Mikester
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Posts posted by Mikester
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Like Black Sabot, I often have slack periods of time here at work. Some I'm probably here at a minimum of 2-3 times a day from work. After work I check in probably an average of once a day. One weekends, probably 1-2 times per day.
Mikester out.
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Another good website that I recently found is called curiously enough:
Imagine that. The battle actually has its own website. I believe it's run by a guy that is over in the Netherlands and he seems to have a lot of good info on his site. This is quite a large website and I havn't had time to look through it all yet. I believe I saw some OOB type info in there though that gave info on German Kampfgruppe's that participated in the battle as well as English paratroop units. The American units didn't seem to be in there, but maybe I just wasn't looking in the right place.
Mikester out.
PS: Go to the statistics button on the menu on the left of the main webpage when you get to it to access the OOB and other related info. Looks like they have info on the British, Polish, and German formations that fought in the battle.
Also, the library button takes you to a nice listing of recommended books on the battle. The most recent one on there that I've read is It Never Snows in September. It's written by an English author who did a fair amount of research and interviews w/ German personnel that actually fought in the battle. The entire book is written from the German perspective on the battle which is quite enlightening after having been bludgeoned over the head w/ the typical Anglo-American accounts of the operations that most of us have read. Very highly recommended.
[This message has been edited by Mikester (edited 06-09-2000).]
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Guys,
If you are worried about your credit card info being out of date I believe a recent thread stated that BTS will be sending you a notice before/when they start processing orders and shipping out.
If you are really worried, or are certain that your credit card info is not good for whatever reason, I believe that same thread stated that you could send steve an email at:
steve@battlefront.com (hope this is right??).
Mikester out.
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Steve/BTS,
I like the single place to come to get/see all CM related info. However, the seperate page for the tech support type issues sounds like a nice way to break things down a bit. So I could see breaking it into the 2 parts your are thinking about as being a good idea.
Mikester out.
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ONWARD men!!!
I've got intel that in addition to the game disks being in MadMatt's hideout that he's got a keg of beer in there too. (Mmmmmm, beer).
Fix bayonets, ready grenades, get your tankards out, let's rock and roll. Time to get us some disks and brewski's mates.
Mikester out.
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I believe Maximus is correct on all accounts. Except for the fact that I'm pretty certain that the status of the battle has absolutely nothing to do with when the reinforcements come in.
There are basically two modes that can be set by the scenario designer to control this. First, he can say that they come in on turn X regardless of anything else that might have happened.
Second, is that he can say starting on turn X there is a Y% chance that the reinforcements will show up. Orginally this percentage was going to be fixed. Say the scenario designer set it to 20%. Howver, I believe I recently read someone in the "know" state that the percentage will actually increase slightly each turn, until the reinforcements arrive. I don't know if this something like 5% increments each turn, or what though. So next turn after the intial 20% chance if they didn't show up the new probability of showing up becomes 25%, etc.
Mikester out.
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Actually, I'd heard the DOJ just plain plans on locking up Steve and Charles. This is due to the fact that 1 in 3 government employees have now downloaded the Gold Demo and spend all of their time at work playing the game instead of wasting their time on the usual worthless governmental nonsense that they normally do.
Mikester out.
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All right Mikey!!!!!
This will provide a good softening up of MadDogMatt and his pals prior to our assault on the mountain.
Go ahead and just send those guys on up to Vermont right now. It's a small state after all. Just have them start bombing all of the mountainous areas up there. They're bound to hit his MadNess sooner or later.
Mikester out
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The setup phase is the single most important segment of the game in my opinion. Especially if you are the defender.
Screw up your set-up and you could be toast. Also, it's hard to find just the right little places to hide those Schrecks, AT guns, etc.
Time to do this depends on how many units you have and the size of the map. Also, depends on whether you've played it before and your familiarity with the map.
1st time I played VoT against a human opponent I took about 20-30 minutes. This was after playing VoT once against the computer. Now I'm down to about 10-15 minutes just because I understand the terrain alot better after battling across it and know what units I have and where I want to put them for the most part.
Mikester out.
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Ah Ha, now we know that it really is Steve's garage!!
This ruse of a mountain retreat will not work on us BTS / MadMatt! We will storm the house anyways. The CD's must be there, we saw the truck (or was this yet another ruse to make us believe that they were there???
) We will move out tonight. If we find nothing then we will at least have had the satisfaction blowing something up (i.e. the weasel). This may sound needless, but then we are the same bunch that sat at our computers on the CM webpage continuously hitting the refresh/reload buttons on our web browsers like "a bunch of monkey's" awaiting the announcment of where to download the Gold Demo, right? 
