Apa

One possible cure to the players ability to deliver HEAT too accurately would be to make area fire really _area_ fire. Make it dependant on distance and known enemies. The range penalty could be something like 5m radius per 100m of distance, with minimum radius of 10m. If known enemies nearby, then you get half the range penalty.

OK, that seems like a bigger problem... As for the "only the team spotter has to have his eyes exposed" - this assumes excellent cover. IIRC a mortar in the open firing at a rifle squad @200m succeeds usually in wiping out the rifle squad. Assuming the open ground doesn't happen to have a nice abstracted 1m ditch in it, the mortar team would be in big trouble trying to aim & fire the mortar.

One big problem for the on-board mortars is the possibility to use them under direct enemy fire. It seems abstracted cover will give the mortar operators unrealistic cover while aiming/firing the mortar. In reality, trying to put the shell into the tube of 81mm mortar under fire would be heroic, but stupid. You will be exposed for a couple of seconds, stationary. The enemy knows your exact position. Everybody is aiming at you...

It is obvious that machine guns would not have been so central to WWII tactics if the effectiveness is what is shown in the video. The problem is likely that of simulated cover. There isn't enough cover in the terrain, so weapon effectiveness is reduced artificially to get a nice simulated effect. As usual, this doesn't work all that well in isolated tests. So, the men covering in open ground should be considered simulated cover. Running directly towards machine gun fire without suppressive fire (as done in the video) isn't realistic at all. That would be 100% pure suicide. There is plenty of evidence, for example the whole of WWI.

I was just playing a battle where a couple of platoons were doing an assault supported by armor. I watched it from a distant view. Artillery firing, machine guns firing supporting fire, mortars firing, infantry advancing & firing. Houses collapsing, panzers exploding... It looked awesome. It was one of those moments when you realize how great a game CMBN really is. So, congratulations to all the people involved!

My intention was not telling you all that large scenarios suck, or that CMBN can't handle them. My point is that I like small scenarios, and I can't handle the large ones. Maybe I could handle mutlibatallion scenarios if I used a lot more time per game. But for me it is load CMBN, play for an hour and hopefully finish the scenario in that time. So my wish is simple: more interesting small scenarios! Even better: campaigns which concentrate on one, maybe two platoons. You might get one or two more as support troops.

I know different people prefer different scales. I prefer small scale battles. They are fun and you can really concentrate on the details. I just wish there will be more small one or two, maximum of three platoon battles. I like playing for an hour and finishing the battle in that time.

For me the biggest problem is that scenarios which have more than two platoons (plus support) of troops are not fun. When you have a company+ of troops then there is simply too much needed micromanagement. I really don't like that you need to check individual doors of houses when you are in command of a company. Not for me. However, the small scenarios are really funny. At that scale the game works beautifully. Unfortunately most of the campaigns deal with way too many units for my taste.

120mm mortars would only be used on map in emergency situations. Most likely something like ambush. I don't think any army was crazy enough to suggest using them as close support weapons. In cross-country terrain the 120mm mortar is practically immobile. And you can't have enough ammo for it, one shell is approximately 10kg. So, from cost-benefit point of view there is little reason to include the 120mm mortar on map.

This particular instance could be solved by improved TacAI. TacAI should move the halftrack into safety in such situations. Of course, that movement could cause a "rage quit" if for example the halftrack decides to move at the wrong time or into the view of a Panther. I don't know about the rest of you, but I really do think that having a minimum area for area fire and indirect fire would solve many problems. The are could be based on range, C&C status and if the firing unit knows that enemy units are in the target area. If the target radius had been 8m (just for example), even that would have changed the results in your example. If the vehicle was in view of the 60mm mortar, then there of course should be no minimum target area. Then the question is if the mortar was too accurate. My experience says that there isn't any big mistake in the accuracy. TacAI should have moved the vehicle, but this might be hard to program in a way that solves more problems than it causes. I think we need to ask MythBuster if you really can hit a bucket with a mortar...

