ASL Veteran
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Posts posted by ASL Veteran
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24 minutes ago, MikeyD said:
I was reading a translation of a 1970 Russia tactics book the other day and it discussed how the width covered by a battalion shifted over the course of the war. The question is, will I be able to locate that reference?
... Ah! Not only did I find the book, the relevant passage was fortuitously bookmarked!
I think that was numbers for a major offensive (the book is literally called 'The Offensive'). Jan'45 would be the Vistula-Oder offensive, I'd guess. Would august 42 be the battle of Stalingrad? I cannot fathom placing 4 battalions and 30 tanks on a 1km wide CM map
August 42 might be Kharkov which just preceded the German attack towards Stalingrad IIRC or perhaps something around Moscow.
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23 hours ago, MikeyD said:
8. Back when Steve was pondering doing something with China I had suggested the 'near future' Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Taiwan has some nifty M60 family armor (with cool camou.) But Steve was cool to the idea, said the conflict would be over in no time were to really happen. Taiwan's half again larger than Israel with three times the population. it seems as viable a theater of operations as any other.
Here's a weird set of picts. A Taiwanese M60A3 with... logs fitted to the sides and turret? Or am I misinterpreting the picture?
doesn't reactive armor look sort of like that? It does look like logs though, although maybe it's some sort of strange looking reactive armor.
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Apparently the vision ports and 'spotting ability' from the earlier Soviet tanks are very poor. No cupola? Two man turret as well IIRC for the T34. No radio either. I can already hear the complaints about 'why can't my T34 see that Pz III sitting out in the open right in front of me?'
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The only way you would get points for destruction of the enemy without actually destroying them is if they have to exit. So apparently the scenario was designed for the Americans to exit the map somewhere - perhaps you are pursuing them while they are retreating? That's the only thing I can think of - if you start the scenario and the Americans begin retreating then your objective is to destroy the Americans before they can exit the map - presumably the opposite map edge. With exit conditions you gain the destruction victory points for every enemy unit that remains on the map (and no points for the ones that exit) and at the time you cease fired nobody had exited yet thus they are all counted as being destroyed. The game is working as intended - the designer might be able to have accounted for the possibility of an immediate cease fire by using some sort of parameters condition to offset it. At the same time though - who would load a battle up to cease fire immediately afterwards rather than playing it out? Not something most designers would think of or perhaps account for. Maybe in a campaign that is always a possibility, but I generally create standalones and so the possibility that someone would load up a standalone and just ceasefire seems remote. I don't know who made it (wasn't me) but I'm sure they just didn't think of the immediate cease fire option when they came up with the victory conditions or they either would have come up with something different or they would have accounted for it somehow.
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On the victory screen shot only one check mark shows so only one victory condition was completed. I assume that was one of the attacker's victory conditions - so obviously not terrain or a unit objective. What was the objective that you were able to achieve, was it just a parameter objective? Theoretically if you had a parameter objective of keeping say, fifty percent of your force alive and you get half the total points for that, then that could cause the cease fire situation becoming a victory for you. Especially if the defender has no terrain objectives and perhaps has a parameter objective that is the opposite of yours.
It also appears from the in game shot that the Americans are all sitting on terrain objectives (probably yours) but from the victory screen it would appear that the Americans don't get any points for sitting on those objectives, so they must only be objectives for you (attacker) otherwise the Americans would have gained points for them - and yet they gain no points for anything.
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If the scenario is a defensive scenario then you would naturally start on the objectives and get points for them while the AI attacker would have to try and take the objectives. That's going to happen if you immediately ceasefire with any scenario that you are defending in. I'm assuming that you are the defender in that scenario, although I'm not familiar with that battle in specific. If you are attacking and you get a major victory when you ceasefire immediately then yeah, something is wrong. Not so much if you are the defender though since, by selecting ceasefire you never give the AI an opportunity to capture the objectives.
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Maybe an ROTC instructor required it for something. Many US colleges and universities (maybe high school too, although I don't remember for sure) have ROTC programs and there are a few military academies outside of west point (what's that one in Virginia - VMI or something?). Texas A&M began as a military academy as I recall and still has a large military presence.
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4 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:
Nah, it's when you get down to eye level that you start to notice tanks hiding behind single trees.
Here we go again with the player bashing. I'd like to see a link to a thread where a player was relying too heavily on the opponent being slow, blind, and incompetent and was greatly disappointed when their strategy didn't go according to plan.
