ASL Veteran

I found this YouTube video about what it is to be British courtesy of the Spiffing Brit Complete guide to Britain

Happened across this - just showed up on the main YouTube page when I went to it. I figured I would post it even though we've moved on from the Flak Tower stuff. There are also a lot of videos on YouTube about Flak Towers where people go and tour them. Apparently they were too difficult to destroy after the war and many still stand today being used as retail space. Imagine Hitler's reaction if he knew that nightclubs and music stores would be in his Flak Towers one day! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jgvkzD8d3k

I don't care about QB point values in the slightest, but what is baffling to me is how anyone could think that anything hand crafted would be cheaper than anything mass produced. The element that's missing in your ... analysis ... is time. Let's say that two different manufacturers are producing toenail clippers. Let's assume that each version of toenail clippers uses the same amount of steel per unit. If company A produces one toenail clipper per minute and company B produces one toenail clipper per day well then the cost of company B's toenail clipper is higher even though the objectively measurable input of steel is the same on a per unit basis. Granted, company A would be acquiring more steel because they are producing more toenail clippers, but if the manufacturing process is efficient enough then that cost isn't going to have a significant enough impact on a per unit basis since company A is producing so many more clippers than company B. That's pretty basic manufacturing knowledge and it comes down to efficiency. Unionized workers only cost more if two manufacturing processes are similarly efficient. The slave labor thing is probably a little overstated in your comments as there would still have been specialists involved. However slave labor is notoriously inefficient since there is a distinct lack of motivation for the 'worker' to do anything beyond the absolute minimum to stay alive and in the case of German manufacturing how many times would the same part have to be reproduced because of sabotage or inattention to detail? A slave isn't going to be working as fast and as efficiently as he or she could in order to support the war effort. Maybe the slaves themselves aren't being paid a 'wage', but the guards and infrastructure that is created to support your slave laborers isn't free. You still have to feed them something and you still have to house them somewhere. At least with unionized workers they can pay for their own transportation, living arrangements, and food out of the wages that are paid to them by the company. With a slave the state has to pay for all the guards, housing /camps, food, and transport for moving the slaves between camps and various work sites. You also have to power the manufacturing site and run all the machinery and if that machinery is being powered such that you are making the same part over and over again because your slave labor can't make it right the first time or is taking an extra hour to do the same thing a union guy is making well then how efficient can you be? So no, simply measuring inputs isn't necessarily safer - at least not in the way being suggested. Without accounting for waste then perhaps more aggregate inputs would suggest greater aggregate outputs since more materials are probably being used in the manufacturing process, but then that would be reflected in the per unit cost basis as already suggested by using the Swedish currency. In other words, the difference in the consumption of material inputs within the manufacturing process would be reflected by the difference in the cost basis through the use of a third party currency. Measuring material inputs would not put Germany on an equal footing with America in WW2. It would only reinforce the discrepancy in manufacturing efficiency between the two. Sorry for the interruption - you may all get back to your regularly scheduled QB points discussion

For the curious the first quote came from 'With our Backs to Berlin' and the second quote is from "Berlin Dance of Death"

Here is another account - wherever he is referring to shelters or bunkers he is referring the Zoo Flak Tower

I decided to try and dig up my first hand accounts - here is part of one

It's entirely possible there were steel shutters - I'm not exactly sure since I'm going from memory of the account. I seem to recall that the accounts would also relate that when the guns on the roof fired it would send a concussive shock down into the tower that was very uncomfortable to everyone huddled inside.

I have read a first hand account or two of what it was like in the towers during the battle for Berlin. From what I can tell it was utter chaos in and around them IIRC. The towers had no windows and all the levels below the roof were filled with civilians and soldiers in various states of combat worthiness. Wounded were all over the place mixed in with crying babies and a lack of food and water etcetera. Just going from memory though.

Yes.

As I recall BFC stated that it was intentionally done that way as a way for the player to have more visual stimulation of something 'happening' when the tank fires or something along those lines. Anyway, it's not an oversight but rather a deliberate thing included in the game.

I get this when I try the new link - I suppose I could just ignore the warning and go through, but there it is

Binkov Battlefields did a decent overview of this hypothetical - at least this one was much more reasonable and well thought out than any of the others I found.

You seem to be suggesting that BFC games are some sort of 'open beta' games or something. That's not the case. Bug tracking is not chaos for BFC. Actual software that is designed for bug tracking is used by the company in order to get the appropriate information to the appropriate individuals and the beta testers are charged with providing the appropriate information through the use of that bug tracking software. While it is appreciated when players find things in the game that may need to be addressed the gaming public has no obligations of any kind in terms of bug tracking. Customers play the games and enjoy them if they like playing them or stomp around angrily if they don't like the games. Players can report things or not report things as they desire. Customers will know that a bug has been addressed when a patch gets released and the patch log is published. Bug tracking, reporting, and fixing is the obligation of BFC to the customers who buy the game. There is no obligation by those who play the game to track, report, and fix bugs. If something gets reported on a public forum more than once or even not at all then it really makes no difference because the public forums are not where the bug tracking is done. Describing BFC bug tracking as chaos is wildly misinformed. It may be different than what some are used to, but that doesn't mean that it's chaos. Leave the bug tracking to BFC. Perhaps if you get invited to the Beta team some day then you can participate in all the bug tracking and reporting that you would ever want, but for now just go and play the game and enjoy yourself.

BFC has bug tracking software internally. The bugs that are reported aren't tracked on the public forums.