The mortar really is quite accurate at close distances. At least modern 81mm mortars. And there hasn't been that much technological improvement, so I think my experience using modern mortars applies to WWII mortars also. Now, if a mortar under fire should have the same accuracy? No, it should not. You need to fine tune the tube if you want good accuracy. To do that, you need to be in a crouching position for a couple of seconds. Actually, you need two man doing that. Not easy to do while under fire. Another issue is that in general I would like that area fire would be much more _area_ fire. Currently it is too easy to use your semi-borg abilities to area fire known enemy positions. The area fire should hit a much larger area. My idea would be to force area fire to an area of maybe 1/25 of range radius circle. So, at 100m you could are fire at most to 4 meter radius circle, or one action spot. At 200m, to 8m radius circle, at 1000m to 40m radius circle. I think there is currently some effort to this, but the area is just too small, and the pattern too centered. This would naturally need a lot of testing to get the minimum circle radius correct. In my opinion, such area fire would be vastly more realistic than the current "spon-on" area fire. This would have a nice effect on the tactic of "use tanks sitting at the other side of the map insta-area-firing anything that is spotted". In addition, being able to set your MGs to area fire at a larger are than just one action spot would be a nice feature.

Sorry, the remark wasn't actually about your first post, but the discussion that followed. It seems to be a little of topic, and a little heated, too. In other words, all you expect from a good forum discussion I guess next we will be discussing Vietnam war...

Maybe this thread has already served its purpose (if there ever was any...) but I can't resist replying. My opinion is that Stalin could have cleared the country. If you don't consider human rights at all clearing the country is suddenly a lot easier. The Germans managed to pretty successfully fight the guerrillas in multiple large countries while fighting a war on two fronts. Remember that Stalin had _millions_ of soldiers on his disposal. If you consider something like Vietnam war, the end result would have been pretty different if the US would have systematically destroyed every village there was in the country. And maybe 5-folded their troop count. OK, I do admit it could have been somewhat bloody to the Soviets. But then again, that guy did kill millions of his own people. So, if they would have lost even a hundred thousand men it would just have been statistics to Soviets. In general I think there are two approaches to conquering a country: be so nice to them that they stop revolting, or be so hard to them that they stop revolting. Divide and conquer, I guess. When you are in-between you are asking for trouble.

If the soviets had taken Finland during Stalin's reign there would not have been an effective guerrilla war. Most finns would have been moved to concentration camps, moved to some distant part of Soviet Union or simply killed. It is incredibly naive to think that Finnish people had the option of giving soviets the lands they wanted and then just lived on. Read anything about Stalin and you know this is true. That man could not be trusted at all. He would have taken the land, thanked the fools and after that conquer the rest of the country. I would say Finland won the winter war. Finland survived, that is a victory in and of itself. Finland also survived the continuation war, but I would classify that still as a defeat. Because surviving a war you started isn't exactly a great outcome. Finland's independence wasn't strong during the immediate years after the war. Of course Soviet Union could have conquered Finland. Luckily Stalin had bigger games to play, and thus Finland survived.

There is the other problem. If you have a scout team, in real life it sure as hell would not advance in a way where the 3 or 4 men are in the center of a 8x8m area. The enemy mortar team would only have single soldier targets. And would not probably see all of the enemy soldiers simultaneously. Thus, a scouting team would not be a good target for the mortar team. However, the other side of this is that in real life if you bunch up your troops, a single mortar team could easily decimate a platoon+ of infantry. I don't see anything unrealistic about that.

I think there are two problems: infantry bunching and too little suppression to the mortar team. Firing a 81mm mortar under enemy fire is suicide. You pose a meter high target, you must stay stationary for at least a second, and the enemy knows where you will pop up. You will be no1 target for the enemy. So, while under enemy fire, the mortar team should be suppressed, or if not, then the team should get killed. Fast.

I should know (I was in a mortar team during my army time), but I am not sure about the lower trajectory causing more range error. The reason is, no matter what your trajectory is, the shell is going to go down in steep angle. And because it goes down in steep angle, there isn't that much more range error. In any case not anything like what happens to artillery going down in small angles. There a small error in the starting angle could cause really big errors at the target. I once got to lead fire. My experience (shooting with 120mm mortars) was that the error in range was less than 10m at the range of around 1000m, and there was virtually no angular error. On the other hand, spotting the right distance is _really_ hard. We also did some "direct fire" shooting with 81mm mortars. At short ranges the accuracy is mind boggling. On a clear day you can see the shell the whole time. And at ranges of 200-400 meters, the pattern is maybe a meter wide (although it is somewhat hard to see the range dispersion). My feeling about CMBN mortars is that everything is pretty well modeled, except the time it takes to FFE when the spotter is in direct visual or voice contact with the mortar team. If the spotter is regular+, the mortar team also, and the mortar team is already deployed, no suppression etc, the time to FFE should be at least half of what it is now. Another problem is infantry bunching up unrealistically close, which leads to maybe unrealistically high casualties. As far as I understand there hasn't been any really dramatic differences in the technology used now vs the technology we had to learn in army. We knew how to operate with nothing more than a glorified compass, 50m set of wire, map and a stereoscopic range finder. Laser range finder, firing computer + GPS were also learned.

