chrisl

It takes a real effort sometimes, but even when I think I can see a bunch of nice targets I try to leave at least one of the defenders without an assigned target. I've been burned a few times by target stickiness, where if I had left them alone they would have switched from target to target in an appropriate way and done a better job of defense. Even knowing this, it's really hard. Another thing that's hard is refraining from popping a tank up over a hill, firing a few shots, and reversing. Often it's better to wait until the enemy walks into an ambush (Enemy tanks always seem to have radar and get off a lot of shots when I pop up, frequently brewing up my tanks).

timbuktu works for both PC and Mac (and interoperates between them). It's used for remote system administration, as well as things like using your desktop machine when on the road. Unfortunately it's true that it doesn't let you provide restricted access to remote users (either they can control your machine or they can't) except under NT, where you can make them an NT User with limited access, but you can't run CM on NT.

Nice being on the west coast-- I get to dl it before the refreshing monkies tie up the site in the morning.

I use both-- at work I have a dual processor Wintel machine (I used to need it for CAD stuff, which I do less of now), plus a Powerbook that I share with a few other people. At home I have a powerbook that has MacOS, Linux, and Softwindows on it, so I can deal with just about anything. I can even run AutoCAD under Softwindows, it's just a little slow... I rarely, if ever, have trouble moving stuff between machines.

I tried miniatures a few times- even got some little guys and glued them down on carboard, but they took forever to play, and it ate up the whole basement, which was also occupied by HO trains and a workbench, so things got crowded. We often played Car Wars as a miniatures thing with matchboxes. That's a fun game, and is going to force me to get a Playstation2 just so I can do the car combat thing (although living in LA I suppose I could do that anyway...)

Played a whole bunch of them: Started out with Wooden Ships and Iron Men (I think I got it for xmas in 1976-- it has a "special bicentennial edition" thing on it). Played a bunch of Tactics II ( a friend had it) Lots of Third Reich, Fortress Europa, The Russian Front, Circus Maximus (first person shooter with cardboard counters). You mentioned Bismarck-- I had forgotten about that-- played that a bunch. Submarine was another favorite, but a pain to play solo. Lots of Squad Leader-- have SL+the 3 gamettes, way too much investement for a teenager to have to start over with ASL (I could afford it now, but don't have the time, plus now I have CM). Also a big Diplomacy fan. When I lived in Germany school was pretty undemanding, so a bunch of us played Dip every weekend for about 8 months. Also played by email some-- the email dip community is very well developed. A friend of mine really liked Kingmaker, it always was a little dull. Looking back, it would have been better with more people. Rail Baron, Starship Troopers, the list goes on...I think I still have about 20 games in my mom's basement, in addition to the dozen or so that I drag along whenever I move. On top of all those I played a whole mess of fantasy roleplaying games, but mostly stopped when Dungeons and Dragons started getting really popular in the middle/high school crowd because I thought the people who played it were too weird. Played mostly SL after that. Oh yeah, almost forgot-- I have Panzerleader and Panzerblitz, but never played much because I got them after SL and they don't compare. [This message has been edited by chrisl (edited 07-23-2000).]

How did you get a tobgue into your cheek?

I hate to say it, but if you had done a search your'd find that this is at least the second thread about the amazing powers of Lt. Stahler.

That's nothing. I've already seen zombies in CM (at least in the gold demo). I sneaked an Ami half squad over a little bump, heard a lot of gunfire, and they disappeared.... A few turns later I see a single guy walking bold upright, and kind of slow (dragging his feet a little, even, with his hands forward) headed for the big german hill. When I moved the camera in really close I could hear him saying "must eat brains". No doubt about it, but the germans shot him and revived him as some kind of flesh eating zombie. The detail that those guys put into this game is incredible.

Bucholz station spoiler * * * * * * * * * * * * * * I just played Bucholz station as well, and hardly had any contact with the germans. Around turn 9 I eliminated a german squad, but that was it. My only losses were a truck that bogged (in the road!) and subsequently immobilized itself, causing the crew to bail. One difference between the CM scenarion design and the original is that the victory conditions in the SL scenario specify that the germans must exit *via the roads* on the south edge. If the exit area were restricted to the roads then an ami defender would have some idea how to move, and there would at least be some contact. I ended up winning 98-2 (the truck was counted as lost). The german had 9 casualties, but failed to exit any units as the AI was trying to sweep them around on the east and they all got too tired.

A couple of companies per side with get you into the hundreds of guys range, once you add in all the support weapons and a few vehicles. That's a pretty typical size scenario. In one scenario I'm playing it looks like about a battallion of infantry and 25-30 vehicles per side. It takes a while to do the calculations, and the movie files are huge, but there's no problem playing on my 300 MHz PPC laptop. When the scenarios are that big it's fun to turn on movement paths and target lines at the same time to get some feeling of the amount of activity and confusion. Red lines everywhere...

It just struck me that you could play hotseat over TCP/IP with a program like Timbuktu if you have it.... It would require some sort of honor system, so that the players wouldn't watch each others moves, but it could work. [This message has been edited by chrisl (edited 07-22-2000).]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by OberGrupenStompinFeuhrer!: This thought has occured to me before, as I'm sure it has to many others. No idea if this is possible or practical, but topo lines <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> I think it's actually been discussed nearly to death here. It's probably pretty impractical to make topo lines like you see on a real topo map, since they'd take some time to compute, and would probably be more than a bit ugly. The issue I was trying to raise was whether they'd be considered unrealistic. A 1:24000 map (commonly available in the US-- free download from USGS) doesn't have good enough resolution to find a hull down position, but it will certainly give you a good impression of the terrain.

Just to be difficult: How about some topo lines... I know this has been discussed, and there are plenty of reasons not to have them (major CPU hit), but would people claim that they're unrealistic? Most maps that I use have both topo lines and grids (and I sometimes add finer detail to the grids with a pencil). How about UTM coordinates? Would be very useful for discussing games, not terribly useful for much else-- I can already use the terrain squares to judge distance pretty well. Height is a little tougher (because I'm stuck with 640x480?). One thing that I've often wondered, and not seen here, is the availability of good topo maps of France/Germany in 1944-45 (to each side). Today we can use things like SRTM to map the entire plant to ~40 m resolution in about 2 weeks, and when I combine that with a cheap GPS I know where I am to within a few meters. Even with map and compass I can estimate pretty well where I am. If I had to do it every day I'd probably be very good and very fast at it. What was available then, mapwise, and in what quantity? Most of the maps I see in the US Army historical site are rough sketches, with no topo information-- are these things that were made later to figure out what rally happened?

One very minor thing that would be useful for bragging rights is to indicate the turn on which it ended. Right now the turn counter goes to "--" and if I want to show off that I won VoT as Germans in the first turn no one will believe it (not like I can do it anyway).

The two aren't mutually exclusive. There was one installment of MDMP released for the mac, and there may be a few other mods floating about, but they aren't widely publicized. If you're reasonably talented with some of the low level guts of the mac (resource editing, which isn't all that hard) and have time to spare in between CM games, you could probably contribute to the conversion of the newer MDMP volumes-- talk to MadMatt. As for your sanity, that's an entirely separate issue, and can probably be determined from the amount of time you spend playing CM and whether you yell at your electronic guys (and whether they yell back at you...)

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by panzerwolfy: I seen some of the post about new explosion, where do I find it? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> If you have 1.01 it will come to you. You may need to turn on high quality smoke (haven't checked), but it's in there.

Nice work! Now it's time to quiz you (because I wanna know how it works): did you do any fire effectiveness tests? My guess so far is that the firepower experienced by the subject is the firepower*exposure, but it's not clear if there's a distinction between exposure of reflected photons and exposure to absorbed lead, i.e the difference between concealment and cover. As an example, a hedge might offer virtually no cover, but possibly 100% concealment. Is this abstracted into a single number that reflects the reduced probability of directing the fire into the right place to poke a hole through the twigs and hit the target? My guess is that the answer is yes, but I haven't tried any tests. Maybe this weekend if you don't beat me to it.

My impression so far is that when one side is recommended over the other it's because there's some special thing that the other side has that would be a spoiler for you to already know about when you had to play against it. The pillboxes and panther in VoT are a good example. I think it's much more challenging to play the Germans in that one, but it's a big surprise to crest a hill and get popped by a concrete box.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Fionn: Just wait until you see someone with one of those tanks on their back from which they spray insecticide. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> LOL - I have to pedal past guys with leafblowers on their backs on the way to work every morning. It's not quite a flamethrower, but it is a high velocity garbage thrower.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Henri: A possibly good solution proposed on the Usenet forum is to allow the Tiger to "see" the enemy tank for some time after it disappears from sight, so that it "knows" that there is a hidden threat. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Targeting is already pretty sticky - I just had a tank that was tracking an enemy unit at long range maintain lock after the unit was behind a building (quite a ways back--maybe 100 m the other side of the building). I had a unit inside the building, and the tank opened fire on the unit behind the building, striking the building and setting it afire. Really annoying, as my unit in the building was well hidden and could have remained so, but had to get the hell out and get shot by a whole bunch of nearby enemy units.

Wanna PBEM? I can do about a turn a day-- my email is in my profile. I prefer double blind, so either a quick battle (combined arms preferred) or pick a scenario and I'll tell you if I've played it (I've only played a few).

try showing topics from more days ago (popup menu above the list of topics).

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by toshiro: How do you turn off the intro movie? I bypassed it by holding the space bar. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> hold down shift right after you double click on combat mission to launch it, and keep it down until you see the main menu screen.

If you're like the rest of us you'll just leave the CM CD in your drive and remove it on those rare occasions when you want to do something else.