juan_gigante

And more of the storyline for CM:SF becomes clear...

stoat, I return every turn I receive. Re-send it. Also, Sir Sir 37mm, I understand that my crushing victory over you in our previous match must have been distressing, but you really need to get over it. We haven't even finished setting up and you're already abandoning me?

Hey, nobody forget that Seattlites can have weird elections too! Our City Council is appointing somebody to a seat in the Council after one of the guys stepped down. 98 candidates paid the fees to be a candidate. Some of them were a little strange. Let me quote the Seattle Times article: I couldn't make this up if I wanted. But I'm too lazy to find a link to the real article, and no one else was as funny.

I'm not even talking about an AAR anymore. I'm talking about when I have the finished, completed game in front of my, and I decide to make a campaign of my very own, for humans to play using both CMC and CMBB, how much of the play-testing will the auto-resolver be able to do for me? I think that the answer is the majority of it.

76mm - I think we might be talking about different things - I was refering to creating one's own campaigns using the completed game. Oh, gosh yes the game should be play-tested heavily by humans before release. I wouldn't want to play a game that was unfinished and released broken. I absolutely agree with you that humans should play the game. I don't think that is an arguable point. But when using the completed game to create one's own campaign scenario, what is the proper role of the auto-resolver? That was the question I was discussing.

My point is two-fold. Firstly, it is true that a nearly infinite number of things can happen in a CMBB game. That's part of the fun. But even human playtesting will not catch all those. It won't even catch most of them. In my opinion, any game or campaign or whatever must either be extremely heavily scripted (which no one wants) or will have opportunities for this sort of irregular results. So I don't see why it should be a priority to check for this sort of thing. This leads into my second point - just because the player does something extremely strange that happens to "break" the campaign, that shouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. After all, military history is full of examples of commanders doing strange, unexpected things that led to incredible success. If a player, playing one of my campaigns, happens to get lucky and discover that doing a specific thing would 100% guarantee victory, I would congradulate him. They merely had the same kind of unlikely, lucky victory that happens from time to time. Think about the paratrooper/glider engineers that took the fortress Eben Emaul (probably spelled wrong) in Belgium in 1940, easily taking out a major obstacle to the German advance. If someone had created a France 1940 campaign beforehand, they probably would not have taken into account the possibility of an airborne attack on the fortress, and the attack would be an example of "breaking" the campaign. But that does not mean that the campaign creator failed by not taking that into account. It just meant that human ingenuity triumphed again over planning. Besides, many possibilities of "breaking" the campaign only came up in one specific setup, a state that could only be replicated by the exact same events happening again, which is exceedingly unlikely. In short, I am saying that even human-playtesting would not take into account many of the possible strange outcomes of CMBB battles, and that just because battles have strange outcomes that the campaign designer did not think of, even to the extent of breaking the campaign, does not mean that it is automatically bad. Just the opposite, in my mind.

Call me crazy, but I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Robert Kaplan's work. He spent a lot of time as an embedded journalist in Iraq and been in plenty of combat zones elsewhere. His writing is exciting, respectful of the soldiers, and both humble and willing to say an unpopular truth. Lots of his stuff is in the Atlantic Monthly, and I know he's done at least one piece with Marines.

But I am hypothesizing that no play-testing, human or otherwise, can account for the limitless things that might happen, a problem multiplied many times over in a campaign setting, when no individual battle will be setup the same way twice. Are you saying that human play-testing could find "things as wacky as players sometimes" do? If human playtesting as opposed to auto-resolving could identify 5% more of the wack things humans do, is it really worth the many extra hours of playing? Call me undedicated, but I'm not going to put in an extra 15 hours on playtesting to find another 5% of wacky possibilities. Besides, even with auto-resolve, a human is in charge of the greater strategic or operational picture. Even using auto-resolve for battles, it is still a human making decisions like to group all his tanks and to send them into the thick forest. That, I think, is an example of a non-standard command decision. I think that for CMC, the focus of playtesting would be on making sure that the greater operational stage functions - after all, if you had 10 years, I doubt you could playtest every single possible battle that could occur in your campaign. And auto-resolve can check things like overall balance and seeing that there aren't any clearly broken areas or forces. In fact, the time saved using auto-resolve means that one could playtest even more at the operational level - trying out more of those wacky human decisions we want to investigate. In essence, I'm saying that the onus will be on operations, with the individual CM battles in the background. Hence, one should put the majority of playtesting effort into the operational stage. Auto-resolve makes that process faster and easier. I just don't think that for an operational level game, the rare vagaries of human on human play for individual battles will have too much of a difference. And besides, for crucial battles, you can choose to specifically human on human those. Here's my point - when playing through a campaign, people would probably auto-resolve a battle that is platoon scale and play anything bigger. What I'm saying is that for play-testing, you auto-resolve reinforced company scale or less. I really don't think that so much of a difference would be made.

Well, JasonC's advice is hardly handing him a victory on a platter. He'll still need to play the game. Besides, it's not like his opponent couldn't come and ask for advice himself.

I remember the fighting in the Najaf cemetary and thinking how incredibly strange it must be fighting in an enormous cemetary.

