ASL Veteran

It's not strange as German TO&Es are probably pretty complicated unless you are just taking a standard TO&E and applying it across the board. If someone just goes by what a standard battalion would look like then you aren't going to be right 100% of the time. There is no chance that Stugs were in that particular battalion on June 6th as each vehicle was custom built from French chassis by the battalion commander in his French workshops before the invasion. They aren't even really Marders and Wespe either - they just resemble them the closest.

If I'm understanding your question correctly, then I would assume that in the board game every step would be the equivalent of a company. If that's the case, then yes, it would be a CMBN Stug battalion less one company. Except that Stug Abt 200 has four batteries and each battery would have six marder equivalents (they are actually French chassis with a 75mm gun on it) and four Wespe equivalents (once again, a French chassis with a 105mm gun on it).

Mystery solved then. According to "German Order of Battle volume 3" by Samuel W Mitcham Jr, the 233rd Panzer division: Established as a special purposes motorized division on May 15, 1942. It's mission was to control motorized replacement and training units in the III military district. It was reorganized as a reserve panzer grenadier division on July 7, 1942. On August 10, 1943 it became the 233rd Reserve Panzer Division. It was sent to central Jutland shortly therafter. It remained in Denmark, headquartered at Horsens training panzer crews and motorized troops until the end of the war. Although it officially became a panzer division on Feb 22, 1945 it never saw combat. It had only 34 tanks in any case. Max Fremerey took command on June 7, 1944 and remained in command until the war's end.

Is there any Barbed Wire in Le Desert? I don't remember if there is or not, but I've heard that there is a bug with scenarios that have barbed wire that crashes the game like how you described. You may need to either go into the editor and remove the barbed wire or try a different scenario until the next patch comes out.

It would be a lot easier to solve your mystery if we knew what unit the tank belonged to. As it is, all we have to go on is 'there was a tank in Denmark in 1944'. There could be any number of plausible reasons for a tank to be in Denmark in 1944 - a unit rebuilding, a unit transferring, a unit training, etc. Do you have a video or photograph of the tank in question or can you describe the unit markings that are identifiable on the vehicle?

If you are using Windows Vista then it can be difficult to find the file because there is a set of hidden folders that it might get downloaded into. The game is located in both the regular Program Files and also in the ... like shadow file system. I forget the path or file names at the moment, but it was frustrating as heck when I had a Vista machine (I have since moved to Windows 7 which is much better than Vista's horribly confusing file scheme).

Yeah, it might be a good idea to make sure that your friend started the game as a PBEM game rather than as a regular game. Your friend must select PBEM game in order to play it PBEM. It can also be a bit confusing the first time because when you start a PBEM game the first turn can either be a 'blank' or ask for just a password and nothing else. If your friend started a PBEM game the correct way but got confused by the lack of anything to do then he may have started a normal game and sent you a normal save file instead.

No need for fiction (unless that's your aim of course). After Authie was overrun there was some pretty heavy fighting in between Authie and Buron.

There is an Authie battle on the CD as well (Surrender Invites Death). The sequence would actually be Authie then Buron not the reverse.

Yeah, I think in this respect CMBO is way more realistic than CMBN could ever be. CMBO is definitely the peak of all realism when it comes to squad level combat in WW2 and I think we are all fortunate that BFC continues to offer CMBO as a product that we can all purchase and admire.

I've already addressed your question in the wounded and killed thread which you will find if you just scroll down a bit. Here is the link in case it drops off the first page http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=103302&page=2 Feel free to address my points there

Yeah, well that sort of an instruction seems unnecessary to me since when you start making your campaign it will become obvious that you are using a new map or reusing an old map prior to any battle damage on it for each battle. In other words, the act of 'doing' will make it obvious as to what's possible and what's not possible.

Steve has posted on numerous occasions (more numerous than I can count) that CMBN is miles ahead of CMBO in terms of 'realism'. Whether you agree with that or not is for you to decide. We can all sit around here in this thread and compare and contrast CMBO and CMBN but if you are a committed CMx1 type then I'm going to surmise that we would all be wasting our time. Just download the demo and try it yourself because that's the best way to answer your question in terms that will have meaning for you.

Just in case some players don't know this, but Red status is badly wounded in the game. Yellow lightly wounded. Only Brown is dead. If you perform buddy aid on your Red truppen they will be evacuated and count as wounded. If you just let them lay about on the map there is a good chance they will be counted as dead at the conclusion of your game.

I was reading about the Canadians in the Sheldt campaign, and one guy mentions that there was a German soldier running along the top of a dyke. They lined up a mortar shot to try and take him down and it ended up landing directly on the man's head. Needless to say he was obliterated in a puff of red spray. Just to add to this though, most of your overall casualties are probably being caused by blast and shrapnel effects from artillery and that will account for most of your ratio. Most scenarios don't have a lot of artillery in them, and certainly nobody would want to play a scenario where heavy artillery was going off on top of their troops for an hour .... what fun would that be? It will also be situation dependent as well to some degree. From my playing, very few of my pixeltruppen drop as 'brown' dead color from the first hit. The majority of my truppen that are hit are 'red' and you have to do buddy aid on them. If you are defending it can be difficult to render buddy aid on your 'red' truppen because you might get pushed out of your position. Another factor - and perhaps a very important one - is that you can't move your wounded pixeltruppen. You can only render aid where they lay. If you were defending and you could evacuate your wounded then you would get a different ratio for sure. So I think that if you really wanted to evaluate this, don't look at the end game screen and make judgements based on that. Pay close attention in game as to whether your truppen are falling as 'brown' dead or 'red' wounded. Do as much buddy aid as you can to keep your ratio down as well. Keep in mind as well that the AI doesn't really do a great job of performing buddy aid. Most of the time if the AI does buddy aid it's by pure chance because if the AI is advancing it will just leave the wounded behind, and if the AI is defending they won't perform the buddy aid unless someone is already close by. The AI will not move truppen around the battlefield for the purpose of performing buddy aid.

