Steiner14

Damn, they are fast.

1. Option to show the waypoints of all units (it's so tedious, to coordinate synchronous movement without that; and i'm afraid it will become a nightmare in big battles). 2. Option of colored command lines showing the C2 quality. ps: the rest can stay as it is pps: a brilliant product.

Yes, propaganda can turn people into the demons it invented while they don't even recognize it...

Ever heard of the DESIGN FOLLOWS FUNCTION principle? And i don't know, if your tracer-spotting suggestion is meant seriously. If there is no shooting taking place, then there are no tracers. Now an awful clickfest has to begin, to find the borders of the C2-range. Command lines would make gameplay much better.

Will try, thanks.

You can overcome the problem i described above? Please explain i want, i have to know!

But you don't know, what range the commander and the gunner estimate. Maybe they estimate 100 yards and then 300 yards?

Have too agree, too. Now you can decide, if you want to move the ATG 8 meters deeper into the wood, or out of the wood. 8 meters from a reverse slope position without LOS to a forward slope position with LOS. 8 meters forward if you are behind a building or stay out of LOS. For RTS it is necessary, that the game engine can make calculations fast enough, but for WEGO this does not apply, since there is no time constraint for the resolution of the turn. It would lift CMx2 to another level, if WEGO players could decide for a much better and finer resolution at the cost of longer turn-calculations, while the RTS-mode stays like it is.

Don't forget, that the calculated median target distance of a good TC and a good gunner with flat trajectory guns like the germans had, usually were precisely enough to hit the target with the first shot.

For players who plan to upgrade their hardware, it would be great, if CMBN-players being able to play with BEST/BEST settings already, would share their hardware specs. Reference battle: Busting the Bocage (US-side) Graphics card (driver version): CPU: Amount of RAM: OS: Resolution: Unit detail: Texture detail: Antialiasing: MIN frame rate i noticed during the battle: Please provide your subjective impressions: 1 (absolutely fluid under all circumstances) - Perfect! I'm ready for bigger battles! 2 (fluid under most conditions) - Almost perfect! 3 (quite fluid and nice to play) - Satisfied for now, but if the system would be a bit faster, it wouldn't be a mistake - for big battles, i probably will have to reduce details

Is this meant to be an advertisement for the forum the AAR is posted in, or for CMBN since registration is necessary to see the AAR? Why are the AI's tanks buttoned down from the beginning?

More important would be the possibility of heavily dug in ATGs. Ritterkreuzträger Otto Riehs knocked out more than 10 soviet tanks from a forward slope position: the gun was dug in deep enough, that only the barrel was visible above ground. That makes a tiny target. I think it would also add to realism, if there would be the option of moving ATGs quickly away from their positions and move them to prepared fallback-positions ("Stellungswechsel"). In CMx1 ATG-crews always were fast as snails and with survival rates like nailed down Kamikaze.

Surely i want debt money to vanish. ps: And it will anyway. It always has.

Gold is the money of kings. Silver is the money of gentlemen. Barter is the money of peasants. But debt is the money of slaves.

Hi Moon, i will not change my ISP, since it is the best and cheapest for me and i could order from another computer anyway. The problem with the security system obviously is, it doesn't work with providers that use NAT. The statement, that the blocking was spam-related, seems not to be true, because TOR-nodes are also blocked after a few minutes and the IP has to be changed again. What i don't understand is, that you are not really concerned about blocking customers with ISPs using NAT from your shop and website, but more concerned about fighting spam.

from my computer. The spam-protection software still seems to block my ISPs-address because it erroneously thinks it was from a spamserver or something else. Therefore i cannot preorder - and i guess all other customers of that ISP, too. Forum access still only possible with TOR software. I had informed the Admin about that issue already some weeks ago, but it seems nothing has changed. ISP: www.bob.at

Steve, are there any plans to reduce the map-edge problem, i.e. by giving scenario designers a tool like areas of incoming fire from outside the map?

+1. Are they moddable?

Pawter, my pleasure.

Hi Pawter, i was really surprised to read so many agressive and ad hominem posts although the problem you described is well known to every better CMx1-player. It's obvious, that most of them never have played a ladder and never played against very strong opponents. I fully agree with your observations and i think i have found the answer to the problem you describe. Maps are essential for operational planning and movement (and artillery). What it means, if an army doesn't have any maps about their own area, but only of the area, they plan to attack (millions of maps of Germany, but no maps of the own land), everyone can study in the first weeks of Barbarossa. But i don't think that fog of war including the map would have such a huge influence on the tactical scale that the extremely heavy tactical concentration of forces in CM would become reduced, because IMO the reason for that problem lies somewhere else: Most CM-battles tend to be balanced, especially when playing ladder. That means, you know that the enemy has roughly the same force like you. Since the appearance of CM, the beginning of CM-ladders and Admiral Keith's(?) fantastic scenario depot, the balance of a scenario has been a quality measure on it's own. And that has been the problem since. The one who concentrates the forces more than the other in balanced battles, can eat piece after piece from the enemy's force. Playing unbalanced battles, or even better, battles, you simply don't know, how strong the enemy is, forces you to a much more realistical spreading of the forces. Then you have to hold back mobile reserves, because the enemy could come around from somewhere with big and nasty surprises. Example: Ladder game, balanced meeting engagement or a quick battle. You invest your money in two tank pltns with the best bang for the buck, the map has two victory locations. Once you have ID'd that your opponent operates his tanks in separated pltns, each one for a VL, you concentrate your two pltns and knock out one ofter the other of his pltns. But playing a scenario, where you simply don't know if the forces are balanced or not, such an approach is highly suicidal. The enemy could have even a whole tank company AND plenty ATGs waiting for you. You go with your two pltns for a pltn of his tanks and that is only a bait and suddenly you are trapped in a beautiful ATG crossfire. :mad: Therefore i can only recommend to forget the fetish of balanced scenarios and try unbalanced, unknown ones - and hope, scenario designers will build more scenarios of the type: Expect the unexpected! How many scenarios of that type do exist? How many do exist, where the intelligence info for one side, or for both sides, is totally wrong? There are endless possibilities and WWII was full of such actions. I really hope that will change.

