Bahger
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Posts posted by Bahger
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Thanks very much for asking, Ian.
My friend and I are still grinding our teeth somewhat, as we are all setting up CM, CMHelper (which I persist in believing is a great asset) and Dropbox for the first time. Some of it is very counter-intuitive, such as when to use Dropbox online vs when to use the app, which makes a file on your hard drive that theoretically syncs everything. Whereas I played a ton of PBEMs in CMBO many years ago, I haven't since (except for a couple of battles in CMSF) and I am not used to all the additional steps within the procedure, none of which contain messages to the user, so that when you start a PBEM and get bounced back to the main menu, it is easy to assume, unless you know better, that the operation has somehow failed. I think my friend and I will be able to machete our way through this but if you, or anyone else, would like to do a small trial PBEM and be available to get onto Teamspeak or Steam voice comms just to talk me through the procedure (involving CMBS, CMHH and Dropbox), I would be grateful; I am a relatively quick study once I get the hang of it.
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I am proud of my outcome in "Speed and Power", too, with 9 KIA/7 WIA and all territorial objectives accomplished. I had an interesting time comparing it to ChrisND's run at it on YouTube. I learned from watching this to take very good care of my recon assets, to place FO/JTAC units carefully and always with a limited 360-degree TA, not to charge tanks downrange but to use their long reach to create intersecting lines of fire and not to run the Bradleys carrying infantry into any possible T-90 engagement envelope. My tanks in defilade on high ground were able to see the Russian forces approaching from the left side of the map to the right and vice versa, creating cris-crossing kill-zones that attrited much of the Russian force before it arrived at the government building, making the infantry battle at that location gratifyingly anti-climactic. I put my Bradleys pushing up the middle into cover before they got to the village and kept them there for at least five turns until the platoon C/O, still mounted, with great LOS, managed to put precision rounds on three T-90s nearby that would otherwise have decimated those Bradleys and their dismounts. Again, I managed to spare my infantry.
FWIW, ChrisND had a lot more opposition to bringing two M1A2s up to the high ground on the right hand side of the map, where for some reason I was able to get them there, and there they stayed for the remainder of the battle, raining death and destruction on Russian vehicles approaching the government complex on the left with relative impunity. It's a meeting engagement and therefore a race to get to the government complex but if you can get there first, having also positioned tanks and ATGMs to spot and attrit Russian armor as it comes down the slope, the battle for the objective need not be quite as bloody or as close-range as it was in Chris's playthrough.
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It's a privilege to read contributions made to this thread by real-world military personnel, including a couple of pretty senior ones. Thank you'
This is a good place to resolve my curiosity about one thing regarding officers and personal weapons; why were some infantry officers in WW2 issued with a Thompson sub-machine gun, like Tom Hanks in "Saving Private Ryan" and others carried rifles? (My father was a Captain in the Gurkhas during the unpleasantness in Malaya, 1949 to 1961 and he was issued with a sten gun but I garher they were not good kit…)
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Fair enough then. And thanks for your help! Personally I do not object to Windows separating data from my program installs as It is sometimes useful to be able to uninstall games and keep the data; however, I may be in a minority.
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Yeah TCP IP connectivity is shaky at best, router is probably your problem as CM is often seen as an invasive program.
I wish they would of take time to update their late 90s multiplayer framework at some point.
Sigh.
I am sure you are right, Stagler. I wonder how to troubleshoot this problem or even whether to bother.
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It's an excellent utility but the instructions for finding your CM install are very misleading. After much trial and error I discovered that you mustn't point the program to the CMBS installation root file as instructed but to the data file in your users directory. Hope this helps.
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Just go read the fine manual. Page 28 or thereabouts for multi-player.
I have to laugh at the inevitable "read the manual" post. Do you really think I didn't? And is it a good use of your time to come here to advise me to do so? You can tell from certain responses to my PBEM issue that the manual does not explain what to expect and do you really believe that the manual contains the solution for our total failure to get an Internet game going? "Read the manual". Thanks.
