StellarRat
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Posts posted by StellarRat
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Isn't self-evident that they were a failure? If they were such a good idea why don't they exist now? TDs went out immediately after the war.
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Seems it would be very easy to allow a mod for all the weapon sounds.
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That's not good.
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Use a tank.
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I had a group of five German tanks sit behind a forest on the edge of a map once for an entire medium sized QB game. They had No LOS to the objectives They were supposed to defend and only fired when I finally stumbled on them after crossing the entire map with My infantry. Even after I found them they never did move. The only other defending unit in the game was an FO in one of the objective towns in a building and I'm not sure if he called in any strikes other then the pre-bombment. Perhaps the German tankers put in a long night at the Haufbrau and were passed out in their rigs?
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If your radioman or spotter gets killed you're done even if the rest of the HQ is ok. I'd check your HQ again and make sure no one got killed or wounded. I'm not sure but it might be possible for a radio to get lost or destroyed too.
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I'm not going to dispute you historically, I'm talking in the game. I haven't done the research to say otherwise in WW II. I do know that tanks are easy targets for aircraft that the proper armament to destroy them.IRL the only place that Air Power was the scourge of armour was the pilots' log books. Against the logistics tail, different story.Yes, made slightly more contempory
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If you have the option of air power all German tanks are just meat on table. Just set your area attack circle to be as much of enemy side as possible. The Allied pilots will eat them for lunch. Even strafe attacks have a good chance to immobilize them.
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OH MY GOD! THE START OF A NEW HULL ROTATION DICUSSION! AYE-EEE! The old timers here will remember this from CMBO. Ten years and it hasn't changed. :-)
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Retrograde manuevers are one of the hardest military operations to carry out. My suggestion is move back using smoke and bounding overwatch. Take advantage of cover just like you did when you advanced (hopefully.) For tanks make sure to use REVERSE instead of turning your rear armor to the enemy.
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Well, historically, I don't any crews aimed for specific points on a tank. I think you'd have to be very close to be that picky. When I was in ROTC the procedure was always "aim for center of mass". BTW, technically, the AI is not reallly an AI since it doesn't learn. It's an expert system.This thread got me thinking on how an ai would improve in a game. If the ai knew the target type, let's use the panther for a second, it would then look at the skill level of the crew and determine if they were smart enough and trained enough to target weak spots on the opposing panther.Think of it as a giant decision tree, and the results would be tied to crew profile data. The same could be applied for human vs human, you target the panther, get a pick list of areas and choose. The skill of your crew would determine the quality of the shot, some random variable for lack of skill would result in hits to other locations on the panther, which might result in a kill, but at least you'd have the choice of targeting the tracks for example.
To code this would require a rather large decision table, but you could I'm use create an efficient algorithm to determine the best place to aim for and shoot.
This is something that I'd love to see, but I'm sure with the staff at BFC they would love to do a lot of things and this isn't one of them right now.
Buy here I can see getting a little more bang for the buck when engaging a Heer Cat, at least you could attempt to immobilize it or shoot for the gun manley with the hope of hitting the shot trap and killing the driver. Stuff like that.
I'm on the iPhone again, so not sure if this made any sense.
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This is going to sound bad, but I've found the best way is to lead with infantry not tanks when playing the Allies. If you can spot the Panther first then hide and call in 155 mm fire. A direct hit with destroy them and they aren't terribly hard to immobilize. Also, the 105 on the assualt Sherman can destroy or cripple them even from the front. The AI tends to leave tanks in one spot so they are vulnerable to artillery.
Against a human all I can suggest is use all available cover, get close and try to take by surprise from side or rear. You can use infantry with zooks or tanks for this because the armor is easy to penetrate from those angles. Also don't forget your tanks can make smoke to help them hide when moving through gaps that might be covered. You have good chance in close combat with the Sherman because turret can slew much faster than the Panther's if you surprise it.
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Yeah, 105's were the standard in US forces in WW II.
I nearly always grab at least one battery of 155mm in QB. The reason I like it so much is that it can be used against armor and hard cover very effectively. When playing with an all infantry attacking force it is my main anti-armor weapon. Because dragging AT guns forward into battle is pretty silly, but moving your FO isn't. I can't really count on 105's against armor and bigger guns are too slow to respond and don't fire enough rounds to adequately saturate an area.
If I KNEW there was NO enemy armor I'd probably pick 105's because they are cheap and effective again soft targets.
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Mobile Infantry, UURAH!
