DevilDog

One thing I seemed to notice was when reinforcing the experience level for that unit went down. All well and good - this simulates the negative effect of conscripts/boots coming into a unit too fast for the experienced troops in the unit to assimilate properly. So I tried reinforcing over several turns, in an attempt to lessen the effect on experience. It appeared to be identical to just maxing the unit out in one turn. I would recommend that if you only reinforce a unit 1-2 points per turn that it have less of a negative effect on experience than say doing the full 4-5 points all at once. Not a huge deal either way, but it would be a good reward to the commander who takes the time to rotate units out of the line and slowly bring them back up to strength. The effects over a long war could be significant.

I recommend leaving the strat bombing the way it is. You can't evaluate it's effects at this early stage of the game. I played as Axis last night with the second hardest setting and a +1 experience bonus to the computer. I conquered the baltic states and the U.S.S.R. got upset with me... Russia attacked me and all I had in the vicinity were one army, 3 corps, one HQ and one tank, all in the baltic states. I managed to get five more tanks, seven armies and three more HQ over to Russia and was kicking butt with hundeds of mile envelopements. But to get to the point - I was doomed, even though I had almost 400 MPPs when Russia invaded, because England (and the French plane which the AI escaped to Britian) pounded my ports and cities in the west so bad that I sunk to 300 MPPs. Now this includes the loss of the Baltic capitol, but still. What everyone fails to realise is that these attacks add up. Yeah one bomber is pretty pitiful, but a bunch of them can put some major economic hurt on a guy. And England is somewhat limited in the way they can respond after France falls anyway. Beef the bombers up too much and the play balance will be the same as Axis and Allies with one side owning super bombers - it's mildly fun to be on the giving end, but the game is as good as over. My 2 cents.

These are two things that I always wanted in a wargame that fit in to the scale of this one perfectly. The idea behind Operational Planning would be that you have to set up your attack orders several turns in advance. There would be an optimal time period in order to get everything ready depending upon your infrastructure. However, the longer you prepare the longer you leave yourself open to: Espionage by the other side. If their intel gathering levels are higher than your defense, or they get a lucky roll they will find out what your plan is and can move to be prepared for it. Of course you could do a fake plan to throw them off balance... I find that Intelligence is severely undermodelled in most wargames, being limited to Fog of War. What would be nice is to be able to spy on your opponent and find out what kind of unit strength he has in a given theater, if not where each unit is actually stationed. Anyway, the game looks good and can't wait to get my hands on a copy. [ May 09, 2002, 06:19 PM: Message edited by: DevilDog ]

Going back to the original point of this thread - I think ammo resupply as such is already covered in operations, and not applicable to single battles. I have had some hairy fights though that have hung in the balance on the matter of ammo. In other words, all my squads with ammo were dead or seriously depleted while my full up squads were pretty much out. While not realistic to get an ammo resupply, what would be realistic is to be able to scavange ammo from dead or depleted squads by moving a unit over to the dead squad and doing an ammo transfer. I made this suggestion about six months ago, but at the time it was dismissed as being unneeded. I still think it would be a fairly important feature affecting about 1/3 of the human vs. human battles I play. My 2 cents. (edited because my computer doesn't know how to spell) [ April 03, 2002, 06:29 PM: Message edited by: DevilDog ]

Back to your original question - the prefered method of clearing mine fields is to line up a company with platoons in column formation and march through the hazardous area until all mines have exploded (at least it's not a REAL smiley)

Recently I put together a non-historic scenario based on a german attack during the battle of the bulge. Since it was winter all the water and marsh tiles became ice. As the german units advanced across the ice 105 mm arty began dropping on it, but didn't affect the terrain. Is it possible to adjust the code in CMBB to account for this, or does the current engine preclude drowning an enemy attack by caving in the ice. I don't know how common it was but I've read some accounts of how the germans would wait 'til a russian human wave attack was at the mid point of a large frozen body of water and then drop a few rounds on it and watch the whole thing give way. I immagine the ruskies caught on after it happened a few times. It's probably impossible to code in now, but can it go on a list for the engine rewrite?

