chrisl

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Slapdragon: So it seems like it was simplified to ease designing efforts a bit.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> And to keep the game from becoming "Arty Mission". If you allowed for the amount of control a dedicated observer might really have, and the number of batteries available to hit a juicy target, the typical match might be a US company against a german battalion. The company wanders around a bit, after being shot at they call in a couple hours worth of arty from a zillion batteries, and then walk in to round up the soon to be prisoners who are looking for their teeth.

It shouldn't be any different with the full version-- there seem to be plenty of people playing with all versions of MacOS (I've used 8.5 and 8.6 only) including various flavors of 9. If you are really concerned, check over in the tech help forum-- there are far fewer posts there, and you could probably list a few months worth on just a few pages and skim the subject headings. The only way you can get CM is to order directly from BTS-- they don't offer a download, most likely to discourage bootlegging. You have to have the original CD in the drive to launch CM.

Ack-- thanks Seanachai for making me look at the profile of the SSN. I hadn't before, and now I probably have to have my eyeballs removed, or maybe see of my insurance will cover a lobotomy. I had utterly forgotten (in the active sense of forgetting) that particular suburb. The presence of a resident of it can mean nothing good at all for the pool. It's quite horrific. And to top it all off, his occupation requires frequent utterance of the phrase "For only fifteen cents more you can have an ultra-jumbo-mega fries with that." I'm going to go barf now.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Seanachai: drivel<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> So has dalem showed up on your doorstep yet?

For most things I have the memory capacity of a doorknob or a piece of cheese. For weird technical arcana (including CM...) I have a pretty decent memory. (I also number my files and keep them for a while-- you hear that Elvis you wanker-- so I can look back occasionally). I managed to avoid another trip to DC tomorrow- I got someone else to go who doesn't mind wearing a tie (I don't even own one...)- but I seem to find myself in DC (or more often Baltimore) a couple times a year. Sometimes I even remember how I got there, except for the part about getting onto MLK in Baltimore, which I always seem to mess up.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Lawyer: I know Chrisl, absent here lately, as a vindictive and <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Vindictive? Me? I'll get you for that!! Good thing I don't have a trip to DC planned for your fest. I was in town last week but it was airport-hotel-meeting-airport without any time to track you down.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Mark IV: I DID make the only worthwhile suggestion in your thread, however; actually, two of them, as I will soon gather the southern Kalifornienens for a similar CMfest. There, Foobar and I shall plot your demise. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> But you'll probably have it in San Diego, which, despite being a very nice place to visit (beaches, 360 perfect days/year) is a bit of a drive. Game updates: dalem has lost his mind. He's up and moved from Ann Arbor, which is a pretty nice place to live, to Minneapolis, which is not. And he chose the worst time of year to do it-- two or three days before the first good snow. Most importantly, he still appears to be on the road (it's only an 11 hour drive, so I don't know what his problem is) and hasn't returned a file since yesterday or so. Loser. At any rate, he's attacking with a bunch of green amis on a fairly open map. It looks like he spent a good chunk of his points on medium sized VT (horrifying stuff that, but of only limited effectiveness against a well dispersed defense) and is hurling his troops up against my regulars now. He's had one platoon cut to pieces, mostly by a single squad (28 confirmed casualties), and his next platoon is running in the open in SMG range. There appears to be another small attack developing on my right, but the one squad that's getting close has been upset by a minefield or two. All in all, going very well for the defenders. MrSpkr and I are playing some sort of micro-abomination created apparently by satan himself. It's a big map full of woods, with a big river running through a gorge and a itty bitty bridge that I have to defend. It would have been nice if I'd been given some troops. After my platoon accidentally bumped into one of MrSpkr's platoons (he appears to have a battalion or so) they were cut up a bit and are none too pleased. Now my only healthy units are two 16 year old boys who lied about their age and are armed with rocks, firecrackers, and pocket knives, and an 8 mm video camera. They're resourceful little kids though, and are hastily cutting up twigs to weave into little stick men which they're going to leave on the ground and hanging from trees in the path of the advancing germans. They're going to tape the reactions and try to use the tapes to scare the next bunch of germans. Unfortunately the german army in 1944 didn't have any 8mm video players. MrSpkr has been a very accomodating opponent though-- he spent a lot of time lurking through the woods and I was getting bored, so I asked him to please drop some shells to indicate where he is. He kindly obliged, dropping a nice barrage full of treebursts on the platoon that beat up on my platoon. It's nice to have such helpful opponents.