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I'm sticking with 155 mm. This the standard for modern US Forces now as far as I know and I can see why based on my CMBN experience.I find 105mm fire to be the most effective in game. The larger calibers don't deliver enough shells, and the lighter stuff doesn't reliably kill light vehicles with near misses. I killed three Marders and immo a StugIII with a few nicely placed 105 rounds in a QB with the same map as listed at thread start. Area fire seems to be a waste of time, linear delivers a much more damaging barrage over an area of ground since rounds fall from point to point and a little high and low of the line you set. -
i was going to bring up exactly these points in my previous post but ran out of time. I completely agree with you. If i was playing WEGO i wouldn't complain about having to hunt around for hull down, etc... but it sucks when the clock is running. You ought to try RT sometime with no pauses. I think it will give you a better grasp of the issues.Strikes me that this engine was designed with desert environments in mind, with much sparser distribution of foliage, etc. Now that it is being used for N.Europe, we are seeing some of its limitations. I think if people are very specific about their issues with how it fails to meet their needs in understanding the fighting environment, the more likely BFC is going to look into them. It probably is true that RTS is especially difficult here - I don't know because I don't play that way, but I could see how it forces the player to make quick judgements about what he is looking at. And I know that some RTS players hate to pause the game, complicating matters further.As a WEGO player, I seem to have fewer problems than many posters here, but then too my gaming pace is probably glacial compared to theirs.
IMO, the two biggest improvements that could be made are a button that shows every tile a unit can see from it's current position and a button that overlays contour lines the map. These would save me a huge amount of time and frustration.
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I think the point to take away from this that the UI is not user friendly in many respects because it's lacking some features that would make the game a lot easier to take in. Note that MOS didn't complain about the concepts and tactics of WW II fighting being too complex he complained that it too hard to figure out basic information when looking at the map. This is also my biggest frustration with the game. I know the tactics and understand the weapons just fine, the problems start when I'm trying to play an RT game and I have to spend five minutes out of my one hour mission time trying get a tank into a hull down position, etc... because there are not visual cues to help me other than changing my view to ground level and basically experimenting. A real tank crew would have no problem doing this themselves and rather quickly I'd imagine. I'm sure someone has figured out a better way to do this, but the point it shouldn't need much figuring in the first place. Complexity because the subject is complex is OK, but complexity because the you aren't given adequate tools is quite another. I still love the game and have spent a bunch of time playing, but it could definitely use some help in the UI department.
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Just to clarify - the platoon didn't move into the village after the bombardment ended. This game was played in Realtime and my opponent and I were using voice comms and discussed the bombardment. The map started out with damaged buildings but none of the buildings were destroyed during the shelling. Now to be fair, I didn't look to see if any of the shells actually hit any of the buildings, but I saw impact craters all around the village area.
The QB map we played on was the one containing 2 village objective areas. A river seperated the two areas and there were rather large hills. The village I was hitting was the center objective.
Well if the enemy was in stone buildings and none of them took a direct hit I could easily see them surviving.
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I suspect your imagination runs a little hotter than reality...
So, you think the game is wrong? Or you know the real facts about 240mm? ?? :-)
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I would imagine the blast alone from 240mm should kill or injure everyone within 50 meters (assuming no hard cover.) My guess is the enemy moved in AFTER the barrage. A lot would depend on how the shells were fused too. Instantaneous vs. Delayed vs. Timed airburst . I don't know what fusing options 240 mm had.
My own experience in CMBN is that 155 mm is the best artillery all around. 240 is too slow, too expensive and fires too few rounds.
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Does pause work in multi-player? I haven't tried it yet, I'm purposely not using pause because I'm training to beat my friend in MP. I stand by my assertion that the terrain takes too long to read. Even simple contour lines would go a long way towards fixing the problem. I think even WW II maps had those. :-)
Another huge aid would be a button that highlights every part of the map that the selected unit has LOS to while darkening the parts it can't see. I've seen this function in other games.
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His point about the lack of artificial aids to compensate for the lack of terrain detail that would be apparent, or more apparent, in the real world is a good one. It's the worst feature of this game and quite surprising given the history of the CM series.
In fact the appearance of the terrain can be worse than being merely uninformative, it is misleading on occasions, particularly where certain angles of features such as roads may, for example, indicate a rise when there is not.
It's strange given the really excellent quality of the game otherwise, anyone done a grid mod or something yet?
I agree with this poster. It difficult to judge terrain, gaps, where cover ends. If you are playing WEGO and have time to scroll all over the place at head level its probably not so much of an issue however playing real time it gets very annoying. You waste a lot of time and get people killed because it difficult figure the later if the land and EXACTLY where your units are in relation to cover. BFC needs to give something like contour lines etc.... finding hull down positions is a nightmare in real time.
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All your girl belong to us
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I thought I wouldn't like real time either, but I like it better than WEGO now. It's not a click fest! When playing solo you can also hit the pause button. I think real time is a step forward not back. No one has time to analyze every tiny detail and micromanage stuff in a real battle. This is a tactical wargame not chess. I don't even use the pause when I'm playing the AI.
Dissapointed by CMBN
in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy
Posted
I'm a bit surprised that this firing on the move thing got past the beta testing or did BFC just decide to release knowing there was a problem? The gyro wasn't very good on the Sherman. Until the 80's firing on the move was not preferred.