Caesar

I like to keep them available in case my opponent surprises me and I need to move my reserve troops a substantial distance. A couple of jeeps can provide you with quickly positioned MGs, Bazookas or mortars.

Use light fast armour e.g. Stuarts, daimlers etc. Preferably more than one spaced apart widely. Move them into and out of cover while firing at the bunkers. I have found (to my cost) that the guns keep tracking from target to target never actually getting to fire. The light guns have heaps of ammo and a very high ROF and so tend to get hits more quickly. Believe it or not I learned this on the recieving end from the AI. The sodding things blew both my bunkers away before they managed to kill anything other than a HT. Mixing in a bit of smoke here and there so that you need only deal with one at a time is quite effective. Use 105mm (direct fire not arty) smoke if possible as it usually prevents the Pillbox from being able to fire with 1 - 2 shots and it lasts a long time.

I have a particular liking for Wespes and so will use them often. I have found that the best way to keep them alive is to keep them moving. Let's face it - they are mobile guns - so keep them mobile. I tend to move them into firing position, fire for a turn and move out of sight. It tends to stop things like mortars, arty etc taking them out. For 50 pts you get a big gun with a decent ROF that moves quite fast.

There are probably considerably more than 12 but the title lead me to thinking that you were looking to start a new campaign. I actually only clicked on it accidently and I am very interested.

The Aircraft sound detecting equipment has advantages over the gun detecting equipment. The Aircraft are higher up so you can detect the high freq sounds of the motor and thus you can get a better directional fix. I have my doubts that achieving anything better than 5 - 10 degrees of accuracy would be possible by ear alone. Consider that the sound is a low frequency rumble (at least that is what I have read that it sounded like, I certainly don't claim any experience here). The only reason I think that they would have used directional sound sensors would be to eliminate some of the backround noise (like the sound of the shells landing for instance) For anyone who has done hunting, how accurately would you say you could place a distant hunter firing, within 1 degree?? Anything over 1 (maybe 2) degrees and the maths make it self envident that you will need more sensors to increase the accuracy to useful levels.

If BT would release the format for the cmb file I would start writing a campaign module for this game. A friend of mine and I have already thought this out quite a bit but still need the cmb format to make it work. Our idea was based around the idea of either using the map editor to generate a large number of maps and then merging them or writing a generator ourselves (definitely the former option first). Roads etc get added on after so that they link. Each player places their forces and the game begins. A cmb file is generated for each battle. At the end of game the result reported from CM are put back in. Casualties, losses etc get handled statistically. Well that was the basic premise anyway. We were mainly aiming to produce a series of battles where the objective was much less defined than just flags, where pushing until your force was nearly gone is not a good idea etc.

How can you go past a Churchill flame thrower - I have set whole towns ablaze with these. You get good flame range, loads of ammo and a 75 to boot all with decent armour. A tad pricey but still a cool toy. Back it up with a couple of 17 pounder armed tanks or tank destroyers to deal with those pesky axis tanks and you're laughing.

Often - 500 points +30%. Must play more humans

Doble post [ February 19, 2002, 04:05 AM: Message edited by: Caesar ]

I don't think that people who are claiming that a person can determine where the sound of the shots are coming from by their hearing coupled with experience have really thought the maths out. With guns 10km away, 1 degree out would put your direction off by 174m (feel free to check my maths, it's been a while since I did trig). If there is some sort of instrumentation to determine direction I could believe this, but to get in the ~25m accuracy quoted you have to be accurate to 1/7th of a degree. How difficult is it to determine direction of low freq sound any way. Consider where you put your bass speakers. All the reports of distant gunfire that I have heard have described it as a rumbling sound. That would indicate low freq and therefor hard to determine direction.

When you fire AP at infantry is there any blast value at all or is it modelled just like a single (if rather large) bullet. I had a situation the other day when my M10 out of HE and I resorted to pounding him with AP. It seemed to be reasonably effective when they were in buildings (coincidence ???) but the guys in fox holes took ages to break and run.

