Peterk

I'm probably going to try to play all of the scenarios in Beyond Valor in the next little while. I'm doing Paratrooper now and am about 3/4 of the way through. Let me know if you ever want a game.

Hey Gary, Are you guys still doing the starter kits?!?! Time for the big plunge. Barricades! Your brother hit it on the head with where the immersion comes from in boardgames. I think the charm of CM however is more than just getting the computer to do the tedious chores and rules. It's seeing your move in 3-D. I have a feeling if it were 2-D; it wouldn't work. If you wrote an ASL proram to do all the rules and calculations and dice rolling - even though that's what some people think they want - I have a feeling that the fun of the game would be gone. ASLers would start complaining that there wasn't enough to do.

You know, the rules aren't half bad if you have an electronic version and can look up and cross-reference things quickly. Just started playing ASL again tonight after 6 months away and I found something out...yes, the learning curve is absolutely huge, but once you make it to a decent level, it kind of sticks and you don't have to go all the way back to the beginning. It's strange, I keep coming back to ASL, but I haven't really touched CMBB for 2 years or so and don't think I'll ever go back to playing it a lot unless CM Campaigns changes my mind. Anyways, my take on what ASL does "better". Better for me doesn't necessarily mean more realistic, but handled in a manner that's more fun for the player. 1. Big battles/campaigns. I don't find that CM operations come anywhere close in immersion/involvement to something like Red Barricades. A turn of Red Barricades - ASL is a lot more fun than a turn of To The Volga - CM; to me at least. 2. Buildings ASL has 2, 3 story buildings with interior walls, cellars and rooftops and possible extra fortification. A fight for a building in ASL can often be a long drawn out affair with lots of maneuvering and strategy. CM buildings are fairly generic in comparison. Scenarios depicting fights for well-known strongpoints like Pavlov's House or the factories in Stalingrad can probably be better modelled in ASL. 3. Solitaire play. SASL is quite well done. The "artificial intelligence" of the SASL system produces a less stupid game from the system than playing against CMBB's AI (at least when its attacking). I'm doing a solitaire play of Red Barricades using SASL guidelines and it feels almost like I'm playing against another person - the system is doing good defense, well-timed counter-attacks. I never saw anything as satisfactory playing solo against CM in a similar sort of sceanrio. 4. Less Fog Of War.... is sometimes a good thing excitement-wise?!? I remember playing a ASL scenario a while ago. A russian AT gun had a killer shot lined up on a Panzer and rolled boxcars to break the gun. In CM if the same thing happens - the German player would say "I wonder why that gun stopped shooting; maybe it's broken"; the Russian player would say "Crap I broke my gun"...but you don't get the simultaneous groan and scream of excitement you get in ASL from the same event as both players see what happened at the same time. Same thing when a berserker is created and starts its charge. Usually very exciting in ASL; but in CM not really. I think the transparency of being able to tell why something happened can lend a lot of excitement to a game.

ASL is a game. CMC is a game. Both games can have similar style victory conditions. A CMC campaign designer can force time issues to be important.

Not true. CMC "campaign" designers choice if this is to be the case or not.

I just noticed this. You so sure about it? I have a feeling your thinking may be skewed by some other campaign-like constructs you may have played in the past. Game starts at dawn your orders are to capture a bridge 8km away by sundown. A short 14 hour campaingn. Victory conditions are weighed to ignore points for force loss - all that matters is capturing the bridge. I don't see how your statement can be taken seriously. Terrain is all that counts and you have a hard time limit. You should even try to avoid fighting as much as possible and move quickly. Ever play ASL? Time requirements are paramount in most of the better scenarios. The monster stack kills everything in its path and then advances strategy will always lose because it is too slow. Scale up a bit and you can get the exact same effect in CMC.

Static defender in CMC is likely to have more fun than a static defender in a typical CMBB battle. There are still orders that have to be given in a timely manner (ie. entrench, support). He will likely still perform light recon even though the bulk of forces are not moving.

And the little stuff I intentionally pull out of your path can bite you in the butt later in the game and lose it for you if you ignore them and don't break up your big stack. Fighting also takes much more time than moving. Even just organizing the fist of death stack is likely to take an hour or two. You might not have that time available in a short campaign. Its easy for a designer to make a campaign where a player who fights too much and doesn't move agressively enough will lose. [ July 10, 2006, 09:05 AM: Message edited by: Peterk ]

[ July 10, 2006, 05:15 AM: Message edited by: Peterk ]

<quote>This seems especially true in defensive situations, where officers all along a line might have access to call artillery on registered points of their front.</quote> The would be represnted by TRPs more than a spotter calling down an ad-hoc barrage.

From reading "Soldat" (author escapes me at the moment) the Germans definitely used members of the artillery group sent to and embedded with the infantry to call down the shells and correct, and it required special training and good knowledge of the guns to do so. Are you talking modern US Army or WWII? Doctrine has most likely changed.

[ December 22, 2007, 09:09 PM: Message edited by: Peterk ]

You have to assign the gun to support a particular unit. When that unit is in battle, you will get a spotter for those guns...if the order has had enough time to propagate through the system, by the time the battle happens. I think that's how it works.

Talking about my guitar was more fun than talking about Chuck Norris.

It might be getting declined because you're trying to pay for a game which doesn't exist yet.

Actually I changed my mind. I need a new guitar AAAND a saxophone. That way Chuck Norris and I can play duets.

Isn't anyone curious about what kind of guitar I need? It's a real beaut. Ice cream gets the strings sticky so I think I'll pass. Maybe I'll have some after I'm finished practicing if Chuck hasn't eaten it all by then.

Ok...anyways....back to the guitar that I need.

I need a new guitar.

CMBB needs tumbleweeds.

Travelling is when you're not expecting the enemy to be near you and you want to move quickly, use vehicles etc. Move is a slower move (imagine the speed of a move command in CMBB scenario) in which the units are expecting to be in combat. If you travel and an unseen enemy is waiting for you, you will probably feel a great deal of pain.

Not really...if morale is less than 50% but a flag is still necessary to avoid a loss, then I would want the AI to throw something together. It should be.... "Am I supposed to be defending in this scenario? Yes! Can I still win if I don't attack. Yes! Then I won't attack even if there's some flag somewhere that I don't have."

It's near the bit that says Moon can post wherever he feels like to promote a new game that BFC has just released. You know, as in it might be tempting while waiting for this one...that sort of thing.

The point of the argument was that if there are ever unposessed flags present, the CMBB AI will never decide "I don't have to attack, I can win handily if I just keep what I have now". In the Red Barricades scenarios which I played against the AI, it was an obvious defensive situation for the russian AI....and it still insisted on attacking....always. That is the problem. Whether the AI focusses on all the flags, a handful, or just one at a time isn't so important. It is going after flags when it shouldn't and doesn't even have to, to win.

I'll play. I have no idea how you'll build a tourny around a game that will take so long to play, but I'll play anything CMC. I think I crapped out in the early rounds of two earlier ROW tournaments so definitely have an axe to grind. <grrr> :mad: