sburke

LOL yep that's me, Birdcrap grog. And obviously not enough wine, otherwise I would have passed out and stopped posting inane stuff

Is this really what we want to spend our time on? :confused: I'd rather a debate on the lack of oil leaks from the vehicles and what color they should be, or if timbered houses have nails included in their models and if so what kind of deflection characteristics might they cause. How about the lack of cow patties in the pastures and the potential for causing my pixeltruppen to slip. I feel the need for thread lock...... You realize how bad that is? I am in total withdrawl from playing the game and my only outlet is this forum and even in that state this thread has become too silly to continue. Who gives a flying f**k what MD thinks? He's just another individual with an opinion. He's certainly entitled to it and if somehow he feels he still has some aura of authority that he has to put his stamp on every review out there, so be it. I ignore far more important stuff than that every day. Oh crap, yes dear i did realize it was our anniversary....umm.... would you like some wine?

Nice looking forward to it when I get back... I'm feeling the need for more wine...

Stuck in a server room. Not much else to do and I am in withdraw. Hell I've never posted in the general discussion forum. I hadn't even visited it.... No PBEMs for a month, waiter more wine! Damn the food here is good though.

I'm bettin CMx2. Main reason is after getting stoned the three stooges would have him laughing too hard to play CMx1. Especially when someone modified his sound files so they were constantly yelling "Hey Moe!" and "You knuckleheads!"

AT&T did the same thing during the transition from the old Western Electric built phones. They placed a big old weight in the phone base to give it heft.

rotflmao Yes and I am a Font of useless trivia.

There is a line we used to use for the Dead (for those of you unfamiliar, that would be The Grateful Dead) - "They aren't the best at what they do, they are the only ones that do what they do." That in a nutshell is what keeps me playing BFC games and CMx2 in particular. There are a bunch of tactical games out there 2d and 3d. All of them have some features/capabilities of CMx2 but none have them all. What I love about it? 1- Watching the TAC AI. There have been a number of complaints about it, vehicle pathing, unit pathing, dispersion etc. Personally I think folks should watch it more. For every time you feel it does something incredibly dumb it has probably performed 100x flawlessly and even occasionaly done stuff to blow you away. Some of the scenes I have watched play out have been documented in posts here. A sniper taking out something like 8-10 men in one turn. A German squad leader named Probst who single handedly drove off or suppressed a couple American squads in Bois de Baugin. A 3 man team that drove off a Sherman with nothing more than a rifle grenade and then eliminated a couple guys from an American MG team while one was a casualty and another was trying to surrender. And those are only the ones I get to see, I'd love to have that same perspective of my opponents troops as I am sure I have missed many many more. 2- Relative spotting. Can't say enough about this. It makes armored warfare a whole different affair than CMx1. I honestly don't even understand how folks can compare the two. Back in my very first PBEM I ambushed 2 Shermans in Bois de Baugin. Neither saw my JPz IV until it was too late. That's when the light bulb really went off as CMSF C2 is so much stronger. It also made me very skeptical of claims of uber spotting tanks. If a Sherman can't spot a Jpz IV that just killed another Sherman and is in LOS how can it be considered to be uber spotting? 3-The tension of the bocage. Yeah I am with General Lee Irked (and that name cracks me up) here. The frustration and claustrophobia comes through so strong here. Most games featuring Normandy are simply very big attritional battles. Scale is everything here. They may accurately depict the allied problems trying to break out of Normandy but they generally are hampered in that it is just a long drawn out process that is pretty tedious. At CMBN scale however you really get to feel what it was probably like on the sharp end. How rarely you really saw the enemy and how hard it was to put together an offense. The nervousness wondering if the position you just occupied is gonna get a mortar barrage, is there an MG position across that field, or an AT gun.

agreed, at the potential cost to my "fanboi" status it would be nice to be able to area target places in certain situations where if you actually could see the enemy unit you could, but until they actually do something to reveal themselves it is as if the location simply does not exist. I expect there is a reason why we can't and a cost associated to trying to include it, but it can be odd and at times frustrating as you can't lay down suppressive fire and you know you really should. I can sometimes get around that by area firing ahead of the location figuring some rounds will pass over, but it is a significantly reduced amount of firepower.