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Great mission in that the enemy AI plans are variable (I believe) and the situation (as US, I have not played as Russia) requires a very fine balance between aggressive maneuver and self-preservation. The time limit and lack of transport means that the US recon force has to approach its objectives pretty directly, with little scope for wide maneuver. I noticed a setup zone that was obviously there to encourage the recon force to put a MG base of fire In the nearby tree line but you cannot dominate from here and you're vulnerable to artillery. There are no really good choices in this mission, you have to duke it out. Superb mission. I got a Tactical Victory, with all objectives met but took a bit too much damage. What exactly is a Tactical Victory?
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Ha! That's very funny. Assuming I can get to play the bloody PBEM, that is. You have to admit, for newbs like me it's a bit counter-instinctual. I played many PBEMs in CMBO but do not remember it working like this.
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That is reassuring, thanks. It never occurred to me that the person initiating the game does not play the first turn.
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Well, creating a QB, designating it a 2-player Email game and naming it does not launch the game but puts me back in the main menu. It does create a file in my CM Outgoing Email folder, which I have now sent to my friend in the hope that once he loads it, the battle will start and he can do his setup turn. Does this sequence make sense to you?
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Many thanks, that gives me somewhere to start. Any theories about my PBEM issues (which appear to be procedural rather than technical)?
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I am not posting this in tech support forum because my PBEM/H2H partner and I figure it must be some form of user error but we spent two hours trying to get either a PBEM or Internet H2H game going this morning and failed utterly. Here is what we experienced:
PBEM:
We each tried setting up a quick battle, designating it as "2-Player Email" but then, after entering a password, CMBS wanted to save the game under the next available number slot for my QB saved games, which was "Quick Battle 025". When I agreed to this, I got an error message (in a red text box) every time saying that the game could not save the file to an outgoing file location or something like that. My friend experienced exactly the same thing when trying to set it up from his end. We feel this must be a procedural error on our part as nobody else seems to be posting here about this PBEM fail but we are utterly baffled and cannot break out of the error loop.
Internet/LAN H2H
Again, total failure. After setting up a QB and then giving our opponent the ISP/port numbers to fill in on the Network input screen that comes up, all we each got after taking turns to try and host was "Connecting..." and nothing from there. We fiddled with our firewall programs, making sure the CMBS executable was added as an allowable process but no luck.
I can live without the Internet/LAN functionality (although I would rather it worked, obviously) but our inability to figure out PBEM is most distressing. There must be something about the naming conventions or procedures that we are not understanding.
Possibly relevant additional info: I am in the US west coast, my friend is in London. We have both installed CMBS on non-boot directories but have no problem playing SP or accessing the saved games data files which we both have in their default location in C:\Users\Battlefront\CMBS etc.
Before running into these issues in the game, we talked each other through setting up and syncing our Dropbox apps and tested file syncing successfully. We also got CMHelper working on both ends. However, as described above, every attempt to launch either a PBEM or an Internet/LAN game resulted in humiliating failure.
Either we are not understanding something here or there are connectivity issues, but of course these should not affect PBEMs, which are our priority. With apologies in advance if we are both being obtuse but please can we get some advice here? Many thanks.
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I did well in the first US campaign mission on Veteran (see here) and although I am no CM ninja, 16 friendly KIA and WIA vs 156 enemy KIA and WIA is a good result. This is what I learned:
- Take it slowly. Be cautious and methodical with your recon. Do not look for a fight but position your units for the best possible LOS with the least possible exposure.
- Move purposefully. Do not move units unless they have decent cover as they maneuver and/or overwatch from other units with good LOS. If you must cross open ground with inadequate cover, use "Fast" move orders so that your unit does not stop to engage superior forces.
- When you deploy UAVs, keep them fairly close to your forward units. If you send them too far forward they can get shot down and you have no eyes on where the shot came from, nor any capacity to spot and prosecute the responsible entity. The best way to leverage both UAVs and indirect fires is to minimize speculative use and to coordinate these assets with direct fire and maneuver.
- Place units with long-range weapon systems on uncontested high ground if possible but only after recon has been there first to spot threats.