There's enough spread in where the shells fall that if you want to bomb the back of a hedgerow you can target a point where you can see (just short of where the guys are) and expect a good fraction of the shells to land where you want them. Same with units a little back from the edge of a woods/tall pines tile.

Welcome back! I was beginning to wonder if you had run into Tom Ripley...

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Stuka: Is that where they make all those cameras?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Except for the Polaroids-- they're made in Barrow.

These may be your only two posts that don't mention cafeteria food or salmon (except for the sig). Welcome back to the forum.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by dalem: I love pure infantry defenses.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Probably almost as much as you love the secret PBEM file decoder that lets you upgrade your schrecks to "elite" in a low troop quality scenario.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by wwb_99: Even if the pause at waypoint command cannot get in, the ability to preplot even a couple moves, with some kind of time advantage would be helpful<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Do you mean preplot a couple moves with a decision tree as above, or do you just mean preplot several moves worth of orders for units? I regularly preplot many turns worth of orders for units-- especially in larger battles where I might execute a flanking maneuver through unoccupied ground. If you plot 5-6 turns worth of orders with waypoints at useful places (so they can be rerouted into better cover) you can move quickly and without delays. You can also change the type of move (e.g. from sneak to run) without time penalty. Very useful for plotting assaults right behind the arty or smoke.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by David Aitken: I tried killing an AOL CD and it would not die. Bend it one way. Bend it the other way. Fold it over. Frantically wag it back and forth. No dice. I had to hack away at it with a scalpel before it would snap. Later I dropped my R.E.M. New Adventures In Hi-Fi CD on a stone surface and it cracked, .<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> I tried boiling an AOL CD to see if it would get all soft (to determine the effects of a hot car on CDs). It was perfectly readable after I boiled it. My Norton Utilities CD was sitting on the floor in an envelope case and I think it got stepped on-- they replaced it for $10. I think the ease of destrution of a CD is proportional to the value of its contents.

If you're donwe playing it, you should check the setting for the size of the no-man's land. If it's set to zero you can get the kind of gerrymandering that you're looking for. I haven't played enough ops to know where the threshold is for being able to hold long skinny bits of advances, but I suspect that unless you've cleared a large swath, zero is the setting you want. The op may have been designed by someone who didn't know this, or before this was seen to be a problem, or even by someone who wanted the lines forced back every time. What I've seen in the couple ops that I've played with no-man's land set to zero is that if you advance a small/medium force into enemy territory you can get two different colored setup zones, which generally keeps you from getting to move a large force up to the captured area, but sometimes you can get a few from the front areas.

The arty problem could be one of two (or maybe more)things: 1) you aren't seeing the shells hit, though they are hitting the buildings. A single 120 mm shell won't generally take down a building, especially a large stone one in a city. 2) a bit of bad luck. I generally buy large quantities of arty in various sizes in QBs, and it's great stuff, especially as the amis. It's usually what I pick first, so I make sure that I have enough. I've seen numerous buildings flattened by arty-- to the extent that I'm very careful about concentrating troops inside them. As for the leader not getting hit- sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. He was probably in sufficient cover to not get hit. Don't forget that in WWII immense amounts of small arms fire was pointed at the various participants, and only a small fraction actually hit anything besides the surrounding terrain. I've seen squads sit out huge amounts of fire for extended periods with little damage, and I've seen whole platoons in cover vaporized in two volleys from just two squads as if I had Star Trek phasers. There's a lot of dumb luck involved-the trick is using tactics that are relatively robust against fairly large amounts of bad luck, and noticing when you have some good luck and taking advantage of it.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by dalem: Hey chrisl, are your hands scarred from all that repetetive hot-stove-grabbing you did as a child??? If the first three tanks you bring too close to the woodsline die from Green schreckitude, what is it that makes you think the fourth will not?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> I actually stuck mostly to cold-fencepost-licking as a child. And it's only three tanks that the evil green schreck has gotten, not yet four. Clearly there is some sort of bug that has given you a crack shreck team, despite the "crummy" troop setting. BTS please fix or do somefink.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Juardis: you hate clowns?! One of the oldest and most revered professions in all the earth? and you hate them?!? I'll have you know that before there were even kinnigits there were court jesters! I agree that those the typical circus clowns can be most despised, but there are true artists around. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Clowns are evil. Suppose you're in the hospital, and you're lying there in bed, and a clown comes in. What does it mean? It means you have a terminal disease and will be dead in a week. Same with jesters-- you only need them to distract you from the fact that your empire/kingdom/duchy/estate whatever is on the verge of collapse and there will be peasants with torches and pitchforks clamoring for your head. And they'll have it before the weekend is out. And circuses-- that was part of a roman policy to distract the masses from the fact that the empire was collapsing and they were all going to rot their brains with lead poisoning. So, in reply to your comment about clowns, yes they are hated.

