Zarquon

Would there be a way of telling invisibility from a software bug?

dieseltaylor, I would prefer Vietnam. But adding another engine from scratch would delay the next cash cow by what, an *extra* three years? Of course I'm guessing but I do not think they can finance the company with CMAK or the sales of naval card games for that long.

Imagine you had a small software company with maybe half a dozen employees, one or two of which do the coding, while most of the others are WW II grogs. You have created a solid position in a niche market and your first (and only) product, now in its third reincarnation, has been a cash cow for about four years. You have spent these years, marketing it, researching the topic, polishing it. It kept you fed. And it still has a lot of growth potential. It features the most popular theme in that particular niche. You have an almost mythical reputation with your loyal fan base. While milking the cow some more (CMAK), you have already begun to invest some of your time (paid for by sales of the current game sequel) in designing and developing the next major version of your (only) product. To put it shortly, your capital consists of - the codebase, developed over many years - the design knowledge (specific to WW II, european theater) - your reputation with WW II gaming grogs Now, as head of that small company, what would you do (knowing that producing a dud will put your *small* company - small, no deep pockets, no safety net provided by the big mother company - out of business)? Throw it all overboard and spend the next couple of years working on a U-boat game? Indians? Roman legions? The battle of Shnapvlunereo, which happens to be enormously popular with about 150 prehistoric-warfare grogs in the world? Space warfare? The Sims: Stalingrad? While applying for a job at Wal-Mart?

Jason, it's obvious you know a great deal about the history and theory of warfare. You also know a lot about wargames. You have high standards. It is quite understandable that you wish for a product that reflects what you know about warfare. It would be a toy allowing you to play with it and test your ideas. It would have to include all the complex features that we talked about here, and maybe many we haven't touched yet. It would then be a detailed and complex simulation. For you, it would be a game. It is also understandable that you have become frustrated with long years of seeing games being sold as 'the most realistic military simulation ever' while all there really was added up to a generic pile 'em on with flashy graphics. So please excuse me for mentioning "fun". My interpretation of the original poster's intent was that he wants to design a game. CM is a good design IMO because it manages to combine a certain amount of realism - more than most games of that scale do - with an accessible interface and satisfying sound and graphics. The result is "fun" for many players. Does it attempt to be a perfectly realistic tool for simulating small-unit combat? I don't think so. To do so it would have to include so many features which take away control from the player that it would lose most of it's audience. So, does being a 'game' mean being 'dumbed down', at least compared to a fully realistic simulation tool? I think so. And I was was about to reply to your kind advice to go bowling but maybe I simply read you wrong. Actually, at times I enjoy banging my head against a brick wall, just for the fun of it! Maybe you should try too, it helps to put things in perspective.

It seems a fundamental design decision is: do you want to make it fun for the player or realistic? The complicacies of logistics, fog of war, the lack of reliability of subordinates, command delay, all this is realictic but it could easily mean that players will very soon refrain from any imaginative plan, anything that incurs a risk. Maybe that's realistic.

I think that step losses of the "8-4-8 becomes 4-4-7" are a thing of the past now. TOAW (I think) modelled equipment down to the last can opener. That's probably bean-counting overkill but it allowed for very fine reductions in combat strength. Also most computer strategy games nowadays already distinguish between pure firepower, morale and disruption values. Have that company march through a swamp at night and see their disruption/cohesion attribute drop to zero. I think that Airborne Assault addressed many of the issues mentioned here, including the unit commander's personality. And a boardgame maybe worth checking out is Victory Games' "Vietnam 1965-75", if you can find a copy. It's system of search & destroy operations is maybe not easily applied to the eastern front but the scale (battalions, 10km hexes) is about right and some concepts were quite unique I think, e.g. losses are calculated on the basis of *your* artillery points and the *enemy's* ground (manpower) strength and vice versa. The reasoning was that artillery doesn't care about how superior your force is; the more men you have in a hex, the more get caught in a barrage, the more you lose. The option of designating offensive and defensive reserves is another point that is missing from most other games I know.

I have no idea. 'Lock-laven' doesn't sound like anything I've heard in the game nor does it sound German to me. Perhaps if you could find the *.wav file....

Hmmm... organizing recon and small patrol actions could be a game in itself. Kind of "what happened before that big battle?". Most games in that scale center on 30-minute firefights and recon is included as a short paragraph in the scenario briefing, while the intelligence gathering before the battle took days to complete and was probably more important to the outcome than the force mix and battle plan. You'd have limited assets at your disposal (as usual), too little time (as usual) and your job would not be to drive the enemy from it's position but instead to find out where he is and what he has. At the end of the scenario, you would have to "write" a report: click on the spots where you think the enemy is and give an estimate of what is there. If you goofed, your side's artillery will hit empty air and your tank division will drive straight into a deep AT minefield at H-hour. Another thing is command delay (maybe that can only be simulated in a simultaneous movement game). A unit has orders to march to point X and began moving an hour ago. Now a report comes in telling you about enemy movement close to X. You order the unit to stop immediately and take up defensive positions but due to the delay involved (and some random bad-luck factor) the order doesn't get through in time and the unit gets chewed up.

