Bullethead

I think it's very important NOT to set everything to random. This is because it's quite possible to get VERY unbalanced games with all settings random. A very significant reason for this is that the amount of cover available on maps varies greatly from north to south across the various regions. Some southern maps are so open that you must give the attacker considerably more, or the defender considerably less, points. So before starting a QB, you 1st have to make a decision as to what type of battle you want. Do you want something more similar to the CMBO experience, or do you want the vast, open steppes? If you pick the former, you have to set some variables to makes sure you get that. If you pick the latter, you not only have to set the same variables, but a few more to make sure it's a good fight. And while you're setting variables anyway, you might as well set the date. Here are my recommendations: 1st Screen 1. Date (Optional) Huge effect on how the game will play due to the different units available at different times. Do you want KVs vs. PzIIs, T34s vs PzIIIs, PzIVs vs T34s, or King Tigers vs. JS2s? But sometimes it's fun to have this be a surprise. 2. Region (mandatory) This has a great effect on the map. Any given tree setting seems to give more trees the further north you go. So if you don't want the extra hassle of tweaking points balances, set the battle in the north region. Also, region affects what nationalities are available. Finns, for instance, are only available in Finland. So if playing certain nationalities is important to you, you need to set the region. 2nd Screen 1. Nationality (optional) Only set if you want to play with or against a specific nationality. 2. Purchase Units (optional) I usually like to pick my own forces. Among other reasons, how else do you learn when what units become available? 3. Fitness (mandatory) Fitness has no effect on purchase points but has a HUGE effect on combat effectiveness. Thus, it can't be left to chance and still result in balanced games very often. Having unfit troops SUCKS, especially for the attacker, it's worse in combination with inclement weather, and it's a near death-sentence in snow. So unless you really want to tweak MANY other settings (handicap, cover, weather, game length, etc.) to balance things for the unfit side, set this to fit. Always. 4. Ammo (mandatory) This also has no effect on cost but a huge effect on effectiveness, so always set it to full at least for the attacker. If you don't want to set which side is the attacker, you have to leave this as full for both sides. 5. Battle Type (dependent on other settings) A lot of other settings (fitness, ammo load, and map type especially) can combine to make things impossible for the attacker. If you insist on playing with these other settings, or risking them to chance, then you have to handicap the axis or the allies. But before you know which side to give more or less points to, you have to know which side is attacking. 6. Map Size (dependent on other settings) A bigger map spreads the defender. So if you've got some settings that suck for the attacker, or can suck depending on what comes up randomly, it's a good idea to go for a larger map to help balance things. 7. Points (mandatory) Always set this to the base size of the battle you want to fight. Not that you have any choice . 8. Handicap (depends on other settings) Depending on what sort of horrible things the attack must or might face, you need to tweak the point ratio or you'll have an unwinnable battle. Which side (attacker or defender) and how much is a matter of judgment, but should consider what sort of map you're going to have, and you haven't even gotten to that screen yet. This is why you have to decide on this before you start setting up the battle. 9. Rarity (optional) If you want quasi-historical OOBs, you'd better use rarity. Furthermore, you'd better set it to variable, which is much more interesting than normal rarity . 10. Length (mandatory) Even in a battle with a fair amount of cover and attackers unencumbered with unfit troops and limited ammo, the game system changes mean it ususally takes more than the CMBO default of 30 turns to get there. So I recommend always setting for at least 40 turns. And if you're attacking with some severe problems (unfit troops, deep snow, etc.) you'd better max this out at 60 turns. And always use the variable ending option to make things a bit uncertain for you. 3rd Screen -- the Map Always set all the variables, to make sure the map fits in with all the settings previously chosen. One thing especially to note: damage. This has a big effect on play at the heavy and extreme settings. The damage is concentrated around the objectives, which does 2 things. If you have a village map, most of the buildings will be rubble. This helps the defender because rubble seems to be better cover and he doesn't have to worry about you collapsing the buildings on him. OTOH, all the craters can give cover to the attacker, allowing him to advance in short spurts over what otherwise is open ground. And unlike most other forms of infantry cover, supporting vehicles can move through it. So use the damage option wisely. It can really sway things one way or the other, but usually it seems to help the attacker more.

