Tarquelne

It's as if what we see during "abstracted" actions isn't an accurate, literal display of the game's reality.

I suspect you're reading too much into the game's lack of facial animations or movement graphics to reflect an individual pixeltruppen's feelings. What we can actually see - rate of fire, say - is ambiguous with regard to the unit's simulated mental status. It's all a big, fuzzy ball of probabilities created by a host of variables that are difficult to determine from our end. You may be looking at one data point of a trend showing that suppression isn't strong enough in the game. But the game's got too much going on under the hood to demonstrate that from the behavior of a single pixeltruppen ... at least one in the ambiguous situation you've outlined. But it's especially fruitless, I think, to ascribe a particular mental attitude to a pixeltruppen and then judge his behavior against that attitude. Of all the fuzzy, hard to determine factors, what any single virtual-trooper "feels" at a given instant is probably the fuzziest and most difficult to determine.

When things go wrong you can have a devil of a time determining whether it was due to skillful enemy action, you messing up, or simple bad luck. Ex: In my current PBEM my Bren gunners have been killed within moments of opening up just about every time, it seems. Most of the way through the scenario I'm still not sure if it was something about the buildings I was using for cover, better-than-I-thought weight of fire from my opponent, or bad luck. Heck, maybe Ive simply had *good* luck in the last few urban scenarios. Or maybe there's something about the game engine I don't understand. Or a misunderstanding with the terrain. Or the weapons. Or good ol' observer bias. And, yeah, there's always the small but confounding possibility of a bug. I think the only thing to do is keep plugging away at the game, remain open to experiment, ask questions occasionally, and vent in exasperation when necessary.

I've been playing a lot of infantry-heavy scenarios set in towns lately. Well ... "a lot" for me. I haven't thought the troops too visible. As for entering buildings: I've sworn off using Hunt: Sneak for buildings that might be occupied (or when I'm, like, sneaking), or Quick if I think the building suppressed. Sneak seems to work as an "assault" mode. IME, at least, 'truppen have been pretty quick with the grenades and guns. Back when I sometimes kept squads together I'd occasionally use Assault. I should try it again sometime.

I find the LOS tool invaluable in trying to suss out the way LOS works in the game, but I've started avoiding using it when attempting to determine LOS between arbitrary points. It's been misleading too often. In its place I'm working on being more aware of all the factors - tiny rises in terrain, long grass, trees, etc - that influence LOS, and just eyeball everything. I'm not sure if I'm actually more successful at judging LOS, but at least I've stopped committing to plans on the basis of the LOS tool and then getting a nasty surprise. I've often thought about how different hedge fighting might be if you didn't know exactly where every bush and break was. I'd love it if there were a mode that tied the camera down. "No further than X from a unit." for example. Or even pseudo-first person, but that might just get frustrating. But I find it far too much bother as self-enforced rule. Especially when it's so much fun to move the camera around during a turn and see everything that's happening.

I agree. I played a PBEM quite awhile ago with a lot of foliage and trees, and finally came to the conclusion that you just can't count on foliage blocking LOS. If you can't see through it the units in the game can't either ... except sometimes they do. That strikes me as more or less realistic. CMBN is mostly WYSIWYG. Figuring out the areas that aren't can get frustrating. Come to think of it, most of those problems seem to be with LOS. I try to take the LOS-tool results with a grain of salt. Foliage of any sort - both ground cover and tree leaves - is especially problematical. If you've got a blue LOS through leaves don't count on units actually spotting anything. But they might. If you've got no LOS to an area with tall-ish grass and the LOS otherwise seems clear ... you're probably out of luck spotting Slow infantry, and any infantry is going to disappear quickly. But don't count on an enemy tank sitting there being unable to hit you. IMO this is something you just have to pick up with experience, playing the game and, most likely, getting bitten in the ass over and over by LOS surprises. I believe a lot of player frustrations, btw, are rooted in trying to micro-manage the units more than the game actually allows. (90% of the rest of the frustration would be trying to figure out *why* your squad was just gunned down to the last man. Poor morale? Bad leadership? High-skill on the part of the enemy pixeltruppen? Does that building not give as much cover as you thought? Or was the order you just gave very, very stupid regardless of the exact circumstances?)

