manchildstein (ii)

grin ... is that entropy? edit.. indeed, now even the 'basic site' www.freeport-tech.com gives the same message... if this site is lost it will be sad... [ February 03, 2003, 08:49 PM: Message edited by: manchildstein II ]

welcome aboard --600 meters -- so are you talking range 13-24? 600 meters would be range 15 in asl... oh did they break that down into something like 13-18 and 19-24 from the 13-24 of the original? at range 15, what did a german PZ IIIG/H need to roll in order to hit and then kill a t-34 in asl? now an asl or sl 'firing phase' (prep or defensive fire) would be an abstraction of 6 or 8 - 'panzer III type' - shots, right?

in 1941 at least i think that the recon infantry was on motorcycles. the 37mm hafltracks were found more as the platoon leader vehicles in the armored infantry companies of the panzergrenadier battalions... i'm not sure if the 37mm halftracks were found in recon battalions. that's another thing... you might want to consider 'recon battalions as part of regiments or divisions' instead of 'recon platoons as part of battalions'... in other words an infantry or panzergrenadier regiment would have a recon battalion, but an infantry or panzergrenadier battalion would not have a 'recon platoon' per se... you're on the right track though... the idea of 'ad hoc' elements of a divisional or regimental recon battalion attached to a single infantry or panzergrenadier battalion is not really 'off base' as far as i know... also, your proportions of psw222,221, and 8-rad seem about right... if memory serves the 'average' 'recon' battalion had 8 20mm and 16-25 MG armored cars... at least in 1941... now getting into 1942 and 1943, the recon squads probably were truck or armored halftrack - instead of motorcycle - 'bound' keep in mind too that a recon battalion could have also had some towed guns in support - as part of its heavy company... perhaps someone else can give you more detail...

bump... perhaps we need an email campaign to convince these people to make their site visible again... i mean those were some really interesting - if not useful - webpages...

this website has some very useful oob info. last week, when typing in www.freeport-tech.com/wwii it started to say 'you don't have access'... then it was discovered that if "WWII" was substituted for "wwii" that it still worked... now "WWII" doesn't even work... does anyone else have this problem? http://www.freeport-tech.com/wwii http://www.freeport-tech.com/WWII

ernst rohm was the leader of the brownshirts or sa. they were wiped out in the night of the long knives or something - and replaced by the ss. http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/festjc/chap11.htm the photos you've posted so far look like they're mostly if not all brownshirts (earlier-era nazis)... but that is probably just my perception... someone with greater knowledge can clue you in... after seeing some other photos of rohm on the web, the guy in the background of the first picture is probably not rohm after all... he sure looks starry-eyed though... [ January 31, 2003, 10:53 PM: Message edited by: manchildstein II ]

in the 1st picture, is the starry-eyed minion in the background 'ernst rhoem?' that one 'female' in the 2nd picture looks like an early charles bronson in drag...

just so you know the old guy probably wasn't off his rocker: --Most of the truck transports for the Grenadiers were either destroyed or broken down.The few trucks that were still operational were wood-gas and coal-gas powered vehicles-- from: http://spearhead1944.com/gerpg/ger111.htm

--From what i read the Typical infantry battle must be planned over more turns then maybe was usefull in CMBO ?-- yes that seems to be the consensus and it matches my own experience. for one thing, the MGs in CMBB will pin, rout, and break your troops much easier than they did in CMBO... in CMBB it's not so much that the MGs inflict actual casualties, just that the MGs tend to easily disrupt troop movements... if you go by JasonC's postings here you should be in good shape. without going into so many words (i have 'a-d-d') my experience matches what he wrote... in short, i usually 'command' between 4 platoons (company) and a battalion ('10 platoons')... so my basic elements are platoons, then crew weapons such as MGs and mortars. in the attack, my MGs and mortars are always looking to get into firing position without themselves being shot at. meanwhile my infantry platoons are 'leapfrogging' one another toward the objective. for the infantry i mostly use a combination of 'move' and 'advance' generally i'll leapfrog using 'move' then when contact is made by the 'lead' platoon, the other platoons will 'advance' around the lead platoon, which is itself by then laying down covering suppressive fire, along with any MGs or mortars i've managed to get into position. even though mention platoons as the manuever elements, i am giving each squad and hq an individual order... i did a lot more group movement in cmbo... i think cmbb demands a bit more precision in orders... one thing to keep in mind is that, if you have to cross open ground with infantry, you must suppress or otherwise destroy the potentially interdicting defensive positions... particularly nasty are the 75mm (axis) or 76mm 'short' guns in a direct fire role... in my experience those will break up an infantry movement, even to a greater extent than HMG fire.