If it were that easy it would have been done

I personally don't know exactly what the leadership bonus does with regard to firepower. All I know is that when making Custer's Stand I had a platoon of German Volksgrenadiers encountering a platoon of American infantry in the town (the south part of town if you are curious - the Americans were on the south objective). When the German platoon leader's leadership bonus was +2 the American squads were absolutely wiped out (they were in modular buildings for cover). It was so ridiculous that I felt the need to adjust something because if I left it as is the Americans would just get annihilated. The first thing I tried was to reduce the platoon leader's modifier from +2 to +1 and that made the firefights play out a lot more fairly. The Americans could go toe to toe with the German squads for an extended period of time - which was what I wanted. Before I made the modification the Americans were broken and sobbing literally in just a few minutes - like literally in two or three minutes the entire American platoon was dead, wounded, and running for their lives. The Germans immediately gained fire superiority with their Assault Rifles and LMGs and maintained fire superiority throughout. What the exact effect was I can't tell you, but the effect was real and it affected scenario balance so take it for what it's worth. It was the only time I ever noticed anything different with leadership modifiers in all the time I've been making scenarios so maybe it was some sort of a perfect storm of soft factors.

The only one who could answer that question would be Steve and I'm pretty confident that he's not talking. So, with that in mind, my completely uninformed guess would be that they would space the releases of stuff being ported over to Steam a couple of months apart. Maybe four to six months apart would be my guess, but that's just me guessing. I would also guess that perhaps since they started with Shock Force 2 that they would go in order of original release for each base game. You probably wouldn't want to just put them all onto Steam all at once because your customers wouldn't be able to buy them all at once so it seems sensible to space them out. I'm sure there is also a lot of conversion work that needs to be done on each game before they can go onto Steam and since Shock Force 2 is the first one and nobody but BFC and Slitherine know how long that work takes there is no way for us to know how long that process is. Whatever work it does take is doubtless going to be applied sequentially to each game as it's next in line for release which would also contribute to the time it takes between releases. judging from the popular new release information on Steam it does seem like the release was a successful one, but I'm not sure that Steam actually shows exact sales figures (I don't think so but I don't know for sure) so there is no way to be certain.

Maybe the OP is pointing out a possible typo rather than the sale price? Certainly if they are saying that Show Force 2 is on sale then I'm not sure what game that is . Unless that's the OPs typo - not sure.

Ultimately any designer has to make personal choices about the soft factors that he assigns to the units and those soft factors may / should be influenced by how the scenario or campaign plays out during testing. However, Ts4ever and Bulletpoint bring up some excellent points to consider. I will generally start with a sort of baseline from what I know about the units involved and modify to match that. I do follow a couple of general guidelines though. Because of high turnover I have adopted a policy of almost never assigning any experience level higher than veteran. The only exception that I will make is with small units such as tank crews, HQ units, snipers, and various teams if the situation is warranted. These units are small enough that they could develop a level of cohesion and continuity that would be consistent with how I view the various soft factors. A full strength rifle squad would simply be too large a unit and subject to such turnover that assigning anything higher than 'veteran' seems unlikely to happen even in what might be considered 'elite' units (which aren't always as 'elite' as some might think). I never paid too much attention to command values until, during the course of creating one scenario with late war German units, I found that the German conscript and green troops armed with lots of automatic weapons would simply cause US squads to rapidly melt if I didn't adjust the command rating down from +2 to either +1 or 0. The firepower effectiveness of the command value is fairly dramatic when combined with an abundance of automatic weapons. For the HQ units a higher experience can be justified in some cases because, for example in the Soviet army, apparently tank unit commanders would hand pick their own crews and unless the tank was damaged or destroyed those crewmembers would stay together for as long as the commander retained his position. So you could theoretically see a big experience disparity in a Soviet tank platoon for example - you might see a Veteran platoon commander with a good modifier but the individual tanks in the platoon could be rated as green or even conscript in some cases given the level of training common during certain time frames. How would you rate a squad that had a veteran core of a solid squad leader, maybe two or three long term veteran squad members, and five new green replacements (or even Ukrainian 'Booty' solders)? How much weight do you give the squad leader in that situation and how much weight do you place on the replacements? If a unit hasn't had any replacements for a while then you might be able to justify a rating higher than veteran, but only in situations where perhaps a battalion has been in continuous combat and had been reduced to 100 men or something like that. In that instance the continuity could justify a higher experience rating, but then the morale factor comes into play. How motivated are those survivors to keep on fighting? Ultimately you have to just take a stab at it and see how it plays out during playtesting. How the campaign plays out is ultimately more important than some notion of 'historical accuracy' because the reality is that there probably isn't any sort of solid guide to what is accurate or not accurate. I suppose that if you just made a blanket setting for all of a certain side's troops to be 'Elite' then some gamers would look at that as odd or maybe off a bit, but short of doing something dramatic like that you should probably just do what's best to have the scenario or campaign play out the way you intend it to play out.

IIRC, the few good men took over all the other places that had mods and scenarios because the other sites weren't able to continue operating. I'm pretty sure the BFC one was absorbed during that process. The guy who runs the few good men stepped up to the plate and took on the project of saving everything and setting it up on his site. At least, that's my vague recollection. The guy who runs the few good men checks these forums occasionally so he can confirm that or I guess say that I'm not remembering it correctly if I'm mistaken.

the ARMA player video is probably the one that can be found on the video tab when you click on the Shock Force game on Steam. It has something like 83k views in one or two days when I last checked.

Yeah, apparently the time to edit was increased from when I tried it yesterday. I was doing it while all the upgrades were happening though so it might have been related to the upgrade process and not necessarily whatever time was assigned for the allowance of edits.

Yeah, I found the button, but when I typed my edit and saved it (my post was three minutes old) I got a message that the time allowed for editing was past and my edit couldn't be saved