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Clearly BORG spotting happens during the turn as well. That is why high value targets (like flamethrowers and mortars) almost instantly draw tons of fire when they get spotted and identified. BFC have always acknowledged that Borg spotting exists and will disappear in the next game. There is some reaction penalty given to buttoned vehicles, but that is independent of the Borg spotting issue.

You generally ignore it. In game terms, a killed vehicle or soldier has the same impact as one who "found something better to do" for the duration of the battle. They aren't useful to you in accomplishing your mission. If you wanted to graft some sort of longer campaign, then you would need to come up with something, but as it stands right now, the casualties are not differentiated. While you can't engage in speculative suppressive fire, you can assign direct fire TRPs (is that what they're called?) Anyway, you can have units concentrate on a particular location, which will make it more likely that they will engage enemy units there.

And have you recovered enough by now to post the results?

Well, buttoned (and by extension tanks w/o commanders) do have degraded reactions. There is still some Borg spotting effects, of course, but buttoned vehicles do have some awareness penalties. You should also be sure that the crew is not still shaken when they crest the hill. That will also reduce their reaction time. It is not required that a buttoned vehicle be engaged before it notices something. Although having shells hit your vehicle does certainly command attention. This may also be a situation where giving explicit targetting orders becomes necessary. You can actually give them targets which are out of line of sight that way. It will keep the target for a little while in the hopes that it will soon be in LOS. But this is a temporary effect.

It seems that the virtualization software for the Macintel systems isn't quite there yet for gaming purposes. From MacWorld Online Magazine Their review of the opensource Q project indicates that it is much less advanced, although it does offer some sound and video card emulation choices. The graphics seem to be the following "Cirrus CLGD 5446 PCI VGA card or dummy VGA card with Bochs VESA extensions (hardware level, including all non standard modes)." I don't know if that would work with any CMxx products. The recommendation seems to be that Apple's BootCamp is currently the only option for running games. Disclaimer: I don't have an Intel Mac, and haven't been able to try any of this myself.

Well, for starters, it helps if you increase the number of turns available in the QB. That removes some of the time pressure. And as one of the other posters indicated, concentration of firepower on a small part of the defense is vital. As the attacker, you get to choose the point of attack. You have to make use of that flexibility. [Aside: Against the AI, the concentrated attack is actually excessively effective, since it will often send troops out of dug-in positions into sometimes suicidal counter attacks.]

Really? Apple's website claims that the MacBook and MacBook Pro will take advantage of paired memory configurations (same size in both slots). The iMac and Mac mini don't have any such claims, however.

Well, you probably don't need to switch from OS 9 in order to do EMail. If you use Yahoo mail, you should be able to read it from a web browser. You just need to locate one of the OS 9 browsers and run that. Either that or get one of the other OS 9 mail clients and use it for EMail. But I would think a web-based solution would be easier. If you find it too difficult to keep the EMail straight, then perhaps it would be worthwhile getting another one of the free EMail accounts to use only for PBEM and access that from OS 9 alone.

Well, you will have to figure out how to access the router to configure it. Then you will have to setup port forwarding. This works most easily if you assign a static address to your computer. Again, this is a configuration option -- you can probably arrange to have the router always give the same "dynamic" address to a given machine on the LAN. Port forwarding is a must if you want to play from behind a router. A more drastic option on some routers is a so-called DMZ function, where a chosen computer is given all of the outside traffic. Otherwise, you need to get your friends to come over and play on your local network.

They can also remove daisy-chain mines without needed demo charges. Other mine fields require the use of demo charges, so once the engineer (or Pioneer) squads run out of explosives, their ability to eliminate non daisy-chain minefields goes away.

