Dietrich

Theoretically there are at least some politicians who are in it for the greater good and who achieve their respective positions through hard work. However, millenia of history show that the reason (well, one key reason) people achieve the powerful positions they do is because they are greedy (at least a little bit) and are willing to lie/cheat/steal to achieve said position. No (high-level) policitian reaches an office because he is self-sacrificing and focused on the wellfare of the many; even if that were so, it wouldn't be long before he was ousted by someone ruthless and conniving. (This is just my opinion.) I think people are inherently inclined toward badness -- lying, cheating, stealing, you name it. If ever you observe a person who seems to have no such bad inclination(s), it's because he/she is successful in combating their inherent tendencies.

Yes, I understand that "squad automatic weapons" (whether automatic rifles like the BAR or true machine guns like the MG42) are not crew-served weapons. And I know that retaining certain weapons from WIA/KIA soldiers is already done. I meant to point out sometimes the LMG doesn't get picked up by whichever soldier gives the WIA/KIA guy "buddy aid". In playing CMSF, I observe that oftentimes one of the M249-armed guys in a squad gets wounded, and then a squadmate gives him buddy aid but doesn't retain the M249. As important as the MG34/42 was to German squads, I would want the squad to retain its MG34/42 as often as possible (assuming that sometimes it could not be retained, perhaps to simulate the MG being damaged). And yes, I think it would be great to be able to swap vehicle crews (especially if a tank with a Crack or Elite crew gets immobilized or its cannon gets damaged). But I'm not going to be an @$$ about it, as if to say "Without this 'outlier' feature that I demand, I will proclaim the game is broken." =P

So (until further notice) no switching vehicle crews and no re-crewing "de-manned" crew-served weapons. Okay. I'm still a bit concerned that when my BAR man or MG-Schütze gets WIA/KIA, his weapon won't be retained by someone in his squad/Gruppe. I think this would be more important for German forces, since the MG34/42 was the lynchpin of German small-unit tactics, while the BAR's contribution to the squad's firepower wasn't nearly as great as the MG42's contribution to the Gruppe's firepower. According to a couple sources, if during the course of a battle a Gruppe lost its MG, the remaining men be redistributed among the other squads which still had their MGs. I, for one, wouldn't want to have to defend against (presumaby) numerically superior forces with just a bolt-action rifle and a half dozen grenades. Will these Posts look like MG pits (w/o MGs, obviously)? This sounds good to me, since field telephones and pseudo-emplaced radios were important to defending forces, especially in broken terrain.

In my in-game experience, Javelin failure rate is rather low, about 10% (perhaps less). TOWs, though, hit the ground short of the target about 10% to 30% of the time, depending on the launching vehicle's relation to the terrain between it and the target. The TOW's flight path looks rather odd; it looks somewhat like it's making many jerky course corrections once it leaves the tube. Shouldn't its guidance make its maneuvering more smooth? It seems to me that in plenty of cases, the TWO wouldn't have hit the ground if it hadn't been trying to barrel-roll.

If M4- or M16-equipped soldiers are firing more than 3 rounds per burst, this is inaccurate. Both the M4's and the M16A4's selective fire options are semi-auto and three-round bursts. (It's the M4A1 that can fire full-auto.)

Might I be correct in supposing that the "coding and UI issues" relate at least in part to how hard it might be to make the AI know how to re-crew "de-manned" HMGs and such? So if the enemy wounds/kills the men manning my MG42 or M1919, I'm something resembling screwed? Can't detach a couple/few guys from a nearby squad and have them re-crew it? I must protest. However, if you're not planning on making crews of vehicles of the same type able to man vehicles other than the ones they started in, I guess it's not so big a deal if HMGs cannot be re-crewed. (In other words, say I'm playing a Villers Bocage scenario and my "Michael Wittmann" Tiger throws a track; it would be awesome if it could work for another Tiger to drive up alongside the immobilized one, bail out the crew, and then have the "Michael Wittmann" crew climb into the intact Tiger and rejoin the battle.) Could it work to have something resembling an MG pit (a large-ish foxhole surrounded by sandbags on three sides and covered with camouflage netting) serve as a micro weapons cache? A squad or team could "enter" the pit, and then the Acquire menu would light up; from there they could get more magazines (or stripper clips), more belts of ammo, and (perhaps) even more grenades.

