Soddball

At least that cat has hair.

Aviator, for your troops to successfully carry out an assault on that MG, the unit must be surpressed. That means he should be lying down before you race your troops up there. Use machine guns and mortars to suppress the enemy unit. When he lies down, THEN you can assault the foxhole. Use a rifle squad with high experience (veteran/crack/elite) if you have it, and make sure that the rifle squad's Platoon HQ is in command range (red line) - a black line means they are out of command range and are more likely to run and hide rather than attack. Don't forget to stop the mortars and MGs firing once your rifle squad is in the foxhole. Soldiers surrender for several reasons, and they all contribute to the likelihood of surrender: If the unit is 'routed' or 'panicked'. If the unit is 'brittle' - that is, it has been routed in the past and has a little red box on its status bar. If the unit is out of command radius - no red line linking it to a platoon, section, company or battalion HQ. If the unit is surrounded by enemy forces. That's why your unit surrendered, I suspect.

Big HE (25pdr, 105, 150) often causes smashed tracks , gun damage, and sometimes forces crew bailing. Heavy artillery (if you can get it in the right place) will also knock out tanks.

Sloping turret armour is also particularly valuable. Try putting the M3 Grant/Lee hull-down in 1942 against Panzer IIIs and Panzer IVs. The turret armour is sloped at (IIRC) 45 degrees and is pretty much impenetrable, whereas the 37mm gun can easily knock out the lightly armoured early P-IVs and can also distress the P-IIIs.

Hull-down does make the tank harder to spot and hit, but turret size is not modelled. This means, therefore, that if your Panzer IVJ is facing off against a Sherman 75 at 1km, you are better off being hull up. This is because even though your tank is harder to hit hull-down, every hit will hit the turret and will penetrate (most likely knocking out the tank), whereas if you are hull up, hits may strike the hull and will not penetrate. Turret size modelling has been a bit of a bugbear, particularly since many players feel that the Panzer IV is made significantly weaker by this, since its turret armour is so thin. The turret's tiny, though, and should be a real bugger to hit.

He sent me a turn. Maybe he just feels the same way about you that the rest of us do.

Is it a scenario or a QB? Do the infantry have 'full' ammo? I assume the infantry are some sort of SMG-based ones, where you sacrifice long-term fire for short-term attack potential. It may be that you chose to attack incorrectly with the forces allocated to you, in which case blaming the game is unfair.

Is it a scenario or a QB? Do the infantry have 'full' ammo? I assume the infantry are some sort of SMG-based ones, where you sacrifice long-term fire for short-term attack potential. It may be that you chose to attack incorrectly with the forces allocated to you, in which case blaming the game is unfair.

So no sharks with fricking laser beams on their heads? L4m3rz!!

Hey, ho, bitches. If you've played and finished a Soddball test scenario, please post here to tell me what you liked and hated about it. I am going to get as many of my finished scenarios up at The Depot. Forward Recon is there now - Inferno and Bidberg Heights will be next. So let's hear your thoughts. I have some fat new ones brewing too, with plenty of molten TNT stashed in them! :mad: :mad: :mad:

is that points used or actual troops? </font>

First: I have nearly completed construction of a campaign of 15 battles of 45 turns apiece. The map is 8km long (east-west) and 3.6km high (north-south). So far, I have taken 9 months to create the map. Map building is the hardest part of the job and the bigger you make it, the harder it is. This map is as big as they come and is 90% complete. Every week I do another hour or two but the finishing touches are some weeks away still. Second: There is a unit limit in CM:AK, but I haven't hit it yet. I'm up to 12,000 Axis and 14,500 Allies at present, having prepared forces for 9 of the 15 battles. I won't bother doing reinforcements for the last battle since they won't reach the field of combat in time due to the size of the map. A realistic estimate is 2 regiments of infantry per side, without vehicles. Third: No, the game doesn't change these values. Your map, however, is going to need to be big to handle the numbers of units you are discussing. A small town on a hill being battled over for 600 turns? I doubt that most players would stomach that! Fourth and Fifth: No idea. A couple of general points. The sheer scale of combat at brigade or (in my case) divisional level is going to be an issue in two areas. Firstly, turn time. I don't know what kind of rig you're running, but turn processing time is going to be huge at this full size map idea. I've playtested my own massive campaign up to about turn 30 of the first game - no contact, no combat, just 2 forces of around 5,000 points each advancing on a huge map - and turn processing took 7 minutes on my 850 Athlon. I built a 120-turn scenario for CM:BB on a 4kmx2km map and with 19,000 points. That scenario took 25 minutes or more to compute turns. Secondly, simply keeping track of that scale of forces is phenomenally difficult. You will probably be moving your forces at company level rather than micromanagement. It's easy to miss, for example, the first shell blast from an artillery strike which threatens to cut your assault company to ribbons. I would suggest you start out very small if you haven't done scenario building before. I don't want to discourage you, but the scale of the task you have considered is truly daunting and I would recommend you practice on small maps. Getting the force balance right for a 300 point-per-side ME is hard enough, for 20,000 points it's night on impossible because playtesting is simply unavailable. Practice with some map designs, learn how the editor works and what its limitations are- - there are plenty. Examples include heavy buildings on diagonal roads, buildings can't be put on slopes, fences, hedges and walls run through the middle of a square instead of along an edge. There are always plenty of volunteers for playtesters here, so don't be shy of asking either. Second and third opinions are really valuable.

