Compassion

But NEVER (well... i guess maybe if someone plays without FOW on...) send your encircleing armor out to roll up a line wihout infantry. That's just inviting wasted mpp's. I usually like to send some corps out to make a new weak line (like one every other hex) in the vicinity of a breakthrough and hook armor back inside the newly created sailent to chew up the now encircled units. Keeps my tanks nice and happy (and hoefully supplied!).

Hey Clone, Ya think that if you come back you can get your own shtick instead of rehashing a half-baked, half-assed dj's lines?

Ah, but it is a gamey exploit to get a little lucky and sink half the brit navy and be able to project an impossibley German weak invasion of Canada and then SR (I mean Operate...erm... letting my age show) 8 high level airflottes with even 1 long range point and then pound the US Easern Seaboard into rubble. That's IS a silly exploit of the game system. The invasion? Mebbe, mebbe not. That could be argued for days.... BUt hte SR'ing? Most definately a gamey exploit of the system. [ December 21, 2002, 11:13 PM: Message edited by: Compassion ]

IS that a revolver in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?" Alright, who can tell that I've seen Two Towers today and then spent the rest of the afternoon drinking Bass?

It's almost laughable what these regimes think it would have taken to terrorize the US into helplessness. As we have seen both recently and in the past, terror attacks generally tend to piss the US off as well as are usually formualated by those that do not understand that the US is as big as it is. It would take years of varied, unanswered terror attacks to cow the US. ANd I'm not talking as an American here, but as someone who had put in the time to undestand first how big and homogenous the US is poorly the fascist and Japanese powers understood it. Shoot, look how poorly Axis terror attacks worked on the tiny island of Great Britain and the threat of them worked on the Aussies!

They would either have been turned to so many miles of radioactive molten glass from US nukes or the US and Germans would have agreed to an armistace, I think. Neither society would have been able to withstand a war then went that long. The germans's might have found themselves in a twilight war with Russians beyond the Caucases, but other than that I would expect a very frigid cold war to ensue for poissibly decades. [ December 21, 2002, 09:53 PM: Message edited by: Compassion ]

I think that smack talk is fine. in fact, the CM forums do fine with a dedicated thread for smack talkers, with their own traditions and place work well. IF you want to indulge then fine. THat way, admonishing someone like rambeaux is not a problem becasue you can point them in a direction to go and express themselves. Until that happens, I'm not sure what can be done about it... other then throwing every single tough guy post into the genreal forum for a feeding frenzy perhaps. But that would be too cruel, don't you think?

Of course that depends on the German slave physics corps coming up with a nuke... NOt the most likely of scenarios in light of the fact that the US had at least two in 1945 and would have been used to bring Germany to heel if they hadn't already fallen.

Then yes, those who complain about innovative or unconventional tactics are double dawg whiney sore losers. I was just saying that there is a gamey accusation could be founded in truth. Simply, if even only parity is found in the Atlantic (in other words, a good season of Brit sinkings), then load up half the heer and land them in Canada and take them out of the war, even if Britain is still on it's isle. Do a fast turn around and invade the US. Easier said than done, but even with just Canada, the mpp's are worth a mint in denied Brit points. Not for the faint of heart. I've read about it here, but have never tried it. It may be for the solo gamers as I've played all of two solo games to completion and think, as Han SOlo said: "Good against remotes is one thing.... Good against the living? THat's something else." [ December 21, 2002, 09:22 PM: Message edited by: Compassion ]

I like buying a french HQ... i've have a couple great successes using an HQ along with a modified Hubert strategy with the French.

I agree withthe rest of your post... hell, the American predilection for everyone to be armed would make an invasion in the 1940's impossible! But Gamey play isn't just sore loser talk. Certainly if it's understood that mastering the game engine and getting the W is the important thing then fine, do whatever you want to make things work.. If however, you play an opponent, especlially one without much experience and you use a limitation or quirk in the game engine (like and early invasion of Canade) to win, then you are using a gamey strategy. Like I said, it desn't matter if it's two mature players playing for the W, but it is a situational call (here I am, Raider Fan calling for good sportmanship... man we are maligned sometimes...)

