Thorsten

The smaller-scale structure is actually illustrated quite nicely in the demo scenarios. The platoons generally have three infantry squads and an HQ unit. They can have MGs teams, bazookas, etc. attached to them too. Organization generally goes by threes (sometimes four, sometimes two if they are understrength, etc.). Am I correct in believing that German infantry platoons generally included a machinegunner as part of each squad, so they would have a seven or eight man squads plus a machinegun team? Was there an organizational difference between Wermacht and Waffen SS units? Thorsten

Okay, I dump on CC3 as much as the next guy, but I have to say something in defense of its mods. The CC3 scene is probably one of the least chaotic out there. The folks who did RealRed did a good job of keeping things centered. The only variation from one person to the next is usually only which revision of RealRed they have. The revision thing is pretty universal in the computer world, so I wouldn't really complain about that. As for modifying the data in Combat Mission, I'm currently in the process of seeing how I can turn my 60mm mortar teams into 88mm AT gun teams in the PBEM game I'm playing against Fionn. Thorsten

I still had to learn the nuances of ambush markers when I started this game (as well as many other things) so they did not get used. As for playing a PBEM against Fionn in a scenario that he is familiar with, well... I remember once playing a game of chess against a friend of mine who was a competitive player and had won several tournaments. He said that there was little chance of me winning, but my point in playing should be to simply learn some things about the game from him. Thorsten So can anyone from BTS answer my original question?

I have a question that came about from a PBEM I'm playing against a certain Fionn fellow. I had two bazooka units, both 'regular', both hidden, both with HQ units close by. With both of them, they stood up to fire at a StuG that was over 160 meters away. Needless to say, after firing a total of seven or eight shots, the StuG is still doing just fine. What governs when a unit will pop up out of hiding? What governs when a bazooka or panzerschreck will try to fire at an AFV? My one bazooka couldn't even hit the StuG when it was stationary, 90 meters away, and fully showing its side armor, so having it open up when the StuG was 180 meters away seems pretty foolish. I know there are a lot of variables involved, so if you could just give me a rough idea, I'd appreciate it. Thorsten

I also have thought about the LOS situation while playing. Actually, I thought about this while playing Close Combat. Instead of an LOS tool, I would prefer LOS to be indicated by a 2-D field. Thus any area within LOS shows up as red, while anything blocked by trees, buildings, elevation, etc. would appear as normal. It occurred to me that someone might think this was 'gamey' but if you think about it, it's the LOS tool that is gamey, not an LOS field. When you look over a particular area, you instantly know what you can see and what you can't see. You don't have to look through some scope or through the sights of a gun in order to find out what you can see. The limitation should be that the LOS field only covers the direction the unit is facing, within say a 120 degree arc (obviously less for buttoned up AFVs). This makes sense since you can't tell if you can see something if you aren't looking at it. Whether this should be used in addition to the LOS tool, I don't know. I don't know if it should be added to CM either, it was just a thought I had that I think is worth considering. Thorsten

If you want to hear the sound of the MG42 without any of the other battlefield noises, simply open up your CM demo folder and then open up the subdirectory called 'wav.' I believe the MG42 are files 00000440 through 442. They sound pretty good to me. Of course, if you want to replace them with the sound of a chicken clucking, that could be an interesting experiment. Thorsten

"As soon as the Tiger turned its vulnerable flank to the Zoka he Unhide himself and opened fire the first shot hit the upper side turret and did no damage" I think that's the reason why your bazooka team worked so well. A bazooka is ineffective against a tiger's front armor, so he waited until it turned to get a good shot. If that was a StuG or halftrack instead of a tiger, your bazooka would have been more likely to open up when it was 180 meters away. Thorsten

Combat Mission actually will come with a way to adjust the AI, if you look at it the right way. When I designed scenarios for Close Combat, I would make two different kinds. One for head to head play, and one for human vs. AI. In the latter, the human player would get maybe one fifth to one tenth of the amount and quality of troops as the AI. This was to make up for the ineffectiveness of the AI, of course. Since Combat Mission will come with a handy dandy editor, then you can edit scenarios yourself to adjust for playing against the AI. If you are repeatedly trounced by the AI on one scenario, then load it into the editor and reduce its forces a bit. If the AI is too easy, then you can add more forces and reinforcements. As an added benefit, the programmers at BTS can concentrate on other things like making the AI even better and adding a feature that automatically adds ground attack aircraft to the OOB of anyone playing against Fionn. Thorsten

