womble

I think it was said that a 'bailing' gun crew would, as SOP, spike the gun they were leaving behind (fire one last shot with the recoil cylinder drain plug removed, often), so an 'abandoned' gun wasn't going to be usable without some out-of-combat maintenance, if ever.

Ah, I get you now. I don't think we'll ever have that situation. I think CAD save-files had a better-defined set of parameters whe AutoCAD was first being designed. BFC haven't had the resource to design a truly open-ended save-game format. I'm not sure that's even practicable, given the material. And I would hazzard that major 'version releases' of AutoCAD have been relatively pricey 'new buys', even with an 'upgrade discount'. I think that's not impossible. It seems to be what CMx2 is working towards, but the resources available mean that if we had to wait until it was all done from East to West, North to South, start to finish, we'd all be old and grey (at least) before we started to play.

If I was saying it like it's a bad thing, I'd've left off the quotes. I giggle at outrageous firepower, same as the next messed-up kid

That looks to me like an HE near miss stripped the track. What started the engine fire? That was Numbnuts cooking his breakfast on the engine manifold while waiting for the recovery vehicle... slipped with the cooking oil.

You can change your own hotkeys And there's an alternate set being included with the release version, we're informed. That has 'B' for bail, though, so you might want to edit that, even. For my money, 'Bail' is a command that doesn't deserve a hotkey. It's not an every-turn command (you'd hope... ) and even in RT, it's probably a low priority command, and even more important that you don't do it by accident.

And yet, .30-06 AP ammunition (which is commonplace) is capable of punching through "more than half an inch" of plate at 300yd. http://www.m1-garand.com/30_06%20Discussion.htm Also, was that 14.5mm a 'headline' figure for that big flat plate on the nose? Was the rest of the frontal armour just as thick and just as sloped? Now, this might be semantics, but the armour system doesn't use grades. It's just a summary. It has to cover many factors such as the open top, what additional protection the driver viewing slit has, whether the armour had known manufacturing weaknesses, vulnerability of external equipment and drive components. Even a modern MBT can be damaged by small arms fire; its external sensor compnents aren't bullet-proof. Ah reckon yew must be new heuh. The USP of the CM brand is its detailed simulation. Especially of armour effects. Fret ye not: the 'poor-excellent' rating is just a very rough guide. You and many other people. Unfortunately, there are arguments for not including detailed information, ranging from the work it would take, through interface considerations, via it's inherent impossibility to account for all factors to the fact that even relatively experienced troops didn't have penetration tables at their fingertips.

Most of a klom sounds good. Some protection from incidental (battlefield) environmental effects, basically. And not much incoming from the sides, hopefully. Edit: Of course, we'll push them much closer than that, relying on their bullet hoses and large ammo supplies to suppress anyone that's going to be rude enough to actually shoot at the vehicle. Probably best to have the crunchies dismounted though...

Not so. They are running out of steel boxes, but have a lot more manuals than boxes. Harware versions sent out for some time after release will have a manual, but one day the manuals will run out and they're not aiming to print any more.

I think the key here is that there were a lot of missions flown. So the 'revisionists' as you call them are correct in their assertion that air power wasn't that damaging, if you read an implicit 'per sortie' onto the statement. Which is what matters for the game. This lack of individual, tactical effectiveness, if properly modelled, should make 'em cheap-as-chips, points-wise, but the sheer scale of the operations means that they should have a high rarity cost... Maybe.

I'm pretty sure that the 'shipping from the States' thing was what stopped me preordering it. I have no idea how I noticed that they were shipping the steelboxes from the other side of the Pond, or even whether I just assumed it, but HMRC can whistle for any import duties, and Royal Mail can kiss my bepimpled behind before I let them get 'handling fees'.

Unfortunately, Groggus Grognardi would have trouble in arguments with G. Handwavii, since there's no physical parameters to work with in the SW canon. It's all Unobtainium and Midichlorians.

I find the whole notion of a speculative market in stocks and shares to be inherently corrupting. The original concept of a shareholder having a stake in the future of the company they buy shares in was fine. That has, over the years morphed into the unholy short-selling, perception-led feeding frenzy that is today's (even semi-)automated stock exchanges. Maybe restricting shares to only being tradeable once a week (each individual share, I mean), or some such, would make the idea of exploting the market less attractive. Or require stockbrokers to pay negative commission on loss-making sales, or something. At the moment, a large part of our world's economy is based upon people selling notional products (bonds, currency, shares) with no actual intrinsic worth back and forth. It's insane, and it can't work forever.

Reading another thread about the integration of modules and games, it occurred to me that there should be some scope for bringing SF content into the WW2 game, should that, erm, idiom appeal as a product, and the thought of those very books crossed my mind...

