Carl Puppchen
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Posts posted by Carl Puppchen
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I recently updated my site with new scenarios.
- the 2 scenarios that Hans sent me are awesome - they are CMAK scenarios #21 and #22. The maps are great and the briefings are great, too. Much better than mine
- I added a new CMBB scenario #4 with factories - this is a brutal scenario with heavy action right from turn 1
- I updated several scenarios based on feedback received
Here is the link
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Really... you think that judged against the other commanders on this list Churchill and Washington are in the mire to the same degree as the others. Who has cleaner hands than these 2 on the list?
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It is interesting -- this thread says greatest commander of all time. That means that it covers more than just tactical prowess, or how many battles won / lost. It also covers the LEGACY that the commander left behind.
George Washington ably led his men throughout even when the mood was dark and it seemed that there was little chance of success. His leadership was very strong, and this is a key element of command.
Another key element of command was political - clearly Washington left behind a democratic system of government when most of the rest here were despots that left behind little more than rape, pillage and destruction.
Also interesting to compare GIAP to Washington - I do think that GIAP was a great commander, he led the fight against foreign occupation of his country, and as occupier we were pretty much following in the footsteps of the French, unfortunately. In the end, however, GIAP will be a footnote as a commander, since Vietnam will just become another eastern mercantile state, they certainly aren't going to be communist forever.
Also interesting on this thread is the apparent lack of judgement from a moral perspective on these commanders. It is well known that the Mongols were brutal conquerers, as well as many of the rest, killing or enslaving their enemies and all non-combatants in their path. I guess that doesn't make someone a "bad" commander? Not my opinion.
Is the best judgement of a commander how effective a killing machine they were?
Certainly when farsightedness is linked in then Churchill, who was always way ahead of his people in fighting fascism, leaps to the top of the pack, as well, despite clearly having many military errors under his belt.
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George Washington. He led the war of independence against the British and held on during bleak hours, rallying his troops with the occasional victory, until finally (with the help of the French and some bad English tactics) he was able to win a convincing victory. Beyond just the military role, he set the stage for the first major functioning democracy since the early Greeks (although the British clearly had some elements of democracy).
If you add in the military, plus the political, plus the strategic, Washington stands tall among the leaders on this thread.
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Against a human opponent in my Cassino / Abbey Hill random scenario a company commander group of 6 had 46 casualties - that is a record for me.
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Your wikipedia link to atlantis doesn't work because there is an extra "s" on the end, else very interesting
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Sometimes you have to play vs. the AI because you don't have an opponent - I do it myself.
But against a skilled human this is a very difficult scenario for the Germans. The Russians have tanks that are basically invulnerable to German AT fire as long as they don't creep within satchel charge range and, unlike the Russians in real life, a skilled player will use combined arms tactics with some infantry moving up and overwatch and as soon as the Germans open up they will be pulverized by 76mm HE fire and MG fire that they can't silence.
This is a very hard and frustrating game to play as the Germans. I am not saying that someone on this message board won't challenge and say they played it as Germans vs. a human and won in a walk over but against a Human my opinion is that this is an extremely hard scenario to win.
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OK, I will check my email when I get home.
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Can someone email me or direct me to where I could find the list of BMP's for CMBB? I was able to find the vehicle list for Germans and Russians but not the terrain list or the infantry / guns. Would appreciate it.
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While you are going through inefficiency there is the whole Russian part of splitting resources between The Party, The Internal Security (NKVD, or KGB) and the Army (broadly defined). These three groups were also generally at each others' throats, with the party / KGB (I will call them KGB even though they had many names over different periods for ease of convention and because it continued into the post war era, and even into today...) having superiority in the 1930's and into 1941-2 when many of the excellent officers in the army being purged.
These forces jockeyed for power throughout culminating with Stalin's removal of the commisar as the decider of military authority in 1942 and re-establishment of traditional battlefield ranks, etc...
After the war Stalin once again went after the Army, viewing Zhukov as a potential threat to his power base. The party is reduced in authority in Putin's Russia but the battle between the KGB and the Army continues, as internal security forces are still quite substantial.
I don't know if you can quantify the net "drag" on the Germans from their overlapping and semi-dysfunctional organizations vs. the loss of talent to the Soviets from the KGB purges of officer corps... that would be an interesting thread, too.
Of course in China you had the Chinese communist party and the Nationalists running a civil war at the same time they half-heartedly battled the Japanese.
And French / British cooperation in the early war was not optimal, as indicated in the battles in Belgium and the fiasco in Norway.
Later in the war US / British / Australian / Canadian cooperation was quite good, in comparison, even if there were many areas where it could have improved.
In any dictatorship it is critical that no one arm of power become too large, and overlapping and battling fiefdoms are the norm. This is one means of assuring that no one became too powerful. I guess you could say on the US / British side these brakes were applied by the civilian / military authority disputes, which of course reached all the way into Korea when McArthur was dismissed by Truman...
Excellent posts by others, as usual, summarizing the WW2 Nazi organizations. You can learn a lot of history on a battlefront thread
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I just added a scenario where infantry attempts to attack Russian tanks over semi-covered terrain. I am playing the Germans in this one so I am essentially torturing myself
. I will create another one where Russian infantry attacks German armor, as well.Since these have a "random" component and I can never say if they are really that balanced it is hard to say if it proves or disproves anything in this post but it is fun to play. Try CMBB #2.
