Sgian Dubh

Greetings to my honored opponents. I have risen from my sick bed to inform you that the flu has laid me low for the last three days. While I am sure that you would love for me to attempt to produce turns in a fever-ridden state, I have not been able to sit up long enough to look at the turns I have been sent. I do have files from all opponents at this time. I am hoping to be back on line by Saturday. Due to time lost, I will be thinking about some TCP play to make up. I have no experience with TCP play. Can you switch from PBEM to TCP and back? Going to lie back down now...

Status report Wet Triangle is underway. St. Edwards allied setup sent. Moltke bridge underway. I have not recieved setups for Highlanders (Elmar Bijlsma) but Elmar and I have recently exchanged emails. I've sent an email to all of my opponents, but I will repeat the message here. Please zip you files before sending them to me. The SPAM filter through which my incoming mail passes is marking all email with .txt attachments as spam and tossing them out. I have no control over the settings of this SPAM filter as it intercepts all email coming into the office long before it reaches my machine. Thanks,

GAJ, I really like your terrains. I think that they are more useful than the gridded terrains overall. ALthough I am thinking about adding a 5x5 meter grid to one of yours just to see what it will look like. To increase the contrast did you load each bitmap into an imaging program and then tweak the gamma up? I loaded a couple of your sets into an image analysis program and looked at the histograms of values to see what kind of pattern you were using. Is there any chance that you will complete the final CMAK terrain and all of the CMBB terrains? If not, I think I will take a crack at doing the rest. Great work. Thanks.

Congratulations on your brand-new Meach Mk I alarm clock. May it bring you years of enjoyable service, waking you at all hours (esp. O-dark thirty on Saturday mornings.) due to the highly-sophisticated "parents are really exhausted" environment monitoring system. All the best. Kids are the greatest gift of all.

Flenser, I did not receive the email to the first account. I will check the other. If I don't have it in a short while I will pm you and we'll try to figure out where the hang-up is.

Hi all, Have received 3 allied briefings for Group three. Awaiting turns from my vic... um, I mean my most honorable opponents.

Aside from this being the winner for the most usage of the word "gamey" in a single post.... I would hope that there will be dedicated recon forces in the next game, with the necessary equipment, etc. It would be great to see Rangers, Pathfinders, etc. Of course, games would be longer this way as realistic recon could (and should) take quite a bit of time. Perhaps you could have the ability to place recon units in special setup positions (having the game check to make certain that there is no LOS on turn 1) which might allow you to reduce the amount of time a bit. Other wise I could see what was a 30 turn games becoming a 60 or 80 turn game as the first 30 turns are spent moving Recon forces around. Or perhaps the game could allow you to select certain areas and have enhanced information on those areas during setup (perhaps sound-contacts, etc.) to mimic the information from returned recon patrols.

Hi all, Here is a suggestion, for what it is worth. I have gone back and forth between using grided terrains and not. If possible with the new engine, why not have a wire-frame that can be toggled to overlay the map as the user sees fit? You could then allow the user to set the colour and spacing of the gridlines (even if it was a text file that had to be edited). This would allow the people who wsnt the aid of looking over the topography and getting a quick feel vs the people who have the time or desire to move all over the map at level 1. The other thought that occurs is to have a hotkey that would allow you to pop up a map that has the topography information. This seems reasonable from both a user perspective and from a 'realism' perspective since in the real world commanders may (I don't know how offen, but I have a growing colletion) have access to topo maps for the area in which they can fight. This may give the users that want it sufficient 'quick overview' to meet their need. [ February 11, 2004, 11:12 AM: Message edited by: Sgian Dubh ]

Hi all, I have just uploaded: "The British Grenadiers." and "Colonel Bogey" Still to come: "God Save The Queen/King" "Rule Britania" U.S. 7th Calvary March Then on to some German, French marches. Does anybody know of a good freeware MP# to WAV converter? I have exhausted the free conversions on all of the demo products I could get my hands on. For those who have the time to download the files (25 to 35 megs each) I hope you will enjoy them. You can get them here: http://www.cmmods.com

Heh. 593.5

Hi all, I apologise for being imprecise (although there is some interesting information being posted). I was, in fact, speaking of the 75mm and larger truck mounted guns. It just seemed to me that for the truck to drive up, stop and have the gun fire 90 degrees to the long axis of the truck with no set-up time for the outriggers seemed a bit odd. I would think that the truck body, without the outriggers deployed, would experience tremendous twisting forces on the frame. Even if not this, if the truck was on any type of incline and the gun were not leveled with the outriggers then what would normally be a simple horizontal traverse becomes a 3-dimensional problem and thus should carry a penalty 'to hit'. The other issue is that the AI treat them like tanks instead of an AT gun with wheels.

Hi all, First a question about how they are employed in CMAK. I noticed that the truck bed has a number of out-riggers. Having used large truck-mounted equipment a number of times, it is my experience that the out-riggers need to be 'set' before the equipment is used. Yet in CMAK, I've seen time and again where a Truck Mounted Gun (TMG) move up to a position and fires within a 10-20 seconds - sometimes faster than 10 seconds. So obviously there is no set up time being 'paid' for deploying the out-riggers, leveling the gun, etc. It would seem to me that firing such guns without the out-riggers in place would impact both aiming and repeatability for hitting the same target. Just some thoughts to start the discussion off. Also, the AI seems to make terrible use of the TMGs. It often charges them forward with no support. I've had TMGS advance to within 100 meters of my trenches with no support around them. Of course, they die as soon as they enter the arc of the infantry in the trenches.

Redwolf, et. al. This thread seems to be going in a direction that I did not intend. I never stated that I thought anything was wrong. I was asking for help (and got it) on why some of the times seemed a bit odd to me. Again, I was not and am not trying to state/prove/hint/etc. that there is anything broken. After re-reading my initial post, I still fail to see why it has resulted in a "defend CMAK" tone. I was asking why *my* expectation was at odds with what I was seeing, not "Hey! There's something wrong here." I was trying to obtain a better grasp on the general rules governing the delay time for Arty FOs. I guess what I was really hoping for was that someone would actually explain how the Arty is grouped by formation level, what effect the formation levels have on the delay times, and etc. Thanks to all for your responses, I have more to think about now.

All of the FOs in the test were regular. I didn't test differing types of quality as I figured that this was self-explanatory and that differences in quality would only shift the delay time curve. So only differences of at least 2 minutes can be clearly seen as a 'real' difference? Are all of the values estimated with the same bias for a particular FO each turn? In other words, is a particular FO's estimates off by +15 seconds for a turn, regardless of target? Or is the bias calculated each time a new target is selected during the same turn? It would seem, then, that based on the numbers I collected and also allowing for a +/- 60 second spread, that the only significant difference (in many cases) for DELAY is whether or not a TRP is being targeted. Accuracy is, of course, another matter.

North Africa, March 1943. I thought I had all of the pertinent data. I've been playing the CM gameslong enough that I should know that there is always another piece of pertinent data. However, I wasn't so much concerned with the total amount of time in any one category and the relationship between calibres and delay times and the effect LOS and TRPs have on delay times. [ January 20, 2004, 03:37 PM: Message edited by: Sgian Dubh ]