dieseltaylor

YK2 "Even the most horrible human being on earth deserves to wipe his a** - Bukowski" Whose arse was he referring to?

Nabla Congratulations on your completing your doctorate and new job .... I watched the gestation of the Nabla system through the forum and felt it was one of the most thoughtful and well discussed ideas on the forum. All credit to you for allowing your baby to be kicked around, dissected and then put together as the complete package. I suppose thanks to all who contributed particularly to Treeburst 155. So Finland strikes yet again - PBEMHelper and the Nabla. Whew! If you are ever in the UK and need room and board give us a shout.

Stalin .. Posted my last one before reading your post. Strangely that was the tactics I used - but I suspect against a human you would have to be lucky to win. One think I did do was to use the central platoons at a distance- with most of the Brens to keep his men occupied and under fire from virtually the beginning. I think spending 29 minutes firing at the front positions with a few feint advances tended to concentrate the AI's mind - and would be pretty much what I would do against a human.

Played it properly this time and got a major 73 /27 but what was gratifying was that I was trying not to be to bloddthirsty and lost 10 men and had 23 wounded which I thought v. reasonable. And six of those dead were in the tanks that I played silly buggers with ....... An excellent learning scenario. Not too big and with the advantage that the troops come with built in combined arms to practice with.

Having played a human as my first game, I was Germans and victorious despite a rather good pincer attack. Curious to try out a few tactics against the AI - I advanced up adjacent to the road. Very traditional and designed really for my own investigation on how to lose as the ANZAC's. I did lose but I wish to say how Lt Bundabeg lead his three men up the road in intense fire for two minutes to claim the little building that was housing a dead LMG squad. The AI decided to send two 12 man squads to recover it the first one, down to nine men broke in and by concentrating my fire from my squads 100 metres away I must have pinned as for two minutes my four men were in there without dying having a little bit of action , the other squad must have been seriously weakened as it broke in and died, the nine man squad left the building shortly thereafter one man strong. Score for the 4 heroes 10 killed no losses!!! Exciting - you bet

The latest collective game is GREAT! In my best Tony the Tiger voice.

One point that always concerns me is that if multiple people fire at a target then how do they know which way to adjust their aim. This really pertains mainly to rifle fire as a machinegun can trace its effect .... unless another machine gun is firing similarly. However I am convinced there is an effect and that accuracy will diminish as more fire and it is weight of fire and then luck that does the damage. I sthier any research on this?

Nijis I had forgotten that site! Very useful where you can go back and pick up the historical temperatures. I just had a look at Kasserine but it only shows current data and stores no historical data whatsoever. We need serious grogs to log climate by the week for these areas : ) so these kinds of questions can be answered immediately. BTW lowest forecast night temperature 37F highest 51F. Lowest daytime 63F highest 75 F The highest 24 hour range is 38 degrees - that is quite a range I think. In Western Europe I imagine our ranges are a lot lower on average.

p.s. And read the stickies at the top of the Tips and Techniques Forum . Therein lies all good info for noobies and grogs alike.

Welcome Tekkor!!!! - One thing I noticed is sometimes it seems your tank crews abandon the tanks a bit too quick by getting scared or something. Is there any way to make your soldiers re-man an abandoned tank once they have "calmed down"? Not in the current game engine. Getting scared normally equates to damage that makes the tank unfit - other than a coffin "- On that first scenario I think my long range guns out to the left of the map and the one in the main base had all-time high score hits on enemies. Eventually they finally ran out of ammo. Is there anyway to replentish the ammo for them?" The normal battle runs less than an hour and within that time frame replenishing ammo would not normally happen. It does get asked for as a possible future feature - but the current situation is historically prety correct. "- Some of the commands some units have I didnt understand. Is there a listing around somewhere that explains what some of the commander commands like "advance" and "cover" actually do when used? I know what they mean but I couldnt quite see what was happening." Advance means that you are using as much terrain cover as you proceed to a point - normally used when you are under fire. It is quite tiring for the troops. I would go into the rest but you will have your game soon ..... "- Im curious on how the play by email system works. Its not one move at a time sent back and forth on email is it? That seems like it would take forever. Do you do more turns or something? Just curious." Depends on how many turns you turnaround in a day. My record is 22 sent but that was several different games. There is an independently produced little program called PBEMHelper which does allow you to post multiple turns per e-mail which is very good. But say a month per game no stress. For the real addict there is TCP/IP play which can be a real adrenalin rush. LAN play is the most intensive and quite gruelling as you will be at your keyboard for probably two hours with non-stop thinking to do. All the best p.s. And read the sticky at the top of the Tips and Techniques Forum

