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Even if this is a problem, I don't think this is really worth worrying about. As it stands now, you can only change the composition of the gunfire once every minute anyway. If there isn't any delay, you can chalk it up to the FO calling the order in a few seconds before the end of the previous turn anyway. I can easily live with this particular abstraction.

The other thing that has often been discussed before on similar threads is that any decent gun crew will spike their gun before abandoning it. That would make recrewing the gun a bit pointless -- except maybe in operations.

Seconding the Gulf of Mexico comments, I will note that I have often seen fog rolling into Los Angeles (My 9th floor office has an ocean view :cool: ) very quickly. It can cover a mile in under five minutes sometimes. It really surprised me at first, but we definitely get fog an d (relatively) windy conditions at the same time. I wonder if that is peculiar to sea-based fog, though. I suppose that the fog that forms overnight due to local cooling in depressions tends to dissipate with wind, however. -- I wonder what release of CM will have fog only in the low-lying areas? Fog in the mountains I tend to think of as cloudy, so I see no conflict there.

Interesting. I'm playing a QB now where the AI seems content to let its T-34 site out on a rise in the Steppes and shoot at me at long range. (Of course, I have no, as in zero, anti-tank weapons. I am also attacking. I am about to see if squads can actually sneak up on a buttoned tank in the Steppes. It might be a slaughter).

Wouldn't levelling the playing field make it even worse?

I had a similar problem on my Mac with CMBO. If I recall clearly, it went away after updating video card drivers.

Thanks for the scenario editor trick.

A long time ago, I read an account by a British WWI army officer, in which he said that the experienced officers would always stick their chest and heads above the trenches to observe (at night), rather than just their heads. This was because the Germans had their machine guns pre-aligned to just clear the top of the British trench. If you just stuck your head up, you would get an almost certainly fatal head wound if shot. On the other hand, if you stood up higher, you could get a more survivable wound.

In last night's QB, I had a Russian armored car that ran out of MG ammunition. After that happened, it kept a targetting line on the enemy infantry and seemed to fire two more times. I certainly heard the MG fire. This occurred during the turn in which it ran out of ammunition. After that turn, everything worked as expected. Unfortunately, I only have a save file from after hitting "Done" on the playback.

Actually, this might make some sense. It is possible that certain seed values for a pseudo random number generator (the computer source of random numbers) can lead to very bad sequences of numbers. In some cases, it is possible to have a seed which ends up always giving you the same number. I don't know how the internals of CMxx are set up, but many programs that use random number generators will seed the number with the current time. If you by some odd coincidence got a bad seed, quitting the game and restarting it would use a different seed (since the time is later) which then fixes the problem.

First off, it may not even be true. Effects like this are often imagined. Second, if true, it may not be unrealistic. If you haven't started engaging the enemy yet, you may be more likely to keep your head down if you hear bullets whizzing by. If you've already determined that the enemy is enough of a threat to shoot at, then you may be harder to suppress. At this point, I would guess that the effect is an illusion, though.

I recently played (and lost -- to my 6-year old son) a Quick Battle. The curious part of it was that I ended up with a Veteran Volksturm Platoon in February 1945. What makes that curious is that when I went into the Scenario Editor later to see what such a thing costs, it wasn't available. Volksturm infantry was limited to Regular or lower quality. I'm not sure what to make of this, but it seems like the QB generator isn't quite as constrained with regard to quality as the scenario editor. (Anyway, I had 1 Vet Volksturm platoon plus another Panzerschreck -- like they needed anymore -- and an HMG to probe against 2 Polish Airborne platoons, a Vickers and barbed wire, roadblock, daisy chain and AP minefields. The terrain was flat with essentially no tree cover (I think there was one tile of scattered trees). The Volksturm were slaughtered.)

Seems reasonable enough behavior to me. I doubt one would want to stay on board a tank that was actively engaged in combat. First of all, it's LOUD, smokey and smelly. Second of all, the turret probably wants to start moving around. Third of all, tanks in combat tend to be bullet magnets. All sound like good reasons to panic.

I guess it isn't my day for getting details right. No, it wasn't February. I think it was sometime in summer. I got it confused with this morning's defeat at the hands of my 6-year old son :eek: in Networked CMBO.

