WWB

In CM you are buying a single figher-bomber. Try buying 4 or 8 at a time. A certain battle or two I have created feture squadron strength airstrikes. They can be very devastating. WWB

I would say win95 rev B if you can find it. It is the fastest, stablest win9x iteration there ever was. You do not need the latest version of DirectX, 8 will work fine for the several years old panzer elite. Anyone know what the guy who suggested ME was smoking? WWB

There was one huge disadvantage to the US (and any other) 12.7mm---ammo weighs a ton. IIRC, you can carry 3 7.62mm rounds for every 12.7mm in terms of weight. Even though the ma deuce was a weapon to be feared, feeding it enough ammo in the field was a difficult proposition. And, when you are holding 20m of front with 2 men, the LMG34/42 comes into its own. The firepower advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. Also, there was one key feature which offset the lack of water cooling--quick change barrels. This allowed fire alot more than other air cooled guns. WWB PS: While normally belt fed, on the advance the LMG42 was often fed with 50 round drums. Not that you would want to hip fire one anyhow. [ July 09, 2002, 09:30 AM: Message edited by: wwb_99 ]

I think it was a Stug or a Marder, but it has been a while. The elevation on that gun was a bit high for reality, IMHO. The 37mm ATG is in CMBO, but not the german one. US Airborne has it in June of 44. The german one was phased out pretty rapidly because it bordered on useless against T34s. WWB

U2, check out the link in my sig regarding hating me. There, you can find many more operations. WWB

Real question is which maps. I have 3 of them, one first edition and 2 later editions. The first edition has at least 5 times the maps than the later ones. WWB

Argh. I have seen it work. Damn bugs. WWB

Not quite. Padlocking units on transport just makes it so they cannot be offloaded. Only decision you would make is what vehicle carries what gun, which players could advise you on. For an example, see my Schwarzwald Bridge scenario--you can place the tanks, but you cannot move the infantry off of them. WWB

TB--you can enforce this one. Just load the guns on transport, and padlock them there. WWB

Ok, so I should insult the russians and use finnish names. Yeah, sure. WWB

Germans did have something of the kind--a 13mm MG (and 15mm for that matter). Forgot the designation, but it was not altogether uncommon but was generally not issued to land forces. Used principally for AA, started showing up some in land battles on the approaches to the reich. Reason you don't see them in CM is because they really did not want to get into the details of simulating the 100 or so different mgs in german service. WWB

Best place to find maps is the Geography and Cartography section of the Library of Congress in Washington DC. They have 1:50000 maps of much of the soviet union, poland, hungary, etc. WWB

Hmm, works all the time for me. I just make map, buy platoon. Place platoon and split squads. Then go back to force editor and delete one of the sections. Do not delete the HQ, as that will delete entire platoon. WWB

No way to place a squad without an HQ. Best you can do is a half squad. Buy the unit, delete all but HQ, go into map, split squad. Then delete half squad. You get a squad plus a HQ which will just about equal a squad. WWB

Sorry to rain on your parade guys, but there will not be a CMBB for OSX. The fundamental problem is that OSX does not support a current enough version of the RAVE extentions for CMx. So you would basically be looking at a rewrite of the graphics engine. Which they are undertaking for CMII anyhow, but it aint gonna happen for CMBB. We are talking 6 months or more of work to get it all updated to OpenGL. Now, when the rewrite does occour, I would suspect that it will be a pure OpenGL product, since that is cross platform, etc. WWB PS: A possibly more constructive way to handle this would be to harrass Apple for better RAVE support under OS X. PSII: just actually read the first post. Would be great to see so OS X based CM. Especially now that photoshop has made the move to that OS. [ June 23, 2002, 09:15 PM: Message edited by: wwb_99 ]

Tanks just are not that instantly deadly. A real life example, occouring yesterday happened in israel. An israeli tank fired 2 shells into a crowded market place. It was unclear if these were 105mm or 120mm shells, but definitely big enough to put a hurt on the crowd. The signficant crowd, standing about on terrain that CMBO would consider "paved" with 0% cover, suffered 13 casualties from both shells. WWB

I think if you can run the game, you could run such a battle. CM scales itself very well, so it will just get slower and choppier on the huge map with lots of units. So a better question is how much hardware do I need to run such a battle smoothly with all the graphical options on. WWB

If you are in europe, it can be found in stores for 25 euros or so. WWB

Oh no. It´s fun to pick your own force. And in the final analysis, I will be happy with any pricing system that comes close to giving historic results. If 'Rarity' does that, I give it my blessings. </font>

Screw the pricing system. Play scenarios. WWB

I think you didn´t quite get my joke. Engineers and such are an asset of every Division; therefore not, in any sense, 'rare'. The comparison with HQs served to illustrate my point.</font>

AS: Do you buy Bn HQs individually? Or as part of a Bn? Given that they cannot be bought except as part of their relatively common unit, I would suspect that this is not an issue. WWB

Yes, generally the squad LMG was the last thing to be dropped. You will notice in CMBO that the LMG tends to last the longest as well. I have seen many a 3 man, 2 LMG42 Panzergrenadier squad. WWB

As for tanks and aircraft attack, generally I ignore the threat. There are very few battles which feature enough airpower to take out a platoon of tigers, or even mark IVs. Hitting a small target such as a tank with a bomb in the days before termial guidance and computer assisted targeting is not an easy feat. But I would worry about my HTs and other open-topped vehicles. Once lost a whole platoon in a single pass. WWB

A corallary to knowing what computer picked forces someone has: Is it an advantage? Yes. Is it decisive? No. Just because he knows you have 2 ATGs does not mean your opponent knows where you put them. He will know he has to look out for two of them. But he will still have to find them the hard way. Since the computer picked his forces, it does not give away his strategy, etc. In situations where this really matters, such as tournaments, there are some procedures to follow to create a game with passwords for both sides. WWB