Jump to content

Joachim

Members
  • Posts

    1,548
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Joachim

  1. You need to go to the task manager, then "details" Tab, find CMBB there, right click for the context menu and then go to the 5th item ("Zugehörigkeit" in German, just below "Priority". Probably "Affinity" on an English Win 10 version?). There you can find the option "all processors", "CPU 0", "CPU1", ... (pic below, but in German) You need to run CMBB on only one CPU. Typically CPU 0 und CPU 1 worked for me. The map editor takes ages to open, as does shifting the map or switiching to "sezup zones". But it worked. I bough a cheap version on GOG.com, they are specialists in getting to run "old" games - that saves me that hassle now. But the map editor is still so slow.Currently EUR 5.49 (that's 6$) . Sometimes with a rebate.... kind regards Joachim
  2. Though I can understand that e.g. an attacker has a time limit to reach his objective, the standard defender should not be stopped by some bell that rings for the attacker. So in certain types of battles - or for certain types of players - there should be no battle length at all. Or the defender should be able to add overtime for his counter by clicking a button... But no time limit might make the game a bit boring to some players. Just about as boring as 120 turn battles where the attacker has lots of time to do proper recce. Imagine you being on the defense and not seeing any enemy for 30 turns.... The time limit is there to enforce some action. The overtime is to avoid last minute flag rushing. Both are far from perfect. They don't fit each and every possible CM battle. But IMHO both work in the majority of cases. There big advantage: They are simple and there had to be a simple solution for a (relatively) small problem. IMHO the 30+x was preferred to the 35+/-x because too many people would plan on 35 turns with the latter and complain about early endings. And despite being a mathematician who should be able to rationally expect that it was possible, I still wouldn't like to see a battle end after 25 turns when it says 35+/-x. So I prefer the 30+x approach. It's 30 turns. And maybe some extra. But don't plan on it.
  3. Well.... it was the same in CMBB. Might be that the guy with the automatic or the guy giving orders are priority targets for the shooters - especially for the snipers among them. Officers do get an inappropriate share of hostilites since 1776 (Cf. "The Patriot" ) If you were the SL, short of opening up on an unsuspecting enemy squad - what would be your orders? "Fire at will" or "Hold fire till Joe Marksman, Johnny Bar or me opened up, then give them hell!" And what would be the assigned priority targets for Joe and Johnny? Losses of NCOs and junior officers in the Wehrmacht were a problem. Looks like they got more than their share. I doubt it is different in other armies that lead from the front.
  4. Consider erasing anything but the actual battle map and the FO locations if processing time is crucial. If you just want to confine a battle to a smaller part - add water around that part. Limit setup zones. No honor system necessary - except for not targetting the FO locations, which can be verified easily.
  5. It is interesting to note that most of the German losses effectively occured in 2 failed all-out attacks gambling on "now or never" in a time when the war was effectively lost for them. A pretty small and biased sample. The Soviets weren't presented those occasions after '43. They had to do without help from the enemy.
  6. With HE, close counts. The thinner the armor, the worse. - Large HE rounds can kill nearby vehicles. - AP rounds with large HE charge (ie most Soviet AP) can kill nearby vehicles. - A tank brewing up, with all the ammo inside going "bang" can destroy a nearby tank. And in your case, it looks like the really big bang killed the 2nd Wespe, not the 122mm round. I had a T34/76 hit a Marder which brew up and killed another Marder 20m away. (Well, actually I had the Marders ) In RL, tanks don't bunch up. There is proper spacing. Put your Wespes at least 30m away from each other - but even 30m won't help sometimes.
  7. Well, did they at least occupy the foxholes? I don't even manage to deploy more than 3 men into foxholes.
  8. Well, any hit on a tank with some HE (and there usually is HE in AP) gives a big bang. So internal armor flaking or just the concussion might injure some crew members and thus persuade the crew to leave. A partial penetration might also see some HE delivered into the tank - enough to destroy critical assets. "Knocked out" or "destroyed" does not necessarily mean the tank is damaged beyond repair (or: TWO, total write-off). It probably just means the crew won't enter the tank again before something outside CMx2's scope happens.
  9. And SR-2 even works for spotting HQs w/o radios???? I couldn't believe it, but: Put some A/C along MS-A, place SHQ away from any radio and still SHQ can spot for MS-A. SHQ has no C2 to PHQ, but C2 to CHQ, which is 300m away and out of LOS. So SR-2 holds for spotters w/o radio. Looks a bit buggy to me. BFC, fix it or sumfink Well done, R-T.