--Although I haven't heard back from Gramp on the email I sent him asking the questions I have, I talked with my wife last night to see if maybe she remembered the conversation better than I did. She said he was in Munich from 1942-1943 and that's when he found the camera (she's pretty sure)! So at least now the time frame is narrowed down. -- i think either a) your wife mis-heard your grandfather or your grandfather forgot the dates. there is practically no way he was both in munich in '42-'43 -and- served as a gunner in the battle of the bulge. ...and i believe the parts about being a gunner and finding the camera... i think simply that the commnication regarding the actual dates is garbled... as for the roll of film also containing pictures of stalin... it seems your grandfather found a 'stray camera' that had been owned by a 'real insider into the high european political circles' at the time, or on the other hand it's as someone else here speculated... a roll of 'pictures of pictures'... in the first case the find is astounding... in the 2nd case it's not so astounding but still highly interesting... just my opinion...

yes it depends upon the situation... i used to think that if i didn't put a lot of flags out - both in ai and pbem scenarios - that there would be no fighting. experience shows though that there will almost invariably be fighting, so flags may not even matter, especially in pbem scenarios. i played one scenario from the depot with over a battalion of infantry and a couple of dozen afvs per side on medium map, and it had just one flag, and it played well. yes you can use the flags in an ai scenario to get the ai to move certain ways or defend positions. generally, in an ai scenario if the human takes control of just one flag, the ai will begin counterattacking.

one problem with the effectiveness of the kv2 in cmbb is that you will see it a lot in scenarios and quick battles.... more than you would have ever seen it in 'real life'... i mean in the scope of cmbb where you don't have any operational concerns such as getting it to travel more than a few meters, it's a great tank... a veritable heavily armed pillbox... the best tank of 1941 hands down... regular kvs are boring in comparison... but in 'real life' the kv2 would often break down en route to the battlefield, or it would be out of ammo, and there weren't that many... i have no problem with the performance of the kv2 in cmbb... except that if the thing about it not being able to turn its turret on anything but flat ground is true... well if there were a way to limit that in the game engine... that's the only change i would make as someone also mentioned in the other thread about this... maybe the kv2 is kind of like the 1941 version of the sturmtiger... it's probably already fought more action in cmbb than it ever did in 'real life' i'll bet too that the gun on the kv had the kind of sights where it wasn't too hard to hit something, even without a flat trajectory... i am reminded of the sights on an m-203 grenade launcher, or on a lever-action .45/70 rifle... the sights are such that they have the firer 'angling' the gun according to a target's range... assuming the ammo is of uniform quality, the only real variable (other than windage) is the proper range estimate on the firer's part... does anyone remember the soldier in apocalypse now who could hit things by sound with his trusty m-79 grenade launcher?... same concept...

my record is 29 vehicles knocked out by a 'naval blast.' .. pretty much every afv, truck, or prime mover within a 200 meter radius... i was playing against the ai and tried to 'regroup' in order to 'continue the attack' but really, after that my forces were 'out of steam'...

gutshot, you may want to try some games without fog of war and see if the 20mm guns and ATRs are really doing 'nothing.' i know from my own experience that having my AFVs penetrated - even by 'lowly' 20mm or ATRs - is unhealthy. i know that even if the first or even second or third such shots fail to do anything, that eventually the vehicle taking such hits is going to 'die.' in other words, when my armored cars or light tanks start taking ATR fire, they're either a) toast or moved into cover or c) survive because the firing enemy units are destroyed or run out of ammo... it's already been said but i'll say it again: if you're playing with detailed vehicle hits, and you get the 'penetration' message about an enemy AFV, yet the AFV continues to 'function,' you may not have the whole story. i've seen AFVs with casualties and in 'shaken' or even 'panic' states actually firing their weapons in the midst of all of it! in other words, penetrations are almost invariably to some degree good for the firing side and bad for the side taking the fire... now if you think there is a bug regarding light armor and light guns/ATRs, you should do some extensive testing and provide BTS with the data...

OoB: order of battle FO: forward observer LOS: line of sight LOF: line of fire FT: flamethrower ASL: advanced squad leader ('80s board game)

there has been at least a bit of talk about the AI being incompetent in handling FOs. i think that a scenario designer can give the AI FO a fighting chance by keeping at least a couple of things in mind: 1) the response time of a given FO's module type 2) LOS by giving an AI-controlled FO both good LOS and rapid-response modules, the human player will be more likely to come under the fire of a barrage... for me, one case in point was the jaegermeister scenario. i played that one several times as soviets against the ai and was hit by offboard artillery - and i think it was (rapid-response) mortars - perhaps 50% of the time. i considered this to be 'good' ... given the nature of that scenario (soviet prep bombardment) and the mapboard (medium-small), it could be that the times the AI didn't use their FO, that the FO had been broken or eliminated by my own preliminary barrages... in my experience, if you give an AI FO good LOS to the human setup zones, a first-turn barrage is not uncommon. from what i've seen of TRPs, it appears to me that LOS and rapid-response are more important. just recently i've been testing a scenario against the ai, and although i was not 'hit' on turn 1, i was hit later in the scenario, in two separate places, on two different turns, by two different AI FOs; and there were only 2 AI FOs in the scenario. i attribute this to the rapid response of the ai artillery modules - they were 120mm mortars. so from what i've seen you have: rapid response + no los at start: good chance the AI will use the FOs when the FOs actually gain LOS rapid response + LOS at start: expect a turn-1 barrage slow response + LOS at start: expect a turn-1 barrage slow response + no LOS at start: AI might never use this artillery i would be interested in hearing of methods scenario designers use in getting the AI-controlled FOs to unleash their fury upon the virtual soldiers of the human player... because when playing the AI, there is nothing like a dangerous enemy artillery barrage to spice things up...

