Barleyman

Long range for a mounted MG would be in my opinion between 500m and 1km. And the case study here was unarmored AAA carrier with a big gun crew, so much of the vehicle silhouette would be vulnerable. I can see a highway from my office window which is about half a kilometer away - I reckon I could hit any _stationary_ car relatively easy if we'd attach a MG mount to the window. A moving car would most likely get away, but they're doing about 80km/h or much faster than you usually see anyone drive in CM. Perhaps some live-fire excercises are called for to resolve this issue?

FWIW, K6-2 500 did not cut it for CM. I can tell BTS is not using 3DNow! libraries for math. My new 1GHz Thunderbird just rips in comparison, no doubt due to some 250% increase in raw FPU power. It took 2-3 minutes for AI + modeling to finish for a big scenario like "all or nothing".

Hmm, this reminds me of some British bi-plane torpedo bomber which was supposed to be good because it was so flimsy most AP and HE rounds would go straight through without causing much damage.. Not too hot for pilot protection! IMHO, soft vehicles should be extremely vulnerable to long-range MG fire, the gunner could just "spray" the vehicle. It's not going to hit the dirt, after all.

Ok, that sounds good! A little late to save my armor in one of the PBEM games I'm involved in, but rinse and repeat. You'd think 20mm AC would be especially good for disposing the guns once their heads are down? I've found out locating the guns is pretty easy, just have a PSW do a peek-a-boo and someone's bound to take a shot at it. Unless we're dealing with someone extra sneaky with hiding guns. Leg infantry will usually notice the guns at reasonable ranges, too.

I'm scared of AT guns I make all-infantry advances and only expose panzers from keyhole positions. 6pdr AT guns are simply deadly against the StuG-IVs and IVHs I like to use to support my attacks. Now I've been thinking maybe keeping the panzers in rear until infantry can take out some of the AT gun coverage or getting impatient and losing my panzer back-up is not the best possible way to use my assets. 81mm off-board mortars seem simply insufficient, I've made it rain shells on the little dears with little effect.. And while assault gun howizers would be ideal, they always lose on duel. What kind of tools do you people to take out those annoying guns? 50mm mortars? OTOH, I've noticed I win easily when my opponent invests too much in AT defenses and gets overrun by leg infantry..

I really like German 120mm mortars on defense. Fast response and nothing says Verboten! like a dozen big shells in a patch of tress enemy probe squads are advancing through It pays to be extra careful with those. It's easy to dump stray shells on your own troops charging in to finish off the victims. And one shell is all it takes.. I've had bad experiences with 81mm knockin' out enemy AT defences. I dumped 81mm shells at one 6 pounder dug in in tall pines for 4 turns with little effect.

LOL! Hey come on! War's not supposed to be funny

Okay, so it's a naming issue, not a technical one.. "low-res" and "hi-res" DD grass mods in fact provide together a high-res grass mod, but you need both of them or things will look odd. And there is no "low res" mod unless you make one yourself.. I actually had a much bigger performance boost by changing LOD bias from best quality to high quality in the Nvidia DX set-up. (TNT2 ultra with 32MB) In any case, I like the DD look, it's just about as bleak as Finland in early winter!

Well. They already DO have our addresses and emails and whatnot. After all, everyone did buy it from the BTS site.. But I quess it wouldn't take too long for the pdf manual to circulate even if it has limited availability..

I found out that the cmhq packet for low-res grass has incorrect filenames. They should be 1550-1569, instead you get 1500-1519 .. I ran into the problem while experimenting with gridded grass.. Decided I didn't like it and then decided to save some memory bandwith by using lo-res grass textures. Honestly, I can't tell the difference between lo-res and hi-res grass I damn near tossed my cookies when up came that golf-course green after a reinstall of mods