That video was, if I remember correctly, discredited by several non-partisan, reputable sources. The main "It was fake" point that I can remember was that the WP would have burnt the clothes off the bodies, or would have burned them some other way or something. I'm not 100% sure exactly what, but I remember this having been brought up before and been shown to be illegitimate. Edit: Here's the thread on this video: Willy Pete Alleged To Have Be Used In Fallujah Here's a site about WP and its effects: emedicine: Incindiery Agents This site describes the effects of WP - effects different from those attributed to WP in the Italian documentary. To quote the section on effects: Nothing about burning to the bone while leaving clothing. Basically, the bodies in the documentary were killed by something other than WP. Yes, the Marines used WP in Fallujah. Yes, civilians die during war, and that's bad. But that example, at least, is false. [ January 10, 2006, 11:42 PM: Message edited by: juan_gigante ]

What? It's something you should start doing? You're the one who owes me a turn, laddie. Sir, I admit that this is a mission your squire could never hope to complete. After all, how is anyone to sum up how Seanachai is a wonderful, caring and sober person who should be loved by all and sundry for his meaningful contribution to society in a paltry 400 words? Thousand page tomes could be written, and the topic would not be exhausted. Rest assured, however, that when I finish slapping around stoat and when Sir 37mm's internet resumes functioning so he can send turns again and is summarily dispatched, with even greater ease than in our last meeting, that the resulting AARs will be the stuff of legend.

Unfortunately for Sir Sir 37mm, stoat has already been snapped up by rleete. So Sir Sir 37mm once again misses the chance to pick up a serf who occasionally visits the MBT or maybe even sends a turn, and is stuck at his wistful grasp at ol' sturmy a month or two back.

I don't think that we can say whether or not auto-resolve will be viable for play-testing until we've seen and used it ourselves. Maybe it will do a shoddy job of replicating human play, and be invalid for playtesting, or maybe it will be super-awesome, and be able to play-test great. See, until we see the final version of CMC before us, we won't know how much of this "wishing away" the auto-resolve will do. Maybe there will be a lot. Or maybe there will be a little. Until we know, it is difficult to judge the quality of the CMC auto-resolve as a campaign play-tester. That said, I think that the best way to do things would be to auto-resolve while in the process of creating the campaign, and then once it has reached a final draft stage, human play-testing it once or twice to work out any kinks the auto-resolve might have missed.

But Peter, keep in mind that Turkey is also trying very hard to get into the E.U. If they say "No" to a NATO majority decision, they can kiss their chances goodbye. It'd be political suicide. If confronted with a reasonably close to united front from the major powers of Europe (ie those that would decide whether or not Turkey gets in the E.U.), Turkey would let itself be used as a jumpoff point. No doubt in my mind. akd, incredible timing on the Javelin photo! They must have used a wire to the camera or something to take the photo right as it launched.

I do agree that this map is biased towards whoever's coming in from the top. That said, I like your plan. I'd be interested to see how many of the craters in the white zone could fit a squad - if many could, that'd make advancing across a whole lot easier.

I second the desire to read a bit of an AAR from JasonC.

After a bit of a hiatus, I finally got back and beat 321 and 322. 321 wasn't too tough (I lost my Valentine to a dumb mistake, though), but 322 was a bruiser. I just had to wait until a moment when three of the Tigers happened to be turning at the same time, exposing their sides to my 57mms, and the 152s raced up to finish the survivor. Took me three tries. Even at 250m, where I got them, the guns had basically no kill chance on the front armor. It sure was fun bombarding the poor German infantry with the 152s after the Tigers died, though. Heh.

Substitute "Advance" for "Move" in NUB's advice, and you've got a decent plan. It'd be a gamble, perhaps, but I'm reasonably sure that a force could cross the white area by bounds. After all, that huge road down the middle is nearly as wide as the white zone. It looks like about 40m to that first really skinny row of trees, some houses and other cover, then cross the road and you're there. I think it would be very important to do this quickly and soon - you don't want to try it with the entire enemy force watching. Have long range assets tie him down for as long as possible, while infantry go up, at run if in the open. I agree that light armor would be handy, both to establish a foothold on the VLs and to harass the heck out of the Soviet tanks. And I'd send a platoon or platoon and a half through the right, even so. Prevent the enemy from moving through there, flank the VLs, take VL C - there's a lot to be done there. I would say one StuH and 2+ PSWs or other light armor. I don't know how many you can get with the points left over, but it might be a tidy number.

I would ditch the Elephant and add some light armor that can dance through the buildings, hit enemy infantry, and maybe get some side shots. I personally love the Stummel halftrack because it's lots of cheap mobile HE. That's just me though.

One guy claimed once to be able to hack PBEM files - if said he could make enemy units magically disappear and ensure that none of his guys died. I can't remember whether or not it was proven.

A key thing to remember about infantry vs. tanks is to engage at ranges less than 30 meters. Set your guys up in cover, hidden, with a 30m covered arc, and do whatever you can to strip the enemy infantry off the tanks. Force his tanks to come in unsupported without infantry recon. stoat is right that the pioneers will seriously rip his tanks to shreds at >30m. Use the 50mm guns to try and get side shots - side shots should kill very consistently on T-34s, and you'd have a good chance on a KV. I disagree with Sergei regarding the worthiness of ATRs. The key with them is to open up at the longest range possible and fire as many times as possible. At more than 200m, enemy tanks will not spot the ATR, so it can fire away unmolested. Have ATRs open up as soon as possible, and keep firing until their spot is in jeopardy or the target moves out of LOS. They've got a lot of rounds for a reason. Hit enough times, and you might get lucky with an immobilization or a gun hit, or rattle the crew into abandonment. Plus, they keep tanks buttoned - key against early Russians that don't have radios. I usually use them as snipers separate from my main forces so if they are spotted, the ensuing hail of HE won't devastate my MLR. And if half-tracks show up? Slaughter! ATRs will take down HTs really, really well. The 7.92s are pretty weak, though. I just only use 14.5s

Not once you finish the series, you won't be!

Emrys, you are dead to me.

Is that the one in the woods not in snow and during the day? (I think it is). Yeah, that one's a cake-walk. If you lose that... 311 is also close to a cake-walk, and 312 is easy, though not a cinch.