LongLeftFlank
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Posts
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Posts posted by LongLeftFlank
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Hmm. Disappointing box office for my baby on its opening weekend: 16 DLs on the Repo and 7 at GaJ. Are people just preoccupied with the CMFI demo, or what? Or maybe there really IS very little gamer interest in playing PTO, even for free. Or maybe I shoulda pandered to Commonwealth module buyers by doing Kohima or Arakan or sumfink....
Well we'll see if it ramps up.
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Yeah, it's a little kludgy but you can get some very nifty results.
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Screenz pleez! (I am in CM withdrawal, with my desktop PC being kaput)
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Yeah, I could kvetch about IG indirect fire shots at minimum range targets (e.g. needing *higher* gun elevation -- play a little Angry Birds if you're unclear on this concept) smacking into trees 40m+ downrange of the gun. But I won't....
Oops, maybe I should do some basic geometry before mouthing off about that. (hint: max elevation of the LG18 is 73deg)
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Well once horses are in, CM Civil War (all of them) and CM Napoleon are on the table.
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The Italians wave their hands for everything!
(so do I, although no Italian blood runs in my veins.... to my knowledge). -
Great post C3K!
Politeness costs nothing, as the old lady said when she bowed to the devil in church, and besides, you never know.
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Hell In the Pacific, a BBC series from 2001, is interesting although its focus is largely psychological/individual, not military/strategic. And they're very detailed about Japanese atrocities, including those against their own soldiers.
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Hee hee. You know, when people go far enough to the Left, they come out on the far right again (i.e. worshipping the Chairman or the Dear Leader as messianic god king).
It doesn't work the other way though; once people move past the point of messianic worship (God / Nation / Race) on the right, they then seem to give up in despair and withdraw from society altogether, becoming misanthropic hermits (e.g. Solzhenitsyn, the Unabomber, Bin Laden). Or Colonel Jack D Ripper.
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The motherboard on my elderly HP Pavilion crashed today, having given its life in the service of CM. Fortunately, I had just uploaded a final version of my Makin scenario and a .brz file containing all necessary Pacific mods to a convenient Dropbox folder. :-) Many thanks to Broadsword56 and SBurke for helping avert what might have been a loss to all CM humanity.
So with all further CMing temporarily curtailed until I buy a new rig that runs CMBN, I am now releasing the scenario as is, together with 3 mod packs:
1. LVT Alligator, available in CMBN:CW Vehicles
2. Japanese Forces, available in CMBN:CW Uniforms
3. Pacific Terrain, available in CMBN:CW root folder
It should all be uploaded shortly onto both the Repository and GreenAsJade's site.
Please note that this scenario has not been playtested by anybody except me, and I didn't finish. However, I hope it gives you the flavour of leading a reinforced US battalion in a moderately opposed beach landing (or, in H2H, of playing a Japanese SNLF force conducting a gallant but doomed defense).
I hope you enjoy playing this as much as I did making it. Please post any comments or screenies in this thread, marked Spoiler if appropriate.
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Just to be clear; only the infantry gun crews (see screenie above) are SS. There is no British gun that approximates typical Japanese field artillery better than the German IG guns; 81mm mortars with their high ROF are just too lethal for my scenario. And I didn't want them to have a modern AT gun (the CMBN arsenal contains no 37mms).
Never fear, the Japanese infantry are all British; I will never use Germans for them as their MGs are way too good and they have panzerfausts and assault rifles and other goodies that the IJA/SNLF never dreamed of.
You can certainly use the Para wireframes instead of LW, but I tested both (see page 14 of this thread for screens) and like the look of the LW cut much better, especially the trousers and boots.
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Interesting; the wireframe (skeleton) .mds files for the original CMBN US and Heer soldiers do not appear to be available (I unzipped all the .brz files and found nothing) for modding or repointing, but those included in the expansion kit can be (Brits, SS, LW, etc.). So after some messing around, I swapped SS for Heer infantry gun units and then repointed the SS wireframe to the Japanese uniform set used by the Brits. The gun crews still speak German, but whatever.
