Redwolf

Here is my suggestion for a new "Volksgrenadier" force that player may treat as a seperate group like airborne is. The purpose is to balance forces with respect to their SMG versus high-end equipment ratio. As stated before, I think this is the better way to good gameplay than to free Allied players to mix airborne and army. Once one VG infantry unit is selected, the rest of the unit selection should be subject to the following restrictions. There had been some threads on what Volksgrenadier units are, so I came to the following characteristic for their equipment: - at least reasonably mobile - high firewpoer - protection not a priority - usually no high-end frontline material - but easy access to material from within Germany, like heavy Flak So here is my suggestion for allowed equipment: - all Flak guns including 88 are allowed, since VG is assumed to have access to batteries in Germany when they need them - AT guns only up to 75mm, the high-velocity 88 is assumed to be high-end front material - all other guns allowed - Flamethrowers only as part of a pioneer platoon - No SdKfz 234/anything, these are assumed to be available to front-line troops as reconnaissance vehicles only and have no business to drive around behind the front spotting for troops that will not dash through enemy lines anyway - All Halftracks including Flak vehicles allowed, truck and Kuebelwagen as well - All tanks allowed except Tiger and variants, Panther and variants, Panzer IV/70, Flammpanzer 38(t) and Flakpanzer IV (Wirbelwind and Ostwind). Nashorn is allowed. - Artillery up to 105mm guns, 120mm mortars and all rockets. Why allow the self-propelled version of the AT 88 L/71 (Nashorn) and not the same gun in towed form? Because IRL the Nashorn can be moved to reinforce a threatend VG unit quickly, the towed gun much less so, especially given the lack of gun tractors. I also think it is good for gameplay, since the complete absense of this gun would mean that the allied player gains enourmous freedom for Churchill tanks and the like once he identifies any VG unit. The small ammo load, good spottability and sensibility against AT rounds of the Nashorn should make it manageable. [ 04-30-2001: Message edited by: redwolf ]

You mention "Word" and "problem" in one paragraph and you dare to mention "perhaps" as well? Just kidding Anything I could do to assist in moving this to other tools?

Matters of taste, I guess. Initiative doesn't buy you anything when you loose all AFVs early. I found that avoiding the tank battle works quite well, especially for the tank combinations I listed. Some more circumstances: - To do this, you need "spotting superiority", you must know where enemy tanks are - Especially in ME, my opponents' tanks usually fall sooner or later from assassination by flanking infantry AT teams, 3" mortars they couldn't even see and similar toys that make the trade much more attractive than the tank duel. Of course, some of them know that and are very careful with their tanks, thus giving me enough room to use my tanks on their infantry. As I said, it works reasonable well I probably don't care about initiative very much, as I don't think I have good enough coordination for a head-on battle. It's funny that you mention that my tactics include the risk that my armour is driven into map edges. In fact, that is what happend to me lately, with said Pz IV and two Churchills. They cornered me in a perfect formation like dancers and when the last slope was crossed, my Pz IV was gone. However, at that time the Mk IV had fired all its HE shells and most of its MG ammunition on infantry that was on the run on open ground (I was defender), while the Churchills didn't even touch my infantry and it was 2 turns before the game end. I won this game although I made many mistakes and the enemy force was overall very dangerous (Jason Cawley's suggestion of Glider company, 3" mortars and Churchills against Pz IV with Rifle company). Maybe the point here is that there was no way to get the initiative as I understand it for these force combinations. And Phillies is probably in a similar position. As I said, initiative doesn't buy you much if you loose your tanks while not knocking out the enemies'. Even with 1:1 chances I don't like that -have some bad luck and you are in a very difficult position. I prefer the systematic exploration of lowest-risk/highest-prey situation. I still think that towed guns are not what a beginner should learn first. You move a tank often and learn something new each turn. You place the gun once and then decide when it's time to open fire. That is not much to learn from 30 turns. Also I don't think you can identify goood anti-tank gun positions unless you understand tank movement. Complexity needs to be lowered, concentrate on few flexible units first, then add the exotic stuff. Infantry squads and tanks first, then tank hunters, MGs and mortars, then towed guns and APCs. I don't know what to answer on the last paragraph. I find total losses quite useless for learning, you cannot identify or rate reasons for the loss, it's just a big mess. Talking to your opponent is definitivly a good idea, though. I also have unique passwords for each PBEM, in case the opponents wants my turns.

The only pages I cannot read are the for CAL, both seem to be hand-written. I have no problems with any other page of yours, including the user/game/whatever lists that are probably auto-generated. Also, THCAL.shtml has about 24 KB of pure text, but the page with all the invisible bloat is 268000 bytes. No wonder it loads so long. The really looks worth looking into, if you reduce some of the bloat, it will probaly work in Netscape with no problems anyway. Besides, I imagine that you don't get all data volume over the line for free.

