Mark IV

Just like it's spelled (?).

I did pretty well at long range in Cambes against Seanachai's armor. Lost a couple, but killed more. Maybe you weren't hull down?

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Colonel_Deadmarsh: If not, I'm gonna send all my men over to the war in Close Combat 2. They'd have a better chance of living in that game.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> This is possibly the least efficacious threat you could have made.

I doubt that superior optics manifest themselves much at distances as close as 300m. The qualitative superiority was more evident at the 800m+ ranges, if I recall correctly. 300m is a chip shot for any late war MBT and the misses would be attributable to many other causes, including the distractions of combat and plain bad luck (another thing not really modeled is incoming AP being absorbed or deflecting off trees right in front of the target). I would like to see something on the optics someday, for sure in Russia, but this probably wasn't an example of a situation where it would have made any difference.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Slapdragon: torching all the buildings in the middle of a defence of a town you are trying not to get kicked out of is gamey<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> No way do I agree with any of this. Any commander can make a decision to burn any town, any time, without risk of gaminess. The men in the Ardennes froze in foxholes on a regular basis. Sure, buildings were better, but the notion that retaining them to sleep in is better than denying them to the enemy, is absurd. I would love to hear your explanation to your commanding officer, after losing a town intact to the Germans, with the excuse that you were saving the buildings for billeting. When I was in Germany in the late '70s I participated in countless terrain walks, and a standard plan was to rubble the town to deny it to the enemy, regardless of weather. Officers were occasionally admonished for neglecting to cover this step in their briefings (depending on the situation). I was often billeted in a tent in deep snow at the time (when I wasn't sleeping in my jeep trailer) and would have laughed aloud at this suggestion. These notions of what constitutes "gamey" behavior are really taken to extremes by some. There is no loophole in the rules of which this takes advantage, there is ample historical precedent for it, and it is just one of the decisions a commander could make, right or wrong. Is it gamey to mine or crater a road, because it may be needed for the advance or supply of subsequent operations? Commanders knowingly made decisions to send men to their deaths on a regular basis in WWII because it was for a higher good (the survival of the many, and to win the war). I find it hard to believe that such men would pale at torching a few buildings to spare their men sleeping in the cold, when they were doing exactly that all over the Ardennes.

You can only save PBEM movies, not battles against the AI.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by russellmz: Clash of Eagles, last night:<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Your spoiler warning isn't showing because you put it in the brackets, and UBB thinks they're code. Bummer, I never played that one. I've taken out Panthers with Jabos, and one or two pretty much pays for the investment. I also just had a QB where they took out 50% of my armored assets on the 2nd turn. They came back and wiped a bunch of German HTs and ACs, but I'd rather do that myself... sigh... I was over 500m from the nearest German vehicles. A lot of times you don't appreciate the damage they're doing to the other side until late in the game, or after. Then you'll find guns and vehicles you'd never spotted, Abandoned or Knocked Out, well to the rear. [This message has been edited by Mark IV (edited 10-01-2000).]

I thought in the demo your last movie (only) was saved under "Autosave.cmb"?

I forced a Sherman to abandon in a PBEM with a flamer. They work well for pillboxes and buildings, but as noted the enemy must be suppressed to get the FT in range. I don't see anything gamey about lighting all the buildings you want. If it makes tactical sense, do it. They do not explode when hit, in CM. FTs are just another tool in the box and have their purposes. You just need to learn how and when to use them. What were you expecting them to do?

Doesn't the cost/FP of the German squad reflect the (nearly) omnipresent Panzerfaust? Or did you control for this? [This message has been edited by Mark IV (edited 09-30-2000).]

See http://www.battlefront.com/discuss/Forum1/HTML/002023.html for one of the more illuminating of the many discussions on this topic. The Buechner book is cited as well. If you have new or better evidence, now would be the time to cite it. There is no "age-old wg myth of IGs only firing directly". The argument was that they were suited to both roles, but in CM's time and geographical scales, the IF option was impractical, as in "not worth coding". It was not a common enough practice to make it worth modeling, the minimum ranges were corner to corner on most CM maps, and it took a long time to set up and register the guns. There are also discussions of tanks using indirect fire which are similar. Yes, it happened, but not very often or very well, mostly beyond the scale of CM, and not significantly enough to stop progress on other projects to model for novelty value.

