Jump to content

tar

Members
  • Posts

    753
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by tar

  1. Unfortunately, neither CMBB nor CMAK run under Parallels 3.0. This is even with the experimental DirectX 9 box checked. There are still some things missing that the CM.. series needs.
  2. I received the following link to a US Army Leavenworth papers study on tank destroyer doctrine in WWII: Leavenworth Papers No. 12 Seek, Strike, and Destroy: U.S. Army Tank Destroyer Doctrine in World War II by Dr. Christopher R. Gabel Combat Studies Institute U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 66027-6900 September 1985 http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/download/csipubs/gabel2.pdf
  3. Well, one proxy for casualties (as well as for how beat-up your forces are) is to keep an eye on your global morale number.
  4. And more specifically, a "Mountain Tank" (if such a thing had existed) would be termed a "Bergpanzer" (without the "e"). As for the derivation, the two terms have a slightly different route into modern high German, but share a very similar indogerman root word.
  5. And finally, don't forget that there is some asymmetry in the way you find out about casualties. When your own tanks get knocked out or abandoned, you find out about it immediately. When the same thing happens to the enemy (unless they explode and catch fire), you have to wait a while to find out. In the meantime, you and your tank crews will continue to think that the enemy tanks are threats and will continue to fire at them.
  6. It seems that the Stug-III's passenger capacity is a bit under-rated in CM:
  7. Of course if you want to be totally outrageous, there are these options as well: 42" 1920x1080 monitor 37" 1920x1080 monitor They are mildly pricey at $1750 / $1400 each.
  8. The standard Battlefront release of CMBO only comes with a printed manual. IIRC, the CDV version in Europe had only a minimal printed manual with the rest on disk. Later versions, I believe, came with on-line manuals, but not CMBO.
  9. Cameroon read my mind perfectly! Where it really gets to be an issue is when you have different priorities for fire support amongst different units. So, even though Red 1 could see the target and may even have a radio to call for fire support, the devious player would arrange for an FO without LOS, but with much higher priority, to call for map fire. The fire mission will be much more likely to be accepted, and probably more quickly. But this would be highly gamey, exploiting the multiple viewpoints available to a single player.
  10. I fear that having this available, particularly on the fly will just open the door to abuses. It has the potential to circumvent the entire relative spotting system. If you, as the player, can use one unit to see this road junction (and thus also see what is on it), and then switch to a forward observer who "magically" knows that this is the right time to shoot at this part of the map he can't see, you will have defeated the relative spotting system. In order to counteract such gamey moves, I would expect that the accuracy of unspotted artillery fire will have to be downgraded by more than in real life, since one will have a lot more information and especially information integration capability as a player than a real commander would have.
  11. These last posts have opened up some intriguing possibilities. About the pace of battle, this is perhaps one area where you really can get an advantage for the attacker. Since the attacker generally controls the pace of the action, the attacker can take the time to setup a hopefully coordinated set of movements and orders, whereas the defender will have to wait to see what develops before doing the same thing. This will make defense a bit more dicey, since there won't be time to analyze everything. It also makes it more likely that feints can be used, since the defender will often have to react (or not) without the luxury of a careful analysis of both where the action is, and also the other "quiet" parts of the front. Although perhaps not too likely in a game setting, a real time system may also provide some incentives to pull back on the attack and reorganize that are lacking in the current game, because you can pretty effectively reorganize while in contact, since you can provide orders to everyone at the same time. It will probably slow the pace down somewhat because it will now take a more realistic amount of time to provide orders to everyone. (I'm not saying that I like it, just that there may be some interesting effects and I'd like to keep an open mind.) Now, what about reports from the field? It would be a shame to have RT without the benefit of a staff to handle some of the communications issues, and alert you to what is happening in other parts of the game.
  12. Not to mention the question of where you will find the time to make precise measurements of the location of the tank destroyer, then move to another part of the map and organize a feint, and then return to exploit the problem in the defense. That would be a rather tall order. Now, the interesting question is really what sort of reports or alerts will be made available to the player/commander in real-time mode. In real life, hard-pressed units will not generally wait quietly to be overwhelmed, but rather they are likely to be screaming for help. Will the player also get such reports and requests? Of course, also in real life such reports are likely to be a bit exaggerated in their urgency. And units that are really heavily engaged may have more pressing matters[1] than reporting their sorry situation to higher headquarters. [1] Example of a more pressing matter: Just staying alive!
  13. There isn't really an on-line site, since the networking play option in the CM series is peer-to-peer. You need to arrange that one-on-one with an opponent. You could try the opponent finder forum.
  14. Throw away the CMAK preferences file. The game will then go through the process of picking a resolution again. (OK, in the future it would be nice if there were a menu or preferences option that would let you pick resolutions when the game starts up....)
  15. They do tend to panic easily if there is any combat action around them.
  16. Here is a reference I located: William M. Connor. Analysis of deep attack operations: Operation Bagration, Belorussia, 22 June - 29 August 1944 Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas March 1987. Available online at: http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/download/csipubs/connor.pdf
  17. Not sure how effective the camouflage is. It is, however, rather difficult to hide a tank at typical combat mission ranges. Unfortunately I don't know if tank profile affects spotting. It does affect to-hit chance for point fire weapons. Hull down makes your tank harder to hit and eliinates the chance of getting hits on the lower hull. The latter may or may not be an advantage. The "hide" command when given to tanks generally just assures the enemy of getting off the first shot at your tank. I don't think it is useful for vehicles at all. [OK, I'll soften this just a little bit. It may be useful against a human if you have your tank completely out of LOS and don't want to reveal the presence of vehicles through a sound contact.]
  18. Also, you need to keep in mind that when playing CMAK with fog of war enabled, that you will not necessarily know exactly when you have KO'd an enemy tank. Unless it blows up or catches fire, you generally have to wait until the crew actually bails out before you (and your forces) realize that the enemy tank is destroyed. You may also be able to observe this phenomenon from the other side when you notice the enemy continuing to fire at and hit tanks that have already been destroyed, and whose crews are trying to get out.
  19. Hear, hear! I would think that LOS computations would really be the realm of graphics processors. They certainly aren't an AI problem. The AI problem that dominates is the inabiliity of programs to come up with a good overall plan, the inability to recognize plans being executed by the human opponent, and the inability to try to mount deceptive operations. Terrain analysis tends to be another weak point, at least at the level where it helps to inform the actions of the AI as far as identifying good routes of advance and strong defensive positions.
  20. Well, consider it the other way around. How would you feel if you had the tank and the other side had the infantry team. Wouldn't you feel robbed if you didn't get the flag?
  21. The nearest gun also appears to have a dent in the barrel, presumably from some sort of "gun hit".
  22. Well, in OS X, the "Create Archive" command in the finder produces zip files. I don't off hand recall which subversion of OS X that appeared in, but it was certainly in 10.3 and 10.4.
  23. Depends a bit on your platform. If you are on a Mac, the print dialogs have options to save as PDF right out of the box. On a PC, it's a bit trickier. Adobe Acrobat is one method, but there are likely to also be some free methods. Unfortunately, I don't normally use Windows, so I can't give exact advice, but a Google search should turn up something. In any event, I bet you could find someone with a Mac willing to do the conversion for you.
  24. Did the ammo improve? Was there a (small?) change in the penetration numbers?
×
×
  • Create New...