"LOL... And the cry for more scenarios goes up" Well that's the trick, isn't it? First get them interested with a free beta demo. Then string them along with an occasional additional scenario. After that, toss a final demo at them and then they'll be so hooked that they'll pay $1000 for a copy of the game. Thorsten

I find this whole argument rather interesting. Let me try to give a bit of my perspective. I get to use $100,000 flight simulators at work. I have flown them until I was physically exhausted, and I have monitored students flying them until I was bored to tears. Needless to say, PC simulators don't do much for me. Now, I could go onto websites devoted to Flight Unlimited or Falcon 4.0 and tell them how crap their programs are compared to million dollar Evans-Sutherland full motion flight simulators or the Frasca procedures trainers that I use at work, but what would be the point of that. So I don't see why someone should come on here and dump on the creators of Combat Mission simply because they tried the game and didn't like it. If you don't like it, or if you got your hopes up and were disappointed, then start searching for a game that is more appealing to you, whether that is PiTS or Hidden & Dangerous or whatever. As to the two issues that have sprung up out of this, targeting and FOW. Targeting seems pretty much taken care of. I just have to add that I recently learned the wonders of area fire, especially for guns. As for FOW, well let's take an analytical view here. It seems to make sense that there are several stages, from 'crew?' to 'machine gun?' to 'MG 42' to 'MG 42' with full numbers information. It is unclear to me exactly how these translate into real life terms, thus it's hard for me to find fault with them. Does 'crew?' mean that I can see three or four people moving while hauling some large piece of equipment? Can I only make out the equipment at the 'machinegun?' or 'mortar?' stage? At what point can I definitely tell how many people are in the unit? Maybe some changes are in order. As was stated, BTS will probably reduce some info for certain stages. There could be other changes, such as being able to make out the number of people in the unit, while not knowing how many are wounded and not knowing exactly what type of unit it is. I really can't say what should or should not be done, though, so I hope BTS makes the right judgements. Thorsten PS Technically, only full motion simulators are called flight simulators. Ones that don't move are called procedures trainers. Thus all those flight sims at the local software store are mislabeled.

I know there are a lot of technical gurus out there, so I have a question for any and all of you. I'd like to do an AAR of a game I am playing against Fionn right now, but unfortunately print screen does not seem to work with my 3D card. I get an image, but it is of my desktop instead of the game screen. My 3D card is a Best Data ArcadeFX with a Voodoo 1 chip. My graphics card is a Diamond Stealth II S220. I'm running Windows 95 with DirectX version 6. Thorsten

"I am sure this isn't a LOS or LOF bug. If you scaled the vehilces down to 1:1 scale things might have looked a little differently. One of the negative side effects of larger vehicles is that somethings look like they are going straight through, but are in fact going to one side or over the top. " I guess I should have made myself more clear. The vehicles were on a 1:1 scale and I checked it from several camera angles. The round could not have gone around the side unless it turned 120 degrees in flight. The tank was at about a 60 degree angle to my schreck, facing to the schreck's left. The crater appeared underneath the track opposite the schreck. In realistic scale, it was about 3 or 4 feet from the back of the track. The only way it could have gotten there was to have a vertical descent angle, or if it had somehow ricocheted off of the tank behind the one targeted. Anyway, it was an unusual occurrence that I doubt I'll ever see repeated. Thorsten

I had an even more interesting thing happen to me. There were two enemy shermans adjacent to each other, and my panzerschreck was firing at the first one. Well one round fell in between the tanks, which I thought was particularly odd. I checked more thoroughly, and found that the round went over the first tank, but somehow detonated on or underneath the tread opposite the one facing the schreck. That's where the crater appeared anyway. For this to happen realistically, the round would have to have had an almost vertical decent angle. The range was pretty long, about 140-160 meters, but I still don't think it should have happened. Unfortunately, there's no way for me to recreate that. I wish I could show you somehow. Thorsten