Bruno: Some good points. But... First, the Germans were not even close to producing an atomic bomb, and weren't working on one very hard. I know about the famous heavy water plant and the British raid, etc., but the project did not have very high-level support. And, the Germans were using a fundamentally flawed calculation of critical mass, so the efforts they WERE making were in the wrong direction. There was no danger of nuclear-tipped V2s slamming into London or Moscow for several years, despite the notion's popularity with what-iffers. Secondly, Japan did originally have intentions toward Russia, which they tested at Kalkhin Gol-Nomonhan, partly against a young armored officer named Zhukov, in 1939. They decided to go south instead. Seems they came to an armored battle and forgot their tanks. The high leadership of the Japanese Army and the Foreign Ministry were very pro-German and wanted to attack Russia in support of Hitler. The Navy and other leaders wanted to go south, and challenge the colonial powers (Britain, France, and Holland), and this debate went on for some time internally. It is often overlooked that while the Nazi-Soviet Non-Agression Pact surprised the rest of the world, it shocked Japan, and caused the fall of the government. At that time, Hitler wanted the Japanese to quit worrying about the USSR and concentrate on the possessions of Britain and France. The Pact with Stalin forced their attention southward, and the dazed Japanese concluded their own armistice and treaties with the USSR shortly thereafter, which were maintained by both sides until the very end of the war. The renewed US embargo of oil was the final catalyst. The whole time that the US was sending Lend-Lease aid to Russia, the Soviets were denying the US the use of Russian air bases for operations against Japan. The Japanese and Russians communicated often about this, and the US was reading these communications the whole time that Stalin was urging America to begin its second front. I imagine this made it a little easier to take the time to prepare the Normandy invasion properly. Later, of course, an alarmed Berlin began urging Tokyo to attack the Soviets from the rear. A somewhat wiser Japanese cabinet merely smiled at the thought and ignored the idea for the rest of the war.

Lots of people could help, but you need to specify whether you have PC or Mac first. It's easy either way.

Another book on the same topic is "When the Odds Were Even", focusing on the Vosges campaign. American forces did not suck. They were learning modern European war as they went, and basically had from the North African landings through '45 in which to do so. I think the improvement in equipment, tactics, and leadership in that very short period was remarkable. The artillery in particular was outstanding, and this can't be fully appreciated at CM's scale. Did anyone say "airpower"? If America was inherently sucky it isn't too obvious in this department. As for the tanks, they were mass-produced and shipped thousands of miles to the front, and then it's too late to do anything about the design. They weren't that bad, anyway, but so much of being a good commander is making victory with the forces you have at hand. And they made a victory. The Americans got a really great "break" out of the deal- they ended up as the first superpower. That's why some feel compelled to cut them down to size by highlighting their mistakes. There were lots of mistakes... but the huge war machine was built, trained, and hardened in one-sixth the time of Germany's, and America was also fighting a two-front war in vastly different theaters. So I think they did pretty well, after the hard learning was done.

The only way I could support buying jeep recon units in platoons, is if the TO&E of the time actually made widespread use of such a thing. Which I doubt. What about Kubelwagens? Trucks? HTs? I am really against the game mechanics being modified to enforce someone else's notion of correct human-player behavior. Guns and explosives are supposed to do that. If the vehicles and weapons are modeled correctly, a player may use or misuse them at will, just like in RL. Good use works, bad use explodes and burns. Leave it alone!

