Hat Trick

From Brightblade For what its worth, if all four shots had a 79 percent chance of hitting (admittedly, a big "if"), the odds of missing on all four shots are about 0.2 percent, or one in 500. Sounds like a run of bad luck to me.

Well, what do you know. I've become a full-fledged member. I'll be strutting around the office all day. I just hope that I don't start obsessing about Brinell hardness factors, Romanian TO&Es, or get (too) involved in discussions of auto-exhaustion of units under MG fire.

Also, battles with a really large number of units are better fought as PBEM, because of the large amount of time it takes to plot orders.

In real life, of course, no commander would have the sort of "God's eye" view of the battle that we have (even with extreme fog of war on), or the ability to communicate with our troops as efficiently as we do. I think that this is primarily an issue of scale. If one plays a tiny battle, with say a single infantry platoon and one vehicle, I actually think that the simulation is pretty accurate (at least if the troops are not too spread apart). It is also, however, much less interesting to play than larger battles. Realism decreases as the battle size increases, because as a single player one has to take on the role of multiple platoon commanders, company commanders, even battalion commanders, as well as all sorts of support units. If the engine rewrite includes an option to allow multiple players for each side in a battle, this could, in theory, increase realism. Of course, one would still need players that want to play at the platoon (or lower) level, and the communications links between the players would have to be quite limited if they were to reflect reality. I don't think that most players would want to play a game at that level of command (at least not often), and I don't think that Battlefront wants to create a "command" game anyway (would you really want to play a company commander recieving fragmentary and contradictory radio and messenger reports, simulated as text messages on the computer screen, while you gave general orders like take that "take that hill" or "go support first platoon"?). Thus, while these and some other changes could make the game more realistic -- extreme fog of war for terrain, delays in orders to fire as well as to move -- one has to find a balance between realism and playing enjoyment. The result is that effective tactics play a much more important role in Combat Mission than they did in real life, especially after the battle commences, when most commanders simply didn't have the information to adjust orders or coordinate action in a timely manner once the fighting began.

From Steve at Battlefron: (italics added) Also of interest to many.

Maybe not number 1 tip, but some common newbie mistakes (ok, mistakes I made): 1) Let my tanks lead my infantry. Tanks have armor, so they should be out in front, right? Unfortunately, no. Unless there are very wide open spaces on the map, tanks and other vehicles are vunerable to hidden anti-tank guns and infantry anti-tank weapons (not to mention other vehicles). You need to use your infantry to screen/probe all woods and buildings before bringing a tank within 100-200 meters of such areas. In fact, its often a good idea to keep your vehicles completely hidden (behind woods or a ridge) until well into the game, when you have a better sense of where your opponent's positions are. Even then, you usually want to keep your tanks well back from the front line; a tanks advantage over infantry is its range, so use this advantage. Caveat: In wide open maps, one can lead with tanks over open terrain where infantry might get cut down by enemy machineguns or other fire. Also, against heavily armored tanks, a more lightly armored but faster tank can be raced ahead to get in side or rear shots at the heavy tank. 2)Put my anti-tank gun or machine gun on top of a hill with a wide line of sight. After all, this way the gun can cover a wide field of fire, hitting multiple targets. Unfortunately, being able to hit multiple targets means that one can also be hit by multiple targets. What happens to your anti-tank gun when 3,4,5 or more tanks come into view at the same time? Better to place the anti-tank gun so that it oversees a narrow field of fire, over key terrain, where you expect the enemy to bring his vehicles singly. The same holds true, to a lesser extent, for machineguns, especially in CMBO, where their supressive effect is less, well, effective. For machineguns, you want a fairly wide field of view, but not one so long that enemy tanks can blast away at them. Its often useful to set up machineguns to fire across the width of the battlefield, rather than its length, so to speak. I've made many other mistakes as well, but these two stand out as the ones that I think other new players may make.

That's great. If you have a write up for tanks and assualt guns, please post it as soon as possible; this is the best primer I've read on light vehicles for the game, and a similar quality primer on AFVs would be invaluable for new players.

