Reverendo

Ellros is right. I quote from the CMBB manual, page 117, "The Men and the Machines -Molotov Cocktail-" "The Russians also developed a special launching mechanism for Molotov-like projectiles, called Ampuloment, which was able to hurl a Molotov across bigger distances, and even though widely used, this mechanism never proved to be very effective."

Though I have no combat experience and therefore I cannot state wether AT guns are too easy to spot or are not, there is a small test I was forced to run that I want to share with you: As soon as I got my paws on the demo version of CMBB, I called a friend of mine to play a hotseat battle in the Citadel Schwerpunkt scenario. I played as the Germans and, as he stated shortly after the battle, he did not change the deployment of the Soviet forces in the slightest. While I did win the scenario, I was amazed at the performance of the Soviet 45mm ATs, not only because of the astonishing number of penetrations he managed to cause on the front armour of my Panzers III and IV -out of sheer luck most of the time, as it normally exceeded what was expected from the gun according to the tables and my own experience playing the Soviets afterwards- but mainly because of the number of shots it took me to find the position of his guns. As soon as my Panzers made it to the crest that serves as a gate to the valley -and having eliminated the AT guns I had met through the loss of a PzIV and the immobilization of a PzIII- they started taking fire from a number of AT guns from the opposite hill. I instantly saw generic markers of gun sound contacts -quite off-target as I confirmed later-, and nothing but that for six turns straight. One of my Panzers, which got very lucky indeed, took as many as 24 shots before giving, and yet did not spot any of the guns at all. Another one, ignored by the Soviet artillery -they were far too busy shelling the others- stood unbuttoned watching the fireworks for six turns without even seeing a muzzle blast. If they are too easy to spot, my Panzer crews certainly need a set of Dienst Brille as soon as possible

Wicky, Thank you very much for your directions. I had searched the forums, but missed that thread. Sorry for any inconvenience my lack of attention might have caused. The thread does not feed my hope, though. It seems that we will all be forced to play CM in an emulator -let's face it, classic mode is hardly more than that-, with an inadequate rendering system, lower frame rates than we should get for our money, and lower graphics. Oh well.

First of all, I would like to say 'hi' to everyone after my long time out of this web board (hey there Steve! How is life?). I am just about to preorder CMBB, as I did CMBO, and I can hardly wait to get my paws on the final version. I have, though, a small concern. Keeping with the not-so-brilliant policies Apple has made display of lately, an announcement has been made stating that the next generation of Macs, in year 2003, will not support OS9 as bootable and will only run it in 'classic mode', which is particularly slow with games, making them unplayable most of the time, and introducing several screen size and resolution glitches. CMBB, as far as I know, is not and will not be OSX native, as it would require a switch to OpenGL rendering mode -RAVE drivers for OSX are simply nonexistent- What will happen to Mac CMBB then? Has anyone had any luck running the demo in classic mode? I am deeply worried about this.

Jarmo, Rune worked under OSX with Classic Rave, which shocks me, since Unreal Tournament did not -and has the same game engine- Rainbow Six worked as well. With some hardware acceleration glitches, though. What I find is that OSX is quite temperamental. Here in Spain, most Mac users are complaining about the number of things that don't work on their OSXs, and right now I am known in my old Apple store -the one I have been visiting for 8 years now- as 'the man who has an OSX that works and is happy with it'. I did not do anything. I just treat my machine like I treated my dear old PowerMac 6100.

Well... I am currently restarting in order to play CM. I generally play a very long battle a week, or two/three small ones, and it certainly deserves the effort of rebooting with 'alt' so I can choose the partition from which to read the system software. Anyway, as a fellow user already said, I would like to play Combat Mission in a couple of years just as I still play Harpoon. And if it can happen through OS X, it would be a lot better. -I know I am insane, but I actually restart in order to play. I would even play if I had to make a fresh install every bloody day- This is not a game: this is a disease.

Hello there, ladies and gentlemen... What kind of rendering did CM use? I have been trying to make it work under MacOS X on "classic" mode with no success. Every other application or game I have tried, both OpenGL and RAVE, has worked perfectly, but Combat Mission has not. Did anybody manage to get it working with OS X? Come on, it is the only game I play. A life without Combat Mission is like a life without milk.

The next time please let the sheep choose the title.

