SeaLion

To JonS : Why do you have to resort to name calling ? Why do you have to resort to insults? Occasionally I meet someone like you in life, someone full of negative comments and unpleasant quips. At first I dislike them, and then later I see inside them, through a chink in their armor, the image of someone deeply unhappy. However, even they should still try to be professoinal.

No, that just gives the enemy easy acces to weapons. Do you want to fight 18 million soldiers armed with crowbars? Plus they think the weapons were given to them by God and that just makes them fight harder.

I mean anti-personel weapon

It's not a joke. My idea is to take auto plants around the country and give each of them a couple of parts to mass produce. This way we could get DaimlerChrysler Space Shuttles coming off the assembly line almost as fast as minivans. Each shuttle would have some sort of weapon in the cargo bay -- my earlier idea was to have maverick missiles but I checked the range and, no, the range isn't enough to make it to the Earth. So I guess they will have to take 88 mm instead. Also you could mount a gatling on some and basically make it an anit-personel orbital weapon.

Here's another idea to add to the other good ones listed above. If you expect the other guy to invest heavily in howitzers or similar weaponry, invest equally heavily in infantry. I find the German sub-machinegunners to be excellent for this. Start them in a forest and run them toward the next forest, trying to keep them behind at least a little cover the whole time. By darting from forest to forest, you can get them pretty close to the enemy guns. Leave one round to get all the men together, then the next round rush in. Pick a destination point right beside the enemy howitzer. I have never failed to neutralize an enemy gun this way except on the very rare occasions when I encounter a hail of gun fire on the last leg of the journy. I find most players (if not all) don't put infantry in front of the AT gun to protect it -- they put the infantry in front of the flag to cover that instead. (Yes, I know, it won't work with little or no tree cover... )

The back blast from the launch would be shunted through an S-shaped exhaust panel and thus wouldn't harm the plane. The weight would be no problem if they used my patented turbo liftfan technology. And to give the missiles ground clearance, you obviously mount them above the airplane and have them firing downward. This is not vapid -- it's just as good as my idea to mount the Iraqi super gun on the space shuttle Columbia.

Shosties4th says "Gee, nobody told Hans Ulrich Rudel that he should stop using the Stuka." Well, I read the book written by Rudel and in it he says that by the war's end none of the younger pilots could handle the plane and survive long. Rudel would go into a dive toward a soviet AA gun, spiral in, twist and weave through the sky, and at the last moment straighten out and drop bombs on target. He stated that the new pilots just could not do this. He also describes whipping his airplane through the sky to avoid the Russian airforce -- again, something the younger pilots could not do in the slow moving Stuka. Rudel was a magnificent pilot and his book should be required reading for all interested in aviation, but you're still misquoting me a little. I basically just said that the German's own flying wing design would have been more survivable in battle. And we also learned from other wars (I'm thinking of the F-111 in Vietman) that the higher the plane's speed, the harder it is to shoot down. One more thing -- the Stuka had a smaller bombload than the Heinkel level bomber, but the Stuka did more damage to tanks because of it's greatly increased accuracy in the diving profile.

They should re-make this game at sea using naval units. You could give mission orders to the planes on the carriers, move subs, strike with destroyers and corvetts. It would be especially good to combine the two games : as the attacker, you would have to fight through the opponents navy, make an amphibious landing, and fight your way to the objective. If you played it right you could still have carrier-born planes to do some more airstrikes. The marine units would be useful here.

This is a good-looking weapon that they should have mounted on a medium bomber. The rockets could have been pointed on a 20 degree downward slope so that the plane could fly level and still saturate the target area. I'll bet a good pilot could be more accurate with this than with level bombing.

There was a 6 barreled rocket launcher used by Germany late in the war called the Nebelwerfer. It fired massive rockets and only needed a crew of four or five. When fired it had a scream like a Banshee and often did portend the death of Soviet troops unlucky enough to be caught in the blast. Has anyone here ever read about this weapon who can verify what I'm saying?

