Dar

Colonel Deadmarsh: Instead of these ridiculous claims that BTS has lost half of their customer base, or that only .000001% of us like the game, or that no one plays it, how about setting up a poll or a thread for those who don't like the new system to respond? Just a straight "post if you're unhappy with new model" thread that doesn't ask for elaboration or opinion, but just requests nay-sayers to reply and be counted? Some hard numbers might just give BTS an idea of how many people are happy and how many aren't.

Guess I'm no one then, 'cause I am loving it! :cool: As for the original post, there is so much bizarre stuff that can happen in any situation that it is entirely possible that a "rear upper hull penetration" can cause gun damage. Anything that penetrates the armor is gonna send out shrapnel/spall and it's gonna richochet around damaging crew and components. Even if it's a 1-in-1,000,000 chance, it is still possible! After all, despite the lottery odds, we do have winners, don't we? I don't expect you're going to see "rear hull penetration" and "gun damaged" in combination in any great frequency. [ November 01, 2002, 01:30 PM: Message edited by: Dar ]

IIRC, the "move to contact" order means they will stop as soon as they have LOS to the enemy. The enemy may be out of practical range, and your unit may not open fire, but as long as they can see the unit that's considered "contact". I would try using the plain ol' "Move" command to force them to move, and "Move to Contact" only when in cover and ready to engage.

My thoughts: It's better to use the tanks to overwatch the infantry as they advance. They pack a punch from a greater distance, and they are vulnerable at close range and blind, so it's better to let the infantry close with the enemy and let the tanks (and other heavy weapons) keep the enemy's head down. That being said, don't expose your tanks by putting them on the highest hill on the map. Although they can see everything from there, everything can see THEM as well, and you're bound to lose them. Use cover and concealment as best as you can to get your assets into position, and focus on targeting one area. Then hit it with everything! Also, don't forget your off-map arty and most on-map arty have smoke rounds available. If you're attacking a clump of trees (clump "A") and expect the enemy has some AT guns and other heavy weapons in another clump of trees (clump "B") farther off, and there's no way you can approach "A" or support the attack on "A" without being in LOS of "B", drop some smoke in front of "B". Hope that makes sense...?

In your "first stupidity stunt", someone mentioned earlier that it might have been an LOS obstruction in the "tall pines" that prevented the unit from firing on the closer unit. I don't quite see that in this situation, as from my experiments it takes one full tile-width of "tall pines" to block LOS. What I think happened here is that the firing unit decided to shoot at the enemy unit that it could generate the most firepower against. Shooting through even a part of "tall pine" tile is going to reduce the effective firepower, and it looks like your firing unit had a less-obstructed LOS/LOF to the unit moving away from it. For example, the squad may have been able to hit the unit moving away with 300 firepower points, and may have been able to hit the other unit with "only" 275, so it chose the target it was most likely to put some hurt on. Just my $0.02!

Madmatt: I'll try to reproduce it as best I can and send in a save. If I can better describe what I'm trying to do, I'm routing a platoon of tanks with a platoon of passengers on board from point A to B to C. I order the riders to get off at point C and head for cover. As the tanks reach point B they receive small arms fire (I think this is where the Sneak order gets inserted into the riders' order queues, commanding them to Sneak to cover near point . The tanks continue on to point C, where the riders get off and proceed to sneak back to point B as ordered. Anyway, I'll try to repro it and send it in if I do. I'm sure there are more important issues to look into than this, but I appreciate your concern!

Actually, that's kind of cool! I like that fanaticism is getting added in there--makes things a little less predictable! My (minor) beef with my initial post is, if the riders feel the need to get off to avoid incoming small arms, they should just bolt immediately. Or my original orders should be rescinded entirely. Inserting the "Sneak" order at the top of their queue seems odd. Oh, well, still a great game, and definitely looking like a huge improvement on CMBO, which was already the World's Best Damn Wargame!

Would be kinda nice to have some heavy arty units to simulate an arty unit getting overrun, but I imagine you could use "lesser" units to some degree. I'm just thinking of some of the deeper blitzkrieg advances the Germans made early on, and also how some of the first T-34s and KVs the Germans encountered managed to wander pretty deep into the German rear echelon.

Didn't see this in a search... I'm having this problem, and wondering if anyone else is. Here are my repro steps: 1.) Put platoon on tanks as riders. 2.) Send tanks forward into extreme/long range of enemy small arms. 3.) Give riders orders to disembark at end of tanks' movement orders (e.g. "Fast" move into cover nearest the tanks' destination) The problem is, once the tanks come under small arms fire from a distance, the units get an order to "Sneak" to cover inserted before the original order to disembark. The units do not disembark, and they maintain their "Fast" move orders to the original destination. They just stay on the tanks but now this order to "Sneak" to the nearest cover at that moment is inserted into their orders. The result is that the tanks reach the end of their move, the troops disembark, but instead of Fast moving to the nearest cover as ordered, they begin "Sneaking" 500 yards to the rear! And, once there, they are then supposed to turn around and Fast move back 500+ yards in the direction they came from! I do not understand why the Sneak order gets inserted there? If the incoming fire is severe enough to bother them, then it seems they should abandon the tanks and seek cover immediately. Staying on the tank and attempting to sneak to the rear before resuming my original movement orders seems quite odd. Net result, I have to cancel all orders and re-issue "Fast" orders to get them off the tanks and in cover. Nothing major, but annoying and, at least to me, a bit illogical.

USTanker-- Cool! Thanks for the reply! That answers all of my questions quite nicely.

