Tero
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Posts posted by Tero
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Originally posted by Andreas:
No. It is not a beauty contest Tero, and I do not give a flying monkey's who won the pissing contest of 'I killed more than you'.
IMO the pissing contest is (or should be) really about "how many bullets/shells/bombs/other assets I needed to kill yours than you had to use to kill mine".
I think that if you want to get an idea of relative operational capabilities, you are best off leaving the total outliers such as Barbarossa and the last two months in the Reich out, since they completely skew the picture, without adding any information of value - it is not at issue whether the Wehrmacht stomped the Red Army in 1941, or whether the reverse happened in the last few months of the war. We know that.
Agreed. It would be easier to debate the relative efficiency of the republican Roman army vs the Gauls (or the Goths) since there are less passions involved.
The "problem" as I see it is the "Allies" (and the Germans) can not let go of ideas like:
1) Nazis were evil - no contest
2) Allies won the war - no contest
3) Allies won the war through far superior strategic resources - no contest.
There may be more arguments which predispose people to think that the ultimate outcome of the war has bearing in the debate about the relative efficiency of different forces in tactical/operational level.
Nobody thinks ill of Napoleon and his strategies and tactics in the operational level. It also seems OK to think highly of Rommel and his tactics and operational skills.
Why is it so hard to extend tolerance to the rest of the German army in the realm of operational and tactical performance ?
The Red Army was every bit a tool of an evil regime the German armed forces were. Why is it OK to think highly of them in the realm of operational and tactical performance ? It seems to be OK to criticise the Red Army for poor performance. Even against the Germans. Why is it seemingly so hard to admit the Western Allies may have performed worse than the Germans ?
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Originally posted by roqf77:
how much of the allies better performence over the campaign was down to being better supplied?
The only yard stick I can think of is operation Market Garden. The Allied plan (in retrospect) sucked big time but the supplies were ample enough to sustain the operation as planned. The Germans on the other hand were little better off than they had been post Falaise Cap in terms of forces and supplies.
In general the Allies were better supplied all the way the autumn of 1944 (operationally speaking). They had to stop to restock when the overburdened supply system could not sustain anymore grand scale offensive operations.
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Originally posted by David I:
Here's another intersting stat: The Germans, on the Western Front alone, executed approx. 5,000 men for desertion or derilection of duty between June 6 and December 31, 1944. That'll keep you in the trenches and fighting! The US executed 1, the Brits ?, but not too many more.
Other interesting stats:
The US ETO forces lost ~90 000 men to trenchfoot and frostbite in the winter of 1944-45.
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Originally posted by Battlefront.com:
We know our audience better than it knows itself. We've proven this.
Famous last words.
PBEM is important, but it is just an extension of the game. Some people seem to think that PBEM is the game, but that is obviously false.
PBEM is not the game. But without it the desired playability and customer product life is severely hampered. Given the projected ~50$/E price tag at least I personally will have to think twice about buying a game which will have (according to gossip and rumors
) only TCP/IP multiplayer capability. What exactly is your client base ? Teenagers/young adults spending most of their free time on the net playing real time TCP/IP games or middle aged Rommel/Patton-wannabees with limited game session time available to them because of R/L considerations ?
Of course if you plan on making a killing with huge one time sales and very limited follow up and after market "accessorising" and improvement then that is up to you.
I have no problems with healthy greed. But with the pricetag like that I expect I will have to justify pretty well buying it over (say) two Disney DVD's.
We put PBEM into CMx1 games to enhance the game and will put it into CMx2 for the same reason. The game, however, will not be allowed to suffer for that option.
What kind of file size are you/we looking at at the moment, excatly ?
And for the record... when we made CMBO we never intended to have you guys playing it 4 years later. In fact, probably every game company I know of would call it a "mistake". At least at the $45 entry level price point.
Are you "forgetting" the pricetag is still after 4 years that same ~$45 a copy ? Which is not too shabby given the reduction in the prices your competitors have been forced to make. Or who have made their games abandonware or shareware.
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Originally posted by flamingknives:
Depends what you're looking at. If you're comparing the Germans and the Western allies, including the Russian losses is a bit peculiar as the allies never had the opportunity to rampage unchecked into an unprepared, underequipped, untrained and huge army on the same scale as Barbarossa.
That is irrelevant, actually. There are detailed studies which single out the German losses in the West against the Western Allies. And there are detailed studies on the Eastern Front as well.
Looking at losses differential is only relevant when comparing the two forces in question.
Agreed.