If your guys are always getting pinned, and the enemy doesn't seem to be, then you are probably pushing your infantry too hard. In fact, by and large, real-world tactics (not Hollywood tactics) do work well in this game. You do have to be a bit careful and can't just charge in. And you have to get used to the soldiers sometimes seeking cover rather than follow what they think are foolish and dangerous orders. If you find them not following orders a lot, then you need to find better orders for them. It takes a while to get a good feel for when you have sufficiently softened up the enemy so that you can assault. (I just blew it in a game against the AI and got slaughtered when I assaulted what I thought was a pinned German parachute squad. It wasn't) What is important is figuring out how to properly combine and operate the various types of units and weapons that you have. Compounding this is the lack of information due to Fog of War. You can't directly see the morale state of enemy troops, so there is both some guesswork and some experience needed to gauge that. For example, you have to observe how much time the enemy spends face-down. You also have to realize that the visual representation of infantry units is abstacted. If you set the 3-man squads option, then the display (once you get close enough) will show one figure for every 4 men in the squad. That gives you some idea. Also, unless you get very close, you won't see the actual count and casualties. That one man charge could have easily been several men, who did suffer casualties on the way in. It is also possible that the unit had turned fanatic. It happens, and then they tend to fight to the last man and be very hard to suppress. And your protestations to the contrary, I don't think you have learned how to operate the forces in this game. It requires some subtlety and thought. It requires planning. And it requires patience, to work forces up without pushing them too hard. And once your troops are pinned, then won't be able to provide effective firepower and are vulnerable to getting shot up, panicked and broken. From the forces you describe it sounds like you have CMBB. Do you really have trouble with the tutorial for that game, while following the instructions? It isn't a walk-over, but it is certainly a scenario that is very difficult for the Germans to win playing against the AI (which is a notoriously bad attacker). Winning as the Russians should be fairly easy, especially if you follow the tutorial instructions. (The CMAK tutorial is more challenging!) Perhaps if we knew a bit more about exactly what sorts of commands you like to give your troops, we would be able to give more specific advice. A few other points. You need to differentiate between sound contacts and real contacts. Generally you shouldn't give a lot of specific targetting orders. Let your men pick their own targets. Later on you will know when to override their choices, but for now let the soldiers choose. Something else you could try (although I really hesitate to recommend it, since it will make learning other valuable lessons difficult) is to play a game with the FOW turned off entirely. It will at least let you see what effect, if any, you are having. =================== One thing to do is look in the game-specific forums and search out some of the amazingly long posts by JasonC. Use the search function. He gives very detailed instructions on how to handle the infantry. I see that you are at least somewhat familiar with his posts, but it would be worthwhile going back to them, since you clearly haven't internalized them. By the way, if you actually lost a tank to a Molotov cocktail, you have my condolences. They seem to be one of the most useless weapons in the game...

Airlanding units vs. paratrooopers. The airlanding units were not jump-trained and as noted above were expected to land either on transport aircraft stopping at airfields or on gliders. Airlanding vs. normal infantry. They were "lighter" units, particularly as regards to the heavier weapons. I would expect to see more pack howitzers and other smaller caliber artillery. Unlike late war infantry units that often had organic armor support, airlanding units would not be able to have such luxuries. Of course, since at least for the Axis, many of the parachute, etc. units ended up being employed as regular infantry rather than in an air assault role, the actual support weapons would have gotten heavier since air transport was no longer a concern.

Hmmm. So it seems that using small caliber guns against pillboxes seemed to work in real life as well as CM. Although I suspect that either the pillbox in question didn't have AT guns or else they were engaged in shooting at something else. (Although the author does mention enemy shells flying past.)

You didn't accidentally get a Mac CD by mistake, did you?

