Joachim

Air works as recon - any gun that opens up might get a sound contact. Tanks with AAMGs give away their position. This hold especialy in desert scens wehre you can't spot a parked tanks at 1200m. But once it fires tracers in the air you can see it. Gruß Joachim

I suspect that any round passing foilage level gets a dice roll for bursting.. Another test would be to area fire at the top of a steep cliff from below with HV guns. Or on a slight rise with woods behind it. Anything that ensures the trajectory crosses the foilage. ... but why test what you deem correct. I say it is in CMBB. Gruß Joachim

Hmmm... I changed that a little bit. "I think it's definitely true about the bang for buck when fighting Allied armor. You get the 75L4x mm gun for less than the cost of a vanilla PzIV. You do sacrifice all-around armor, MGs and mucho HE, however. The PanzerIV is definitely much better at fighting infantry. If you know you'll be facing mostly Allied tanks, I'd go for the StuGs." Gruß Joachim

Old bug for all guns, HMGs and mortars. Gruß Joachim

If a shot from a DF gun hits the trees, it might create an airburst: I remember 2 treebursts in the years since CMBO came out, both from IGs. One was a sIG firing from a higher elevation into a valley at long range. 2nd was a lIG from a small hill at 800m. I checked them several times and found no craters. The explosion graphics looked like treebursts. My conclusion is that if treetops get in the way of a shell, there is a chance for a treeburst. No matter which gun it is. It is just that DF usually aims at the base of a target. So treebursts are extremely rare Two facts that might influence the results: As the IGs are low velocity weapons with a high trajectory, they might actually come down in a steep angle. Their inaccuracy often results in shooting too high thus hitting the foilage instead of the target ground. I assume that when a round passes a certain height over trees there is a random dice roll for a treeburst. A steep angle might be necessary - or increase the probability. Gruß Joachim

The crew just wasn't there. Somewhere on the web there is a source stating that while his Soviet AT btn regularly got new guns, they seldom got replacements. To fire the gun, only the loader and the gunner were necessary - and usually not at the same time but alternating. Others would try to stay away from that bullet magnet. Check the "Truth about AT gun" or sumfink thread. Gruß Joachim

Is it really modeled in the game??? </font>

Found this: Private Tank in Germany (Source: Rheinische Post Online.) Note the article is in German. It's on two brothers owning a T55 from the former NVA (GDR army). Tank rides possible. But no armament. Especially note the pic. Gruß Joachim

Suggest you do some test vs. the AI to find out how it works. I had a QB recentyl where a single 150mm sIG counted for 900 casualties. So HE works - especially vs bunched up units. Given that 70% of the AI's men were casualties at the end, there were only 30-40% eliminated teams/squads. 150mm fire was around turn 10 - it took some time till I counterattacked and found how fragile the AI spearhead was. The number of kills my armor scored did not match the lots of eliminated markers they left on their rampage. Most of the squads they engaged must have taken a beating. And this might be your problems: A squad is not bunched up where the marker is. It is spread out around the marker (call it center of mass). Survivors might lie a bit further apart. You don't see dead soldiers - only dead units. Units die with the last man. The bigger the squad, the easier it is to score a casuality. Remnants of squads are really stubborn and drain lots of ammo. So while your 4 shots did some damage, this damage was done in good cover -and it won't necessarily eliminate units (unless there are some small teams there). Most of them will be pinned. Add another 4 rounds next turn and they'll be broken. It will take a while till they decide to leave good cover and head back into the open. Having 150mm rounds heading towards you in good cover is better than having them on your heels in the open. Add 1-2 81mm mortars for treebursts and they'll panic faster. Treebursts tell the troops trees are worse cover than the open fields. Plus panic is a function of the amount of incoming over time. If you spread 100 rounds over 50 turns, only a few will panic. Concentratee it in 10 turns and most will panic rather quickly. Add some attacking infantry or armor and they will start to run. Re: Brummbärs: Hey, you got 50% kills on a moving, zig-zagging target. That's not ineffective. But I found that the best AP weapon on a tank is the MG at below 150m. That's why the Brits had no AP rounds in early war tanks and the Germans had the PzI. Gruß Joachim

Tigerfibel suggests corrections using fork (bracketing shorts and longs when area behind target can be observed) or knife (consecutive shorts converging into the target when area behind target can't be observed) at ranges beyond 1200m. So German gunnery training included correction of shoot. The trouble without correction: If your guessed range is wrong, the chance to hit the target is rather limited. You need a lucky shot to hit. The bigger your estimation error, the bigger the necessary luck. The trouble with correction: If your guessed range is correct and the miss is solely due to the gun scatter, you will correct the gun scatter. Always correcting for gun scatter might result in the aim point wandering off - but this is rather unlikely. After a few shots the sum of gun scatter will effectively converge to zero. So gun scatter will affect measurement, but only with an additive error term. Is this noise enough to completely throw off measurement? Considering that eyeball mk1 has usually more scatter than a somewhat decent gun/sight combo, I'd go for correcting shoots. Trusting the gun might be a good idea with a freshly boresighted gun that has not moved since boresighting. After a few bumps in the terrain I would not trust a gun. Another point: Once a gunner sees 3 rounds falling in the same point off target - I bet he will change aim no matter what training says. So you will better behave strategically and teach him a method that works with his intuition. Even if that method is slightly inferior in theory - in practice it will work better. So training manuals might not show the best way to hit a target. They will show the best way to hit a target considering human errors. Gruß Joachim [ August 30, 2004, 06:19 AM: Message edited by: Joachim ]

Ah yes... I bet there was sumfink else. If you want to make it perfect, use the following procedure (lots of micro-management): Firing halt at the beginning of a move: 10secs increments - press pause Other increments- experiment with the amounf of waypoints and pause commands to achieve a certain delay. Firing halt during a move: Involves 2 turns. a) Have some move/fast/whatsoever command active from last turn. Add new waypoints so the command delay for those makes up roughly the pause you want. Too complex? Sure. But priceless if it actually works. Gruß Joachim

Add another button: "Override conversion table for roads when mirroring" and put a note into the manual. Or add columns "horizontal mirror tile" and "vertical mirror tile" in the conversion tables. Gruß Joachim

Shoot&Scoot works all forward, too. But it somewhat lacks on the "halt on contact" procedure. It stops at the designated point and fires - which might be too late. But there are rumors this is better than nothing.