Sore loser.

You don't have a clue, and even if you do i choose not to believe you . </font>

Just wanted to add that I haven't got many actually up at the scenario depot (although I have about eight which are finished and which I haven't got around to sending ) but I really value the opportunity for feedback on these scenarios and think that the depot is an enormously valuable site. What about a file included with the scenario that you download. It saves to your computer, and when you've played the scenario you just fill in the info and it sends itself off to the depot? Might work with some email systems, might not. I don't know, it's just a thought.

Spend a chunk of your points on a platoon of Wasp flamethrower vehicles. Burn every single building on your approach using the wasps. Late-war (Nov 1944) British troops seem to have a flamethrower per platoon, and buy at least one extra Bren LMG per platoon for additional fire support. Recon Assault squads are good, too - 4 SMGs IIRC. If you can afford them, a Sexton or two (25pdr HE, and something like 80 rounds) will give you some serious close in HE chucking ability. So ideally, a platoon of Wasps, a company of flamethrower-equipped infantry with extra bren guns, a recon assault platoon for close-in scrapping, a pair of sextons - now you're talking TNT! Angry out loud! :mad: [ November 22, 2004, 04:29 AM: Message edited by: Soddball ]

Have you reached battle 2 - and contact - in Alpine Summer? And do you like the hilarious purchasing decisions in Cheery Waffles? I am just putting the finishing touches to another couple of scenarios so when you get run down and worn out with those two, you can have some new ones. :mad: :mad:

Bah. Cockknocking double posts. How are you getting on with Alpine Summer and the new Cheery Waffles, Axe?

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Facing off against heavily armoured kit like the Brummbar, you can really annoy your opponent by hosing it with multiple AT rifle rounds or, if you have heavy HE (such as 25pdr or 105mm), hitting the front. Both will get a modest frequency of gun damage and can be screamingly frustrating for your opponent.

Are you relying too heavily on SMG-heavy units? German Pioneers pack rifles and have stacks of ammo, and can keep firing at long range for long periods of time. Compare that to SS PanzerGrenadiere in late 1944 with 35 ammo and 2xMP44, 2xMG42, 2xSMG, 4xRifle who empty their magazines in 2 turns flat. I think you should try an approach I have recently been using - for every infantry platoon you buy in a QB, buy a Bren, BAR or LMG42 (dependent on nation). They offer a healthy amount of covering fire, independent of the squads' LMGs, and enough ammo to fire for several turns. Have you also tried splitting your squads and using different-ranged covered arcs for the SMG-heavy and rifle-heavy sections?

Are you relying too heavily on SMG-heavy units? German Pioneers pack rifles and have stacks of ammo, and can keep firing at long range for long periods of time. Compare that to SS PanzerGrenadiere in late 1944 with 35 ammo and 2xMP44, 2xMG42, 2xSMG, 4xRifle who empty their magazines in 2 turns flat. I think you should try an approach I have recently been using - for every infantry platoon you buy in a QB, buy a Bren, BAR or LMG42 (dependent on nation). They offer a healthy amount of covering fire, independent of the squads' LMGs, and enough ammo to fire for several turns. Have you also tried splitting your squads and using different-ranged covered arcs for the SMG-heavy and rifle-heavy sections?

IIRC the Panther A graphic is used as a 'default' graphic which may give a clue to the source of the problem.

I have to agree with the other players here. A 'cover armour arc' and a couple of squads of supporting infantry, or a supporting LMG would have won you that. Instead of thinking 'enemy tank coming down the road, best ambush it' you need to think, 'enemy tank coming down the road, I can ambush it and my LMG team can button it up and hose down any infantry that messes with me.' Poor tactics cost you that tank.

There was probably a reason that 68 of the Nirvana songs were unreleased - maybe they sucked more than Wallybob's pitiful combat skills. :mad: :mad: :mad: