Hensworth

How is this Tiger hull down ???

There is no spin campaign. There is only you seemingly stuck on the idea that this must be a discussion on what you propose, whereas most people have already come to the conclusion that what you propose isn't what it's going to be and are trying to move on to discussing what the merits and demerits might be of what it actually IS going to be, namely 2x2km squares.

Not my problem. Personally I have the developer down as a nut who happens to be into just the kind of CM experience that I like too and is making the game because that's the kind of game he wants to play. If he spends any amount of money on the development, it is highly likely that he will not earn it back. To some degree, yes. But one of the things I like in a campaign is that you get to experience different kinds of battles : totally imbalanced games that teach you the value of having one poor AT gun over having none at all, games where taking a platoon down with you can be considered a success, games where you get to stomp all over a hapless company marooned in the open steppe with a handful of tanks, games where nary a shot gets fired and yet you still come away with a sense of achievement at having fooled or misled your opponent. Being forced to play out the sometimes not so glorious and action-packed phases of an engagement can be enlightening. [ October 11, 2006, 11:07 AM: Message edited by: Sgt_Kelly ]

I'm not going to explain the whole of Onion Wars here, but most of the people taking part are husbands and fathers and have jobs. The average age is probably higher than the average age on the CM forum. The campaign models a whole war, not an operational campaign. As such, one turn covers a month and not an hour or a couple of hours. Just goes to show there's more than one way to get to Rome. A little creativity can go a long way. What I'm saying is, you can bend the laws of reality a little and still make a fun simulation. It isn't entirely true to life, no, but then how much sense is there, really, in talking about realism the way JasonC does when you're still after all sitting behind a computer screen with a bag of pretzels and a beer. Somebody puts something together, leaves bits out and goes out of his way to get other bits exactly right. The result convinces you or it doesn't. That really doesn't depend on every little sub-aspect being convincing when you study it in isolation from the rest of the game.

I played 17 battles myself over 4 turns and created something like 20 to 30 as a GM. Teams are about 10 players a side and the GM camp has 2 to 4 people in it. The campaign started more than 2 years ago and is now in its 18th turn. At an average of 10 games per turn, you do the math. Suit yourself. You're probably right and CMC won't be for you. I'm not remotely interested in winning you over. What interests me is the exchange of ideas, even if your tone is constantly dismissive and derogatory.

In what way ? So what ? Games abstract things or there would be no game in the first place. People control everything from Roman legions to nuclear submarines in games and none of it is 'realistic'. I have several games on the go at the moment, all of which take place on much bigger maps and with much bigger forces than you claim are possible. It is not taking me two hours to do the orders and the game handles it just fine. Onion Wars is a campaign that features battalion and up sized battles typically and it's been going strong for years. Those games get finished inside 3 weeks. I'm not saying there are no issues with the choices the designers have made, in fact I'm rather skeptical myself, but you're overstating the whole thing by a mile. People are happily playing well above your assumed limit. You may find it unrealistic, you may wrinkle your nose at it, but it's by no means impossible. [ October 09, 2006, 01:27 PM: Message edited by: Sgt_Kelly ]

As long as you stay below 1000m I don't think the range is all that important. You just need to give them more time. Two turns is not that long. Eventually a considerable proportion of the shells will start landing in the trench and the occupants will quickly suffer. The SU-76 should be perfectly adequate, once homed in it is more likely to stay on target and is perfectly capable of breaking an infantry unit. With the 122 one good hit might be enough, but it might take longer to get it.

The fact that beehives are in doesn't excite you ?

To be fair I think JasonC considered the difficulties of somehow determining the map sizes dynamically and that's why he would leave it up to the scenario designer (that was the key part of his discourse I had missed, conciseness also has its merits...). I think that's a good compromise but, as Sailor Malan points out, not likely to happen.

Indeed it does. I appear to have missed one of your posts. I apologize profusely for wasting your time.

