Andrew H.

[q] Dieses Produkt wird nicht erscheinen, da man mit juristischen Winkelzügen versucht, die Veröffentlichung zu torpedieren. [/q] Tranlated, this is approximately: "This product will not appear because people have used legal tricks to scuttle its publication." All in all, a pretty slimy statement, given that the "legal trick" is based on the fact that the company is selling stuff that doesn't belong to them.

<blockquote>quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by Cpl Carrot: Whats the guy on the left packing? Looks mean.<hr></blockquote> That's a BFG 45. Germans get it after defeating the soviet boss in the Brandenburg Gate.

<blockquote>quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by rexford: When 17 pounder APDS strikes the Tiger II turret front head-on, the compound angle is 10° and the hits should penetrate normally beyond 350m. However, if the APDS strikes the turret front at 11° from armor facing the compound angle is 15° and hits fail from 150 to 950 meters. <hr></blockquote> Thanks for posting this (and all the other stuff you post, of course). I particularly liked the example I quoted above, though, because it's so easy to imagine stuff like this happening in a CM game. I also sort of like the image of KTII's charging Fireflies to get closer than 200 meters. I suppose some people might call that "gamey".

I think the otherwise forgettable movie Patton explained this best: Q: Is it true that machine gun bullets can go all the way through our halftracks? A: No, they just go through one side and then bounce around inside.

IIRC, the armor ratios were adjusted due to the high number of potent "vehicles" that the Germans had. That is, after maxing out his "Armor" category, the German player has the capability of drawing on a wide variety of vehicles armed with 50 and 75mm guns which can take out regular allied tanks,and which can also be effective vs. infantry. US and british vehicles don't have this capability. So to some extent the answer might depend on what sort of armored vehicles the soviets have. A better solution, IMO, would be to redefine "Armor" to include all armored vehicles with weapons in the 20mm and above range; vehicles would armored and unarmored vehicles with MGs or less. An even better solution (although this would have to wait for CMII or beyond) would be to have multiple overlapping categories. So a Daimler AC would be considered "Armor," "Light Armor," and "Recon." So in a Combined arms type battle, the Daimler's points would count against the "Armor" category. But the multiple categories would permit different kinds of battles, such as battles involving only "light armor," or battles involving a certain number of "recon" units. The latter two hypothetical battle types would be particularly interesting in Russia because the soviets had some nice light tanks that it would be fun to play with -- T-60s and 70s as well as the BT types

<blockquote>quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by Les Gray: BTW; If you read the EULA (end user license agreement) for any MS product, you will see that you do not own it either. As a matter of fact, virtually every piece of software out there, that is sold, sharewared, freewared etc is only licensed for use, not sold outright.<hr></blockquote> I'm sure I'm not the only person who saw his dream of instant wealth vanish when I realized that CM license did not permit me to "rent or lease" CM to anyone else. WRT CM, Nvidia, and XP, it's important to realize (as Shrullenhaft pointed out) that this is a driver problem. It doesn't matter how long XP was in beta (if it's not still in beta); the only thing that matters for CM's compatibility is the specific nvidia drivers for xp. My 81.23 (I think) drivers are dated Sept. 14. So even if BTS felt responsible to change the game to work with the new nvidia drivers, the earliest that they would have been able to do so would have been in september, assuming (1) that nvidia gave them a copy of the new drivers and (2) that they had an XP beta lying around and (3) the XP beta is the same version as the release. Of course it's silly to expect BTS to do that...and even if they did, what happens if nvidia releases a new driver the following month? As I said before, the problem is with nvidia's drivers, and nvidia has to come up with the solution.