Beady - In a sense I think I should say read the frums or even better the Forums. If you look in most you will find current discussions on how to kill Tigers, how to use flame throwers etc. You can do searches on whatever you like to be dug up from the archives. Yuo can ask specific questions on the Forum - Tips and Techniques is good for this IF a search has not already answered the question for you. I have been playing for 4? years and I learn at least one new thing a week at this site[some of it even relevant to the game] ; ) Part of the game is that you do not always get to chose your force so you have to develop some analytical powers!!! For instance if I tell you the MarkIV is the German wonder tank of 1941 and will beat up virtually anything this is not the case in 1945. What you can do is look at the gun - short barrel fairly useless against tanks, long barrel good, ammo load good, machine guns for infantry suppression etc etc. Nashorn, enormous gun, open topped , skinny armour. So for the Nashorn you can say bad for it to be shelled, mortared, hates aircraft as it is a big target. And virtually anything will be able to shoot through its armour if close enough. Like real war you have to learn the strength and weaknesses of things to get the best out of your assets - it takes time but that is how it is. The other thing you will speedily learn is that even the strongest force if in the wrong terrain sucks - try running TigerII's around a small town crowded with bazzoka equipped infantry men ...... fun if you are not the Germans. It is a great learning experience - and you can keep it simple to start with if you just learn to use American equipment as it is the most standardised in CMAK. ...... and then you learn what you hate most in the German line-up. Have fun : )

I have been in Tunisia in November and it is quite cold in the mornings near the shore. On a trip into the Low Atlas mountains it was wet, cold and windy probably in the effective low 40's at I guess an altitude of between 1000 to 2000 ft. We had a early morning start one day in the desert south of El Djem and I would think it was slightly above freezing but warmed up to low 70's by the afternoon. I have not spent months there but the temp. were not remarked as being abnormal.

Will this be available despatched out of Ireland?

redwolf "If your scenario has nothing but fortifications for both sides then you are designing an interesting scenario" LOL

BTW On Fiefdom ... and sorry to interrupt your normal high quality [in spirits ] postings... but how soon do you form your cabal and do detailed planning? I would be grateful if any could explain who the mortal enemies are ... before the game restarts ... so I do not spend to much time and money supporting the ungodly.

Are you using PBEMHelper at all , or in Trusted mode if so? Thinks must run a few films were I could have done better .....

I am not sure its modelled but for killing troops low velocity guns work better. I believe the shells do not burrow into the soil as much and that generally speaking they carry more HE. Of coure the T34 comes tooled up with loads of cannister - lovely. If you are referring to weak sides then give me cheap tanks with fast turrets in a town as range becomes unimportant[ish]

I have resolved my PBEMHelper non- recognition problem!!! I had upgraded form CDV Combat Mission 2 to BTS Combat Mission Barbarossa to Berlin. The problem was that PBEMH hereafter always referred to as HELPER did not recognise the exe. file name!!!

It is a bit of a bugger to get used to. I have used it successfully many times and the Trusted mode is great for getting multiple goes per e-mail. BTW I have just downloaded the lates version but it seems a bit bugged as it will only recognise CMAK and CMAKdemo but not CMBO and CMBB. I have alerted Harri. ANYWAY back to the request. To be honest I just played around with it until I got the hang. If you have multiple e-mail accounts you can practice the sequences to yourself and see how what happens ties up to the instructions. E-mail me when you have some sticky problem you cannot get you head around.

Yes. But then the high velocity shell is not that clever for anti-personnel work!!! Oops we are in a town. What did you say weak sides ....Mmmm

e.g. 192.244.203.111 Just four sets of three is the IP address you need

BTW if you read the thread on Churchills' , currently on this page, there is a link to armour penetration tables for British guns [the site covers other countries aswell]. So with normal shot APC 17 lb will go through Tiger frontal armour at 1000 metres! If you think thats good you will weep when you see the penetration with an APDS shell. Happy hunting

You might consider playing with British forces. They have the 17pounder gun [77mm I think] which turns up as an ATG and in a slightly reduced form in the Archer and Firefly. If you search the forums you will find why Tigers hide from them!! The British also have their 6pounder [57mm] which even without tungsten is not to be messed with. This turns up as an ATG and is also in some British tanks. I believe it can penetrate the sides of Tigers at 500 metres And lastly they have the PIAT , equivalent to a bazooka but with more range [200metres] and can be used stealthily as it does not fire a rocket. It too can kill Tigers. US infantry tends to be more butch - but then if all your tanks are gone it may not be much fun playing on.!

polytropos I think your view of the training of the average infantryman is a little optmistic. The capabilities of most squads was to be told where to go and attack and when to defend. Within that you obviously have variations but it is the exceptions to the run of the mill soldiering that get repeated and admired - and this builds a false picture of the normal activity/capability of soldiers. If we had Ghurkas fair enough, fanaticsm and major heroics every battle ..... BTS do build in better response times, accuracy, use of cover etc for superior troops so the AI can show the difference without human intervention. The requirement to have a shoot and scoot for infantry goes a two steps to far in micromanagemnet - for the reasons mentioned in my first post.

Well I agree with MikeyD. The game IMO is meant ot be played pretty much a platoon level and there does appear to be a tendency for people to want perfect results. There are two reasons why I think it correct to have the AI responsible as is: A: Most importantly because of Borg spotting you as a commander have way way too much information which already allows you to plan more adequately than in reallife B. and far less importantly the figures represent men somewhere in a 20 metre square box so certainly at squad level it is not as precise as the little figures show I think a lot of people should play TCP/IP or LAN with the one minute orders ticker running to get the general feel of the combat rather than viewing it as animated chess with lots of fancy pieces. You learn to love your AI and appreciate the beauty of the game. BTW if you are playing over 1500 pts go for two minutes!!!