Peterk
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Posts posted by Peterk
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You see...the problem is...that FAQ is _funny_. Funny enough to lead newbies into thinking the current Peng threads are funny as well. But they're not....not even close. They're bitter, angry, cryptic, senseless places so awful that they may even turn newcomers off the game entirely should a visitor happen to venture in there on a first visit to our site,
Battlefront, why not create a password protected hidden enclave for these misfits where they can frolic away without _any_ contact with the outside world whatsoever??? Prestige for them, more sales for you, peace and quiet for the rest of us. It's a win/win.
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Here's the situation. I'm playing a Quick Battle that was generated by the Biltong rules. June 22nd - the early attacks on Russia. 5000 pt. assault on a medium sized map (2km deep by 3km wide), mostly open, lots of steppe to traverse to get within range of the objectives.
The rules give me 1500 points to spend on Air Power so I stock up on 8 Stukas and I'm smiling.
The game starts and the Russians have 3 pillboxes and a bunker visible on the first turn. I figure these should make natural targets for the bombers.
I start 1 company moving on the steppe from the start line towards first good cover about 1000 meters away.
The problem is that the Stukas seem to have taken a liking to strafing my guys moving in my open and every time a plane flies overhead they drop, lose their movement orders, and every single turn I have to replot 20 or so units all over again.
The planes are attacking my squads far more than they are attacking the enemy pillboxes and it's making movement pure torture. This is the 2nd QB in a row where planes were present where I've noticed this tendency towards friendly fire.
I just don't think this is terribly realistic. I understand that the fliers frequently made mistakes and accidents happened BUT in context it's quite silly.
The battle is an ASSAULT, therefore it makes sense that the pilots should know the enemy is entrenched and that any large bodies of men moving in the open are friendly. It doesn't make sense for obvious enemy targets like pillboxes and bunkers to be ignored to attack companies which are fairly obviously moving to the attack.
Were there any instances of troops on the beaches getting strafed by their own planes on D-Day??? I don't think so...because it was fairly obvious that the enemy were the ones in the trenches not the ones scurrying for cover in the sand and moving forward.
In a meeting engagement I can accept the current behavior but not in an assault.
I know most battles are not played with air-power and this probably won't get seen very often...but the way it is now makes definitely seems to make planes far more of a liability than a help to the attacking side.
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> Fuc&, fuc& the medals: GIVE ME MORE
> SUPPORT!!!!!" I HATE BUROCRATS!!!!
It gets worse Seahawk ...much worse. Enjoy. Send those medals home to Berlin so they don't get lost.
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Seahawk, to answer your question....
Any group on the screen that does not have the _Maximum_ number of men in it at the beginning of a battle, can not participate.
In the newest version coming out today or tomorrow, you will not be able to enter battle results for those men.
I should really make those guys turn red on the screen or something. I was assuming everyone would make a print-out.
p.
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> I take it that there were no Canadian forces at
> Juno beach on D-Day?
Of course there were. Juno was the canadian beach. Gold/Sword the british, Utah/Omaha the US.
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The photo is in my paperback copy of The Longest Day. I'll see if I can drag my scanner out of the closet tomorrow.
Actually I goofed a bit in my recollection....
The caption reads:
"British troops land under fire. Beach is unidentified, but it is probably Gold. Note, at left, wounded men lying in water and others falling, while at right trooper strides calmly along beach."
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> Hey Peterk, just wanted to say thanks!
> I enjoy the heck out of Biltaid
Glad you like it. It's lots of fun to work on.
> One bug(?) I've noticed though is that for some > battles I'm alloted Ski troops for my task
> force...
If it happens before October it's a bug. After October, it's in the rules. Let me know.
> Any chance of building in a stat keeper in the > future?
There will definitely be a player history with the basic battle results added in. Tracking squads? I don't know. There's so much churning due to the replacements, I don't know if it would be very interesting. I'll think about it though.
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Major, any possibility of setting up a CPX against the Marines? I'd love to watch a bunch of civilians take on the pros!
[ March 08, 2003, 10:08 PM: Message edited by: Peterk ]
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Pretty easily....
They're moving on the attack, get fired on, and drop to ground becoming pinned.
Just because other units happen to move by the same section of ground without any problems doesn't mean that the pinned unit will have the presence of mind and the courage to get up and start moving normally again. They're probably wavering between doing just that and breaking completely.
If you don't want to take my word for it, I have a really cool picture of the Canadians on Juno Beach on D-Day. It shows one squad on the ground acting like they're being fired at pretty badly. Other soldiers maybe 20-30 feet away are walking forward calmly without a care in the world.
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Disaster has struck early in the history of Kampfgruppe Kossits
Battle #1 - Meeting Engagement in hilly open terrain, won easily.
Battle #2 - Headquarters requests immediate followup. Axis assault up a steep hill. Open terrain. Pillboxes at top of hill cannot be dispatched. Major Loss.
Battle #3 - A week later. Sent out to capture bombed out village. Terrain flat as a pool-table with no cover other than craters. Given no artillery support but 4 auxilliary tanks 4 fighters and 2 Stukas supporting. Enemy has a MG pillbox which could not be dispatched. Also 3 large AT guns clustered together in a small group of scattered trees cannot be knocked off their guns. Friendly air forces spend 80% of their fire on friendly troops.
Major loss with grievous casualties.
Battle #4 - Russians counter-attack survivors with appx 6:1 advantage in men. Very little additional support provided. 5% of my force staggers off map after resisting wildly, the rest are killed or captured. Company command falls into enemy hands. Tactical loss.
Group continues with mostly conscript replacements.
Anyone else getting nailed badly by these rules???
