Brian Rock

After 45 minutes I concede failure. Yahoo does not seem to want to direct link to my pic. If anyone can be bothered seeing what I look like check out: http://au.photos.yahoo.com/bc/xrayzed Incidentally, I like a good tank shot as much as the next guy, but for what it's worth, I reckon the best piccie is Miles.Osborne's. That shot with his 3 yo daughter is just gorgeous. [This message has been edited by Brian Rock (edited 02-18-2001).]

But think of it from the sniper's point of view. How would he know there was nobody else for miles? Bear in mind the player has far more information than any of his troops would have had in real life in these situations.

I can't speak for the gentleman referred to above, but as a former lecturer I always felt there was a distinction. The former is someone who tries to take a passive role in the learning process, the latter someone who takes an active role. I don't think I need to explain why initiative and critical thinking tends to produce better eductional outcomes. Not to mention making a lecturer's job easier. I don't think being boring is a virtue, but I did sometimes wish I didn't need to put so much effort into being entertaining.

Carter:

There is also the diversionary attack, drawing a defender's reserves towards a small force while the main body hits somewhere else. I haven't played a lot of PBEM so don't know if this is used much by CM players.

Presuming the next war the US fights is against an army that fields tanks. There are a lot of hot spots where the armor threat is minimal to non-existent. Think of Somalia, Panama, Grenada - no real need for heavy armor. In many of the situations that will likely arise a tank is overkill. The idea is not to eliminate tanks from the forcepool so much as to provide a mobile force that can either handle it without armor, or manage the situation until the armor shows up.

TacOps maps just have one level of hill. Some of the user-made maps show topographic lines, but in the current build these are for aesthetic purposes only.

I was born with it. All rather dull compared to most of these stories.

I don't know about that. I figure the Bob Semples tanks still holds the crown. It takes a lot to beat a tank made from corrugated iron and matresses.

This has to be one of the silliest things I've read from a professional warrior for ages. In his defense he does say "very theoretically" - but there's theoretically and downright goofy. It presumes that every shell gets fired. I would think the enemy might have something to say about this. Between killing tanks,killing ammo supplies, and just avoiding being where the Brit tanks are just might mean a lot of those 15,000 shells won't get fired. It would be interesting to look at rates of tank ammo consumption in the Gulf to see how real-world figures compare with this sort of back of the envelope calculation.

In Gantner's autobiography "Roll Me Over" he talks about being shot at by German "bazookas" (his term) while stuck in a field. Apparently none too happy about it, either - it seems they were somewhat outraged at it about the time.

A battalion of elite paratroops on the wrong map.

3 3 4 34 14 15

Exceptionally funny. Well done. My race was a photo finish. I had to replay the movie three times to determine the jeep just barely accelerated past the Kubelwagen. Both died about 30 seconds later of course.

Not intended as a straw man argument. More reductio ad absurdum. I wasn't implying that I thought you'd argue for stones and spears. On the contrary I'd think you'd be one of the first to seek a firepower solution. (And that's not a barbed comment either. I'm a firm believer in "send a bullet, not a man" where possible.) Agreed. But what about battles/wars that have been won without the destruction of the enemy's armed forces? Is this a bad thing? If we take the occasionally quasi-religious fervor out of the argument, I'd agree with them. The goal of manueverneed not be the destruction of enemy forces in the field. That's not to say it never is - but if you can achieve your objectives without getting into a slugging match I don't see a problem. I am not arguing that a manuever solution is always the way to go. But it does seem odd to me to argue that an attritional point of view is intrinsically superior. Sometimes it is mindless, robotic and dumb. Attrition can be an effective strategy. It is sometimes the only viable one for a range of reasons (time, terrain, training, etc). My problem with attrition is that it can be a wasteful strategy, and often an ineffective one.