Bojangles, tu español es bastante bueno. Sigue estudiando, es un idioma muy bonito. Blenheim... ¿Lo dices en serio? Avísame cuando pises tierra madrileña. Gracias a Dios, en septiembre estoy bastante libre de obligaciones. Por cierto, no te fíes del e-mail que viene en mi perfil de usuario: es de los tiempos del General (Viriato). En reverendo@mac.com o doolan@mac.com tendrás más suerte. Y a mí que no me gusta el fútbol...

I have been making Lego models for a hell of a long time, with a great deal of success... But my hat is off to your T-34. The model is damned good, and extremely detailed and accurate for its size. Great job -to whomever made it-

Vaya vaya... Os dejo solos un par de semanas y me montáis una discusión en castellano. No me va a quedar más remedio que renunciar a mi vida social y quedarme pegado a este foro, día sí, día también. En fin, saludos desde Madrid a cuantos españoles haya en este encantador huequecito de Internet. Y si alguno es, precisamente, de Madrid, queda invitado a una copa cuando él decida. Reverendo (haciéndose notar) P.S: aye, Steve. Ye Bloody Scotsman speaks Spanish!

I know BTS said they were not going to release any more patches for Combat Mission, since they were pretty busy with Combat Mission 2, but... Could a MacOSX version of CM be possible? Say 'yes' and you will make a man happy. Regards, Reverendo

Hmmm... It seems to be worth trying. But, wouldn't the movies take up humongous amounts of disk space?

Thanks for the interesting links you provided, Paco. As for the decision of purchasing air support, I have to admit that it is not quite a wise tactical move, as they generally fall short of being worth their cost. I have rarely seen fighter-bombers take enough units out to justify their acquisition. Only once, a lone fighter-bomber hit the track of a KönigTiger with its guns and turned it into a sitting duck for my ifantry AT teams. Pointwise, the fat cat was not nearly as expensive as the two fighter-bombers I had purchased, but the tactical weight of the latter's actions was astonishing and I managed to win the scenario. My last case of misidentification was certainly a case of bad luck, I am afraid, since both fighter-bombers mercilessly attacked my own units raid after raid. After the battle, I spoke to my friend: his unit list did not include CAS, and none of his units had been attacked by my fellow RAF friends. Life is cruel. P.S: sí, Paco: recibí tu e-mail en la dirección adecuada. Te he incluído en mi lista de ICQ, pero aún no he logrado verte conectado. Si te interesa, podemos especificar un día y una hora para una charla. Aye, my lads: the above text is written in Spanish. And no, we do not wear Mexican sombreros, we eat more hamburgers than Paella, and soccer is way more popular here than bullfighting will ever be. Sure, my family is from the UK, but I know this place very well.

A couple of days ago I was playing a Quick Battle -hotseat- with a good friend of mine here in Spain. He was defending a town -with lots of German-looking lads- and I assaulted as the Brits. Since I suspected there would be some very hard targets around the area, I chose to purchase a couple of fighter-bombers and a jeep -that is, a pretty small rhubarb and a light recon unit for spotting so I could check if the bombs actually hit something-. In the first two turns my jeep sneaked its way forward and hid behind a hill. It spotted a Tiger (and soiled his pants). Then the sound of fighter engines was heard. The first fighter-bomber dropped a couple of bombs and totally leveled an empty, tiny wooden house next to my infantry. Then, the second one flew two times over the Tiger doing nothing -it actually followed the Tiger's course, but did not drop bombs or strafe- and then chose to head back towards my units and bomb at will. It killed a British rifle squad and damaged an Archer and a Challenger. Now, I am more than happy with the Fog of War system CM has. But please, can we have flags on the top of tanks for identification? One thing is to have fighters attack whatever they feel like attacking, but having them attack your units every time they fly around is frustrating The saddest part is that none of my two Bofors fired back. There should be hotkeys for telling your flak guns 'Yes, I ken they do look like Spits, but they are fat BF109s. Yes, really. Come on Tommy, believe me, frag them!"

I might be mistaken, but why should they wear white uniforms, if they are inside a tank that is already white?

