Peterk

> As the Sovs, if I had expected reinforcements > (especially armor) I would have disposed my > forces in a completely different manner. I Bingo! I was assuming Russians would get _no_ tanks whatsoever and so set up my 2 little AA guns out in no-mans land in truly desperate fashion hoping for the unlikely flank hit on carelessly advancing armor. Those guys should really have been far back waiting to pounce on infantry. Even the briefing mentionning that armor was 10-minutes to the rear and might come to help would have resulted in me making a much more reasonable set-up.

The scenario was fun and well-balanced for E-MAIL but definitely not for a double-blind tournament. WHY??? The scenario notes made no mention of reinforcements and the heavy use of reinforcements in this scenario gave an unintended bonus to the players who played more quickly. Example, by the time I had gotten to turn 5 of one of my games, my opponent had already finished his game against his other opponent (they must've played TCP/IP) ...and so he knew there were heavy reinforcements coming in and roughly when and where they would appear. I didn't. Hence unfair advantage to him. Not PO'ed or anything, but I would have thought it obvious that using this sceanrio in a tourny was a bad idea. Put all the pieces on the board on turn 1 so the set-up plays a larger role. That's where the most skillful players shine (...not saying I am one of those). [ February 02, 2003, 05:47 PM: Message edited by: Peterk ]

> Please oh please allow it t o work on a Mac Of course it will work on a Mac!

My evil goal is to make the tool so easy and fun to use that people won't want to change the rules very much because then they won't be able to use the program anymore (...heh heh). Seriously, I will eventually probably put 99% of the rules (the tables) into configuration files that can be tweaked by the users as they change.

> Why you're about it, won't you 'code' 42 South > for me Unless the system for '42 south (and beyond) is dramatically different than '41, my program should be able to handle them all. I basically program in all your tables and rules and use the date of the battle to decide which set to use. Works well! I should mention that some of your rules are truly EVIL programming-wise and rival the NHL Hockey penalty system (which I had the misfortune to have to implement in code 100% accurately a few years ago) in complexity (...but nothing so hard that it's unsolvalble after a couple of drinks).

I've been trying to think of a way to get involved in the fun and have started to write a pretty cool Java implementation of the Rules. It'll track your guys, save a history, generate the battles for you, all with a nice UI...you'll be able to type in your data and resume a campaign that has already been started on paper. I'll probably have something working in 2 weeks or so and would need 2-3 Java savvy beta testers to give it a spin when it's ready. Drop me a line at peterk@look.ca if interested.

Hi Biltong, I finally started playing after a few months of doing only PBEM's. The rules are well laid out and aren't too confusing. I love the spreadsheet approach. The premade map approach is excellent. Is anyone using the Python BCR helper??? If yes, does anyone have a solution for an annoying little problem I've been having. It runs in a little DOS shell window, which in WIn98 unfortunately does not have have a scrollback buffer. The scenario parameters scroll off the window before I can get to see them. I've tried all sorts of little tricks to try and log the session to a file or something but can't get it going. I'm going to toss an idea out that people will probably hate, but it does make things easier. I didn't like it in the original Wreck's rules and did a bit of experimentation early on when CMBB came out. One of the most annoying things in the sequence performed to get a new scenario going is having to generate a phony scenario just to get CMBB to generate AUX forces which may or may not match closely to the type of AUX forces that are supposed to be used in the upcoming battle. Why not just make a roll that maps to a rarity factor and then allow the player to freely buy whatever he wants in the 4 families of units??? Speeds things up and usually the results are more or less the same between the two systems. Any plans to take this on into 1942??? A Stalingrad campaign might be quite interesting all on its own.

Hey Blackout, I'm going to confuse matters a bit. I'm on a P2 300 MHz / 128 Meg RAM with a nVidia TNT2 card and...the game runs great...not just small scenarios with detail turned down. I play huge battles fine and the detail is usually pumped almost to the max. No problems whatsoever. 233 is a bit slower than 300 and I don't know much about the video card on your laptop, but you might just find that's its tolerable.

> You’re right. Found the same thing... allthough > mine is dieroll based from 27 through to 36 > with modifiers on map size, weather and type of > Axis Attack I like your way. The variation is a great idea. > You’ve just given me an idea – I've been > thinking about importing a river crossing map > and maybe I should ask for a volunteer to do a > large city map as well where 4 or more battles If you can find a way to get this to work, that would be absolutely incredible. I thought about something like that as well, where you load in the last save file for a new quick-battle but it didn't look like it would do the trick - units are imported as is and placed (locked? I didn't check) where the last battle ended and exactly in the same state/ammo remaining as the last turn, which sucks for what we want. I really didn't think it looked promising. > but I decided against that since I learned a > hell of a lot during my painful green days in > CMBO… mostly how to run LOL…. You'll still learn a lot. You're attacking so much in the first 2 months, it's an enormous challenge to keep your guys regular and _not_ slip into the Green. > Would you like a set? I would love to hear what > you think. You been there/done that.. you’ll > pick up the mistakes/variations/ideas faster. Got them. Thanks. Actually I was well along on my rules soon after getting the game and then i started playing a whole bunch of e-mail games (I think I have 6 happening right now) and the solo rules just fell on the backburner. I'm glad you stepped in!

> Maybe it just recycles numbers? They _can't_ do that!!! Member numbers will lose all prestige value then! Heresy!

The current weirdness is nothing compared to the CMBO weirdness 2 years ago - it's actually quite normal. I'm thinking Church Of CM, The Attack Of The Refresh Monkeys, The Great SS Hamster Debate...I'm sure there's more.