Why narrow down the number of possible readers? TH is the only major CM website where I cannot read some pages. With all respect, TH is not such a beautiful website that it is worth the trouble. Nor seems beauty to be important for the task. IE is inacceptable on the machine I read most websites on, due to security reasons. BTW, I checked the rating system info page on IE and it still looks truncated (the same as in Netscape). Wasn't there some sentense that player classes were not supposed to play each other and the exact formular?

Strange that my netscape handles all other tables well (would I be able to read this otherwise?), only those out of Microsoft Frontpage (and then only some, TH's amoung them) not.

The fact that you are loosing 100:0 says one thing: you did not cause any significant losses to the opponent. That in turn implies that you don't understand CMBO's point system and concentrate on the flags too much. If losses are high in a CMBO game, the flags do not matter much. It is useless to capture the flags while taking heavy losses. So, the first thing you probably need is a change of mind towards: strike for damage. If the opponent knows that you are a (for now) weak player, he will try to get a major or total victory. He can forget about that if he takes own losses. No matter how badly he beats you up and forces you into surrender, he will never get the points for the losses back. One way to get started: Let him take the flags. Do reconnaissance. Identify an isolated group of his units, usually you will find such around small flags in games with several flags. Concentrate all your infantry to attack this group, except a few half-squads still for recon. Place all your AT-capable units, especially tanks, to view over the approach path from the main part of his force, you will usually find some canal with open ground. Have an artillery FO already locked onto the path with smoke, but not on the field of fire of your ambushers, but besides it towards the enemy main force. Basically liek this ("I" is your infantry): <pre> I I small_enemy open ground smoke big_enemy I I... tanks FO </pre> [stupid forum software ****s up layout, how do I use "pre" here?] Then, supress the isolated group with mortars for one turn. They are much better than MGs, especially when the opponent is in trees, which is often the case for minor flags. Should be bigger than 2 inch, though. Time your artillery so that the smoke rounds fall in this turn, so that smoke will be there next turn. In the second turn, attack the small enemy group. You should be able to gain a 2.5 or more superiority in infantry. Depending on how paranoid your opponent is and how clever he assumes you are, he will start reinforcements from the main force either now or he already did it after the supressing turn because he knew what was coming. If he underestimates you, he will have the late option and will drive through the smoke into so heavy losses and the attack is broken. If not, your infantry that attacked his small force will take a beating, as are the ambushers. However, they do so after having striked themself, that is much preferrable over getting decimated without point gains. [ 04-28-2001: Message edited by: Martin Cracauer ]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR> Your ATG presense should be significant. You should focus all your efforts on eliminating his AFV's as soon as possible. Your goal is to strip the enemy infantry from their AFV's. In a greater scale this would be done through artillery striping. On a smaller scale, you just need to eliminate the enemy tanks -- it's that simple.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> I otherwise liked your post, but here I disagree. If we are talking tank against tank, depending on your tank types, you should not neccessarily go for the early tank battle. If you have a Sherman against a Panther or a Pz IV against a Churchill, you should instead use your tank to destroy enemy infantry and heavy weapons, avoiding the tank. Somewhere I hade a longer posting about that, let me know if someone wants a pointer. If we are talking towed guns, I am sceptical that a new player can handle guns well, both for placement and for using, which means when to open fire. Laying out a meaningful defense is one of the more difficult tasks and early errors are much harder to correct. Granted, sooner or later you must learn it, but as long as you loose totally, you do not learn much and must shift to things that give you a better learning feedback. I'll post some recommendations later.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by RenoFlame 36: If you look at the German "fast tanks" of the early war period, they were quite lightly armored. As someone else pointed out, they were only concerned with the small caliber anti-tank weapons of the time. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> I don't think you can gain assumptions from very early tanks. The Pz I was a training tank only and the Pz II was only a interim solution until the Pz III was available. The Pz III (and IV) is the only tank that was built as required by doctrine. It was certainly faster but less armoured that the other nations main battle tanks, but for its time it was exactly like the Panther later (armour and speed-wise, not gun wise). <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR> I think another discussion almost as interesting would be; Without air power used as "mobile artillery", would the original Blitzkrieg tactics have been such a resounding success ?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Well, enough artillery could have done that, too, but not as effective. And as Germany didn't have plenty of resources any "not as effective" could mean "not". Good point, anyway, I think that the air issue is one of the major differences between Poland/France and Soviet Union. The former opponents neglected camouflage of many units not in first line, the Soviets did not.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Stacheldraht: I'm guessing, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that since BTS doesn't have the resources to readily create a game primarily built around an upgraded engine (along the lines of what id does with the Quake series), they want to keep the game architecture closed so they'll be the only ones who can provide new units and rules, things which would be relatively easier for them to implement and profit from with a new game. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> The question is: should we have a problem with that? For me the issue of loadable new units (geometry and data) is not very important, I would rather see some mechanism problems fixed, no openness except OpenSource would help here. I think that overall the idsoftware example applies quite well, however we are now at the time of Doom1 with its quite primitive extension possibilities, not Quake. As long as this is as such, I will assume that Combat Mission will sooner or later be open enough and BTS should make as much money as possible from it, as it will not be opend enough that we can work on the mechanics (which would require OpenSource or a very aggressive architeture of dynamically loadable code) and we need Charles for that, still free from pressure from a stupid distributor.