At some point BFC will want to shed some of its CM fanbase*. They'll ask us to vote for one of scenario replay, extra TCP/IP features including full replay for both WEGO and RT, and co-op. Then they'll sit back and watch the bloodletting. *Older machines, Peng-fatigue, and Soylent Green stock.

Not even ritual purging?

I was using 2.5.4 - never updated because other than the seldom-used chat, it was fine. (EDIT: Not sure if it was 2.5.4, but it was certainly not the latest.) I just updated to 2.11.0. I'm not seeing the temp chat files appear. Or if they are I don't know where. Chat still doesn't work. At least, in the 30 seconds since I sent a message, no one has replied. (See, this is why I just use e-mail.)

I don't use chat much... could very well be Dropbox. It's temp files, Windows... my assumption is sheer perversity on Microsoft's part. There are files in the directory older marked with last-modified times predating this PC, the hard drive, and the OS. Here's some actual data: When I open H2HH 2 new folders/files appear in the temp directory. FWIW, this happens even if the DB client isn't running. (Or, at least, I've exited and I don't see the DB icon anymore.) The last directory formed was named "tmpkklgzo" The file inside is named: "chat_36074243940227.h2hh" And the entire contents of the file is: {"messages":[],"local_timezone":-43200,"current_seq":0,"local_daylight":1,"local_altzone":-46800,"h2hh_version":"2.9.2","last_rendered":0}

In Users/#account name#/AppData/Local/Temp I found about 1600 folders with chat_#numbers#.h2hh files (one each) in them. The few I checked were blank outside some stuff like ""current_seq":0,"local_daylight":1," It totals up to about 6 megs. Chat wasn't working with my H2HH install last time I checked, btw. (GaJ: Read my mind and dosomefink.)

It sounds like there's nothing to interfere with a human player changing plans on the fly so long as the units involved have suffered very little damage. (Plus, I assume, changed-plans shouldn't involve arty.) But it's going to be tough to get scattered, rattled units into new positions. So... perhaps plan and prepare for one group to do the breakthrough, then another the exploitation, then have some reserves tasked with mop up? Hmm.

I'll almost certainly use it quite a bit. With CMx1 most of my multiplayer games were TCP/IP. No replays is unfortunate, but with smaller battles it shouldn't make a huge difference. I tended to play smaller battles over TCP/IP anyway. Just out of curiosity, what makes TCP/IP replays such a headache with CMx2? Sheer amount of data? A matter of not being built into the engine from the beginning? Illuminati intimidation? (If it's the last one, if you deny it or don't say anything it's OK: We'll get the message.)

That's what you think: I've successfully lured you into shooting all my Green troops. Unless you just happen to have more ammo than I have men, you're doomed. (Bwahaha: )

Brain-in-jar technology has matured enough to greatly reduce the cost of Battlefront's payroll expenses and health plan.

Great news. I'd be tempted to buy MG if all it offered were the changes/additions listed in the OP.

It might be an improvement if we could express our displeasure with the game's ruling on a LOS with a little two-fisted persuasion. Perhaps a fighting mini-game? With cardboard you could try hammering something to become a little shorter/flatter when necessary. To clarify an issue.

DB, in opening files to generate previews and coughing up files to the Feds on demand, is just as bad as a personal computer. (With the - sometimes important - exception of having no chance to smash your HD before the lab gets it.) Note DB will remove DB's encryption for the Law, to save the NSA the trouble. If you want to make the NSA earn their keep you'll need your own encryption. Whenever you put files in the "cloud" you'll be told your privacy is important and the files are secure. Maybe the service is run by liars or incompetents, maybe not. Either way, you'll be told the same thing, any mainstream service will likely cave to the law, and any service you can't successfully sue if your data is leaked or lost is one you can't count on not to leak or lose the data. Here's the followup post from the guy who originally discovered the file-opening behavior: http://www.wncinfosec.com/opening-and-previewing-documents/ Like most convenience features it's a non-zero added security risk, in that it's another opportunity to create a vulnerability. If you're concerned you should either be encrypting your data or just not putting it on the public cloud at all. (The internet is hardly a bank vault. When you put files in the cloud they're copied multiple times in multiple locations and overseen by multiple people. None of this is particularly conductive to iron-clad security.) So this is really something of a non-issue. Real news is when someone finds a security flaw in such a service, and the jackpot is catching one actually leaking/mining data... Which the Infosec guy was fishing for. Good for him. (Give him the WH beat!)