Note that unlike the repurposed British infantry, who aren't wearing any web kit for some reason neither CoonDog nor myself can divine, these repurposed SS are wearing a lot of German gear, although the bayonets and gasmasks can't find their textures (appear blacked out).
But as my Makin scenario is now on the eve of publication, I am pronouncing this mod set good enough and fit for use. Some other modder can take it to the next level if it ain't good enuff for him. I haven't done badly IMHO considering textures aren't my core competency.
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Agree with the conclusion, but again, everything you say only became clear to the Allies in hindsight, some time after the war.
The Allied powers (except perhaps the US & Canada, although in a nuclear age, maybe even them) were fighting for survival against a sinister and highly capable foe who had provided ample evidence of its intent to enslave and likely destroy their civilizations.
Who really knew what technological nightmares German ingenuity was going to spring upon its enemies to, if not win, at least raise the price of victory. Rail-garrison V1/V2s tipped with nerve gas or anthrax and dropped on London, heedless of retaliation? ATGW? Some kind of weird hybrid atomic weapon? (it's not like you could drop Einstein or Oppenheimer a quick email and have them reassure you that this wasn't likely). Anything seemed possible; nothing could be altogether discounted.
It was only with the industrial heartland of the Reich under Allied control and the Nazi war machine at last showing signs of loss of will to fight that policymakers could entertain notions of easing off on humanitarian grounds. And guess what, that's about March 1945.
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Once again, this quote doesn't really speak to policy or intent in the prior period. It is more a reaction to a wave of end-of-the-war concern that intensive bombing of German cities was no longer justifiable on military grounds, with the majority of the former Reich now under Allied occupation. There was no "My God, What Have I Done?" here.
I'll say it again. Prior to the successful crossings of the Oder and Rhine in early 1945, the Allies were simply in no position either to take victory for granted, or to commit such enormous resources to a bombing campaign whose primary purpose was terror or revenge. The most they can be accused of is profound indifference to civilian losses in light of their own, and probably some grim satisfaction as well.
Also, pay a visit to downtown Turin, Genoa or Livorno sometime. Notice all those generally ugly postwar cement flats and office blocks? Yup, these Italian cities were bombed *extremely* heavily as part of the same strategic campaign, as were Caen, St Lo, Rouen and other transportation and industrial centers in France. Revenge and blood lust at work here?
Also -- and I have no idea of the answer -- were any Luftwaffe personnel or commanders actually tried as war criminals by the West for aerial bombing of cities? (the Soviets locked up Erich Hartmann for 10+ years, I know, but they had their own definition of "war crimes").
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Actually I'm not as big a user of covered arcs as many folks, but I am huge on Face command, which accomplishes many of the same ends, as you guys noted above.
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Well a unique long term advantage of mainstream Western civilization has been its practice of introspection and reinvention. Even a hidebound and brutal slavery-dependent culture like late Rome embraced the levelling ascetic faith that was Christianity and then imposed it to coopt the barbarians who were overrunning it.
Its infantile twin is reflexive self hatred combined with uncritical adulation of other cultures that are automatically assumed to be far more (select all that apply: Pious / Virtuous / Manly / Egalitarian / Multicultural / Sustainable ) than we Wicked White People. This moral poison afflicts all too many otherwise educated, tolerant and intelligent people and is a source of nonstop amusement to other cultures who suffer no such self-doubts except when, oh, they've been slammed by two atom bombs or sumfink.
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The Brits were still doing that sort of thing during the Malaya insurgency. I think during and after that it became increasingly unacceptable. There was some expose story and official apology about Malayan atrocities going on when I was in the UK last May.
The British apologize for everything these days; if it helps people move on that's fine but I personally feel it merely feeds the juvenile and narcissistic nationalism (I suppose there's no other kind) that exists in these countries.
