dieseltaylor

Can I add to VAB's request. Always report the precise tank model and gun as otherwise its pretty useless for anybody else who may have relevant tests, or anecdote, or War Department reports. I am willing to bet that relating a spalling test on Tigers with spalling evident that the gun was very likely not a 75mm Sherman gun. As for 14.5mm ATG's knocking out vision blocks I think a moments reflection will show that thousands of rounds of HV tungsten bullets aimed deliberately at vision blocks may well be effective but actually it does not seem a fair extrapolation to take this too far.

http://killzoneauthors.blogspot.ca/2012/10/et-tu-amazon.html And now they censor reviews. I have done a few book reviews on Amazon and I would be very upset to be accused and banned. It seems to me that Amazon is unprepared to invest in people who can think and simply uses computers to generate a "suspicion of" list and then acts on it. Perhaps it should realise that selling involves people and you need a certain amount of intelligent humans with powers to provide an interface for your customers. Something it could/should have learned from telephone companies.

Your right that we only have one side of the story but its not as though Amazon have a no capacity to respond. On a legal point it would appear Amazon.co.uk. can disable books bought through Amazon.com which might argue they are the same company. However Amazon UK appears to be separate and most orders seem to go to Luxembourg to evade paying tax in the UK and the US. Interesting.

VAB - Very true borg spotting was a problem area. I did find it was much less of a problem if you played on very large maps with decent amounts of terrain features. Thsi also had the effect of making high ground worth fighting for : ) I have suggested to BF that perhaps they look at the possibility of tightening up the spotting algorithm perhaps as a optional setting so that the spread of time goes from minutes to a range of seconds. I am not suggesting that cover etc is not given more value but in equal situations such as : If you think I am being daft in one testing range a Sherman was fired at five times by a MkIV at AFAIR 1800 metres with three shells bouncing of the front glacis. Not only the TC fail to see the enemy tank but he also failed to duck down to button up. Now in some of the tests spotting was virtually instantaneous. This difference is huge and in a scenario with a few tanks one side could be on the losing side of all the spotting. Way too random for a tournament where players only play say 5 games and all against different opponents.

Looking forward to a society of electronic devices and DRM? I'm not so I don't use anything that is DRM'd http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/

My instinct is that the variability inherent in CMX2, in actually spotting another tank which in my early tests varied hugely from seconds to minutes, make a tournament as ROW was unplayable. Now it may be the constant tweaking and version V2.00 have made it less variable but my suspicion is that it may not. So from the tank/vehicle side of things I have concerns. I will run my tests again when V2.00 is out. However if it still has the huge variability in spotting then I reckon many people playing the same scenario may get different results but not just down to player skill. I am beginning to wonder that for all its faults CMX1 is not a better game for tournament playing. Just to illustrate the thought no one would get very excited about chess as a game of immense thought if you rolled dice whenever a piece were taken. Or bridge with wild cards!!!

VAB - Yes it is. Check any sport and only those originated in the US use countdown. Ice hockey is actually uses normal time system outside of North America. Possible exception is Rugby League.* SP - I have only played a couple of games in CMBN which were ceasefire jobs and certainly we found that it continued well beyond when we both went ceasefire. Now this was under CMBN 1.00 so things may have changed. * or possibly not

I am sure that North Americans, who are exposed to the few games that use a countdown clock, do find it simpler. However for the rest of the world it is not a common mechanism. I have a problem here. In CMx1 normal time was good enough and then for no apparent reason in CMx2 it becomes a countdown timer. So I am left wondering why. More appeal to the US market? Thoughtlessness as to the effects on reinforcement calculations, appealing to a twitch market, no thought as to the H2H with players working in highly unrealistic minus time. I am not saying that forward time was perfect as knowing how long was left in games with fixed endings could be handy in a TCP/IP game where one might fail to remember something difficult like 30 turns in the heat of the moment. But perhaps I am wrong and droves of people wrote to BF asking for it to be made simpler though I cannot recall it being a mentioned in the forums. It would be nice if it had to be changed if it were optional or two clocks ran. Its a right pain in the butt when running tests to be working backwards when recording events. JonS - " As for "helpful suggestions," how about the suggestion that if we're down to whining about the clock, then clearly must be CM in a very good state." There seems a disconnect in the logic. I thing you misunderstand the situation if you think that there are not plenty of problems in CMx2. As for how it shows in CMFI please do tell as I ain't buying it until CMBN version 2 has been trialled. Are you suggesting its been fixed?

Just a helpful suggestion JonS. "We" don't understand who decided the CMx1 system needed changing. Was there a petition I missed? Does the modern US Army run in countdown mode when in a firefight? As you are au fait with things BF perhaps you can say or find out why BF changed the way the clock worked.? P.S. On the practical front , you may not have noticed, but in larger battles scenario designers work in forward time and give advice such as reinforcements appear in 10 minutes ,17 minutes, and 23 minutes. Helpfully all you have to do is deduct this time from the 45 minutes starting time to work out when they will reach you. Just jot down 35minutes, 27 minutes and 20 minutes for the countdown clock. Cute system and really user-friendly.

