Pak40

This sound interesting, but I have a couple of questions/warnings: 1. The QB map generator never puts Bocage tiles on the map. I fear you will be spending a lot of time tweaking the maps for historical accuracy. 2. How will you handle cases where two or more player's units are on the same 1km hex? Who will get to control the battle if one is called for. It seems that cases like this will be the norm because one single company gaurding an entire Km of front line seems awefully weak.

I've noticed that Veteran commanders generally have more bonus abilities. If I can affort it, I usually buy everything veteran. If not, then I will mix it up: 2 Regular platoons of infantry + 1 Veteran platoon of infantry. HMGs veteran, bazookas veteran. You want your HMGs veteran because they have lots of ammo and you want them around for the duration of the battle. If they are Regular then the might break halfway into the battle and you'll lose important firepower. Bazookas also are important because you want them to kill their target on the first or second shot. They probably wont survive if they miss the first two. I assume a veteran bazooka has a better chance to hit than a Regular, therefore I buy vets whenever possible. The only benefit of having a veteran spotter is a decreased wait time for the rounds to come in, the accuracy is the same no matter what the level of experience. The amount of time decreased isn't that much unless you buy Crack or Elite. Therefore, I only buy Regular spotters.

George W. ?

Sounds like you used green barbedwire. Try the crack or elite barbedwire instead, you will get different results.

Hi Murph, I posted this last month but here it is again: Smoke is very usefull, but needs to be done properly and timed well. Don't use onboard mortars or tanks to make a mass smoke screen. They usually dont have enough rounds to effectively make one. They are only good for blocking the LOS of one MG or AT gun. To properly make a mass smoke sceen use offboard mortars. It's cheap, fast firing and plenty of smoke rounds in a massed area. The smoke, however, will only last 1.5 turns typically. Use smoke in 4 different ways: 1. Smoke the open ground which your men will have to cross before reaching some sort of cover. This is effective if your enemy is on the flank. 2. Smoke the cover which your men will move into. This should put up a big enough screen so that the enemy never sees your men moving into the cover. When your men get to the cover, hide them so that they are not seen when the smoke goes away. Then bring up supporting tanks etc. to launch your assualt. 3. Send scouts ahead to "find" some enemy forces. Once you determine where the main enemy forces are, drop smoke on top of them. They will be blind and your infantry and tanks will be able to move into position. I like this tactic the best, especially if I need to get some tanks in to position. 4. Use smoke as a bluff. Drop it in an open or semi-open area but have your men sneak up a different route using as much tree cover as possible. He may see a couple of your sneaking men but he will suspect your main attack is coming from the smoked area.

...and churches with 2 stories to simulate the steeple.

I too would love this, but I don't think it will happen for several reasons. The biggest being that a significant amount of the code would have to be re-written. For example, big buildings would occupy 4 tiles instead of 1. LOS calculations would have to be altered...I'm sure there are tons of other changes which we can't even grasp that would have to occur to make that happen.

If your area supports it, I recommend going with DSL or cable modem. It's worth the price just so you dont have to worry about dialup connecting, not to mention the MAJOR increase in speed.

I watched "Thin Red Line" for the 3rd time the other night and noticed that the they got the grenades pretty accurate. There wasn't much of an explosion when they went off.

I feel for you. But I'll have to point out a couple of things: First, it says "less likely" not positively. Second, I remember reading somewhere that if you actually target a specific unit (rather than letting your units choose targets) they are more likely to "stick" to that target for the entire turn. [This message has been edited by Pak40 (edited 01-25-2001).]

How are you going to fix the glare coming off of the tank?

no, I think it'd be better if BTS made a command to customize your own commands. This way anybody can make any command they want. BTS would spend half of their resources developing it, ensuring that CM2 wont be released until 2005 [This message has been edited by Pak40 (edited 01-24-2001).]

I'm running Direct X 8.0 and everything is running wonderfully, much better than in Dir X 7.x

Love - Game, Set, Match.

I'm glad you explained that. I was under the impression that it wouldn't be too hard to switch between the two.

True, but the person who did not setup the QB must rely on the truthfullness of the person who did setup the QB.

Steve, I do agree that previewing the map before force picking will be less realistic. I'm actually not a real proponent of this and I probably wouldn't use this feature very much if it were an option. I guess I was just under the impression that the more options that CM offered, the better the game will be. Grogs who strive for realism can choose not to use it. Anyone who doesn't really mind the lack of realism can choose to use. My point is that the choice is left up the two people playing the game. What I'm suggesting is not uncommen in all of the top flight simulators. Flight sims give the choice to tone down the realism. After all, CM is a simulator of sorts, isn't it?

Actually MacDonald did have that luxury on a couple of occasions. He was able to go forward and observer the line before his company was to take over. But, I agree, this is not typically possible. It was only possible with MacDonald because he was to moving into a static/defensive position. Steve, we both agree that picking your force is not realistic. Yet you've have givin us the OPTION of picking our own units. We both seem to agree that battlefield commanders somtimes/often have prior knowlede of the ground ther're going to fight on, usually with use of maps or, if they're lucky, aerial photos. So why not give us the OPTION of looking at a bird's eye view of the battlefield before we pick our units?

