Wreck

This one goes out to my homeboy, Holien. Smile, smile, old man... All of us are in the gutter, at least you are looking at the stars. Some of us never even look up, gamey bastards! The last turn of our game:

Holien: Get a free account at fotki.com for the photo, or send it to me and I will put it up and post it here. Regarding the battle, we got a score of 56-30 with one small flag neutral. If my model of scoring is correct, that means that 100 points was worth 14 victory percentage points, or in other words the total battle losses plus flags were ~714 points, of which I ended with 400 (100 for the flag and 300 in damage to you), and you ended with 214 in damage to me. (And 100 were neutral of course.) If you had neutralized the second flag without taking any additional losses, the score would have been 42-30. So set your mind at rest; not rushing the flag did not affect the tournament score result. Of course you still should have, because I am a gamey bastard and I play to win the game, not WWII. (salt w/ smileys to taste) Now if you have been able to take one flag entirely and neutralize the other (with no additional losses), you would have won. But I don't think that would have happened.

To clarify a bit: An ambush, set by any unit, will be "triggered" if any enemy unit is (a) in LOS of the unit with the ambush order, and ( within range (if I recall correctly, 20m) of the ambush point. I suspect that having other units see the enemy unit first will speed things up because of the "borg" sighting used in CM. Once the ambush is triggered, the ambushing unit will then fire at the unit which triggered it, *if* the type of unit is correct. Light AT weapons won't fire at infantry, typically, and infantry won't typically fire at tanks (unless the commander is exposed). Regardless of whether or not the ambushing unit fires, once it is triggered it is off ambush. It will generally keep firing at the triggering unit, just as if you had commanded it to target that unit manually. But if that unit is the wrong type, leaves LOS, is destroyed, moves out of range, etc, etc, then it will happily select some other unit anywhere in LOS to fire at. Sound contacts in CMBO never trigger any action from in-game units. Their only effect is to possibly trigger action from you, the player. As for your final question, there is no way to keep a normal relationship with a woman during the early phases of CM addition. Hopefully you chose one that is tolerant. One thing that will help is to start playing humans via email ASAP; this will make playing the AI much less interesting because the AI sucks compared to a human. Also, playing via email you will also find there are free hours all the time where you are waiting for your enemies to mail you; this time should be spend attentively on the lady. In any case, do *not* get sucked into TCP/IP play until you have gotten over the worst of the early addiction. It's available at all times, practically, takes all your attention for hours on end, and is even more addictive than email play! [ April 10, 2002, 11:59 AM: Message edited by: Wreck ]

The problem with LOS in CM is in part due to the borg sighting. But in large part it is due to the modelling of all units as points. In particular this is true of the gun/tank problem, where tanks get to kill guns safely via area fire. In real life this did probably happen. But not as frequently as in CM, because of lack of knowledge to fire (no borg sighting in real life), and because the gun would be just as likely to be able to see part of the tank (but not its gun), as the tank would be able to see near the gun (without seeing it). In fact, given the fact that guns are much smaller than tanks, the reverse situation (guns killing tanks that could not see them, at least not down the barrel) probably happened a lot more than the CM-style tank-kills-helpless-gun. BTS should forbid tanks from area firing on spots which they have more than a modest amount of LOS obscuration to. That would be easy. A bit harder would be at add one exception: allow them to area fire at any spot they can currently, *if* they are in range of a friendly infantry HQ that sees the spot (i.e. they act a bit like mortars). And they should be in-range of infantry only if unbuttoned. The best fix would be to give all units an area, especially tanks. Of course this would require a lot of work (and extra CPU horsepower) in/on LOS, which is why BTS doesn't do it.

To both the Capt and Redeker: I have your turns and will return fire tonight. If either of you want to lock horns in TCP to speed things up, I am game. This weekend in particular I think I should have time for it.

Hi guys! I was out all day yesterday being social, and come back to ferment in WBROW! Cool, finally some new games to play. As I wrote in one of my AARs, I figured out pretty quickly that WBW loves the "seesaw" battle, where one force is initially dominant, while the other must hold, but gets reinforcements during the game so as to bring forces to parity in the long run. So I tended to play my games towards this: on the offense, I charged as hard/fast as seemed at all safe. In particular Ranville comes to mind here, but also Real Guts, where I got to the back of the board fast enough to ambush from the side/rear the two PzIVs. On defense (which I got lots of), I played for time confident that my reinforcements would be sufficient. In that sense my relationship to the great God WBW was different than a lot of people here; I was not cursing him as the devil but praying for rain. "Gimme a tank!" I would pray... and lo! there were tanks! Yes the old address at dc.net is no more. It's singin' w' th' heavenly choir. It is an ex-address. The verizon.net address is correct; thanks Jim. I have the German setup out for the Berg, and the American one back to Holien for the Ranger Challenge. Flag Rush Hill, I await the setup from Warren.