And whilst they are sorting out the clock can we please go back to accumulating time so that extra turns are + not - minutes. I still find it distressing that whilst the rest of the world has time going forward for the CMx2 series BF decided that a countdown clock was superior. There are barely a handful of sports that use a countdown clock but besides that in a military simulation should not time advance forward?

Very interesting would be in the open. This below suggests a hit rate differential and I suspect a 105mm is more lethal. "Neutralising effect, in NW Europe, on an enemy in open positions, was achieved with a bombardment intensity of 0.02–0.08 lb/sq yd/hr. in 25-pdr equivalents. Lethal effect: A density of 0.1 lb/sq yd causes 2% casualties on targets in slit trenches, about 20% on targets in the open."

poesel: The War Office documents that J D salt extracted data from would prove useful in setting up the tests as you may be able to get an approximation for your test design and what you are actually comparing. It is not perfect and I would hope that someone can direct you to US WW2 tests. There is a link somewhere on this or the Brixia thread I believe or someone may have it to hand. For kick-offs one test for the 3" mortar said a point target was a 0.06 chance of a hit per shell .... therefore 70% destruction chance for 20 shells. Another WO document is on 81 targets in an area 150 x 100 yards and using 25pdrs, sa 105mm and a 75mm. http://mr-home.staff.shef.ac.uk/hobbies/ww2eff2.pdf

JasonC: And when we have that info then it can be cross-referenced to what the War Department thought. Incidentally from other places ;; Made me wonder if too much modern practice had tinged the artillery model.

I get to do nothing as BF make the game. My guess would be that if there is a discrepancy between the WD work and how it is working in CMBN then it needs a fix. My guess would be to produce more error in firing accuracy and/or lessen the effects when going prone. It seems , judging from the comments on the boards, that the accuracy of the small mortars is overstated. Also I suspect looking at the 2" data that there may be some wriggle room where a mortar goes from LA fire to HA fire and what the range is. At 400yds the 2" is over twice as inaccurate then it is at 200yds when firing at low angle. Also low angle of fire presumably means the burst pattern is smaller and more elliptical than a high angle bomb.

My experience gained from CMX1 was that the smaller the map the more potent a threat artillery was. Playing on larger maps neutrailised its effects as the opponent was pickier, had to be pickier, on using it. I felt very annoyed/sickened that when first playing CMBN on its launched all thos bloody stupid scenarios with fleeing infantry bouncing off invisible walls around the battlefield and running back into the barrage. Stupidest bloody thing I have ever seen in a claimed realistic game. Salts derived War Office reports has plenty on artillery effectiveness and various cover divisors. It almost seems we inherited a CMSF artillery mod.

Also interesting is this: And perhaps most graphically for our purposes:

I was curious o see that the Stugs were immobilised by 3"[81mm] mortar fire. The UK tested Churchills to a 25pdr barrage: The Churchill is well armoured but a 25pdr has less blast effect than a 81mm but probably flies bigger chunks of metal. In any event neither has any fragmentation effect on 0.5"[12mm] mild steel. Is this uber-mortars again? I am not saying it could never happen rather that a 100% success rate in this battle seems odd. Perhaps more testing is required including how many shells fired. As noted since CMBN was launched the crew behaviour is positively bizarre when responding to penetrations.

Grog huh! Its von Richtofen : ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_von_Richthofen just for those "grogs" who did not know : ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Ritter_von_Tutschek

X COM!? Borderlands 2 its actually funny and is multiplayer. Also downright scary.

Its important to remember that JasonC is not always right and you need to exercise some critical faculties. The thread on the Brixia mortar is a slight case in point. JC Whilst agreeing with Jason on the BF problem I was amused to see that in fact light mortars are in vogue now, and that production of 22 was actually 50-50 HE and smoke in WW2. Facts brought up by other contributors. There is no doubt that a vast amount is good and he is particularly strong on banging away that war is always a matter of material.

ANd then therre is Borderlands2 : ) IS xCOM multiplayer?

Grouch! But perhaps I have not watched lots of fawning hype so perhaps just seeing the video makes it more palatable.

Hister - " Hey, why are some of you guys so cranky against John?" You have only been on the forum for a year so perhaps you are unfamiliar with some of the longer term posters previous posts. I won't go into the details as it I also prefer a BB to populated by users who are respectful and polite. And if they don't like a thread they can, as you say, ignore it.

I think the British got it right by mixing them up as both had strengths to play to. It also undoubtedy kept the German tankers nervous as if you saw some vanilla Shermans there was good odds that lurking further back was a Firefly or two. I imagined the speed of the shell, if it penetrated, would bring attendant lumps and shards of metal which maybe not as satisfying but at least it got through.

Sorry to hear that he seems to have become a moneygrubber. Given most humans can read many times faster than a lecturer speaks I have always thought those things poor value. Also as you cannot break off to process a particular concept without losing more talk it is even more redundant. P.S. I do find it a trifle annoying that the media can go so overboard on various personalities even if they are just spouting commonsense - I had a quick look at Suze's wikipedia article and site. Unfortunately the US does seem to need a celebrity culture more than most nations and I am left wondering why that is. My gut feeling is the media realised or generated a need to populate a "global" village filled with a limited range of characters that we all[?] have in common. : ( P.P.S Which reminds me of the idiocy of people who need to see someone in the flesh or buy garments with names on at inflated prices. humans! Huh! ..... : )