CMBB follows the same system used by CMBO as regards what heavy guns are available on-map. The highest level available in both cases is the division's arty regiment--if the gun was only found at corps-level and above, it's not going to be on the map. In addition, if the divisional arty had multiple calibers, the biggest size isn't seen on the map. So in CMBB, the Russian divisional arty for most of the war had 76mm and 122mm pieces. At the very beginning and very end, there were also 152mm tubes, but neither for very long. So following the same rule as in CMBO, the Russians should only have 76mm guns on the map, nothing bigger.

manchildstein II said: If the 105s didn't have a radio FO, then yeah, that might not be realistic. The bigger the arty, the further back it is, so the longer the telephone wire has to be, and thus the more time it takes to lay it. This required time might exceed that available before the ad hoc attack MUST go in if it's to be successful. This is one of the main reasons the Germans developed assault guns. Their whole blitzkrieg system required ad hoc forces acting quickly all the time, but they were stuck with mostly telephones for their arty. Why they didn't buy more radios, I have no idea. But that's the situation they had, so they developed assault guns to give the grunts rapid-response, arty-caliber firepower without having to wait for the wiremen (IGs not being much better than arty, apparently). The same circumstances applied to the Russians and the allies of both sides using their systems. This is another area of adjustment for CMBO players. Besides all the tactical changes, folks will have to change their unit purchase habits as well. Arty isn't nearly as useful as it was in CMBO, due to limited FO movement, longer delays, and the blind-fire scatter. Sure, it still hurts when it hits, but it can't hit as many targets as before. Thus, something else has to be there to deliver the large-caliber HE. In a typical CMBO battle, I usually bought forces as follows: a reinforced grunt company with some on-map mortars and maybe an 81mm mortar spotter, 1 or 2 fairly powerful FOs (105-120mm), and as many good tanks as I had points left over for. These days, the grunts need a lot more suppressive fire to get anywhere and arty just isn't as useful. So I tend to get mostly assault guns and extra HMGs to support the grunts. If I have an FO at all, he's going to be medium mortars.

Kwacker sai: We had quite a discussion about this. Basically, it comes down to a choice between accuracy and delay time. In real life, if an FO can't see the target, the whole spotting round procedure is either impossible or complicated to a greater or lesser extent. "Complicated" means there are ways around it that work in some situations, but with the cost of increasing the FO's delay time by a greater or lesser amount, and some additional number of spotting rounds, depending on the situation. "Impossible" means there's nothing for it but to take your best guess and hope for the best, accepting whatever inaccuracy you get. And depending on the situation, the FO might decide to just shoot in the interests of speed. The problem is, CM's engine isn't good with all the shades of gray the above implies. When is a situation "very complicated" as opposed to "impossible", and when is it only "slightly complicated"? In addition, the current arty system can't handle some of the real world corrective measures that are used in "complicated" situations, like coordinated illumination and using smoke and airburst spotting rounds. So, longer delay time or lots of inaccuracy? CMBO used the 1st system, CMBB uses the 2nd. Neither is perfect; in fact, both are almost equally wrong. But the CMBB method fit in better with some of the other changes to arty in the new game, and people had been complaining about a lack of scatter, so that's what we ended up with. Steve has said that totally revamping arty is one of the major goals for the new engine. I really hope so because the current system will never be very realistic. Changes toward realism in 1 area create equal and opposite reactions elsewhere. But for now we have to wait.

manchildstein II said: Radio FOs have the word "radio" in parentheses after the type of weapon. Like this: "Howizter spotter 203mm (radio)". If it doesn't say radio, then it's wire. It could easily be that the Hungarians don't have any radio FOs. After all, wire remained the principle means of arty communications for both the Germans and the Russians throughout the whole war. But I'm not familiar with the Hungarian OOB so can't say for sure.

