Andrew H.
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Posts posted by Andrew H.
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I don't know if it was the Cold War or any kind of thoughtful analysis that made the Germans the favorite side.
IIRC it was simply that the Germans always were depicted as having large variety of interesting units/weapons systems with a wide variety of different strength factors and special abilities, whereas the Soviets in particular were always depicted on the counters of the time as identical hordes of brown counters - all pretty much the same. They were simply "boring". The Germans were "cool". Even their snappy uniforms (thank you Hugo Boss).
I think the reasons that the Germans were popular was primarily because they were seen as having high quality skilled troops, while the soviets were, basically, faceless red hordes. In terms of dramatic narrative, it is much more interesting to be in the small, outnumbered, but highly skilled group of individuals than it is to be in the faceless mass of soldiers whose only idea of tactics is the human wave attack. This is the view that you get in the books written by the German generals after the war, and it was the widespread wargamer view throughout the 60's and 70's (by the time I started wargaming more seriously, in, say, 1982, this idea was slowly changing...but there is still a strong "German super-soldier" contingent).
It's interesting how even US WWII war movies often try to put the US soldiers in the "skilled underdog facing the overwhelming foe" role - think "Battle of the Bulge" or the "Dirty Dozen".
I did tend to play the soviets at that time, though - and somewhere at my mom's house I still have a large fleet of 1/285 miniatures. But it was frustrating...if I won, it was because I outnumbered them 4-1; and if I lost, they would brag about how they fought off huge odds. (Even though this was SL and we knew that the scenario was balanced and also he had a 10-3 leader with an HMG in a stone building and I had to cross open ground with 48 squads. But I'm not bitter...)
And I think that the Cold War had a certain subconscious affect in how we thought about things, too. I didn't know anyone who wanted the Germans to win...but clearly the results of the war, as seen from 1983, say, did not lead to an optimal situation for Eastern Europe, and I think that there may have been a subconscious feeling that the end result would have been better if the USSR had won less decisively.
Of course now I find the Soviets more interesting to play because they present a different set of challenges - winning when you have a handful of super soldiers isn't always as interesting as winning when you have a lot of average soldiers.
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I think it's great that BF has gotten into its "stride". Just saying, if you don't have time to actually play more than a fraction of scenarios... (Maybe everyone else is just very fast?)
I've played a lot of CM, but only a fraction of the scenarios. 4 times out of 5, I'll come home from work and have maybe an hour to play CM. So I fire up a QB - usually small on small, small on medium, sometimes tiny on tiny or small - and play for an hour or so.
When I have more time, I'll play scenarios, although I tend to play medium and below, which takes less time, too.
But I think everyone plays differently.
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I like the feature, both for a quick check of a squad's brittleness as well as to let me know whether I've lost the LMG.
I don't really have a strong opinion on the UI after one quick battle (in which, BTW, the Germans kept picking of the guy carrying the LMG). It does a good job of making the casualties obvious, which I like a lot.
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I've played CM long enough that I don't have a particular issue with the UI, and one can learn any arbitrary system with enough practice, but the relative key system did take some getting used to when it came out, compared to just clicking on a unit and then hitting "q" for quick or "f" for fire or "s" for slow (or whatever the original commands were).
But given the number of commands, that's probably not workable - and maybe at some point there is something easier than just a large number of hotkeys.
Having said that, at least the UI doesn't interfere with us getting new commands.
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I'm not sure that CM is too off on the casualties, actually...and I don't think that average casualty figures are relevant.
*Every battle* in CM is the most important battle of the war. It's Team Desobry at Noville and Foy (1st batt./506 PIR took 200+ casualties in a day); it's the 106th ID in the Schnee Eifel; and it's the 26th VG Div. trying to take Bastogne. Across open fields. While being shelled by 105s.
Average days, for people in the front lines, are something like: Dig foxholes, hear some trucks moving around, and be shelled by mortars for 30 minutes. There's one casualty when Private Smith gets a piece of shrapnel in his leg and is sent to the field hospital.
Or - not rare - there is an attack, so you march your company to jumping off point...but you can't find it and the attack goes on without you.
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While we're waiting for RT, I thought I would point out a QB feature I'd like to see in some future iteration of CM.
