LightningWar

Didnt you hear? The FTP had requested the week off for the Holidays. Wanted to go see Mamma and Pappa FTP. It will be back to regular working hours after New Years Day. May be a bit slow as it recovers from the hangover. But just give it time. LW

I had to reply to this one hehe 3.On a personal opinion I F**king hate turn based games but CMBB is still ok. Close Combat is totally more fun constantly ordering your troops and not having them stop evry 60 seconds. They dont have to "stop". Sure in between turns they wont be moving. But that is the game .The corpses stay on the map during the battle in Close Combat. How the hell do you know what you and your enemys casualties are. You dont until the very end. You think Patton, Rommel, and Monty knew what the enemy had or what the casualties were? I can see it right now. Pattons rolls up in his jeep. Sir we are looking at about 1.5 German companies routed or wiped form the map. Patton busts out his handy unit selection lists. Determines. Hehe that silly German commnader has squandered 450 points. "Men" he yells "Give them hell. We have a 450 point lead on them!" 5.Better opening music. CMBB's music blows. Close Combat actually has a intro movie. not everyone knows exactly what the hell is going on, so give us an intro and tell us. Even I agree CMBB has some goody into music. Sounds like "The Wizard of Oz" on a bad day 6.why the hell is there a limited amount of turns. out of nowhere i could finally be making serious progress and then it ends and says total defeat. ROTFLMAO! Ya sure you were just about to make your move 40 turns in. But ended with a "Total Defeat" hehehe. 7.you are expected to be an Erwin Rommel in CMBB. Its cool how real it is, but please some dificulty settings. CMBB players are a different genre. They dont think having a Tiger tank for kill an entire Soviet infantry dvision is very realistic. 8.The Close Combat instruction manual explains the abilitys of each tank,gun,unit in the game. How the hell do tou know which unit is best. other than that CMBB's manual is awesome but its still missing vital information. Does it really matter when Close Combat is a quasi realistic RTS of WWII? I guess you learn by doing a little research. It is all about learning the game. I got all 3 close combats for 30$ when the third one came out. Well that should tell you something LW [ December 18, 2002, 11:55 AM: Message edited by: LightningWar ]

I remember when I first downloaded the demo for CMBO. I played as teh Germans and we had a couple of 105s.They started targetted american troops. I had my sound up real loud and was just waiting for the gun to shoot. Then B00000000M! I about jumped out of my chair. I was hooked LW

That is all they have to do. Deal with a bunch of whiney 15 year old console kiddies. LW

When you are driving on a rural interstate. Look out and start placing 88s in the right location to stop an armored advance. Anybody who has driven in I94 about 30 miles to the east of Fargo knows what I am talking about LW

Because of work ect... Last night sat down played an Axis attack on a Soviet village QB. I had 1 battalion of SS and a company of SS Fusiliers. 4 Panthers and 2 Stuhs. I must say the first time I played it back in Sept I got smoked big time because I was using CMBOs uber inf techniques But this time I took much more dilligent care of my troops and made sure they had cover fire from MG42s. And brought in the Panthers to keep the Soviet armor away. Stuhs to supress destroy soviet infantry. The game is longer but a lot more realistic feeling. Too bad for me the Soviets finally brought in some arty. Right as I was making an assault. Looks like 2 toons routed big time. I hope they can unroute themselves before the battle is over. I also like how on a defenders note if you can place your troops right with MG support a smaller force can indeed stop a larger one LW

I have seen this also. I had a MG42 covering my troops advance last night in a QB. They had a hull down like position in some scattered trees. They got spooked for whatever reason and tried to sneak back down the reverse slope. They kept disobeying my orders to move. Finally I just put a halt command on them and they seemed to obey that. Turned and started waxing some more Russians. As for the snow comment. This QB I am playing is a snow map. I suggest moving everywhere until the last second then running or assaulting or advancing. Use close tank support to supress any infantry who migh ruin your day LW