Compassion said: This is EXACTLY what is assumed to go on behind the scenes, the net result of which is you having an FO unit on the map controlling guns off the map that can fire onto the map in the battle you are fighting. What you're not understanding is a few tactical limitations of field telephones that no amount of infrastructure and prior preparation is going going to solve. Military field telephone wire differs GREATLY from domestic telephone wire. It is MUCH more heavy and bulky. This is mainly because most of the metal in it is steel, to make the wire strong enough that it won't break when grunts trip over it, trucks run over it, etc. In the case of Germany, all the metal was usually steel because the Germans didn't have enough aluminum and copper to waste on tens of thousands of miles of telephone wire, most of which would be abandoned when the front moved. Then there's the insulation, which also has to be much bulkier than on household telephone wire, to take the abuse of being out in the field for months. As a result of this, a spool of field telephone wire small enough and light enough to be carried by 1 man, such as those spools you see on the back of WW2 German soldiers, only holds a few hundred meters. To go further than that, you need bigger spools, which in turn pretty much require a vehicle to carry them and special mounts in the vehicle so the wire pays out neatly behind the vehicle. Thus, there evolved 2 distinct spool sizes. The man-portable kind of very short reach, and the bigger type with about a mile of wire intended for vehicular laying. No use making anything in between. And for a variety of practical reasons which I won't go into in this post, an FO team in a CM battle is only going to have 1 of the small type. NOTE: It's possible to use the big spools by hand and it's possible to use the small spools from vehicles. However, doing either imposes a lot of other limits and penalties on the units involved that the game can't handle. So don't get me started on that Anyway, now we have end product of all the parent organization's infrastructure: an FO team on the map at the beginning of a CM battle. Besides a map, binos, and other such arty-related stuff, they have a field telephone and a small spool of wire. Stretching off the friendly map edge behind them is a telephone wire running several miles at least to whomever the FO talks to. Laying this wire took considerable behind-the-scenes effort on the part of the infrastructure, BTW. Now we run into game engine limitations and design decisions taken as a result. Ideally, it should work as follows: </font> The game would keep track of the total distance moved by an FO team. Once it reached several hundred meters, then end of its available wire, no further movement would be possible during the current battle. After the battle, the parent infrastructure would show up, lay more wire to get the FO to a new OP, take the FO's empty spool to reload, and give the FO a new spool. But none of this can happen during a battle.</font>The game would keep track of the path over which the FO moved, because it leaves a "snail trail" of wire as it goes. Then any time a unit (friendly or enemy) crossed this path, there'd be a chance of the wire getting cut or broken, especially if tanks crossed it. The game would also check for damage from shells falling along the path.</font>The FOs could ride in vehicles, but they'd still be subject to the total distance traveled limitation above. In addition, the vehicle would be limited to walking speed and no more as long as the FO was aboard. </font>Unfortunately, none of these ideal things are possible. The engine doesn't track distance traveled for any unit, nor does it keep track of the paths they follow. It does not alter vehicle speed based on what passenger the vehicle is carrying, and limit that vehicle's movement to a distance that actually affects the passenger and not the vehicle itself. Thus, numerous abstractions had to be made. Abstracting the limited distance thing was the easiest. Giving the FOs a slow speed, because they're carefully paying out wire from their small spool as they go, puts a practical limit on FO movement. Combined with the increased delay times for calling fire and the length of the typical battle, slow-speed FOs can't walk more than a couple hundred meters anyway and still be useful in the battle. So everything is still within broadly acceptable levels of realism. It should now be obvious why wire FOs can't ride. First off, not being able to limit vehicle speed with FOs aboard is patently unrealistic for the purposes of laying wire from a small spool. Second, the higher speed of the vehicle as opposed to slow walking speed lets the FO cover way too much distance on the map during a battle. He would easily be able to cover way more than a few hundred meters and still be able to fire before the battle ends. This is also patently unrealistic, because the FO doesn't have that much wire. Hence the only possible solution was to keep wire FOs from riding at all.