  10. In CMBB or CMAK units with "hide" spotted really bad. If they don't spot anything, they can't react to it. For squads hiding in woods or at night the first sign of the enemy often was incoming. CMBN is in line with that. Hide means hide - not "take cover". In situations as depicted in CM - the enemy is already close - any soldier will take cover and hide as good as possible vs the eyes of the enemy while still trying to have some situational awareness. That behaviour is most likely modelled in CM. Hiding makes sure a squad really keeps all of their heads down. Did you always stick your head out when playing hide&seek?
  11. Sounds on par with the classic "hand grenade shoved into the barrel" approach.
  12. Problem: Setting up as the defender in dense terrain is a PITA. 2 reasons: a) Checking LOS HMGs or ATGs have one powerful, important weapon. It does not matter if some rifleman in the crew has LOS. Imagine an ATG setting up to control a road, firing straight along that road. You can either put it into the middle of the road - works fine with CMBN while setting up, but not during play. So you put it a bit towards the side of the road. Wanting to place it so it barely is into the road and half of the incoming will hit the house or hedge 10m ahead of the gun. Of course it gets a trench. I'd even spend 2 of those to fortify the sweet spot. Now you get a grey line to where you want to hit. But does that mean some rifleman has LOS? Or all but 1 riflemen? If the whole crew has LOS the target line turns blue - but then all of the crew are exposed and will die fast. Eyeball mk1 is the only help to judge whehter the important weapon has LOS.. But it sucks to evaluate 3D situations on a 2D screen. And then we have the next problem: Exact placement for guns or HMGs. Placing the gun exactly on a given point does not work. Some AI tries to evaluate cover and then spreads the crew. It shifts the crew around depending on facing. But some crewmen should be more equal than others. Cause if some crewman has good LOS to the intended field of fire it should be the crewman which operates the important weapon. And: If a crewman gets good cover, it should be the one operating the important weapon. Same problem for squads: It is pretty annoying to have a 5-men squad in foxholes. Well. 3 of them. Guess who has the worst cover? Guess which weapon has the worst LOS? Splitting up works - but if the squad joins again some idiots will start to crawl away from the perfectly placed squad LMG position covering the break in the bocage. Solutions: 1) Tweak the "placing AI" to take care of covered arcs, not just considering cover - issuing CAs doesn't influence beyond facing right now. That's the complex solution 2) Place HMGs or guns on the selected pixel, not somewhere in the selected tile. Maybe even do that for the important wpn in a squad. That should be easy. If you also want to keep the current system - use the shortcut for "normal movement" to place as is, and the shortcut for "slow movement" to manually place the weapon in the exact spot. If that spot is in bad cover, the operator can still crawl away, indicating that he has his own mind.
  13. Once 2 trenches are in adjacent hexes, the trenches will join and the facing will change. But the facing won't be sticky. Even the form of a trench will change, e.g. if you put 3 trenches into a V-pattern.
  14. Well.... what about the next module: "It does snow in september"?
  15. Place a waypoint where you want to check LOS from. Select the waypoint and then plot a target from there. Check LOS with targetting tool, then delete the waypoint.
  16. Well, I dunno much about video cards and their specs. VRAM and resolution. That's how I measure them. Once every few years I ask somebody who knows and get me some new equpiment. But not yet, Kameraden, not yet. And I don't care much about shadows. What I did care was not seeing most of my units - neither them nor the floating icons for them. And I couldn't even select them when selecting an area. So if anybody else runs CMBN on such outdated equipment (or some laptop with poor video card) and has the same problem - tell him he should toggle shadows.
  17. Yeah, but the newer PC won't see me this week. So I checked the system requirements, found that in theory the old one matched each spec (contrary to what Schrullenhaft says ) and tried it. Actually, the game runs fine - with shadows off. I never cared for detailed graphics anyway. Operating System: Windows XP/Vista/Win7 Check. Processor: Pentium IV 1.8 GHz or equivalent speed AMD processor Barely. But: check Video Card: GeForce 5200 or Radeon 9200 (32 Megabyte VRAM or better and must support 1024x768 or higher resolution) in OpenGL nowhere it mentions OpenGL 1.2, not even DX9. But it has 64MB and supports 1024x768 or higher. So: check! Sound Card: DirectX 9 compatible Sound Card Haven't tested sound yet System Memory: 256 Megabytes RAM hey! I've got more than twice of it! Check! Hard Drive Space: 3.5 Gigabyte yes Other Requirements: DVD Drive (not needed for download version) The game does not work in a virtualized environment (virtual machine)
  18. Dunno the age of that PC. But it still runs XP and I remember it ran on w98 not that long ago... But hey, it is near but above the minimum specs ( http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&page=shop.product_details&flypage=shop.flypage_bfc&Itemid=26&category_id=36&product_id=280 and actually it even runs with DX9. Still wouldn't play "To the Volga" on it. But apart from that it is the PC that runs CMBB fine - no graphics glitches. My newer PC in the other apartment has graphics glitches. Which made the old rig a keeper
  19. Demo, training scen, played as US vs AI, WEGO D'led the demo from eprison and gamershell. Installed from both sources. Identical behaviour. Specs: Pentium 4, 1.8GHz, Nvidia GeForce2 MX, 64 MB. US side: I only get floating icons for the tanks - and anything in the second floor. Triangles on upper screen edge only for anything with floating icons. I can only group select (shift/click + drag) units with floating icons. Example: 4th plt HQ in the upper floor has a floating icon, MG besides it gets one. MG moves forward, leaving upper floor and floating icon vanishes. And I don't see any inf in the open. I see the start of their movement path if they have any. But that's it. German side: Hmmm.... Pretty sure I got a floating icon for a inf unit not in the upper floor. No floating icons/triangles or crews for a gun and a MG. I see the weapon, I even see the gun recoil - but that's it. "Shadows off" solves the problem.