MikeyD might be overstating it a bit, but I have watched videos of players playing a scenario who say nothing when they get the drop on the enemy but complain bitterly whenever the enemy gets the drop on them - sometimes within the same minute of action. It's just the nature of the beast - selective memory.
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57 minutes ago, DMS said:
Hm, I didn't expect that B-4 can hurt someone's feelings so much!
It just serves as a testament to that weapon's firepower.
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It would be more enlightening if you had the team selected during the video so we could see what they could see. If the team was selected then the tank wouldn't appear if they couldn't see it and it would appear if they could see it. As it is, the tank is buttoned up so … not sure what they are supposed to do to it. They could potentially have tossed a grenade after they stopped but it appears that the tank was knocked out already. They aren't being fired upon so no reason to stop moving to take cover. I don't remember if the hunt command stops movement upon spotting an enemy or if they have to be fired upon though so maybe the 'problem' is a valid one depending upon how the command works. Even so, it would have been better to have the team selected so there would be no doubt. Just the act of moving in front of an enemy unit until the team reaches it's destination doesn't really reveal anything one way or the other.
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On 2/8/2020 at 8:08 AM, BornGinger said:
In the CM-games, at least in Final Blitzkrieg which I have, the crew in a Sturmgeschütz has only one MP40 submachine gun, for the commander, if the vehicle is a Stug III of the late type while the crew in all other Stug III types doesn't have a submachine gun. The crew in all the different types of a Sturmhaubitze 42 has a submachine gun. Although I trust that Battlefront have made this decision based on what they believe is correct information the video Sturmgeschütz School - Choose the Stug Life shows that there were more than one MP40 for a Stug III crew.
According to a Sturmgeschütz leaflet dated 1943, which explains the responsibilities of all the crew, the loader had also the duty to "always be ready to defend against anti-tank infantry with hand grenades and a submachine gun. Close combat weapons should always be kept at hand" and the leaflet goes on to say about the driver that "For close range defense, he always carries a submachine gun at hand with which he also can shoot out of the observation slit" and "When rolling up trenches and enemy positions he can use his submachine gun to effectively support the commander".
If the crew had to bail out of the tank and destroy it if it couldn't be saved they should carry on as infantry which the leaflet explains with "If you're forced to bail out, don't forget your handguns. Continue as an infantryman".
It is possible that the information Battlefront had when they made the games was different than what is in the leaflet mentioned in the video. Maybe they should look through that information again and if it's possible that not only the crew in a Sturmgeschütz had more than one MP40 they could make changes to the German tank crews in the games.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w47yYXLFGM
(Didn't find a way to add the video so the link has to do)
A lot of things are put in training manuals and leaflets, but the actual fact of what happens in the heat of battle seldom matches the ideal of what a leaflet might expect. We have had discussions about what happens when a tank is hit by fire and I've collected as many first hand accounts as I was able to. Here is just one example of what happens when your AFV is destroyed in battle. As you hopefully can surmise reaching around and packing your belongings are one of the last things a crewman is thinking about and in most cases a bailing crewmember would likely be completely unarmed. There are many aspects of the game that is more forgiving than in real life - like the fact that in the game every crewmember who survives the killing hit on the tank gets out. In many cases that isn't true. The only instance in which the number of submachine guns being carried in the vehicle would be relevant would be in situations where the crew voluntarily dismounts and does some recon or something while dismounted.
After inspecting our target, discussing possible danger spots and driving tactics, we mounted and informed Arno, our gunner, Karl, our loader, and Egon, the radio operator. Their first combat action was now before them. Ready to go, ready to fire. ‘Panzer March!” Our nerves tight to the breaking point, each alone with his thoughts, complete silence inside the vehicle, only the engine was humming. So we crawled and crept slowly toward the hill top. What was waiting for us on the rear slope? Otto was standing in his hatch. ‘Slowly, a little higher! Stop! Turret three o’clock, aim at the edge of the woods! Again, nothing, Helmut, let’s go, march!” I geared up and opened the throttle all the way. We crested the hilltop. I spotted the edge of the woods and steered toward its left corner. We wanted to go around it so we could see what was behind it.