The Stats at the beginning of the thread seemingly pits the entirity of the Allies against Germany. In reality, the Allies fought against the Italians, the Romanians, Hungarians, Vichy French (Briefly), the Finns and the Japanese.
That works both ways, actually. The minor Axis/co-belligerent losses are either calculated in or not depending on who is doing the research and to what purpose.
For example in the case of Soviet/Russian studies on their war against the Finns they often cite the entire number of the Finnish casualties between 1939-1944 while they cite only their guestimate losses for 1941-1944 or in some extreme cases only the number of losses between 1943-44. The Soviet figures have been considerably skewed since the accepted figure of RKKA KIA for Winter War was ~48 000 while the actual number is in the order of 130 000. (The Finnish estimate used ever since the end of the Winter War for the total number of RKKA KIA was/is 200 000 BTW.)
Conversly the Finnish studies have had to use Finnish intelligence sources to determine the RKKA casualties because until very recently the "official" Soviet/Russian figures have been pretty bogus.
Either way it is (too) often argued that because of these "discrepencies" it is impossible to determine actual losses on either side in any given battle/operation/campaign. Which is not strictly speaking accurate since the data on Normandy for example does not leave too much in dispute. What is more, it seems to me that whenever the figures start to look a bit dubious and against the Western Allies the "who won the war again" and the "strategic level" cards are played to divert the attention from the fact the ratio of actual KIA is very often close to or better than 1:1 in favour of the Germans.
The fact the majority of the German losses in 1944-45 were MIA/POW does not make it any less evident that in the "bang for the buck" cathegory the Germans seem to have been more cost effective than the Western Allies.
And just to dissolve the neo-Nazi argument against me I must point out that, based on the casualty exchange rate figures the Germans lost to the Finns in the "bang for the buck" cathegory. And in case you like to point out the Finns lost the war then I I like to point out that the only warring capitals in Europe not occupied by enemy forces at any stage were Moscow, London and Helsinki.
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Originally posted by Andreas:
Err, please read what you quoted again. In both cases the desasters that really related to strategic factors are substracted in order to understand better what really went on when they met under 'fairer' conditions, and to get an idea of operational capabilities.
So, just to even out the playing field, any and all actual non-bodily harm related casualties (POW/MIA) no matter what the time frame and what the opposing forces can be disregarded as they do not give a "fair" idea of their operational capabilities ?
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Originally posted by flamingknives:
If the parity of numbers is based on the massive losses of the Soviet army in 1941, then any other comparison is skewed as a result.
By the same token, any comparison based on the massive German losses in the last 7 months of the war is skewed. Should these losses be left out from the calculation ?
On top of that, when there is more of one army in the field, AIUI, they tend to take a higher number of casualties, simply due to there being a target rich environment for the other side. In addition to that, a defending army will inevitably inflict more casualties than it receives, all else being equal and excepting when it is routed.
The point being ?
Nobody seriously expected the Finnish army to last long enough for a negotiated settlement to be reached (105 days) in 1939-40. Nobody expected France would fold as quickly as it did.
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Originally posted by Andreas:
He pointed out to me that once you substract the 1941 loss figures for the Soviets, the whole efficiency question takes on a very different perspective, because that was when the bulk of Soviet casualties was inflicted. For the rest of the war (until March 1945) it was much more even.
This is what I find perplexing: it seems to be OK to subtract the number of Allied MIA/POW (that is what most of the Soviet losses were in 1941) to get the ratios "correct" but if the same is done to the German numbers it is all of a sudden a no-no attempt at distortion of figures to make the Germans look better.
And yes, the number of Finnish POW's in Soviet hands was less than 3000 between 1941 and 1944. And the ratio of Finnish POW to KIA is ~3000 POW to ~65 000 KIA. The number of Red Army POW's in Finnish hands was ~60 000 and the entimated number of Red Army KIA in the Finnish front is 300 000.
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And then there is always the possibility to use FTP instead of SMTP without resorting ellaborate SMTP server setups.
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Show of hands:
Who will reconsider buying the game if PBEM is out ?
[ February 28, 2005, 04:22 AM: Message edited by: Tero ]
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Originally posted by JonS:
Edit: my bad. Nothing in that thread - try here, for a discussion on "Opportunity Cost VPs" that goes through, on-and-off, to the end of that thread. Other ideas come up, including assets being yanked, and how that might be handled VP-wise.
But, you were involved in that thread anyway :confused:
Yes.
Opportunity costs were indeed covered but there seems to have been no official follow up on them or other force mission related victory conditions.
I'm just fishing.
Had you been on a 6-o'clock closing bender before the bottlestore workers go on strike?
