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Quintus

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Everything posted by Quintus

  1. The toothpick, if dipped in a high enough quality ink, can be used to draw very good maps...
  2. Off Topic but semi-relevent. Holland may have been knocked out of the land war pretty rapidly but their navy did a good job with what it had out in the far east. Somewhere in my cupboard I have lead miniatures of a fair number of Royal Dutch Navy vessels that I've fielded in WW-II wargames. (Do people still yell "Where're our bloody bikes?" at German tourists or has that tradition died away?)
  3. I suppose the "Gamey Police" should hop back in their time machine and issue citations to the Soviets for firing on the German concentration areas before the start of Zitadelle Fie and indeed Pshaw. Without figuring in an intelligence branch / advance recon model into the game, this is all rather hard to argue without getting down to opinion verses objectivity. The 'Oh yes it is' arguement for gamey probably hinges on whether one party or the other would know -when- to fire the artillery (too early and the enemy would not BE there for example). The Soviets pounded away at the Zitadelle assembly areas partly I suspect due to intel and partly also because they had O.P's and recon to tell them that there were several hundred tanks 'over yonder hill'. This is not modelled in the game. However, the fact that in the real world there were opportunities to pre-empt an enemy action with a few tonnes of lobbed TNT would probably form a reasonable part of the "Oh no it isn't" arguement. I operate a "does it look like I am taking the pi$$" system of gauging whether or not something is gamey (other than being into historical stuff more than 'will it help me win?'). Taking 10 pupchens, paratroop engineers and crack panthers just screams 'pee take' to me and so I suspect would the act of pasting a very narrow deployment area that I know as a player is likely to be packed with a couple of thousand points of log-jammed enemy forces with five batteries of artillery on turn 1. Back when I used to play 1/300 lead-miniature wargaming, we used to frequently play the Monty Python game "How not to be seen" and try to guess which hill an enemy HQ would be hiding behind by the simple expedient of blasting away with indirect 105's and seeing if the enemy army ran about like headless chickens afterwards. However, this happened in a game that assumed pre-game recces. So, to recapitulate : It's all down to taste and opinion UNLESS there's a model for recon and pre-game intelligence information. (Now, THERE would be a useful add-on for a future game - Recon pre-battle engagements and a scouting report)
  4. "I've straddled your weapon and gone down on one knee... now, Herr Oberst... will you marry me?"
  5. "I've straddled your weapon and gone down on one knee... now, Herr Oberst... will you marry me?"
  6. Thank you to JasonC for that info on the Rumanians. From what I can see, their infantry is all rifle armed until April of 1942 and then it gets that rather nice cavalry squad mentioned. I shall have to definitely give them a try at some point. It almost makes me wish that there was a Far-East version of this game out at present... Rifle armed infantry, odd calibre on-board field guns, AWFUL tanks but passable aircraft... it's just like the 1941 Japanese army I used to 1/300 wargame with.
  7. Whilst the individual Italian soldier was probably every bit as brave as anyone else, the army as a whole did not do at all well. Groggier souls than myself can probably go into deeper detail but if a British army with the sort of kit it had at the time can boot an Italian army most of the way to Casablanca in the time it takes you to say "Sapristi Indelible!" (*) then I think that says quite a lot. Their record in the Balkans was no less awful. Badly led, terribly equipped and not really all that enthusiastic about fighting a war that involved facing off against armed enemies (machine gunning spear waving Abysinnians didn't really provide much of a foretaste of what modern battle involved). And if you think their army was bad... Lord, the airforce... Oh, the airforce! (Savio Marchetti and Folgore aside, Trumpton had sufficient air defences to see them off) Their Navy however... for a non-radar navy, they had some good stuff. (*) To quote a Goon show villain.
  8. I think rarity=off is about the only way to make the 'minors' truly viable (reflecting I suppose, those units that had all the best gear). Sucks to be me : December 1942 with Rarity=On. -le sigh-
  9. Other than being part of a well designed scenario, has anyone had any success with the Romanians/Hungarians/Italians in Quick Battles? (I'm excluding the Finns here as they are something of a case apart IMHO) These Axis nations seem to suffer from woefully inadequate armour, troops that are armed almost exclusively with rifles and are very light on anti-tank weapons (even molotovs). I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any success stories with these 'underdogs' on the Eastern Front. (I am fully expecting a proper kicking at the hands of my soviet opponent against my Italian infantry in my present game) [ April 01, 2003, 06:00 AM: Message edited by: Quintus ]
  10. I'd be interested to find out for sure if arty type rather than blast value did have an effect on suppression. I remember that in the old war-games ruleset ('Firefly') I used to play that rocket bombardment gave a significant penalty to morale checks.