40m it is.

Maybe the fire was started by an ampulomet? Whatever, don't eat that yellow snow.

Would the game be more fun if you could literally roll over infantry squads without having to worry much about getting hurt, as you have to now? Would the resulting player behaviour be more realistic?

Wow! This is impressive. I will test it, just one question first: how exactly (through what interface) did you get the data out of the editor? OK, two questions: how did you figure out the binary *.cme file format?

You've asked for it... ----------------------------------- (Knock at the door, sergeant enters, and salutes.) Sergeant: Two civilian gentlemen to see you ... sir! Colonel: Show them in please, sergeant. Sergeant: Mr Dino Vercotti and Mr Luigi Vercotti. (The Vercotti brothers enter. They wear Mafia suits and dark glasses.) Dino: Good morning, Colonel. Colonel: Good morning gentlemen. Now what can I do for you. Luigi: (looking round office casually) You've ... you've got a nice army base here, Colonel. Colonel: Yes. Luigi: We wouldn't want anything to happen to it. Colonel: What? Dino: No, what my brother means is it would be a shame if... (he knocks something off mantel) Colonel: Oh. Dino: Oh sorry, Colonel. Colonel: Well don't worry about that. But please do sit down. Luigi: No, we prefer to stand, thank you, Colonel. Colonel: All right. All right. But what do you want? Dino: What do we want, ha ha ha. Luigi: Ha ha ha, very good, Colonel. Dino: The Colonel's a joker, Luigi. Luigi: Explain it to the Colonel, Dino. Dino: How many tanks you got, Colonel? Colonel: About five hundred altogether. Luigi: Five hundred! Hey! Dino: You ought to be careful, colonel. Colonel: We arc careful, extremely careful. Dino: 'Cos things break, don't they? Colonel: Break? Luigi: Well everything breaks, don't it colonel. (he breaks something on desk) Oh dear. Dino: Oh see my brother's clumsy Colonel, and when he gets unhappy he breaks things. Like say, he don't feel the army's playing fair by him, he may start breaking things, Colonel. Colonel: What is all this about? Luigi: How many men you got here, Colonel? Colonel: Oh, er ... seven thousand infantry, six hundred artillery, and er, two divisions of paratroops. Luigi: Paratroops, Dino. Dino: Be a shame if someone was to set fire to them. Colonel: Set fire to them? Luigi: Fires happen, Colonel. Dino: Things burn. Colonel: Look, what is all this about? Dino: My brother and I have got a little proposition for you Colonel. Luigi: Could save you a lot of bother. Dino: I mean you're doing all right here aren't you, Colonel. Luigi: Well suppose some of your tanks was to get broken and troops started getting lost, er, fights started breaking out during general inspection, like. Dino: It wouldn't be good for business would it, Colonel? Colonel: Are you threatening me? Dino: Oh, no, no, no. Luigi: Whatever made you think that, Colonel? Dino: The Colonel doesn't think we're nice people, Luigi. Luigi: We're your buddies, Colonel. Dino: We want to look after you. Colonel: Look after me? Luigi: We can guarantee you that not a single armoured division will get done over for fifteen bob a week. Colonel: No, no, no. Luigi: Twelve and six. Colonel: No, no, no. Luigi: Eight and six ... five bob... Colonel: No, no this is silly. Dino: What's silly? Colonel: No, the whole premise is silly and it's very badly written. I'm the senior officer here and I haven't had a funny line yet. So I'm stopping it. Dino: You can't do that! Colonel: I've done it. The sketch is over.

You might have a look at the rules PDF for the Onion Wars IV campaign (www.onionwars.net). In essence it's fairly close to what you describe but has evolved over several campaigns to a format that is both detailed and manageable for about a dozen players on each side. <shameless plug> Or you could join a team to see how it actually plays out. </shameless plug> If you have only two players then 50 turns might be playable and result in more realistic fights. For a larger number of players 50 turns (probably mostly played by PBEM) take too much time, as you need to keep things moving. Same goes for the possibility of two battles in one turn. What's most important IMO is the GM's interpretation of orders and the scenario map design. Both of which must be left to the GM's imagination; you can only have some very rough guidelines about them. BTW, do you actually need victory flags? I think it creates artificial limitations on tactical options. In my campaign experience, at the end of a game it was nearly always quite obvious who controlled the map and who was beaten.

11,6 per day. I don't want to judge this, I am only curious.