All right. So they did this on purpose It's only a little disconcerting with the eye-in-the-sky comms.. I expect it might be possible to have uncertainty as to the exact position of your troops except when they make a report. This would detract from the flashy 3D graphics of the little quys shooting at each other, thought! On the same train of thought, you wouldn't be able to command invidual squads, who wouldn't receive any orders unless in contact with their HQ.. Even cooler would be to ID a squad in the forest as americanski, only to find out later they were the guys from Company C with a leutnant who sucks at navigation

Oh, okay, I get it. Turret floor is not at all at the same level with the hull top. Still, the russians designed their tanks for the smallest 5% of their troopers, so I reckon there's not a much in the way of elbowroom. Not to mention the TC is probably much more likely to buy the farm than the rest of the crew.. What kind of ratio in casualties is there? As bad as with junior officers/troopers? Hmm, IIRC if the loader for M1 buys it, TC is supposed to load the gun? [This message has been edited by Barleyman (edited 02-08-2001).]

How is the crew distributed inside a tank anyways? People talk of two- and three-man turrets, so it sounds like only the driver's position is inside the hull, rest of the crew are all crammed into the turret? Ammo is also stored inside the turret? So, er, what goes inside the hull, beyond the engine and the driver?

I've seen my people shoot at each other, especially during night battles .. Is this intentional or a bug? I'd think it would be realistic except that the troops are supposed to be telepathically linked.. Yeah, I even get a target line from my squad a to squad b during the orders phase afterwards!

Second that motion, except that I get a BSoD. Actually CM is really really good at bringing it out, since W2k crashes immediately in CM. I had to play McGees Alice for ten minutes until crash. So CM makes a fine bug-huntin tool =)

Oh, not to disparage your fine software .. I use it myself Command line options would just make sense and they'd be very easy to implement, so.. Well, I have some new turns in my mailbox, so without further ado..

Are you willing to test that hypothesis over a game, assuming CM2 comes out with winter war support? On an unrelated note, I feel it's just an american bias to give units with little or no experience "conscript" status. After all, certain central european country with a conscript army certainly made fairly big waves between 1939 and 1945.. Yeah, put the conscripted AA staff company where I served in 1994 into any frontline and arrange for a lot of funerals.. Similarly conscripted jaegers with qualitatively and quantitatively vastly superior training would give much better account of themselves in the same situation.

sound of axes grinding in the background Didn't Grigsby (the man!) say that he always has to implement some special rules for the Finns as otherwise they'd lose immediately with the troop/equipment levels present.. But what does he know

Here's a dead simple feature request. Wouldn't take a long time to implement and has immediate benefits: Command line parameters! With those suckers it'd be trivial to tweak different PBEM tools with CM. Right now one-click PBEM does some UI hacks to implement this which doesn't work very reliably.. I think we'd just need a few, like password=[password] pbem=[path+filename] savegame=[path+filename] How about it? Damn sight more do-able than most of the other suggestions I've seen. And *no question of historical merit*

Wouldn't it have been cool if in SPR when the GIs climbed on the "tiger", half of them would've been taken out by one of those babies 8) OTOH, everyone knows that 20mm AA firing at close range won't get more than 1-2 casualties in a single turn!

Oh yes they will AI does a fine simulation of early-war USSR tactics! So just bring on the human wave assaults, my Maxim teams are ready and waiting! (Worse yet, Finnish army was almost all conscript..)

How about a mercenary?

On the other hand, single 20mm flak guns are dirt cheap and just as good against light armor as quad/37mm varieties.. Quality vs quantity again? I usually try to get at least a single 20mm flak since there are no 12.7mm machine guns in German armoury. The flak guns can really freeze the battlefield within their FOV - Not too many squads want to run into 20mm hail!

Ok, I see. I think my mistake's been to plot the moves itty-bitty into the bocage. And then the guys get their asses handed to them. Bocages are *bad* if your people panic, since they might run into it and become instant target practice dummies..

Is it actually possible to shoot down a plane? I've never seen it happen.. At least, there's never been "Flying circus attraction, one (1)" in the AAR.. Yes, the 20mm flak guns poke away for all they're worth, but I've never seen it amount up to much..