M Hofbauer

120km...that is, if the engine doesnt overheat and the gearbox survives long enough.

rotflpmp

thanks, and please be careful that the Panzerschreck wont have the ballistic path of a laserpointer ! again, thanks !

going back doesnt help, not on my browser types. oh, Dark Knight, the short answer btw was "Borg" refers to the fact that in CM once a friendly unit spots an enemy unit, all friendly uinits share that knowledge at once as common Borg-knowledge (of course it works vice vers too, enemy spotting you), they dont have to discover that enemy unit themselves, sotospeak.

which prompts an important question. while you can compensate for a poor situational awareness of the individual tank's AI by manually ordering them around, you as the MegaBorg depend on the enemy units being spotted at all in the first place. so, the ulötimate question is, who is best at spotting enemy units? a tank commander? a tank gunner? first has a good all-around view unless he's unbuttoned in a non-german tank. second has these fine optics to identify enemies at large distances. both their potential goes to hell ass soon as the tank moves. so, what about infantry? are there HQ units especially apt using scissor binoculars? are there dedicated recon squads? what about guns? HMGs? just who has the best spotting ability ceteris paribus (= given they all have the same spotting/experience value) ?

LOL...@ adware idea... indeed Kettler hits the nail right on the head, using the human player for direct control all the C&C and "situational awareness" issues that plagued the early war german opponents will be lost.

yes, them and their fetish for Übertanks, like the King tiger (I fully agree with you, the influx of such "customers" that are readily identifiable already by their nicknames is...uh... troubling... and not a healthy sign for the game. But then, you just need to look at what other titles 1C does, what their usual business is... 1C projects ... most distrubing is the huge numbers of really downright Sudden-Strike clones of the worst RTS kind like Stalingrad, World War I, Desert War, Cuban Missile Crisis...) :eek:

while we're at it... "KT" is another two grog points gone. "King Tiger" (or, to use hip gangsta street speak, "KT") is as ubiquitous as it is wrong. The word King Tiger furthermore does not exist in the woeful english language. My Webster goes from "king's yellow" right to "king tody". I am not familar with the canadian english but I assume it doesn't exist there, either (presumably there arent too many Tigers in canada to warrant developing own naming conventions for them). Panthera t. tigris (LInnaeus) in the only valid zoologic translation (since the german name for the Pz. VI Ausf. B or Tiger II "Königstiger" was, in line with german naming tradition, taken from the predator mammal of same name) is Bengal Tiger or Royal (Bengal) Tiger. not that this is a new finding.

ok, here I am, writing a legthy offline reply to juardis, explain the borg to Dark Knight, and when I go online and post it, all I get is a "thread closed" "you know, I am going to move this thread over to the CMSF forum" harumph. leave *our* threads here, leave theirs there. (SouthPark redneck voice) "we dont take kindly to CMSF folks round here" (/SP off)