Making a battle get tougher as the scenario goes on is already possible. I can just keep adding reinforcement groups every thirty minutes until I run out of reinforcement groups available in the editor. At some point though the scenario has to end wouldn't you agree? What's tough for one player may not be tough for another, so while you might be defeated by the first reinforcement group maybe the next player can fight through eight reinforcement groups and still be ready for more. There has to be an end because a scenario isn't real life. It's a scenario and this is a game. It's also good to keep in mind what the definition of a scenario is. Paper Tiger has presented you, the gamer, with a scenario and it's up to you to meet the challenge that Paper Tiger has presented to you within the context of the scenario he has created. Once you start altering Paper Tiger's scenario it's no longer a scenario that Paper Tiger created for you but a scenario that you have created for yourself and which suits your needs. How many of 'you' are playing this game and how many of your individual needs can be met by one scenario. At some point it becomes impossible to meet everyone's needs so players tend to gravitate towards designers that they prefer. Scenario designers do the best they can within the constraints of the editor, but a scenario designer can't be all things to all people.

Steiner, you aren't making any sense to me. You are proposing a lot of things that might enhance the concept of time running out in a scenario. Why not just stick to time running out? Why make it more complicated than it needs to be? Adding all the extra bells and whistles adds nothing to the fact that time just ran out. It just makes you feel better about it running out.

Time limits really only do one thing in the game ... force the attacker to move. If there were no time limits it would have no effect on the defender because he would just sit there and get bored since he has nothing to do. Now some may think time limits are unrealistic .... perhaps, but then you could also think of the time limits as General Montgomery visiting your headquarters and wondering aloud "This battalion commander sure lacks fighting spirit. The battalion to his left and right have both advanced 500 yards but this guy is still drinking tea and hasn't moved an inch in a full hour. Maybe he has seen too much battle and needs to have a desk job in London instead of a field command. Soldier, you have thirty minutes to get off your duff and capture that church or I'll find someone with some fighting spirit who can give me some results." It's certainly not unheard of for a subordinate commander to have pressure put upon them by their superior to stick with an attack timetable so I don't know why there are so many people who think a time limit in a scenario is 'unrealistic' or 'artificial'.

Yeah, I seem to recall someone trying it out and discovering that it only works hot seat, but my memory is a little hazy.

I don't think you can but I'm not certain. If I recall correctly a campaign can be made for multi player but I think it can only be played hotseat. None of the campaigns that come with the game are designed for multi player so if such a beast exists it would be third party. I interpreted the response above about the campaign to be that you would want to separate scenarios out of the campaign they recommended and play them individually and not played as part of the campaign.

George always makes pretty good scenarios so you might try Nedforce. I think that My Honor is Loyalty should be an interesting battle as well, but I'm a bit biased on that one .

What force size do you and your usual opponent typically prefer? Battalion size? Company size? Platoon size?

I believe someone did some testing and decided that the gun crew gets protection from the trenches but that the gun itself gets no benefit. I'm not sure who did the testing or how they made that determination. Guns are not treated as vehicles by the game though. I believe that guns are treated similar to very large machine guns in terms of targeting (in other words the crew is the target of incoming fire and not the gun itself) so I'm not really sure whether the distinction between gun and crew is a valid one. As far as I can tell there has been no change in the CW module since nothing has been listed in the changelog.

From reading many first hand accounts I'm not too worried about the first round hits at under 1000 meters. I think you may have a case with the speed of target acquisition though. From what I've seen modern tank crewmen post on the forums it seems that the current WW2 target acquisition in CMBN is comparable or even faster than modern target acquisition. I think there are some YouTube videos that can be found online of modern tankers going through the target acquisition and firing process and you can compare the YouTube videos with the in game action to compare. I did a quick search on YouTube and found this video It appears to be about 14 seconds between shots? Of course the range to the target will be a factor and there is no way to know the distance of the targets.

Well, for one thing the location of where the truppen start at when you load the scenario isn't necessarily where the AI will be putting them when it's setting up because the designer can use setup locations that are different from where the truppen are located as the default. Generally speaking, I never use a default setup because you never know for certain if the opponent has looked at it or even played the scenario prior to playing against you. I find that doing a partial setup by just adjusting the default isn't very good because no matter what I'm doing I'm still thinking like the designer to some extent and not myself. I always take all my truppen and relocate them to an open field somewhere in my setup area and then start by setting up heavy AT weapons, followed by my HMGs, and finally by my infantry squads. That way I am not influenced by the designer in any way and I may actually find a better defensive design by starting from scratch. Sometimes I end up with something similar to the default, but I got there my own way.