mission right now, I'm on the outskirts of Bolleville... moving towards the "jumping off points" to La Haye du Puits. I have 3 depleted Rifle platoons from L company, a weapons platoon, 5 shermans plus engineers.. not looking forward to this one

I'm on the mission after "crossroads" after taking the N803 (main road exit) route.. can't remember what the name of that mission is, basically assaulting a town with two secondary objectives: a chateau and a railroad crossing

*spoiler! b/c I am so frustrated at that mission, there is also a 50mm ATG hiding in the small forest on the right side across from the river! I don't think it can do much to the shermans but still an annoyance.. at least, I never lost any tanks to them. For the first mission, I found that by running along the sides of the map - going through the forest on the right and the farm road on the left are the best (and really only) avenues of attack. There is one ATG that is always in the same position.. use mortars. There aren't a lot of german forces in this mission so you can easily overwhelm them.. it also helps having your shermans pepper the far bocage. There are some positions on your side of the map where you are out of sight of the ATG and can still target the far bocage

Just need to knock out those two 75mm guns before moving your tanks across the bridge.. I've played the scenario enough that as soon as the mission starts I send mortar barrages in their general direction..

Yeah, I got sick of being pelted by artillery.. took a ceasfire and then took the hills in the next mission - University of Hard Knocks

I restarted.. got 1 engineer squad to the bridge, managed to blow apart the barbwire at the bridge opening but promptly lost half the squad because of a mine explosion due to the demo charge.. Moving squads across that point is tedious at best!! Constant artillery and machine gun fire... these ww2 generals were psychopaths for ordering troops across such a space war is hell indeed..

loaded this scenario up again after upgrading to 2.1... not even sure if this is even considered a spoiler anymore.. crossing the bridge is awful, its really hit or miss if the engineers even blow up the barbed wire and my guys want to run across the bridge in order to get to the left side, beside the bridge. Perhaps I should go into the scenario editor and get rid of the barbed wire because its just so stupid where its placed.. ok, my rant is done..

Has anyone had any issues with mods and the 2.0 version? I'm probably going to upgrade it tonight - should I remove (cut and paste) the "Z" folder prior to doing this?

Its tough.. I just re-played this battle today. In my game, the Germans decided to ignore the center and right objective and head towards the group of houses on the left (where Turnbull and most of his crew starts). I managed to take out the marder and one of the PvIVs, but the other one decided to go along the road on the left and came across through the back of the houses. I managed to kill the tank and all its crew but not sure if this counts as the AI touching the area.. they don't actually have to hold it do they?? Gave as much of a bloody nose as I could, my mortar was super effective on the germans once they crossed the river.. and turned tail and ran but they got to the left objective anyways and I was left with a tactical defeat.

good read.. speaking of which, can you make the missions in your road to montebourg campaign longer? (I Kid!) I would throw my hat into having the good intel.. but I also realize that in war, having good intel (probably more so in WW2) was an absolute rarity. If there is one criticism I have with the "Road to Montebourg" campaign which I could think deals with the mission time limits, (and I must say its more of an asthetic one because I've absoutely loved playing it!!!), its in the tactical breifing.. the tactical map. The vanilla game gives us a battle map and possible locations of enemy forces, either marked with a soldier icon, or just question marks if something MAY be there and the geographical layout is pretty close to the actual in game play. You've choosen to show a b/w screenshot of the objective in the battle in question and of course I don't know the layout until i hit the start button. Maybe this has actually enhanced my game playing experience since I have no idea where the enemy is or coming from but at the same time makes for some frustrating first turns as I try to "guess" where he might be. As in example.. I think its the second mission in the campaign, Ecoqueneuville.. no idea where german strongpoints are located or even where to direct artillery assets. I have two avenues of approach, go along the paved road or blast my way through the hedgerows to get to the villiage. Maybe this forces me to use scout teams more, but like chainsaw stated.. maybe patrols sent out before the battle or during the night could have located possible positions. What this leads me to do is I send out a few scout teams to some point... if I don't come under fire, then I move the bulk of my forces up, then send the scout teams forward again, if its all clear then I move everyone up.. wash, rinse and repeat. Maybe this is how it was done in real life during the battles, I don't know I'm not a military expert by any means. My thinking, and maybe this would dumb-down the game, but would be to have map markers or something indicating that a scout team heard or saw something in a certain location or area during a previous patrol. Just my thoughts and would take no offense if anyone wants to shoot these down in flames

here here! I agree.. some people do this in their scenarios, battles... but others do not and its trial and error

