Affentitten

Well I have been to Syria. Back in the good old days of Assad Senior. Not this pussy little wannabe son of his. Back when you could see the Israeli jets permanently loitering 6 inches inside the airspace border. I think the fact that I have been to Syria makes me uniquely qualified to comment on this game. I have also been to France and Germany and Britain and the USA. That made me an expert on CMBO. I haven’t been to Russia, so I wasn’t quite such a CMBB buff, but I still bought it and enjoyed it. I have been to Egypt, including El Alamein. So I could have been a big CMAK expert. But I didn’t buy it because my computer was too crap. What was the question again? Will there be a Krak des Chavaliers scenario? I disagree with dalem, whatever it is.

I think the manual also says that AA fire, even if it doesn't kill the plane, will affect the accuracy of its target runs.

I often place AA in scattered trees well back from the front line and it's not unusual for them to score a kill. Of course, the only way you'll ever know they've got a kill is by checking at the end of the battle, because there is no obvious explosion that I've ever seen.

Some Popski's Private Army actions behind the lines in Libya and Italy. British airborne fighting as regular infantry and artillery in Italy.

A standard procedure when dealing with Japanese bunkers in the Asian war was to wheel up a two-pounder or Bofors and just fire at top of the slit with the intention of caving it in. It wouldn't cause much damage to the occupants, but they wouldn't be able to fire back, allowing them to be outflanked and receive a doorknock at the rear.

I doubt it. There was no firing whatsoever, so the AI troops couldn't have been panicked. But even if that were the case, why would the battle play out all the way to the end?

Had a weird thing happen to me yesterday. Had been playing the on-disc Operation Kalnikova Railway (know that's wrong, but I don't have it here at work). I think it's about 8 battles. Was playing the Reds versus German AI. The 3rd last and 2nd last battles were pretty bloody and climactic, and towards the end of the second last I ran out of targets. I was spread pretty thin though and just assumed that there were more Germans hiding deeper in the forest. The set-up at the start of the last battle seemed to confirm this. Typical jigsaw puzzle with several no-go zones between my scattered units and along the flanks and rear of the map. But when I started the battle I noticed that the computer player wasn't "thinking" its move. That load bar just stayed up for a millisecond before the compile movie one did. I assumed that the AI had very few units left, and that perhaps it was even just a single gun that couldn't move. Well, after 25 turns of running units around in the forest in huge skirmish lines and having mortar squads stand at attention in the open, I couldn't flush any Jerries out. Then at the end of the battle I was awarded a total victory. When I clicked back to the map there were no enemy units at all!. Why wouldn't the operation just end on the 2nd last battle if I had destroyed all of the enemy units, there were no reinforcements scheduled and I had posession of all flags and about 80% of the map?

SPOLIERS = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Yep. But I didn't need them. Played as the Germans against the AI. The Russki infantry made a few forays out of the treeline and got promptly hammered back by fire from my HMGs and mortars, which I was alernately hiding/firing. The tanks sat out in the open but couldn't spot any of my other troops. Lost one Pak to an airstrike and the only time the tanks fired was at the gun crew that broke and ran. From about turn 6 to 30 nothing at all happened. Tanks never moved at all and the odd infantry squad that came out of the trees never went further than 5 meters before breaking. Probably the least action-packed scenario I have ever played. But I recognise that it's down to the AI's attacking weaknesses. It obviously got stuck in a loop of the tanks waiting for the infantry to advance but the grunts not wanting to until the tanks started supressing fire.

Oops Durning one of the builds, scenarios created in a previous build lost all their ATR ammo. Repurchasing the ATRs fixed it, but this scenario slipped through the cracks</font>

SPOILER QUESTION = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = I'm playing this one as the germans. There are three AT rifles listed in the briefing, and sure enough I have them. But they're all displaying with EMPTY ammo loads at the start. What the....?

The road has scattered trees along the side. Are you saying that sitting in the middle of an open field offers more cover?

Played this as the germans PBEM. Got soundly beaten but made the Russians bleed. Had a couple of luck things in a row go against me, which meant I knew I was on a loser by about round 5. Ithink against even a half-competent human opponent, the Germans can't win this one outright, it's just a matter of what sort of draw or minor they might scrape. SPOILERS The biggest beef I had with this one was where the Tiger reinforcements popped up. Why the hell will urgently rushing reinforcement tanks pop up in the middle of a paddock when there is less-exposed road access elsewhere? My opponent was doing a classic Soviet mass wave of armour, and when my Tigers suddenly appeared, it was right in front of about 8 or 9 ISU-152's. The Tigers were dead in 2 rounds, half of them before they even got to move. Sure, they burned a couple of soviet assault guns, but not nearly enough to make a difference. One of my 88s in some trees got taken out by an air strike before it even fired a shot, and one of the 75mm guns missed a point blank shot three times in a row before it's target AG pivoted and nailed it first time out with a snap shot. It all went downhill from there, but I ended up forcing a draw through sheer exhaustion, and thanks to one squad that went fanatic and single-handedly held up one entire wing of the Soviet assault, accounting for 38 infantry casualties!

