dan/california

Great Comic, I just favorited it.

Body, what body? We can barely find the smear.

Ooooh, so its Canadian Bacon and all the fixins, outstanding!

John, you separated your to tank destroyers to increase your coverage and flexibility. In the end you lost one of them for relatively little return, and the other one that littered the field with burning Shermans before it took once shell too many. Do you think if you had kept them together, there would have been an opportunity to achieve true fire superiority and reduce the amount of return fire they had to deal with.

It is worth pointing out that JasonC is attacking the morale model based on insufficient information. Getting the behavior he wants might be as simple as setting initial troop morale and motivation to very low levels. It is far to soon to judge. His larger argument about Design for effect vs engineered simulations amounts to requesting a whole new game. Which is less likely than my fat rear end winning the next Tour de France. I am at greater risk of winning the lottery, literally.

The difficulty, from a practical standpoint, is that one squad or platoon should only respond to another's losses if they are aware of them. So if the squad that gets blitzed is out of C2 how would the other squad know? Probably doable,but non-trivial programming.

Isn't that a felony in most places, and somewhat gross to boot. I mean eeww.

Despite the wishes expressed above, the answer is yes, Mac will play. He's odd that way.

Mac has politely requested you leave his unmentionables alone!

I think some of us are responding to all of his commentary, instead of the specifics of his last post. There is a very fundamental issue about the game engine design philosophy that has been kicking back and forth.

This crowd would debate the rendering of an overcast sky, and not very politely either. Its what gives the place charm.

Tongue firmly in cheek Major,firmly.

Get this thing out the door so we can argue about what you did do, instead of what you didn't.

Yes, and all you have to do is come up with five to ten man years worth of first class coding effort to give us your take on how it ought to be. Until then you are trying to beat something with nothing.

This is a blatant attempt to hijack this thread with a tripod stalking horse.

But if thet were under merciless mortar fire, but not in close proximity to any enemy soldiers, that had brought them to the same state in terms of morale failure what would they have done?

Do troops still rout as well, or has surrender essentially replaced that functionality? As structured it really seems like a last ditch warning to the player that a given unit has been used up. You can get them somewhere safe or they will decide to take the POW camp instead.

In the looking I have done recently Wikipedia has been truly comprehensive. I mean chapter, verse, and serial numbers. The info is there for minimal looking.

Jason C, the higher level morale idea you bring up is not without interest, But CMX2 already has the means to set any casualty limit you wish. You can tack on such a large point penalty for any loss percentage you care to specify that it will make victory unachievable for that side. You can set that for 5% losses and, to use the extant example, give the American player 4 hours just to take hill 154. It would probably be more realistic. But you are conflating scenario design with engine flaws, they are not the same thing. And the purpose of an AAR like this one is not to produce a perfectly historical overall result, but to illustrate as many specific game mechanics as reasonably possible, and be entertaining to read.

Boeing's customers for the 787 are not exactly jumping for joy either. But it comes down to the same answer. It will be done when its done, and then we will start on your list of complaints, maybe, you hope, some day, if your nice. Everything more complicated than cooking dinner takes longer and cost more than it was supposed to. Its nearly as consistent as the second law of thermodynamics.

Indeed, convincing the Russians otherwise was one of Hitler's greater blunders.

If I was really going to blame the Soviets for something, it would be the way they treated their own people. I was just trying to point out the fact that there are great advantages to convincing the other side they can surrender without being crucified, though. However, there is no shortage of proof throughout history that other factors have often conspired to keep this from being the case.

But MANY of those Soviet surrenders came in the first year or so. Whole Russian Army's simply punted. They were just caught completely by sunrise in the initial German push, I am still not sure how they held it together. But as the war went on, and Stalin started to get together, he can say quite truthfully "that it takes a brave man to be a coward in the Russian army". This was not always advantageous. There are any number of anecdotes about units following orders that were not only suicidal, but uselessly suicidal, because the major new he would be shot by his own side if he even attempted to question them. I think there are some cases of this where the Germans were concerned as well. One of the weird little facets of World War II continues to fascinate me is how the Germans treated Western and Russian POWs completely differently. It just illustrates something very unusual in the way their minds worked. The Western Allies of course reaped great advantages from treating prisoners very well, and making it known that they treated them very well. I am sure this made a great difference in more than a few cases on decisions of whether the fight to the death or not. And it probably helped with the reintegration in West Germany into Western Europe after the war as well.

So we know Elvis wouldn't do it over the same way. Hopefully we will get another DAR soon to illustrate some different approaches. Or the game itself, actually I vote for that one! Elvis, you have not discussed your use of artillery in great detail. Could illuminate when and where you called in supporting fires, your target reference points, and so on.

And as a practical matter, both surrender and routing are effectively impossible/unthinkable in the US's current conflicts.