cool breeze

Boy do I love being right

I haven't read the whole thread so sorry if this has been covered but it seems like tree toughness was substantially reduced for the better at some point in the CMx2 wide upgrading/patching thing? Because I kinda remember them used to be being made of iron, and now they just seem tough. Sometimes they do still seem too strong, but I think maybe there is some randomness in how tough the tree is? if there isn't it would be realistic for it to be added. I imagine a big tough old tree might have 5 to 10 times the damage points than a 30ish year old/young tree of perhaps similar height. Of course it would be stupid to shoot at a tank through a tree (trunk) but if you're shooting at a tank with AP and keep accidentally hitting a big tough tree that is in the way I can imagine it messing up quite a number of shots before becoming a stump. But I do agree the bushes shouldn't stop AP, and I think it might aid immersion if a lot of the AP shells that hit trees get deflected, so we aren't inclined to imagine the perhaps not that big of a tree fully absorbing those rounds while staying upright. You could also argue that WYSIWYG means the trees should have a toughness per tree type/model but no randomness to the toughness within the type/model. Which leaves out the unusually old tough trees entirely unless you give em extra models. That would be cool but probably too much work to put into scenarios, so I think just having the same models cover a range of actual tree sizes/toughnesses seems good.

Would be nice if people would consistently come back to the threads they start while being upset about a problem and let the world know their concerns were satisfactorily dealt with. I'll just add that I have also contacted the help desk numerous times and been consistently impressed with the level of personal and immediate attention provided. Thanks for all those shock force re-activations! I've probably got to make some more requests in the near future to get all my CM games up and running again, but I'm not sure because the system has gotten so much more user friendly over the years. And Shock Force 2 might come out before I ever really get the need for CMSF1, CMBS has so much modern war satisfaction for me.

Hey, I'm glad I'm not the only one who' had Drop Team/ Drop Team 2 on their mind lately! Sort of started learning to use Unreal Engine recently (sort of as in not enough time yet to be really learning) and been thinking about games to try to make on it, and copy right issues and huge programming challenge aside, Dropteam 2 is one of the coolest I can come up with. I also got a more original idea few days ago that anyone can use as long as they give me a cut . In this document http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00963402.2016.1124664 about recently declassified numbers of floating nuclear weapons in US arsenal, you can see they list a Mk 23 projectile for our BBs at 15 to 20 kt each in service from 1956 to 1962. I read this to mean from 1956-62 we were carrying who knows how many rounds of nuclear 16" shells. When I read that I was kind of overwhelmed by how "badass" seeming it was to have our BBs (greatest ships of all time) shooting broadsides of nuclear rounds. And why the heck would you take them off the BBs in 62? And then I thought how cool of a game it might be to drive around one of those nuclear armed BBs with an exaggerated number of nuclear shells on board blasting down impossibly huge USSR fleets and bomber waves and missile waves followed by some crazy boss battles and maybe giant alien ships and or monsters. Copyright.

Oh no no no! This is clearly an intended feature to to simulate the rarely used standing on glass ladders and other soldiers shoulders technique! .

Oh no I knew something felt off when I wrote fireflies, thanks for to reminder. I was really meaning and thinking about the 76mm Shermans although I guess the Brits with the fireflies were a good example too. But wrong names aside it still seems like a good analogy to what I'm talking about. The Sherman 75mm was released in mass because they knew the gun was reliable, but it was built big enough to handle the experimental super gun too in case it was needed (even though it sacrificed ammo and especially HE) , and they started sending the 76mm model along with the 75mm ASAP. Yet it' kind of old fashioned and WW2 style to plan on the first batch just getting destroyed and replaced, much more modern to plan on an upgrade.

All points very much appreciated. Totally agree that a 152mm FSV on a tank chassis is not a particularly helpful thing. But my money (like ten dollars or so ) is still on us seeing a surprisingly long-backed and tall turret fit onto the armata tank some time coming up. To me the current turret looks small, like they might have a bigger one that can fit there too. While it doesn't seem helpful as a FSV it does seem very helpful as a MBTfield trial, and also marginally helpful playing the roll firefly's played for the US. And about the ammo, if it carried 20 rounds it could have 10 sabot and 10 HEAT. 10 152mm heat is a lot more HE firepower than is carried by the MGS.... not that you really want to compare a tanks HE firepower to MGS, but it's no wet noodle. I'd take it in CM for sure even if it only had the 10 sabot and 10 HEAT. P.S. oh and when I was talking about making the tank big enough to fit the 152mm gun, I very much meant to include the autoloader and such as part of that. Of course this takes nothing away from the very correct points that there are big trade-offs in making that design criteria. But I think that having the tank be somewhat bigger was deemed not too big of a drawback.