But is the SAW's value in its rate of fire per se or in its ability to provide suppressive fire for longer stretches than a magazine-fed weapon can? I'm no small-arms grog, but because the M249 is belt-fed (200 rounds per belt, AFAIK) and has a quick-change barrel, it can fire more and longer than the M16s or M4s wielded by the men accompanying the SAW gunner. Also, the M249's rate of fire is not that much greater than the M4's -- 750-1,000 rpm versus 700-950 rpm.

In WW2, close-quarter combat/hand-to-hand combat was (to put it broadly) a matter either of wielding your weapon like a club with a blade on one end or of actually using your hands to beat down or grapple with the enemy. The vast majority of infantrymen back then had bolt-action rifles, which were not capable of firing bursts, and thus an rifleman encountering an enemy at point-blank range in a trench or in a house would -- on account of the bolt-action-ness of his weapon -- only have time to snap off a single shot (if at all) before he waded in with bayonet and stock. German infantrymen often wielded their entrenching tools (spades) in hand-to-hand, preferring these to their bayonets in many instances. On the flip side of that, plenty of times an Abrams or Stryker or Bradley or LAV or AAV of mine has taken a hit which renders it "destroyed" (at which point the crew bails out), but when I check the damage tab to see what parts or systems got wrecked, nothing which would prevent the vehicle from, say, reversing out of LOF is has a big X or even a small one, and sometimes the crew bails out after a hit even if none of them are WIA/KIA and the tank/vehicle is not immobilized. In such instances, I can't help but wonder: What are the criteria for a tank/vehicle being "knocked out" and the crew bailing out? Is there no recorded instance of attacking troops running low on ammo and sending runners back for more magazines or belts? (But don't get me wrong -- I do agree that being able to readily re-supply squads and such would be more likely for defending troops in prepared positions.) I find it interesting that more than one person has said "I don't care too much about re-crewing weapons, except in the case of AT guns." But why just AT guns? What if you were playing, for example, the German defenders in a scenario where the attacking Americans had no armor or vehicles but outnumbered you five to one? Would you not care if the men manning one (or all) of your tripod-mounted MG42s were taken out? Would you not care if the men handling one of your on-map 81mm mortars* were rendered WIA/KIA? I know I would care. * By the summer of 1944, the Germans were often using 120mm mortars for battalion-level fire support and dispersing individual 81mm mortars to line rifle companies for more focused fire support.

As much of a bastard language English* is, it's no surprise English is swiftly becoming the lingua franca of the world. (Of course, it helps that English is a de rigeur school subject in many countries where English is not an official language, and that the internet is tending to homogenize individuals various languages -- toward the English mean, that is.) For centuries, English has been borrowing/stealing words and phrases from numerous other languages, even languages which American and British English speakers wish their native tongue hadn't borrowed from. (As a parallel example, even almost a thousand years after the fact, Spaniards resent and tend to downplay or even deny the extent to which medieval Arabic influenced what is now Castillian Spanish.) * Sorry, all you folks out there who blithely believe English to be a Latin-based language -- it's actually a Germanic one. =P

...you scan nearby rooftops for the sniper appearance of kaffiyeh-clad snipers with SVD rifles. (Or am I confusing it with "You know you're a Call of Duty 4 player when..."? )

I think it would be rather a break in immersion if a gun whose crew is WIA/KIA but not destroyed cannot be re-crewed. Also, Canada Guy's above-quoted post illustrates the difference between "knocked out" (combat ineffective but more or less intact otherwise) and "destroyed" (combat ineffective on account of being in many pieces). The "Red versus Blue" concept could work in CM:N. However, in regards to your suspicion that it could get confusing once the Red Army (no pun intended) is included in the force mix, I think "Red versus Blue" should be modified (at the risk of being confusing to players accustomed to CM:SF) to be: Blue = Axis Red = Allies Contrariwise, I suppose it would work for each army to have it's own color. In that case, though, it would make more sense to me for Germans to be grey, since the term Feldgrau ("field grey", which was actually grey with a greenish tinge) was used to describe the characteristic Heer uniform and the term sort of embodied the Heer in general.