Nah. Nappy patrol, early morning feeding frenzy, work, early evening story times with the lads and late night story times with the mrs.
And the prospect of the state monopoly strike over here will have little or no effect on my activities.
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Originally posted by JonS:
Extensively.
Figured as much.
Well, I'll have to find the time to wade through all them posts.
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Has this issue been covered already ?
Now that we get relative spotting how will that affect the victory conditions ?
So far the combat missions themselves have been simple and straight forwards. What I would like to see is more variation in the missions beyond the simple capture the flag.
The defenders could have missions like hold at all costs, delay and so on and the attackers bypass and tie up (pin down).
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Perhaps the answer to the file size issue is to rethink the data which is required to make the play back file. The units will have memories built in now. Can that already stored game play memory be used to cut back the amount of data which needs to be transferred between the machines ?
They can make the TCP/IP work without choking the bandwidth of the customers then what makes TCP/IP data so different from PBEM data ? The way I see it the only real difference is the resolution of the orders needs to be consistent and if the benefit of the TCP/IP is real time two-way connection between systems then a simple solution would be to count the number of TCP/IP packets needed and compare them with the PBEM file. How much data is transferred over a (say) 2Mb DSL connection over a (say) 60sec orders phase in a TCP/IP game ? The data needs to be the same as between two 256k DSL (or even two 56k dial up connections). Unless of course slow DSL and dial up customers will have to upgrade or stop playing TCP/IP.
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Originally posted by dieseltaylor:
Therefore the country who defended the longest would record higher kill ratios until such time as its defences crumbled. The efectiveness of the defence being a function of militay resources available to attacker and defender against/ and the terrain it was spread over.
I would therefore submit that analysis by losses alone is bogus. I think Dupuy probably knew what he was talking about : )
This disregards the political aspects of the conflicts. There are plenty of examples where inflicting casualties on the attacker has affected the political outcome of the conflict more than casualties inflicted on the defender, no matter what kind of assets and strategical supply resources have been in play.
And in these cases the outcome has been mostly in favour of the defender (relatively speaking).
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I am more than a bit surprised at the hot seat play being so out of favour. It is AFAIK the easiest way to implement multiplayer games.
Has there ever being any serious study made about which game modes are the most used ?
Solo play is no. 1, that is pretty self evident.
To me email and hotseat are almost equal. (Yes, I do have friends and we do play both email regularly and perhaps even more importantly head to head whenever I can escape for a few hours. That is a social function. It is nice to go back home once in a while with the thumbs in working order because banging the consoles is fun but after the evenings me hands are shot.
)I have never ever played TCP/IP unless it has been in a home LAN.
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Originally posted by Wartgamer:
I imagine the HQ based relative spotting playback movie to contain, of course, what the actual HQ sees and added to that what is realistically relayed from those units under his C&C.
OK.
What if there are no HQ units in the force mix ?
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One work around could be to assign human player with dedicated "initial" unit (not necessarily a command unit since there is no fixed force structure the player preferences may end up the force being comprised of exclusively non-command units) through which eyes the play back would be seen through.
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Originally posted by Battlefront.com:
Tero, I explained this earlier. It is really straight forward. You click on one unit and it shows what it can see. You click on another unit and it shows what it can see. The two may or may not overlap, they may or may not be in conflict with each other. The less C&C contact, the less those two units will likely have in common with each other. Circumstances are, of course, very important so there is no one right answer.
OK. One guestion though: no unit clicked, nothing showing ?
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Originally posted by Larry Thorne:
Half a day in IWM was not enough at all...it would have been enough for the main hall, but there is stuff beyond it too and I mean very interesting stuff
A word of caution. If you drag along your girlfriend or wife do NOT seat her below the clock which is counting the war dead.
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Originally posted by Battlefront.com:
If there is no communication between the two friendly units then there will be TWO markers for that one unit. The first thinks the unit is in the house, the second knows it is someplace else.
That is good and proper. But how will this be represented to the Player Almighty ? How will it play out if both units in guestion are in CC as opposed to either or both of them are out of CC ?
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FWIW, IMO this topic is DOA.
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Actually, the correct form for the 12362" to read as thousands would be 12 362"
No wonder the US engineers could not get their reverse engineered MG-42 copy to work.
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Will the graphical representation of the spotting be modified so that when the active unit is changed the targets that unit has spotted disappear and the targets the new active unit has spotted appear instead ?
The CMx2, PBEM poll
in Combat Mission: Afrika Korps
Posted
B
Noting that most of the A people handles are not that familiar to me at least.