Folks, if you look at the turret or upper hull armour data for the Tiger 2, the Panther and the StuG, you see a "C". That indicates "curved armour" and it means that the game will treat this part of the tank as if a certain percentage of shots hit a much better angle. Similar issue is the "+" on the Tiger 1, for a certain percentage of shots it is much more than 100mm. From what I can see, your point is exactly addressed in the game.

For the record, I agree with you, I was just expressing what I thing BTS' reasons are. I am involved in OpenSource software projects myself, hence my opinion how capable such organizations are. Regarding mechanics improvements, I don't see that many suggestions that are practical. Practical includes that the TacAI must be able to act on the feature in reasonable ways, for many that is very difficult. If I was BTS, I would wait until one major competitor has a similar game on market and then open Combat Mission a bit more. That may damage CM3 sales, but it will do much more damage to the competitor. Also, if things continue as they appear to be, CM2/3 will sell so much that a loss of sales due to third-party work is acceptable for the increased market share.

We seem to agree that the simple "one force only" rule favours the German Heer too much. We have two alternatives: - Allow mix of Army and Airborne for all nations - or narrow down Heer, i.e. as I suggested by making Volksgrenadier into their own "virtual" group with reduced vehicle choices. I'd like to rephrase that option two is better, because option one opens a can of worms of combinations, for example may you mixed German airborne and Mountain troops. Also, if you allow the Airborne/Army mix, you loose much of what the narrowing down is for. We are supposed to *choose* between SMG-heavy infantry and decent tanks. One or the other, make your choice. If you allow the airborne/army mix, you don't have to choose here. The only thing that this would narrow down is mixing U.S. and U.K. units. That is rather pointless, there are not many combinations that create a problem for the game. So you can have U.S. 12-men squads with 3 inch mortars. That's not a big deal, the big one is the SMG squads with decent tanks issue. Can you name many serious game problems that arises from U.S. and U.K mix? How much would we gain from the liberale rule? Hence my suggestion to do something against the overdone German freedom, instead of freeing the allied player to do the same nonsense.

I think we need to split the discussion into two issues. I think we all agree that the true heavy tanks (Tiger) are not really connected to the main doctrine, but "something" else. 1) Did the Germans intentionally move the overall doctrine with the main-line (medium) tanks used for the normal roles to better armoured and armed *medium* tanks, at the cost of speed, and yes, why? 2) What are the heavy tank units for, what is that "something"? As said, my answer to 1) is a clear "no", the Germans did not change doctrine, they put back the speed into their main line tanks as soon as it was practical. I would like to see historical quotes on 2). As we all know, the heavy tanks were concentrated and then used -all together- for one specific task and then pulled out of line to be repolised (respecitivly rebuilt . The questions here are a) what were these tasks as planned? and what were tasks in practice. The Jagdpanther battaltion usage orders posted here some time ago were exactly what I would like to see for Tiger units.

I disagree with most of your major points, and -surprise- come to the opposite conclusion. 1) The Pz IV, which was meant to be a heavy tank from start, had to be upgraded until it was much too slow. The Panther is the attempt to put speed back into the tank units, it is much faster than the later Pz IV. You got it right that they had to do continuous upgrades, since too weak tanks are simply useless. However, you miss the great effort to solve the speed problem in 1943. The Panther is not a heavier/more-gun Pz IV. 2) True heavy tanks are irrelevant here, since they are used from strategically controlled units that support "normal" units. The true doctrine-conformant breakthroughs and exploits are usually done with medium tanks, where the heavies may help in the initial stages, if they are not busy conducting other tasks. 3) If there is a sign of changing doctrine, it is the continued development of the StuG and Hetzer (fine) to the Jagdpanzer IV (and /70). The latter is not a cost-effective bodyguard for infantry units, it is confession to a loss of initiative. Plug holes instead of creating them, react, not act. Did I mention that I like turreted tanks Overall, I think the tank doctrine is dictated by the mass-produced Pz IV and Panther and here is early line continued. StuG is not a tank and heavies are outside doctrine.