Doesn't lowering the speed and spotting capabilities of such units fix the problem at CM's scale, in the most straightforward way? If I understand one of the points correctly, the true value of the vehicle in the overall logistical sense isn't captured in its cost. But since CM is a tactical game, perhaps any tweaking to reflect soft vehicles' importance should come in the assessment of victory points... the little units' value to a CM scenario seems about right to me. The soft targets that make it onto a CM battlefield are there for their perceived tactical contribution. Stupid employment of them should reap a just reward. The fact that jeeps and trucks brung the guys to the dance (and will to the next one) is important, but not on the shooting battlefield (the battalion/brigade/division isn't going to send ALL, or even a large percentage, of their transport within a klick of the front line). If their characteristics are modeled accurately, problem solved, in the context of an hour or so of battle. A burst or two of MG should be the reward of dashing thin-skins. If unit costs are weighted for their overall net worth to the war effort, shouldn't the price of the 88 Flak go up, since every round might have brought down a B-17? Should we purchase HQ units separately, at a higher cost, to prevent O-grades from conducting solo assaults? Isn't this the slippery slope to modeling field kitchens, because of their tactical importance? This issue has really received a disproportionate amount of attention, IMO. It has not been a problem in the games I've played. I would prefer to see unit characteristics modeled as accurately as possible, and then let the player make his own decisions, and live with the consequences. I don't have a problem with jeep rushes, so long as MG42s (or even a couple of K98s) do to them in the game, what they would in real life.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Maastrictian: Actually a lighting strike on a tank would not have any afect on the crew (unless the TC was unbuttoned and had a hand outside the tank). This is for the same reason that being in your car durring a thunderstorm is safe.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Better than your car, really. Thanks to the metal tracks, the vehicle has lots of contiguous earth contact, and is in effect a grounded Faraday cage. You're right about the lightning running around the outside; that's the so-called "skin effect". The tube radios in WWII tanks would be much more resistant to ambient surge than modern solid-state electronics, as well.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Mannheim Tanker: At this rate, we could surpass the cesspool (thread length, and maybe even contect<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> You already have. The Cesspool does not permit "contect". Back to the dark place now....

I find that a two-line email with the setup sets the atmosphere and avoids misunderstandings nicely. It would also obviate most of this thread. An incomplete model is fixed, and now does a better job of simulating reality. Good! You can agree with an opponent to an anything-goes game and be as creative as you like.

It won't be soon, and will likely be a "somewhat different" platform, and will be East Front (this is West). Buy this one NOW.

That's not a full snail- without the shell, it's a bailed crew.

Here's hoping (and believing) that CM2 models reality at least as well as CMBO, and infantry plays the same part as it did on the Eastern Front in real life. If the unit modeling is correct it shouldn't matter which scenario you play... what happens in the game should be pretty close to what happened in real life, like it is in CMBO. It is weird to think that the people who put this wonderful combined arms maneuver game together, would suddenly abandon all principle to create an ahistorical blastfest. It was a big war and I think BTS will get it right. It'll probably be later than anybody's worst guess, and I'll pre-order now... if I get a poster!

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Pham911: You +2, +3, +4 people are weird.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> You're right, of course. But I like to try all the tools in the box to see what works, and this helps me track my ground-pounders. Real life commanders are much more likely to take a recon flight to 3000m every 60 seconds, have their squads affix 20x20m orange panels to their boots, and ask them to refight each minute of action 2 or 3 times. But I have to compromise with reality due to my limited conceptual abilities.

My first review of a movie is usually at fullest realism. I definitely prefer larger unit scales, usually 4, to track the action (back to Realisitic for figuring hull-down, or maneuvering in tight spaces). (This brings up a tiny grievance I have... the width of the little trails and breaks between tree tiles. You can move an AFV down some of them, but not others. If you plot a move through one, and the AFV can't make it, it takes the long way around to the endpoint. Naturally it usually drives around on the enemy side offering some choice flank shots. The vehicle commander would know at a glance that his AFV couldn't fit down the path, so I wish I could know, before the AI interprets my wishes during a movie...) Back on topic, more and more, I toggle trees off, or to minimum, for review and plotting purposes. I know real commanders couldn't do it, but then, they could see the actual terrain with their eyes. I find this really helps assessing positions in wooded hilly country. All graphics are stock, off the CD and patches.

I am ignorant (evidence abounds). But, if you want the ignorant represented in your quiz (and who wouldn't?), wouldn't it be wise to post some kind of link, or other explanation, as to what the hell you're talking about? I've no bloody clue what a "#cmquiz" is, and I'll bet others don't either.