Whatever the Brits did in Malaysia was largely implemented by ethnic Malay forces who never liked their Chinese minorities (rubber plantation workers who had since taken over the entire mercantile sector) and had persecuted them even more harshly under the Japanese. Many though by no means all of these huaqiao took their cues from the homeland, which in 1938-1978 generally meant Maoism; the CPM was virtually all Chinese for its entire existence.
Chinese vlllages in many parts of Malaysia only stopped having shoot on sight curfews in the mid-1980s. When I was there in 1989, 2 elderly Japanese soldiers finally came out of the jungle, having joined their CPM opponents at the time of surrender (and temporary resumption of British rule). Please note that British rule in Malaysia had always been indirect, via treaties with the various Sultans who still nominally rule today; they fully intended to grant independence, and did, but not to a Communist regime; hence the (successful, btw, and a model for what the US later hoped to achieve in Vietnam via "strategic hamlets") counterinsurgency.
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Having the ambishing unit facing toward the back end of the building (away from the intended ambush) on an upper floor seems to decrease the chances of them being spotted or giving themselves away. As the enemy enters, they turn and open fire point blank, with devastating results if they have automatic weapons. That was a staple of my Ramadi CMSF scenario.
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I've found hidden guys will generally open fire of their own accord once enemies enter an adjacent square; sometimes even 2 squares away. I've also been gratified to see computer side troops with no orders, Slow crawl to the next square to get out of heavy fire or regain LOS
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Yeah panicked units do seem to banzai charge the enemy a lot, but they also do run backwards and hide (as you'd expect) a lot too. My best read is that they favour the nearest cover terrain, even if enemy held.
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Fortunes of war, basically. The enemy unit spotted him first or smelt a rat in spite of his efforts. I recently had a solo guy lying prone behind a hedegerow toss a grenade into an entire squad entering the adjacent square in Hunt mode, killing 4 of them and Panicking 2 squads. They never saw him.
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Well yes, there were some idealists, particularly in Japanese military intelligence, who sincerely believed in Japan's own manifest destiny as benevolent liberator of Asia from the white devils. They set up the Indian National Army, the Burmese Liberation Army, etc. Regrettably the mainstream of the Japanese command had little patience for such notions, being all too eager to step into the shoes of the imperialists, treating the natives as racial inferiors, fit only for slave labour. And of course the (anti-Japanese) Chinese huaqiao populations in SE Asia were subjected to what was more or less genocide -- fortunately they didn't get time to implement that fully. Ironically, a lot of those massacres were carried out by Japanese-directed INA and other native troops, analagous to the role of Ukrainian auxiliaries in the Russian Holocaust.
The brutality of the Philippine insurrection has been overstated in my view and retroactively subjected to modern day moral judgments that even the victims would not have recognized or expected at the time. This was 1903 and 19th century conventions still applied. While armies were no longer expected to burn and loot their way through the countrtside, civilians were not supposed to engage in warfare. And it was still considered acceptable practice in the West to torch native villages that had engaged in "banditry" (guerrilla warfare). Just as soldiers caught in civilian clothes or the other side's uniforms could be legitimately shot.
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Absolutely true but I gather there are still quite a few Imperial Japan fanbois in the large Korean gamer community. I'd guess they view the Japanese as relatives (the races are genetically indistinguishable although most Japanese deny that) who had the stones to overrun half of China, run the white colonialists out of Asia and go toe to toe with the superpower for a year and maybe longer had they had better luck at Midway (and changed their naval codes sooner). Just like the Germans have their admirers in nations oppressed by them.
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Really? So much for my next computer being Mac then...
CM.exe as Trojan
in Combat Mission Fortress Italy
Posted
Yes, installing antivirus is like supporting a military coup d'etat. The added "security" isn't worth the other problems, not least the massive resource hogging.