Arty team on the very far left of the map on a hill(CMBO). On turn 10 a squad from my enemy sarts shooting at them. What do they do? Run for the nearest cover which is where the enemy is. Needless to say they didnt last long in the trees with a full squad of germans. I went scouting with a kubelwagon. Roaming around my enemies back side when all of a sudden a Churchill AVRE is heading right at the kubelwagon. They narrowly miss each other. AVRE turns its turrets but doesnt get a shot off. We go around the back of the map for like 15 turns. This huge tank chasing around this stupid jeep. Until finally my jeep got a stray 105 from one of my guns land about 30 meters from it and they abandoned. LW

I got the game the week it came out. Tried it and havent played it much since. I was bad at CMBO and I really sucked at CMBB But I am going to try it again. In the few times I did play. I found the game to be much tougher than CMBO. The troops do get tired much easier and break much easier. The tiredness can be alleviated by not running them across the entire map but having them walk until they find the enemy. Send out a half squad a few hundred meters in front. When they get waxed you know where to drop the slow arty But I am going to try it again this afternoon and get into this time. Just had to much going on when I first got it and didnt have the time or energy to actually learn how to play. LW

I really think Motorola and IBM have hurt sales significantly. I don't know if the chip designs just wouldn't support the higher speeds Intel put out, or if they didn't have the money to throw at the problems, but the end results are processors that don't stand up well to the competition. They are good chips and fast enough for every day tasks and even really good serving tasks, but they are just not quite up to par." Actually the reason behind this is simple. The G3 and G4 are designed for embedded use. This means they require low power consumption and heat dissipation. Most of the G4s and G3 end up in switches and routers. I bet a small % of them end up in a Mac. So the gutz of the business for IBM and Moto are embedded uses. Apple is left with whatever time they can devope to ramping the chip. IBM and Moto could probably get the thing upto 1.6Ghz but it would eat alot of power and produce a lot of heat. But it wouldnt make a lot of sense for them to do this because the main aim of the chip wont buy that. Apple made a poor deicision when picking the G3 and G4 as their desktop flag chips. Because the manufacturers of the chip are not interested in ramping the chip for Apples of purposes. Now this watered down version of the Power4 should be interesting. The Power4 is a server class CPU with a lot of power behind it. But again in the big iron world clock speed doesnt matter as much as scaleability. Power 4 appears to scale(>8 procs) very well. But will Moto and IBM ramp the thing? Who knows. LW

Since the PowerPC chip processes twice as much data per clock cycle as a Pentium, a 1.25GHz (actual speed) G4 could actually be as fast as a 2.5GHz Pentium." Dont believe the Apple propaganda machine. The G4 gets about the same IPC as an Athlon. Twice as much is a pipedream. No matter how hard they try to create obscure photoshop benchmarks. The plain simple fact is. On everyday programs and applications the G4 is not anywhere near twice as fast as a P4. For starters up until the last couple of months the G4 didnt even have a DDR interface. It was living off PC133. That is memory bandwidth starved. LW

The difference between OSX on an old G3 and a modern DP G4 are huge.Windoze users wouldnt even attempt to run XP on underpowered hardware. Yet Apple gives Mac users the option because of the longer life of their products and all people can do is whine !" Define underpowered for a PC. Most likely at this stage in the game high powered for a Mac What are you guys at 1.2Ghz? That was so 2001 And is not even really low end for a PC anymore. Surprisingly XP if given enough ram. >256MBs seems to run pretty quick. Quicker than Win2K for the most part. I still run Win98 for games, Win2K for my workstation, and XP on my laptop. Well rounded LW

Soviets get a lot more armor. And just like CMBO once you have control of the armor you can walk the map with some patience. In the few IP games I have played. I got a couple of Stugs and maybe a captured T-34 vs 4 IS-2s or 3s? And a ISU-152. Even on a good day I have no chance. I could take 1 Tiger but since most maps are not wide open fields but resemble CMBO. That is worthless also. Tiger is no match at the ranges I am playing for 5 tanks. So after my armor is killed off it is only a matter of time before they rout my infantry. Especially since Infantry seems to rout if a stray round lands within 100 feet of them. LW