As there are other ways to do edit maps than it is now, I guess the guys at BFC will present us with something amazing. If you have only forest, you don't need 5m tiles and you don't need to zoom in. But the prospect of designing maps on the 4*3m screen of a video beamer in my new 70qm living room.... BFC - if you've got the 5m tiles, I've got the living room. Even better - 4x3m hi-res tiles with a :cool: ultra-zoom function. Gruß Joachim I'm a communist at heart - glad I've got a brain, too.

The stupid AI will soon ignore hiding guns as they turn into "generic unit markers". The good player knows how to exploit a bug - or ask his unit if it killed the gun. Area fire rules. To fool the TacAI, just hide the gun and set a covered armor arc. If that doesn't work - move the gun a little bit and then hide. Depending on gun experience the gun will setup for 1-4 turns afterwards, but it might survive. TRPs increase the performance of guns - especially if there are choke points. The 3,7cm PaK with HC has a hit prob of >80% on a TRP 200m away (vet or reg with bonus HQ). Gruß Joachim

Sergei, my point is that it is possible to create scenarios with maps of the same quality as it is now if you have say 5m tiles but a standard 4x4 tile brush. The procedure would be exactly the same for exactly the same quality maps as now - you would effectively get 20m tiles (maybe with different slopes on steep height changes) if you were designing maps the same quality as now. Your point is that a scenario designer with some self esteem would of course use the 5m tiles and try to create the best maps possible. While I fully understand your point (I made some scens though I have only one published at TPG right now) I don't want an improvement wasted cause the pressure on scenario designers to create better maps would mount once the improvement is available. If no other improvements by BFC to the map editor were made, I guess Pyewacket or the author of mapping mission (sorry, bad memory for names) would create some nice tools that would help designers (just like mapping mission now can do roads on its own without carefully selecting roads) with some of the work. Of course there would be the need for some additional handywork. But let's face it: With tiles 1/16th of what they are now, only a few maps will need 16 times more work. Most areas - like woods, fields and such - would take exactly the same amount of time while roads, rivers, walls, hedges or wood edges - which usually make up less than 10% of the map - would need more work. The designers would spend double the amount of time on maps. But what would be the reward for the crowd? I guess it would be worth it. Gruß Joachim

Big tiles? Where's the problem? We already have big and very big tiles. The very big tile is the 5x5 tiles brush. So for scenario design, just allow a 1x1, 4x4 and a 20x20 brush with 5m*5m tiles. (Or even smaller tiles and more brushes) 3D effects might be a bit more complicated than the scenario editor. Gruß Joachim

Makes sense too me. a) "Every shot must count" If you have lots of tanks firing in your general direction getting hit is just a random process. It does not matter if you move or stand still. c) If you have impenetrable frontal armor, you can afford to halt. d) The gunner can assist in actually spotting targets while on the move. Not concentrating on targets far away ignoring that well-hidden ATG nearby. Gruß Joachim

Move them off map. You won't get exit points for them. But their comrades can't free them. Gruß Joachim

The Pak40 will need more hits to kill. But it hits more often. For long range, it rules. Especially when the range is above effective mortar range (ie to much scatter) Though it will not hit as often as 3 lIGs on short or medium ranges. OTOH they have only a few HC rounds. Plus those lIGs need lots of mortar ammo to get destroyed. It's in the mix. 3.7 AD or AT vs recon vehicles. 7.5 for the real thing. IG forward, PaK to the rear. If you are lucky, your opponent will not get full id's and deal with the IGs first, wasting mortar ammo or sparing your PaK... allowing it to withdraw. Gruß Joachim

The wheels are often dug in, with branches covering the whole position except for a small part of the gun shield. The commander is a few metres away. Only one man at a time is at the gun - loader or gunner. Muzzle flash and smoke depend on type of shot. It's easy to find out if the gun is big or small. You won't mess a 3.7cm PaK and an 88. But while almost any tank in Normandy was killed by an 88 (whether towed or SP), the Germans had only a very limited number of 88s there. Majority of guns there was 7.5cm. So it seems a lot of people messed up id'ing a lot of guns. Gruß Joachim

40-60 HE shells (of around 90-100 shells total) for the Tiger. Plus a bigger blast value. But I found that it is usually much more effective to let the MGs fire at 100m distance than using the main gun. Fighting a big cat improves your tactical skills. You have to use every advantage your force selection has to win. It is just like comparing PzIIIs or IVs in '41 vs a T34. Comparable price, but the T34 is better armored and has a better gun - both for AP and AT. Only solid tactics can carry the day for the Axis there. Guess BFC did the pricing for the experienced player with solid knowledge of armor tactics. Gruß Joachim

In huge (2000+pts) armor battles, the plt discount is available for the Axis, too. OTOH I'd like a company bonus if I have 4 Tigers on map. Gruß Joachim

The "!" with vets means "have lost faith in their CO". They are not broken after receiving lots of incoming that could have got them killed. They just know that the CO has screwed up once, doesn't care for their lives and hence will question any further command he gives. Gruß Joachim