Hpt. Lisse

You gotta wonder, if at no time in this title's five-year development cycle was an AMD processor used... I have to doubt that. Unless 1c/Maddox has been directly supported by Intel all that time.

Does Eastern Front even run on WinXP? Through an emulator maybe?

Thank you for the elaborations, gents, it does help make more sense of the stats provided.

Andreas - Man, even I raised an eyebrow to the "up tp 80% of Panther tanks" were destroyed from the air when I read it. But - and I don't want to sound like I'm badgering you - JonS excellent reports only serve to demonstrate the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of rocket & 500 lb. bomb attacks on AFV's. When a Panther had "been left on the road in perfect condition with full complement of petrol and ammunition," it wasn't KO'ed by a Sherman's 75 or 76mm gun. A perfectly good AFV which is abandoned due to air attack is still a loss due to air attack, so to speak... In the context of this thread, I think we're trying to ascertain the battlefield effectiveness of Shermans vs. Panthers, as in, the ones that made it to the battlefield (a la Combat Mission.) I do realize that not every Panther tank was commanded by Sgt. Barkmann. Do you or JonS have any insight here?

Andreas - I'm more than willing to accept this statement, if you kick out some data to prove it.

In defense of MikeyD's statements, and various twists on the statistics presented here - A large number of Axis AFV's were destroyed due to Allied air superiority. I recall reading (was it from the Actung Panzer site before it got pulled?) that up to 80% of all Panther tanks were, in fact, destroyed from the air. I know most/all of you gents are aware of this, but this discussion seems to be framed in an AFV vs. AFV manner. Despite the above-listed Axis fiascos, I suspect kill ratio of German vs. Allied tanks to be statistically more significant once we pull the air support kills out of the equation. A member here with access to the data should list the post-D-Day Axis tank losses in sub-categories. I'm sure the Allied tank losses during this time frame due to Luftwaffe action was minimal...

A few quick notes from a CM player on CoH: For the click crowd, CoH is a fairly impressive game, but not without numerous flaws. Among these: > The game is insanely fast - it needs a speed slider like Kato Kalin needs a carrer. With four difficulties, Easy, Normal, Hard and Expert, most players can't beat the computer on "Normal." > Yes, is can seamlessly zoom in to a beautiful high-res firefight - but to take the 10 seconds to do so is absolute suicide. The board/big picture must be managed every second, with frequent pausing along the way. > HMG's and AT guns, which have limited firing arcs, must be manually told to change that arc, even when threatened. > AFV's which suffer damaged engines are not immobilized, they just slow down, of particular annoyance when battling assualt guns like Stugs. > Even after the first patch, there are SERIOUS bugs. On hilly terrain, units can literally shoot through the landscape/escarpments. Axis AFV's occassionally become invincible when their health is reduced to almost zero. When depleted rifle squads (they're half sqauds of 6 men) are sent back to HQ to get re-inforcements, they occassionally become stuck there, permanently. (Important, because you many only have so-many units in the world.) Engineers will construct barbed wire/sand bag walls - and end up stranded on the wrong (enemy) side. Instead of hanging back at a good range, AFV's will blindly charge forward into enemy groups when ordered to fire upon them (as if "target that unit" and "bonzai!" were rolled into the same command.) Pathfinding is largely decent, but sometimes screws the pootch, particularly when it comes to AFV's protecting their vulnerable rear. I could go on, but you get the idea. CoH's point/resource system is well-constructed, and the single-player campaign is good. But there are many issues to be sorted out before I'd give this one an 8 out of 10. Relic may have given us the revolutionary Homeworld, but after playing CoH, I'm a little surprised at the gushing reviews. 'Course, if CMC or TOW would just come out, I wouldn't have to bother with lesser games...

So close now...

I'll tell ya the same thing I told Eric Young concerning GIC years ago: I want a little blood only to help discern my prone & hiding troops from my dead/wounded troops. I don't think it's too much to ask, have a non-blood button in the options menu.

Yep, right, soz mate, I was just looking at some plasmas, etc. I sit corrected.

...and the ratio you're looking for is 16:9. Not sure, though I'd be surprised if wide screen resolutions were not supported by TOW.

I think it's quite possible/probable that it's not an 88... just trying illustrate the inherent problems of non-arty types grabbing hold of whatever captured field piece happens to be around.

'We had taken the city of St. Côme-du-Mont and all the high ground surrounding it. We re-formed our units and dug in on a static line of defense on the high ground overlooking the river. Two troopers had one of the 88s that had been firing on us and along with two German prisoners turned it around and pointed it toward Carentan across the river. It was a large field type with oversized casings that had to be loaded after the projectile. While digging my foxhole I casually watched the troopers. It didn't dawn on me what they were doing, but they took a shell casing, filled it with small powder bags and tried to fit the projectile in the end of it. The casing was so full that they pulled some of the powder bags out and finally got the whole works in the breech of the big gun. Whether the German prisoners knew what was going to happen or not I don't know, but they gave no sign of it. Suddenly, one of the troopers yelled, "Now, Hitler, count your children," and pulled the lanyard. There was a hell of an explosion and when the smoke cleared a portion of the blacktop road was torn up and the whole rear of the gun was destroyed. The barrel lay on the ground and the four men had disappeared, except for one German leg with boot still on it. They never knew what hit them.' "Curahee!" by Donald R. Burgett. Page 138 of the paperback.