>>wounder if that will improve my memory ? >Hope your not mortally woundered. >Sorry, couldn't resist. Heh... you know, things like this have a way of turning on you, such as causing a person to use your (posessive pronoun) instead of you're (contraction for you are). Live and learn, I guess. Thorsten

I'm no expert on tactics by any means, but I can say what I know. Basically there are two general thoughts on both strategy and tactics, those of attrition and those of maneuver. Attrition warfare tries to grind down an enemy by taking him on head to head. Maneuver warfare tries to get into the enemy's rear areas to disrupt unit cohesion, supply lines, etc. and destroy the enemy piecemeal. Usually, most battles end up being a combination of the two. Standard practice for the US since WWII has been attrition warfare. It was used in the pacific theater, the Korean war, and failingly in the Vietnam war. Soviet strategy was more maneuver based. For example, if a commander had two units, one was close to being overrun, and the other was pushing through and advancing into the enemy's rear area, standard practice was to reinforce the unit pushing through, and NOT the unit that was struggling. As for Germany, well they invented the modern version of maneuver warfare. How does this apply to Combat Mission? Well, let's take a look at the AARs. Fionn's theme in attack seemed to be one of attrition. He methodically destroyed all of Moon's advance units. He never allowed any of Moon's forces to be behind his main force. There were areas where he could have applied maneuver warfare, the most obvious of which is when he raced his halftrack through and behind enemy lines. If he wanted to pursue this course of action, he could have brought in supporting fire to fix the bazooka teams that fired on him, and sent the rest of his halftracks through a few at a time. Keep in mind, though, that one shouldn't advance through to rear areas without a plan in mind. We don't know if the area where his lone halftrack went to could have supported a large break-out force since Fionn never tested this strategy. One has to remember that the point of maneuver warfare is to break up and surround your enemy, not to get your own troops surrounded. Another place in the AARs where this could have conceivably worked was during the endgame. Fionn had a fairly large force in the southern woods that he brought north to reinforce his other units. He could have sent them all the way west, then brought them north while his panzer and two halftracks suppressed the machine gunners in the southern buildings. Then once his infantry was there, he could have raced both of his halftracks west (instead of just the one) and they could have attacked the western-most buildings while his forces around the blockhouse fixed Moon's units with suppression fire. These are just examples, mind you. I can't tell simply by looking at the AARs whether these would have worked or not. Thorsten

"Basically the ambush drill in their army (presuming ambushes in jungle terrain and at very close range) was to simply turn towards the ambush and charge it tossing as many grenades and firing as rapidly as you possibly could. It was only when you had penetrated the enemy ambush line and were, preferably behind them by a few metres, that you were supposed to go to ground, I suppose the rationale is that it is better to act aggressively than be pinned in a killzone AND that if you get behind the enemy line then you probably have cut off their line of retreat and whatever friendly forces were behind you on the trail will move up and you can set up a crossfire." Yes, this is true. I have read accounts from the Vietnam War both of the use of this tactic, and of what happened to units who failed to use this tactic. Basically, if you simply hit the dirt when ambushed, you've doomed yourself because you're surrounded on three sides by fire that is pre-set on your location, and you are giving the enemy time to close in on you. Charging an ambush will cause high losses, for sure, but fewer losses than if you sat still.

Yeah, Fionn and I had discussed something like this a while ago, since this was basically the project I was working on in CC3. What I have in mind really isn't possible with the current incarnation of Combat Mission, though, since units can't move from one scenario map to another. Without this ability, it creates some problems. Let me quote Fionn here: "This way we could link a TRUE strategical aspect war with an excellent tactical-level rendering (Combat Mission) . From what I have seen Combat Mission is probably the first game to actually give us the flexibility to do this sort of campaign. By instituting some common sense limits on 'Stacking'. e.g. no more than 1 battalion per side per map (or something like that)and giving each overall commander the equivalent of a division (or whatever was historically present) we could probably really do well." The limits on 'stacking' are an artificial constraint that is necessary given this current state of CM. However, with the ability to move units from one map to another, one creates the possibility of true maneuver warfare. With this possibility, it would be foolish to stack units on a particular map and allow for the possibility of having your entire force surrounded. I realize this was in an old thread, but there are a lot of new thoughts that can be brought to the table, and old threads tend to fill up and get closed anyway. As long as this doesn't spread to four or five threads, I think we'll all be fine. Thorsten