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I just updated the site with my first 3 CMBB scenarios. The 3rd one is nuts - I got permission to use a good city map and it features Russian heavy tanks w/out infantry support against German infantry at night - a short, sharp and violent scenario with tons of action. I also updated the Blitzkrieg 1940 scenario to give the Allies a better force mix based on results from playing it out...
Here is the link
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If you play some nationalities with long combat delays or types of artillery that are slow to respond (generally the higher calibers), TRP's are almost the only way to make them work effectively.
In most of the scenarios that I create I give the attackers TRP's because it lets them start bringing down artillery on the defender right away (you don't want to plot it for the initial start because pre-registered fire uses up all of your ammo and cannot be adjusted) which in turn speeds up play.
Also, I figure that the attacker at least knew where they were headed well enough to plot some artillery, else why would they try to take the objective?
I think TRP's also give an accuracy bonus on direct fire but I don't have any stats on this and haven't noticed it as a practical effect.
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Hey no one - I don't like the tone of your post.
Are you saying that the impact of a squad in a building when it collapses isn't substantial? What do you base that on? In the dozens of times a building has collapsed on my troops it has often totally wiped out the squads or if not severly mauled them.
Thus the gamey part, as I see it, is intentionally targeting a structure, then hitting it until it has ** which is clearly availabe from the targeting line, and then not hitting it any more. If this building is an objective, which can be the case, you have effectively denied that location to the enemy, because they can't put troops in it (unless you don't think a collapsing building hurts troops, which I vehemently disagree with, why do you think that they run out of it when it gets to **), that is gamey.
The act of destroying a building, isn't. Putting it on the edge of destruction and stopping so that you can smash it right at the end of a scenario and denying it to your enemy to artificially impact the time frame, is gamey.
Flamethrowers are a different story. I don't remember in my analysis of their deployment major sections where they talk about using up ammo on your own locations to deny them to the enemy, they were generally used to reduce enemy strongpoints and were viewed as rare and valuable assets. It would not be a typical doctrine to deploy them in the way discussed (sure it could happen, but far from typical), and that is why I call it gamey.
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I don't think you can definitively say what is gamey and what is not gamey.
I think that hitting a building until it has ** on it at the objective but not rubbling it, effectively denying it to the enemy, is gamey.
I think that setting stuff on fire near the objective, with no enemy around, using all of your ammo up to do it, is gamey.
It is in the eye of the beholder...
and I do it too, just feel a bit guilty, that's all
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Having flamethrowers burn something with no enemy around just to deny it to the enemy is pretty 'gamey' - in that, would they really burn all their valuable ammo on that in the real world.
Kind of like when you hit a structure that the enemy is using but it isn't near you so that it is to the ** star rating (about to fall down), but you DON'T hit it any more so that they can't crawl back into the rubble but if they DO go into the building, then you can flatten it with their guys in it...
not to say that I don't use these tactics from time to time, I just feel a bit guilty about it
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I will look into those mods...
about to finish my first 3 cmbb random scenarios. I love playing the germans and trying to take out conscript KV tanks... grrrrr
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No problem, your mods look great too!
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You should sign up at cmmods... you can download their mod software to track all of your cmbb mods - it is very helpful.
Probably ought to download the 1.01 1.02 and 1.03 patches somewhere on your hard drive too, or put them on a CD.
Odds are you will be reinstalling cmbb sometime after having pc problems.
If you do that make sure any scenarios you built are somewhere else or they will be over written.
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This will take a while, so there is no rush. I am still trying to figure out how modding works. I will try to take mods from only a few designers so that there are less to contact.
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David - I don't know if you are still looking at this thread but I was thinking about creating something for cmbb similar to what you created with cmeto (without the scenarios).
I am going through all of the recommended mods and putting them in one place. Then I am going to write up which mods I was going to use, and create a "summer" and a "winter" scenario with all different terrain and vehicles so that you could plug in different mods and see the impact on all the vehicles (I would change parameters to get all of the vehicles and weapons on the screen at one time from 1941 to 1945).
Probably this thing would be close to 500 plus megs if you consider the vehicles with summer and winter views, plus all the terrain. I have some space at my site but not a lot - is there any chance you could host it where you host cmeto? Also the bandwidth would be big.
In any case I want to do this for myself because I play cmbb across the LAN and also with a friend of mine so I need to be able to set up all the mods without having to download them all individually.
Let me know what you think. From cmeto it seemed like a lot of controversy on the scenarios, I wasn't planning on putting any of them in there (except maybe some of my own
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Ha... good point on whether balanced or not. The random scenarios are all a bit of a crapshoot...
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Hey don't forget when it happened to me, too
I usually post over at the cmak forum but now with combat mission campaigns I will come back over to good old cmbb.
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You can try the "random reinforcement" crete assault that I built... only 16 turns and lots of fun from the git go
Updated "Random Reinforcement" Scenario Site
in Combat Mission - Scenario Talk
Posted
I recently updated my site with new scenarios.
- the 2 scenarios that Hans sent me are awesome - they are CMAK scenarios #21 and #22. The maps are great and the briefings are great, too. Much better than mine
- I added a new CMBB scenario #4 with factories - this is a brutal scenario with heavy action right from turn 1
- I updated several scenarios based on feedback received
Here is the link
Combat Mission Random Reinforcement Scenarios Site