Then, a violent rattle on the outer walls, machine gun and rifle fire. Our turret MG was firing. I recognized a rapidly firing enemy machine gun, spotted the flat helmets. De clutching on the right, aiming the hull MG, firing – all that happened in a flash. There, at the corner of the woods, enemy soldiers moving a gun into position! Report to the turret again aiming the hull MG. Our gun was firing with the Panzer moving at full speed. ‘Stop! Stop! Back! Back! Faster!’ Otto shouted that order. I knew the engine was at full speed, it could not go backward any faster. I turned toward the instruments, we were way past the maximum allowable number of revolutions, the time was sixteen minutes before sixteen hours. Just as I was about to look out of my sight slit I was blinded by a flash of light. There was a bang as if a soda pop bottle had smashed into a stone floor. Hit to the forehead, alive, those were my thoughts. Then, the Panzer was shaking as if in the grip of a giant fist, brightness, howling, shrieking noises, totally inhuman. Smell of sulfur, complete silence.
Then Otto’s voice: “Bail out, Panzer’s on fire!” I unlatched my hatch, pushed it open, it moved only a few centimeters. Flames immediately blazed through the opening. The turret skirt sat above. I saw how Egon, our radio operator, pulled his legs from his hatch. That was the way. Across the transmission, the radio, my breath stopped, it was getting so hot, I had to get out, I could not take it anymore. Far away, a face. Arms stretching toward me. Shouts: “Helmut, get out!” Pulling, ripping, fresh air. I was outside, jumped off, letting myself drop. Egon had come back and pulled me out. Thanks comrade! Egon helped me to get up, I was standing again. Bullets whistled by and hit the hull. We leapt to the side away from the enemy, there was Otto. What about Arno and Karl? Otto pointed to the turret, its side hatches were still closed and yelled: “Both were killed outright, I was still inside!” I could not believe it. Arno Eltus from Konigsberg in East Prussia, my gunner. Since Hasselt we had been together with Otto, always in the same Panzer. We lived through our first actions, victories, always the three of us together. Now he was gone, just left inside the turret. What a terrible realization.
Dark smoke billowed from the open hatches. We ran into the direction of our front line. Suddenly I heard: “Helmut, you’re on fire!” I rolled on the ground, Otto and Egon helped extinguish the flames. Again, machine gun bullets were whistling by us. We ran and ran. Finally we reached the rear slope, found German soldiers, houses. A squad of soldiers addressed us but I did not hear or comprehend anything. I could see but not recognize , felt pain, severely burning pain. Then it turned all black around me and silent.
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When CMFI was released it was not possible to close assault tanks with infantry in buildings - the only exception was open topped vehicles from the second floor or higher IIRC. However, a great debate ensued within the beta halls, arguments and sacrifices were made, blood was spilt, and eventually Charles relented and allowed infantry to close assault from buildings. If they aren't assaulting from buildings anymore then Charles changed it back while nobody was looking. So anyway, if someone says that they can't then they either aren't updated past whatever version was released post CMFI base game, or it was changed back for some reason without anyone noticing. Vehicles will usually need to be sitting near the building in question for a period of time before the infantry will assault it - it's not an immediate thing. Vehicles spot so well though that infantry don't usually get to remain for very long in such close proximity.
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On 12/23/2019 at 8:08 AM, Rik_atc said:
Hi, Altough have been playing CM games for a while, I just purchased CMFB, so I am looking for players to play 1vs1. Is here or any other place where I could find opponents?
Thank you
The Blitz website and The Few Good Men website are good for finding opponents.
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23 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:
But in scenarios, it's the designer who places enemy tanks and guns. Good designers check LOF to make sure the guns can target the areas they need to target. If elevation were modelled, the designer would just see a little "out of elevation" under the target pointer for certain locations.
I'm not saying Battlefront are stupid for not including elevation. I'm sure they have their reasons - all I'm saying is that I personally don't really understand why.
Edit: I should also in all fairness say that I don't have much of a problem with lack of elevation restriction. It's extremely rare that I see situations where it looks silly (like in the video above). I'm just curious about the design decision.
I think you actually understand the situation completely, but because 'you don't have much of a problem with elevation restriction' you can't identify it as a problem. However, the fact is that you don't actually know if you have a problem with elevation restriction because it isn't in the game. Sure, you can eyeball your tanks and assume that they would always fire when you want them to, but inevitably there would be situations in the game where you might assume that a vehicle could fire and it wouldn't. It would just sit there doing nothing and in some instances where you exposed your vehicle to enemy fire by carefully positioning it in a location where you assumed that it would fire I'm sure your response to that would be - well I won't assume, but most players would immediately post to the forum that the game was broken. However, let's just assume for the sake of argument that Bulletpoint is always going to be 100 percent accurate in his assumptions about when a tank will be able to fire and when it won't. How many other players will make a mistake at least one time when positioning their vehicles? 80 percent? 50 percent? 20 percent? How many posts do we already have on the forum about 'my tank won't fire' and elevation restrictions aren't even a factor?