When i started to play CM i learned the basics purely against the AI and that was by far enough to be fascinated for quite some time. Later, when the AI was no challenge anymore i began to try this strange PBEM thing for the first time. Wow! That was a revelation! A complete new gaming experience began. Tasks, that worked against the AI, suddenly became very difficult. Because of stronger opponents, soon i had to learn how to read CM-maps to get a slight advantage over them. Careful planning and execution became prerequisites to have a chance against better and more experienced oponents. While the AI forgives tactical mistakes, and time to correct them, a good oponent does not. That was one of the most beautiful lessons, after playing the AI had become boring. When i got better and was winning against most of my randomly picked PBEM-oponents, and with the experience of vanishing oponents if their situation had become uncomfortable, i began ladder-playing. After around 40 battles ladder-playing became boring, too, because ladder-playing means playing meeting engagements and balanced battles only. Since i had a very high winning streak, i knew i had understood CM-tactics well and that was no longer a challenge, since reaching the top of the ladder would have meant to play much more games, all of the same. But i didn't want to play meeting engagements only, but was interested in the whole variety CM offers: from highly unbalanced attack and defend to historical battles. I wanted to learn, how an attack against a heavily entrenched oponent has to be conducted in CM, or how a defense could be played against much stronger attackers. That was the reason, why i stopped ladder-playing and kept playing with a handful of players, that had proven very strong and reliable oponents. And to answer your question: playing big battles with such oponents is a great experience. BUT: They easily can span over several months and therefore you need to know your opponent well. Bigger battles do not always mean better, but they offer aspects, smaller battles cannot: Having battalion sized forces at your disposal, on a big and wide map, and an enemy, that could have weaker, but also could be two- or threefold stronger than you, and you have to think very carefully, before you decide, what to do with all those units and where and when to move them, while you know, your oponent is a very good player, who will merciless punish you for every little mistake, is a great experience. Smaller battles quite soon reveal the whole picture. In smaller battles one or two good moves, or losing one of two or three tanks, can also flip the coin torwards one side. But big battles can stay undecided for a long time, since single losses have a relatively smaller impact on the outcome and they contain enough units to compensate for bad luck. In big battles more surprises later in the game are possible, because of the amount of units and the size of the map. Big battles also allow real world tactics with flanking movements over several hundred meters. Therefore i would say big and huge battles are great- IF the players on both sides have enough tactical experience to handle big forces on big maps and have enough knowledge about each other. Therefore i wouldn't recommend big battles for beginners, but for very experienced players with enough patience they are very entertaining and somehow the crown.

I see two key problems: 1. That CM doesn't offer an import/export function, that allows to pick units and their condition remotely, i.e. via an Excel-sheet or a comma separated format and that it doesn't export the units and their condition after a battle. 2. That CM doesn't offer an ending of the battle, without judging the outcome. I think, IF these two functionalities would be offered to the gaming community, we would in no time have very interesting developments of meta-campaigning, since it would make it very attractive for single persons to experiment. Who says, that a meta campaign must be huge? What about a meta-campaign, modelling the historical battle on a map of a few kilometers? Without CM supporting the efforts of meta-campaigning, i think they will always tend to be planned way to huge with the problems, that JasonC described from his big experience in that field. Instead of beginning gigantic and then being forced to shrink from campaign to campaign, because of the natural real world restrictions, an organic grow from small, thrilling and successful campaigns to bigger ones would be much better. But for smaller meta-campaigns that are really good to handle without much overhead, becoming attractive, imo CM has to offer the community an interface. Maybe the big success CMBN surely will become, could change Steve's mind to take a few dollars from his soon busting pockets and pay the few hours of development of such an interface? :cool:

Nidan1, good to see you're fine, and around. I still remember about our last battle "Bridgehead at Fedorowka" (my last CM PBEM game).

Question: Aren't the dimmed colors of the unit bases a step backward from CMx1? In CMx1 they were really great for orientation and in the replay phase, before first contact (or when observing a certain area), you could zoom out the map and fast forward the replay-phase until you saw the first enemy green/red/blue unitbase-color appearing. You will not come across this often in RL, because moving tanks into infantry's terrain without infantry protection is forbidden and suicidal. Also a thanks from here for the video - better than nothing. But the realtime clickfest and permanent camera movements, while interesting action is moved away from the screen, makes me sick. Couldn't watch the video to the end. Why don't we get a WEGO-video, where CMBN can show it's strengths modelling tactical combat and where the action is shown in it's full glory?

Good footage, thanks. If you only know the official scenes, then i can tell you, you have seen nothing yet. From what i have seen, the good films obviously have been locked away (or maybe destroyed) and only the worse ones have been made public. This clip contains some not so bad clips, where the viewer can get a slight impression of the fighting and how the german soldier behaved in action (i have seen the Leibstandarte in Kursk in a 20 minute color footage in a private presentation and i can't describe that in words). There even exist long color movies from the first days of Barbarossa, where the Soviet airfields full with planes go bust, or color movies from STUKA-pilots in action (face and unconciousness), or the desperate attacks against alliied bomber-squads and lots of combat action, where you can see NCOs' and officers' faces seconds before leading the attack.