From Schrullenhoft Presumably a stationary wreck or abandoned vehicle would not pose this problem. While the current engine treats vehicles differently from other terran objects (as I understand it), changes in line of sight due to smoke and destroyed buildings during the game demonstrate that, in theory, the engine should be able to handle blocking line of sight due to a vehicle that is no longer moving. Perhaps this can be incorporated into the next engine, even if the effect moving vehicles cannot.

Thanks for the research. I didn't know that tall pines blocked line of sight from second story builings. Good to know.

If I recall correctly, the ability to unbog by setting a reverse order was a bug in CMBO, which was fixed in a subsequent patch.

From Boo Radley I share your sentiments, but I belive that the exact quote is "Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! He chortled in his joy". I would have let it pass, but I hold someone with your literary username to a higher standard. Plus, since I can't compare to others in this forum on WWII grogness, I can at least strive for literary nit-picking grogness.

It might be easier for new players to find if it is posted the tips and tricks forum.

Outstanding, Pak 43, simply outstanding. Do you have the music for this?

Perhaps a solution is to allow the adjustment to an area out of the LOS with a short time delay (reflecting the ease of making adjustments to existing fire), but with some loss of accuracy (reflecting the fact that the FO is not able to actually see the new target area, and so in real life would not be able to call in fire exactly where the player wanted).

From Skolman Wow. I assume that by "very often" you mean in the game, not in real life. Both my vehicle machinegunners killed their entire crews, including themselves, and I don't care how dark or foggy it is, there's no way you'll shoot yourself.

In CMBO the other night I had an armored car machinegun itself to death in the fog as it tried to kill two german soldiers that were running by; shortly thereafter one of my halftacks did the same thing trying to kill the same two guys. Both vehicles completely wiped themselves out. I'm just glad that squad didn't run past my tank.

Kingfish -- Thanks for the reference. Don't know how I missed it.

From Eden Smallwood: Uhm, what was the reasoning behind not implementing this? It seems to me that once one side "owns" a victory flag, it ought to continue to possess it until the other side takes it away. I hate having to leave little half-squads, crews, anti-tank teams, whatever, well behind my main force solely to maintain control of a flag that the other side has no chance of getting.

Great post, wish I had seen it when I first got the game. Two points of clarification for newcomers: 1. If the terrain looks different than on your game, that's because the designer added "mods" to change the look of the game. It still plays the same. Similarly, the units sizes have been increased to make them easier to see. 2. "Button up" means that a vehicle has closed its hatches. This reduces the crew's exposure to small arms fire, but reduces their effectiveness.

I was playing a quick battle the other night, and two of my vehicles "killed" themselves (confirmed by looking at each vehicle unit's detail screen, where each unit listed itself as one of the targets destroyed). Any ideas on how this could happen, and is it a bug? One vehicle was a halftrack, the other an armored car (both British, with machineguns, but I don't remember the exact types). The scenario was in thick fog, and the two vehicles were both shooting at a German infantry squad (which was down to two men). The squad passed very close by both vehicles, and each vehicle self-immolated as the squad passed by. At first I thought that that must be one hell of a pair of German soldiers (uber-Finns, perhaps? ), but on further inspection I noticed that the vehicles had done themselves in. My theory is that the vehicles shot themselves as they tracked the squad running past – but this does not seem to be very realistic, even in thick fog. Any other ideas?

Thanks, Terrapin. I still wonder, though, whether suppression varies soley based on rate of fire, a combination of RoF and caliber, or (God forbid ) caliber alone.

In modeling machine guns, does the game engine differentiate between the effects of caliber size and rate of fire? It seems to me that rate of fire is more important for suppression effects, and caliber is more important for penetration. I seem to remember reading that a .50 caliber machine gun, for instance, had a relatively slow rate of fire for a machinegun.

From Moon: Actually, I'm not sure that I agree. I mean, it would help the player, but I don't think that it is realistic. In real life a tanker may think that there is a hull down position up ahead, but he may not know for sure until he get there.

Perhaps "scoot" can be added as a command, like "hide". That way it can be used with any movement command -- e.g., move, hunt, fast move, even revesrse to a point, then scoot.

Desert Fox: These are commands in CMBB, which are not available in CMBO. Are you playing CMBO? If so, I've used sneak to good effect, at least when the distance to cover is short.