I think that shortening the number of turns in Winter is a fine way of simulating winter IF the time clock is an issue... say... setting up a superrule that public discontentwith the war goes up if you ond't have progress for so many turns or some such. At this scale, weather condidions, especially in winter become difficult to implement unless you balkanize the map for weather and terrain purposes.

Note my member number here... pipe down junior! My name comes from a name I used to use in FPS games. People would try to run some smack on me and then I'd shoot them down many times... and then tell them I felt their pain. When everyone else is names Beelzebubba or some such, it's much fun to not have a 13 year old's concept of dangerous as a handle.... I used to play alot with my brother... First Compassion would gun you down and then Weak Minded Fool would mop up... hehehe.... [ December 21, 2002, 10:14 PM: Message edited by: Compassion ]

THey had lots of neat designs though many were unpractical or depended on some other branch of service. I always liked the Blohm & Voss seaplane bomber concept that depended on oversized U-Boats to work as tenders to maintain a flotilla across the Eastern Seaboard of the US... of course that project was cancelled in 1943 when Happy Time came to an end and there was going to be no way to project a force like that across the Atlantic. [ December 21, 2002, 08:39 PM: Message edited by: Compassion ]

True, though the crash has been thought by many to be caused because of intentional misuse of the plane by the test crew.... gone horribly wrong. As for accuracy, the only thing they had to go on was the government delivered bombsights (have no idea if the hopped up Nordens they were using at the time could handle either the flying wing's extreeme pitch up cruising trim or the speeds it flew at). Add to that the B-36 shared it's corporate sponser with that of the brand new SecDef's last job, the B-36's design win is certainly suspect! THough as you say, it was a design ahead of it's time and until modern avionics and computer flight correction had been perfected, it could be a handful in some flight conditions... .But damnit!, it looked cool in War of the Worlds! [ December 21, 2002, 08:17 PM: Message edited by: Compassion ]

Add to that Hitler wouldn't have been interested in it... he is quoted (perhaps apocryphally) as saying that he is a "Lion on the continent and a mouse at sea." He hadthe same concerns faced here. Add to that even after years of war, the Higgens boat came as a huge shock and he was supposed to have decreed that the greatest innovation of the war, so we see that not only had there been no work in that direction, there weren't even any conceptual designs done that came close. I think that even if the sealanes had been cleared, the question of manpower would have come to play. I don't care how much merchant or assault shipping they were able to build, I can't see how they could have stocked mounted a credible invasion force but kept Uncle Joe at bay at the same time. But then I try to work in my manpower whinge when talkingabout things to clean up in the next version anyway.

I wonder if this isn't more a reflection on the German air doctrine of using tac air only and not worrying much about strategic bombing. Even though they were hard pressed and obviously trying to concentrate on defensive weapons (no matter what Hitler said) in 1944 and 45 and the need for a large long range bomber was nil. However, Luftwaffe project list has many concept drawings for jet powered bombers but most with ranges well under 3000km. THere are a few 4 engine jet designs, but they are built for speed, not distance such as the Arado AR E.560 project listed below: This fast mover would carry 3 tons of ordinance with a top speed of 590mph, but a range of only 2100 mph. Conversely, the US had several designs on the boards as early as 1944, but with the Superfortress's sucess there was no need. THe Germans had several quite innovative designs that would come up for long range bombing of any kind, but they were cancelled well beforethe writing on the wall was recognized mostly due to (imo) lack of patronage in the Luftwaffe and the procurmement offices. The world would have to wait until 1952 for delivereis of the B-47 for a jet bomber to arrive on the scene (shown here with a jato or rato package for short take offs). Note the F-80 flying chase. [ December 21, 2002, 07:40 PM: Message edited by: Compassion ]