<blockquote>quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by Iron Chef Sakai: i would also like to add that the T-34 tank design was made by chriostie, an american,by the name of CHristie, hence the christie suspensionon the t-34, wide tracks and sloped armor inovations. the american army was too cheap to buy his designb so he sold it to the russians i beleive in the very late 20's or early 30's. <hr></blockquote> Christie did not design the T-34. The T-34 did use a (modified)Christie suspension, but the rest of the tank was Soviet design. The reason the T-34 was revolutionary is not because of its suspension, but because of its combination of thick sloped armor and a 76mm gun that was an effective AT and anti-personnel weapon. By contrast, the Germans -- indeed, most combatants at this time -- had separate ground support (Pz IV w/short 75) and anti-tank (38(t), Pz III w/37 or short 50) AFVs, in a sort of tank-destroyer pattern. Sometime countries tried to make dual purpose tanks, but ended up with cumbersome things like the Grant (37mm gun in turret plus 75mm gun in sponson mount) or the Char B, with a 47mm (I think) gun in a turret and a hull mounted 75. The T-34, of course, made things much simpler. Christie did design some tanks, but his tanks were much more similar to the soviet BT series -- fast, lightly armored, with the peculiar ability to drive on roads without treads. The BT tanks were good for light scouting tanks, but they weren't revolutionary. I don't mean to downplay the importance of suspension: the T-34 had a very good suspension, which gave it good cross country flotation. Much of this is due to Christie's ssupension; some of it is due to the soviet designers being smart enough to choose a wide track width. The Sherman would have been better off with a Christie style suspension than with the horizontal volute suspension they started off with. But Christie didn't design the T-34.

These production numbers are interesting. I wonder whether they are really inconsistent with battalion reports though. That is, if a battalion counts, say, 5 tanks are write-offs and draws five new tanks, does that really mean that these tanks are write-offs, or are they only write-offs as far as the battalion is concerned. In other words, might these tanks be overhauled by a higher level rear echelon repair park, sent to a replacement depot, and eventually reissued to another unit. The same would be true wrt to cannibalized tanks: the local unit might use the tank as a source of spare parts for a while, but is it possible that the cannibalized tank would eventually be taken to a rear area and refurbished, and then sent to a different unit. It wouldn't necessarily make military sense for a tank battalion with several severely damaged tanks to pause its advance until the tanks can be sent to a rear area, repaired, and returned to the battalion.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Germanboy: I check with Mellenthin and the Handbook later. As for not taking armour through them, a bunch of crawling soldiers is slightly less visible than your average T-34/85, so this might be an explanation.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> It might also have to do with leaving the ground in such a condition that tanks are able to drive on it, even after the barrage has been lifted.

I think the Bren's ROF needs to be adjusted downwards...it must be hard to change the magazine whilst holding that big flag. Although having the gun on the tripod would make things easier. Also, these guys should be easier to spot with that flag. Although I suppose that might depend on the direction the wind is blowing. :cool:

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Doug Williams: So, Mr. Johnson and JasonC, you contend that 40 combat infantrymen armed with rifles, automatic weapons, and hand grenades, and swarming all over a tank have virtually no chance of doing any damage to it or it's occupants? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Even the "swarming over" gives the infantryman too much credit: the *deck* of a Sherman is 6 feet tall. So even climbing on the deck is something of an accomplishment. And if that turret is whipping around, you'll end up back on the ground with several broken bones. The most common method you hear about for non-AT weapon equipped infantry to knock out a tank is by pouring and/or igniting gasoline on or in the tank. Sometimes the smoke gets sucked into the ventilation system, which can have real effects, or which can fool the tankers into thinking that the tanks is really on fire and cause them to abandon it.

I'm not going to get into the numbers. I am interested in the human aspect part of gunnery, though, esp. wrt things that can be accounted for in the game. It might be interesting, and it might be realistic, if tank gunners got some sort of accuracy bonus for shooting, when, due to range or unawareness of the enemy (maybe), the enemy would not be able to hit the shooting tank. Like, say, T-26's at 2000 meters. There may be some sort of de minimus rule, so that tanks with a very low chance to hit don't invalidate the bonus. At first I was going to try to make up some number realistic sounding bonus (like 10% of the actual chance to hit added as a bonus, so a 50% chance becomes a 55%; 90 becomes 99, and 5% becomes 5.5%). But then a simpler solution suggested itself: have a crew, for shooting purposes, act as the next higher quality level. So regulars would shoot as veterans, veterans as crack, etc. Elites can't get any better; that's what elite means . I think that the bonus should be temporarily lost if enemy units come within firing range, and permanently lost (for the rest of the qb/scenario) if the tank is hit by enemy fire, regardless of whether it is AP, HE, arty, or small arms fire. I am assuming, of course, that there is some firing benefit that more experienced crews get. There must be, since order delays and morale don't apply to vehicles, but more experienced vehicles cost substantially more. Anyway, does anyone have any thoughts on this system?

It's hard to take out tanks with just grenades. There aren't really any open parts of the tank, and the hatches lock from the inside. There's a well-known case of a KV-2 holding up an entire German armor division for a day - basically, they had to use engineers with demo charges, and they were only able to immobilize it. I think they took it out the next day with an 88 FlaK.