isn't there a german halftrack with a single-shot, tungsten-only 20mm?... i think though that maybe it appears after 8-41... as for the pictures... they're also small at the actual site from what i can tell... i think you might have found one of those 'free' upload sites which shrinks your pictures... if so, try getting a free account at tripod.com... they allow full-size pictures... i think stalin's organ may be correct about the vehicles shown ... i thought that even the psw222 had an autocannon... that all (except for that weird halftrack i mentioned above) of the german 20mm vehicle kinds were pretty much of the same type of '6-shot auto-firing mechanism'... and the hungarian toldi having some other kind of gun... perhaps a built-in 'slothurn' ATR?

a couple of things might help... if you already know what you're shooting for, put a target line to it even if you can't see the target unit yet... then go to camera level 1 and press 'tab'... then you can see the target line and how it might 'wrap' around any ridge between your vehicle and the target... then you want to 'scoot' to where the target line 'wraps over' the ridge... to make a long story short, camera level 1 can really help in a shoot and scoot... having a target line is icing on the cake...

well 1.0 is a little difficult... let's put it this way... in my experience the 1.0 version leaves no room for error... in 2.0 there is a bit of leeway... i could send you the new one... the only thing really missing is the soviet (spoiler) briefing... and a correction or two to the axis briefing... i'll fire it off to you sometime tonight...

but there is a sound file - at least for the single-shot toldi - which could work. just use the ATR sound. for example, i was playing a scenario where a bunch of T-60s were opening up... and the 6-shot sound got me wondering... did the T-60 have a 6-shot clip?... but more to the point... some ATRs started shooting back at the T-60s, and the single shot of the ATR sounded like just one of the 6-shots from the 20mm... at first i thought it was some kind of bug, or wondered if the t-60 had been 'taken out' in the middle of a shot... then i realized it was an ATR... so why not at least take the existing single-shot ATR sound and use it for the toldi 1?

perhaps another issue to consider is the use of HE as spotting rounds in cmbo/cmbb... in squad leader the spotting rounds were considered to be ('blue') smoke. was that wrong? that's something i've always wondered about, ever since cmbo... so a number of questions seem to arise here: 1) in 'real life' was HE used as spotting rounds, or was it smoke? 2) in cmbb, can the FO see only the ground where the artillery round is hitting, and not the explosion itself? and if so, does that even matter? 3) should cmbb use less rounds when correcting fire? 4) are the artillery modules too expensive in cmbb? 5) in cmbb, should there be 'battalion-level' spotters available, meaning that they have say - 8 or 12 or even 16 tubes?

i noticed in the 'hungarian innaccuracies' thread that the toldi 1 had a single-shot 20mm which is modelled in the game, except that the sound is wrong. i'm wondering why the single-shot sound of an ATR wasn't used for the toldi's gun instead of the 6-shot sound from the german 20mm guns. on the topic of the T-60 tank, did it as well also have a 6-shot clip like a german 20mm, because it uses the same sound as the german 20mm 6-shot. by the way, when i was looking through the advanced squad leader (asl) manuals for vehicle notes on the T-50 and T-70, i noticed that the T-60's 'L/85' (is that right? i don't have cmbb handy) gun is given the '20LL' designation. also, i'm fairly certain that the german 20mm guns in the game have varying 'L/values' but they do all seem to use the same 'ack ack ack ack ack ack' sound... anyway, can we expect the toldi sound to be 'fixed' in the 1.02 patch? i would think as well that a single-shot 20mm would be a 'quicker load' than a 6-round 'clip,' so it would be neat if the sound were fixed, but also if the rate of fire were a bit higher... ...just some thoughts on '20mm stuff'

man you've got me going on this one... i've got some ideas for a battle... will keep you posted... right now i'm re-testing 'nogai steppe 2'....

but we've discussed before that each unit is worth more on some maps and less on others... for instance, if the los is limited, then a bt tank with 76mm gun is probably a good deal... whereas an 88mm gun is probably a waste of points in limited los... on the other hand with long firing lanes the 88 is probably a good deal and the 76mm bt 'toast' so if you truly want each unit to have a 'combat value' you have to take the mapboard and weather conditions into effect (weather affects los)... you would probably also want to adjust the cost of heavy armor according to ground conditions

once i was targetting a kv2 with a german 150mm FO. The FO could see the tank but the barrage fell about 150 meters wide. where the shells fell, the FO couldn't see... but i'm wondering if in cmbb the game engine is not taking into account the height of the blast... in other words i'm certain that the FO could have seen the explosions, even if he couldn't quite see the ground where the shells were falling... but it appeared that the game engine was only looking at the ground itself... and when this happens, how is the player to correct it? it seems like moving the target of the barrage 150 meters away from the intended target is a bit counterintuitive...