I tend to agree that the direction and speed chosen by panicked troops is sometimes strange. They seem more like squirrels than headless chickens IMHO, however. Squirrels often get run over because they have the "last safe place" mentality, which works like this: A squirrel decides to cross a road. When it starts, it's in a safe place. But then you come down the road and the timing is such that the squirrel is about 95% of the way across the road when your car gets close enough to panic it. When panicked, a squirrel runs for a known safe place, and the last one it knows of (and probably the only one it can remember at the time) is where it was when it started. So it turns around and tries to run back across the road to its starting point. This of course takes it directly in front of your car so it gets squashed. As to your mortar inaccuracy... CM off-map arty of all types follows a pretty small set of simple rules. In CMBB, one such rule is that if the FO, of any type, doesn't have an LOS to the target point, the fire will always scatter off target by up to 400m. The scatter amount seems weighted on the long side as well, because my tests have shown it's somewhat more likely to be 400m off than dead-on, and the most common distance is about 250m rather than 200m. Thus, the usual miss distance is greater than the N-S width of the normal impact pattern for guns and mortars. This means firing blind is almost always a complete waste of ammo. NOTE: this assumes normal in-game fire at a non-TRP location. Blind initial barrages and blind fire at TRPs don't scatter, or at least not enough to make a difference.

I just tested all this stuff on 2 maps. The 1st map was a road through the woods, the 2nd map was a long bridge. The difference is that in each case, vehicles are confined to the path while grunts, crews, and lighter guns can get into the woods. No unit had any ammo. The ramming vehicle was a Ferdinand, chosen not only for its weight but its lack of MGs. For targets, I gave it a jeep, a 50mm mortar, an 82mm mortar, a 45mm ATG, a 76mm F22, and an 85mm AA gun, all lined up on the road or bridge in front of it in that order, with their backs turned. I gave the Ferdinand a single "fast" waypoint so that the line stretched over all targets. I ran each test several times and the same thing happened each time. The following effects were noted: 1. Road through Woods </font> Jeep: Did not move before Ferdinand arrived. Was pushed to side of road up against the trees. No damage done either physically to the jeep or mentally to the driver. Ferdinand didn't slow down.</font>Mortars: The troops started heading for the woods immediately, although they didn't get there before they got run over. The guys then continued moving and got well back into the trees. It was impossible to tell whether Ferdinand pushed them aside or whether all such movement was under their own power. No damage done, no morale penalties imposed, no loss of speed to Ferdinand.</font>45mm and 76mm Guns: Crews immediately rotated these guns 90^ and managed to push them out of Ferdinand's path and get them hidden in the woods before being run over. Thus no damage or morale effects at all.</font>85mm Gun: Being unable to move, this gun sat there in the road, the crew with it, and got run over. The gun was destroyed and the crew momentarily freaked, although they stayed in place during the overrun. Then the crew instantly got back to "OK" (although with the red dot lit) and ran into the woods. No damage or speed loss to Ferdinand. </font>2. Bridge</font> Jeep: As above. Jeep pushed to edge of bridge w/out physical or morale damage, Ferdinand's pace not slowed.</font>Mortars: No effect at all. They didn't try to move, weren't pushed out of the way, weren't damaged, did the suffer any morale effect, and the Ferdinand didn't slow down.</font>Guns: None of them tried to move at all, so each gun was run over. Each was knocked out. Crew morale effects as above for 85mm. Following gun destruction, the crews remained in place. The Ferdinand didn't slow down. </font>So it looks to me like tanks can only destroy guns. It also appears that if a unit is capable of getting out of the way, it will do so rather than be run over, even if being run over does it no harm.