The question as I read it was not whether or not 2x2km is the right size for maps if size is fixed, or whether or not it would be better to have variable sized maps (obviously it is, although I'd like to see your suggestions for the implementation of it). The question was, given fixed map sizes, should there then be a cap on the size of the force that can be deployed on them or not to stave off your dreaded super-coordinated all-deciding single überbattle syndrome. I am saying no to that and that's all I'm saying. Have you looked at the screenshots ? 2x2 km is what it will be. I had nothing to do with that though. The only point I'm trying to make is that you don't make up for a design limitation by introducing another one. I believe you said the very same thing if I understood you correctly. Fixed map sizes are not ideal, fixed map sizes coupled with fixed maximum force sizes are even less ideal. Like you, I wish to see maximum flexibility for players and scenario designers and don't wish to ram anything down anyone's throat.

Just like a CM scenario doesn't generally offer the time and forces to learn from mistakes within the single game and adapt tactics accordingly, I don't think there will be room for this whole sequence of events in many CMC scenarios. There is usually time and strength for one gambit. You fail, try something different next time. This means that someone seeking to win by forcing a decisive battle would have to adopt that tactic from the start. Assuming coordinated movement is as trivial as you propose, he would have to spend time to mass and then move that blob around at the speed of its slowest moving element. Victory is by no means the foregone conclusion you make it out to be. Multiple objectives far enough apart alone could render the whole ploy useless. Other counters have already been suggested by others. If you are really hellbent on preventing this from happening you can easily do so by adapting your scenario. There is no need for it to be designed into the game on the grounds of your personal perceptions of what is and what isn't realistic. Realism in games revolves around the suspension of disbelief, which breaks down to different causes for different people. While I take your point about handling force sizes upwards of a battalion, I find that even those fights tend to consist of a series of smaller ones rather than devolve into the super-coordinated travesty that you make it out to be. For me, things aren't as bad as you paint them. Bigger sized fights do have merit and I would not like to see them banned from the game as a matter of doctrine. If you think they make no sense, design and play your scenarios accordingly. [ October 06, 2006, 11:14 PM: Message edited by: Sgt_Kelly ]

I think you may be overestimating the ease with which such a big decisive battle can be forced. The need to find the enemy and the reality of different force elements moving at different speeds alone might make that more of a challenge than you appear to anticipate.

Well, at least 1stSSLeibstandarte managed to spell Leibstandarte correctly and not 'Liebstandarte' as it is called in 90% of all scenario briefings that feature it. Credit where credit is due. Do we have the bare bum picture handy, perchance ?

I agree, which is why crude and arbitrary stacking limits should be avoided. Coordination penalties are a different matter and can take on many guises. To me the requirement to spend 1 - 2 hours on micro-managed orders for 3 battalions is ample discouragement and automatically leads to my defining point and reserve units, the latter spending a sizeable part of the battle being totally ignored. I need no further encouragement to steer clear of trying to wallop my opponent off the map with a perfectly timed single-blow firestorm. The ability to play like that and find scenarios designed by like minded people for me to try my hand on is enough to keep me happy. There are others who believe perfectly timed choreographies designed to defeat type-cast forces on type-cast maps are the holy grail of CM. More power to them, I don't believe in forced conversions. You say CM is apt for a certain force size bandwidth and scenarios which stretch the envelope too much don't get played. Why should CMC be any different ? [ October 06, 2006, 10:43 AM: Message edited by: Sgt_Kelly ]

Dirtweasle, the problems you are talking about have to do with performance. JasonC is talking about the principle of commanding and co-ordinating large forces. Those are two different things. JasonC claims CM doesn't work above battalion level even if the game would run smoothly because it breaks the credibility of the model to let one player control so many units. I don't really feel this is the case. Accepting that a pixelated representation on a screen has anything to do with reality is such a huge mental leap that the number of pixelated troops I'm commanding is largely irrelevant. If I can accept that ordering 50 such units bears a relation to anything real I can also accept it for 100 or even 1000 units. Stacking limits are just as undesirable as they represent an absolute safety net for the defender. He knows he can't be succesfully attacked in area X if he can get so and so many troops there because the attacker can't bring enough forces to do it. I get a much bigger reality break from being forced into consecutive attacks on the same hex because the game won't let me pile in enough troops to do it in one go than I do from commanding large numbers. Variable map sizes almost implies a continuous battlefield as opposed to a segmented one. Clearly CMC hasn't gone down that route.