I thought we heard, around the time of the parade, after we started seeing pictures of it, that there was a 152mm turret for it too. I thought the Kremlin had said they had it but weren't saying if they would put it in the parade? Anyway, while there was a lot of fantastic speculation and ridiculous claims making around the time of it's unveiling, it seems like if the Russians thought they were running out of room for improvement with their 125mm, they would make fitting the new 152mm tank gun they had been working on as a replacement to the 125mm fit into the new tank that's supposed to stay relevant for a long time. By fitting the gun into the tank I mean making the tank big enough to fit the gun, because they say they already had the gun. If the tank is big enough to mount the 152mm turret, it's definately big enough to mount the 125mm turret. But if you make the tank only big enough to fit the 125mm then you need to make a whole new tank to fit the 152mm, and if you expect the 125mm to stop cutting it later on you'd be building a bunch of obsolete tanks if you did that. So triple barreled rail guns aside, I don't think its unreasonable to think they might have just made the tank big enough in the first place. And while i don't think it would be easy to change out the turrets and such, I think the fact that the turrets are separate from the crew compartment does mean the turret is kind of a bolt on modular kind of a thing. I meant its not like integral to it, its like stuck to the top of it (and down into it a bit) and connected up with the rest of the tank with a bunch of wires/plugs.

Thanks for the reply . All that feasibility and economic stuff is way above my pay grade so I'm not trying to be drawn into an argument about any of that stuff, I was just giving my take on why I thought they might WANT to do what they say they are doing, not commenting on if they CAN do it, or anything like that. And while putting some of the autoloader in the basket in the hull does constrain the potential size of it, I was under the ill-informed impression that the armata tank was designed to work with either the 125 or the 152.

But it seems to me that they might think the current new 125 mm is up to the challenge of facing the current generation on western armour but not whatever the next generation is going to be, and they think they are at or at least nearing the the limit with what they can do with 125 mm. So they want to be ready to move to 152mm for MBTs when it becomes necessary, but since it is still a system that hasn't been field tested it would be an unnecessary risk to make that the initial MBT configuration. And it would also mean that whatever armour the west came out with next would be an attempt at being 152mm proof. By releasing it first with the new 125mm for MBT and 152mm as unimportant accessory, it makes it o the west is more likely to respond to the 125mm threat than the 152mm threat with their next generation of armour. This allows the Ruskies to still have a western armour beating weapon at their disposal after the next generation of western armour is released. And if they cant get the next new generation of 125mm to penetrate the next generation of western armour then they can modular-ly switch out the turrets of the 125mm armatas with the 152 turret and make it the new MBT.

Hey guys I feel a little out of place commenting here... seeing as my knowledge of this stuff comes largely from this series of games... but from playing this game it seems pretty clear why the Ruskies WOULD be interested in fielding a 152mm gun armed heavy tank. They can't seem to get their 125mm to do the job well enough against western/USA unobtanium uber armour, so they gotta go bigger. I'd much rather have 20 shots that will kill vs 40 shots that will blow up in my ammunition rack after my first shot pings off the armour. Plus the APS systems are bringing missiles down a notch and I've been under the impression the Ruskies relied on missiles to be a much bigger part of their firepower 125mm and otherwise. Now that they are starting to lose a lot of that edge they gotta make up for it with bigger guns.

It would be cool though if the guys not aiming/loading the machine gun could do most of the mg deployment time while the mg was actively working from the window semi-deployed. I don't really need them helping with their rifles, Id rather them do the furniture and or loopholes while the mg gunner fights. Once they finished the gunner could just move to the tripod and "plop" it on.

Great videos, mucho fun! Seemed a very Soviet plan and execution. Probably would have been a little safer to shoot more first, I would have had some tanks/spguns move to where they could barely area fire the 88 and shoot a few shells each, and I would have let the team meatshield shoot the rifles and mgs at it for longer, the rifles work out to 700m I think. But the way you did it made for the best video!

I see what you guys are saying but technically his user name is claiming he is not a troll, right? Too*drolltotroll?

I just went looking for the post that someone made recently where they Photoshopped the background a lighter gray to match the fog and it made it look way better. Now an improved version of the demonstrated idea is in the game and so soon! Clearly a Hip Hip Hooray are in order for the photohopper but I cant remember who or find it. Ill guess Ian tho since hes a photoshop guy. Anyway Hip Hip Hooray!

like seriously look at the freaken image at the top of the website you really think they might have forgotten about muzzleflash?

