Mud

Hmmm, might work... need to check how fast the non-Katyusha spotters go through their ammo, I suppose. A scenario designer could toss it in by strictly limiting the FO ammo counts and requesting that the player follow certain instructions, just like the ol' "Your FO is authorized just as a bridge destroyer" deal.

Also, prime^: Read some history books, like John Erickson's _The Road to Stalingrad_ and _The Road to Berlin_. Late-war, the Soviets often used 30-60 minute long preplanned preparatory barrages... a technique which suggests that they felt that it was better used then, and that they likely lacked the flexibility you're claiming that should be in the game. The game does lack some probably reasonable techniques, like a rolling prep barrage (right now, you can specify only one target for each FO doing prep barrage... and it'll take all the FO's shells, too.), and the ability to specify preferred groupings beyond tight/wide. Maybe it'll be overhauled for the engine rewrite.

Hrrmm. Are you sure there's not a second shooter that's still unknown due to, say, EFOW? At least for small arms fire, the tracers aren't drawn until somebody figures out where they're coming from, IIRC; might be the same for gun and tank fire. That's just a wild conjecture, however.

Haido -- Not only does MTW use sprites (which would break away from CM's textured-model approach and likely inflict anguish upon modders), but it pretty much locks the units into pretty tight formations, and does not appear to model individual soldiers that much (e.g. archers in the /last/ row of the furthest-back group of archers can die from their own friendly fire... because it's abstracted to the point of "an archer died", not "that archer died"). Lock-step formations makes some sense for MTW-style battles. It does not make sense in any game which features artillery and machineguns, so BFC could not reasonably take that shortcut -- they'd need to individually track everybody's location, and draw them accordingly, without making the UI into a quagmire (organizing and selecting units... Unless MTW changed dramatically from STW, in that game, you only need to worry about directly controlling some 16 units in a battle. A single CM battalion might have, say, 3 companies of 3 platoons each, each of 3-4 squads, which might be split into 2 half-squads each. The squads might also have 9-12 men or so. That's a lot of men to draw, and more importantly, a lot of units which the player must organize and control (again a diff from medieval-style chaotic melees and modern warfare: you can't just commit troops and stand back and watch until the confusion dies down)... so the UI needs to be very good at showing who belongs to what unit and so forth, which becomes difficult when more men are shown. It needs to be much better at that than, oh, Shogun:TW. An additional note -- if BFC did draw individual soldiers, you'd most likely hear pleas to ask to be able to give orders to them... *shudder*. As it is, unit portrayal is done down to the point where control is possible, and some information is conveyed (e.g. a depleted squad might show only one or two men instead of three). (Added: On a lighter note, be warned that your opponents may try to take advantage of higher-density armor from even higher-res textures... ) [ October 13, 2002, 12:33 AM: Message edited by: Mud ]

Rob -- All the patches that were released for CMBO were. Heck, by the time that I jumped in, they'd remastered the CD so that it was already 1.12, and not only that but the manual had been revised. So far, BFC does not appear to be the sort of company that puts bug fixes and a few new units together and calls it an expansion pack or a gold edition.

I've played "Close Combat 2"'s campaign, and it is not particularly impressive, especially if you play the German side. It's partly because the AI cheats like a maniac when it ignores all supply rules (cheerfully reinforcing paras who have neither LZ nor road access), and partly because it badly handles areas that basically are settled. For instance, if you hold XXX Corps at the Son crossing, you can slaughter the Poles at Driel -- and you will have to, again and again, as it repeats basically the same deployment again and again on successive days. Grossbeek Heights is similarly absurd. And Shogun is a beautiful example of a broken campaign. Aside from it again cheating rather blatantly (being able to spend into debt, for instance), it's overly simplified to the point where tactical skill trumps operational skill. For instance, nobody needs to worry about food or transporation issues, so each province of Japan gets to hold as many troops as he wants, up to the number of distinct pieces that'll fit (because it uses a board game model w/o overflow boxes) w/ no attrition except in battle. Don't worry about trying to flank a bridge position, because it won't let you; crossings must be forced, and with only one map per province... ugh. Keeping in mind that BFC has, what, /one/ programmer (Charles), I'm inclined to think that they have other priorities for the rewrite. Campaigns, even when they /don't/ have a detailed tactical layer underneath them, can be remarkably complex -- see _Empires in Arms_, for instance. It's a very, very nicely done Napoleonic board game... and one whose rules nest rather deeply and whose Grand Campaign (1803-1815) is estimated at taking up to 200 hours to play. Tactical layers complicate things because it limits how much abstraction you can do. For instance, for consistency, all covered formations would need to be tracked in terms of manpower and vehicles, not just abstract attack/defense ratings and step levels... because they're going to be shown. If maintenance, fuel, ammunition, et al are problems, then again, the user may need to be shown which units are having shortages of parts or ammo -- it doesn't make sense for a PzV to be abandoned when withdrawing from one about-to-be-liberated town for lack of parts, and then for that particular PzV to reappear but a PzIV to take its "disappeared" state the next battle. Plenty of stuff to worry about... - Do not repeat battles with foregone conclusions, like dropping Poles day after day into Driel with identical forces and deployment, to face the exact same defenders, with predicable consequences. This is remarkably dull. - Do not force players to take blatantly stupid approaches when, actually, other decisions would be much more realistic. For instance, if an attacker has forces on /both/ sides of a river, and they coordinate to attack a position that's on one side only, the attacker should not be forced to move /all/ his forces across tiny bridges under fire, ala Shogun. - Do not completely abandon realism just to please the players who believe that their small set of German tanks (uber-, of course) and all-fanatical all-elite SS troopers facing faceless hordes of incorrectly stereotyped barely-armed Russian peasants could have, by themselves, changed the course of the war and utterly somehow neutralized the logistical nightmare intrinsic to invading a country that big. Making CMBB a bog-standard RTS where standard bolt-action rifles can whittle down tanks by depleting their "hit points"; where mechanics can repair tanks during a battle; and units have LOS limited to how far they can move in about, oh, 15 seconds might have increased sales even more, but at a pretty huge cost. I think I'd rather see them fix more fundamental issues, like the huge biggie of Borg spotting; stopping a vehicles in the back of a column from cheerfully firing their cannon through those ahead of them; the inability of MG teams to abandon their heavy gun, extra barrels and belts and run away; and so forth.