WW2 service with Canada is worth $150.00 Will post in General. Sorry everyone. [ November 18, 2002, 05:26 PM: Message edited by: Affentitten ]

Ahh yes, but how do I know that I have space and good terrain to fall back on? One of the "unrealistic" things (yes, I know, it's a game) about operations, is that as a defending commander, you never know what terrain is behind you until you get pushed into it and get a look when the next map comes through. And how many maps are there? So you have a tendency to defend what you've got perhaps over-tenaciously. I'm more wondering why the "up to 25% and flags in contention" rule doesn't seem to be ever applied in my example. 20 turns in a 15-turn battle is plus 33%.

Is the variable turn limit really random? Or is it just always maximum? I'm playing the "Long Day's March" scenario (6 x 15 turn battles) as the scratch defenders, and so far I'm 4 battles in and EVERY one has blown out to 19 or 20 rounds. There are no flags in contention, and most of the time at the 15-turn limit there is only a bit of sporadic fire going on. How in the hell is 20 turns equal to 15 turns plus "a maximum of 25%" anyway? And over the course of the six battles, I will have played an extra 25-30 rounds, or basically an extra 1.5 - 2 whole extra battles. This seems manifestly imbalanced, especially in a scenario where the open terrain and assets favour the attacker from the start.

I think that playing as a defender against the AI is a pretty certain win for you, barring a massive imbalance in forces. I seem to find that the AI just doesn't "think" as well in attack as it does in defence. It will habitually funnel units into an obvious zone that you have covered, run troops across open ground when a more complicated route would have been safer and so on. That's why it's called AI. And it may explain why, if you're a novice, you find more success at defending. I have the same issues.

Thanks. SPOILER = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Did no-one else run into the strong Soviet platoon in the bottom left corner? I went wide and deep on my flanking run and hit them. Since I was using MTC, everybody stopped and began a plinking competition. I broke contact (using "assault" to run away) after a couple of rounds when I realised how many there were, but of course the firefight had sapped casualties and morale and generally disordered my advance.

I think my 'mistake' was using the advance/assault orders too early. Since I had no way of judging the disposition of enemy units on the hill and there was quite a bit of open ground to cover towards the end, I was effectively charging up the hill. As it turned out, my men were nearly on top of the enemy before any LOS came. I could have sneaked or moved them up the hill from that angle and they would have arrived fresh. Unfortunately, by the time they got into contact, most of them were borderline exhausted and all of them were "tired". I was using all my mortars and MGs to lay fire across the top of the trenches. It was frustrating to watch every unit go to ground within two or three meters of the end of the trench and be picked off, most of them panicking and running into the open kill zone surrounded by trenches. Two of the bog-standard Russian squads up there had kills of 35+ at the end of the game. I'd picked off only 5 of them.

Damn. Just tried this one and got caned. I got all my units undetected up to the end of the trench line and assualted. Every single unit stopped short of the trench and either went to ground or tried to play plink-plink. They were completely decimated. When some of them got into the trench on the assualt order, they then decided that they would change their orders to "run out into open ground". Not a man came back down that hill.

I had the great satisfaction of blowing a timber bridge with a pair of Panthers yesterday in one of the disc scenarios. Took the two Panthers about 90 seconds to destroy it. Had absolutely no effect on the game as all 20 or so of the Russian tanks negotiated the soft ground dividing the map without a single one bogging!

Anybody tried blowing bridges with this tactic yet?

Wow. Hats off to that effective graphical presentation of enfilading fire using only ASCII characters! Kudos! And as for chin defilade on tank commanders, how risky is that for their dental work coming into massive contact with the hatch rim as the vehicle lurches over the terrain? Or does that count as a survivable wound?

This battle is a good example of the need for "reccomended play as" directions in the description. I was playing against the AI, and as the briefing focussed on the Russians and I like desperate urban defence battles, I played the Russkis in the absence of any reccomendation. Sadly it was all over by Turn 3/30. I'd picked off the key units in the German attack with some well-sighted assets, and after that, it just became a case of how many Krauts I could kill. Flags were never under threat. Won a total with 5 casualties to 211! It shouldn't be too much trouble to include a play reccomendation in ALL of the disk scenarios rather than just leaving it up to the individual author.

Oh OK, I see what you're getting at. Thanks. But situation 4 is the weirdest of the lot! I was wondering why my little 50mm mortars with command LOS were dropping things straight down Jerry's poop chute whilst the professional arty type was so off mark.

I've just read it. But the answer to the scenario I've outlined above isn't covered. I've used re-plotting, LOS, command LOS and my FO is not incapacitated. The rounds are not just missing, they're landing hundreds of meters out into the green haze on every single occasion. This would indicate something beyond mere random chance.