It's a rather roundabout way of showing that the effect of HE on AFVs is undermodeled, which is an opinion held by some here.

The Shermans Stoffel was worried about were plodding through scattered woods. Another two were coming up a road at speed.

Stoffel, those were not the same Shermans, I had 2 pairs.

Oh lighten up. They can't all be as incredibly profound and wizened as you.

The only reference I could find in the manual to the inferior troop quality thing is on page 219 : "QBs apply the experience setting (low/medium/high) appropriately to the various forces available. For example, "high quality" (Note : as set in one of the parameter screens) Russian troops in 1941 will only be Regular." This suggests that it only affects QBs and doesn't actually change the performance of the experience categories you set in the editor. I.e. a regular Soviet squad is always regular, never green. I also don't think this goes all the way up to 1944. In fact I seem to remember this was limited to 1941, although I might have got that impression from the fact that that is the year mentioned in the quote above. If I'm not mistaken, the 1944 cut-off pertains instead to the Soviets switching generally to APBC (which I presume refers mainly to 85mm and is also mentioned in the manual). My thinking on the 76mm issue is largely in line with BigDuke6's. It doesn't look like anyone can prove conclusively that Soviet 76mm AT was better than it is in CMBB. However, if you expose yourself to prolonged fighting against StuGs in 1942 and 1943 as I saw in Onion Wars, you get the distinct impression that there's nothing you can do. I for one am inclined to accept it the way it is in terms of relative performance. Perhaps we need to look at the pricing system instead. StuGs are significantly cheaper than T-34s because they have neither a turret nor, on the earlier models, an MG. But this means - even with rarity on - that the Soviet player faces more StuGs than he has T-34s when in reality it was the other way around. On average two T-34s to take on a Tiger likewise seems a bit off. I think people who put together scenarios for CMC will have to think about numbers and not use this pricing system as a guideline. In metacampaigns that use a purchasing system, you have a very hard time explaining to the German side that their tanks are too cheap.

It is deplorable how time and again the focus of a thread becomes the most contentious point raised in it.

Rune, I have never been willing to put it down to bias because a biased team wouldn't have felt the need to do such things as explain the poor quality of Soviet troops in '41 in the manual. Having said that, CMBB in its ripe old age is being used increasingly for things that go beyond the single battle where these inaccuracies add up to a distinct disadvantage. CMC is a case in point.

Forget it, there's nothing in this. I was just plain wrong. I remember testing it because we were facing a lot of captured T-34s in a campaign I was playing. Evidently my sample must not have been large enough because in the test I did just now (T-34 M1942, range 400m, tanks facing away from each other on a pooltable) they came out pretty even (150 iterations 85 - 63 in favor of the Germans with 2 undecided).

We are not talking about overall performance, including spotting targets while buttoned, firing at them and knocking them out. In this respect better performance by the German crews is justified because the Germans replaced the optics on their captured T-34s. What I'm talking about is purely the acquisition of the target by the TC standing in his hatch (as represented in the game by a target line appearing and the turret beginning to turn towards the target). Unless you're going to contend that the Germans had consistently better eyesight, there is no reason why the German TCs should be better at spotting enemy tanks than the Soviet ones. If you're going to maintain that this is justified, then can I ask you if the Germans should also be deemed better spotters of enemy tanks than the Americans, the Brits, the Australians ? Should a green German crew still do better than a Soviet veteran one, just because they are Germans ?