Do one of the following. 1. Convince the German government to change its laws so that CDV isn't bound by that requirement anymore. 2. Convince CDV to completely leave Germany, and to produce a German-only version of the game to fall under those laws, or completely forgo the revenue stream from Germany. 3. Provide BFC with an economically superior alternative distribution scheme in Europe and a legal, economically viable way to get out of their contract. 4. Get over it and stop whining about something that otherwise ISN'T GOING TO CHANGE, when you know full well that you're just pointlessly whining about something that's already been whined to death.

Try "A Deadly Affair" to gain some respect for ATRs and Molotovs. Partisans attempt to ambush a truck/halftrack/tank convoy...

Hmmm. Just thought I'd toss this one out: Does the presence of captured vehicles affect the probability of friendly fire (or of not drawing hostile fire)? - mumbling: When there are no captured vehicles, just knowing the general model/shape of the vehicle is sufficient to judge whether it's hostile. A German soldier who suddenly sees a KV-class tank move past him can guess that it's hostile, even if he doesn't know whether it's a KV-1 or a KV-1S or a KV-2 or variants. But if there are captured vehicles of a type also fielded by the enemy... then there might be doubt. This doubt might be greater far away, or at night, or from the air, or other conditions that hamper visual ID. The Russian-controlled infantry and vehicles might also be more hesitant to assume that a KV-class vehicle is friendly, once they know that the enemy is fielding KV-class tanks. And from the POV of a fighter-bomber, well, hope those aerial recognition panels work...

Hm, interesting question. It's not doing dynamic lighting yet, but faking shadows might not be so involved. For now, I've applied a hex grid to the grass and snow textures, although I must be missing something about how CMBB aligns textures because there's a periodic missing edge on the boundaries. Hmm. Maybe they're not all oriented the same while on the grid. Incidentally, if you find a grass/snow mod tasty, but ungridded, there's a package called ImageMagick that, combined with a little scripting and a grid texture, overlay the grid onto a bunch of images for you. You could use it to do some pretty twisted things, like try to make a "wireframe" mod by applying edge detection, thresholding them, and turning whatever remains into bright, shiny green. Hmmmm.

Nope. There was no notification whatsoever until the actual game arrived.

Hm. Perhaps it reflects the lack of a loader/assistant? 1 MP40 at 40m = 36fp If 1 MG42 at 40m normally = 50fp w/ loader, and it drops to 20fp w/o, then it's slightly better for the loader to stop assisting (-30fp/MG42) and fire his MP40 instead (+36fp/MP40).

