Treeburst155

I wasn't really thinking of graphics when I suggested a higher minimum system requirement. I was thinking more in terms of the behind the scenes calculations. Relative spotting, tanks blocking LOS when alive, and other compromises they made which don't come to mind right now. Maybe better building damage and things like that. Updating the graphics to what we now call "hi-res" mods would be fine with me. I'm not sure they can do much with the LOS and spotting issues by raising the minimum to 450 mhz with 128 RAM. (Notice I changed the specs-no video card), but I still think Charles could enhance the game if he knew he could aim at the above system for a minimum. He would have more to work with. treeburst155

Olle, So you are saying that a smoking pillbox would block LOS. Do pillboxes and wooden bunkers ever smoke? I can't say as I've ever seen that. Treeburst155

ascertain the causes of his toe jam. His wife came in and asked.....

Speaking of CM2 and chatting. I wonder what the minimum system requirements will be for the game? I think they should make it so that a PII 450 with Geforce SDR barely squeeks by and do away with the many restrictions to the game engine built in just so low end machines can handle it. If you don't have at least a PII 450 in 18 more months you need to upgrade bad. You can get an 800 mhz with a Geforce cheaper than the PII 450 used to cost. Things will only get faster and cheaper over the next 18 months while we wait for CM2. If everybody upgraded BTS would have more computing power to play with and could make their games even better. Treeburst155

It's been my experience that a selected enemy unit still displays a yellow box even when it is completely out of view. If you go down to level one and the selected enemy unit is over the next hill you will see the yellow box on the hill. I sometimes use this technique to make sure a unit of mine is not visible to an enemy unit. If the yellow box is below the horizon completely then I'm safe. Treeburst 155

I can't imagine sending a QB setup to somebody and NOT filling them in on the map parameters, season, time of day, weather, etc.. That's outrageously unfair IMO, and a little thoughtless too. Treeburst155

As I understand it ricochets are quite capable of killing. The ricocheting round is calculated to hit some spot and any unit on that spot will be hit. Again, I don't think anything interferes with the flight path except terrain. Units on the impact spot are susceptible but no unit in between can be hurt. Also, I think even shattered rounds can hurt nearby troops (shrapnel effect). Treeburst155

Mr. Clark, I don't believe your back tank can take out the front one by accident UNLESS the round actually falls on the exact location of your front tank. Nothing can interfere with a round in flight except terrain. To hit any vehicle not specifically targetted requires that vehicle to be at the exact location where the round would have impacted the terrain. When two tanks are very close together one could be targetted and the other hit. Unless your lead tank is very close to the target of the rear tank then you are safe. Treeburst 155

I think you can just eliminate the flags completely when you make your own map. The problem with this IIRC is that the AI needs flags in order to know what it's supposed to do. If the AI were on the right in your map I would think you would have a nice defensive battle on your hands as the AI tried to get to the water's edge. For human v human games just don't put any flags on the map. Treeburst155 I

I would really appreciate it if one of you CM experts would let me know if any of the following statements concerning LOS/LOF is false: 1) Pillboxes and wooden bunkers never block LOS 2) Live vehicles never block LOS 3) Dead vehicles only block LOS if they are burning (the smoke) 4) You can send your troops across friendly LOF and not get them hurt UNLESS they are crossing machine gun LOF whether infantry or vehicle mounted (grazing fire). 5) #4 above may not be true in conditions of poor visibility due to mistaken identity. Have I got it right? Treeburst155

Jazza, You can do exactly what you described as far as making a scenario and choosing your forces. Your opponent just has to be trusted not to look at your force choices when he loads the scenario into the editor to choose his stuff. This can be difficult to do since in fairness he needs to see the map (you have)where your forces will be all lined up. The way around this is to send him a copy of the map before you place forces on it, along with the real scenario file. There also has to be an agreement not to edit forces such as adding 50 rounds to arty or messing with the capabilities of leaders. In effect you are codesigning a scenario with your opponent. As long as you are playing an opponent who considers winning secondary to fun and surprise, the above works well. If you would like to try this with me I am willing. I even have a great map I made that is as fair as you can get and suitable for medium to large battles if you want to use it. Another way is to have a 3rd person actually purchase the forces for both sides from lists (screenshots?) supplied by each player. That way you don't have to trust the other guy. I personally don't feel this is necessary since the cheater really only cheats himself out of fun and challenge and there's no money on the game anyway. Also, the final .cmb file as saved by the player who purchases his units last should be sent back to player 1. Now the trust needs to go both ways since both players have the ability to look at each others units. (No tournament saving) This idea is really no different than doing a double blind game as far as cheating is concerned. You really don't know for sure if your opponent is playing blind or not. Another great thing about setting up a battle like this is that there are no restrictions on what you can spend your points on. Things can get way ahistorical but I don't care. You can always agree to some house rules before choosing forces. I personally don't like to see a guy use more than two sharpshooters because of the nature of spotting in the game. You might as well play with FOW off if you are going to use six sharpshooters. Anyway, I better get back to work. Treeburst155

I agree the tac AI sure is good at picking out AT assets. I'm not sure yet but I think it can even pick out the squad in a platoon that has the best panzerfaust capabilities (quantity/range). I'll need to run some tests on that. I'm not so sure this is unrealistic however. I haven't paid close enough attention to what ranges the AI regularly detects AT units. That would have a bearing on how realistic things are IMO. Treeburst155