Good idea! I second the suggestion.

The point being though, currently when the spotter is eliminated, all remaining rounds are lost. I don't even care if this feature would be controllable by the player. Realistically spotters avoid being overrun, but when they run out of places to hide and figure they're going to die anyway......

How hard would it be to code in the option for arty spotters to fire all remaining rounds on their position, or last target. It's SOP for arty batteries to already have the spotters position plotted. It would be a really nice spiteful feature, as I find it somewhat annoying to have my spotters overrun....

Let me get this straight. You hired someone to help you playtest CMBB? I'm willing to work for free....

Will it be possible to pick up ammo in CMBB, especially for bazookas/panzerfausts? Nothing worse than having all your live anti-armor teams run out of ammo, and all your dead one get killed with their ammo unused. Annoying, but not as bad when this happens to squads.

I've never had this happen before - what gives? In a hotseat game I picked all defaults for setup (computer choses forces with combined arms setting) with the exception that I set points for 300, picked meeting engagement, and set the map size to small. The computer gave me an M20 armored car, a 60mm mortar team, and a 81mm mortar team. That's it. That's less than 100 points. My opponent received a German paratroop platoon, a heavy M42 MG team, a panzerfaust team, a sniper, and a SPW 251/1 halftrack. What's up with that? Epiloge: This realy happened. I rushed my armored car to the high ground under cover of smoke from my mortars. My MG fire then routed the sniper who ran off the map. As the area where my car was was receiving fire I reversed back over the hill and fast moved around the other flank keeping about a 100m distance from the enemy forces. The reason I did this was to try for a flank or rear shot on the halftrack since it's MG is forward mounted. I was hoping for a shot at it before I got knocked out. Instead, what happened was.... as the car crested the hill he shot up the panzerfaust, producing one casualty, and the team ran for cover. The squad providing cover for the team also got MGed in the open, lost several men and routed - running off the map. By this time my car was completely behind the Germans and alternately shot up the two remaining squads and MG team which were in the open (there was no cover on that side of the map). The squads ran off the map, and the MG team took 4 casualties, and routed to the rear, but not off the map. The HQ ran up to the house the panzerfaust was in to rally him, losing several men to the heavy mortar fire that was now falling. They then ran to try to rally the MG team. By this time my car was out of ammo, having circled the attacker twice, so he headed for the rear, being missed by the panzerfaust team who fired off all but one shot. The mortars were by then out of ammo. The panzerfaust occupied the building with the victory flag. Nothing to do but use the mortar teams as infantry. All this with no casualties to the defender. If I had been attacking I don't see what I would have done much different. So my response to this whole thing is - Huh?

Beman: What he's referring to is a bug where your tank sees multiple enemy units at different distances, where movement of the enemy units causes their threat level to change so that your tank alternates targeting them. This completely debilitates tanks as they will just sit there turn after turn spazing back and forth between multiple (the most I've ever seen was 3) targets, but never firing. I sent Madmatt a turn that displayed this and after looking at it for awhile he said it was a definite bug, but they were too busy working on CMBB to fix it. No big deal as it only happens occasionally. But it is exasperating when it does happen. Hopefully it'll be fixed in CMBB. It should be real easy - right now the AI must be set up to switch targets as soon as a higher point target pops into view. So a one or two point differential will cause a target switch. What needs to happen is put a requirement in not to switch targets until a certain threat percentage of the current target is reached, i.e. if a new threat appears don't switch to it until the threat from it equals or exceeds 105% of the original threat.

When I was active duty our STA platoon was our battalion internal scout / recon force. Our battalion CO used them to tremendous effect in several force on force encounters with other marine and foreign units. The Koreans we went up against in particular couldn't figure out how we kept hitting them where they had minimal defenses. Only one 2 man team was ever seen, and that was at long range. Well, I guess our battalion CO was gamey, what did he know......

