Barleyman

FLAK has plenty of range to cover entire map, but I wouldn't put much faith in it. Keeping tanks in cover and not grouping them too closely helps a lot.. Single 20mm FLAK is pretty useless at shooting down planes, you might have more luck with Quads or 37mm guns. All in all you probably do best by treating FLAK guns as chainguns. They're great for suppressing infantry and killing APCs and soft-skinned vehicles. Some people consider the truck with 37mm FLAK gun better than Übertanks.

Come on guys. If we model long hair, we need to model lice etcetera too. And then you'd have soldaten scratching themselves in the midst of a firefight and where would that take you?? The committee for hygienic soldiers!

You can get umpteen StuG IVs for the cost of those 5 KTs. Those StuGs, well used, will eat alive anything that would wipe out the KTs..

If there was a live tank less than 20 meters from me, I'd be scared to death of it and not very concerned about possible schrapnel if I had something that might do me some good before that 12.7mm MG chews me into dogfood. OTOH there's been some brouhaha here when a reservist got killed by a 30mm grenade gun schrapnel. Target was some 200 meters away but the gunner managed to hit a tree stump 15 meters away. End of story and confirms the "**** happens" principle. I've personally been reprimanded by a sergeant for killing myself + my pair with a LAW. It's easy to forget that the tube is 10-20cm lower than your sight, so even when you can see the target, the rocket might not.

Exception to this rule is the venerable Pz IV .. It's turret armor is quite weak so you're actually making it more vulnerable by making enemies aim for the turret. The hull armor is far more likely to shrug off low-caliber AT munitions than the paper-mache turret.

Ok, I see why you like the ISU so much .. Talk about phallic symbolism Me? I just want to see if the T-34/40 is as f-king invicible as in steel panthers. Since the original had those armor tables, the long 60mm gun in PZ-IIIj only had a penetration chance with PzGr-40 .. From any direction!

Tons of Pact hardware was bought for scrap iron prices from former DDR stocks in early 90s. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if this didn't include a large number of 7.62mm and 12.7mm MGs .. It did include 35mm (?) grenade rifles + other neat toys. They also bought el cheapo Chinese AK-74 (?) clones so everyone gets a 7.62mm assault rifle when the time is ripe to take back what belongs to us. I'm referring to Goteborg, of course. Those chinese rifles had some problems with Finnish ammo, apparently the hammer wasn't quite strong enough so you got piles of misfires. Apparently they modified the entire 200k shipment of rifles.. [This message has been edited by Barleyman (edited 03-29-2001).]

And there's still no "Realism=[Life/Hollywood]" toggle anywhere! Hollywood realism would include upgrading grenades to 105mm HE equivalents, give all automatic weapons 1000 bullet clips with no weight penalty and give the heroes cloaks of displacement.

Maxims? As in the WWI era HUGE liquid-cooled MG that's heavy with really slow ROF etc etc? I thought that MGs are dirt cheap compared to just about everything else? You could probably buy a literal truckload of those things for the cost of one APC..

If you get some of the tweak programs from <a href=www.rage3d.com>Rage3D</a> you can enable table fog option. Whether it actually works is another matter Some of the tweak programs say that the table fog potentially causes problems so it should be enabled only if some game uses it.. YMMV. One thing those tweak apps are good for is radeon "overclocking" .. That is, you can put your underclocked bulk card to the same spec the retail package uses (183MHz)..

FSAA kludge is not an option for TNT2-family. My TNT2 Ultra was getting a bit long in the tooth.. And since NVidia couldn't be arsed to fix the problem during several driver updates I decided to switch over to something that supports CM. There's price/performance stuff you can argue about until Stalingrad falls, but one card works with CM, the other doesn't. Which is what's important for me. [This message has been edited by Barleyman (edited 03-12-2001).]

I solved my flickering problem. This should work for anyone with a TNT/Geforce. I bought an ATI Radeon 64MB DDR and it doesn't suffer from flickering. In fact their driver readme lists that as being fixed Feels weird not having to go back & forth to desktop to play. .. YMMV! The same card does NOT work properly in W98 for me.