BTS has simply tweaked the QBs so that the game plays more like they want it to. They feel they've improved their product. Some may not agree with them but in the end it's what BTS wants that goes in. If I want to paint my kitchen red and you don't like it well then that's just tough. Besides, to get an "even playing field" out of a QB you would have to have symmetrical maps. The maps are the real imbalance, not the makeup of the forces. 1,000 pts. is a 1,000 points no matter how it is forced to be allocated (within reason of course). In closing let me just add that REAL men play scenarios anyway. QBs are just training grounds. Treeburst155

I played QBs for the first couple months I had the game because I was interested in fair fights rather than historical situations. When I got tired of QBs (they weren't that fair anyway) I started in PBEMing the scenarios. That's when things really got fun. I wish I could convince people how much more fun it is to play the scenarios rather than QBs. Many of them have great replay value too. Even if you played them just once you could play for a year! I've got 228 scenarios on my drive. If only half of them are any good I've still got over a year's worth of PBEM. I won't go back to QBs until I can't find any new scenarios. That may never happen since more are created every week. The one fun thing about QBs is choosing all your own forces. That is also the root of most of the QBs problems. It isn't worth it. Forget chess-like fairness since QBs don't give it to you anyway. You want fair competition? Play the same scenario 4 times; twice from each side. Who ever gets the most total points is PROBABLY (not always) the better player. Larger scenarios are probably better gauges of skill due to the fact that luck tends to even out. That lucky gun hit on your Panther by a Greyhound is not so critical if you've got eight more Panthers. QBs are great for practice, experimentation, and for saving the scenarios for double blind games against human opponents. That's about all. I really don't understand the infatuation with QBs. To each his own I guess. Treeburst155

I finally got into CMHQ but I sure didn't see the Paderborn scenario by Wild Bill. I did a search several times and also scrolled the whole list. Would any of you great guys want to send it to me? I'd sure appreciate it. Treeburst155

It's a shame CMHQ is often inaccessible. There are quite a few good scenarios that are only found there. I recently reinstalled CM and forgot to save the scenario folder. I was so careful to save my PBEM folder, .bmp folder, and .wav folder buth forgot the scenarios. I would really like to get into the Scenario Depot to get the stuff again. Does anyone have Yeager's Farm or know another place to get it? That one is a keeper IMO. Treeburst out.

That really is an impressive piece of work there. I'm going to play with it awhile. Treeburst155

LOL!! So the arty is firing blind if you do it. I've got an arty spotter right now I need to unhide then. Thanks Matt! Treeburst155

If you have an opponent who loves Hellcats try the AA stuff like Ostwinds (37mm) or Wirbelwinds. They don't miss much with their rapid fire cannons even when the target is moving fast. Bye bye flanking Hellcat. Treeburst155

No spoilers here. This is a great one! I tried it in a double blind PBEM as the Germans. It's so good I want to try it again as the British. I think the replayability of the scenario is great. There are so many different things that can be tried, at least from the German perspective. I'm just wrapping up the game now and with luck I MAY win a minor victory after getting off to a great start. My opponent in this one wants to move on to another scenario so I'm looking for somebody who wants to be the German attacker. Be forewarned, it is a large scenario. There are 60 turns and lots of units for both sides. It's too big for TCP/IP IMO. You will need some decent chunks of time to give orders. If you would like to have a go at it and think you can manage more than one exchange per day then post here or email me. One exchange per day would just take too long IMO. NO GAMEY CREW STUFF!! Thanks go to Frank Radislovich for this jewel. Thanks Frank!!

Very interesting! The cat is out of the bag now. To tell you the truth though, I haven't had much trouble keeping my FO's from getting spotted while waiting on the rounds. It seems if you get them into a position unnoticed they stay that way. Maybe I've just been lucky with them. Treeburst155

As I understand it this thread came about due to perceived unfairness and lack of play balance in QBs. I also fixated on this issue for awhile. Then it dawned on me that CM is not a game of chess. Even if you had identical units (axis vs axis for example) there is still the randomly generated map which often favors one side or the other, sometimes quite heavily. There is also a great deal of luck in CM just as in the real thing. Especially in armor heavy battles. There's no such thing as an even game of CM. Some are more equal than others but none are truly balanced. I don't think it's possible. Even if they were fair, the more skilled player could easily lose due to rotten luck. I started enjoying CM more as soon as I quit dwelling on the imbalances and luck involved. Think of CM as a combat simulator, not as a game. If you are the competitive type and want to know how you rate against other CMers you have to play MANY games from BOTH sides against many different people. Even in chess your rating is provisional for the first twenty games. I'd say you need to play 100 games of CM in order to assess your skill level with any accuracy. The way I see it there is no longer any need for the QB feature of CM since there are so many good, well thought out scenarios available now. I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of us will never play them all, especially if we reserve them for human opponents. QBs have a sameness to them after awhile and the maps quite often don't make any sense. On top of that they're rarely balanced! Give up the QBs and the need for a fair game. You will enjoy it more. Pretend you are the commander. Play the role, not the game. If the deck is stacked against you then so be it. That's the way it often was. There is nothing wrong with an honorable surrender after doing the best you can under the circumstances. There's always the next scenario and the one after that. So they cut down German armor for MEs. Who cares. The game has never been fair. It never will be. Treeburst155

There's also some great small arms sound mods along with two small explosion sounds by a guy calling himself "Mord". You get several sounds to choose from for most small arms weapons. I think I found it CMHQ Treeburst155

Thanks fellas! Treeburst155

Done deal! Remember, EVERYONE must vote for CM to have a chance. Don't be lazy. VOTE!! Treeburst155