Hmmm. I haven't noticed any galling bugs, so I'll lay out some possible feature requests. In no particular order: (1) A time-left display when reloading. Hopefully this wouldn't be too hard. Granted, it might be mostly an issue w/ a certain incredibly rare 70-ton heavily-armored assault mortar... (2) When an aircraft gets shot down, it might be handy for a message to appear... especially if it's your own, since you can't select the enemy AA gun and get a kill report until the game is over. Might depend on FOW et al -- who would know when a plane goes down? Hmmm. (3) A 'Back' button in QB design would also be rather nice, although not crucial since you can start over. (4) Given the sheer variety of units one can select, it's would be even more useful to be able to get the 'I just hit enter' statistics on a unit then. (5) Hm, would it be possible for the game to indicate how much delay, on Turn 1, a spotter would have if he does /not/ order a prep barrage, just so the player knows whether or not it'll be basically useless if he doesn't? (6) Prep barrages -- possibly should be more flexible, based on QB/scenario design. e.g. set to "Turn 1 prep barrage allowed", "Prep barrage must be ordered during SETUP phase", "No prep barrage". The second case might apply when arty had to be planned with poor prior intel/recon, and the third might hamper a defender versus an unexpected surprise attack. This might be an awful lot of work depending on how the engine works, 'tho. (7) It would be nice, come AAR time, to be able to figure out how many casualties minefields and aircraft gave, so one can try to figure out which justified their points. For minefields, this just means that they have to be selectable, and that cas stats are tracked, which hopefully isn't a huge problem. For aircraft, this means that either there needs to be a way to bring up, say, a window listing the aircraft and losses they inflicted, or some other way to select them to get info. This is mostly an issue for AP mines... especially with EFOW and pre-battle casualties, it may be rather unclear whether or not the mines actually inflicted significant losses or not.

(checks profile) Ah, so you're in Ohio -- then you can order the BFC version and get the full manual (which, if you were elsewhere and ordered the CDV version, would be extra -- the paper version, anyway. Apparently has to do with the DVD-size packaging now common in the EU, or somefink like that). 'tis good, and some 262 pages describing much of the game (but, as with CMBO, not the units or weapon details -- /that/ would take a lot of paper, methinks). And the game -- well, the improvements are /good/. Air support is no longer generic, MGs suppress a heck of a lot more, pinned units actually act pinned, arty now can do prep barrages... it's quite a bit better.

If your opponent brings along decent HE/arty support, or armored vehicles that an MG42 won't hurt (given that your test was rigged with aforeknowledge of 'infantry only') you'll probably want some infantry that can hoof it for longer distances without getting tired, and that doesn't lose ammo if taking losses while on the move.

Won't the choice of "best" card depend on other factors as well, like what kind of CPU he has (if he has an /old/ computer, will the CPU be able to keep up?) and AGP speed (original AGP bus, vs. something newer like AGP 4X or 8X)?

Thankfully, BFC has sufficient clue to design a game that has longevity /without/ common console tricks like limited saves or locked levels/units. As for the endgame, do a post-mortem: go through all the units and examine their records, and express your regrets for the dead pixels should you choose.

If the German takes 6 Sturmtigers, how many fighter-bombers is the Russian allowed?

If the German takes 6 Sturmtigers, how many fighter-bombers is the Russian allowed?

Yup. Plus, there's not much cover on the tank, especially when the CM engine does not model tanks as solid objects so bullets can go right through, so make that transparent bullet magnet. When the tank is being fired at by an AT team, well, that's icing on the cake. Dismounting seems pretty reasonable. Routing less so, but they were green after all...

Hmmm. On a somewhat related note, would it be possible to add a way to specify one-shot covered arc -- that is, once triggered the arc is discarded, along with the related targetting restrictions? That way, similar to the CMBO ambush command, one could have an AT gun hold fire until a target presents a highly favorable shot, but then engage normally (under the presumption that it's been spotted by others outside the arc).

MikeyD -- I don't see why not. I haven't tried it, but from what I've read, the QB generator lets you import a map from the final saved game of a battle (you can save on the AAR screen according to the manual), with units (presumably including fortifications... it'd be rather strange if they didn't). They're not counted against the QB's point budget, either. Create a ME-style scenario (i.e. no digging in), place fortifications, give each a token sharpshooter (probably needed), play it against yourself hotseat, make sharps run off map, and cease-fire. Hm. Might have to place the appropriate victory flags as well.

It has changed in CMBB; at the end of the battle, true casualties-inflicted counts are revealed regardless of FOW status. Note, 'tho, the numbers may still not add up: - Units which left the battlefield aren't there anymore, so you can't check their kill count. This includes air support, since that never sticks around. - Minefields cannot be selected, IIRC, so you can't find out how well they did (this is mostly an issue with AP mines, obviously).

Did you use an 80-minute CD-R, or did it somehow fit on a 74-minute one? (Edit: Tested w/ a Verbatim 80-min CD-R, written via a PlexWriter 40/12/40A, Linux, dd+cdrecord. Works.) [ September 25, 2002, 10:30 PM: Message edited by: Mud ]

Extreme. There's something rather satisfying about watching a faceless, unknown enemy approach... When your platoon -- running low on ammo, but down a mere five men -- knows that it's firing at /somebody/, but isn't even sure that it managed any hits whatsoever, and then after the ceasefire you check and find out that your "anvil" platoon inflicted 105 casualties...