Call it "Whose Turn is it anyway?" and, each time a new turn arrives, have it display an improvised joke based off a headline pulled from google news and a random noun. Heck, when I read the thread title I assumed that's what the program does.

Statistics is useful in identifying what's garbage and what isn't. When you researching a messy subject with a lot of "garbage" statistics becomes a primary tool. It works even better than sneering. Yes, really. Note the "more" in my statement. I didn't say all the cross-checking transforms the ratings into Truth, or whatever. But it does allow you... well, others... to attach more confidence to the results. Both in the non-technical and, loosely-speaking, technical sense of "confidence." Duh. But you can get measures of the reliability of a subjective opinion. The mere fact than a claim is subjective doesn't mean it's useless. You just need to start thinking about things like error bars when you use it. Lets be fair. In fields where being pig-ignorant AND obdurate are helpful, there's nothing a course on statistics can do but dull your competitive edge. More seriously: Even the hard sciences often have to use the sorts of correlation-searching, or data-massaging that the poor, benighted social science guys are generally stuck with using all the time. (Assuming they don't just drink themselves into becoming post-modern.) Understanding what statistics can and can't-do is a basic part of being scientifically "literate." I'm done with this thread. I'm going to go meditate on xkcd 386.

I'm not terribly interested in defending Dupuy. OTOH, I'm somewhat interested in explaining the difference between magic, guessing, and work in the social sciences. The overall point of may be: When you take a methodological description, then reject the relevant details and leave yourself with only a dismissive over-simplification, you're hardly looking at it "exactly." Yes. Most researchers have limited budgets and limited amounts of time. They have to replace asking everyone in the world, time machines, or god-like omniscience with DUM DUM DUM!.... statistics. The mumbo jumbo tossed in there describes why you'd be justified in trusting those subjective opinions more than you could under other circumstances. I guess the theory was that soldiers of different backgrounds might tend to be of different qualities, and they wanted to explore what may or may not make a difference. Of the 20+ things they tested only a handful much of an impact. The only one that surprised me was "temperature". And this study pointed out these were all just correlations. "Temperature" probably says more about "first world" vs. second or third status, or the general history of the nation than temperature itself. One might find out something interesting from following that up. Or you could just mock it. Tire pressure? What the heck does that have to do with saving energy? I suspect you're being sarcastic. If so, it looks like you misunderstood what was going on. They got their subjective measures, then they crunched some numbers to make them not quite so subjective, then they compared them to some even-less subjective numbers, then they compared all that to some objective numbers in an attempt to figure out which of those objective measures are important. Yes, yes, yes, that's all based on the assumption that three military historians they cross-checked against each other aren't *all* idiots, that the work in the QJM they also used as a cross-check wasn't a waste of time, that the people compiling the hard data didn't lie, and that math actually works. And, yes, it would have been better if they'd compared only objective measures to objective measures. Too bad nobody has any. OTOH, if they keep pursuing this line of research, maybe some can be generated one day. Yes. They'd be much happier if they could simply pretend they could isolate that stuff. I assume these guys are all too honest to be politicians and too ugly to be actors. Yes. When you can't measure something you find things you *can* measure, and then try to suss out any relationships. "Hard" scientists do this, too. A lot. No, he said he didn't have time to even try, but it seemed like a good idea. *Now* I can understand why warrenpeace said "deliberately misinterpreted." That's a pretty egregious mistake you made there IMO. Based on your next post - and the one quoted from above - I think you may have completely missed that the CEV numbers mentioned earlier in the thread came from a completely different method from the one described in the SCACE document. The "QJM" method uses a model - which does have subjective stuff in it - to crunch numbers on battles and, eventually, spit out the CEV scores. The stuff with the three historians and the demographic data was one part of a quick (less than 2 months, I think - one part mentions a "45 day timeframe") study. It was designed to identify what influences troop quality, not present a cast-iron conclusion about who had the best troops. But - and I think this isn't unreasonable - if you want to identify influences on troop quality it's handy to have some idea of the quality of the troops. And since you'll be using statistics, you need numbers. OMG, ninjad by Jason. Events beyond my control interrupted the composition of my message. And I had to move big rocks this morning - my fingers are tired. JasonC Good point. It'd go a long way toward correcting the method's blindness with regard to the larger scales. At the very least it'd aid in the examination of how willing armies are - or should be - in accepting losses when achieving objectives.