Well, that would be 20M per rendering. But what I don't understand here is, why does it have to be in VRAM? With AGP 2x (which should be a reasonable minimum), you have 566MB/s. That enough bandwidth to render that 20M worth of buildings 28 times/sec, which seems like it should be plenty fast. Hard drive? Again, why can't this data be loaded into main memory once and then AGPed onto the graphics card when needed?

Ah, but you are quoting out of context. As anyone with the book knows, the quote continues: "The American commander, upon hearing the news of the fires, became irate. `The general demands that we get into town in the next 20 minutes, or we will lose the war!' he screamed at his subordinates on the radio. Knowing the high stakes involved, the Americans threw several companies into the streets around the burning buildings, only to have them mowed down by heavy machinegun and burp gun fire. And that's why we are all now speaking German. Heil Hitler!" [ February 14, 2002, 09:49 AM: Message edited by: Wreck ]

Here is an shot from the game that turned me against vehicle flamers. My enemy, the ever slimy Ghost342, got the bottom (west) side of the map; I came from the top. Both sides could get into their side of the wood in the initial charge. I then attached across, only to find wasps, so I backed out of LOS to my side. I then maneuvered my hetzers to act as support, and called for arty. But I could not see behind the wood, and Ghost just sat on his side and flamed it from end to end, an impassible wall. This put me in the position of having to go completely around the end of the wood, across 20m of open ground, charging into his guys in woods at point blank range. Alternatively I could push into the center, but of course Ghost by that time had the majority of his force there, since he only needed a handful to hold his right. Clever play, or slimy? I would say both.

Gamey. I agree with the points Jason makes. However, if you did not agree not to do it, it can also be seen as clever. I don't mind people doing it with man-packed flamers, since they have little fuel and are a point-sink in any case; it makes up. I mind it with vehicle flamers, which have tens of shots, range, and which are damned cheap. These days I routinely ask for no vehicle flamethrowers as a condition to play, just as I ask for no armed soft vehicles, no SMG infantry, etc. Removing these things from the game subtracts little other than gameyness. When I do get a vehicle flamer, as in a scenario, I restrict myself to only use area fire with it on squares that I know the enemy is in. Simple enough.

I agree with Jason in re: cellars. One way to approximate their effect would be to make a special rule case, where infantry that are hiding on the ground floor of a building with a cellar are assumed to be mostly down there, and therefore get their exposure number reduced, perhaps halved. The hiding represents the inability to fire when down there, of course.

Searching has not been working for me recently, but I can address the point at least tentatively without reading the referenced material. It is a reasonable and expected thing that HE hitting buildings will potentially hurt infantry in them; I am not zany. So the explanation for defending a bit back would simply be to not be in the most obvious defensive positions, since they are likely to be worked over at range by enemy direct-fire area HE. Survivability in the outer buildings could easily be better than it is modelled in CMBO without being anywhere near 100%, and no infantry commander would want to take, for example, 20 or 30% casualties without being able to reply. In any case, defending two rows back from the edge is still defending in buildings. I realize that part of what attracted infantry to buildings in a lot of cases was the chance to be warm, but the cover afforded was certainly a factor.

Nonetheless, the building modelling in CM is a great problem. In part because of borg sighting, and in part because area fire is allowed, you get the ability to knock down buildings to attack infantry that you cannot see. Buildings in WWII were not perceived by the infantry as fearful deathtraps; quite the reverse. IIRC CMBB is going to tone down the borg sighting somewhat, though I don't recall how. This will help. I might suggest adding a rule giving a good chance that units not accept orders to area fire on areas that are barely visible. Ideally, buildings could be rubbled bit by bit. However I doubt that will happen. Failing that, I would prefer that BTS drastically reduce the casualties taken by infantry in buildings that detonate. They might then increase the blast effect of rounds hitting buildings somewhat, but only against infanty in the same building, which would model men being affected by collapsing parts of the building.'

Bump -- I wanted to refer to the map.

