crowbar
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Posts posted by crowbar
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sorry but I think the consensus view that CAS couldnt hit anything worth while (talking armour not softskins ) is overstated
tanks dont have to be completely or even physically incapacitated - take the case of platoon leader, first company, schwere panzer abteilung 503. By the logic so far anyone in a kingtiger in normandy would be pretty safe, but since tank commanders would really need to be unbuttoned on road marches Hans Fendensack is surely not the only tank commander mortally wounded by jabbos
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after playing closing the pocket about 10 times now I am beginning to think the evidence trends the other way - about 50% of the time panthers getting a non penetrating hit sit like lemons or in one case with los to a sherman firing at it instead choose to coax mg at some infantry running away - could just have been a very dense crew but they didnt have to suffer for long ; (
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think this might solve one big problem with CMBN
for a game where so much time needs to be spent assessing the terrain and location of units the camera controls are still at theatre of war levels (bought 3 games hardly ever play any of them - moving the camera around is just too masochistic)
Im sure Battlefront has a lot to be proud of with their Shockforce generation of games - my one question would be have they seen what else is out there? have they seen the sort of modern war experience that flightsims like DCS Black Shark and A10 can give?
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only trouble is after replaying the scenario so many times you have a good idea where those us atg and everything else is going to be set up
not stonking the locations until they get spotted is a tough road
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"I find panning the camera with the mouse to be reasonably smooth, but you can't pan and move forward at the same time"
at 1280 res Id say its just about bearable - with hopefully higher resolutions in the full game my guess would be too much mouse scrolling
mapping something like zoom or pans to a variable input like a joystick hat or throttle could give a much more user friendly experience
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I tend to push all infantry and sdfz 234/1 s down right flank - but hate the low hedge - (there should be a least one gap) your infantry do get panned by all the brownings unless they are suppressed well
leaving only mortars mgs and spotters on crest
marders its a case of sidle up behind a tree near the crest slowly
panthers I ve tried racing into the commune a bust - and crest hunting
boy do I miss the cmbb search for hull down command - otherwise you have to realtime micromanage exactly where your afvs go and hope they dont decide to do a pathfinding 180 degree turn showing their ass to the yanks!
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closing the pocket scenario
max detail afvs and 1280 res original - though resized smaller by youtube
using alternate hotkeys do find the zoom and pan camera commands are not very smooth - is there any setting that will let us moderate them
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similar ending to the scenario - what tends to happen is both sides run out of infantry towards the end - shermans were camped on the objective markers and saw german mg teams (mg s not deployed) sent forward into the grinder and oblivion.
Not having more panzerfausts as equipment on german infantry teams is a real problem in this scenario - if more than the one squad had them it would be a closer run thing
also from the german point of view the right flank of the map shows up the low hedgerows as a pain - tried to bulldoze a route through with 2 sdkfz 234/1 and then 2 panthers as an alternative to having your infantry shredded by 3 brownings when approaching the flank objective
seriously not one gap ? had more than enough of that in brothers in arms games
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good job this game wasnt around 10 years ago - lots of 1 /300 th wargame companies would have gone bust
bocage has a big impact on tactics so far - for a game representing pattons blood and guts charging around the battlefield the learning experience so far seems instead to suggest lots of creeping around hedgerows with gamey pauses so infantry moving to a new hedgerow dont stick their heads up for too long
variable reinforcement isnt possible is it? ie how fast you cross demarkation lines would affect how much reinforcement your enemy gets
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after some serious slowdowns on this game every time more than 5 tanks were on screen - its one of the reasons I have ordered a new system - can someone post a reply here on what procedure should be if you are migrating systems
I remember seeing once something about needing to unregister the game if doing something like this but cant find the information again
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Ive only just got the game - and must admit my current pc spec is only just coping when it gets busy on a mission - the pause key certainly gets essential and los judgement with the cameras ideosyncracies is a chore rather than fun
there are some bits Im finding a shame though - with the textures and models being good quality the camera angle and view when you centre on a unit (enter key)to my mind seems wrong. Rather than being so close all the texture detail gets blown too large and the similar perspective issues between camera and model - does anyone else think the view ought to be above / behind the vehicle showing it in the landscape as well as its view
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I guess the topic seems to have split into 2 items now
"bagging a retreating enemy "
in all the examples quoted so far it seems to me that the psychology of the encircled troops is going to be the main factor in its success or failure
eg german troops in the ruhr - given their situation how many are going to fight hard to breakout and retreat eastwards?