That is quite impressive. Now that I think back, I realized that almost half of my troops were never even engaged in the battle.

I recall that one of my observations about CMBO was that it seemed that the defender didn't have enough of an advantage over the attacker. Attacking was easier than it perhaps should have been. That has been remedied with CMBB! Great job! In my first (non-demo) foray, I decided to try a fully random Quick Battle against the AI. I ended up with the Axis defending against a Soviet Assault in the Northern Front, in February. I had a Green baseline with a few regular and conscript troops, (2 understrength companies), a 75mm pillbox, a 75mm AT gun, 4 MGs (2each MG34 and MG42), 1 81mm on-map mortar, two AP minefields, three barbed wire (finally enough to do something) and a trench. No vehicles or FOs. I was attacked by a large force of veterans with 7 armored cars, and hordes of infantry. The results were not pretty. A lot of the infantry got hung up in the wire and the minefields (which were deviously placed in the only two tiles of cover in front of my MLR). (See image below). Many units had kill numbers in the high teens. I just wish I could find out how many casualties the minefields caused. Final score: 98:2 Now to try attacking next.

Unfortunately this doesn't work, because the host has to buy units before the game gets to the stage of allowing the client to connect. By the time the client learns about the parameters, it is too late.

Would this be easily mod-able? Could it be as simple as swapping the names on two files?

In my first attempt as the Russians, I set up a cross-fire just ahead of the river bed. The plan was to shoot from the woods on the Russian left flank, and reverse slope positions from the hills on the right flank. I had about 8 of the AT guns set up, roughly 4 on each side. I had one AT gun set to harrass (and hopefully ambush from the rear) near the front -- it didn't work. The tanks were supposed to pop up from the right flank and get side shots in on the Germans from behind the hills. The priority for the AT guns was to kill the PzIVs since that would pretty much eliminate the threat to my own tanks. The plan worked pretty well, although it turned out that I didn't check my AT gun placement as carefully as I should have. Some of my "reverse slope" deployments were visible from the front. Oops. In any case, the cross fire did allow for flank and rear shots, which disabled a number of the tanks. My HQ tank was taken out of the action with a gun hit after about 3 kills, but the remaining tank stayed active for the entire game. They played a cat and mouse game hunting up over the saddle between the hills, and then reversing out of sight. The AI never really did address that issue. (Of course, heading toward the tanks exposed the rear to AT guns, but mostly the AI seemed to have an "out of sight, out of mind" attitude toward the KV-1s -- a mistake that a human player would NOT make.) My infantry AT teams didn't do much. (At least I didn't think so, but apparently they did imobilize one Pz III in the road through the scattered trees. I saw it at the end of the game) I also managed to hit one PzIII with two Molotov cocktails, but it seemed to pretty much shrug them off -- Grrrr! The final reserve line never got breached. Only one or two German panzers made it into the riverbed, and they were dispatched by the KV-1s cleaning up stragglers.

The PowerBook G4 is a very nice machine. The screen is truly wonderful!

I wonder if the original problem had anything to do with there only being 400 points availble for the QB? Maybe there weren't enough points to be able to buy whole units at higher than green quality?

I would start with just about any of the Team scenarios. (Except Team Krempp -- it's nearly impossible even for experienced players). They are fairly small and short situations. Most of them are defenses, although some of them let you attack. One good plan would be to play through Team O'Hara or Team Ostle a couple times. The AI has more than one attack plan, so you would get some variety in defense. After you solve that puzzle, you can try Team Mcmains or Team Meyers, which are a little more challenging in their setup.

OK, I played Panzerblitz as a youth as well, but IIRC the T34/85 was a pretty mean tank unit. It was also the game that made me really like the Panther. The unit that was most deadly in Panzerblitz, but really wimpy in CMBO(!) are the Wespe and Hummel.

Well, I could live with the old bug, since one could easily avoid by gentlemen's agreement (we are all officers here, right?). But having it surface on the main screen is a bit hard to overlook. Anyway, I noticed that I didn't give a lot of background information in the original post. It was, indeed, a once fully identified squad that then disappeared.

The weapons graphic continues to show the NUMBER and type of gun even when the other information about the size of the formation is not shown. See screenshot below: