Vanir Ausf B

DX 9 and OpenGL 2.0 have essentially the same functionality. DX9 doesn't really do anything revolutionary compared to DX 8, it just does it better. I'm not sure if 128-bit color and the expanded pixel and vertex shaders would really make enough difference in CM to be worth it. Remember, CMBB is still just 16-bit color. DX 8 shaders could be used for things like water. By the time CM3 is out DX 8 compliant cards will be common enough to support it. I also recall Kwazydog mentioning bump-mapped tanks...

It's the angle. The camera views in CMBB are tilted higher up towards the horizon compared to CMBO. That means you can't see units close to your position as well. To see the same number of units in CMBB as you would in CMBO you have to back the camera away further from the units which makes the units look smaller. This can be solved by hitting Shift+z one or two times. This will lilt the view down to where it was in CMBO so you are looking at less sky and more ground. The problem is that this doesn't 'stick'. If you change to another view level and then back again you have to tilt it all over again. It's very annoying. I have been one of several people to request that lilt angle be made sticky in a patch. I don't know about HE being less powerful. I'd have to run some tests. As someone else pointed out the HE blast values have actually been increased over CMBO. But that doesn't necessarily mean they are more powerful, they may just be calculating differently.

AFAIK, and I could be wrong on this, shot traps are modeled simply as an increased chance of a weak point penetration. There is no "shot trap" message. Whether this increased chance of weak point penetration only occurs when the shot hits the turret front or anywhere on the tank I don't know, but I've always suspected it was anywhere on the tank. [ November 01, 2002, 05:32 AM: Message edited by: Vanir Ausf B ]

Armor penetration for Soviet guns increases over time due to better quality ammo and a switch to capped ammo in 1944.

Well it's also THE ONLY GAME I've bought in the last 5 or 6 years that doesn't allow you to set the resolution in-game. I guess that's my perennial #1 CM annoyance.

I dunno. Seems to me having the armor penetrated would cause even worse maintenance problems.

My question on this is that if 2 FH plates resist better than one, why did the Germans move to a single plate with the later StuGs and Pz IVs?

It does appear that the 2 plates are a factor. In June 1944, at 1000m an SU-85 is given a "fair" chance of killing a StuG IIIG with 80mm armor, but only a "rare" chance against a StuG IIIF with 50 + 30mm armor. Where it gets interesting is when you run the same test with a Sherman 76. The Sherman is given a "good" chance to kill both models of StuGs at 1000m, even though it is listed as using APCBC with "large HE charge" and it's penetration tables shows lower penetration figures than the SU-85.

According to a prior post by Kwazydog on this subject, the Move command is now the new sneak command. Sorta.

No, it's not. One thing I think should be pointed out. The source for the 30% figure is... me, based on a test I ran many many moons ago for CMBO. Which means do not take it as an exact figure, but a close approximation. BFC has never said what the exact hit distribution is for the CM engine except for the lower hull (which is exactly 12% BTW, unless it has chanced since CMBO). If I'd known it was a contest I could have written a lot more.

Steve has said previously that the universal turret size will not change until the engine rewrite. All is not woe for the Russians, however. In this thread a while back Rexford posted some stuff that suggests the late model IS-2 should have a slightly thicker upper hull, 110mm instead of the 105mm it has now. More importantly, in a later thread Rexford proposed some changes to the penetration figures of several German guns that would have a significant impact on their ability to penetrate some Soviet tanks frontally.

3000 pt attack/defend combined arms unrestricted quality fit full ammo sewer movement allowed no casualties random date variable rarity

This seems to be the case for Soviet AT guns in general. The numbers in the unit stats windows seem to be very optimistic compared to their actual in-game performance. For another example of this, run some SU-85s against StuGs in '43. According to the SU-85's table it should penetrate the StuG frontally without too much trouble at 500m, but the targeting indicator says Low chance of kill. For more mystery fun, compare the performance of T-34/85s to Sherman 76s in '44-'45. According to their penetration tables the 85mm gun is a little more powerful, but tests will show that the 76mm gun out performs it in-game.

It's not a HUGE problem. It's just that CMBB is such a fine product that there aren't that many things to bitch about. So the few there are get more attention, I guess If the game is slower as a side effect of increased realism, that's generally fine, within reasonable limits. Slower for the sake of slower is not something to aspire to. I'm simply not entirely convinced that the new delays are any more realistic than the old static model. But don't lose sleep over it. I'm not

Perhaps. But Steve said it was the over-effectiveness of low quality troops in CMBO that necessitated the change in CMBB. That's why I think the comparison to CMBO is valid. The delay times don't even out until you reach the 3 minute delay limit. Reading back through this thread, I saw a point made by Steve that was interesting: It's interesting because it doesn't work that way. Every waypoint makes the delay go up. Ironically, if it was that way I would like it a lot more than I do now. If, for example, conscript delay began increasing over the base number on the second waypoint, greens on the third, regs on the fourth, ect, that sounds better. I'd have to play around with it to be sure, but I like the idea.

Silly idea. When you plot moves over impassible terrain the new AI waypoints are usually longer than if you had plotted them yourself, and they frequently will take you in directions you would not have wanted. I have had a number of squads cut to pieces when they wondered out into the middle of a street into LOS of the enemy after I plotted a waypoint a little too close to burning rubble. My point exactly.

I have posted a response there.

First off, I question the underlying assumption that green and conscript troops were too good in CMBO. I don't recall this ever being an issue before. My general impression from my own games as well as AARs from well known players like Fionn is that top players tended to gravitate more towards higher end troops. Certainly my own admittedly limited experience with green troops (I never used conscript *shudder*) in CMBO is that I would never willingly choose them for a game I cared about winning. It was like running a race in deep snow As far as how unrealistic complex orders with no additional command delay are, well, more on that below. This is true as far as it goes. However, I don't think this has any significant impact on the outcome of a game except perhaps in a meeting engagement where both sides are 'rushing' the flags at the start. As you suggest, when the bullets start flying the differences between the experience levels really start to manifest. This is due in no small part to the fact that command delay is only one thing that is effected by experience. Lower experience troops also have longer arty TOT delays, lower firepower ratings, lower accuracy, poorer spotting and more brittle moral. If we were to assume for the sake of discussion that low quality troops in CMBO were too good, I would be in favor of balancing things out by tweaking some of the other factors than command delay. The primary reason is realism. For reasons I and others have given, I think adding command delay for lengthy waypoint strings is not realistic most of the time. In my opinion, most of the waypoints plotted in a typical long movement are made necessary by mundane maneuvers around impassible terrain. They are the kind of common sense decision that would usually be made by the unit itself rather than communicated down the chain of command. For example, the platoon leader may order a squad to take up position behind the low ridge just up ahead, but it's doubtful he would need to instruct the squad leader to move around the pond in-between rather than swimming across it. Even a conscript NCO could figure that on his own. Yet, when you plot the move you have to include the waypoints around the pond and you take a command delay hit. Lastly, I think that the way it has been implemented has not really made lower quality troops more difficult to use compared to regular. Rather, it has made them all more clumsy to some extent. I haven't played enough games to judge this completely, but a quick look at some delay times in CMBO and CMBB shows this: </font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;"> CMBO CMBB % increase Green infantry delay: 33 sec. 42 sec. (4 waypoints) 27% Regular infantry delay: 20 sec. 29 sec. (4 waypoints) 45% Green tank: 20 sec. 20 sec. (4 waypoints) none Regular tank: 13 sec. 14 sec. (4 waypoints) 8%</pre>

Good catch. I hadn't noticed that.

Yes, I remember the thread. Let's just say that in my so-far experience with the game, I really do notice longer delays even with regular troops (the tank I mentioned above was regular). Maybe it's just the way I play, but it seems to take forever to do things anymore. I'm starting to think 60 turns for a 3000 pt attack/defend QB is not to long. This is fine if its in the name of realism, but as I have stated, I question the extent to which this is true for this feature. One thing Steve said stood out: In my opinion, the CMBO system did a fine job. If the purpose of the new system was to more accuratly simulate lower experience troops by making them clumsy to handle, I think this was already the case in CMBO. I found green troops to be much more sluggish than regulars, and conscripts were enought to make me pull my hair out. I guess I look at it as fixing something that wasn't broke. But I know they won't change it. I'm just venting

Exactly. The problem is that is it often the case that it is necessary to plot a lot of waypoints to do things that really wouldn't be complicated in real life, or that would be decided "on the fly" rather than preplanned. This seems to be especially true in city fighting. You may say "run to the building NOW!", but what path do they take to the building? Where do they stop in the building? These are things that in real life would usually (but not always) be not necessary to preplan out to the last detail, but you always have to plot these out in the game, because you as the player are playing the role of the squad leader as well as the platoon leader. A good example someone came up with in another thread a while back was that when you are about to drive down a road in your car, do you stop and plan every turn? No. If you already know where you're going you just go and deal with the minute details that pop up as they come. In a recent game I gave a rather lenthy string of waypoints to a tank thet ended up giving him a delay of almost 2 minutes. The thing is, most of the waypoints were ploted to manuever him around impassible terrain in his path, such as a pond, a house, some swamp, ect. This is stuff the tank driver wouldn't need to be told to do by anyone, nor need to plan out in advance. He'd just drive around the obstacles as they appeared. No reason to for a big command delay. There were already command delays in CMBO, and I thought they did a fine job of abstracting the rather nebulous C&C structure of CM. The new system just makes the game harder to play without really adding any realism.

Yup. It also can be difficult to get a platoon (or god forbid, a whole company) to properly set up an ambush with covered arcs. Because each unit's arc doesn't overlap exactly with the others, you often get situations where only a few of the ambushing units are triggered and the rest sit around watching them get slaughtered. This usually happens when the enemy enters the kill zone from a slightly different direction than you anticipated. I like covered arcs a lot, but I'm thinking they should have been a compliment to the ambush command instead of a replacement.

Situation: my platoon is advancing over about 70 meters of open ground to a stand of scattered trees. They come under fire from a machince gun several hundered meters to their flank. They go to ground and start sneaking towards the objective. About 5 meters away from the cover of the trees one of the squads goes to panic status and turns around and starts sneaking the other direction, over the same 70 meters of open ground they just covered. Not a new problem; it was in CMBO as well. But if we're going to have a thread about things that we'd like fixed, it's as annoying a problem as any other. Oh yeah, and for something I'm certain wont happen, I'd like the new system of increasing command delay for every waypoint plotted stripped out and returned to the way it was in CMBO. This is the one new feature in CMBB that I think actually detracts from both playability and realism.

I love big battles. The problem with small battles is that luck plays such a big role. A single weak point penetration or arty shell landing in the right spot will often decide the game. Then again, some people may like that sort of thing. To each their own.

Yep, I noticed this as well.