Come on BooBoo, answer the question and end the debate, where are my guns?

25m accuracy - darn that's good. Do any of the grogs here know where there is a web site that explains exactly how they did the measurements that accurately? I guess that is why they used 4 sensors - to get extra accuracy. Redwolf - Hyperbola, yeah that's what I came up with too. I steered clear of the maths though and just plugged a whole range of numbers into excel. Going by the graph, I figure their distances apart must been quite large relative to the distance to the guns to achieve the 25m accuracy. Major Boo Boo - Found my guns yet?

What's so gamey about running units around a lot to simulate lot's of troops at a point. Isn't that just creating a diversion. A friend of mine and I were discussing recently ways of achieving exactly this. Put yourself in a real life situation. You want to attack on the right so you send a platoon to the left and tell them to act like there's lots of them. They repeatedly move across an exposed point while sneaking back around to make the enemy think that the attack is coming from there. Once you see his forces move to combat this 'threat' you attack the right. That seems like a reasonable tactic to me.

A simple question to clear up the 2, 3 or 4 sensor debate - Where's my gun. Listening post A is 700m from listening post B. Assuming that sound travels at 350m/s and that Listening post A is coordinate 0,0 and B is 700,0 then what are the coordinates of my guns if B recieves the sound signal 0.371668s after A. Sorry about the numbers but I just chose a position and calculated the lengths to the listening posts using pythagorus and have left it as accurate as possible (WWII technology measuring to a millionth of a second accuracy - Hmmmm). If Major Boo Boo can calculate it correctly then he is right, if he doesn't/can't then his detractors are right. So - where are my guns??? Now to my real question. I have read here lots of talk about directional mikes being used. How accurate (in terms of direction) were they. Did they ever just use straight triangulation. The maths involved to time differentials is a real sod, while I was 14 when taught the maths for triangulation. I also have some doubts about the accuracy using time diffentials. The listening posts would have to be a very long way apart to achieve big enough time differences. A relatively slight change in distance forwards or backwards (along the y axis if the x axis runs through the listening posts) makes very little difference to the time difference. Does anybody know how exactly they got the time difference so accurately. If you add or subtract 0.1 seconds to the above example, it makes quite a difference.

Love the Hetzer as a cheap way of dealing with allied armour. Sides and top are a bit thin though. Any mortar bigger than 60mm will go through that tinfoil top armour. I always felt a bit gamey using them - they just seemed to give so much tank killing ability for their cost. How common were they? I suppose they are cheap because they are so useless against infantry. Either the StuH or the Wespe for infantry support. I love any thing with a 105 (or 95 if british) Just watch those infantry bail out of buildings when those babies start pounding them. At ~50 pts the Wespe gives you a fast moving artillery piece with plenty of blast power. Pays to keep them moving around a lot though as mortars can take them out (I lost one to a 2inch mortar once) The Panther or Tiger would be my first choice as a tank. The Tiger is better against infantry - the Panther is better against tanks. If I am short of armour points I go for the 234/1 or 234/3 to give me a bit better infantry support, fast, plenty of ammo and excellent effect.

MikeyD's mention of the squeeze bore reminded me of a question I've been meaning to ask - Why don't we see them in CMBO. Were they only used on the Russian front?

Just a thought, you could possibly have 'Position' flags, set by the designer, that are invisible to the players (to prevent deliberate flag hopping). Once a player holds a position flag it would not be abandoned. You could even build in dependencies of one flag on others to simulate supply. However - I am a programmer myself and attempting to stick new features into an almost complete project is called feature creep (at least here in NZ it is) Feature creep is like the bubonic plague to project deadlines and as I want CMBB NOW - please don't even consider adding any of these really cool ideas (that I keep reading on this board - not necessarily mine) if it means delaying my new toy. There's always Service Pack One for such things!