Thanks for the replies-- Gpig--Glad to see I'm not the only bizarre, twisted mind around here! Redeker: Thanks for the link! I found there the link to a page on the M829A1 120mm round, and in the M829A2 section they mention the "use of a carbon-epoxy composite for the sabot". "Carbon-epoxy" is something they're making bike frames, boat hulls, and other things from, so it sounds fairly light yet very durable. Still, not so light you'd want to get hit by it when it's launched from the bore of a 120mm! I have to comment on the line on that original page Redeker linked to about the bore evacuator which vaccuums out the bore between rounds. No matter how high tech we get, some things just don't change and you still need to swab out the barrel after each round!

For all you tank veterans out there: As I understand, sabot ammunition consists of a heavy metal core that does the actual damage when fired, and there is a jacket of material surrounding the core which is jettisoned in flight. I have a couple questions about the jacket material: 1. What material is the jacket made out of? 2. Can you see this separate from the round in flight, i.e. does it fly up and away at much lower velocity, much like a shotgun shell wadding? 3. After firing live rounds on a firing range, is this material collected? Is it recyclable or otherwise reusable? Goofy questions, I know, but sometimes my mind works that way... Thanks for any answers! [ February 14, 2002, 02:10 PM: Message edited by: Dar ]

I believe it's a message from God: "I'm OK; You're OK."

Capt: Keep 'em coming! I agree with some of the others that sometimes historical accuracy needs to take a backseat to playability, but I appreciate the research and testing you and others do to expose just where CM:BO is lacking. I believe the CM series is and will be for some time the most realistic computer game available, but those areas where it could stand improvement should definitely be brought to attention. Pointing it out and backing it up with facts and documentation is the best way to get BTS's attention. There will always be unrealistic elements (e.g. instant, global awareness of a newly spotted enemy unit) that won't go away, but minimizing those and maximizing the realism is something I think all of us want.

I think a higher chance for bogging down or becoming immobilized on the rails is quite realistic. Think of all the weight an armored vehicle puts on its tracks, and how the tracks distribute that weight over a wide surface area. Compare that to being straddled across a rail or two, where all that weight is now on one or two small areas, and I imagine there'd a great chance of breaking the coupling between two tracks. Also, trying to straddle one or two rails, i.e. "follow" the tracks, is another good way to get stuck. Those steel rails would be hard to grip from such a shallow angle to climb, and they're designed to support heavy freight locomotives that typically weigh more than any tank ever has or will, and they don't budge very easily. Additionally, the ballast, which is mostly loosely-packed gravel for supporting a fixed rail and water drainage, may not allow much traction for a vehicle off the rails. Just my $.02!

Much as I love the different vehicle and uniform mods out there, the one mod I can NOT live without is the "Richard Tremblett's Velvet Grid" texture (with a subtle grid overlay). If you have not tried grid textures before, I recommend giving it a shot. The grid makes it so much easier to read elevations and fluctuations in the terrain. This is the mod they'll have to pry from my cold, dead fingers! ------------------ Dar

Me huffin' and puffin' and sweatin' at an SCA event that a co-worker talked me into attending near Pittsburgh. It was about 95° with 100% humidity. That was bad enough, but the crazy people dressed in armor and beating each other with sticks pushed me over the edge! ------------------ Dar

In one Quick Battle I had a sharpshooter lying low in the 2nd floor of a building as a full-strength enemy squad occupied the ground floor. After several turns, they moved on, never having spotted my sniper. I was rather impressed that he wasn't spotted. And I think it's a good feature, not a bug. It certainly seemed like realistic behavior to me. ------------------ Dar

<img src=http://members.theglobe.com/dsteckel/images/main/Pete04.jpg> I wonder what it's like to be a Panther or Tiger... Nay, a King Tiger! ------------------ Dar [This message has been edited by Dar (edited 02-15-2001).]

Sorry. I think that (the original quote) is a load of crap. Things change in war, and hardly ever for the better. When you've got an enemy shooting at you, piss running down your leg, your optics and machinery damaged from hits and large caliber HE near-misses, your seat stained with the blood of the last unfortunate soul you replaced, and you're trying to remember how to operate the optics and gun traverse you learned all about in your 48 hours of training before entering the replacement pool, then let's see how many shots you need! ------------------ Dar

Hot damn! This is fantastic... Kudos to BTS (yet again!) for continuing to improve what is already the best damn wargame to date. ------------------ Dar

I think that game Henri mentioned is "Orion", which I also had on my C64. One terrific game, but unfortunately it probably didn't appeal to as wide an audience as most games because of the need to learn programming. There's another game out now that's somewhat similar called "Mindrover". If Orion appealed to you, I'm sure Mindrover would. ------------------ Dar

Tiger: I feel for ya, man. This is a very frustrating behavior that really chafes my butt whenever I encounter it. It really seems that each vehicle needs to track a couple of extra variables: o What was I last shooting at? o Where was it? o Why am I shooting at it no longer? o Is it a viable threat to me? Based on the weight of those answers, *then* it could determine whether or not to engage another target outside of the aspect. For example, in this case with your Tiger it could resolve these as: What: Churchill Where: 12 o'clock Why: Lost LOS to target Threat? Yes. Based on those criteria, then the Tiger would not engage anything out of its frontal aspect (between 10 and 2 o'clock) for one or two turns unless it was more threatening than the Churchill. Guess that would mean tracking the time since the last time it had LOS to the target, too. ------------------ Dar

Looks like you can. Just to be safe, though, I better try it again... heh, heh, heh. ------------------ Dar

109G: Dunno... Let's give it a shot and see if my GG-1 shows up: ------------------ Dar