IIRC, the good ol' .50cal HMG M2 was originally called the M1918 or some such WW1-era number. Anyway, the story I heard was that it was originally intended as an anti-tank weapon. Browning figured that if other countries did OK with scaling up their standard rifles into the 1st ATRs, it would be even better to scale up the standard MG. If this memory is correct, then a belt-fed ATR existed not long after tanks came onto the scene.

I think the stories of "unpainted" Russian tanks only happened where a besieged city had a tank factory, so it wasn't a common thing except locally. Also, I've never heard a definition for "unpainted" in this context. Did it mean bare metal, just primer, or some half-ass green paintjob that didn't cover everything and started peeling off immediately? More on this later, however. Let's just talk newness for now... It only takes a mile on a dirt road or cross-country to totally cover a tank in mud or dust, depending on ground condtions. And even if it's just dust, there will be patches of mud around the fuel filler caps and all over the lower hull. In these areas, the dust is sticking to spilled fuel or oil and grease slung off the tracks and bogies. So newness of the tank is no reason not to make it very dirty. Now think about Leningrad and it's besieged tank factory. Many buildings in Leningrad collapsed or were heavily damaged, and each one would have made immense quantities of masonry/concrete dust. The tanks had to drive through that to get to the front from the factory. Now think about the FDNY trucks that turned solid gray even blocks away from the WTC collapse. As a fireman, let me tell you, there is nothing in the world cleaner and shinier than a firetruck between runs. But you'd never know from looking at those pictures. Exhaust stains are another matter. These can take a while to appear or they can start with the 1st crank of the motor. It depends on the motor, its condition, its fuel quality, and a bunch of other things. Then throw in the Russian tanks' ability to make exhaust smokescreens and even a new tank could have serious carbon stains after just 1 skirmish. Rust is a bit trickier, and brings up the subject of paint, or lack thereof. When you make large forgings and castings, like what tanks are made of, the metal usually starts rusting immediately because the heat of its creation makes it vulnerable to oxidation. So assembly has to be preceded by grinding the rust off the joining surfaces, and then the whole thing needs to be de-rusted before painting. The paint then stops further rusting as long as it lasts. So, if the "unpainted" tanks were bare metal, IMHO they should be depicted as pretty much solid rusty brown. Maybe a base of silver with a thick coating of nearly contiguous rust pixels, with darker rusty areas around welds. It would look, more than anything, like a destroyed tank that had burned out (those things rust up completely in about 5 seconds it seems, due to the heat as above), expect it would have mud on it (which bakes off burning tanks). But anyway, definitely not the shiny, chrome-like look of bare metal some folks might be expecting. The other options for "unpainted" imply a half-ass job. With that, you wouldn't expect the workers to waste time trying to de-rust the nooks and crannies. And these places are where the welds are, which also rust up quickly due to the heat involved. So a tank with just primer would be whatever color the Russians used for that, but only on the big surfaces. The angles and corners would be all rusty. Then this whole thing would be covered with mud or dust. It would look like "a total piece of crap", even if it was only hours away from the factory. And if the "unpainted" tank had a half-ass coat of green on a half-ass coat of primer, I think it would look even worse.

Wonderful job, can't wait to get my hands on it. Also, good idea about the pigpen thing. It always looks funny when you use a bunch of different mods and the mud on them is all different colors . Where can I find the "pigpen" site?

Excellent work, Mr. Noobie! On the subject of rust and all.... I was in-country during the Gulf War from Christmas Day 90 to Tax Day 91. During that limited time, a mere 3.5 months, everything we owned became thoroughly rusted, dusted, and busted. So I think significant weathering on CM textures is very appropriate

Tungsten also usually has less penetration that AP at longer ranges. What was the range in your example? If it was long enough, then AP might have had a better chance of penetrating. Also, I recall BTS saying RE: tungsten in CMBO that its use depended to some extent on FOW. At that time, BTS was trying to keep tungsten from being used too much . Anyway, the idea was that because tanks/guns only had a few tungsten rounds, they didn't want to waste them on things they could kill with regular AP. So BTS put in a tendency for the AI not to use tungsten unless it had identified the target as something really requiring it. Maybe that's what's happening in your example.