ok, since you asked: "The later CC games allowed players to rotate units in and out of the "Kampfgruppe" for each individual battle. ToW is going to allow moving men around individually. The ramifications of this strike me as rather profound. " well, in cc you could simply choose not to use them in the next battle. mostly made sense for tank crews whom you couldnt afford to buy a new fahrbaren Untersatz. otherwise, a depleted squad ior even crew could siomply be held back, if you didnt thrust them forward, there was hardly a difference between not using them *for* the battle and not using them *in* the battle. "I can collect my best tankers in my best tank, the best infantry in the same squad. In so doing I may be forming a weaker crew or weaker squad that will be less capable and less resilient. A lot depends on just how interwoven these individual attributes with the combat engine, but just having the option to reorganize this way seems huge to me." to me, too. it is very gamey but aklso very rewarding. "Platoon Manager, the new subgame of ToW." seriously, looking forward to it. Big time. "How much influence does a good tank commander have on his tank in the game? Is it better to have the best crewman be the gunner, driver or commander? " fist of all, they have different skills, driving, marksmanship, morale or somefink. we dont know yet how crew managment will work exactly, whether you will get soandso much "experioeence points" that you can freely distribute for any skill on any soldier, or whether there will be specific driving skill points, mnarksmanship exp. points etc. to be awarded. IMO most everybody will probably prefer to nurture the gunner, as driving and command/awareness can largely be done by the player himself micromanaging pathing and target selection / situational awareness (see my other post about how the early war C&C deficits and awareness deficits of early french/polish/russian tanks will not be an issue). "As a player will you follow the US model and make a bunch of equally capable units or will you go with the German model and create a handful of very capable units with a mass of less capable ones? Admittedly those were strategic level decisions and not tactical like in the game, but you get the idea." you will, and I will, of course creatde a few select "favorite" pet units/crews that you will nurture along. but you already pointed this out yourself. in the long run of a campaign, depending on how generous the program will be re. experience points etc., you might as well end up with many highly developed crews. like in cc3, where towards the end of the large campaign most of your snipers and many of the tank commanders and gunners were Majors serving happily alongside each other. of course there is a possible an inherent danger here: lopsiding a campaign. if it is tailorted towards a specific player performance, it might easily become lopsided up or down due to two opposite circuli viciosi: if a player performs above expectation, his soldiers will become beteer than the computer setup of the campaign accounts for, meaning it will be even easier for him to also win the next battle better than expected, even more so. a self-reinforcing effect. the longer the campaign lasts, the more lopsided and easier it will be for the successful player. the reverse can also happen. if a player fails to meet expected performance, he has less ability to improve his troops, making it even harder for him to win the next battle which was tailored to be a challenge to a player who has successfully improved his troops. a downwards spiral, he might find himself towards the end of a long campaign to battle trying to fight huge masses of high quality enemies with only a few green ill-equipped troops. the original Close Combat, only the original CC, countered this with its dynamic campaign flow. it would get harder ifn a player played very well in last battle, yet it would again become a bit easier in the next battle if he failed to do well. (of course the player also advanced faster in the time-line so he was never really punished for good performance) this generally worked to keep it a challenge for every kind of player. in the later CC's, this was no more, and they generally became lopsided easily after a while. I remember well how especially cc3 wasn't really a challenge after half the campaign since you already had a top-notch team together. I can also imagien how poor players would eventually have found themselves fighting off hordes of heavy tanks with just a few green troops and inadequate equipment. c3 accounted only minimally for performance within the individual operations by giving point boni when the flow moved to one of the end maps (more points for the poor player who retreated omne map); so the smart tactic was to fuirst withdraw a map and lose it intentionally, harvest the huge amoun t of points to equip your troops, then quickly go back and conquer all the maps needed for the operation. that way you could still equip your troops even tho the initial battle looked weak and didnt give you the points required to re-fit with new tanks, guns etc. we dont know which path ToW will take - and thios is one of the things where the demo will NOT help. "I like the idea, because real commanders do this kind of thing all the time. But I suspect it might be open to abuse and that task organization will become an important consideration, perhaps even de rigeur, in multiplayer combats. " real commander do it a lot? are you sure? my bet would be they do not even have neat little graphics showing just how proficient each platoon or company member is with a value from 0 to 100 for different abilities. back when you had a command, did *you* know as a company CO just which of your hundred or so soldiers was the best to man one of the 50cals or one of the TOW launchers or whatever you had? and I bet you would not have been able to have one of the platoon lieutenants man the M60 because he would be the most proficient with it, or have Pv2 Shlonk lead a section because he shows such good leadership abilities. Naw, it is gamey. That is not to say it isnt good. CC, the original CC, tracked proficiency on a one to hundred scale for each soldier for each type of weapon! but it didnt show it, it only showed general color coding of whether someone was generally a good soldier or not. but that didnt tell you whether he was maybe very good with the K98k but sucked real bad as a MP-40 or PzF user, or was a poor melee fighter. only later did clever fans (Fisla?) create thris-party programs that opened up these innards and let you see all the values that the game internally tracked for each soldier. I think this more general impression of good soldier / poor soldier is a bit more realistic than having a fixed value of "78" for marksmanship or somefink. "Will the player be able to completely change the organization of his forces forming fewer, larger squads or more, smaller teams? I guess that has already been done with the hotkey grouping feature, but I'm thinking along the lines of task organization before the battle that should, I think, have an influence on how the morale system works. I wouldn't want trooper A to get panicked because the rest of his squad, 500 meters away and out of LOS, is taking heavy fire. Conversely he shouldn't be superman because the rest of his "real" squad is tucked safely away in a trench while the group he is with is pinned down. " A very valid concern. I had a big laugh, and a big shock, when I read in another thread that CMSF would have single soldiers but not individual LOS/LOF. That would be even worse than the later cc problem where the rather large squads did have individual LOS but squad placement was buggy/hard. that guy with the last PzF somehow always ended up in the back of the squad with no LOS from the back of the building to the Sherman parked in front. apparently, ToW will have neither of these problems. But the one you describe is a valid concern. the problem is also that we dont exactly have any idea of how the morale model will work. is attachment to a good squad leader all that is needed? or do you have to be close to him? is it a O/I issue like in CM with its brown/black connection lines? or is it more fuzzy with a "the closer the better" function? does *any* leader do, or does it have to the OOB leader of the specific squad ? ???