Yeah. thats one of the things I like about the game is that if you click on one of your units, the game only shows you specifically what that unit sees.. seems to me someone in the tank saw this gun so I would assume whoever it was, the tank commander, gunner, whoever, would have been screaming to the other crew members 'hey, we got an AT gun right over there!' and maybe automatically should have been targeting it that being said, as a player myself, I always manually make sure that a particular unit is targeting who I want it to because I don't trust the AI to make the best decisions for me most of the time

isn't this mission detailed in CMBB manual? Sort of as an advanced training session. I've played this a few times and if memory serves me right, the manual says you can bring your stalin tanks in shoot and scoot missions up to the ridge.. but I would get killed from long range by the German tanks so after awhile I wouldn't bother with that strategy. The rocket barrage you have at the beginning of the mission is invaluable for softening up the villiage and if you are lucky, can take out some of the hidden AT guns they have.

yeah... I was wondering about that too. And it doesn't help the ammo situation with the tendancy of the AT guns to fire AP rounds at infantry either...

Fun scenario, I made it to Hell in the Hedgerow, managed to clear it with a tactical US victory (If my memory serves me right, don't have that save file anymore..) My plan of action: I forget specific names of locations so I will use generic terms --- Spoilers follow The villiage in front of me was defended by a few German squads: a squad in the two houses on the left side of the map in the villiage and the rest in the 2-story buildings in the center along the villiage road. Routed/killed them with pretty heavy fire and took up positions behind the hedges and in the buildings. Along the left side of the map was a very long open field, that opened up to a house across the covered road (in front of the creek) so I sent two scouts to check it out, no incoming fire so I thought ok.. i moved them up to the creek proper and saw along the whole left flank was a line of barbed wire and within 3 seconds my guys were blown away (turned out to be from a hidden infantry gun, more on that latter). After a few turns, my squads in the villiage made a visual contact on the infantry gun, so I had a position to fire on. I found a very good spot on the left side of the villiage, in a hay stack field across the road that gave me a nice long LOS to the road objective so I positioned a HQ squad and 2 mortar teams there and started some indirect fire, managed to knock out the gun. Around this time, German Artillery started to fall in the villiage and I lost 2 squads and several casulties in other teams.. which left me royally p***ed off.. but thankfully I kept guys in reserve so I had to move them up, at least to help with buddy aid. In my own stupidity, I decided my attack was to go through the barbed wire section across the creek so I moved 1 platoon through the long field on the left and got a few guys killed crossing the road to the house.. german infantry position farther down the road spotted me and fired some shots so I sent a platoon to the right flank of the map and came across a machine gun in a small hedge and more infantry behind the bocage on the central road. Destroyed these units and moved a squad up into the covered road and took out another infantry unit positioned about halfway down the road to the far house. With the covered road secure I began to move some squads up the left side of the map, had an HQ unit call in a smoke screen in front of the far hedgerows across the creek. Once the smoke came and started to spread, I rushed 3 squads across the creek and were promptly stopped at the barbed wire.. I thought they would be able to cross it at a very slow pace but they just refused to go any further. Next turn I ran 2 squads to the next field over and I started to get shot up by pillboxes and a machine gun hidden in some foxholes across the map.. The smoke left a line of sight for one of the boxes and they shot up 2 squads and broke them.. still had one squad in front of the barbed wire which remained out of sight.. Had to call in a howitzer artillery strike along the road in front of the wire. Once that was finishing up, I only had about 5 minutes at this point.. I moved forward my one squad and didn't recieve any fire. Miraculously, the howitzers knocked out the pillboxes so I got a squad to touch the road. Mission accomplished but I got a serious kick in the pants by the germans. I figure I lost between 30%~35% of my troops.. mainly due to that artillery strike in the villiage and the insane crossing of the creek. I didn't touch the german units along the right side of the road objective, some more pillboxes and machine guns.. I had units fire on them from the covered road but didn't send anyone over to assault them. I probably could have used my mortars more effectively along the road objective, better position of my smoke and definitely not go across the creek on the left side. There was absolutely no cover (my mistake) and I thought squads could go through the wire, apparently not. Hey PT, any thoughts to this? I wonder where would be the more ideal to assault across the creek and any thoughts about dealing with the pillboxes. I got super lucky with my artillery but that may not always be the case. I hope you have some more scenarios in the works!!!