Not to dispute the central point JasonC makes, but the sortie count for Normandy is a bit exaggerated. Taking statistics from http://afhra.maxwell.af.mil/aafsd/aafsd_index_table.html I find that from Table 128, that there were 11,320 Bombing and Strafing sorties flown by fighter aircraft in all of June, 1944 in ETO. Fighter losses in June 1944 were 540, of which 147 were attributed to enemy aircraft, 226 to AAA, and 167 due to "other causes." (Table 159) This is not broken down by type of sortie, but I would imagine that ground attack aircraft were more susceptible to loss due to AAA than enemy aircraft. Keep in mind that the loss statisitics also include losses of escort fighters in the strategic bombing campaign. The official claims of the Ninth Air Force in regard to ground target destruction are in table 197. The source is listed as Ninth Air Force, Statistical Control Unit, so I will presume that these have not been correlated with German loss figures. For the Normandy campaign (6-Jun to 25-Jul), the claims (among others) are for 1,945 motor transport, 155 Armored vehicles and tanks, 194 locomotives, 2,117 railroad cars and 365 horse drawn vehicles. They claimed a lot more for the pursuit across Northern France... This needs to be correlated with the data presented above WRT actual German losses. Note that this covers only the US air forces, but they represented the bulk of the air power. BTW, the relevant tables are in the "Operations" section.

But if you think you might want to do this, the editor allows you to have the computer randomly generate a map for you. It doesn't have the same surprise factor as a randomly-generated QB map, but it does allow you to edit it as much as you like.

But did Rommel, in fact, move his mobile 88mm guns around on the battlefield in the time scale of a typical CM battle?

I did some testing of this a while ago. I suppose I can try to look up the thread with search, and I discovered that although the intent (and the officially stated BFC position) is that going faster should make things worse, that is not what I found in my (admittedly somewhat smallish tests). The chance per unit time of bogging is higher when moving fast, but the chance per unit distance is lower. In other words, the increase in bogging chance does not fully compensate for the greater distance moved over the same period of time. === Ah, found it: Well, in my previous test, I found the numbers somewhat close, but with an edge to the fast or hunt moving. This was based on admittedly limited numbers of test cases in CMBB on different terrain types in wet weather. I have seen Moon's claim that Charles had taken care of this in the past, but it seems that almost all of the empirical tests indicate that whatever fix was made did not completely get rid of the issue. In my test I used 80 vehicles (40 at each speed half Pz IVE and half Pz VIE) and had the following results: Summary: Slow movement 26 incidents of bogging, 7 immobilizations, mean distance before immobilization 265m Fast movement 18 incidens of bogging, 7 immobilizations, mean distance before immobilization 370m The details can be found here: http://www.battlefront.com/discuss/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=7;t=001545;p=1#000000

Here is a link to a short description of taking out a German bunker on Omaha beach: Taking out a bunker.

I found that this doesn't seem to help. In fact, I think it is counter productive. While it is perhaps true that it will take longer (in time) for a vehicle to bog while going slow (Move command), it will go farther before bogging (in distance) if you go fast (Fast command). So, I hardly ever use the Move command for vehicles. Fast or Hunt seem to work better for me.

He's one of my colleagues. Actually, if you want more details on the entire set of Tactical Language simulations look at Tactical Language News Story or the project home page. For more information on new approaches to military training simulations which incorporate ideas from commercial sims, you can check out USC's Institute for Creative Technologies

Not if you had to wait 40 years for supply to deliver an AT-4 to you.

You might want to try setting up a bit further from the road. Being within 1-5m of the road in the woods doesn't let your infantry hide very well. As long as they are within about 20m of the road, they will be able to use their grenades and close assault, and they will be harder to spot. If you can, it would be good to have additional infantry, or preferably an MG at some greater distance to force the armor (HT or tank) to button up. That also reduces the spotting ability of the armor and makes the ambush more effective. It will also strip the tanks of any riders farther away from your ambush zone.

CMBO will use software rendering in Classic, but that only works if you remove the "Classic RAVE" extension. You will need to do this after starting up OS X, because the boot sequence for OS X will detect the absence of the extension and re-install it. So, what you need to do is start OS X, then remove the extension from the Classic system folder, and then start up Classic. That will get you the 640x480 display size. I've used this successfully for PBEM games when rebooting into OS 9 wasn't practical, but it isn't the greatest experience. Note to others: This will only work with CMBO. CMBB and CMAK will not run at all under OS X/Classic.

Not really. At least not if BFC is using the XCode environment. It will build applications for both PPC and Intel hardware. And the OS interface is the same regardless of processor. So is the graphics, so it really shouldn't matter. But I understand the caution.