When you set up a QB now, you choose a lot of parameters: Battle Type; Map Size; Environment; Region; Service; Combat Force; Weather; Daylight; Month; etc.
Most of these parameters allow you to select either "random" or else make one particular choice. I.e., for Environment, you can choose "random" or "hills," "town", "village", "forest", and so forth. For Service, you can choose "Random [side]" or something like "Waffen SS", "Luftwaffe", "German Army", or "Kriegsmarine". For Daylight, you get "random" or "day", "dusk", "dawn", or "night." For Combat Force, you get "random" or "mix", "infantry only", "armor only", "mech infantry", "airborne infantry", etc.
What I would like to see is the option to exclude certain options and then choose random, which would be drawn - randomly - from the remaining non-excluded options.
So under Day, I would be able to deselect "Night," choose "Random," and have a battle that is either set in Day, Dawn, or Dusk. Or deselect "City", choose random, and have the Environment set to anything but a city fight.
Of course, if you implement SOPs, this could be included as an SOP...
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And then "bullet time".
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Couldn't resist, but there are two sets of conditions that will tell if you are using your tanks right or wrong...
If you are playing me, and your tanks are going all 'splody and burning, well then, you're using them just right.
If you are playing me, and all my tanks are going all 'splody and burning, well then, you're using them all wrong.
I was going to say that if you have to ask the question, then yes, are using your tanks wrong.
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Pix? Hah! Close your eyes...tightly. Then push hard with your fingertips against your eyelids until you feel excrutuating pain.
Open them up and see the world through a red haze of blood and pain!
THAT is deep woods smg assaulting! Gloooorriiiooouuuusssss....
So basically Bil has tree-ents and Ken has a group of orcs armed with SMGs.
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At 5'3, I wish you guys would stop climbing around in my tanks and go back to the infantry where you belong!
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And don't forget it had to write in a vacuum as well. That's what cost millions of dollars. The punch line is that the Russians, faced with the same problem, used pencils. Stoopid bloody Russians, huh?
Michael
At the risk of being pedantic, the joke is not actually true. For whatever reason, snopes won't let me link directly to the page, but it's worth googling "snopes" and "space pen" to get the (surprisingly kind of interesting) story. Highlights include: (1) pencils aren't great in zero-G because the tips tend to break off and graphite bits float around; (2) after the Apollo 1 fire, NASA tried to remove everything flammable from the capsule, including pencils; and (3) the "space pen" was developed by a private company at no cost to NASA.
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I own CM: Touch, as well as "Bulge" and "Drive on Moscow," (all for the iPad) so I think there must be something else going on with the game they denied, or else they've changed their criteria.
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"Everybody's like Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece..."
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Admittedly I haven't done a huge amount of urban fighting in CM, but the doors issue is not a big deal for me. When your troops suddenly find they can't get in a door, I rationalise this as perfectly normal. If the building is damaged, maybe something fell across it. If pristine maybe the owner took precautions and pushed a dresser across the door and left via the window (in the vain hope they might come back without their house having been fought through). Unless a unit had been fighting in the same part of town for a day or more, you think they know where every door is? Let alone which ones are open/damaged/usable? If you are doing 'real' urban fighting (as opposed to advance to contact type stuff), you don't use doors on the whole anyway - blast though a wall (either with engineers or large HE). And any defender that's been there for more than a few hours will have loopholed the walls anyway...
Although I completely agree that the troops shouldn't have an architect's knowledge of where all the doors on every building on the map are, the door issue is still a big issue because instead of troops stopping where they thought the door would be, they continue around the building until they find the door, even when this is a horrible idea.
I.e., assume an enemy occupied building facing a street, an unoccupied building on the other side of the street, and a friendly unit behind the unoccupied building and out of LOS to the occupied building. If you give the friendly units orders to enter the unoccupied building and the only door is in the front of the building, the units will move the rear of the building, move around the building to the street, and enter the building from the front door. If there are any survivors. Even going in through a side door would likely lead to casualties if the enemy occupied building had LOS.
The problem can be worked around easily enough, of course, but I still think it's a problem. It just may be a problem that can't be easily solved, because *sometimes* your order to enter a building just means "enter it anywhere; it doesn't matter", and other times your order means "enter this building from this side only...and if you can't, for God's sake don't walk around in front of the building on the road that is covered by the flak guns". It's always completely obvious to *me* what I mean, though.