Maddmatt sent me an e-mail acknowledging the files I sent him and said they were able to replicate the bug with my autosave files. Although it is a bug it is rare, and he said they would be unable to patch it as all their time is being spent on CM2. At least they see there's a problem and maybe they can circumvent it for CM2.

Another thing I've seen (but have no files on) is a vehicle without orders just charge forward into the enemy lines to certain death for no apparent reason. It has only happened to me twice, both after the v 1.12 upgrade (I jumped from v 1.05 to v 1.12). Neither time were my vehicles under fire, in fact they were hiding and I had given them no command for the turn in which they took off. I don't consider this to be a crippling flaw or bug - I just filed it under crap happens. But I would be interested in finding out why this happens occasionally.

I know I've read about this same problem previously, however I haven't experienced it until downloading v. 1.12. I've had vehicles overcome by the inability to choose between different targets. They will just sit there wildly fluctuating between several targets. I have autosave files that show this. I'm not sure how to post them so I will send them in a separate e-mail. This seems to be an honest to goodness BUG as opposed to unit changes/features that some people disagree with.

My point is that the Fog of War in CM is very realistic. May times you don't know where the enemy is until they open up on you. So when you give them moving orders it would be nice to have a qualifier, "unless you start recieving fire".

One thing that I've noticed when moving to contact is that frequently troops running in the open that come under fire will continue running to their objective until they reach it, are wiped out or break due to cassualties. The obvious way around this is to move in only short rushes, like you do when you're engaged. However a battle often hinges on getting to a key piece of ground before your opponent, and short rushes take a longer amount of time. What would be nice is a little pull down menu for your troops to set their agressiveness: Agressive, Normal and Timid (or whatever you want to call them). On agressive mode they would charge to their objective, ignoring all else like noted above. On normal setting they would continue to their target until their first cassualty, at which point they hit the dirt. On timid they hit the dirt as soon as they take any fire at all. Due to the very realistic Fog of War modeled in CM, I feel this change would make the game more realistic and enjoyable. It just drives me nuts to have my troops run into a hornets nest and just keep going. They never seem to hear me shouting at them to get down, take cover and return fire! They never seem to learn......

Those airline jokes reminded me of this one: A tour guide was leading a group through an old brittish air museum. When he got to the display for the Battle of Brittain he stopped. "It has come to my attention that we are honored to have in our midst one of those gallant pilots who defended our isle from those early waves of Jerry bombers! Would you be so kind, sir, as to regale us with a tale or two?" The old Scot was hesitant at first, but stepping from the middle of the tourists quickly warmed to the subject. After describing the hectic scrambles that precipitated air combat he got to the meat of his tale. "When we got altitude we were really in it thick - there were Fokkers to right and left, there were Fokkers above and behind us! We were surrounded by Fokkers!.." At this the guide interupted, aware of possible sensitivities among the tourists, to explain: "Fokker is the kind of plane the Jerries were flying." Startled, the old Jock stared at the young man before exclaiming, "Them fokkers was flying Messerschmitts!"

I can only speak from personal experience. Although never in combat I always hated driving around in AAVs (the closest thing the Marine Corps has to APCs). The M16A2 service rifle (5.56 NATO) and AK-47 have max penetration out to 200 meters, and can punch through the AAV's "armor" out to that point. Forget close assaults, a squad should be able to toast certain IFVs within 100 meters at least. And while that rifle round has enough punch to go in one side of the vehicle it doesn't have enough penetration to go out the other side. That means my 20 Marines in the back (yeah we were never able to quite fit two full squads in there) just went through a rifle round blender and are now a quivering pile of jelly(meaning, ironically, in this case troops are better off in a truck). Compare that to how hard it is to kill those 20 men deployed on the ground and I'll rather walk than ride any day. The rifle rounds used in WWII were much heavier than those used today with better penetration characteristics. But for practical purposes the 30-06 round is pretty similar to the 7.76 NATO. A M1 Garand could certainly make swiss cheese of a 'track. At a somewhat closer range (certainly 50 meters and most likely further out) .45 FMJ would do a job on the 'track too, especially if fired from a Thompson SMG (.45 rounds are after all only pistol rounds and have limited penetration; which is where the .45 gets it's power from: all the kinetic energy is absorbed by the target knocking it flat as opposed to a rifle {or 9mm pistol} round that punches a hole and keeps going, losing little of it's energy). Anyway, my point is in real life a half-track wouldn't survive more than 10 seconds against a squad IF: 1. The track was stationary. 2. The squad is not green. I would say a moving track would get 10 seconds added to its life (unless in the case of ambush of course). And a green squad might actually run away from it depending upon their training and leadership. [This message has been edited by DevilDog (edited 02-17-2001).]