WWB: You really ought to read what the man is saying. He explains in perfect detail the why and how of testing he is doing. The why is, because it is broken now and it matter even more in Russia. The how is scientific testing -- one variable at a time. HMGs at long range against squads. Maybe it is the case that CMBB is fixed; maybe not. But your bizarre notion that CMBO is too complex to ever test is not only empirically false, it is offensive to the very spirit of interchange on these boards. Why bother to discuss and argue about any aspect of the game at all, if in "a real game there will be other components which might well effect [sic] how that component works", thereby somehow rendering any analysis useless? It is also offensive for you to tell Jason what he knows about the interaction of advancing troops and incoming fire; unless you have some hotline to his brain you can't know what he knows. But I shall leave off.

I am completely behind Steve on this matter of modelling flamethrowers in CM. His 5 points on the previous page are all valid, particularly soakoff. Right now, killing an LMG in a squad means killing just about the whole squad. Is that realistic? Arguably yes; the squad is focused around its main weapon, and everyone knows how to use it. If the operator is wounded someone else will step in. For flamethrowers neither fact is true; plus flamethrower had the distressing tendancy to blow up when hit. It should not require killing or wounding 10 men to take out a flamethrower. One may bit on low side; two may be bit high, but it seems to me that it is the best answer available in CM. Bazookas are intermediate case. Currently they last through 2 men; arguably they should last a bit longer than that because they were valued byt the troops and easy to use. There are certainly cases of men running over to grab a 'zook when its initial operators are out of action. Another point about flamethrowers that Steve did not list among his 5 is obviousness and its interaction with use. With rifle grenades, fausts, and demos it would be difficult or impossible for the other side to pick out the man with the specific weapon. And with one-shot weapons particularly, there is no gain in noticing a guy has just fired one -- even if you mark him as your next target, the damage is done. And in fact the guy who just fired his 'faust is probably *not* the one you want to target, all other things equal. Whereas flamethrowers are much more obvious even before firing, and once operated even more so. And as multiple shot weapons, the enemy is going to target the operators if possible after a shot, because the weapon has not "taken itself out" unlike the other single-use squad weapons. The bazooka is an interesting intermediate case. It is not much more easily seen, IMO, than other squad weapons, but it does have the "multiple shot" criterion arguing that it should be a separate team. Certainly anyone who is arguing for integral flamethrowers should support the idea of integral zooks, and more strongly since zooks are at least not very obvious weapons and also more likely to be picked up by others when the initial operator is down. But it seems to me the "single use" criteria, in addition to making the inherent squad weapons easy to implement, is also a big factor in what makes a team, because multiuse special weapons are likely to be prime enemy fire magnets.

Group 3: I am back in the saddle. Expect a turn from me in the next day or two. If you don't get it by then, pester me.

It seems obvious to me that CM defenders are, necessarily, attritionist. The reason is simple: they don't need to move to get the flags. Therefore the entire concept of strategic maneuver is vacuous for them. There is nothing for them to gain by moving, except perhaps better positions to kill the attacker. But that is not distinguishable from what an attritionist defender would do. Therefore when I discuss CM defense I am generally thinking attrition. To the extent that I say something helps maneuverists I mean that it will tend to raise the change that some significant maneuver not directly aimed at killing enemy units will be worth doing. That does not mean the chance is large, though. I disagree that the map depth works against attritionism. In fact it is the other way around, IMO. Consider a defense that sits in its setup positions and never moves -- is that "maneuverist" (hardly), or "attritionist" (at least arguable). Given the choice of only the two classifications, I would say that the more immobile you force the defense to be, the more attritionist you force its strategy to be. You suggest that expanding the depth of the map would help attritionist defenders, and that is true -- the defender has added setup locations, but loses none; it is provably better. But the question is would it help a maneuverist defender (whatever that is) *more* than it helps an attritional defender? Seems to me that in addition to adding new places one might put the MLR, the expanded zone adds the possibility of ambushes or other attacks ahead of the MLR, which then run back to the MLR or beyond. That sounds maneuverist to me: movement. We must also consider the attackers. Maneuver, if it requires anything, requires room to maneuver. Less room means less chance that moving is going to get you better position. Less room also means a more static, and therefore necessarily attritionist defense. Well, if the defense is going to stand then the obvious thing to do it beat on it -- and the attacker has the guns and numbers to do so. And as we did before: would a deeper map help attackers? Clearly not, since the defender will have more options for setup while losing nothing. Does a deeper map hurt attritionist attackers more than maneuverist ones?

<blockquote>quote:</font><hr> The most cost-effective modules can expect to kill 45 men for 100 points arty cost, and only for some modules <hr></blockquote> How did you determine cost effectiveness? Is there a thread where you reported the results?