OK, valid point. However, the US army has a weapon called the Javelin -- basically it is a heat seaking, anti tank rocket launcher. When you get a growl in the head set, it means the seeker has a lock on and you can fire and duck for cover while the missile is in the air. Also, more to the point, if you have line of sight on the enemy tank, then your radar waves will bounce back from the steel tank hull but not so much from surrounding vegetation or sand. And, they should beam in data from orbiting J-Stars aircraft, and the tank should fire using that info.

If radar-directed guns, like the Soviet ZSu-23-4, were so effective against airplanes (Israel in particular) why don't they slave the 120mm cannon on the M1 Abrams to a radar? The computer/servo motors would do most of the work and the gunner could just press the button after verifying the target. It would extend the range of the M1's smooth bore cannon and would give the tankers a much better first shot capability

Don't worry about getting along with everyone. The free exchange of ideas is what makes Western Civilization great -- especially, sometimes, ideas that are contrary to our own. ------------------------------------- Peace Through Overwhelming Strength

Knowing the point limit to the game won't help that much because some players will make unusual choices when selecting units -- you might see 3 ferdinands, assume he has no more, and then move some tanks out to get behind them. Then when you see he has one more ferdinand, you actually suffer a disadvantage because of your calculation. Also, as in most games, both players should fight and think to the best of their ability. Both CBBO and life are like a chess game -- you should always be thinking three moves in advance

Actually, in a way you are agreeing with my point. It is true that over England the Spitfires wiped the Stuka out because of the speed diferential (which is why I could never understand why the US purchased A-10 Warthogs. The Fulcrum would have done the same thing to them.). However, the flying wing design would have been about 100 miles an hour faster due to it's streamlined configuration and it would have carried the same bombload. Thus, it would have been hard to catch even by Mosquitoes. Let me put it another way -- when Northrop's YB-49 Flying Wing was put into a shallow dive it suddenly broke up into thousands of pieces. The pilots and engineers had underestimated the speed that the design would pick up. The much smaller German design would not have broken up (less stress on a smaller airframe) but would have had all the extra speed.

Speaking of dive bombers (and yes, the terrain was rather flat in the game) I think Germany could have done much better in the war if they had concentrated on one bomber design only -- but not the stuka. A German design bureau had drawn up a small flying wing about the same size as the stuka and it would have been the dive bomber to replace the stuka. If they had mass produced this instead of playing with Heinkels and other level bombers (that tended to get swept away by Allied fighters) they would have had a much more survivable bomber force.

I recently fought an opponent who considered himself unbeatable. He always used tanks...and more tanks. So I asked for an unrestricted game and took jeeps for recon and fighter-bombers as artillery...and that's it. My planes blasted all his tanks and now he doesn't e-mail me any more. Was I being gamey ?????

A good rule of thumb is to always use a Priest to level any buildings in village or rural map. Always use artillery to level the town in an urban map -- the buildings are closer together and you will run out of ammo if you use vehicles to demolish them. One of the artillery spotters has 100 rounds -- perfect for wiping out both pesky troops hiding in the houses and for eliminating the enemy civilians too. This way you can have your own civilians occupy the land after the war.

I don't see it as a 'mistake' to have helped the russians, as we would have had a equally bad cold war with Berlin if the Germans had won. Do you think we would have been the eventual victors if Germany (and remember how darn smart those guys were in inventing new tactics, weapons, jet engines, etc) had had 50 years to build up arms against us? At least the Russians were manageable.

Besides, Phemur is smart enough to come up with a counter tactic to stop to massive deconstruction that I am doing. That's what war is like -- tactic, counter-tactic, and so forth.

I am the one who Phemur was fighting. I knew him to be a most excellent infantry commander, and I knew the value of buildings as defensive posts, so I selected my forces accordingly. My armor heavy units lay siege to the wood structures first, and then I will move in to finish off any survivors. This is not my strategy. Having read over 100 books on military history and philosophy, I know that in the old days (1939-1945) there was little chivalry on the battlefield. Did you know that in Russia, 3 out of every 4 buildings in the country were leveled by war's end? (Usually by Generals like me) Or that when the Americans pushed on toword Berlin, if they took fire from a village, they often leveled the village? Even in Vietnam this sometimes happened (My Lai was not the only village to undergo this) My study of military thought led me to my current tactics. Plus Phumur is such a fomidable opponent, I decided to take no chances.