  11. The game does require prisoners to be escorted. I stand corrected Teach me to not read the .pdf manual more often... Hmmm, boss out of office... laser printer unattended... binding machine to hand... Giving in... to ... temptation... -whirr-
  12. It's a shame the game doesn't require prisoners to be escorted. The image of some POW's ducking into a ditch and grabbing a rifle from a dead body before taking potshots at the foe is a good one. I've not run into the bug myself but I second the sentiment that in the face of an actual patched solution, the only honourable thing to do if you capture enemy troops is to immediately send them to the rear to avoid taking inadvertent advantage of this apparant bug.
  13. Well, I couldn't get two "4" guns onto a transport "8" tow, so I guess CMBB 1.02 has closed that option off. Nice idea though.
  14. Reading through another user's post, I came across this website : http://www.iremember.ru There's an interesting depiction here :- http://www.iremember.ru/artillerymen/monyushko/monyushko2.htm of a studebaker truck carrying three ZIS (3?) ATG's ! Now, THAT would be a funny thing to be able to pull off.
  15. I think, if I remember the few first hand accounts I've read properly, that entrenching tools, knives and pistols were preferred in trench fighting because of their length. This probably applies to a lot of the 'up close and personal' stuff. There's a classical parallel I suppose, in a close melee, short weapons do better in the main than long ones (Gladius for the Romans, the short spear of the Zulu etc). SMG's are probably easier to use in-close too, gangsta-stylee.
  16. the company level of command is the "natural" one Ah, that makes a good deal of sense. I'd not heard the term 'Hrair limit' before but was aware of the concept. I had totally overlooked the 'click on the HQ to command the entire unit' option, that's another thing to try and remember (along with "Never get into a peeing contest with Tigers at long range with T-34's, it's neither big nor clever.") Thanks for the advice.
  17. My 'usual' 1000 points is roughly : 1 company of infantry, 1 platoon of tanks, 1 FOO, as much support as I can reasonably grab (plus tows for any ATG/AA) and any leftovers going toward an extra platoon of infantry if the points allow. That's for a combined arms battle anyway.
  18. One of the things I have come to notice in playing CMBB/O is that I seem to have some kind of limit to the number of troops I can keep track of and manage effectively. Below 1000 points I am perfectly happy and will merrily beat the AI and get a passable ratio of victory to defeat verses humans. Above 1000 and I start coming unglued. Has anyone else noticed this sort of thing in their game-play? I am guessing that practise, practise and more practise is the key. [ March 10, 2003, 09:09 AM: Message edited by: Quintus ]
  19. Could this be a question of scale? If the vehicle size option is set to 'larger than actual' then could the infantry unit be outside the actual pillbox but because the graphic is 'oversized' they appear to be inside?
  20. Well, I would like to thank Schrullenhaft very much for his help there. My 4500 card is now on speaking terms with CMBB and CMBO and very smooth it is too. What I did : Re-installed windows2000 (needed doing) Installed the 15.0084 KYRO drivers Installed direct-x 8.1 Installed the manufacturers drivers for my monitor Installed CMBO/CMBB Doing it as a clean install is probably what did it, the amount of accumulated cr@p on my PC doesn't bear thinking about. Once again, a big thank you! Now... time to blow up some bad-guys.
  21. Well, I join the long list of people with Kyro/Hercules hassles. Win-2000 PRO, direct-X 8.1 and a Hercules 4500-TVOUT card... CMBO seems to only want to run in 640 x 480 "Argh!" and indeed, "Help!"
  22. if you're updating to 1.02 with the download patch then upgrading won't change anything. it's the way the CD tracks are written that is the copy protection. I did try making a copy of my CMBB disk and the CD 'burned' okay. However, the copy wouldn't run on my '98 machine. On a whim, I tried it on a windows 2000 machine instead and it ran... However, when the 1.01 patch was installed, the copy no longer worked. I am guessing therefore that there is some 'property' of the original CD that the 1.01 exe is programmed to look for and that this quality is not copied by my CD copying software (win-on-CD and Nero). I'd much rather find a legitimate way around this than rely on the l33t sk1lz of some hax0r or whatever.
  23. Bad Joke Warning : "I once drank so much I was seeing things, monsters at the end of my bed in fact..." 'Really, Delerium Tremens?' "No... big green pterodactyls!"
  24. This is pretty much my position... although in my case it's the whole 'switching CMBO and CMBB CDs' that is the issue. Love the games, don't want to wreck the CD's but can't copy them for safety's sake. (although, as CDV told me, it IS possible to copy the CDV CMBB, I just don't know how). Shame you can't get a 'game only' CD (lacks all installation files) or something like that by sending in your manual cover. It COULD be open to abuse by pirate types but they'd be pirates who'd sent in a mailing address and (say) a five dollar cover charge AND they'd have to have access to a genuine copy of the game to set up in the first place. Just a thought.
  25. Whilst I am no authority on how to win CM games (my loss to win ratio is about 5:1) I must admit that that 95mm gun on the Cromwell and Churchill's is a beaut'. With a 'c' round it does the job very nicely on a lot of the opposition armour and the blast value of the HE shells make it lovely for harrassing the German infantry.
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