Regarding the issue of what sorts of terrain a defender might expect to have in western Europe. I agree with Jason's analysis -- there is almost always something there to defend with. But all this tells us is that if we wish to play more or less historically, we should use quickbattle settings that give the defender a town, ridge, or forest. It is still possible to play the game simply as a game, not trying to use it to sim the WWII western front except insofar as it cannot help it. If one is playing only with the idea of using the system to generate interesting games, then it might well make sense to place defenders in treeless farmland, for example.

<blockquote>quote:</font><hr> As for the idea that a "fairer" test is open hilly ground, um, why is that "fairer"? <hr></blockquote> I did not say "fair" -- what I said was "if you want to see maneuver". And the reasoning is a matter of how CM generates maps. In rural terrain, the flags are not likely to be placed right where the best defensive position is. Some might be; some might not be. Therefore, in theory, there is the chance that the attacker can maneuveristically maneuver to get those flags without having to crush the defending force. In villages, though, the chance of winning on flags without also killing the defenders is much less. In my experience.

Both of these examples were similar to the default CM quickbattle scenario -- attacking a village. Now, CM generally induces a rather attritionist mindset, because the value of the units is usually more than the value of the flags. But village terrain does not help the maneuverist, as it tends to concentrate cover right where the flags are, thereby tending to make "taking the flags" and "killing the defenders" roughly the same task. Also, using "infantry" type forces is another way that attritionism is encouraged. Infantry cannot maneuver that well itself, and has no "flanks" the way that tanks do that would encourage maneuver on the other side. I would suggest that if you want to see maneuver in CM, you play on a large map, using smaller combined arms forces, in more open terrain -- rural, light trees, perhaps.

A comment on the first, "maneuverist" example. Obviously the forces involved were human bought. But it apparent that the American did not have a firm grasp on what he was doing. 76mm W+ HVSS shermans? Vets, no less? I would never buy these, for any scenario. This is what, 500 points spent? This would be much better spent on 8 normal M8HMCs, or perhaps 4 normal M4A1s if you are concerned with historicity. Or even 3 jumbos; this is a bit over 500 points but not much. The only reason I can think of to take veteran tanks is for their superior ability to fight tanks. When you are shelling buildings with HE, crew quality is pretty much a non-issue. (Of course for me to think in terms of shelling buildings is rather attritionist, isn't it?) Now look at the infantry force. He has an incoherent mix. He bought zooks to attack infantry. He has spent lots on mortars, but he has no HQ to spot for them. He spent lots on slow MGs, yet he tries to maneuver. He is attacking an infantry force (with VGs allowed, no less) of 1000 points with just three platoons! That, almost by itself, lost him the game. Here's his points breakdown, more or less: Shermans: 508 Infantry: 387 Support: 252 Vehicle: 56 Arty: 314 Spending the same amount for a gamey force, I would have ditched the "support", thereby saving 252 points. This would have bought two more platoons. Then I would have dropped both Shermans and the M20s, and bought 10 M8HMC cockroaches. Finally, although the 81mms are, I suppose, acceptable for maneuvering (smoke is wonderful stuff), I would not get 105mm against a village. Either get mortars for speed, or the heaviest you can afford. For slightly less than the 105mm module you can get a 155mm module. If you want historicity, get a company of infantry with an additional platoon, and buy a platoon of M4A1s instead of the cockroach swarm.

An irony here is that armor is a good defensive reserve because it is maneuverable. Yet that very fact is the reason why maneuverist offensive cultists believe that it should be attacking, not defending. Only maneuverable elements can get the proper force-multiplying fung-shui of neatly sequenced battles. Another thing that does not completely make sense to me about the use of Panthers described here, is that Panthers seem rather obviously designed for defensive use. The Germans obviously understood that defenders need big front armor but they could skimp on the sides; that's why the jadgpanzers were as they were. And the same thing is true of the Panther. Did they think it "should" attack because it had a turret?

<blockquote>quote:</font><hr> Without effective manuever, you will not achieve favorable attrition--except with a truly overwhelming force. <hr></blockquote> How many Americans were on the ground in Afghanistan? Hundreds? Against 60000 Taliban? If you count the air crews there were probably only thousands of Americans in Afghanistan at any one time. Counting northern alliance troops as well, the ratio of troops was probably no better than 1:2 -- far less than the 3:1 supposed to be necessary to attack. There were no manuevers in Afghanistan. Just look at the lines with binoculars, night vision equipment, air recon, satellite photos, etc., and punch in the GPS-accurate target coordinates. Then GPS-aimed iron bombs rain down and obliterate everything remotely close to what you point at. How could this possibly be considered a war of manuever? This is about as pure a war of attrition as one can imagine.