Nah business trip - Rome..even for me 11:30am is a bit early for wine

You of course know what this means? It makes you a fontboi. Okay okay yes I am really sorry to utter such a lame joke. Just finished dinner and a half bottle of wine and couldn't help myself.

You know Aris, I've never noticed any birdcrap on your Mods. I can't park my car for 20 minutes w/o getting birdcrap. Are you suggesting there were no birds in Normandy or that somehow they were toilet trained. Come on man you are killing my immersion... YES I am only kidding!!! Nice work...again.

Now about that clock thing. I don't like the number font.

It must be exhausting to carry around that cross all day.

MD and Galileo in the same sentence? That would be funny in some other context maybe. As it is, it is simply sad...and a bit of an insult to Galileo. Not particularly about MD, but to demean Galileo into a discussion about personal opinions on game features.

rotflmao. I really ought to save this as a prediction of the future. Sadly it will likely be 100% accurate.

no that was the tiger, it caught a brief view as your infantry got a little ahead of the smoke. I was really hoping it had done enough damage that maybe your infantry would balk. I noticed that on the first tiger as well. I could actually hear them yell "granate!" and then I gather they sat around and drew straws as to who was gonna jump out first. Either that or they were making sure to grab their tourist guides, check the wallet for cash, put the kids sweaters on, check the cell phone.... Everybody remember where we got knocked out!

Off hand not sure, but it is shadow of the hill 8:30am if you are interested in checking. The second one in the field he swamped in smoke, that tiger never even saw the close in infantry. I knew they were coming, but with it immobilized and no infantry available to support there was not much I could do. That'll teach me to leak opsec when posting about an ongoing PBEM LOL I did get a PzIV over there but it arrived too late to stop the attack. The infantry that committed it paid for it the turn after, but the tiger and crew were pretty much history then. JonS also has a knack for removing the uber toting pistol crew as well. Had a great scene with two troopers standing over my prone infantry pumping rounds into them, one armed with a sten gun.

Hey would you like a little salt in that wound? LOL

Well I lost not one, but two Tigers to JonS by close assault. It can be done, but it isn't easy (and shouldn't be). I think that is a pretty fair summary. Good tactics are rewarded much more in Cmx2 than Cmx1 and bad tactics are punished much more severely. To me that is a good thing, it means the engine works. Is my learning curve frustratingly flat at times...oh yeah. Still I am learning and to me that simply means I have a LOT of years of enjoyment ahead.

Not to beat a dead horse, but again I think it is important to note the decision was made WHILE CMBB was in development. There were no declining sales figures at that point. As to whether it was the best decision to be made, yes I do think we can answer that. Can my infantry perform tactics it should be able to do that they were completely incapable of doing in CMx1? Absolutely yes. Borg spotting vs relative spotting, no contest. The envelope please, aw skip the envelope, completely unnecessary. And you are exactly correct, we are the market participants, hell we are the market. And the market has spoken. BFs financial state has apparently improved enough to hire a second programmer. And that is after selecting an era and setting that the howls of protest still have not died from. They are showing no signs of slowing down on their release of new product while at the same time looking forward to possibly an even stronger engine. Let's face it, these guys know their business model a heck of a lot better than any of us and also seem to have some perspective on what the community wants that isn't at all reflected in this forum, yours truly included. I would never have thought to go to a modern era with the engine first. And yet I am glad they did. It's bad enough listening to the "but in Cmx1 it was this way..." now. Imagine if they'd launched CMBN instead of CMAK. Word of warning to you. Whatever teething pains you may feel CMx2 may have, PZOstf is gonna drop a significant portion of what makes CM what it is. Your bar may simply be set incorrectly. Instead of accepting that some things are just not going to be set to your personal taste or that some issues just aren't important enough to warrant BFs attention to most of the community, you are looking for a product that meets what you think the important design decisions should be. Unless you design your own, that isn't likely to happen. It is just the way the world works. If on the other hand you find something that more appeals to your taste, why by all means enjoy it.

dang I missed that post, thanks for putting it up again. That'll have me chuckling all day tomorrow.