- Exploit long-range weapon systems by placing tanks and ATGM-equipped vehicles in defilade from where they can command LOS from one end of the map to the other, using intersecting lines of fire. It's amazing how effective these systems can be in taking out enemy vehicles before they can position themselves as a threat to your main effort.
- Always get down in the weeds to assess LOS and use the predictive LOS tool to assess LOS from a forward plotted waypont before committing to that route.
- Never push your IFVs so far into combat that they might get shwacked before you dismount the infantry.
- Do not move your vehicles across long distances without overwatch or cover provided by either elevation or terrain obscuration.
- Plan carefully for where you place snipers, FOs and JTACs and give them target arc limits so that they do not pick fights when they should be spotting. More through luck than judgement, I managed to get a vehicle-mounted spotter into such a good position in the first mission of the US campaign that he was able to direct precision artillery fire onto three enemy tanks, obliterating them all.
- Do not use supporting fires speculatively but time it so that you can coordinate indirect fire with direct fire and maneuver on identified targets.
- If you see an enemy tank with LOS on your axis of advance, do not walk your forces into its kill zone. Put them nto cover, suspend your advance and use precision artillery, long-range direct fires or CAS to deplete the threat before you move up.
- If you have to advance through woods or towns, dismount infantry and cover their advance with LOS from vehicles.
- Set up intersecting lines of fire.
- Above all, be patient. OPTEMPO is an interesting concept. It is much better to play out a couple of turns if you feel that the enemy might reveal itself to your forces by maneuvering into their LOS envelope than pressing into unknown territory because you think there is some benefit in racing to your objectives when your situational awareness is incomplete. It is much better to wear the enemy down via good fire and maneuver tactics than rushing headlong for objectives. Maneuver to take the primary objectives and dig in rather than over-extend yourself. You will still be credited with a Major Victory through overwhelming attrition of the enemy regardless of ground gained (apart from the primary objectives).
None of this will come as any surprise to experienced players but it may be of some use to intermediate strivers like me.
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This is really helpful, gents, thanks so much. It's a terrific little utility.
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This is very helpful, Baneman, thank you so much for going to the trouble to explain it. One quick question: I got the impression (possibly wrongly) that using this utility meant that you don't have to send files by email because my assumption was that if both players have a Dropbox account, then the file can be uploaded to/downloaded from the Cloud? Am I mistaken?
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OK, sorry guys, I think I got it figured...
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Ok I will try again but can you tell me how you got it to recognize CMBS when you pointed it to the installation folder? I did it as I instructed but the game did not show on the list of CM products.
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Unfortunately the excellent-looking CMHelper utility has not yet been updated for CMBS and does not recognise the executable. If anyone learns otherwise, please post here, this looks like a most useful tool.
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I've called fire missions that have been right on the money and others that are all over the place. Let's say that in each case the spotters are not tired, pinned, rattled, etc., C3 is solid, the target area is the same size and LOS is good when the initial call is made. I was wondering why some missions are accurate and others not, even discounting random errors that are probably built into the game to simulate human error. Tonight it struck me that maybe the spotter must not change position for the entire duration of the mission, from initial call to end of mission. Might it be the case that moving the spotter at any point in this process might severely jeopardize the accuracy of the mission and that shifting LOS, even after the initial call, can make the impact less precise? I will often move my spotter after the initial call, particularly if he is in a vehicle and this may be a bad thing to do…
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System sound output with volume and mute controls on the keyboard is the bomb! In CM the lack of a volume slider is a little odd and I find the ambient effects (wind, birds tweeting) to be a little loud but the multi-directional audio design is very admirable in this game and deserves props.
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Huge files. How do you think Chris manages to handle the files from his preview playthrough streams, i.e. recording a stream in 1.5 hour chunks and uploading those to YouTube? I would think his live commentary would make the files fatter still.
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Thank you. It's a godsend.
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Erm, can someone remind me how to do this? It's just the regular "T" hotkey, right? It doesn't seem to be working for me, unless it's disabled in the setup phase. Thanks!
PBEM possible?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
Dan, pls check your PMs, many thanks.