After that we will search out and find this mountain retreat!Just in case we need to storm the mountain we will need more help. Volunteers take one step forward. It will take at least a platoon and HQ to storm this mountain stronghold. And anyone with ties to the Confederate airforce let me know. We could use some support from some P-47's and 51's to soften up MadDogMatt and his friends before we attack! We will need demo charges to blow the wire and probably the mines that his Madness has laid out to welcome us as well. Get ready men. Onwards with our most holy quest to find the holy grail of wargames.
Mikester out.
PS: We'll need beer too, someone please bring some.
[This message has been edited by Mikester (edited 06-08-2000).]
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I believe the "warehouse" is Steve's garage in actuality. Recon from various partols reports movement of heavy supplies in and out of there recently. In addition intel reports a drop of boxes from a truck there yesterday. Name on the side of the truck was ACME CD Copying Service Inc. The weasel is parked in the front driveway and has been modified with the addition of a 50cal MG and a sentry manning it 24 hours a day.
I say we should form into two squads. We will assault the garage and free the little CM disks at night. First squad will sneak into positions to make a frontal assualt and then wait. The second squad will infiltrate to the enemies rear through some woods at the back of the house and begin attacking the back of the garage at 01:30 hours attempting to gain entrance to the garage via the rear and creating a diversion. When the sentry is distracted by this and goes to investigate the team waiting in the front will charge forward. Satchel charge will blow up the weasel and 50cal (sorry Steve, it had to die sometime
) and then they will gain entrance to the garage and free the imprisoned disks.I just hope there are no snipers on the roof or a flamethrower team hidden in the back of the garage. Ouch.
So, uh, Steve, you might want to send the wife and kids over to the mother-in-laws place for a few days or something. Wouldn't want to have any collateral damage or anything like that. Err, well, except for the weasel that is.
Mikester out.
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The "acceptable" casualty rate that I've always thought of is that the minimum number of casualties should be incurred in order to meet the objectives that you were ordered to take / meet. I.e. all objective flags taken, all units exited specified edge of map in time given, etc. The question is, what is the minimum number, right?
Mikester out.
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Black Sabot is right. I forgot about the ambush marker being available to the AT gun in the bunker.
Mikester out.
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This seems like a good idea to me. If you can rotate free standing AT guns and guns like that 150mm monstrosity, then you should be able to give a rotate to this direction order to an AT gun in the bunker. Of course the rotation would have to be restricted to within the firing arc allowed by the bunkers firing slit. Maybe this is why they didn't do it already?
Mikester out.
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Patboivin,
Did you just issue your troops a movement order toward the Panther, or a move order plus a targeting order which locked a targeting line onto the Panther. You can do both at once and I've done this many times with tanks vs. any type of target and infantry vs. other infantry type targets, but never tried it with infantry against tanks. Since I havn't tried to do what you suggested yet, I'm not sure if that would work. Also, if none of the squads had any real AT capability (bazooka, satchel charge, etc.) they may have been remiss to engage the tank, ergo why they stood there. They went where you told them to and what else were they supposed to do? Throw rocks at the thing and maybe crack off a few rounds. And since the Panther didn't see them, or decide to attack them, for whatever reasons they just continued to stand there. I'm not sure I'd necessarily call this a bug. In fact, I might actually think it was just plain insanity
Mikester out
[This message has been edited by Mikester (edited 06-06-2000).]
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Thanks for the info your Madness.
Mikester out.
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Jeff and Max,
I seem to recall BTS saying they were not going to get into this type of thing. But I do seem to remember that Fionn and Madmatt most certainly will. I think a few others have said they will probably have scenarios available on their websites as well. What I want to know is if CMHQ or BTS will at least be a place where we can go to a page to get a listing of all the links to the other pages where we can get scenarios. Steve, Charles, Fionn, Your Madness?
Mikester out.
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Londoner,
Tree splintering is a bit too detailed to model in a game like this. But yes, artillery airbursts exploding up in the tree tops are in and they are quite nasty too.
You'll know them when they happen if you have a camera view like camera angle 2 and you pan out so you can see above your guys in the trees. When the mortar/other rounds start coming in you'll actually see the little blast spheres expanding up in the tree tops where the shells are exploding. Really bloody damn cool stuff. And for the larger caliber artillery shells you can actually see the shell falling out of the sky and slamming into whatever unfortunate thing it happens to hit.And all of this is just the tip of the iceberg. Try doing a search for a topic that was posted not too long ago called something like: "What have we seen" if I'm remembering correctly. It will give you a great idea of just how much detail there is in this game.
Mike D
aka Mikester
[This message has been edited by Mikester (edited 06-03-2000).]
