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PanzerMiller

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Posts posted by PanzerMiller

    Villiers-Bocage scenario or map?

    in CM Normandy Maps and Mods

    Posted

    George -- What is the typical range at which the Brits and Canucks get their kills in your simulations? Is it reasonably close to the 900m and 150m, respectively, that the battlefield forensic analyses suggest? And do the Canadian kills occur typically after the Tigers have passed them by, as was suggested in the documentary (if we accept, of course, their conclusion that a Canadian shell drilled Wittmann through the left rear hull and into the engine deck)?

    I accept that this desired level of concurrence between the sim and RL may be a little too much to ask for, but as is the case with any simulation exercise, this can lend lots of credibility to the structure of the model.

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    Villiers-Bocage scenario or map?

    in CM Normandy Maps and Mods

    Posted

    It's worth noting at the time no-one on the Allied side had even heard of MIchael Wittmann. All they knew was that Shermans had bested a clutch of Tigers. The interest in Wittmann is very much a post war thing.

    Yeah, I thought this was a real interesting nugget of info from the documentary. I suppose that even after Villers-Bocage the Allies wouldn't have had detailed intelligence on precisely who was responsible for smacking them upside the head.

    And the whole "Black Baron" thing was interesting as well! I guess I need to read Agte...

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    Villiers-Bocage scenario or map?

    in CM Normandy Maps and Mods

    Posted

    No worries, George...I did stop reading rather abruptly when I came across that word, but I figured it was some sort of admissable warp in the fabric of reality...

    I seem to remember reading something when I was much younger about a Polish armored unit claiming to have taken out Wittmann...anybody else ever come across the same? Sorry I can't be more informative on this...

    EDIT: Just found this rather outdated discussion on Achtung Panzer:

    http://www.achtungpanzer.com/gen3.htm

    Polish 1st Armored wanted to stake claim to the kill...

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    Must say something.....

    in CM Fortress Italy Maps and Mods

    Posted

    Glad you enjoyed the Ost front stuff. Must admit I'm looking forward to heading back there with CMX2.

    Could not agree more...I still fire up CMBB now and then to "get my fix"!

    The Normandy project is the action outside Cintheaux during KG Waldmüller's counterattack when Wittmann led his unit into disaster. Theres a sort of thread - under villers bocage. It has some screenshots of the map I was working on.

    Got it...I do remember reading the early days of that thread...will check it out now.

    Thanks again!

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    With the Old Breed

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    I read both books (Old Breed, Helmet) earlier this year, after many years of knowing about them but focusing instead on wading through Glantz's ETO books. Sledge's book is incredible...his descriptions of the horrors on the Shuri Line will stay with anyone for a long time. I also recently got a copy of The Pacific but haven't yet watched it...really looking forward to it...

    And all this with a 20-year Marine Corps Captain -- veteran of Guadalcanal, Okinawa, and the Chosin Reservoir -- as my father. He never talked about his experiences, and his memories died with him this past January. Strange (though not that surprising) that I have to read books and watch HBO miniseries to learn about this stuff...

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    US shortcommings and how did they win.

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    PanzerMiller - um, if you want to know why the allies won, you read Richard Overy's aptly named "Why the Allies Won". Not complicated.

    Thanks, JasonC...I think. I'll assume the salty undertones flavoring your response were not deliberate.

    I certainly wouldn't blindly assume that any book with the most directly relevant title would by definition be the best. I asked for a consensus on the best book(s), not those with the most obvious titles. If Overby's book is indeed the best on the topic, then you score twice.

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    US shortcommings and how did they win.

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    Awww... Come on.

    If not for the trolls, then for the simply ignorant who need educating.

    And of course the entertainment value.

    Here here.

    One could almost write their own thesis on this general subject from all the material that's been written here, across so many threads.

    Is there any general consensus on the best book(s) to address the "Why did the Allies win WWII?" question? I suppose that's yet another can-o-worms now opened, but...anybody?

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    CMBN games seem to be more imbalanced...

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    I think it should be a house rule that if you post something like this you need to send out a bottle of wine to every person who reads it or at least some excedrin. My idea of a Kolmogrov-Smirnov test is to see how many bottles of Smirnov some guy named Kolmogrov can drink while still standing upright.

    Right on, sburke...! :D Discussions about statistics can get a bit esoteric and jargon-y, eh??

    Sadly I can't speak from too much experience here since I haven't played much CMBN (but I am an aged CMBB veteran). But it seems to me that there's been alot of discussion around here about people who will try a scenario, get their ass kicked a few times until they learn the mechanics and the more demanding tactics, and then (based on their long experience with CMx1) will begin to own the AI in subsequent scenarios (or iterations of the same scenario). That's gotta be a big factor here...

    Damn, I gotta start playing this game...but the learning curve scares me a little bit, and with a job, travel and two teenage kids, my trip along that curve could take awhile... :(

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    CMBN games seem to be more imbalanced...

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    I don't think disparate sample sizes is itself a problem. If there were 1000 CMBN games and 1,000,000 CMAK games, the comaprison would still be useful. The question is whether the "small size" in absolute terms of the CMBN data is "too small". A small size, in absolute terms, of the CMBN data set would certainly limits its usefulness. But there are 80 games in there: that's not ridiculously small. After 80 games, we can see that the "apparent trend" is for at best a flat distribution, maybe even favouring extreme results over even ones.

    How many games would you want to see in the data-set before you started to thing that this result is statistically significant? I'm no mathemetician... but it seems to me that after 80 games, having 30+ of them with an 80% plus winning margin seems like a lot.

    Is there any other relevant "characterisation" or statistic that would add to your understanding?

    GaJ -- With all due respect, I think you're being a bit harsh on NormalDude here. I would agree with ND that you cannot make a truly meaningful comparison between 3,856 scenarios played in CMAK and only 80 scenarios played in CMBN -- especially when the individual actors that generated those two datasets have (no doubt) significantly different characteristics -- familiarity with the game engine being just one example.

    And there is a BIG difference between 80 v. 3,856 datapoints and 1,000 v. 1,000,000 datapoints. A BIG difference. In this case, a dataset with 80 events is too small to draw meaningful conclusions about hypothesized flaws in game mechanics, scenario design, etc. Sample size IS an issue here.

    Your later comparison of the first 80 scenarios from BO, AK and BN is starting to move down the right track, statistically. But the results from the full AK dataset indicate that the initial distribution is not fully representative of the "true" distribution and, therefore, difficult to interpret correctly on its own.

    These are really interesting data and a good discussion. But the jury is still out.

    From GAJ's original graphs I estimate that

    The probability that the CMAK distribution is unbiased is <0.00001% !!

    In the latter case I compared the observed distribution with a theoretical distribution having a mean result of 50% and the same width as the observed.

    What are your assumptions concerning this "theoretical distribution"? The width is not the real issue...it's the variance...can you be a bit more specific?

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    We're not so old after all

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    And if she is getting a PhD, she may even have earning potential.

    As one of those that has gone down this path, I say...don't believe the earnings hype. Trust me.

    By the way -- 49 years on Earth, about 40 of them playing these wonderfully maddening games. And my 13-year-old is soon to follow in his old man's footsteps...can't wait to teach him a thing or two about combined arms assaults...

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    Still playing after all these years

    in Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin

    Posted

    I'm in purgatory right now...have been a devoted CMBB player for years and can't shake my fascination with the Ostfornt (yes, DAF -- it has gotten under my skin!). I bought CMBN but I haven't warmed up to it just yet...and I don't want to go through the hassle of learning and unlearning UI features if I want to move back and forth between the games. I have the old Stalingrad Pack ready to go on my old XP machine and I'm leaning towards going back to that warm, comfortable blanket that is CMBB... :)

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    Targeting when assigning indirect fire, very annoying "feature"

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    Absolutely.

    The game is designed so that you play two roles: overall commander of a force, and commander of each unit. Without that, the game mechanics could not work. You have to be able to give orders to units that may be isolated or whatever.

    However, when you are in the role of commanding a unit, the game does not make it easy for you to act on information you have only in your role as overall commander of the force. If people can keep in mind that these are separate roles -- not the same person in two different locations on the map -- the question of what is gamey and what is not starts to get a little clearer, I think.

    If you can rationalize a way for you as overall commander to communicate something to you as commander of a given unit, go for it. :)

    Well said. It all depends on how devoted to realism you want to be. Y'all should now begin to see where each of us would fall on that continuum. I for one am finding the C2 and Relative Spotting system wonderfully challenging and exciting, so I at least try to play with a close attention to realism...for better or worse. To each his own... :)

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    Targeting when assigning indirect fire, very annoying "feature"

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    Instead of ordering a tank to stop, I order my tank to go around the field and take out the unseen ATG from behind.

    (sigh...)Aren't we talking about enemy units that are not visible to your own unit, and are also not known by that unit to exist?? That's what I thought we were talking about. If the tank doesn't know the ATG is there, and doesn't have communication with other friendly units to tell it that the ATG is there, why would it sneak around the field to take it out from behind??

    What am I missing???

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    Targeting when assigning indirect fire, very annoying "feature"

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    No, it's not a different beast, that's my point. Logically there's no difference between moving using knowledge you don't have and targeting using knowledge you don't have. In fact, you're probably moving him so he can target something he doesn't know about yet.

    I just mean it's a different beast in terms of player-based fidelity to realistic gameplay, that's all. Nothing to do with logic, mechanics, UI, or anything else.

    Remember the scene in Band of Brothers in Carentan where the American paratrooper sees the Tiger in ambush position, then sees the British column of tanks beginning to move up the road? The trooper informs the lead tank commander of the location of the camouflaged Tiger, but is stunned to hear the reply "Well, I can't shoot him if I bloody well can't see him, can I?" He then proceeds to drive up the road, directly into the waiting ambush...watched in close order by the men of Easy Company.

    Try to recreate that kind of reality in your next mission...all the tools are there...!

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    Targeting when assigning indirect fire, very annoying "feature"

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    Btw, I'm still flabbergasted at the logic expressed in this thread. Apparently, if one of my units spots an ATG, I should just blithely drive my tank right into it because the tank has no way of knowing the ATG is there!

    Well...yeah, that could actually happen in RL if there's no way for the spotting unit to communicate with the tank. But we're not talking about movement in this thread (at least not yet) -- we're talking about fire.

    Steve said it perfectly a few posts ago: you need to try and separate in your own head what you see as the player, who has the entire map in front of you, from what the unit sees in front of him (and what those units with whom it has comm contact can also see). Unless I'm missing some subtlety that others have mastered, this critical distinction really doesn't seem too complicated to me. If the tank can't see the unit, and hasn't detected any evidence that a unit exists there, it shouldn't be able to fire at it...period. You as a responsible player should recognize the inherent realism of this situation and resist the temptation of exploiting a "gamey" way around the intended mechanics. Period.

    Now, movement in this context is a whole different beast. You would have to be a seriously dedicated student of realism to do what @Wrath of Dagon is suggesting: To drive a tank through a hedgerow, into an open field that you as the player know is covered by AT assets through visual contact by other friendly units, but is not known by the tank to have such assets becuase it is out of comm with those spotting units. Such player-based control of realistic gameplay would be truly hardcore!

    EDIT: Steve and I posted almost simultaneously...and as always, Steve said what I wanted to say so much better.

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