Funny you mention this. Because yesterday I decided to install my V4V games from Atomic. I believe they are computer versions of AHs game. Anywho I am right now playing Velikye Luki battle, full campaign, as the Germans. Right now I just got done encircling and eliminating a large portion of Soviets using the 83rd, 20th Motorized, and 8th Panzer. I setup the 83rd on the outskirts of the town to take the brunt of the hit. I put the 20th motorized and 8th Panzer to the south. Using the 3rd Gebs to shield them from Soviet forces coming in from the South. After I finally got the 8th and 20th in place I launched my attack at dawn. I tore through the lines with the 83rd heading NE out of the city. This created a great opportunity which slowed my attack up by a day. But it split a descent sized spliter group off the already large Soviet force. So I turned 80% of the 83rd to the NW and finished them off before sending them east to encircle the soviets. I took the 20th Mot and 8th Panzer and pushed east from their southern positions. After 2 days of fighting the 8th panzer and 83rd met up on the other side of the Soviets. While the 20th Mot smashed into their lines a little west of the link up. The encirclement was complete. I squeezed them as they tried to break out. Eventually most surrendered and the rest were decimated. The soviets sent up a contingent of infantry to help from the south but the damage was done and by this time I had the 1SS I believe just setting up and using them I encircled yet another force of Soviets. By this time the Soviets have shown up with large Tank and Mech forces. I am currently in retreat with the 83rd to get back into the city. While I am organizing the 20th Mot, 8th Panzer, 1st SS, 291st, 3rd Gebs and eventually the 1st FJ division to again break through SE of the city then turn full north to try and encircle he new forces the Soviets have shown up with. It wont be easy and I am debating launching early because the Soviets forces are already on the outskirts of the city and the 1st FJ isnt due to show up for a day. But yes it would be cool to try and adapt CMBB and These types of games LW

I got an Inspiron 8200 about 5 weeks ago. It has te GF4 440 Go in it. Runs CMBO and CMBB great. The ATi 9000 is better so I would imagine it should run it just fine. Unless there is still that fog bug. LW

You seem to hold a bias view. What other major offensive was there besides the Bulge that late in the war? After Kusrk the german army was more or less spent. Not enough equipment and manpower to stop an overwhelming soviet army. I remember reading about the fall of the belorussia. German man power figures were staggering. Divisions at half strength. Sometimes at a 1/3rd. So we need to look at the bulge as the last real offensive by the Germans. Anything else was just a delay action to try to somehow stop the Soviets in the east. Now my opinion is moot. I dont really have one. But I dont really agree with you dismissing the bulge as a counter example because of the terrain. LW

Such a computer does not currently exist. The largest CMBB scenarios exceed current computer limits, at least computers that are x86 based. " What does that mean? LW

I guess if I remember right. If you request a cease fire and your opponent doesnt. The game would go on right? So keeping it secret is really pointless as if you actually want a cease fire you have to get the other side to also request a cease fire. LW

I have yet to see an artillery spotter arrive as the first of his force in SMG range." w00t! You mean I cant expect hordes of mortar teams to lead that rush of tanks and SMGs? LW

Game machines HD has 40 GBs. It has 22 GBs free. No need or desire to erase CMBO from my machine. And not to mention I could possibly want to play it LW

You forgot the Cuban Bocage Crisis. We didnt send those ships to escort those soviet supply ships out of there because of the threat of wimpy nukes. Those ships were laden with bocage and deadly. This probably ties in with the theories about the second gunman on the bocage knoll. LW [ September 25, 2002, 11:53 AM: Message edited by: LightningWar ]

Tank really is a smaller package than most would think. LW

Got it on Monday. Not sure when Ill get home to play it. But I think the realism will help a lot. CMBO was a great game. But it just seemed to easy for a perfectly placed arty drop to crush an enemy. To me the game just became an arty slugfest. Whoever scored the most hits won the game typically. I am hoping the arty is better in this version. I am also glad the MGs work better and surpress that uber infantry. Tanks with moral is a huge increase in realism over CMBO. Where a lone TD could stop an entire column of tanks and infantry if placed right. But again without playing the game I cant say for sure if it is better. But it just seems like it should be LW

Cant wait to see all the new mods for this game. This one already looks great LW

You guys get mail on Sundays? Anyways I got mine yesterday. But wont be able to play it till Sat if I am lucky LW