Looks cool, Scipio. 1 question: what years does this mod apply to? 1 suggestion: I think the inscription on French cannon quoted in your sig was really "Ultima ratio regum" [ October 24, 2002, 07:50 PM: Message edited by: Bullethead ]

TRPs disappear between battles of operations. This isn't a bug, it's a feature. NOT a good feature, IMHO. I argued against it as hard as I could. But I lost.

You can, of course, make a terrain mod test scenario, too. Make a long slope from level 0 to level 19, put steppe and the various kinds of trees and bushes out there, and 1 of each type of building. Make summer and winter versions of this, too.

Yeah, the Big Cheese mods are great, also. I have both and plan to switch back and forth. I just hadn't seen Noobie's mods advertised so I figured I'd get the word out.

What I suggest you do is make a collection of "mod test scenarios", 2 for each nationality. By "mod test scenario", I mean set the date to June 41, buy 1 each of all the AFVs and guns, and put them on the map in some sort of organized manner. For instance, all the heavy tanks in a row, then a row of all medium tanks, a row for mortar vehicles, flamers, ATGs, whatever. Then change the date to July 41, buy 1 each of whatever becomes available, add them to the rows of stuff on the map already, and repeat until you get to May 45. Then throw in a platoon of each type of grunt. Save this scenario as "Layout_(nationalityname)_Summer.cme". Then change the weather so there's snow on the ground and resave the scenario as "Layout_(nationalityname)_Winter.cme". So now you have a summer and winter scenario with 1 example of each type of unit that nationality has, all neatly arranged for easy viewing. You can check your summer and winter mods just by loading these scenarios in the editor. NOTE that you can't play these scenarios because there are no enemy units . Also, you can check mods for the way the infantry uniforms change over time simply by changing the date of the scenario in the editor. Do this for each nationality. It's a pain, I know, but the exercise is worth it because it helps you learn when a given unit becomes available. Thus, I ain't gonna send you mine (besides, I've only got the Russians done so far anyway )

For them as don't know, check out Tom's Combat Mission HQ and the T34 mods of Mr. Noobie. This guy's got 11 mods for 10 different versions of the T34, all with excellent detail, coloring, weathering, and optional slogans on the turrets, plus a separate mod for rusty T34 tracks. Killer stuff. Thanks, Mr. Noobie!

PiggDogg said: As best as I can determine, WW2 Russian tanks really didn't carry smoke ammo, so it's not BTS' fault they don't have smoke in CMBB . I admit I've been curious about this myself. I've come to the conclusion it was a doctrinal thing. Smoke shells are basically good for only 2 things. You can mask an individual enemy unit that's causing you problems w/out blinding yourself with a smoke discharger in your own face, and you can point targets out to arty FOs and supporting airplanes. The latter use requires a pretty good level of training, excellent realtime, inter-arm communications, and very decentralized control, none of which the Russians had as a rule. The former requires an unbuttoned TC looking around trying to spot the threat (say a well-camo'd ATG), which for most of the war the Russians didn't have either. So basically, the Russian system didn't usually allow for realtime target marking by tankers, and with the TC being the gunner and buttoned up most of the time in action, his odds of being able to spot the type of target usually smoked was pretty low. Hence, the Russians probably figured it was more effective to just carry more killing ammo. That and use tanks in great mass so that an ambusher could knock off a few w/out blunting the whole attack. This doctrinal stuff is pretty much lost on CMBB. There is no need to mark targets for other units due to the game's absolute spotting system. But OTOH, the default attacker/defender ratio in a QB, and the very small size (compared to a realworld battle) of a most CMBB QBs, mean that needing to mask a dangerous enemy unit is much more important than in real life. The loss of just a couple of AFVs in a given QB can be the difference between victory or defeat. Thus, the Russians' historical lack of smoke ammo is more of a problem in CMBB than it probably was in real life. That all said, it's my understanding that most WW2 Russian tanks had the ability to inject diesel into the exhaust system to create smoke screens, at least for the ranks behind the first. This had the potential to let the Russians get in close before the Germans could do them much damage, and then flank shots would become available. If you have this, there's another reason not to waste ammo storage space on smoke ammo. Again, however, this system wouldn't do much good in your typical small CMBB battle because you usually don't have enough tanks to both make a decent smokescreen and hide behind it at the same time