Well, now that mouse is incommunicado for a few days I suggest that we finish up this thread and start a new one before he reappears. We might even want to leave Peng out of the title of the next one so he can't find it.

Game updates: dalem is about to be crushed like a can of diced tomatoes (lightly salted). Despite a couple of lucky shots with his gamily hidden AT guns, my attack of green amis rolls onward. The arty has hardly begun to fall on his little dalem head. Why don't you park your AT guns in the open, like a good historical player? MrSpkr is afraid to send me a setup. Peng was threatening to send me a setup before I left for vacation, but I haven't heard a peep out of the pod since then. If he can get unpickled, and pry himself away from those lopsided tcp/ip games against Hiram/Phil, I might see a file from him.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Joe Shaw: Btw, Lorak, why isn't the A.I. a Knight? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Because it doesn't gloat when it wins or make excuses when it loses. It never shows up in the pool to challenge anyone, and it doesn't post mid-game reports of how much its opponents suck. I demand a taunt AI in CM2:BB!! BTS Please fix or do somefink!!!

There are only some 20,000 threads, but some 250,000 posts. The search engine on UBB is probably nowhere near as sophisticated as the average web search engine. Those don't search on demand for you, instead they have daemons that roam the web, indexing the contents of everything they find. When you type something in they just look in their index and spit out the contents. I find the opposite of what Shatter suggested works here on the board-- if I use one word then I get a response in a few minutes, if I use more than one my browser times out and says the document contained no data. I haven't found a way to change the browser time out (and I have a DSL connection, so my connection doesn't time out) but there may be something that can be changed in the UBB server software to make it go longer before timing out. You can also search using a regular browser, since they index the contents of the CM board, but you'll get a lot of responses from the original Peng thread, which contains just about everything worth searching for.

Some of the features requested in the original post can and do actually occur in CM (sort of), but they're rare for some of the reasons described as to why they shouldn't be there. If a unit encounters enough force to eliminate it quickly, the owner of the eliminated unit won't know anything other than that his unit was zapped. It first happened to me all the way back in the gold demo: I had a half-squad (maybe it was full) sneak over a small hillock and quite literally disappear. It turned out later that 3/4 or so of the men were casualties, and the rest captured. There was no indication of what caused it, and I continued to suffer casualties when I tried to get past there without spotting any enemy for a long time. In a few other instances I've had units essentially vaporized with no indication of the cause. It's more likely to happen when it's night, or foggy, or both. On a clear day that sort of thing isn't so likely, but in the fog you can lose a lot of units before getting any idea of the cause. Higher quality units are more likely to cause such things to your enemy, as well. I know it isn't precisely what was requested, but given the scope of CM: squad level representation of combat, with the basic unit of maneuver the platoon, and the capacity to play regiment sized battles, it's probably represented at about the right level. Unless you're playing the smallest possible battle, the idea of sneaking around and zapping the sentries isn't really necessary--if they're out in the woods where you're sneaking the troops through, then it's abstracted away. You can sneak a company or more up pretty close the MLR in many cases, and there were probably a few of phantom sentries killed/captured in the process. There's just no need to represent them, since they probably didn't have a radio or phone anyway. [ 08-10-2001: Message edited by: chrisl ]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Mace: Oi! I'll have you know that,Cristal, the only ladder I'm on is the one that gets me up to the roof of my house! <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> You know there's this stuff called phone cable (and relatives called ethernet cable and coax, depending on your connection). If you go out and buy some, or even steal it from a neighbor, you can extend the connection the the net down from the roof, and all the way into the house. If you steal enough cable then you can even run the line to any room of the house. That way you wouldn't have to stand on a ladder when you type. You're probably all the way up with both feet on the step that says "don't step on this one-it looks like a step but we didn't really mean it". That, or you could just sit on the roof and type. Beats the hell out of trying to type while standing tippy-toes on a ladder.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Mace: What's interesting is that the globe rotates on it's axis, and more interesting, it revolves around the sun. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> You're saying the world rotates around the Axis? I knew you were one of those übergerman players all along. You only play as germans, and then you always get nothing but smg squads and rickets. What a gamey bastard. I bet you're even on a bunch of ladders and always use "The System". Scum. Stick to the outerboard where you belong.