Slapdragon

A Bazooka at 13 meters? That is what infantry are for (which is why a nice arty bombardment is always in order). I get so I ignore Bazooka teams creeping about my perimeter when I play Germans, because they are so whimpy, but in house to house or if you are sitting right on top of them then they are a terror. Of course I am always gleeful when my lowly tank importent Americans take out a big tank with a rifle grenade because the German thought wimpy meant impotent. It must be luck or skill Abbott, or twenty turns of having them crawl up to a buttoned Panther.

You know, it looks about even to me Colonel. That Panther is a killer. A few good tanks are much better in a tank on tank than a lot of poor tanks, since one well handled Panther can smoke a half dozen Sherman 75z before they pount the Panther into dust, and the Panther can kill the 75w halfway across the largest board you could realisticly play with those forces. I would play Abbott with those forces taking the German because he has to get my Panther with the flamethrowers or the artillery, or throw away his tanks to get an A-Kill then tackly my skillfully hidden defenders clustered around two of the three flags with LOS to the third, with possibly an outpost ambush to kill his tanks before they can even get close to my Sherman. Abbott's ranking is not bad, he could still, using my strategy, slip my sides or do any number of things that could mess me up, and one of the flamethrowers getting into my midst would kill me, but that seems fair and square. If anything, the Panther tilts it in the German favor, since I need to touch my nose on its butt with my Sherman to do more than scratch its paint (as was the case in real life.)

Sure -- those all are doable issues, a matter of tweeking tables in some cases, or even tough like rebuilding the AI but not hurting performance, just some of the LOS arguments are perfectly valid but undoable unless they write for 64mb 3DFX cards fielded on multiprocessor NT and MacOS machines.

Speaking of Intel: Notice how well the game runs on Intel machines? That is a trick, because you have no real "standards" for the way color is drawn to a screen, no two machine / video card combinations do it the same. I know DirectX is suppose to solve that, but how many games do you know force you to tweek, throw out, or otherwise mess with Direct-X to get them to work. CM worked right away with my Dell, when it took the whole day to load SSI's Steel Panthers (finally had to downgrade to DirectX 5).

Not that modern tanks have anything to do with this, but my cousin's husband was a tanker with 1ID and he claims armament and motive casualties are fairly common. Being to gusty with the driving will in some cases shake the fire control of an M1 out of wack and is considered a casualty in the field. Now, I have had my share of American tanks with dead armament in CM, but what you could be seeing is a statistical fluke. More numerous American tanks coming up against less numerous more powerful German tanks take more shots against the Germans. Hits do not need to penetrate to kill the main gun, merely cause spalling or concussion damage. "Bore sighting" only works at short distances with no arc, since cannon follow the same physical model as rifles (you shoot above a buck in deer hunting when the buck is 200 meters away and your bullet hits it on the down angle, only your sights lie and tell you it is a straight shot), What we see then is a case of the ant versus the elephant. The elephant can stamp any ant, four ants blazing away at the elephants is goning to do something eventually.

Some excellent discussions about LOS and other mechanics have come about recently, but I thought it might be relevant to point out something about the simulation. If you start to hack around with the game engine, you see many things are abstracted. Tanks for instance are two wire frames (upper and lower) with a nice animation for tracks wrapped in a graphics file. The wire frames are abstracts of the tanks, with the flat graphic file filling in much of the detail. If you look at the frames, they do not fill in small parts of the tank, only gross shape. To test out the game when I got it, I made a custom scenario and "bought up" all of the tanks, infantry, and trucks I could and threw them on the biggest map I could. I ran the game on a Dell PIII-1000mhz and a Power Mac G4-500, very close matches in terms of computing power, and both with ATI cards. The game was playable (barely) and although the AI was a slug and animations stuttered, it kept chugging on. Thus, the game seems to be an excellent match to the hardware in our hands now. I have not seen a game that ran that close to the edge without going over since Marathon from Bungie. In other words, somehow a small design team was able to beat the best of the rest of the industry and bring a product to market that runs well on the hardware that is common. I can remember when team "Tank Battle" only ran on our SGI work stations, the PC "Tank Battle" we got shipped gratis never could turn the crank fast enough on our old P90s, the action would freeze, frames dropped like mad, and your shot would show up after your target had already "stuttered" into a new position. As a game, it was a bust, because who can afford to use an SGI to keep it going? I think in the end they were giving it away. In other words, we are going to kick the tires and find many places that don't conform to reality. CM2 will come out and some of the easier things, including the AI, will be fixed, but we have to face facts that if we demand something that needs more polygons to be drawn, more detailed physics and wire frames, and higher resolutions, we had better hold on for when the CM engine gets a bit long in the tooth, and the CM team retreats to build CM:TNG, something that would be a few years off even in the best of the world. That said, ten years from now we will be seeing fuzzy logic AIs that can simulate intelligence, stupidity, and self preservation, 24 bit color tectured wireframes with smart modules that turn the treads, spin the bogies, get mud splattered, and target ball turrets. We will have high resolution fractal trees (no two the same, but they all look like trees) and wire framed individual soldiers. Get down and dirty and you will see shell casings from the action of the weapon, you will see the tank commander frown as he comes around the bend, and you will see an infantryman stop to scratch is bottom before being yelled at by an AI controlled sergeant. So some of our critique should be labeled "speculative" rather than "BIGTIME DO RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!" just because there are no good coding solutions that would not require us to own 8 processor IBM render stations. That said, if my M4A3 ever passes up another tail shot at a Panther I will shoot the whole crew and sell their tank to good will Steve Jackson [This message has been edited by Slapdragon (edited 09-12-2000).]