Not that it's likely to be much of an issue. If the demo comes out even a few hours before the full game, most people who're going to get the full game will probably d/l the demo anyway, I'd hazzard...

Not to its complete extent, no. BF release new games with a few modules per game. SF had Marines, Brits and NATO, IIRC, and BN will have Brits and their chums, Market Garden and 'odds and sods' pack, then there will be a new game for Bulge, which will only cover its period. How much of the BN-plus-three content will be rolled through into Bulge, I have no idea. Same, once the Edit: first East Front game comes out: how much of the Western Allies TO&Es, for example, and the equipment to support them that wasn't the sort that got lend-leased, will be available, is a great unknown. But the fact remains that for each of the selected punctuation points, you'll be required to buy a new 'game' rather than an add-on module for BN. I don't imagine I'm the only one who fervently hopes we won't have to wait quite as long as that for Bulge... Even the gap between SF and BN would probably have some of the refreshmonkeys certified.

BAD protection is better than NO protection. And I remember many occasions in CMx1 when light vehicles got knocked out (or at least mobility and weapon killed, even if they weren't burning wrecks) by heavy .30ish calibre fire.

Burning tanks stay there burning. Houses on fire tend to fall down. The fire spreads to neighbouring buildings and wheatfields. Modelling this realistically is very difficult. Modelling it less-than-realistically would almost certainly lead to game players using deliberately set fires in even less-realistic ways. The flames on a KOed tank are little texturey things and the damage to any unfortunate crew can be abstracted easily; no one is going to get back in a burning tank. The flames from a burning building would have to be much larger and better-rendered to be even halfway realistic-looking. Damage to units in the buildings would need more detailed calculation. Players would want to be able to send units into parts of the building that are not on fire. They're apparently working on overcoming these and doubtless a thousand other difficulties with having fire modelled on a large scale in the game.

Yes. Definitely. I meant to mention this. Would it be impossibly confusing (barring an obviously traumatic transitional period ) to have 'select' on the left button and 'act' on the right?

To stop people picking 'unrealistic', 'gamey' force mixes like Panthers backed up with AA half-tracks only...

Selecting units. * Click a unit with the left mouse button to select it. (same as CMx1) * To select multiple units at once, you have to hold shift while you drag your mouse over the units you want with the left button held down (different to CMx1). * To add units to ones you already have selected, use shift-click. Same as CMx1. * You can use '+' (actually '=') and '-' to step through your force, one unit at a time. (Same as CMx1.) If you have no unit selected, pressing either of these keys will select one for you (not sure which one). Same as CMx1. Targetting the enemy This is quite different in many ways, but the default easiest way is quite similar: * Select a unit * Press 'T' and you'll get a targetting line. This also functions as a Line of Sight tool. There are lots of other options for targetting, but I'm not going to rewrite the manual here. Just one more thing. The spacebar menu This method of issuing orders works the same all the time, so is easy for me to describe. * Select a unit * press the space bar; a menu will appear * select an order from the menu. Easy as that.

Some of what you say about the "Barkmann's Corner" scenario itself is, I think, made redundant by the particular nature of that scenario. Specifically, and my recall may be faulty, I don't think the Allied attacker has any infantry at all. I don't remember seeing any in the AAR... Perhaps not as dangerous as you might think. The Shermans will have difficulty penetrating the front of the Panther, and its flanks are pretty secure. And with the chaos at the far end of the road, the kitty will have the drop on its victims most of the time, so even registering a hit before getting killed is going to be challenging for the green tanks. I'm not sure there us very much 'further back'. The Panther sits at a kink in the road and any further back will mean very short engagement ranges, not longer ones. Yes, I'd say that too. Don't think they can be deployed there, but I'd be wanting to sneak some 'Schrecky goodness up inside that treeline if the scenario allows it. I think the further out option would be best. Gives you a good chance to nail any flanking elements before they see your Panther's side armour.

I'm pretty sure the NCOs would keep the men pretty busy, even if they were dug in (during their apparently towed days) in a sector that wasn't expecting counterattack.

I heard rumours of a followup film to Serenity.

That makes some sense. They had the same NVG icon as all the other troops, in this scenario. Yeah. There's a quartet of 'em, but I had them hunkered down out of LoS, in order that they didn't pick up any unwanted attention and were ready to pop up and slot the expected reinforcements... So they didn't get a look at the objective until the show was all but over.

Why would they be? They'll be exactly the same as any other building, in principle, I'd expect. Some 7 storey stone bell tower might take a little concentration of fire to level, and its ground floor I'd expect to be pretty resilient (since it's going to be thick to take the weight of upper floors), but enough HE will be able to drop even bridges, so don't expect large buildings to have some sort of exception rule.