Hi Biltong, I'm having a go at it as well, but I'm old and slow and have little free-time and you'll probably get something polished before me. Some little findings/suggestions based on my playtests: 1. Consider bumping up the turn lmit (if you haven't already) to 35. Attacks are slower to develop in CMBB. 2. The medium sized map for an attack on a large town looks really, really bad (basically a few hundred small houses tossed together haphazardly really close to one another). Really boring to play on and...doesn't really look much like a large town. I was considering taking that map-type out of the mix entirely. 3. Why not start the Germans as Regular? They should get an advantage against raw Russians at least in the very first few months. This remedies the most frustrating part of the CMBO campaign. Glad you scrapped the aux system. I did the same as well, allowing the player to purchase his mix, but basically knocked anything off the list that had lower than -20% rarity. Consider this rule for purchasing armor - keeps things interesting especially when a cool upgrade to a weak AFV comes along: You spend points to buy into a "family" of tank (ie PzIV or PzIII). 50% of the time you get the latest version but 50% of the time you get the version before that.

I'd like to double this request. I'm working out rules for Quick Battle single player campaigns and if there is no snowy ground option, it will make some periods of the campaign a little bit more ackward to handle.

> Oh, but there are clans here already : didn't > you see > * The Peng clan, no need to tell more > * The statistics-jerks clan (see "AI cheats > thread" ) > * Rexford clan We need a good old fashionned Clan War methinks to put the Pengers in their place.

Ummm...that's in the game already. Set up a normal firing arc and move your guy accross - any enemies in that arc that shows will get targetted. That's basically what you're asking for. To fire at hidden enemies you have to use area fire - and that's not really specifically at one point, the effect area is larger than just the point you choose.

I have no problem with Sneak->Crawl but Move->Sneak??? I use Move to get my guys from A->B along a road. They're not sneaking, they're marching!

Hi Guys, I've retrofitted the Wreck rules for a 1941 campaign (June - Dec.) as the Germans and am currently play-testing them. It's slow going though and I'm only on battle 6 and am in July 1941 still (lots of attacks for the Germans in the first 2 months). The bad news is I haven't typed them up yet and it might still be a while before I'm happy with them. Wreck, I've been meaning to send you an e-mail to double-check. Are you doing anything with the old rules yet?

God, that lose/loose thing has been bugging me for years, but I've been too polite to _ever_ complain about it (...until now). Thank you! For the chance to vent among friends who feel the same way! Here's #2 on my list - usually done by people who also have trouble with the lose/loose concept - pore/pour. You don't pour over a document, dammit!!

Try a platoon of flame tanks one of these days. You'll see Russians surrendering.

Will try this one out in the very near future. Thanks!

> Yah, only to find I only managed to get a minor > defeat, while all along there I was, thinking I > was doing really well This is probably more due to the briefing not telling you how long the map is - something I've been complaining about in operations for quite a while. I got lucky. I only managed to take the town on battle 4 of 5 and I was getting nervous because I was sure the map was much longer, but the KVs were out of the game by then, and then on that last night battle my guys just mowed over the last kilometer or so of map. The Flame tanks worked great at night. 4 battles to wear down the russians and 1 battle at the end to move fast and exploit the opening.

This operation was lots of fun! How to get rid of the KV2s??? Their big vulnerability is that they are "SLOW". The old US adage about how to kill a Panther - "grab him by the nuts and kick him in the *ss" was never truer than here. Swarm them! Fast move 2-3 tanks (doesn't matter what!) to either side of them. Their turret is not fast enough to track you so most of your guys will make it. Then just start pinging them from both sides (doesn't matter if they penetrate or not!). Eventually, the crews will go crazy from all the hits and just decide to bail even though the tank is still fine (these are Green and Conscript crews we're talking about here). I got really lucky with one of them on one of my first encounters - a PZIII spotted one and fired _one_ shot that hit the front and didn't appear to do any damage. Next thing I know, the crew abandonned it. That's when I knew that the crew's were fairly brittle and could be driven to panic fairly easily. Expect to lose "lots" of tanks dealing with them though (and make sure, your infantry stays out of the way until they're gone - that thing is a vicious anti-infantry monster) ..... the good news however is..... ============= SPOILER ======================== Once they're gone, the battle is a cakewalk.

I've seen LOS go right through a thick patch of Woods at ground level as well. No big deal, narrow break in the forest to let a sliver of LOS through.

> Ouch! That kind of pitfall is why I generally > lead w/ both teams from one split squad... I must be the only one on here who doesn't do the split-squad recon. I have lots of bad experiences with it: 1. Attacker is usually in a lot of time pressure and using the split-squad recon effectively almost doubles the amount of time you need to move forward. I usually don't have that time and definitely didn't in this scenario. The minefield caused 1-2 casualties, the guys didn't break. It was scary but the effects were minor. It was just careless on my part which is why I mentionned it. 2. I've had split squads totally evaporate from a single attack by a well hidden enemy. Result - I lose 5 men and get NO information whatsoever other than something is close to where they get hit. I'd rather go with a full squad and have a couple guys left to give me some info.

> Well done Berli! This scenario is truly evil, > and ideal for head to head play.. Double-blind, yes. Otherwise I wouldn't. Once you know about the reinforcements the game would suffer from a 2nd play. Russian knows they're coming and sets up a welcoming commitee. German knows they're coming and it takes the time pressure off a bit and he won't push as hard and make mistakes. Still, good scenario - no doubt.