vbfg

That shows a whole heap of promise. Thanks for the link.

If they model spitting at the armoured front plate of the gun then these scope for the modders to do new sound effects for saliva hitting metal. I wouldn't expect penetrations there though. Except from the Finns...

If he communicates via wire, and he probably does, then he must walk.

Every now and again I'm prone to stack the odds totally in my favour in a QB against the AI. Maybe I'll pick a battallion of infantry for the AI and give myself 6 or 7 T-34 platoons with no infantry support at all. I did this last night and not for the first time I noticed that I was well behind where th enemy *must* have been without having seen him yet. Not unusual, he opened up on the tanks and buttoned them and they just couldn't spot. When I do this, purely for the stress relief of kicking ass you understand, often the only way to flush them out is to reconnoitre by fire. This seems to have a huge morale effect on the infantry, and they often just leg it as they did last night. Not just the troops under direct fire either, it could be a whole company or more. Infantry that I haven't spoitted, haven't fired on but have got behind and whose friends I'm firing on does seem to get up and run under certain conditions. Maybe it's a question of having enough firepower behind them that they can do nothing about...

Very well timed, I just finished reading Raus' description of this today. Thanks!

One of the best pieces of tactical advice I read on these forums concerned mortars, I think it came from JasonC but I'm not sure. Use them to get the enemy heads down on a point target like, say, a MG or a gun of some kind. When the enemy unit is pinned you can switch mortar fire elsewhere but follow it up with MG fire of your own to keep the suppression going. I've had mortars blow their entire ammo load on a gun before without killing it but they'll keep it supressed for the few turns they keep firing. Better to save your ammo IMO and use the HMG, which can often fire for close to the duration of the battle, to keep their heads down.

So much less frustrating when the other person is in the same or next room as you though. You do have something to do, you can walk there and berate them for taking so long. When your opponent is in Florida and you're in the north of England that's a little harder to do. [ July 11, 2003, 03:16 AM: Message edited by: vbfg ]

To be fair though, the MG42 probably didn't spot them. It just seemed to decide they were enough of a threat to abandon the cover arc for a wee while. That they knew the new infantry threat was there may well have been down to borg spotting.

I played a game this lunchtime against the AI where I had a platoon forward in a patch of woods and then about 100m behind in tall pines was a MG42. The patch of woods was 'L' shaped, but with the 'L' rotated anti clockwise 90 degrees so it was lying on its back and with the three squads arrayed along its back in a line. Their view to the right was slightly restricted but they certainly were in a position to fire on anything that came from that direction. They had no cover arcs. The MG behind had a cover arc which covered the area to the left of the woods where the platoon was located. At that time there was a strong counter attack going on in that direction. Something did appear to the right of the platoon but they, with no cover arc, and even with line of sight to this new enemy to the right, continued to shoot at the attacking forces to their left. The MG42, which was further away and had a cover arc directing it away from that area, turned to engage. I think it's entirely reasonable that those guys should, these new foes had turned up seemingly out of nowhere within 100 metres of where the MG was. The ability of the MG to spot units outside its cover arc didn't seem to be a problem though.

All our base are what did you say? </font>

There's not much you can do about it even if it is gamey. You can decide not to persue certain lines of thought but sometimes things just occur to you. The other day I played one of the scenarios on the CD for the first time and noticed that I was getting 88s as part of my reinforcements. I don't often play the kind of battles that warrant having them around, and I assumed the scenario designer wouldn't give me them and potentially upset play balance if I wasn't likely to need them. From that point on my entire expectation of the game was coloured by the assumption an armoured counter attack would appear, probably in the latter half of the game. Sure enough, two platoons of T-34s and a platoon of Valentines showed up. Of course I'd lost my 88s by then to an air strike as my infantry were clearing the positions I had ear marked for them....

There's always a chance, that's where my Encyclopedia of German Tanks of World War Two turned out to be hiding six months after the house move.

Are there other clipboard mods for CMBO? If not, this quote from that site might explain the lack in CMBB:

I've played this as Russians a few times determined to win the thing. Once I think I've managed to get a decent sized force forward into the gulley and they sat on the flags until the AI was forced to do something about it. I don't seem able to reliably convince my tanks that maybe this once speed is their best defence if they ALL go NOW! [ June 20, 2003, 07:02 PM: Message edited by: vbfg ]

The clipboard is the orders menu. Select a unit, hit space. The list of orders that comes up is the clipboard.

Not that I'm saying you're wrong, I have no idea. I just thought you'd like to know my source...

My source is Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky: The Intelligentsia and Power by Phillip Pomper. I think it's a quote from Trotsky. It's the only reference I've ever seen to the origin of his pseudonym.

Slightly off topic, and I don't think it's ever been proven that this is why he chose it, but a similarly literal translation of Lenin would be 'lazy man'.

Rock the Casbah - The Clash. Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeease!

I don't do it now. I'm just not going to say I've never done it. Thanks for the tip btw. I didn't know that. [ January 31, 2003, 04:02 PM: Message edited by: vbfg ]

Plus of course the obligatory request for a full game playback, preferably viewable from the perspective of whichever unit you choose as per the current playback now. Thanks in advance.

I'd love to see a means of viewing maps with contours and the like, even if only means dumping them out to a graphcs file. A good chunk of the fun of this game for me is making plans before hand. Often it's useful for seeing how the reality matches up with my intentions but that's not why I do it. I just like making plans. At the moment I'm getting the camera as high as it will go and taking screen shots of what's visible. On my machine I can just about get the whole of the Prokhorovka map this way but anything larger and I get stuck. I like the idea of an interface for selecting units riding on vehicles too. Just today it took me five minutes to select a HQ inside a German half track instead of the flame thower that was tagging along to warm the tea after the battle was over. I am cack-handed though I suppose, that might account for some of my difficulty. I'm not so keen on being able to click on a unit in an order of battle and have the game focus on that unit though. I can see the convenience of it but as a total noob' I often lost some units through not being able to find them. I rationalised it away as "well, sometimes a commander just doesn't know where his units are...". I realise now that there are other aids like bases and increasing the size of units that help find them bu those first impressions counted for a lot in my conception of what the game is. I'm not sure if anybody else sees it the same way but I think I'd miss that, it's part of why I got so keen on making plans in the first place.

FWIW, that I have this game at all is due to Fionn's AARs on combatmission.com. I can't remember quite how I came across them but I was searching for something on Google to which the answer was found in the articles section. I had a browse around, got reading the AARs and something in it appealed to me. I'd never been much into wargames before. I'd done a bit of D&D but nothing tactical in the same sense. Now I've been playing for 18 months or so and as an added bonus I have a whole new relationship with my Dad because of the game as he's got into it too. Nice one mate. Should you ever find yourself in the north of England I owe you beer and curry.

Marxist experience of marketing is limited I suspect. Perhaps they didn't understand the target demographic.

There's no way they can kill a Balrog with that ring! It's only 18 carats! BFC! Please fix or do sumfink!