Agreed with all you stated, but chasing the sales figures as rationale is I think a certain injustice. Yeah granted one would assume Steve and Charles would like to be able to have their business provide at least a comfortable living, but the sense I get (purely a sense here) is that they are more driven by what they want to create than the sales numbers themselves. As much talent as CM shows in it's design I can't imagine if they really wanted to make a fast buck, they could not do so without so much hassle. Let's face it, they have chosen to work within a narrow niche in game design that is bound to please a very small subset of even the wargaming community. They have done so by reviewing what they perceive as the basic flaw in design for effect that most of the tactical wargaming world is built on and decided to slay the beast as it were and try to do something that inherently should create a more realistic experience to the extent one can with the tools at hand. Considering they are the sole standard bearers of this model, they have only their own judgement to rely on and not 10,000 Monday morning quarterbacks who are speaking after the fact with no investment of time, money or resources telling them how they could/should do it better. Many items of it are absolutely a work in progress. Steve's own statements about UI development are a case in point. However the shift has been made and there is no going back. I work in the technology arena specifically on phone systems. Been doing it for 20+ years and right now I am actively watching the demise of my career. Well maybe not my career, but the technology the way the last few generations have looked at it. Pretty soon "telephone call" will be consigned to the same dustbin that cassette, video tape etc have all gone. I could fight it, or I can try to grasp what it is becoming and try to be part of that. I know plenty of old phone techs who just gripe and now just pull cable. For me, watching BFC is like watching some dotcom come along and completely alter the playing field. Yeah it is new (well maybe not that new, but considering how small BFC is and what the rest of the wargaming industry is doing, it is still new) and yeah it may be rough on some of the edges, but as JonS said several times in his DAR last year.. "wow, just wow". Pretty much sums it up for me. CMx2 has matured nicely, I still can't get my head around what CMx3 might be, but I have a lot of faith in these guys. Oh and Diesel, Bois de Baugin if you hadn't noticed my sig or previous AAR and screenshot postings, is probably my all time favorite in game scenario. The artillery becomes available at 14:55 to 15:00 or by the game clock prior to 60:00. That was one of if not the first scenarios I played in CMBN and it really did not tax my mental abilities to understand the schedule. Hell I spend a lot more time trying to figure out what time my coworkers want to schedule that meeting - was that 1pm PST or EST. CET? Are you f**kin kidding me?!!

Well I read the post Cpl Steiner provided the link to and the term that comes to mind is Luddite. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite Many of his contentions turned out to be hopelessly wrong and the nuance that 1:1 provides in the tactical domain is something he just apparently (at least at the time of the posting) did not get. I can't say that understanding has improved in the reviews he has written since. I hate to say anything not really knowing the guy, but there are two things going on here it seems. 1. A fundamental change in technology that altered a playing field he was very comfortable with and where he considered himself somewhat of an authority. 2. A distinctly separate item which has been alluded to numerous times here on the forum that I can not attest to knowing much if anything on the background. That is a certain level of distinctly anti social behavior. As I understand it that got him banned more than any issues about disagreement over CMx2. BFC seems to be extremely tolerant to disagreement as long as it stays within the bounds of reasonable discussion, cross that line and they will become intolerant fairly quickly. It is simply too destructive to the community. I've dl'd the mods you noted and frankly it seems a shame that someone who really does seem to enjoy the game a lot can't seem to conform his behavior to a level acceptable enough to have been permitted to continue to be a part of the community. We all make our own choices and we have to live with them. I for one am glad that I like yourself missed that whole period.

LOL no that wasn't what he meant. He is referring to the clock counting down versus up. Personally I think that is one of those 6 of 1, 1/2 dozen of the other discussions. The clock is telling you how much time you have LEFT. That seems perfectly reasonable to me, but I'd probably be fine with it counting up as well. It falls in line I think with quite a few of the complaints. They are personal preference. Subjective feelings are a no win. BFC will never make everyone happy. My attitude when I come across those items is usually "meh, I might not have done it that way, but can I make sense of it.. yeah.. okay time to move on." And that is likely the last time I will spend a second of thought on it... until it comes up on the forum. * Seems Vanir beat me to it on the reply and his is a little more..... errrr brief. ;-P