Isn't anyone going to run series of tests with a couple platoons lined up in a bridge and run some panzers across?

Was that a typo or did it really have a firing mode where you had to pull back the "hammer" after every shot? What's the "hammer" called in automatic weapons in English again? Different from rifles?

I noticed something funny when I was playing with the Viller's Bocage scenario - I had Wittman driving away from the village to get a hull-down position from the other entry road, while couple of panicked conscripts run across the road.. There was a panzer coming down the road at full blast and those guys ran directly under it!! Splat! Now the question is that did the tiger just mow them down with close-range mg fire or does CM really model street pizza? Shades of Dune II perhaps?

Say, that's a neat idea! IMHO the really narrow is a bit too narrow, so how about a version which is midway between the anorectic and the lo-fat?

Do I hear complaints of people who rely on static defence here I usually use 120mm mortars since they strike good balance between firepower, ammo loadout and price. Not to mention it's there when you need it, not 2 turns late. Yeah, 155mm is just so macho, but with just one or two salvoes it's not terribly cost-effective.

Did I mention I really like 120mm mortars?

A bigger gun would probably kill you if you get run over. OTOH they have reasonable ground clearances so you might get away unhurt if you're lucky. But the gun will definitely not stop if you get run over.. The Russian 2x23mm gun has 7 person crew and it weights 1100kg. So everyone has to push about 160kg. It's not a big feat to do that for 100 meters but you won't push it for hours, no way. I actually remember seeing a news photo of Taleban militia using this gun in anti-personnel role so yeah, it's do-able. But it's only got 60 pieces of ammo in the boxes so you won't do much spraying. Here's a lovely picture of the lovely piece of scrap metal: Sergei

Luckily they have dedicated users who have pointed out this potential pitfall and can now serve us with a well rounded out product in a timely manner! Phew! What would BTS ever do without us?

What little I know of software projects.. (little magicks are most dangerous things) It should be a lot easier/sensible to keep CM map/unit compatibility in the CM2 codebase instead of doing a truckload of changes into the engine and then trying to jury-rig all that into the previous version. That way you can deal with issues as they arise. Another option might be a "plug-in" filter to allow CM2 binary to read CM1 data. Well, The Man might know what he's doing. "Älä opeta isääsi naimaan" and all that.

Nostalgia.. I have personally pushed a 2x23mm AA gun around a few times. Gun crews (Even the collection on barrel-bottomers in the staff unit!) can actually move the damn thing at a brisk walking pace on a level road. But as soon as you hit a _gentle_ slope you realize you're trying to push couple of tons of boiler plate uphill. I just shudder thinking about moving the thing across broken terrain, but we weren't asked to do that In any case, you should be able to move light guns along roads reasonably quickly. As long as nobody's shooting at you! .. (I wonder if you can use "Sergei" against ground targets .. )

Is CM2 going to be compatible with CM scenarios/ops? I understand it's inteded to revise TacAI on lessons learned basis with decisionmaking covering several turns. Panzers would "remember" there was that nasty firefly in that town sector so we'll just ignore the infantry right now. At least back off from LOS to the last known position of the biggest threat before rotating to deal with grunts. Sort of factoring in threats they "saw" with stuff they can see right now. .. In any case, it'd be nice to be able to play some of the excellent ops/scenarios with upgraded TacAI later on. Any chance of this happening?

.. When you hit the dirt every time a prop plane goes overhead.

I rather like the gunmetal TC. Now comes the "..but" part: Landmark text is really very ugly, it looks bloated and smudgy, almost unreadable. A stark contrast to the otherwise much-improved text font all around! It's is just wrong. It looks like someone took the label letters and inflated them to 300% and left them to their misery! Also the "embarked" font used in the bottom of the toolbar is pretty hard to read, probably due to being "weathered".. .. I really like the color-coded status screen, tho.