Well, the discussion about tile size is purely academic, since this will not change until CM2, and I must say I have not seen lots of hedgerows around Russia. Allowing allied tanks to go through hedgerows seems to be the best solution, but I have to agree that not allowing Panzers to do so is not actually fair. A couple of years ago I was speaking with a veteran tank commander about the hedge-cutters fitted in allied tanks. As he stated, the only purpose of these was to avoid the exposure of the tank's belly. Also, he stated that heavy tanks could actually get track damage by driving over a hedge, while light tanks often 'flipped' upside down when trying to do so. Medium tanks, though, did extensively run over hedges before being equipped with the hedge-cutting device, with no problem at all -apart from the ocassional '88 AP shell that found its way into your ass through the tank's belly plating, that is- Arguing that this belly-exposure matter is enough of a reason for making hedges impassable to German tanks strikes me as nonsense. Driving up a hill with a Pz IV and staying on top of it, buttoned up, is not wise either. Rushing a Sherman towards a German infantry-defended position and staying as close as 10 meters is not wise either. But if I tell my tanks to do it, they do it. What I mean to say is that if everything that is considered a tactical flop was totally left out of CMBO, I would not lose a single battle: my trusty TacAI would avoid casualties and I would be able to relax. As I said before, though, this discussion is just for killing time, since nothing we discuss here is likely to be included in any CM related game anytime soon...

Paco, you are right. My profile e-mail is the one I had when I registered, a long time ago. I cannot update my profile, since I have already registered an account with my current e-mail (the password for which eludes me for the moment). Try the e-mail below reverendo@mac.com

Brilliant!

Paco... Are you actually Spanish? If so, drop me an e-mail. You would be the first CM with whom I share a country as far as I know. Sorry for the off-topic lads, I am just curious

The idea is very, very good. Something similar happens in my beloved Harpoon series. If you lose a contact and find it again later, it is shown as a brand new contact. So, if you are tracking 'Skunk-1' with active sonar, lose it when switching to passive and 'hear' it again when switching back to active, it is shown as 'Skunk-2'. Based on the proximity of both contacts and the traffic of the zone scanned, you have to figure out wether it is the same old contact or a brand new one. Sometimes it is actually a new one, and it bothers me quite a lot when I am not prepared for it. My only objection is the actual code to make that happen. Try to imagine a map full of wood and open tiles, in which contacts are constantly appearing and disappearing. In a few turns, the game engine would have hundreds of lost contact markers around the whole battlefiend plus the actual units to track, and it would have to track LOS separately to each and every marker. Fading would be a lot easier, but not half as realistic.

As far as I know, the tripod allows the MG to use a light bolt instead of the heavy one mounted in light MGs. Though I do not remember the exact numbers, the heavy bolt gave the MG a fire rate of about 800 r.p.m while the light one allowed for 1200 r.p.m. You cannot fire a MG effectively at the latter fire rate if it is not fairly well fixed to the ground with a tripod, that does not only add a third leg for better stability, but more weight to the MG itself, thus reducing recoil and making the high fire rate bearable. The increase of range is mainly due to the optics, since the bullet and the gun are still the same. The reduction of recoil would help the bullet travel a bit further, that is true, but I am pretty sure that the relevant increase is not in actual range but in effective range, since better optics would allow the gunner to target objects that are far away from his firing position. I am pretty sure about the firing rate issues I mentioned above, but I would need correction for range issues. I can help with physics, but I have never seen the optics of a German HMG.

Well, if you ask me, I would not play missions with dogs since I would not want to see them explode. Not without a Bill Gates mod at least. Another problem K-9 troops had was that they usually returned hand grenades to their owner. That was especially true with the Stielhandgranate model and Germany was forced to use Egg Grenades instead (try and make your dog fetch an egg and you will see why the solution was effective) "War pigeons" would not be that bad. You would be able to increase command radius quite a lot. Also, they could be shot down by AA fire, producing a cloud of feathers that would obscure LOS the same way fog does. Feathers would also offer great possibilities as offensive weapons if combined with the tar from molotov cocktails or hand-made sticky bombs. Sort of a Surface-to-Honour missile. Combat Swallows and Pigeons would also be able to carry TNT filled coconuts, thus providing a conutry with cheap fighter-bomber support. When out of coconuts, they could make strafing attacks, blocking LOS through vehicle hatches and windshields in quite a gross way I will not describe in this post.

Well, I happen to have an ATI RagePRO 3D card (if you can call it a 3D card, that is, when compared to the NASA-like technology found in stores today) and I do see fog in all its glory. The texture resolution is quite close to watercolour and the card chokes when above six AFVs are ablaze and withing sight, but 3D fog is there, even when it is not dense.

Thank you, my good man! I am heading there right now.