I don't know how many scenarios you have made … perhaps you have made a few, but the idea that a designer can just spend hours upon hours micro positioning tanks at every point that they will occupy or potentially occupy just to check for elevation restrictions is pretty comical. It already takes many hours of work to create an AI plan (many aspiring designers don't even try and make their scenarios H2H) and in some of the bigger scenarios you will probably not be able to position tanks individually since an AI group will contain several tanks in it. It's already difficult enough to get all the tanks in one AI group to point in the right direction when you want them to let alone individually checking for elevation restrictions. That's not even considering the fact that any given vehicle might choose a different action spot to stop at when arriving at any given waypoint. That's also ignoring the fact that tanks in AI groups can be given orders where they individually stop in spots between waypoints designated by the designer - for example I can give a tank platoon an Advance order from one location to another and half the tanks will move and then stop somewhere in between waypoints - where? Don't know and I have no control over where they stop. How about the AI in Quick Battles? The guys who do all that work creating Quick Battle maps have no idea what the player is purchasing. It is simply impossible for an AI plan for a Quick Battle to account for elevation restrictions.
So, don't get me wrong, I would love to have elevation restrictions in the game as much as the next guy. I would also love to have elevation restrictions in terms of where vehicles can move since all tanks can negotiate any terrain grade no matter how steep - short of cliffs of course. They also don't lose any speed while driving over said elevations. However, I also recognize and accept the reasons BFC has given as to why they haven't included these things. We were actually able to convince them to put some sort of penalty into the game for some of the extreme examples which crop up during city fighting so at least they added that in, but to have historically accurate elevation gun restrictions is probably never going to be in the game.
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Cut off at Koevering and Eerde Dunes were both included stock in the Market Garden module and were created by 'Jaws'. I found the original scenario threads in the beta forum and for Koevering he said
"Thank you Broadsword! I never intented to make this a huge battle but it was like this in 1944
Only the forces of KG Walther are extra in this what if."
I don't think he ever made a non what if version and I didn't see the bit about Eerde Dunes that made it a what if, but I think he added some additional forces to that one as well. I don't know if Jaws is still hanging around here, but he's the one to ask about it.
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3 hours ago, Jaeger Jonzo said:
Yes it’s incidents like cut off/out of ammo/hopeless situation when you should be able to surrender a unit or the game engine enforces the unit to surrender whether you like it or not. Let’s face it not many commanders give carte Blanche to their men surrendering but those guys might take it upon themselves to preferring a POW cage than being wiped out.
The problem is that the game has no mechanism to identify cut off / hopeless situation so that's basically a non starter. For a lack of ammunition, I'm not sure you would want units to surrender automatically if they are low on ammunition or even out of ammunition because they may be in a position where they aren't threatened by enemy troops. Ideally there would be a way to code some level of awareness into the AI such that units could identify such circumstances, but we can't even make our pixeltruppen's suppression levels a trigger for specified activity in an AI plan so we are a very long way from having troops who are aware that their situation is hopeless. Just file this in the 'nice to have in some distant future' version of CM but not going to happen any time soon.
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There is no way to render an opinion on what you are describing without a screen shot or a video. Generally speaking, if you can see something you can shoot at it so my assumption would be that your vehicle was partially obstructed in some odd or unusual way or perhaps there was something going on with the state of your crew. For the 88s you don't need to acquire the ammo from the bearers. When the bearers are close enough to the weapon the ammo will automatically be added to what shows as available for the gun. You can easily test this by setting up an 88 in one spot with the ammo bearers somewhere else. Look at the available ammo. Then move the bearer close to the gun and look at the ammo again - you should see the gun's available ammo increase by the amount the bearers are carrying.
If you don't want to be seen I think your best bet is to hide, although they don't spot as well that way either so - not sure what to tell you there. Spotting is as it is.
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23 minutes ago, Anxel Torrente said:
So you mean that huge IS tank isn't just a few meters away but actually several hundred meters away? Seems very strange that a game should work that way. It is still very odd that they couldn't see that huge tank and not even hear the rumbling of that huge tank while they're walking cautiously towards it. Must be the magic of the elven queens one can read about in Tolkien's books that are protecting the Soviets in that forest and making the Germans both blind and deaf.