Captain Wacky- I really appreciate your efforts, but I was wondering if you could make some grids that were a bit more subtle? Let me explain what I mean... Back in CMBO, there was a mod called "Velvet Grass" that just rocked. Each tile had all kinds of different colored pixels on it with the result that the ground looked to be covered with very realistic, tiny 3D-looking moguls and stuff. Then somebody made a gridded version of it by simply erasing very thin stripes of these multi-colored pixels leaving the original, plain green showing. And he did these stripes through the center of the tiles instead of around the edges, so you dind't get a double width of grid line at the tile boundaries. This was simply superb. The overall effect was the best of both worlds. If you looked at the map while zoomed out, the gridlines were invisible unless you wanted to see them. And even when you were zoomed in, they weren't obtrusive and you could choose not to register them if you didn't want to. Do you think you're up to making something like that?

Marko Litmanen said: This is all a matter of game engine limitations rather than a question of historical facts. Your problem is with radio FOs because wire FOs can't embark in vehicles at all. This is a function of the engine's inability to deal with all the issues concerning laying wire, so there's an underlying assumption that a wire FO only has a small spool allowing only limited foot movement. So now radio FOs. The reason they can't call for fire in a vehicle has nothing to do with them being FOs. Instead, it's because the game engine has a rule that says no embarked unit of any type, whether infantry, MG, FO, or gun, can shoot while embarked. Hell, they can't even use the LOS command. This isn't realistic, of course. Grunts, MG teams, radio FOs, and even some ATGs could all shoot while embarked. Unfortunately, the game doesn't seem able to discriminate between units capable of embarked firing and those incapable of it, so no unit gets to shoot while embarked. Hopefully, when BTS rewrites the engine, this issue will be addressed. At various times there's been some discussion of having dedicated FO vehicles. In these, the FO would be the vehicle's "weapon", so wouldn't be able to disembark at all, but you could call for arty from the vehicle. IOW, kinda like how mortar vehicles work, only with an FO inside instead of a mortar. I thought at one time these were going to be in CMBB but since they're not, I figure they came up against another engine limitation.

Hmmm. I had some Hs-129B2s strafing me the other day. The impacting bullets very slowly worked their way along the ground for hundreds of meters, creating many hundreds of little 20mm explosions and resultant tiny craters. The impacts seemed to completely fill a 20m square terrain tile at any one time and progressed across the map at about 1 tile per second. The really interesting thing is that this creeping barrage of 20mm continued LONG after the plane's shadow had swooped across the map. Hell, I even shot down some of these planes and the strafing effect continued after they were dead. Pausing the film and clicking on my units, I determined the planes' targets each run. In each case, the impacts started short of the target, worked their way onto it, held there for a couple of seconds, then worked on beyond the target for a LONG way. Often, this extension of the strafing crossed over other units. I found the net effect very depressing

The official name of the 25mm Russian AA gun was 72-K Model 1940. According to Zaloga's Red Army Handbook, this weapon was... My own experience with this weapon is that it works very much like the German single 20mm. It's good vs. infantry and light vehicles and about useless vs. airplanes.

Seanachai said: Well, shave my head and call me Peng!! Me and Senility in agreement?!?!?!? :eek: I must be drunk tonight.