IN the 40's the XB-35 flew: The design was eventually scrapped not because of it's difficulty with the transition to jet propulsion.. indeed, it's biggest stability problem was due to the poor efficiancy gearboxes of the contra rotating props required to keep this plane flying straight with no tail section. Perhaps it's biggest problem was politics. Many of the then Air Corps generals had an eye towards breaking from the Army and creating their own branch of service... THey were looking for respect and appropraitons dollars in the upcoming post war drought years that were by then coming quickly and didn't want to fund such an advanced (which always reads expensive when talking about defense contracts) design (most of them didn't like the idea as it was such a departure from what had been seen before) of unproven worth... After all, the B-17 and B-29 was good enough to win the war, why monkey with proven success? This broke the spirit of Jack Northrup... a successful aircraft builder during the war whose true passion was the flying wing. The Air FOrce went to the extent of not only cencelling the project, but had all designs, machining and tools destroyed along with the test planes. Still, some coudln't let the idea die and a few short years later, the next flying wing took to the skies. THe jet powered YB-49: This beaut nerly went into production when a tragic crash of one of the test models doomed the program. Again, many believed that this was also due to politics and a desire from many to procure the B-36. Many who worked on the plane including Air Force test pilots loaned for trials claim that the B-49 would have been the superior buy and that in fact it's great stength was it's stability in mos conditons and its very structural integrity.... though in extree conditions it was difficult to fly. Like many modern flying wing designs, it needed to fly on auto pilot much of the time and perhaps it was ahead of it's time.... The ultimate triumph of the concept would come many years later:: With the advances in fly by wire technology and modern avionics, the Flying Wing flys in today's Air FOrce... And it was built by Northrup. Old Jack Northrup was able to at least see the designs before he died. This adds nothing to the discussion, but I love these things and any chance to drag the pics out... Actually, it does add something... the differnece between a weapons system is often context and the time it's built in. The game currently had a big boost with the way the tech advances come in providing some context to tech advances.. But more could and should be done for SC 2 to model not only industrial advances, but also political and institutional intertia workign against radical designs (along with my own pet peeve about manpower levels).

I see what you are saying... It does get confusing about what the right thing to do is when talking about such pie in the sky concepts as massed jet fighters since we never saw them enough to develop good counter measures to them as well as the fact that they never performed quite as well as they could have with a decent design cycle. I'm not sure that the game could ever be scoped that way without a major re-write from the ground up. WOuld the game even be the same if we said that there was a product that was going to be crash researched that would gain significant advances but have serious drawbacks? IF lines were in relative stasis would we see those kinds of crash programs in the first place? I would love to play that kind of game, but I would also love to see Hubert build a world wide game with 1.06 type rule base (with some tweaks perhaps to current mechanics).

THat's a game design flaw to automagically upgrade all units of a type. I would think that the smart thing to do would be to fix the flaw rather than open up a seperate, inherently flawed research line. That's all just engineering and it's not like those concepts weren't previously understood. The stresses are different becasue of how jets work, but not to all that great a degree. Also, the increased streamlining was understood before the war but until a powerplant was powerful enough to require it, it just wasn't done. Radical revolutions came later, but like I said, not until the very late 40's. Until then, designers were still pretty much leveraging previously understood concepts and applying them. I think that a game that extended past WWII into the 50's or beyond then new lines of advance for certain generally similar items would definately be needed (and make for a much richer variety)... It would be fun to look at building a doctraine and spending your R&D on making that doctraine work. [ December 20, 2002, 07:09 PM: Message edited by: Compassion ]

mmmm... I dunno about that. I mean, yeah, with a jet you are looking at a radically different engine design, it's true. But the rest of plane design doens't change much, it seems to me. Engineering and aerodynamics pretty much stays the same. Yeah, you are dealing with more thrust, but still not really changing concepts, at least not until you start to threaten the sound barrier which is a few years outside the scope of the gmae.

Well, if you can catch a 262 in a turn it was toast. Those Jumo jets were pigs and took forever to spool up (unless you wanted a flameout or an explosion, that is). The preferred method to engage them was to wait for them to have to cut throttles for some reason and then dive on them. Not the niblest plane, it relied on pure speed to survive so that if it did have to turn, anything in the sky would be able to turn inside it and get a high deflection shot off right into the top of the plane. [ December 20, 2002, 07:31 PM: Message edited by: Compassion ]

Isn't that only if the road to Moscow is open?

From what Hubert has said in earlier discussions about map size, you might be able to increase the size of each hex, but that he was working under an absolute limit on the nubmer of columns and rows... or at least that's how I took it... [ December 11, 2002, 09:52 PM: Message edited by: Compassion ]

WOuld you be an AI only player? These tactics of yours won't work easily against an allied player of any worth.