On another note, I'd also really like the ability to toggle buildings off as mentioned upthread; plotting movement on dense urban maps is sometime difficult if there are a lot of units and taller buildings. And this will become even more difficult when sewer movement is added. (There will be sewer movement, won't there?)
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Not that the Finns needed to get on the rear deck to piss in the engine compartment. They were entirely capable of directing their streams 30 or more metre with pinpoint accuracy, while remaining hidden behind half a blade of grass. They only got up on the tank to prove they could get that close...
I read that there was so much vodka in the Finns' urine that they could ignite the stream and use it as a flamethrower. There's got to be a YouTube video somewhere.
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Blowing up tanks with machine guns is so last week.
I want to see a sniper blowing up a tank. Or a dismounted tank crewman armed with a pistol.
And of course I want to see a flamethrower do it. But that's what everyone wants.
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I really like that kind of small-unit analysis.
But I think there are some gaps in the explanation in scenario #2.
The tank commander is behind the hill, observes (I wonder how, exactly) the AT guns, and then charges them with his tanks, overrunning them.
He was successful, of course, but it seems like a pretty risky move. Why not drop mortars or arty on them? Or flank them with infantry? Charging guns specifically designed to destroy tanks *with tanks* doesn't seem like a really good approach. It seems like a way to end up with most of your tanks destroyed and being used as yet another example of poor soviet combined arms technique.
Now undoubtedly there is a reason why the direct attack made sense. Maybe the commander noticed that the AT guns were not manned. Maybe there were 4 AT guns and 35 Russian tanks. Maybe the commander was able to pinpoint the location of each AT gun, assign each AT gun to a group of tanks, and have them concentrate their fire on the appropriate AT gun as they crested the ridge.
But they don't *explain* any of that...and charging into AT guns doesn't, in general, seem like a great idea; one huge reason for scouting is precisely to avoid doing that.
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Do you still have arty?
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Heh... no. The hole is not literally simulated (i.e. polygons are affected) like periscopes or other things. Plus, the particular "stations" in a vehicle are explicitly defined and assigned values for the system to use in it's various calculations. Nothing like that is generated on the fly.
Steve
Thanks for the explanation.
I guess that means that firing personal weapons through the hole would be right out as well.
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I think Amizaur has a point, but Freyberg has one too. As far as range estimation goes, tank gunners usually set their sights at what they expected an average battle range to be, depending on the terrain and sight lines. The trajectory of high velocity cannon was flat enough that a target appearing at anything close to the anticipated range was likely to be hit.
Michael
I've forgotten the precise details, but I think there's something in the Tigerfibel about setting the range to around 900 meters and having a good chance of hitting any 2m tall target at a range of 200-900 meters. (With the impact being near the top of the turret at 200 meters, and near the lower hull at 900 meters).
Note the disadvantage for the 9 foot tall Sherman vs. the 8 foot tall T-34 vs. the 7 foot tall StuG III. Most Tigers simply surrendered when confronted by 5 foot tall bren carriers or weasels.
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It seems like Bil may need to revise his Squad Infantry Drill to deal with changes in technology.
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The issue here is the game considers the Hetzer effectively spotted. So how then to narrow down what "spotted" means in terms of when the hit decals are/aren't shown? I'm not sure there is an easy way for the game engine to show one element and not another until a separate set of spotting conditions are met.
Agree that it would be nice if that could happen, but like Bil... overall it's a plus to the game even if there is a rough edge or two.
Steve
Can a crewmember in a tank that has been penetrated spot through the hole?
I know it sounds silly, but I remember the report of the bug where the tiger gunner (?) couldn't spot because he was sitting sideways in the turret and not looking through the telescope.
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I think BFC is modeling the unreliable transmission on the T-34/76s. I would expect early Panther D's to sometimes randomly stop or else refuse to move.
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BFC's new management initiative has allowed them to dramatically reintermediate top-line action items. That's why CMRT is coming out so soon.
Download Managers - Any that work?
in Combat Mission Red Thunder
Posted
I had something like that happen with MG (in the US); I just had to stop and redownload.