Dungeon Siege most definately!

By the way I believe that training manuevres are completely different from actual combat situations particulary the type of scenarios that CM models i.e. short, violent and close quarters with no driving along for hours without enemy contact. Madpad: All CM models is the actual engagement, usually fighting forces are in the field for months at a time. It can get very miserable and you would not believe the fatigue you can experience. The difference between elite and untrained units is that elite soldiers channel their missery into something productive like killing the enemy. At Camp Lejeune we had HMMWVs, AAVs, LAVs and tanks collide with each other during night maneuvers. The driver has a very limited view in the best of conditions. At night, with gobs of dust in the air (or if you're realy lucky you weren't buttoned up and got gassed - me), and so tired you can't keep your eyes open, you're lucky not to run into one of your guys in front of you, let alone someone else you aren't expecting. Playing CM YOU know there's about to be an engagement. In real life you usually don't know until someone opens up. I can't emphasize enough how limited vehicle drivers and commanders view is. When you actally climb into the driver's seat it's a shock. You can't see anything within 10 feet of the vehicle - no joke. I am continually impressed with the accuracy of CM. The designers must have prior service experience - they got so much right. No computer game will ever be the same as real combat, but CM models it very well. I have read a lot of posts, not just yours, that complain of 'glitches' not understanding how accurate in that instance CM portrays real life. I can only hope none of these 'glitches' get fixed in a patch and take away a little of what makes CM so awe inspiring. ------------------ Devil Dog

Ubermac: About the only time you have plentiful maps of your area of operation is when you're involved in a training exercise. In a tactical level operation the only way you get to know the land is by walking it - if you're on the defensive. On offense it's usually the Battalion or Regimental Commanders who have the map. After the break out in France in '44 not even all of the generals had maps. The less you know about the terrain and enemy the closer you are to realism. ------------------ Devil Dog

Hello Everyone: I just found out about CM several days ago when I read an article about it in PCGamer. WOW!!! All I can say is that this is as close to real combat as you can currently get in a computer game. As a former USMC infantry captain I get bent out of shape at how completely devoid of any reality so many "combat simulations" or RTS games are. It is certainly important to mold your unit into a highly trained combat team (something increasingly difficult given the current internal and external political pressures in the military). However, there is a fair amount of luck involved, i.e. being in the right place at the right time that can only be modeled with full fog of war and simultaneous enemy and friendly execution of orders. Once again, Kudos to the design team for creating a superior "locked on" piece of work. With that said let me get to my trivial and non-technical comment. Would it be possible to save movies of an entire battle or to at least be able to replay them after the battle is over? It's sad to completely and utterly destroy your opponent and not be able to preserve a record for posterity. Depending on the coding perhaps this would be possible (or maybe not) in a subsiquent patch. Now to end with a historical tidbit I gleaned from the excellent "The Last Battle" by Cornelius Ryan. The Panther and Tiger I & II tanks are well known to have problems with mechanical breakdowns. Although some of this may be attributed to a hasty engineering effort towards effecting quick production, a fair amount of the machinery that went into these tanks was produced by slave labor and in concentration camps! It's a wonder that the tanks ever worked at all. This sabotage of German war time production by the victims of Nazi genocide seems somehow fitting. Happy wargaming everyone! ------------------ Devil Dog