The flight time of a mortar shell _decreases_ as you shoot at longer distances. That is, until you change propellant amount. This is because when you shoot as close as possible, you use the least propellant, and you shoot at an angle of close to 90 degrees. Hence your shot will go very high, and get more weather effects etc. When you shoot at longer distances, you shoot at lesser angle, all the way to (approximately) 45 degrees. At that angle your shot will go the farthest, and with least flight time. Now if you need to shoot still further, you add propellant. And change your angle to somewhere around 70-80 degrees. Thus more height, more flight time and more dispersion. I bet this is what happens at around 320m.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>How hard would it be to calculate t=v/d for fewer than 25 sounds at any given moment? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> This calculation would give some funny results. the further you are from the sound source the sooner you will hear it and if you happen to be on top of the sound source, you will never hear the sound. Funny, isn't it I don't know how much cpu power is needed for delayed sound playing, but propably not too much. Distance calculation is fast, and t=d/v isn't too complex either. Only problem that I can see of (well, I don't know too much about programming...), is how to make the system simple enough, so that these calculations doesn't need to be calculated for every frame. And even then it wouldn't be too cpu intensive.

We aren't propably going to get any patches to CMBO anymore, or atleast not a patch that makes this game CMBB on the west front. Asking for such a patch is a bit like asking for a free upgrade from Quake1 to Quake2 to Quake3. Ofcourse I also would like to see this done, or some other way to play on the western front with the new "rules" before the second coming of CM engine.

Well, the real problem is, that the player has more control over his troops that he realistically would have. But there is no way around this, except that you give orders to companies (you being the batallion commander), who then make what they wish to achieve the objective... Doesn't seem like much fun to me. This is a game, so there will always be something "gamey" in it... Ok, that company thing wasn't maybe too smart, but something like it it is realistically, a commander of a batallion level cant give a 10m hunt order to 2 tanks at the other ends of the map, at least not simultaneously... Also, there has been talk about non-absolute spotting, which would solve this problem pretty well, but it is something we wont see before CMII, or so I have heard. Apa

4, but I like to play as the allies too, it is just that I like to play as the Germans more 1.) 4 2.) 6 3.) 37 4.) 15 5.) 15

Heidman: not sure, but that is where this whole thing got it's start for me... Also I didn't read your posts well enough, sorry for that.

Skipper: With this you are proving that Hitler wasn't too genious strategic: Apa: You know, how they say "Victory has many fathers, failure is a bastard"? I especially liked you blaming on Hitler the lack of winter equipment. ROFLMAO, they had no time to procure it, the whole frigging gamble of Barbarossa was to destroy RKKA during summer campaign, within 500 km from the border." You know of the saying: Always prepare for the worst... And, yes, Hitler was a good politician and a good diplomat. The Stalin part, A: has a smiley. B: Is my opinion, which I am _not_ trying to make everybodys opinion, like sombody here... Soviet Union _never_ took over Finland. At least officially. Heidman: I have not sayed that Finnish troops should always massacre Russian ones. All I am saying, is that they should definitely not be named conscripts in game terms. And neither Finnish officiers should be of the lowest quality. My last post to this topic. Apa

Come on now, are you truly saying that Hitlers leadership past the usual hierarcy (he gave orders to division level from the main headquarters wasn's stupid? Or that the high ranking officers of Wermacht, who tought Hitler's orders to split the summer 42 attack was suicidical were all wrong? Or that Anthony Beevors (sorry to bring this up again...) was wrong when he judged Hitler as a bad commander? And this list could go on as long as one wishes, no withdraval from Stalingrad, no winter equipment... One point I certainly admit: Stalin wasn't a genious either And you are saying that Stalin didn't kill a lot of Red army officers, so if _you_ have any facts showing this, I would be more than glad to see them. Also no soviet propaganda, please Apa