Just don't do the rush. The attacker who is first there will not get foxholes, at least in non-town/non-village scenarios that is a major disadvantage. Buy fat artillery (150-155mm or big mortars) and markers. Place markers on open ground behind (from your view) flags, run spotting half-squads to flags and then let down artillery on the advancing, probably tired enemy infantry. Concentrate a major part of the force near a minor flag. If the enemy distributes his forces to seize all flags at once, eleminate one part. Place ambushes on the way from the next-nearest flag, especially AT-capable guns or tanks that pick off his AFV. Get around the flags and attack enemy from the rear. While he is still moving, you will find heavy weapon teams helpless, proably also thin AFVs that were supposed to be guarded by keeping them behind the dangerous ones. Maybe combine with last paragraph, infantry on flag and simulaneous tank raid to enemy rear area. Is also historical If you fail to get the flags, don't loose your nerves. In games with high losses the flags don't count much. Search for detached enemy units, maybe underpowered flag guards and attack them with all you have. The opponent will react when his view falls on the victory level display.

My wife keeps telling of a big blue room. Supposed to be somewhere bejond the carton that I put in front of these annoying light-emmitting squares.

The Sturmtiger is as historical as 1800 planes airstrikes and railroad guns are. The latter were used, but they are strategical weapons that a) the local "normal" forces commander had no control over and in the rare case they were used unbalanced the battle in a major way. As far as I can tell, the same is true for the Sturmtiger. I would like to see actucal combat reports, anyone has some? Regarding new 3D models, this is not desired, BTS reserves the right to extend the game. That way, it should be ensured that extensions can still be sold. As much as I liked to fiddle with deeper CMBO modifications, all I can say is that for now that should be preferrable for me/us. To sell future CM games, there has to be enough new stuff in it. The graphics system can be extended as the graphic cards grow up, but the basic mechanisms of CMBO leave only a few holes that can be filled with current computer mechanisms. So, to sell future CMBO games, BTS will for a major part have to rely on people's desire to get new units, for money. Look at the graphics mods and on SP:WW2, not to speak of Linux and FreeBSD. The manpower that an internet community can throw at a goal can outright flatten what a company can do. You cannot compete with them.

The Panther is not a very thick tank. The point about that tank is to get a medium tank with decent speed that has sufficient (not overwhelming) armour again, after the Panzer IV and before it the Panzer III lost here. If the Allies say they lost 5 other tanks for each Panther, maybe, but they were on the offensive and less experienced that the crews that were given Panthers. Several other factors come to mind that can explain this number -even if it is right- without making the Panther much than it was. The tank you are talking about should be 76mm or fireflies, though. As said in this thread, the single factor that really made the Panther a very dangerous one-sided threat is its longer range, which is especially useful on the defensive, but doesn't play a role in CMBO.

What I said is correct. What the manual says is right as well, of course, but not precise enough. Or can you turn the manual content into something to type into your pocket calculator?

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by UniversalWolf: I think it would be colossally funny to have a vehicle in this game that had a huge gun but took ten turns to reload.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> I'm afraid that BTS is so much after this kind of fun stuff. Not to say anything bad about them or you, but it's a fact. They want to get the most fun from application of historical tacics (my interpretation). <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>This brings me to another question: has anybody successfully made a new 3D model for CM? Just to qualify, I'm thinking about buying the full version of CM, but for now I'm still using the demo. I'm working from a limited frame of reference.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> The geometry of the 3D models is hardcoded into the program executable, as is the performance data. Buy the game, you won't regret it. Using the Hummel, big arty or flamethrowers to blow up stuff is fun you are probably open for, and fun that can still be part of a balanced game.

You will always get this score when you have all flags and no own losses. Opponent's losses do not matter at all then. Martin

While we are at it, what about the Website and readability in different browsers? I also reported the rating system info page to be truncated by mail, but never got a response. Suppose I would make suggestions for more portable HTML code, could/would someone apply it? Martin

More suggestions: The artillery setting for short-75 rules should say "up to 107m", which would include the British 4.2 inch mortars. It has less blast that the 105m howitzers. Axis Heer has too many choices. Volksgrenadiere should make their own group. I would find it fair to say: if you take Volksgrenadiere, then limit vehicles and tanks to what Fallschirmjaeger have. Not that Airborne has anything to do with Volksgrenadiere, but the AFV available would make a nice balance versus the SMG troops: sdkfz 250/1, 251/1, and StuG (no StuH). All support material is allowed. Or agree on a virtual price raise for SMG troops. BTW, I cannot read http://tournamenthouse.com/CM/THCAL.shtml at all (Netscape 3.x), just the headline is showing, the date and anything below it is not.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Stacheldraht: Martin, I don't think, iirc (have to check my references), it was reloaded from the outside, rather the ammunition supply was, via crane.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> You are right, the crane isn't for loading the gun. Sorry about that.