Maybe he's in the Grossdeutschland division Actually, it's worse than that. Look at the uniform, the helmet...he's a Fallschirmjaeger!

I'm pretty sure that double penetrations aren't modeled in CM. The range looks really close, to judge from the picture: I wonder if the .50 cal killed one tank through the side turret, and the tank gun killed the other one through the front. That would give the Hellcat credit for both kills, and would look like the Panzers were knocked out with one shot. I don't have my game handy, though -- can a .50 cal penetrate Mk IV's turret from the side at point blank range?

After reading all of the fascine/funnies/ engineering threads, it occurred to me that there is a relatively simple way that BTS could permit engineering type battles without doing a bunch of new coding. That is, they could make a new battle type called, say, Breach. The defender in such a battle would get a bunch of points to spend, most of which would have to be spent on fortifications. The attacker would be wise to spend his points on, say, engineers. There should probably be other limits on the attacker's force selection, although I'm not sure what, precisely. I gave this proposal its own thread because it is essentially independent from proposals to change how the engineering battle is modeled or add additional equipment. Although of course if flail tanks or mine-clearing pachyderms were added to CM, they would also have an important role in the Breach-type battle. I have some rough ideas about how force selection in a Breach might look, but I would hope that people on the board could refine them further. Force balance I suspect that everyone who has CM toyed, early on, with defending against an attack by purchasing lots of wire and mines, only to realize, relatively quickly, that it never makes sense to defend by setting up extensive belts of mine and wire. They're just too expensive. They may or may not be overpriced for regular battles, but they're certainly overpriced if you want to set up extensive belts of fortifications. So the easy way around this is to have a different force balance for Breaches. Maybe the attacker and the defender get an equal number of points, but the defender has to spend 2/3 of his points on fortifications (perhaps with the further requirement that 1/2 of the fortifications be unmanned (i.e., mines or wire or AT ditches). Maybe the defender should even get 1.5 times the attacker's force. Victory Locations/setup It seems to me that the best VL/setup scenario would be a cross between a probe and an assault. That is, the defender would have a fairly deep setup, like an assault, but there would be a lot of flags spread across the map, like in a probe. This would mean that the defender would be spread thinly, and would have to rely on the fortifications to slow down the attacker long enough for the defender's other infantry units to come over and try to repel the attackers. The defender will have to start out with his infantry units spread out, though, so that he can cover all of his fortifications -- it would be easy for engineers to breach a minefield if no one is shooting at them. Considering that the defenders will have spent 75% of their points on fortifications, they should not permit them to be breached uncontested. New engineering stuff While this proposal doesn't require any additional units (or additional capabilities for current units), it's certainly not incompatible with new units. Flail tanks could be easily incorporated into the unit selection, as could wire-cutting engineers or infantry. Different kinds of roadblocks, pillboxes, trenches, foxholes, etc. would also add variety. Of course, if there were different terrain types, the defender might base his defense around them, which might encourage the use of specialized vehicles to cross the obstacles (or at least leave burning fascines as cover for advancing infantry). Additional victory conditions could be incorporated as well, especially things like exit conditions. Particularly if, in SL style, what had to be exited was, say, a convoy. But none of these new units or victory conditions would be required to add a Breach type battle. Thoughts?

If you go to the CM players meeting in s.f., though, be sure to leave your crown at home. Although I would like to see a picture of it...

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Slapdragon: Void = Gunny Bunny [snip] Anyone have any good observations that shoot my theory down? Idiotic Attempt to Cut Down Rommel Idiotic Comment on Mortars A legitimate poster makes at least one real post in 14. Even Peng. [ 09-30-2001: Message edited by: Slapdragon ]<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> AV's not GB I think you've forgotten (or repressed ) how illiterate and, well...spastic...GB was. AV has mastered the compound sentence and the comma, which GB could never quite master. I don't think that GB would use a sig from Blake, either. I also get the impression that AV has played the game, which was never the case with GB. The posts are different, too. The "tiger tank crews" thread was productive, and I found the 2" mortar comment to be funny. GBs posts were things like how CM would be better if BTS sold out to MS (!), how he was being oppressed, and how CMBB would be worthless if it didn't have dynamic lighting. The Rommel post was sort of bizarre, but wasn't in GB's style at all: GB would never claim to have a gay latino lover; GBs style was more along the lines of calling everyone who disagreed with him (i.e., everyone) gay. (There was an extensive "Fionn! That's a girl's name!" conversation on usenet). So AV isn't GB. Also, he apologized, which denies him GBhood right there.