One way to do this would be to have multiple scenarios going on at the same time in parallel. So one large map is created, then sliced into thirds and entered into the scenario editor as three separate scenarios. So you have, for example, three companies that are all part of a battalion, with three players fighting their individual battles and a battalion commander overseeing the whole thing. The battalion commander can order one company CO to send units over to the ajoining scenario map, and the battalion commander can allocate assets that he/she holds in reserve as well. For this to work, scenarios would have to be changeable on the fly, so that a unit sent to a map edge and ordered to go to the next map would disappear from one scenario and reappear in the other. Of course, they would have to reappear in the same state they left, and not as a fresh new unit. I hope I made that idea clear enough. Thorsten

There's something really odd about that B-17 picture. From the positioning of the elevator and ailerons, it looks like it's about to do a snap roll.

"Sometimes I wish we could all just talk in real time online. It'd be so much easier." Ahh, but you can. Simply get ICQ (www.mirabilis.com) and install it. It's a wonderful program, and it allows you to chat with multiple people at one time. Thorsten

"If you are interested or know of someone who is (where are all the Close Combat improvers who I know hang around here?)" Fionn, did you get my email? If not, try writing to me at weyter@plains.nodak.edu (I am one of those Close Combat improvers). Thorsten

What about creating new doors via 75mm shells from tanks? I understand it was standard practice for the German army to attack a town in this way. Their tanks would be on the edge of town and they would blow holes in the sides of buildings, then infantry would pour into those buildings. Thus they avoided moving down the streets, which were much more dangerous in terms of ambushes, etc. I read about this in a discussion of technical flaws in the movie Saving Private Ryan (concerning the final battle scene). Thorsten

The nice part about a game like this is that it can be broken down into three distinctive parts: the units, the maps, and the basic game engine. The game engine can be improved while still allowing the use of old maps and old units. For example, if a new game engine uses 10m x 10m tiles instead of 20m x 20m tiles, that does not necessarily prevent the use of old maps. The problem comes when some sort of trick is used to get the higher resolution that prevents the use of old maps. Some workarounds may include map converters or re-releasing all the old maps. The same goes with units. A Panther may stay a Panther in the new game engine, but if the engine is designed to include new data about units, then some sort of conversion process will have to take place. Problems like these have been plaguing game designers since the Commodore 64 days. Thorsten

"Kip, there still will be a chance of the guys surrendering, but MUCH lower. Realistically this can happen. The point of surrendering is to not get killed. Withdrawing, even from 100m (which isn't that far away) leaves open the possibility of death. I have read about German units surrendering out of heavy woods because of being fired at by Shermans from much greater distances. In this one case the Germans got closer, saw that the tankers were black, and then ran back into the woods. The black tanker who was telling the story said that a few more HE rounds cured them of their racial views pretty quickly" Umm... wasn't that from an episode of the Cosby Show? Grandpa Huxtable and his buddies were sitting around the kitchen table telling war stories and Heathcliff tried to tell the story of when he was on a navy ship in Bermuda when there was a practice fire drill and his dad and his buddies all got up and left.

I certainly did not intend to start a Close Combat vs. Combat Mission debate. This fall I fully intend to shell out money for both CM and CCIV. CC and CM are the same scale: 2m by 2m, and both have the ability to push my CPU to the limit, no arguments there. As for the level of detail and realism in CM, I understand that was a big reason for creating the game in the first place. It raises the bar for all squad level war games. I can only hope that Atomic takes it as friendly competition and rises to the challenge. If not, then I hope someone else picks up the real-time and 2d game models where Atomic left off. One of the most positive things about CM is that there is room for improvement, and that the designers KNOW there is room for improvement. Too often, game designers don't have an idea on what needs to be improved, and their games end up becoming devoid of playability and are nothing more than pretty pictures. I see CMs place in 3d wargames the same as I saw Castle Wolfenstein's place in first-person shooters, the start of a new generation of games. Hopefully one that will have many descendants, all improving on the original. Thorsten