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Graybeard,
Do a search on the following:
GD won't extract
I believe that is the thread that krm and I are remembering where some folks were having problems similar to yours. Hopefully reading this will help you.
Mike D
aka Mikeser
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Graybeard,
God whatever you do, don't buy a MAC.
I believe krm is correct. Some people were having problems opening the download file and got around it by first starting PKZIP, or PKWinZip and then opening the file. Do you have either of these programs? If not, they are generally pretty easy to find on the internet. Just do a websearch on pkzip or winzip (I recommend getting the winzip version since you have Win98) and you should be able to find somewhere to download. I think it's about 1MB in size.
Mike D
aka Mikester
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Hi Allan,
As Lanzfeld mentioned above, there have been at least 1 or 2 very large, and quite detailed, discussions on this in the past. It will not be incorporated into the game as I recall. If you want more info do a search on sand, sandbag, sandbags, and similar terms and I'm sure you'll find it.
Mikester out.
[This message has been edited by Mikester (edited 06-03-2000).]
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Can't remember where I read it. But I'm almost absolutely positive that the Germans (maybe it was the Americans?) used the tactic of shining the spot lights off the clouds during the Battle of the Bulge.
Mikester out.
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For those that might be interested.
The latest resurrection of the white phosphorus debate got me looking for some info I'd read a while back. I couldn't find it, but did come across some other info that pertains to 2 other discussions that have come up before.
1) Use of flares for illumination at night. CM doesn't currently have this as I recall because it is generally believed that flares were mostly used for signalling purposes. However here is an exception as describe in "Order of Battle Series, The Ardennes Offensive" by Bruce Quarrie:
"This was defended by the CCA of the 7th Armored Division, which had already had one encounter with 9 SS-Panzer Division outside St. Vith, and was now starting to pull out as part of a planned northeasterly withdrawal to straighten and shorten the American lines. After a short, very confused fire-fight ilumminated soley by flares, Wisliceny's force broke through at Manhay. The road to Granmenil and Erezee lay open." (p. 67)
This would seem to indicate that there were cases where flares were used for illumination purposes during night battles.
2) The use of the POZIT proximity fuse has also been raised before. Here is a real example of it actually being used in combat as found in same source noted above on p. 87:
"In the first place, Kaschner did not have a whole division for the attack, but only three battalions; one of the others was late arriving, one had gone to help 272 Volksgrenadier division to the notrh, and one was too far away, having been relieved at Wahlerscheid only hours before the assault. In the second place the Americans, having been there for a month, were well dug-in with overlapping fields of fire. And in the thrid place, seeing the German attack developing, the CO of the 405th Field Artillery Group, Col. Oscar Axelson, too the bold step of ordering his 196th Battalion to use the still top-secret POZIT proximity fuze. This made the high explosive shells burst overhead the German infantry, causing a degree of panic as well as horrendous casulaties (Kaschner lost 20% of his assault force on the first day)."
So there is some evidence to support the notion that POZIT fuses were actually used in combat as well.
Do either of these stories indicate that these actions were taken on a "regular" basis? Probably not, but they do show us that flares were actually used for illumination purposes in order to fight at night and the POZIT fuses did see actual use in at least one real combat situation in the ETO during the war.
Mike D
aka Mikester
PS: Still looking for that WP info.
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Exact info on the book:
Title: Grenadiers
Author: SS BrigadeFuhrer (Brig. General) Kurt Meyer, aka Panzer-Meyer to his troops.
Translated by: Michael Mende
Publisher: J.J. Fedorowicz, copyright 1994.
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
ISBN: 0-921991-19-3
Good luck in finding a copy.
Mike D
aka Mikester
[This message has been edited by Mikester (edited 06-03-2000).]
CM Editor Capabilities - Questions for Steve
in Combat Mission Archive #2 (2000)
Posted
Rudelover,
I hope what I'm about to tell you is correct.
I think your progress / status in the game only affects the reinforcements in the campaign, not during a given portion (i.e. single battle) of it, or a stand alone single battle scenario.
In other words. The reinforcements that come in during a given battle of a campaign, or a stand alone single battle, follow the arrive at turn X at Y% percent probability of arriving on that turn and every turn thereafter rule.
While the "reinforcements" that arrive between battles in the campaign really represent higher level reserves that you may, or may not, get depending on how the overall campaign is going for you at that point in time.
Only thing I'm not sure of is whether there are also true reinforcements that can arrive between battles of the campaign in addition to these "reserve reinforcements". In other words one's that follow an X of arrive between battles 1 and 2 of this campaign and a Y of some given percentage (probably 100%, but not necessarily).
Hope this helps. Steve/others in the "know" please correct me if I'm wrong.
Mikester out.