No. Nice job of deliberately misunderstanding what I wrote though. Thirty meters away in game looks like something is very close when thirty meters in reality isn't necessarily as close as you might think. That's especially true if you are looking through thirty meters of forest. So you see, the distance is the same in game and in reality, but because of perspective that same distance might look different between the game and reality if you are someone who doesn't necessarily have a good grasp on how those distances actually translate to reality from the game. However, I'm not going to waste my time on a discussion when you aren't actually looking for an explanation but rather are simply interested in grinding an axe because you don't like something. There are a lot of gamers who don't like the way spotting works in the game and you aren't the first one to complain about it. At this point in time though, since it's almost a guarantee that it will never change, you can either choose to grit your teeth and play through it or you can quit the game and play something else. Belly aching on the forum isn't going to accomplish a single thing except perhaps to get like minded individuals to pat you on the back and say 'I agree'. I suppose maybe that might make you feel better about how much you dislike the spotting in the game, but it's not going to accomplish anything meaningful in terms of how the game plays if choose to play it.
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I feel that this topic is probably a waste of time to discuss, but I'm going to toss some stuff out there anyway even though this entire thing is pretty subjective. Basically what a gamer's expectations for spotting are might differ from how the game handles spotting and no amount of discussion is probably going to sway them. With respect to the video of the IS2 - I'm not bothered by that in the slightest. For one thing in game perspective is probably different from real world perspective in that items that are twenty yards away in game in a forest might look like they are on top of each other, but when seen in real like really aren't that close to each other. Each action spot is essentially 8 meters square and that vehicle appears to be at least several action spots from the soldiers when they spot it - it looks close in game but go ahead and stand on an American football field and see how far twenty or thirty yards is and it might change your opinion of how close something is. Another thing to consider is that 'real' vehicles might have a considerable amount of foliage tied to it perhaps even including full on branches and other stuff. The vehicle models are all identical for any particular type and such foliage or additional things attached will not be represented for a variety of business or practical reasons. You will just have to use your imagination for that. Similarly all the trees of a specific type are identical in the game. A map maker can change things up a bit by mixing different tree types but that doesn't alter the fact that every birch tree will look identical in game. Anyone who has spent time on Earth and seen a tree will know that trees don't generally look identical in real life, so there might very well be 'branches in the way' but you just can't see them because the differences between individual trees aren't represented. The ground the trees are sitting on are probably either light woods or heavy woods which adds some bush art to the bases of the trees - once again an abstraction. I know that this probably isn't going to sway anyone, but if the spotting just doesn't work for you in this game then I'm not sure what anyone can say about it since it's not going to be changing any time soon, if ever, and contrary to popular belief military personnel and vehicles are not 'automatically spotted' as soon as they are in someone's LOS because - well it's part of life or death for them to try and avoid being spotted so troops actively attempt to conceal themselves on an active battlefield. Those that can't conceal themselves don't usually have a long lifespan in a combat zone.
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Just in case - the quality settings only affect the loadout when you initially purchase a formation. If you have a previously purchased formation and you attempt to change the quality setting then it will have no effect. Once the quality setting is chosen then the loadout will change within the confines of the quality setting every time the scenario is loaded up. What you should see, for example, is when loading a scenario with US armored infantry you will get variable numbers of BARs in each squad and it will always be different every time you load the scenario. You can see this effect in the scenario 'Last Man Out' as an example where the Germans have lower quality formations and the loadout can be pretty dramatic between squads with some of the heavy VG squads getting two MG42 and some getting only one or none.
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For something this specific it would probably be easier to figure out which units were in the geographical area that you are looking at and then try to find out what vehicles were in those units. The 233rd Reserve Panzer 'Division' was located at Horsens in Denmark from August 1943 until the end of the war. It only had 34 tanks and was used as a training unit so I doubt that any Panthers were present in the unit, but you never can be sure without finding more details about the unit.
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Infantry can't swim in the game. They can cross fords. There is a bit of terrain overlap where normal ground interacts with water when the map is put together so in certain instances it can seem as though someone is 'underwater' or standing somewhere that they shouldn't but those situations would be map specific. Only certain amphibious vehicles can cross non ford water obstacles so if you are truly seeing infantry crossing non ford water obstacles then it might be a bug of some sort.
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You can also find content created by the community at … I think it's still called the scenario depot over at 'The Few Good Men'.
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well just so you know, when you set the headcount to 50% the game cuts the overall force by that amount and not necessarily each individual unit. The end result is that the headcount will vary from unit to unit - it might even be varied each time the scenario is loaded, although I'm not absolutely certain.
Exciting news about Battlefront and Slitherine
in Combat Mission - General Discussion
Posted
That alone makes the move worthwhile