eg france 1940 - most of the troops encircled by german forces could have broken out if their mindset allowed - it was more a lack of political will and understanding of new warfare methods
"montgomery"
there have been some very interesting posts in the thread - though talk of him being a political animal (along lines of say Eisenhower)seem dubious.A general trait of his seemed to be good man management at lower levels but terrible relations at times with those the same rank or above. He certainly understood motivation, & training troops (who lets face it change from being a small professional force to a national conscription army)- my reading of him would be as a bloody good divisional or corps commander having to work with the restrictions of his forces. Uk infantry or armour rarely had huge amounts of initiative or drive (barring their adventures in the desert early on)but they could hold their own when defending. By Normandy most planning of this time seems to me to be trying to find any new strategy to allow forces to advance into a position that the germans will want to take back (do night drives or mass aerial bomardment ring any bells)
Having said that Montgomery's planning of the Normandy invasion to my mind is far and away his best moment. Yes Market Garden was poor but a poor, badly planned Normandy (think Dieppe magnified by a few thousand)was well within the planning grasp of the vast majority of ALL allied commanders in 1944. When looking back from hindsight the one thing often not considered is how much worse it could have been
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ok I hope this topic doesnt get locked down but anyone into a real afv/wargame graphical revolution should look at
http://community.codemasters.com/forum
and search for the development updates and look at the screenshots.God knows what pc it will need to run it or if its ai will be up to the standard of the graphics but you would almost pay the price just for an animated wallpaper that good
crowbar
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IIRC, the movement rates were something like this:
Matilda: 2 hexes/turn
PZKW IIIh: 3 hexes/turn
Stuart: 4 hexes/turn
James Dunnigan once wrote that a good wargame always provides players with the illusion of movement; this one doesn't.
No Movement?
dont you remember the illustration on the back inside cover showing the size of a tank in a hex?
to be honest that matilda would have to shift some to do the 2 hexes
yes it was very close to miniatures rules - thats what I went on to for the next few years while waiting for a tobruk plus or something to come out in the shops. aint the internet great! now I find out theres a yahoo usergroup on it and all these supplements to it - though the prices suck a bit!!!
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With the imminent arrival of CMAK Does anyone else remember and rate this game highly?
I have to say it was my favourite wargame bar none - and I include squad leader et al - for a company size game it had what seemed a perfect balance of detailing what was important - the process of getting a hit on an afv - giving a good idea of scale in a boardgame - even infantry combat
ok I m rambling : )
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Quote
"A website with operational level 1941 info and maps from the Russian side of the hill -
http://www.serpukhov.su/dima/war/eng/eindex.htm"
I'd be a bit wary with some of the sites - after looking at the map site nortons av was picking up js.Exception.Exploit virus
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I guess what I dislike about driving each tank to a hull down position from a rear camera view is that you cant press a key to halt or change the direction of a tank's movement to get to the spot you want.
Yes you can have a similar view to a M1Tank Platoon type game but you dont have the fine control with positioning that such games give you. With CM afv's following the waypoints I find the process a lot more frustrating and time consuming than it needs to be.
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re LOS and HullDown
yes I am aware of the hull down command - to be honest though I didnt think it was implemented very well in CMBB ( does anyone else issue Hulldown for the tanks to trundle off into the sunset looking for a never found hull down site? - whereas if you chose a slightly differing route ... )Its not being able to AIM afvs towards hull down positions that grates - yes you can go to a camera view behind each tank and try to micromanage each one to find a hull down position but how many game turns would that take?.Correct me if I am doing this wrong or if I ve got this wrong but the hulldown state feels like its a mathematical bonus that gets assigned to a vehicle on a random but not very common frequency rather than having a tangible relationship with the terrain we see in the game.
I know that the graphical scale factor between an afv and the terrain is not 1 to 1 - and so the visuals we see in the game are an approximation - but for me a desert wargame by definition only increases the importance that the terrain has on a battle. With very few real differences in cover states on an unprepared desert battlefield LOS & response times are the only thing between a Sherman and its ronson state.
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can anyone tell me if the cmak engine is going to tinker with the los rules and the ability of players to find hull down positions in the new game. With the steppes of russia the lack of a true los tool was disappointing but for a desert environment it seems to me to be an almost make or break point about buying the game. If a player has to randomly search each point on the terrain again to try to find hull downs for me at any rate it would become a tragedy repeated twice. How about a tool where you choose first the point that you want to be hull down from and that then shows in a highlighted colour the potential hull down sites on the landscape. Does anyone else have a dream? is it impossible in CMAK?
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I m not sure if this has already been posted but finally it looks like movies can be made in cmbb on a non mac. I ve tried a version of hypersnap (5 ?) which can take concurrent jpg pics once a second and save them to disk. You still have to resize & create the gif or avi but at least it works. I ve made a couple of them so far : )
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this month pc gamer did a 4 page spread on what was ww2 rts but now is called Battlefield Command. Roll on next year is all I can say even if you can only control a group of 30. Lets hope that also means you can work with a platoon of 5 tanks!
: ) :eek: :eek: :eek:
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Has anyone got anywhere putting these two together? From what I read on the forum a few days back it didnt sound promising. I'd like to hear any success stories before trying it myself
thanks
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god I hope this one works better than the last - after the 60 meg download it crashed out almost at the start saying it was a corrupt download
woe woe
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so far to get it to work with the european version which I have got
there are 2 things
1) as mentioned find your CMBB folder and copy the CombatMission2.exe and rename copied file Barbarossa to Berlin.exe
2) dont unzip any of the downloads (either rulesets or mods). I dont know what unzipping and rezipping with winzip did to them but none would work until I redownloaded the originals
hope this helps
would it be worth saying DONT Unzip or lose the original Zipfiles on the CM HQ page??
Commonwealth module
in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy
Posted
if the screenshots are any indication I predict a lot of argument over what the correct colour should be for khaki uniforms - my guess would have been closer to the helmet colour
looking forward to this a lot though!