If anyone is using Biltaid, I've fixed a few serious bugs relating to multiple emergency replacements and HQ demise. Also, the large battle rule has been added in. I'll probably be releasing v1.0.2 tomorrow so keep an eye out if you're interested.
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...also that's one thing you won't be able to do by using the scenario editor method. Axis casualty level.
How are you handling it History Buff?
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The Casualty setting is what you put into CMBB Quick Battle - for any number over 0%, CMBB will eliminate some units or men (you have no control over this). Biltong 2.1 says to treat these casualties as though they are combat casualties, even though you never get to use them in the battle.
Units that Biltaid shows as having < the maximum number of men are depleted and should not participate in the battle. If you make a print out of the battle, there is a note saying they are depleted. I know you're not doing printouts because you're using 2 screens so you're not seeing that message. For those units, you move them off the board on turn 1.
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Any downside to doing it that way? Victory Locations? You get to see the map before you purchase your units, right?
Are most people using the scenario editor?
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I don't think you can. Try your best to keep them _at_ Veteran so that they help the average battle group experience calculation. Once some more units become veteran too, then you'll be able to make the quality jump.
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... and as a variant.
If you are foolish enough to lose 3 battles in a row, bump your experience down by one step!
You're not being nasty enough Biltong, if there's a way to go up, there has to be a way to come back down!
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> Gosh: I hope you mean Apple OS 9
Yeah, and that should have been look out for v1.0.1 of Biltaid not 1.0.2. Bad luck with myversion numbers today.
If anyone's looking for it, I think the JBindery app comes with the Apple Java when you d/l it.
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Just a quick word for anyone trying to get Biltaid going under MacOS 8. There's a program called the JBindery that is supposed to do the trick. It will let you configure the Java call properly and it will create a clickable Icon for Biltaid. You will have to give the name of the main class as well as the classpath. This info is included in the .bat and .sh file that came with the zip.
I wish I had access to a Mac to try it out myself but alas... If anyone gets it going, could you please send me a little procedure that I could stick into teh readme file for the benefit of others who will try to do this in future.
Also, I've discovered some pretty serious bugs when there are more than 1 immediate followup battles that'll I'll be fixing shortly. The Large Battles rules from v2.1 will be going in as well.
Keep an eye out for 1.3 this weekend.
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> I still don't see how you could only get one
> platoon and one tank in a 1000 pts game.
Maybe an immediate followup after taking heavy casualties where most units are flagged as not participating?
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> And WTF am I supposed to do when I get ordered > to a 1000 pt. assault and end up with about 1
> platoon of troops total and 1 tank?!
You have to know when to fight and when to run. Ending up with an all Green core group is going to hurt you for a long while so preserve your guys and if the situation is impossible just get off and swallow the favor loss.
p.
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Hi LT Tel,
Yeah, I picked that one up on the day I released 1.0. There's a bug description on page 1 of this thread and a notice of a patch. Please update it to 1.0.1 from the site where you originally d/'ed it and you should be OK.
ABout the "will not participate " forces. You are correct. Set them up close to the edge and move them off on turn 1.
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> No questions this time, just an update from the > first battle of a 2-player BCR campaign:
That sounds like so much fun. Tempted to try it myself, but I doubt there will be any players around to volunteer to play the Russians in those difficult times!
My campaign's off to a nasty start. Started with a meeting engagement on a map with large hills, NO cover. I took that one easy - the tanks pretty much won it single-handedly. But of course, the powers above wanted an immediate followup at night in the same crappy terrain. Pushed it to dawn and the Russians get a pillbox on top of a monster hill commanding the whole board - should've attacked at night after all. Did I mention that there's pretty much no cover?
As an aside...this may seem like heresy...but part of the reason I released Biltaid last weekend is to take a few weeks off to try and finally learn how to play that damned ASL game. I bought so much of that stuff and can count the number of Squad Leader games I've played on the fingers of one hand. Hardly good bang for the buck. Any other Squad Leaders around who would be interested in teaching me a few things in a VASL PBEM??? Maybe Guards Counterattack or Gavin Take???
Is it even feasible to want to play ASL when you've got CMBB on your hard-drive!
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> Either the way of the AI-attacker is
> predictable and by this not very funny or you
> make just the Germans cross the river and the
> Russian side attacks the bridgehead which is
> not really a complete River pack
But for 1941-42, that's perfect. Axis attacks river...possible Allied counter on the bridge-head. That's excellent!
1944-45 might be another story where the German would probably want to defend those bridges.
Actually Biltong Rules 1944-45 is probably going to open up a whole can of worms with the Ai. Anxious to see how it turns out...if we get there!
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Biltong's going to have a laugh when he sees this one.
The rules for altering time/date values in 2.1 are a little flaky. To avoid major headaches do not even try to make sense of how it's supposed to work. Instead use a little honor rule like pay 40 or 50 to cancel the immediate attack when it comes up and treat the next fight like a normal battle instead. I got a sneak peek at the enxt version coming out in a little while and it'll all be much clearer.
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> on the attack immediately (gosh: I am still on > the Barbarossa day: 22nd June for my second
> battle) the HQ from Berlin asks me if I want to > use favor points to change various parameters. > From what I see the panel shows the selected
> option and additional ones plus the favor
> points to spend to change default.
That maniac in charge will give you 5 battles a day if you aren't careful. Consider yourself lucky with only 2 a day.
If you have trouble telling what the default value on the favor question is, you can _also_ exit without spending favor by hitting the 'X' in the top-right corner. Macs have those, right???
Biltong's Campaign Rules - South 41 to 42
in Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin
Posted
Sublime,
I'll double check that Biltaid is handling casualty percentage properly tonight. The details you posted help a lot.