  20. Well, there is something in the manual: Static ops count flags and losses. Assault and advance ops just count if and how fast you reach the map edge.
  21. Hmmm..... I dunno about the exact mechanics, but there are 3 categories for victory points: Ground, targets and parameters. Dunno what "Parameters" are - maybe similar to exit points? In the given AAR there were no "targets", so killing units did not influence the score. I guess it will be possible to mark all units as targets during QB purchase. If the ground objectives for both sides are the same (ie the old flags) and each unit is a target (only those give kill points in CMBN) and "parameters" are not part of the score, then IMHO the result should about match CMx1 QBs.
  22. The US lost about twice the amount in vehicles and about 2.5 to 3 times the men. Given that two forces about the same amount of "purchase points" fought each other, a major victory re losses seems correct. The US inf could try to achieve some objectives, but the US commander decided to call it quits. There is not much sense in trying to push an inf Co vs several tanks in terrain like that. Neither in RL nor in CMx1. I guess CMx2 models this, too. 1) The remaining inf presence was kept in check by the remaining German tanks. Standard SOP for US forces would have been to call up more armor, air force or arty. But I doubt the remaining force would have pushed the matter much (except for rare occassions, which CM doesn't model). Applying the "You don't win a war by dying for your country, you win wars by making the other fellas die for their country." doctrine means an end of battle without taking the objectives with inf. 2) In RL the US forces would not know the strength (or weakness) of the German force. Would you attack several German tanks with a company of inf? Now imagine a German inf Co nearby.... 3) I can't remember that CMx1 counted what one could have achieved after the end of the battle. A certain amount of turns (or ceasefire before that), then end of battle and what is achieved then counts. Even in a campaign with manual decisions by GMs I wouldn't bet much on a US victory when resolving the post battle orders. The US inf had their chance with armor support. Armor support dwindled. The likely reply for a US claim of victory would be that nobody wants to die like a hero but prefers to fight another day. So US survivors (not knowing that there was no German inf) would fall back and regroup. On the strategic picture the German losses would matter more - but holding the ground they could reclaim their tanks, reducing their losses. And any battle on that scale would not matter much anyway. So why try to put it into a strategic context? (CMx1 didn't use that context, too - and ladders did work) On a tactical level, Bil did better with his forces. He wiped any armor from the field. He used a pure armor force, giving him an edge in tanks - but lack of scouts. Warren used a combined arms force that granted him the ability to scout better with his inf (Good decision!). But IMHO he did not use that advantage. He could have used his inf to scout Bil's deployment and screen some approaches, then hit him hard with concentrated armor in one location (ie use combined arms tactics). Read: IMHO Warren did a major mistake. I couldn't find a (major) mistake in Bil's orders. So IMHO we have a clear winner.
  23. Well, I saw 1 thread with 55.000 replies on 1837 pages on that software and it still works. No full-time admin. They got miles from the day of the refreshing monkeys and I remember urging people to start new threads once a certain post count per thread was reached.... ahhhh the old days.... BTW: Double clicking on some buttons works with this software. E.g. double click on "quote" brings up the quote in "go advanced" mode.
  24. Hmmm.... they might have just used different trains on them, re-loading where the rail gauge switched. That would save lots of time as for a larger railway system you need more trains, too. IMHO it would save lots of work to use captured, modified or new trains on the "Soviet" part.
  25. Do you mean "To the Volga"? That should be with the original operations (in the top right of the load screen is a button "operations" or sumfink like that. Click it and you see the operations instead of the battles.) If you have a non-English version, it might have a different name (German CDV version is "Auf zur Wolga"), so search for anything with "olga" in its name.
×
×
  • Create New...