Makes The Jelly Judder

Ok, my game against Wicky has been fought to its conclusion. Not many casualties on either side. My force was 1 Company of infantry load of light mgs and antitank rifles 3 mortars 1 mortar spotter (250 rounds, nine tubes, sweet jesus-it takes only two minutes to fire the lot) 2 snipers 5 valentines 3 T34's 1 Matilda Total complete loses 1 antitank rifle 1 mortar (crew survived) 1 Matilda, 4 valentines. AAR screen.... Red army gets to flags first and takes up defensive postions. Red army kills germans as they come over the hills. I think Wicky was a bit unlucky with this map. Not only was it raining causing most of his halftracks to become immobile, but I was really defending a reverse slope postion whilst he was attacking with equal sized force. [ March 06, 2003, 06:11 PM: Message edited by: Makes The Jelly Judder ]

I can't let Wicky grt away with posting pictures of my dead tanks, so here are some of his dead/blowed up stuff. A Dead German, note the lack of arms. A dead PZIII I'm not really sure what this is, it was a tank then it was an sp gun. Whatever it was it was killed by the combined fire of a maxim and a at rifle.

I think this is very interesting, I will now use a short hunt command to rotate my tanks into the correct position and then reverse (At least it will stop rotating to fire then), seems to me that changing direction whilst reversing or moving is fatal for a tank as it will not shoot whilst turning, using hunt will solve this. Looks like we need new commands "Rotate but stop to shoot", and "Reverse Hunt"

well was this version of the BT ever made or is this image just the flight of someones fancy?

I got Dwain Dibbly, is he a famous USA general?

Just finished playing around with the all armour quick battles and have just discovered what a useful tank the Valetine IX is, well at least in the anti arnour role. When it first apears it can kill all German tanks except the Tiger at about 500M including the dreaded STUG. It's only real downside is the 2 man turret makes it blind as a bat, its only really good in overwatch where you can constantly unbutton it inbetween turns, the last thing you wan't is them driving around buttoned up. The turret armour is very week but I have still had a few short 50mm rounds bounce off it from 500M, and in return I have not had many of its 57mm rounds bounce of PZIII's which I suppose is its German equal. I think the real important thing is that the 57mm is very accurate (I take it this is the Brit 6lb gun?). In the last battle I had 6 T34 and 5 Valetine's (Most regular, some green), the T34's hit bugger all at 500M whilst the Valetines hit and penertrated normally with the second shot. The tank of the match award went to a Valetine who killed 3 PZIIM's and 4 PZII's, the best of the T34's was 1 PzIII and 1 PzII (both from behind and point blank range) the other 5 killed nothing. Also whats up with the auto pick for all amour batlles? The first battle I had the AI selected 5 flame panzers and 2 short barreld PZIV's and 1 short 50mm PzIII, made the battle interesting but come on this is an armoured battle, why is it allowed to pick anti infantry tanks/ AA tanks?

I'm up for it...let me just check my postal address...hey it says Kent on it! I thought I lived in London.

You could set your PC's to accept anonymous ftp logins and then post your ip addresses. Don't know what options you get on windows (If standard windows installs allow ftp, winxp should though?) but you should be able to make just one directory available and read only. Or is this too scary?

Could the AI be made to use pre-planned first turn barrages even when it can't see any of your units? Say just select an area of your set up zone at random and fire! As it stands if the AI is playing the Russians and has bought itself medium to large arty then the combination of AI stoopidness, long delays and inaccuracy makes the AI even more of a pushover than it would have been in CMBO. I don't think I have seen the AI successfully call in arty against any of my anti-tank/IF guns in CMBB either. The arty turns up like 15mins too late and 150m off target, which the AI then retargets but the battle is over before it begins firing again; this is a real handy cap for the AI which used to be quite good at this in CMBO. The alternative would be to just stop the AI from buying arty for itself as its just a waste of points in the current system.

d'oh must learn to read [ January 21, 2003, 09:23 PM: Message edited by: Makes The Jelly Judder ]

Actualy you can play CMBO and CMBB under osX, thats if you don't mind software mode. In system prefrences, select the classic 9 icon at the bottom under system. Click the advanced tab, then from the drop down list select start with extension manager or some such, then click the start classic button. when classic starts the extension manager opens first, find the classic rave extension and uncheck its box, then click done/ok or whatever. Classic will now start and double clicking either your CMBO or CMBB icon will start the game in software mode. It's not the best solution. With regards to iBooks and CMBB, the demo ran fine on my 300Mhz 4mb vram toilet seat, so the full game should run great with 16Mb of vram.

I'm sure that in a few months games will be requiring you to install DX9 wether you need it or not. Anyone remember Half-life? That didn't even need DX but it still insists that you install the latest version (well latest at that time DX6?). Even my CDV version of CMBB says that I have got to have DX8 even though the graphics engine is unchanged from CMBO which was DX7? I doub't that CMBB really needs DX8. We will all be upgrading in a month or so because our new DX8 games will insist that we install DX9, crazy?

I think that there is only one thing that effects compute time. Line of sight. If noticed that if you drive a bunch of hiden tanks over a hill into line off sight then it takes a long time to compute the turn compaired to the previous turn. I also think that the CMBB engine treats craters and trench's as if they are units. Thus it computes the craters/trenches lineof sight even if it is irrelevent as a combative unit/target. ( I think this might be true for barbed wire but I have no experince with this. There is a CMBB operation called penny packets, if you double the German forces you get double the number of trenches and the game takes ages to compute a turn even though its on a small map with only a few units.