Units can spot firing guys at night farther away than they can see the terrain, so OBVIOUSLY they are modeled and this whole thread is stupid and maybe people should play some night battles before coming on to complain.

Maybe I should have actually finished reading before commenting . Now that I read your post I have a better sense of what you wanted out of the scenario and I see my last post is likely not going to hit the mark. Anywho I think you're kind of missing an important point of the role of scenario designer, especially in a campaign. The scenarios are always about interesting battles. Interesting in the sense that by the time you take things over, someone has miscalculated at some level enough to make it not completely one sided. So its always about handling the mistake of some superior officer on you're side, and or taking advantage of a mistake of the superior officer on the other side (say you're defending, which means they are attacking with too small a force.) Plus its the dang first level of the main campaign for the game so you shouldn't have to be a soviet artillery prep fire expert to win it. Im glad all that prep fire stuff was taken care of and I didn't feel like whoever handled it had to leave me any of his ammo allotment to finish the mission with what was provided by my generous communist masters. Leave it to the American Capitalists to save lives with better more flexible heavy arty usage.

JasonC, I think you might feel differently about that scenario if you actually played through it. I thought the whole campaign was great though I would have preferred a few more missions and I thought the first mission was the best and really set it off with the right tone and realistic feel. Gave a great sense of the scale and did a great job of showing the difficulty of defeating the German empty battlefield concept I have read you describe. I think if you played through it you'd find it much more how you want it to be than you think. SPOILER the only concentrations of enemy force are deep in the zone in well hardened positions that would have generally been pretty safe from prep fire. Everywhere else is just carefully positioned small hardened spots with few men but the firing lanes all overlap to make it a tough slog to get through. You get tons of guys all at the start (realistically so) but there is no reason to spend any time setting them up because the starting zone is safe (as is realistic in this case). Then once you start you have total freedom of how to attack given the hugeness of the map. But given the friendly forces and the enemy, and the loose casualty restrictions, and I think a somewhat historical approach would give successful results. Plus its easy to role play away not having control of the 3 hour boring prep barrage. You are the commander of the ground forces, including the mortars and the su-76's. But some higher up artillery planning mucketymuck was responsible for the prep barrage and you are just left to make do with what he left you.

The weather and how far the blue line to go definitely are tied together, its easy to see in the course of a dawn battle. Like mission two of school of hard knocks But I have also seen what your talking about so good point but I think its just that its not quite right all the time not that it doesn't work like that at all. It could also be that we were both trying to shoot ground that was "out of weapons range", so they didn't fire, and they didn't see anyone even though they could see the ground because they just hadn't cause it was a hella hard spot. But Ill take your word for it that they just cant se it sometimes even tho the blue bar says so that does ring true. Honestly haven't been playing the game much for a while

My bold. I think this is not quit 100 percent accurate. I'm pretty sure you can board at a pause waypoint for the vehicles. It better work cause I try to do it often and it seems to work so like I have my APC behind the tree line where the infantry are hanging out, and I want to pick the grunts up in the apc and go to the next tree line ahead. So I give the infantry a boarding order on the apc, and a 20 or 30 second pause so they sit on their hands while the apc drives up. I give the apc a fast order to the grunts, then a 20 or 30 second pause to give the troops time to board, then say a hunt order to 30 meters from the next tree line. next turn I give the grunts hunt order into the tree line. if the apc sees an enemy he stops and the troops disembark. The troops then hunt forward until they see someone or get scared.

What JasonC said is pretty much exactly what I was thinking about the matter ( not that that lends any extra weight to it . The test with the trees on grass vs trees on light forest vs open grass seems good. I think the experiment would be better tho if the guys were in foxholes and the rounds be made bigger. Like JasonC says the trees give too high of airburst with 60mm. I think 105 120 or 150 would be better. providing foxholes makes it so the airbursting nature matters more, the bigger rounds make the explosions more in range, and while JasonC is playing down the wood splinters I imagine they might help when its a big round sending a large amount of wood flying.

I always make sure to send my men back for the extra cigarettes

yeah I don't know what might be causing the particular problem the OP is having but I do know I have used the grenade launchers successfully out of windows on numerous occasions.

I dunno that world in conflict vid was not to my taste, I prefer CMs honestly. I don't like how the smoke drops down into the ground and its too gray and needs the round shockwave of thin dust. I just looked at W: EE tho and I like those ones, that seems like about what I was imagining.