Almost all (if not all) infantry units in the European Theater had attached or organic armor. Typically this would be distributed among the regiments or battalions. The Batallion commander would assign the armor where he felt it was needed. So you answer is no, not out of his arse but out of the division's armor pool.

Jarhead, good idea. seems logical to me.

I remember way back when I first started playing this game. I thought the same thing all of you in this thread are thinking. But since then I've learned to keep my AT teams and FOs alive. I'm not saying that all of you are beginners, just that I've changed my tactics.

It would be nice and realistic if there was a 2-D map of the battlefield, either topographical or not. Charles MacDonald, in Company Commander, mentioned the maps that he received before moving into the line. This proves that officers had maps of their area, even down to the platoon leader if I remember correctly. BUT, I do understand that it would be a great programming feat to produce a topo map made from a 3-D QB map. HOW ABOUT THIS IDEA: Maybe BTS could show a Birds eye view of the 3D battlefield (without letting the player move around). This would let players see the battlefield from a plan veiw before they picked forces. It will let the player see the general layout of the land, major hills, clumps of trees, buildings and roads but not all of the detail like walls, gentel hills, hedges, etc...

This sounds like you're attacking and as I stated above, the zook is not an offensive weapon. I realize you have no choice since your tanks are taken out already. But, I'm not surprised at all by the results, even with the use of smoke. Any commander that tells his infantry to run across open ground to take out several tanks/SP guns (and some infantry) should expect the plan to fail. I think I can help explain why the SP guns turned onto the zook teams. I think the first one, at 400m, was by random chance. You rushed a platoon with the zook, therefore the SP gun had a 20% of choosing the zook team. Just bad luck. The second one, you were only 150 meters away. The SP guns probably got the "AT team?" unit idification and logically aimed at him first. Now, I know you are going to say that the guns shouldn't have spotted your men through the smoke and the fog, and that's where I have a couple of questions for you: 1) were you using onboard mortars to make the smoke? 2) where was the smoke placed? on the open areas where your men ran?

Yes. But there is a big difference between hunting and rushing a tank with lots of infantry (which is what you're discribing). Hunting requires patience, sneaking, waiting, patience, sneaking, waiting, then BLAM! A zook is not an offensive weapon, but you're trying to use it as one. It seems to me you are trying to kill your oppenets armor as quickly as possible, which seems logical, but it always isn't the best choice. The great thing about infantry vs. armor is that your infantry can always see the tank. The tank can't see all of your infantry. Your infantry, therefore, have the edge and can stay out of LOS. The enemy tank will have to work its way closer to get a shot at the infantry. That's when your hidden zook takes him out. Now if you're playing a map without much cover then you should have bought an AT gun, not zooks.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by jasoncawley@ameritech.net: But they have drastically simplified what was going on for the purpose of fitting it into a movie. The supporting arms are largely missing. For instance, more U.S. soldiers were killed or wounded by mortar fire on Omaha beach than by machineguns - many of them while sheltering behind the sea wall, some by hits on or near the landing craft or crossing the beach proper. They don't show it because it took longer, basically. While on the other side, the U.S. sent several battalions of "swimming" tanks to support the men on the beach, in the first wave. Some of them sank in the surf, and others were blasted by German guns, but a number were operating along the beach, shooting back at the machinegun nests. And destroyers came in to 400 yards off the beach, when they saw how bad things were, to plaster the bunkers with 5 inch guns. The preliminary bombardment was also missing, <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> For obvious movie making reasons SPR can't be perfectly historically accurate or realistic. One of those reasons being that 4-5 hour movies don't float too well with the public. I can't help but correct your inaccuracies. Usually I don't care if people are wrong but in this case it's just too much. Yes mortars were devastating on Omaha beach. SPR did an excellent job showing that. Did you not realize this when Miller was dragging half of a soldiers body or the countless other explosions on the beach? And , personally, I think that MG fire was far more devastating in the first and second waves than the mortar fire. If you've ever read Amrose's D-Day you'd get the same idea in your head. In regard to your comment about the DD tanks, only 3 made it ashore. Yes 3 out of 32, the rest drowned. Omaha beach was some 5+ miles long and only 3 DD tanks made it ashore, so excuse Speilberg for not showing one. Other tanks coming off of LCTs made it ashore but they were on the other side of Omaha beach. Regarding your quote on the destroyers: Yes they were there and played a big part helping to open the draws. But, as I stated, Omaha was several miles long and the chance that one of the few destroyers were even near the 200 meter stretch of sand where Miller's company hit the beach is very slim. The preliminary bombardment on Omaha was very ineffectual. Naval fire was too far inland and the bombers, who were supposed to bomb the beach so that infantry could benefit from the craters, were also off target (for the most part). THE TWO MAIN INACCURACIES OF THE BEACH LANDING IN SPR AS I SEE IT: 1. The beach width was way too short. SPR gave the impression that the run to the sea wall was maybe 75 yards. In reality there was a low tide when they attacked and the men had to run 200+ yards in some places to get to the seawall. I'm not sure of the exact figures but I could dig them up. 2. The soldiers were on the beach a lot more than 20 minutes before the first openings were made in the defenses. But I'm not really upset at this because I understand that Speilberg couldn't make a landing scene an hour long.