dan/california

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.

The tools are there, in terms of victory conditions and so on. This is purely a matter of scenario design. Which seems to be getting better and better over time.

One of the great advantages of the Ost Front, from a game perspective, they really did things like that. Of course it was hell on earth if you were actually there, but as a game....

CMBN may rate a mention in "divorce lawyers monthly" before its over. The thing that amazed me is that defended woods, lightly defended in some cases, seemed almost impossible to advance into. Also, the German machine guns didn't seem to pull their weight. at least from the info JonS and Elvis gave us. An excellent DAR gentlemen, I wasn't sold on re-fighting Normandy until I read it. now I am sort of frothing at the mouth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/technology/personaltech/27basics.html?ref=technology This is a nifty NYT article about cloud based file sharing services. There may several different ways to greatly simplify moving wego turns back and forth, and this neatly list many of them.

Tube Guy regressed to the mean?!

I realize we're dealing with a sample size of one, which has no statistical significance. But the sniper's kill stats strongly imply that after years of people whinibg in the CMSF board about snipers not being effective enough, we can now enjoy years of people whining about snipers being too effective. I realize point allocations probably aren't settled yet, but how much does the sniper cost versus an infantry squad? Has this discussion even started yet. If it hasn't, lets start it, maybe it will annoy Steve badly enough to give us a few more bones. And your comment about dead heroes accords nicely with the percentage of Medal of Honor winners who live to collect in person.

The thing is of course Hitler didn't have to fight nearly as many people at once as he wound up doing. If Herman Goring wasn't the dumbest, drunkest, and most useless ex-fighter pilot in history the panzers would've rolled right over the Dunkirk beaches and captured the vast majority of the British expeditionary forces. If they had followed up in the Battle of Britain by not getting distracted with the attempt to burn down downtown London and kept hammering radar installations and airbases they could easily have invaded a vastly more demoralized Britain six months later. With Britain out of the war, the idiotic distractions in North Africa and the Balkans don't happen. An invasion of Russia that started on time and with Erwin Rommel leading the southern prong could've ended very differently. I will grant you this involves some of the perfect luck and judgment you're talking about, but it's certainly not violating any laws of physics. And yes the US might've been able to nuke the Germans into surrender eventually anyway. But that would've left us with a very different world.

Where the Germans really shot themselves in the foot with the inability to say " this is good enough". If all of the effort that had been put into creating the Tiger, King Tiger, and God knows what other engineering fantasies, had been focused on turning out Panthers with working transmissions as fast as humanly possible it would more or less certainly have taken Us and the Russians longer to conquer Western Europe. Of course the Germans seemed to have some sort of deep seated problem standardizing anything at all. The US came within a whisker of making the mistake the other way. The Sherman was "good enough", but it was just barely good enough. A lot of brave men paid full retail for its inadequacies. The US probably could have iterated one more design cycle before locking down its tank designed for the whole war without reducing its production numbers significantly.

Any feel yet if we will see it before the Eastern front Game? If Normandy is half as good as the AAR indicates, either AI or better multiplayer/Coplay would seem to be nearing the top of the pile.

Your down to the odds and sods, he has two corporals,and no one has any morale or command to speak of. Its looking kind of over, to me at least.

My basic definition is any system where the tiniest difference in initial conditions can give completely divergent outputs over time.

Its not just that there is inherent randomness, there is so much inherent complexity it results in the appearance of randomness. Which is much more in line with how the real world works.

The other thing it really points out is the importance of understanding why something isn't working. MANY game companies would have ham handed in some kind of modifier and then been bitten on release when many thousands of "playtesters", I mean customers, found out where that broke something else.

I have read that the Russians were known for conducting their realignment campaigns with Makorov's of various calibers. I hope you feel bad for the widows and orphans.

I am not yelling too loudly for the patch because I am hoping later equals more. There are a lot of improvements to the engine in Normandy and since this is CMSF's last go I am hoping as much as reasonably possible will be tossed in.

Major your sense of humor is a national treasure, its a crying shame that would be about 40 hours on a plane and three thousand dollars or so to come visit.

I have also noted that troops parachutes do not deform correctly with steering input.

Any BETA testers in Seattle?

I can play the game while they improve the effects for the Market Garden module, I'm just saying..........

The computer I had it has expired or I would email it to you. Hard drives seem eternal, till they don't.