Yes, I know exactly which spot you are talking about!! I thought that was a gap too and tried to send my guys through it only for them to go around on the left side and get shot up. pretty damn annoying but thankfully I had an earlier save file from that mission to go back to, to avoid doing that again. Just stupid

Its obvious to me that this panzerschreck team must have been part of some LSD experiment put on them by the german high command. Its all in their heads, that other tank doesn't even exist!

Thats exactly what I thought because I see this in the initial set up phase when you move mortar teams close or away from each other. The unit's ammo stays the same, but the ammo count will go up (or down) Maybe it takes a few turns for this to show but when the knocked-out mortar team I moved got close to the functioning one, there was no change in the ammo count. I thought this shows immediately. No big deal really because it didn't affect the battle/scenario I was playing

Here's one.. I had a team with a knocked out mortar but still had 32 rounds of 60mm HE. I ran this team over to another mortar section with 9 rounds left so they could "share" ammo. However, once the move was finished, the other mortar team's ammo count didn't increase to 41, it stayed at 9... I guess I could assume the mortar team "dropped" their ammo after their equipment was destroyed? But they still were showing 32 rounds under their ammo status. I thought mortar teams can share their ammo... at least when I play a map with a set-up zone, if I position mortar teams close together their ammo becomes amalgamated.

I like that idea... instead of drawing the LOS all over the map looking for which spots he can see or not, one click of the LOS button shows you what you see, click it again to turn it off. I'd have to assume that this information is already known in-the game, where a particular unit can see or not.. we just don't know until we draw that damn LOS line...

One thing I'm not to sure about is the colour of the LOS line. So the light blue means that everyone can see the target.. but what about the dark blue/pink like in Gurra's picture? His LOS is dark blue through the wheatfield then becomes pink at the point where he is clicking on. Is it the same concept as in CMx1 where if you track back only the LOS line you will come to the point which can actually be seen by the squad? If I recall.. in CMx1, even if you are pointing at a target far away, behind trees and in a valley, the LOS tool will show you up to what point the unit can see something.. past that, it turned black or something (been awhile since i've barbarossa to berlin and maybe I dreamed this up!!...) Maybe I'll answer my own question.. I think it doesn't work like this. In Gurra's pic, the entire line is dark blue, even the points which can be seen by the tank (i.e right in front of it). I know its something that probably can't be achieved in the game, but in Gurra's situation.. the point that he is looking at past the wheatfield, it would be nice if the LOS tool showed him from which position (or at least a best guess by the unit, along the line) where the point is visible from instead of just telling him "this point can't be seen" by a long dark line.

something about the Fog Emulation table being removed from the NVidia drivers, I think. I did a google search for this and noticed that on some of the older NVidia Control Panel programs, there was the option to click 'fog emulation table' but as of driver release 186.44 which is the one I have, and more than likely previous ones, it doesn't exist anymore. If anyone can provide some insight on to why this was removed, much appreciated! ATI fixed the problem in 2008 with one of the catalyst releases.. but NVidia went the opposite route. It really sucks that you can't see the fog anymore as it really added to the atmosphere on some of the maps, one of my favourites being Gozlow.

If you check out www.theblitz.org and do a search for a poster named PoorOldSpike, he's done tons of tests within CMBB and CMAK to look at different aspects of the game. Do a search for one called 'Cover Story' which lists the effects of all the different kinds of terrain on exposure. I'd upload the pdf in question here but its size in mb's bigger than allowed.. Essentially what 50% exposure means is that the targeting unit can "see" 50% of the targetted unit. Or in another way, 50% of the unit is not hidden and exposed to incoming fire. A unit with an exposure of 75% will be easier to hit than a unit with 25% exposure. As for checking the concealment, that seems very ambitious! One other variable, at the start of a battle, before the first turn, hidden units are given some kind of camouflage bonus (as said in the cmbb manual) so they should next to impossible to see unless you are right on top of them.