I have to agree with you Simon. You can give your forces orders that are, while not impossible, rather unlikely to be obeyed by any normal person - especially not a shocked or at least rather unhappy recently bailed out tank crew. JasonC (I think it was him) recently posted a real life AAR and it clearly showed that in real life troops were not as heroic as they are in the game. In defence of the game though, to make it playable (and fun) your troops do have to be fairly cooperative. It's frustrating enough now when your troops that have gotten upset go off and do their own (and often quite stupid) thing. Imagine how the game would be if your bazooka team just ignored your order to run forward on their own to take out a tank that you could see was vunerable

Just trying to confirm something in the current game. If I arrange my units so that I am firing from more than one angle, i.e. I fire at the flank of my opponent as well as the front, does this affect their morale more than if I simply have two units firing from the one angle. Also, will it reduce their cover.

<blockquote>quote:</font><hr> BTW, the real problem with the SdKfz 7/1 and 7/2 is that they are practically unkillable by tank fire when lead by a competent player <hr></blockquote> Redwolf - What exactly do you mean by this? I am not questioning whether you are right or not - I just haven't noticed this. BTW I agree that the Pill box is too vunerable to the light guns. I have come to the conclusion that if you are attacking then you should always buy a couple of light armed vehicles and space them fairly widely. I have knocked out numerous Pill boxes using this technique. Surely if the slit was that easily hit then it should be able to be knocked out easily with a 50 cal. A few hundred rounds of 50 Cal ammo pouring through the slot and ricocheting around would surely do more damage than a single small AP round [ 01-14-2002: Message edited by: Caesar ]</p>

I have had the situation happen to me where the other player plotted a short move for the tank I wanted to assault. My men were charging a short distance from woods to the back of a buttoned tank. Had they simply cut the corner (the tank did not move directly away from them) they would have had a decent chance of killing the tank. The assault vehicle command would have solved this issue. After all the men would have known that they were attacking the tank - not simply going for a short run. To solve all the problems of ridiculous ahistorical charges you could simply give the command a maximum range and perhaps load up the morale level required for the command to be obeyed and continued. Being able to tell the unit to target the tank and have them use their anti-tank weapons would be nice too. However, this should definitly be left for a patch unless it will not delay the release at all. I don't think it is worth delays - it's not that important.

I have found that using fast lightly armed/armoured vehicles the most effective antidote for Pill boxes of all types. As mentioned above a couple of them widely spaced apart and moving after every shot preferably moving to hull down positions is best. Their high speeds and high rates of fire seem to take out the pillbox most often. Another good trick is having a tank moving into and out of cover. It causes the gun to keep retargeting and never getting a shot off. The tank seems to be worth more than say a Daimler or Stuart tank and so it can often sit hull down for an entire turn blasting away without being hit.

<blockquote>quote:</font><hr> Sounds silly, but throwing things far and accurately is common skill with most North American youth. Gyrene <hr></blockquote> I think you should perhaps take a wee look at a game of cricket at the Melbourne Cricket Ground and watch fast bowlers achieving around 150 km/h deliveries and all fielders expected to be able to return a ball from the boundry to right over the stumps (three sticks in the ground about three feet high and placed a few inches apart). I have seen many fielders (none of them North Americans) able to hit a single stump. I would also think that the over arm bowling action used in cricket is probably more similar to the grenade throwing action than the baseball pitching action. Right next door to Aus you have New Zealand - the world softball champions (that's one of those stange world competitions where the whole world is invited not just North America)

How accurate is all this advice from a real life perspective. While I have little doubt it will work in the game (I shall be finding out very soon) is this how it was done in real life. When I have used AT guns so far I have given them as wide a view as possible while trying to give them some sort of tree/rough cover. This seemed like the obvious thing to do until I first fired at something and almost every thing my oponent possessed was unleashed upon my poor AT gun. In real life are keyholes sought? Do AT gunners expect to die soon after they open up. It seems to me that the AT guns die rather easily.