Probably the simplest thing to do is to use the Move command. Even on the same terrain, this won't work perfectly, as experience levels lead to delays in start times, which create gaps. But these gaps will be shortest with the Move command, simply because troops travel a shorter distance walking for a few seconds than they would running for the same amount of time. Depending on the experience difference/delay gap between the troops, you may be able to use the delay command to cause the more experienced troops. This won't work perfectly, as the difference in experience levels rarely works out to exactly 15 seconds.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Jarmo: The tech gap becomes really important only when the other side has something you just can't kill in a fair fight. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> This is probably right; I don't think that the Germans could have obtained the results they got in France '40 being solely equipped with WWI style tanks, for example. But I don't think that Jason's point is that tech gaps never matter; I think his main point is that the tech gap that existed in WWII between tank fleets was not so great as to make a meaningful difference in longer term operations. In fact what this means, assuming that the German tank fleet average is StuG/PzIV, and the allied tank fleet average tank is the Sherman/T-34, is that there is no tech gap. Or there is no tech gap as it applied to fleets. Because these numbers are averages, though, there will be situations where there is a tech gap as it applies to individual battles. And the tech gap might prove the decisive factor in these individual battles, as it often does in CM. But, once again because these are averages, using the above average part of your tank fleet in a specific location means, through the rules of mathematics (or at least arithmetic) that other parts of the line will contain your below average tanks, which will be overmatched in turn by the average or better tanks of your opponent. So when you have many such matchups, the averages average out and there is no meaningful overall tech gap. Now if the Germans fleet averaged out to a reliable, fuel efficient, easily mass produced King Tiger, and the average US fleet averaged out to a Sherman, there would be a substantial tech difference that would probably make itself felt operationally. Note that I mostly assumed for the purposes of my argument that groggy things like guns and armor were the decisive factor in the tech gap. In real life there were a lot of non-groggy things (supply, logistics, air power, reliability) that were at least as important as the grog factors. The presence of these factors, combined with the fact that there was not much of a tech gap between tank fleets (and the allied fleet was much larger, btw), means that even where the germans were able to achieve numerical parity and local tech gap superiority (to coin a phrase), their successes were mostly limited and mostly local.

Actually, if CM wanted to do this realistically, they would have bad leaders, but not tell the players. That is, in the game the leader would appear like a regular leader (+1 Morale, whatever), but in reality, he would be -1 combat, -1 stealth, or whatever. I'm not sure that CM should actually model bad leaders though; you're probably better off just having inexperienced leaders.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by tss: Once again my canonical example on this: A Finnish 75mm Pak40 team fired at own tank at range of 15 meters and missed. Then reloaded, fired again, and hit, blowing the venerable T-26 to pieces. - Tommi<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> And if they'd missed with the second shot, they probably would have picked up the Pak 40, charged the T-26, and rammed it.

CMBO:CMBB = SL:COI Which is fine with me. :cool:

Well, the 95 "shots" a German HMG carries is equivalent to 2000 or 3000 bullets, as I understand it. It's not uncommon for me to have games where my HMGs do a lot of suppressing, and may cause an occasional casualty...but I'm not sure that the HMG would have caused even one KIA, even if it uses all its ammo. Note that the above example involves an HMG firing from around 300 or 400 meters or so. If the range drops to, say 100 meters, the enemy casualty count is usually higher. But typical MG employment ranges were at around 500 meters, IIRC, where the MG will cause few casualties or KIAs, but will be effective (against historical troops, i.e., Greens and Regulars) at suppressing units that try to move in the open. At unusually close ranges, the casualties will be atypically higher. CM doesn't model all the ways artillery was used. During the Bulge, for example, Germans would typically drop a 30 minute mortar barrage on US positions every night, just to keep people from moving around. This would cause far fewer casualties than the typical CM artillery strike, where the FO is targetting specific units in a specific location. The Allies, with much better logistics, would use much more artillery. Sometimes the purpose wasn't specifically to kill anyone, but to keep them from being able to reinforce troops by covering likely rear areas with artillery. In this situation, you are successful even if the enemy takes no casualties.

The only fair thing to do is to fill orders in alphabetical order by username. As of yesterday's date, so that a bunch of people don't log in as AAA1 or something annoying like that. Also, yesterday was the first day of Fall. Where's CMBB!