With our college PCs, whenever we load a new peice of software, we generally erase the whole hard drive and load everything again. Sounds crazy, but your PC could have a virus, corrupt DLLs, a schizzy registry, an old set of Active-X shared files, corrupt Active-X pref files, or a dozen other things. The registry is the most common, as it slowly degrades over time like bad cheese and needs to be rebuilt. So, try erasing the whole shooting match, saving your documents to a backup. On my Dell it takes 8-14 to burn it down and then get everything back on, but I am rewarded with 3 months of flawless activity.

Yes, even more dreaded is the Hamstersturmtroppenfleabagenjaegermeisterfliegershiessen (Does anyone envy German's ability to crunch together 8 words and come up with a new word? I do, must be fun on Saturday nights) of the Luftwaffe. Someone discovered that Hamsters, like Cats, can fall incredible heights without getting hurt, saving money on parachutes. Of course, if you throw them out of a plan at too high and altitude, they explode in the low pressure, so the Hamstershiessen as they were know in short had to be duct tapes (er, in this case hamster taped) to keep that from happening, and they had to hold their paws over their eyes on the way down. Added advantage: after picking the tape off themselves, those rodents were pissed, so look out allied Armies!

Actually, it should work in the Beta because RAVE is part of the Quicktime layer and makes calls right to hardware, while QuickDraw and Open GL remain supported. In fact, the "Carbonization" process is fairly easy for OSX with most apps. An added advantage to recreate CM on OSX is that it can recompile for other Unix operating systems easily (of course, getting all the myriad of cards to work is still possibly a big headache). The CM Mac version and the CM PC version are the same, and were very well engineered. It is my bet that OSX wont be such a big climb for the CM team after their tour de force. As with any other software conversion though, getting a native OSX CM / CM2 will cost time for the CM team. Time is money. The Mac world is getting what could be the most powerful OS on the market in a year. You pay for the power of course. Now here is something that we who own Macs should understand: if you are willing to pay for it, they will design. I for one will pay for the OSX version of CM without whining about extra money for the same game, then I will shell out more bucks for CM2 CM3 CM Revised, CM Designers edition, and every other CM product that the team cares to slide in front of me. There-- Big Time knows that by supporting my platform of choice, they have my buck for the next 50 years. (I have a Dell, but it is not half as fun as my Mac.)

Aside from it being comical calling a Nazi unbiased, Speer really lays it out for you, and he is very critical of his own mistakes along with Germany. Now, Speer was a dupe in some ways, he barely new about the mass killings (hence he did not swing by his neck at Nuremburg as all the other Nazis who were in the know did) but he reads pretty close to the other great history of the war, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

That said, if the game covered the jungles of China and Asia then I think hidden terrain would work well -- It really was not mapped well until the 1960s and there is references to Chindits having to take celestial fixes to even know within 100 kilometers where they were.

I am more basing this on extant histories. Both Gantner and MacDonald refer to being lost on route marches, but never refer to having problems knowing what is around the bend as in, is their a river over that hill. Each reference to combat navigation implies a great trust in their maps. In the Hurtgen, which was well mapped (by the French Ordnance Survey in 1850 to start) it is a problem, of course, what is around the bend is more Hurtgen - no problem. On the Eastern Front the best source is the author of Soldier, and they never had problems with artillery fires in support of advancing troops, except when the troops out ran them. Germans had maps of Russia, just not 1:25000 quads like the US had of France. Thus it is likely a lot of work for little realistic gain. Of ocurse, if the aim of CM2 is to move away from the realism format and add more gaming conventions to add suspense or story lines (Damn, we have to assault a hill next! No one told us!) then it may be worth the effort. I would rather see more varied terrain and added terrain to CM1 than this feature, which is at best dubious in its simulation value. I just don't find literature to support

The only problem with blacked out FOW is that Europe was the most mapped continent of its time (The French survey started 200 years before the US Survey). You may not know where a field is, or if a clump of woods still exists, but you know all the hills, rivers, towns, most of the roads, and all of the railroads. Unlike explorers, you are fighting over land fought over a dozen times since 1801, that really has not changed that much before the 1960s with the urban explosion. So the current FOW is probably way more realistic.

