Mud

It wouldn't surprise me if wasting transport like that would be grounds for demotion or perhaps -- in extreme cases -- execution on the grounds of sabotage, considering neither side had terribly great logistics. Recon should be done with units that can plausibly do recon, such as split squads not that far away from HQs and the rest of a possibly ad-hoc platoon so they'd have a chance to communicate or to fall back under covering fire if need be.

T: hit T repeatedly to cycle through the various levels of shown trees -- something like 'none', 'sparse', 'full', 'extreme'. It has no effect on whether or not those tiles are actually wooded, but setting trees to sparse (I prefer to at least know at a glance whether the tiles have trees...) can make it easier to find your units. Also turn on unit bases ( and cycle through unit sizes ©; maybe play at size +2 or so, since realistic-sized units can be tricky to impossible to see at any view that lets you see much of the battlefield.

Hm. There are, it seems, tables, but aside from the color-coding (the colors associated with the guns are on the same coding scheme as the color coding of the armor) I'm not aware of a summary system.

Just don't forget about treebursts. When the arty starts coming down, the woods can be a very, very bad place to be.

BTW, if you haven't noticed it yet -- select units and hit Enter. You'll see a fair bit of data on them, such as armor, firepower, speed et al. For an AT gun, you need to check muzzle velocity as well as the penetration table, since that nicely-penetrating HC round won't do squat if the muzzle velocity means that it'll probably miss at that range. Vehicles have armor described, per sector (turret / superstructure, upper hull, lower hull, and front/side/rear), et al.

Yes, believe it or not there were disparities at various times. This isn't _Warcraft Foo_ where units and counter-units are so matched and where sides are symmetrical. When the Soviet AT capability is lousy, the game reflects that... and when the Panzers bog down on snow and mud and the T-34s flank them with ease, that's reflected too.

Yeah. To be lured into following something, you need to at least have a memory...

If you've got the BFC version, get the small patch. If you've got the CDV version, get the big patch.

You'd need a very, very big and open map (very North African, basically...) to pull that off. That way, you'd be able to get attention of tanks, but accuracy would be low.

Was it full-ID'd as a truck, or might it have been a HT?

Yeah, there's a maximum range -- maybe 70m or so. Any further than that, and doing a 'follow' would probably just get your guys killed unless that vehicle is immobile and heavily distracted.

Fuel tank explosions? I think somebody's been playing too much _Operation Wolf_.

Um, you'd better leave that can of wyrms and run away really, really quickly. Do a forum search to find out why.

*shrug* It always depends. If there's a Tiger 1km away in a hull-down position behind a ridgeline and in front of it is 900m of billiard-flat plain, it might take a /lot/ of vanilla Shermans to have even odds. If it's the silly Hedge Maze scenario, then a single Sherman might do the trick. Heck, in that scenario, one Stuart + one flamethrower can work...

thewood -- Don't forget other effects, such as whether, how much and for how long the sudden light will affect the night-vision of anybody in the area. In addition, unless it's a billiard-table map and no vehicles or buildings are in the area, it won't all be lit up equally due to shadows. Will the light, for instance, illuminate that sneaky PIAT team crouching behind the building -- depending on the location and power of the flare in the sky and the angles involved, it might or might not.

Maybe the sound of its tracks grating on the ground makes it easier to track, but as soon as that stops it's easy to forget where it is given all the distractions of the rest of the battle. (By out of LOS, do you mean that it's just further away, and would be visible were it daylight -- or that it's moved behind an LOS-blocking obstacle?) (Addendum: Human eyes are quite tuned to movement. Try walking outside at night; you'll notice moving things fairly readily compared to stationary hiding things.) [ January 13, 2003, 11:07 AM: Message edited by: Mud ]

The ImageMagick suite has a pretty capable image conversion program, and it's command-line which might help if you want to convert a whole bunch. If you're using strictly GUI, check if your image software has a batch-conversion option. Paint Shop Pro does, but you don't want to buy it just for converting images. Irfanview might as well, but I don't recall.

Bear in mind that choosing different battle types can also be used to handicap, to compensate for (a) differing skill between players (e.g. forcing the more experienced player to defend against an assault), or ( very bad conditions. Asking an attacker to do, say, an nighttime attack in deep snow and maximum cold on a large map with only physically unfit infantry might be pretty darn unfair at the usual attack odds. (It might be pretty darn unfair even at assault odds...).

Yup, no cover; they're treated as vehicles, and all vehicles in the game are non-solid, basically -- anything can shoot through them. The poor sap who drives right in front of an armored column can get plastered by every single vehicle in it, for instance, unless terrain intervenes. It's one of the things I'm really hoping will get changed as part of the engine rewrite.

Apparently: Q1: Can somebody please put together collections of mods, on CD, and sell them to people who still are bound by 56k? A1: *shrug* Anybody doing so should first check with the mod authors... but CD burners are now common enough that it wouldn't surprise me if somebody were willing to burn an occasional platter for cost. Q2: Is the Sturmtiger / Sturmmorser Tiger / big bastard of a mortar tank in the game? A2: Yes, but (a) It's VERY rare in scenarios that approach any degree of historical realism, because there were rather few and their usage in battles of the sort depicted was extremely limited. ( In a Quick Battle where you can choose your own units, you'll pay a considerable amount of your Requisition Points (Armor Category, specifically) to get one. And if Rarity is on, you'll pay far, far more, and then watch enraged as an Il-2 or bad ground conditions immobilizes it before it ever gets in LOS of the enemy. Them's the breaks.

With regards to ammo, the manual does have brief descriptions of the general types (cannister, AP, HE, T, et al). If you're looking for more detailed information, e.g. "How well does a specific type of AP round fired from the gun on a T-34 M43 do against face-hardened armor(*) at 0 degrees slope", Rexford's probably the best here at answering that sort of question. (*) The "performance against typical enemies" penetration tables, in-game, don't actually say whether typical == homogeneous or face-hardened. Be warned.

MikeyD -- "A Deadly Affair", perhaps? A lightly-armed partisan force takes on a German light armor column, complete with Elite Trucks with "must exit for points" on.

A whole pack of 20mm FlaK for causing gun damage to your opponent's favorite tank and overall causing irritation.

Shatan -- Not for CMBO. In CMBB, at least the SMG troops' power is fixed, through better MG modelling, different ammo distributions, reworking of the movement commands and their effects on cover et al, and so forth. Now, you have to pay much more attention to cover, defilades, suppression, recon-by-fire, et al as an attacker. I haven't checked the flak trucks, but it wouldn't surprise me if they're fixed as well.

If the edge provides the best cover, then feel free to use it. Bear in mind that if your units are routed by arty/other incoming, some may rout off the board... Gamey == generally, abusing features/bugs that exist only because of limitations of the game engine. Examples -- Wall of Fire: In CMBO, fires are very well-behaved in that they neither spread nor die down. Ergo, especially a Commonwealth player with a bunch of Wasps can create an impenetrable Wall of Fire around, say, a victory location, with minimal risk to himself. Don't try this in CMBB... Abuse of Rare Units: Having large numbers of rare stuff like Wirbelwinds, Pumas and Super Pershings could be considered gamey. Abuse of Buggy Units: There are two unarmored German flak trucks which are a bit bugged, if memory serves, in that they're harder to kill than should be. Grey Areas: Certain rules conspire to make charging SMG platoons much more effective than they should be. MGs undersuppress and don't vary fire rates based on threat proximity, SMG teams get too much ammo relative to rifle teams, and running troops get too much benefit from cover. Having a force consisting mostly of SMG platoons unrealistically charging could be considered gamey.