Ant

That's wrong. It's not available in the shops here in the UK yet!

That's wrong. It's not available in the shops here in the UK yet!

There should be an extra squad added for the British: The brew-up squad. These would be indepandant teams which could be attached to platoons similarly to independant mortar and MG teams. Any platoon containing a brew-up team should get a morale bonus.

Hmmm. Personally I think it would be a little embarassing to have my Indian soldiers on the brink of carrying an assault only to have them break out into the obligatory Bollywood song and dance routine. Entertaining, yes, but highly embarassing. Especially in the face of the enemy

Well the list of nationalities in the game is listed as: USA Germany Italy Britain Canada Australia New Zealand Poland South Africa France I don't know if that means Vichy French and Free French, or just free French. Maybe there aren't any Vichy French in CMAK.

TCs getting killed on a regular basis is fairly realistic. Casualty rates for TCs were high in WW2 and it's still happening today to the Isrealis. The trouble is that thanks to the Borg spotting bug tanks in CM have a far higher situational awareness than they have in real life. In reality a buttoned up tank is almost blind and deaf. If you lose situational awareness in a fight you're dead and the only way a tank has good situational awareness is when it's unbuttoned. Unfortunetely, that means putting the TC in harms way.

Yes, I've seen that. I was just wondering if the Rifle grenades depicted in CM were purely of the AT variety or can they be used in the anti-personnel role similarly to the way a squad will sometimes use a Panzerfaust against infantry.

To be honest that what I was thinking about too but I daren't mention a TV programme or a movie as a point of referance on this board cos all the grogs would go into a feeding frenzy I just feel that they are potentially very usefull weapons that we maybe aren't getting the best out of in CM.

No I don't think they're the best AT weapon either they were developed as an anti-personnel weapon, but for some reason I always got the impression that CM utilised them as an AT weapon as I've seen them being fired at tanks. Mind you I haven't seen much of them as they weren't a particulary prevalent weapon in CMBB and I didn't play CMBO that much before I switched but now with CMAK they should be more common.

:confused: Am I the only person who thinks that those figures are completely irrelevant and misleading without specifying range, or is there some kind of standard range assumed for all penetration tests? And if so what is it?

What do the squads in CM regard as valid targets for rifle grenades? I've seen them being used on enemy tanks but that's it.. Will they target half tracks or enemy infantry, or are they purely used as an anti-armour weapon?

I think that in order to limit the size of the download for the CMAK demo they stuck a few low res bmps in there. The full game will probably look better.

Oh, I see. Wouldn't know about that I'm afraid.

In fact I've just tried it with both Antialiasing on and off and it isn't blurred in either case. If anything it looks even sharper than in Andreas' screenshots.

No. Just clear picture of mountains & sky. Regards Blurry Nvidia </font>

I don't suppose we should have been surprised really given that all through CMBO and CMBB BFC were telling us it wasn't possible with the current engine....then all of a sudden they found a way for CMAK to do it. I think it's a good effort though given the limitations they were telling us about. It is, after all, only one type of tank and that tank still works reasonably well even if it isn't a genuine 'independant two turret' tank.

Hmmmm. I just ran several tests of a panzerscreck team and a platoon HQ inside a small peasant shack. Not one firing of the panzerschreck resulted in either the schreck team or the HQ becoming supressed. Yet I remember that happening in CMBO (which isn't installed at the moment so I can't run a test on that)

I just ran a test with CMBB and there's no backblast effect in that It was definitely in CMBO, I wonder what happened to it.

Well BFC put it into CMBO so I don't know what's happened with CMAK.

The kick from the cartridge fitted to the tail of the projectile was supposed to recock the spring ready to be fired again. Unfortunately if the firer didn't brace himself properly it didn't recock and he then had to go through the hassle of manually recocking it.

Ah, thanks Kingfish. I only took a short look at the demo last night and none of my M3s did that. Maybe it was just too limited an observation on my part. There are certainly other characteristics which make it look like only one gun though; such as one gun hit taking out both guns, or the aforementioned hull down issue. Maybe BFC will tell us how it really works.

One other disadvantage that I noticed with the 'one gun pretending to be two' method is that the 37mm turret won't rotate outside the forward quarter of the vehicle. Instead the whole tank rotates stug fashion. This is fine for targetting enemy tanks where you need to use the 75mm gun anyway, but against a HT where it could rotate the turret and use the 37mm it still brings the whole tank to bear instead.

Inbitially BFC said the engine couldn't handle multi turreted vehicles. This line was maintained right through the CMBB development process. Then when CMAK was being developed they said they'd found a workaround. What I think they've done for the M3 is essentially give it only one gun but several different ammo/penetration varieties to give the impression of two guns, and of course the associated graphics for two guns, but really in game code terms it still only has one gun. hence both getting knocked out with a single gun hit and the ability to only fire at one target at a time. So essentially we're being fooled into thinking it has two guns when really it doesn't Not that I'm complaining. If that was the only way to model the M3 with the existing CM engine then fair enough. It does the job well enough anyway. Of course that's only a guess so I could be wrong but the evidence I've seen so far points to that. [ November 21, 2003, 10:45 AM: Message edited by: Ant ]

I've got no real life experience of it but I do know that in CMBO there was definitely supression effects from backblast in small buildings because in the first scenario I ever played it happened to me. I think it's mentioned in the manual too (Also mentioned that the PIAT didn't suffer from this if I remember rightly) and I thought it was a very good attantion to detail. I don't know if it's done in CMBB because I can't remember ever seeing it (must test when I get a chance) but it's definitely not modelled in the CMAK demo.

Well from my quick look at the demo last night: The armour penetration figures are by ammo type. As the M3 has four different types of ammo I presume two of those are for the 75mm gun and two for the 37mm gun. Haven't tried to specify which gun to use though.