An interesting read, and one of the most historically unbiased internal looks at the German war machine, is Albert Speer's "Inside the Third Reich." On pp 416-418 is a discussion that points to why the Allies prevaled despite having inferior equipment. During the Bulge, Sepp Detriech was stalled infront of Bastogne in part because of under estimating the power of an elite American unit dug in and defending a crucial road head, but also because his most powerful tanks were blown up before he got them, he never had a full load of ammo for the tanks he had, and he could only attack at night or under clouds. Speer laments that no matter how many tanks they produced, only "one in three" reached the soldiers at the front (probably more than that made it, but it shows his frustrations). Likewise, this effects the game in many subtle ways. Americans only rarely camoflauged their tanks. They were more scared of air attack from their own numerous and agressive fighters than they were of being seen.

You are correct, the book I am looking at is a 1951 Regimental History of the 67th Tank Regiment and it clearly says 200 King Tigers rolled out of the production plants and almost immediately into battle (quoting here in part an interview with Speer done in 1946 by USAE) but that "less than 50" made it to the front due to air attacks, breakdowns in the trains, and other problems. The chapter in question is on the 67th's participation in the Battle of the Bulge, and nowhere does it say that these numbers refer to entire tank production.

Throw in with the other terrain types, detailed bridges. Give us a suspension bridge, a pier bridge, and bridges that block LOS.

That is true, but this is actually a picture of the 1st Free Hamster Division under General Jacques LeRodent.

There is one way. (Make that two, but unless you have an RGB-Firewire box and a DV Recorder way #2 is out). Put a folder on your desktop called "film". Run the game. Take a screenshot at #3 setting each 5 seconds, then move in and get closeups and what have you. Throw all the graphs into the film folder. Hook the sound out on your computer to a tape deck of some sort and run each turn through to get audio. Then get yourself a copy of IMovie. Import the sound, and the whole folder called film. Use the sound to cync back all the pictures you have. I would use 6 pictures each second and a duration for each picture of 2 or 5 frames (depending on where it is going). IMovie is great, but Final Cut is better, but that costs big bucks. Premiere works, but not as well. I teach this "rotoscope" method to students for animation, they usually pick it up quickly.

One of the things than many players like is history. While the winning and loosing aspect is a lot of fun, even playing a doomed defense has a lot of interest. In almost any game escalation begines when players choose only the toughest units, King Tigers and Comets, Panthers and JS111s facing off, when each of those tanks except the Panther was relatively rare on the battlefield. Of the 200 King Tigers made, less than 50 made it to frontline combat. For the Americans, it was historical to trade 4 tanks for 1 German Panther in all but the most elite tank units because at the same time 20 German tanks would succumb to Jabos and Arty. Now if you are playing yourself, that of course is not matter. [This message has been edited by Slapdragon (edited 09-10-2000).]

[This message has been edited by Slapdragon (edited 09-10-2000).]

The Hamster Armored units in particular were fierce though. Now some unkind soles will tell you that the practice of making an APC from two stainless steel colanders was cheap, but let me tell you, facing them with only an M1 as they roll to you is a scary sight. Over run attacks do not do much damage, but the fleas you get from them are humiliating.

Actually, many Hamsters served willingly with the German military, but much to the shame of Rodentia there was a small few, the so called blond hamsters, who became members of the Waffenhamster SS. It was these Hamsters which participated in the senseless Abbeville atrocities against the Canadians, and who looted the palace d' art of its priceless water nipple collection, which has never been recovered. That does not mean that the slave OstHamester Battalions fought willing no matter what revisionist like to think, many a Hamster ended their days underneath a Sherman tread, in what was known as a "Osthamsterpankaken" in German.

My PC screenshots are always washed out, so if I have a real reason to be taking screen shots I use my mac, which is much simpler anyway. Shift-Apple-3 and you have it on your hard drive, then pop it in Photoshop. That and my Dell has a "GPF-17 You have performed an illegal action" severe crash that seems to take the game down during critical moments. It takes a lot of willpower and skill to play games on a PC.

Meters have been used even by the US Military for a long time, but as a yank I like it in meters. If I was a designer working with 3D images and having to create hit registers and a myriad of tables in an Application written in C++ I would want my table to be as easy as I could make them, which leaves you with the metric system. As Manny said: "14 inches a foot, ounces and pounds, bog save us."