I've never said attrition wouldn't work - just that it may not always be the best way to go. I think everyone here would agree attrition WWI style was pretty poor generalship. I also think you'd be a bit daft if you thought the Israelis should have relied on attrition in 1967. As for the advantage of numbers - wasn't it Napolean who said "God is on the side of the big battalions"? I tend to favour a manuever-warfare approach, but don't think it's a magical panacea. It does seem to me that opposing manuever warfare on principle because some generals who practice it ultimately lost doesn't make sense. There are cases where well-equipped forces have managed to lose to badly equipped forces. So do we ditch the SP arty and assault rifles and give everybody rocks and spears? Manuever principles can provide a combat multiplier. Sometimes attrition is the best (or only feasible) way to go. It depends. Complex questions rarely have simple answers.

There is still some semantic confusion here about exactly what we mean by manuever & attrition. It seems to me there are two camps: one sees them as philosophies: Attrition = eg winning by direct means, firepower, grinding the enemy down, exploiting superior resources, etc Manuever = eg winning by indirect means, exploiting holes and gaps, eliminating the enemy's centre-of-gravity, superior application of resources, etc The other sees as them as systems: Attrition = eg centralised command, "command push", adherence to doctrine to make the plan work Manuever = eg initiative, "recon pull", innovation and adaptationto achieve CO's intent (Apologies to everybody for overly simplifying the various points-of-view) Part of the problem is that there is support for both points-of-view in the literature. It's hard to clearly discuss something when the parties aren't using the same words to mean the same thing. As for the question about a post-1700 war won by manuever - I'd think Frederick the Great and the Seven Years War would qualify on both definitions.

Steve has already answered this: Noted already.

The tricky thing with making QBs realistic is that QBs are inherently unrealistic. I think Slapdragon puts his finger on the problem: If QBs only offered a limited TO&E - say you had a 44 Inf Battalion - then you could argue the player is taking on the role of battalion CO during the planning phase. In reality the player is given a catalogue of the entire army ("Build your own OOB! It's easy!"). There is nothing other than personal aesthetics to stop a player from adding in bizarre combinations. Personally I usually try to create historical formations - but sometimes I do like to create killer units too. Now having said all that, I wouldn't mind a variant on QBs - where players were given a TO&E for a single battalion and allowed to mix and match. But then you need to address issues over whether either player had sight of the map or not (maybe a toggle), and how good those maps were (MacDonald may have (usually? often? sometimes?) had maps, but not all COs did, and sometimes they were simply wrong). You also have to consider that the forces on the day were often a fraction of those on paper, and how to handle cross-attachments. In short, I don't think it's a simple fix, and can't see it going into CMBO. Too much work to do it properly, and every day Charles spends adding something to CM is another day he doesn't spend coding CM2. If something like this was going to happen it would be a CM2 candidate. My advice is work the design out to the Nth degree and lobby like crazy when the CM2 suggestions start coming in.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by tero: I found some new evidence to put the alledged effectiveness of CAS in doubt. These figures are for USAAF only as I have not located any compatible comparative data on RAF yet. At http://www.au.af.mil/au/afhra/wwwroot/aafsd/aafsd_list_of_tables_operations.html I found the official figures on sorties, expended ammunition and bombs and the numbers of lost USAAF aircraft. I really find it odd the real historians claim these figures are indeterminable. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Are you saying the Air Force historians aren't *real* historians?

I have an old copy of Muzzle Velocity. Buggered if I could make sense out of the thing. The mission seemed to be over before I had any idea what was going on. Of course it could just be me... I'm in the midst of a big clean-up, and it's on the "should I chuck this out?" list. HEDU/JG26 - if you have problems finding a copy email me. I'll send you mine. I'm sure we could come to some arrangement to cover the cost of postage from Australia. Presuming you have some half decent black market contacts.

This appears to be a sound and valid tactic to me. I can think of a few real world examples not dissimilar to this.

There is a typo in the url Wild Bill gave for SPW@W. The correct url is http://www.matrixgames.com/

CeeBee Apology accepted. My response was meant to be read in a tit-for-tat style, not as a flame. As is so often the case with the net, what I thought was really obvious - wasn't. So let me apologise in turn. As for settling this on the field of battle, I'm afraid I'm the only person on the board who isn't a fan of the CM PBEM system. Too slow and cumbersome for my tastes. Of course, with TCP/IP just around the corner, this will no longer matter...

Ceebee My post was in the same spirit. That's what the smiley is for.