Tarquelne, MegaKill - Thank you for your pointed replys, and I'm in general agreement. I do understand that this project has been ongoing for a number of years without netting euro one, and I also have faith in 1C that subsequent patches will fix many of these issues.

Tarquelne - don't yell, son, it's rude. Myself, Uwe and others were arguing for realistic gunnery ranges for this game with MegaKill on 1C or Codemasters forums years ago, so just take a deep breath or two. If the change in animation technique is the culprit for no on-board mortars, then I'll gladly wait a month or two to have them. Same goes for the "interface" problem w/troops entering a structure. I suspect, however, that there may be more problems afoot - esp. with occupying buildings - than just interface problems. This all relates back to my previous question - who's willing to wait for Battlefront's design recommendations to be implemented?

True that, but a great deal of time and effort was spent coding soldiers for close-range combat - even gun crews and the such. This quote is from a IGN E3 article back in '03: "When a unit is told to throw a grenade, it'll have to put down or stow its gun, take out the grenade, and then chuck it (The first time this was demonstrated, the guy with the grenade actually got shot while throwing the thing, causing the thing to do a lame duck straight into the laps of some friendly units)." Fun stuff - it certainly leads me to be somewhat surprised that basic hand to hand combat wasn't covered. Or again, perhaps they played with it but couldn't get a satisfactory result from the AI, etc.

Tarquelne, I highly doubt they scratched mortar teams due to animation requirements (as we can see, they've been in the game build for years now) - this smacks more of AI problems with indirect fire units. Just like the coding for building entry exists, but they couldn't get the troops to behave correctly. Here's the 64K question for all of us: Would you rather - A) Buy the game as is, with some fixes (camera control, etc.), and hope they can patch these issues along the way, or Wait until a few more major issues were resolved before offering it up for sale?

As a long-time CM player and TOW dev follower, I was surprised to hear about the lack of on board mortars. Hmm, I wonder why? Or another one, roughly 18 dev months later... What's that you say? No dug-in troops? How 'bout winter time? And I'm sure this MG team would have liked to be in a 2nd story structure in this town... Sorry MegaKill, I'll still gladly purchase the game... but damn, this code couldn't be sorted out in 3 years? Yikes.

No kidding... though it certainly seemed like MegaKill was taking our comments to heart back then...

After following the development of Theatre of War (aka Battlefield Command) for 4 years now, I feel quite vindicated that the only upcoming game to challenge CM for my WWII loyalties will now be published by Battlefront. Article here There were a lot of naysayers out there, may I add... I do wonder how this will effect the CMX2 WWII title development, however.

Just a heads up - a number of video card companies are having large-scale RMA problems with this model card, especially if they are "factory overclocked" versions. Check it out eVGA seems to be doing a stand-up job of tackling this issue - I just RMA'ed mine (less than 2 weeks old), as eVGA has just released a whole new production run (different SKU's, etc.) that use different memory chips, etc. eVGA forum declaration My CM experience was BSOD citing nv4_disp.dll hardware errors after a couple hours of play - but it got progressively worse as time went on. They will start to fail 3DMark03 and 06, with flashing black artifacts on the 2D screen while trying to benchmark. If you're experiencing this, or other strange behavior with this model card, RMA that mother.

this is after a full format C: ? I mean, my laptop (933 MHz, non-CM playing mother that it is) came w/win2K, but I wiped it off and put XPpro on it...

Two more items, Foamy - Same thing happened to me this fall (Barton 2500 OC'ed to 2.1 GHz, FX5900, WinXP Pro, 3x256mb RAM, Epox NForce2 mobo) All driver hunts were to no avail., etc. No heat problems. 2 things happened simultaneously - I ran MemTest and one of my 3 sticks of RAM failed right away (annoying, PC3500 Kingston HyperX, maybe 2 yrs. old.) BUT Right after that, my entire mobo crapped out. Yep, bad capacitors, as so many have from that particular era of manufacture. With the failures ontop of each other, it's impossible to say which might have been responsible for the lock-up/beep freeze. (If at all.) So download MemTest (it's small) and give it a shot. Also, physically check your mobo for swollen/leaking capacitors. I'm sure Schrullenhaft has a link to MemTest here somewhere... Worth a shot. [ May 31, 2006, 05:53 AM: Message edited by: Hpt. Lisse ]

Is this your own build? Or is it a complete box? Power Supply does sound suspect... though that 9550 can't be drawing much... I see that listed as an AGP card, is this a NForce3 mobo then?

Gotcha. Have you run MemTest since the new memory module? Have you physically checked the mobo for bulging capacitors?