Tarq's lawyer, I have to reject your last writing on the grounds that you failed to provide a power of attorney to legally act for Tarq. until then you are merely dust beneath my feet, and your statements buzz of flies in my ears. Tarquelne, now you've done it. all I can say is that either - gasp - it seems that Moon just called Madmatt a liar, or Madmatt IS a liar OR used misleading statements in false advertisement. OR somefink.

At which point one might wonder why one doesn't simply play an FPS. </font>

I assume you are.</font>

well thats what everybody else is thinking, I guess.

I assume you are. I think you still havent fully immersed in what kind of game ToW will be. You are thinking too little game, too much simulation, too realistic. too-too-too

right on. wasnt the original, real CC originally running under Computer Squad Leader or somefink? to paraphrase RMC referring to the board game squad leader "there were only StuGs and PzIVs and it was good." in the original CC, there were only occasional tanks. and it was good. AFVs made a huge impact, even a small SdKfz with machine gun would require you to adapt your tactics. tank vs tank duels were a rare affair and modeled rather well for the purpose.

yep, complete with smoke trail, flat trajectory an' all...* thread with linked pic *(to ComradeP: thats - of course - sarcasm!)

Who are you and why are you so special that you deserve to have your questions answered without expending any time looking for the answers yourself? </font>

Who are you and why are you so special that you deserve to have your questions answered without expending any time looking for the answers yourself? </font>

(whispers to C'Rogers:) ("the mortars, the mortars... tell'im about the mortars")

(whispers to C'Rogers:) ("the mortars, the mortars... tell'im about the mortars")

not saying it is THE TRUTH, but just as a heads up this is from the official US Army CSOI 1944 (courtesy of RMC):

"Eye Candy vs. Clickfest!" why cant it be both?

Moon: " The longest campaign spanning the entire war is the German one IIRC. Some, like the Polish and the French ones, are shorter." *g* " Each mission is not a simple one-objective affair, but often has 3 or 4 or more sub-missions" just don't makle it a puzzle adventure... find the key for the lock so you can enter the bridge that takes you to the mystery lair..

Moon: "You can force units to stay in place or hold fire also of course." dioes this depend on unit quality? i.e., are very experienced units more likely to keep fire discipline than green soldiers? Juardis: "Will it be obvious to me that PFC Juardis dropped his M1 and now has a BAR? I could see where that would change how I would want to use him. Or is the AI smart enough to know how to use him? " the problem I see with scavenged weapons that you get to keep for the campaign is that after a while every single russian soldier in the squad will be toting a MG42and similar...