All factual claims about Dupuy's work are "IIRC": That's what statistics do, Sublime. They allow you to take an arbitrary number of different factors and scales and boil things down - if you want - to a single number. That doens't necessarily mean that number will be of any practical value, but - if you've set things up right - the number will accurately reflect whatever it's supposed to describe. (Heck - the Germans and Western Allies were also very different armies with different experiences and in different positions, and they came out only 20% different.) Dupuy basically had a model that he'd use to crunch the numbers for different battles. The model would describe the expected result. Differences from that result would indicate performance above or below average from one side or both. Do enough of this math stuff and you can pop-out the CEV numbers. The most likely place Dupuy messed-up would be the model. (I wonder how well he accounted for the defenders often-touted advantage.) By necessity - war not being as simple as baseball - it has fudge-factors built into it. Though that sort of mistake would be far more likely to throw all the ratings off, not simply assign the UK and the US similar numbers. (Err.. assuming he even tried. Warrenpeace can probably clear this up, but I don't remember if he looked for differences between the Western Allies, or just differences between the Western Allies as a whole, the Germans, and the Soviets. But I think sample size would be the only thing preventing a UK vs. US analysis.) Unless he was an idiot that wouldn't effect Dupuy's results one way or the other. Well, OK, arguably the very nature of the war could have changed enough to throw off his model, but that's sheer speculation. I very much doubt the model was anywhere near that sensitive. BTW: For at least the first round of studies Dupuy crunched the numbers on the battles the Army chose. And, again, that shouldn't matter when looking at expected vs. actual. It's like a CM scenario where the victory conditions favor one side because - assuming equally skilled opponents - that side is going to get crushed.

I am sure that operational ability - just like tactical performance - can and should be judged independently of numerical advantage. It's very easy to do a headcount and attribute the Allied victory to sheer quantity, but I'm not so comfortable with assuming that tactical ability - what Dupuy demonstrated - and numbers - rather obvious - were the only categories where the armies involved had significant differences. Especially if we want to seriously address "relative effectiveness."

I thought his method measured performance in individual battles. So in addition to not taking overall-quantity into account, it doesn't account for many operational factors and no strategic factors at all. Which, IIRC, covers the factors JonS mentioned. (Though perhaps not logistics.) For instance: A terrible decision relating to *not* having a battle (Dunkirk is arguably an example of that.) wouldn't show up in the CEV at all. Hmm... and the Soviets were supposed to be hot-**** operationally late in the war, which wouldn't contradict the 2:1 German to Russian CEV at all, assuming CEV is focused just on engagements. Anyway - Assuming that's all true Dupey's work is still pretty relevant here, in that it indicates that we do need to look beyond the tactical to explain differences in overall performance. Yeah - as long as they were intent on winning militarily they were doomed. I'd say Germany's only decent hope of hanging onto victory - more concretely, some of the territory it seized - was achieving a diplomatic solution before its all it's enemies fully committed to war. Poland made that far trickier than bullying Cz, France made a diplomatic solution quite difficult ("It's just a little bit of France! They'll hardly miss it!"), and Barbarossa made a negotiated peace utter fantasy. No chance of making-nice with the Western Allies and taking on the Russians one-on-one, defensively, or even - they could hope - with some help from an anti-Communist alliance. The real problem the super-nationalistic militarists - besides killing lots of people - is that they seldom know when to stop.

I believe I know what you mean. I don't mind some one-solution puzzle-ness to a war or strategy game, so long it's reasonable to expect someone to come up with the solution the first time they play, and (thinking of your bazooka guy) if the solution isn't too finicky. If you need to figure it out via trial and error, or if the slightest error or bit of bad luck can turn things around, then I'd call it a more of a puzzle (a type of toy?) than a game. No matter how many AFVs there are.