I don't think it's too hard to code something like the above now a days. The real killer is the time it takes. You might spend 2 days coding some smart arsed particle effect only to discover that it either looks pants (even though it took smart arsed programming to work) or it brings an average system to it's knee's. It was possible to create images as above using a voodoo2, the trade offs are it would take one programmer several years to code well (that’s if he wasn't colour blind, you can add another year if so). It would take 2 mins to update the scene. And the voodoo2 system would run out of texture memory as soon as two tanks appeared on screen at the same time. I'm certain that Charle's can code a graphics engine that is as good as if not better. Unforntuantly Charles also has to do the AI, interface, game engine, units, physics ect. Plus he might be colouring blind also so that might double the time it takes.

I have noticed that tanks in CM always have the right shell loaded into their guns when the stumble onto a target. Will the new engine make us decided at the start of a battle wether tanks have HE loaded or AP? Would make tank battles very exciting when all of your tanks are loaded with HE. What would normaly happen in this situation? Would the tankers fire the HE shell and risk giving away their postion? or would they try to quitely reload AP and hope that no one sees them. This would also give us some control over the rarer types of ammo, for example we could force tanks to have Tungsten rounds loaded at the start of the battle, would also be useful to have a "Reload with ....." command. Or is this too much micro-managment?

CMBO worked fine on my blue and white original addition toilet seat ibook (4Mb Vram), so that should work fine on a white iBook. The CMBB demo also worked fine too, havent tried the full version though.

I think most of the Shermans problems were caused by lack of experience. The USA simply were not fighting at the time of its initial design. Whats worse to my mind is the crap Brit tanks. I mean come on, the Brits knew that the German 75mm AT gun was common, so why the hell didn't they give the Cromwell the right amount of amour? Look at the Germans, they upgraded most of their tanks so that they would have some protection against the most common deadly AT gun of the time. 80mm of armour seems to have been just the right amount to give the StuG an PzIV a fighting chance (especially at range). Were the allies just pulling tank designs outa their arses? or was there actualy some "Design" process followed?

Wouldn't freindly fire have something to do with it too? When you have air supremacy you don't really want miss idenification of your ground based forces. My understnading was that the camo applied to allied tanks in the desert in WWII was designed to hide the tank from German planes.

It's been a while since I last used OSX but I think this works. 1) Theres an option to start classic so that the extension manger opens first. 2) When this loads disable classic rave. 3) Classic will now start and CMBO will now run in software mode. Hope this works!

Very gamey spoiler for Death Ride of the 42. * * * * * * i find that its best to drive 1 tank using fast down the fast roads + button it to stop the tc getting killed. This tank should speed past all the heavy Ivans and then rotate it on the flag so its pointing back down the road. Now all the IS2's will come out of the hidy holes and you can blast them with the rest of your king tigers as they advance slowly (and I mean slowly, got to give those tanks time to move). Just taking this one flag is enough to give you a total victory, I would not move the rest of your force out of the town as it will get mauled by the anti tank guns. Now that is gamey, I wounder if you can speed the whole axis force through the town? [ December 05, 2002, 09:38 PM: Message edited by: Makes The Jelly Judder ]

Just wondering. Fighter/Bombers still seem a bit too unreliable. They either destroy loads of units or nothing (Or worse some of your own units). I Played a quick battle (Imported Map) recently where I bought a Russian Petlakov Pe-2FT, the plane flew on and dropped all its bombs (can't remember if it does two bombing runs or just 1, but it carries 8 550lb bombs!) in a dead straight line down a road and accross a bridge in a town. The bridge blew up with about four enemy tanks on it, plus some on either side of the bridge crossing at fords. In total it took out about 8 enemy tanks and 6 of my own plus I had a company of infantry in the top floor's of the buildigs dotted around (They weren't too bunched up, the planes' bombs fell inline for about 300 meters) plus some German infantry all got wiped out. I know this is an extreme example but thats nearly 2000 points worth of damage done by the plane. To top it all off a stuka turned up a couple of turns later and took out its own sides last tank! So does anyone use them in quick battles? Some times the strafing types can be real cheap. Also there's a German fighter bomber avalaible in June 1941 recorded as having 2 1100lb bombs and 4 110lb bombs. Is this right? should not the "and" be an "or", even then 2 1100lb bombs? [ November 26, 2002, 10:08 PM: Message edited by: Makes The Jelly Judder ]

Some times I'm glad when my Russian tanks get imobilized in the first volley of a fight. I think "Great at least they will stand and fight", and not get killed whilst retreating.

I like OSX, hell Apple likes OSX, and the future for Macs is OSX. Apple really needed to update its operating system as the 9x system was so old i.e. no proper memory management, piss poor virtual memory ect. With Windows encroaching into all of Apples old markets i.e. graphics and design stuff, Apple had to act and OSX is the result and its pretty good. Also OSX is not Windows, just ask the UNIX guy's what the differences are. The dock may eat your memory but at least you won't run out of memory any more.

Ok so it may be better to stay in the tank, but wouldn't you at least reverse the beast out of harms way. Five front turrent penetrations would at least convince the crew to move the tank? and that surely means that tanks should be "Broken!" more easily?

Does Bill mean Dick? Does George mean Dick? You and your funny names. I knew it was Dick in charge all along.