I don't exactly know why, but I find Vietnam extremely interesting. I've read some books about it and even tried to design my own small infantry unit board game about jungle warfare (not that I know much about it, being mostly a caouch/office creature. Perhaps that's why...). "Comanche 6 - Company Commander in Vietnam" (James Estep) was nice reading. Based on this, I think the typical VN scenario could look like this: You command a US infantry company. Patrol the area for a couple of days. You have your platoons spread about the valley, marching through the underbrush. Distance between them is varying, but it could be a couple of miles. If you're lucky, you encounter a couple of VC/NVA troops, marching in pairs, carrying rice or other supplies, and blast away at them. If you're unlucky, you run into boobytraps on the path without ever seeing one enemy soldier. That doesn't mean that a VN setting couldn't be interesting. Hot landing zones, bunker clearing, 'bomb damage assessing' (running from crater to crater) or Hue-style house fighting could make for fine scenarios. But the problem is IMHO that all this calls for a slightly different game engine. The CM scale just isn't right. In CM, you have infantry squads and HQs as your game pieces. You can stage a bataillon fight if you want to. But a 'typical' VN scenario isn't about a set-piece battle, it's about ambushes. It includes smaller forces, with perhaps not even a company on each side. It would be more about individual soldiers than platoon-sized units. Half-squads should be the biggest maneuver units IMO. The engine must support realistic helicopter operations and that is quite different from ground vehicles ops. Command & Control issues should be more complex than they are in CM, if only the get that 'movie feeling' I guess most participants in this thread are thinking about (OK, this includes me). And the 'I'm here' feeling is what such a game is all about, isn't it? I'm not asking for Jesus Christ-death poses, slaughter of civilians (by both sides) or anything Hollywood. Only the scale should be focused much more on the individual than what is possible with CM.

That's what I call customer service! Anyway, it's only a 4 MB card, W2K installed.... I'll try. Thanks!

To play CMBB during the holidays I've installed it on my old laptop that has a S3 Virge MX+ graphics chip. CMBB offers only 640x480 modes here. These work, but the game cannot be played because some game buttons are not visible. This seems to be a DirectX problem. The DX Diagnosis tool reports a probelem with the Direct 3D funcions. I've installed DX 9.0b but it didn't help. Any ideas?

My two cents on this: I don't know the game engine, but my gut feeling is that if you're occupying 'crater' terrain - layered on top of the 'minefield' terrain - you should be safe. Lurkur, that still won't get you through 50

It might be helpful to know *what* was changed to make the wooden bunkers survive longer than in CMBB. As to my knowledge of the current CM engine, it is probably the silhouette factor of the bunker that was lowered, not penetration or armor values. Unfortunately, although the program treats bunkers like vehicles, it does not tell much about a bunker's attributes. But if it is the silhouette factor, you should see considerably less *hits* on wooden bunkers than on concrete ones.

Most here seem to agree that the answer clearly is a definite 'eh, it depends' Many random maps present you with a single building, overlooking your path of advance. Of course it has to go down very soon. Apart from obvious cases like this, it's mostly a matter of capability. If you face a town with multiple buildings, you usually don't have neither the time nor the ammo to flatten them all. But if you can identify a few that are very likely to be occupied, you can probably afford to rubble them. And a building that has just been rubbled is a much nicer jump-off point for your own infantry advance than an intact house that could hide a couple of squads, waiting for you. The only 'gameyness' is in knowing the battle will end after 30 turns and that every bullet and every shell you haven't fired by then is wasted.

a) Try tactical counter-whining. Kill his KV but let him kill something else in return. Whine louder then he does. Use a larger font. Exploit FOW. Tell blatant lies. "NOOOOOO! AAAHHHHHHRRRGGGH! MY PRECIOUS KUBELWAGEN WITH THE TWO 450MM ARTY OBSERVERS! BASTARD! HOW COULD YOU KNOW THAT? HOW COULD YOU EVER HIT IT AT MORE THAN 200 YARDS? CHEATER!" "YOU &$§%$ KILLED THAT ELITE WASSEN-FF SQUAD", which had only one panicked man and no ammo left, "WITH A SINGLE BURST! IMPOSSIBLE! GRRRRRNNNNMMM! HATE! DISGUST!" exit half your troops in turn 1. If you still win each game, you definitely have a problem.

It's purely a game balance issue, I think. The game forces players to use snipers the way JasonC just pointed out. They are quite expensive and you can't waste a shot if 10 is all you've got. So you have to pick your targets carefully. A sniper could carry 50 rounds but then they would nearly dominate the battlefield.

If you think about it, it's quite obvious. The air in the barrel creates enough buoyancy to keep the gun afloat; thus it's far easier to move it in water than on land. It's amazing what the CM physics engine is capable of!

Don't Bug Mention ... ???