Though I am not a denizen of the Peng thread(s), I get the joke.

I understand and agree. But what about a situation like where a Panzergrenadier squad has used up all its Panzerfausts yet there's an M8 prowling nearby? It would be nice for the squad (or perhaps a couple guys detached as a sort of ad-hoc "anti-tank team") to sneak back to the SdKfz 251/1 and grab the spare Panzerfaust therein. If that the use of multiple Panzerfausts by a single squad in a given battle would be rare enough, though, I see the wisdom in not bothering to allow for such. Speaking of issue infantry AT weapons, what other German infantry AT weapons might we see? For instance, was the Hafthohlladung used rarely enough that it wouldn't be worth including it? (For that weapon in particular, I can see how it would be a pain in terms of coding and animations to make it work, especially since everything 1:1 now.) And what about the Panzerwufmine? Yeah, I suppose that's true. Despite the time and effort the US Army, for one, put into making training films showing how to use German small-arms and such, I reckon such films weren't widely seen or the info in such films wasn't put much into practice.

Will this apply parallel-wise to Panzerfaust deployment/use? As far as I understand, any given squad could have one, two, or even three Panzerfäuste (depending on how well equipped the squad tended to be, that is). Could a Panzerfaust be picked up from an SdKfz 251/1, for example? On a related note, might it be possible for pixeltruppen to pick up or crew enemy weapons? (It would be great, for example, to see an Airborne squad storm a foxhole, then use the MG42 there to fire on other German positions from the flank.) Or is the weapon model tied to the soldier model, so that they can't be mixed?

And it looks like they used Birdstrike's "USMC 3:10 to Yuma" scenario for some of their tests. A good choice, I think.

"Achtung! Iwan!!" "Schieß sie nieder! Dauerfeuer!!" "Handgranaten - Deckung!" "Paß auf!" "Nahkampf!!" (But, of course, CM:Normandy will have Nahkampf as well. ...Won't it?)

I'd like to see Bad Moon Rising with a much bigger map. It would be interesting to see how the T-90 and M1A1 fare against each other at even greater ranges. It'll be great to see, for example, a Panther advancing amid small groups of trees and taking hits from two or three 57mm ATGs which ricochet exasperatingly (for the American player, that is) off the front glacis.

A couple things (admittedly little things) which to me indicate that this is not a German training film circa 1940 redubbed by the OSS: - In almost all shots, the Kar 98k-armed men hold their rifles in their left hand. As can be confirmed simply by looking at contemporary photographs, German riflemen held their rifles in their right hand; that's what they were trained to do. - The whistle which the "German" squad leader blows has the sound of an American signal whistle. The German Signalpfeifer had a sound more like that of (in the words of one observer) "a robin being castrated". (This can be clearly heard in a 1944 Luftwaffe High Command sniper training film, which can be found fairly easily on YouTube.) Also, the whistle is attached to his tunic by a fine metal chain. A German NCO would have his signal attached with a lanyard of braided fabric. JasonC - Regarding the BAR, I stand corrected. What I should have written (so as to be more clear) was "relatively ineffecient", that is, ineffecient compared to the MG34/42. And yes, I admit to being a fan of high-rate-of-fire belt-fed MGs like the MG34/42, but I also understand the reasons why many think that they are quite overrated and that their reputation owes more to Teutophilic propaganda than to real-world effectiveness.

I wonder how many police officers in the US would be as diligent and effective in their jobs (I don't mean that to imply that I think American police personnel are ineffective or corrupt or whatever) as they if their immediate family members or other relatives were in as much danger of getting murdered as any given Iraqi or Afghan policeman's family members and relatives are. (Not that mafia movies in any way reflect current reality, but I suppose a cop who has the misfortune to 'cross' the mafia would be in a not-dissimilar position.) I wonder to what extent the Iraqi translator edited the MP's diatribe. If I were in his shoes, I'd probably think to myself, "Sheesh, I can't possibly tell these guys 'you're all a bunch of @#$%%$# women'...."

To be honest, I find scenarios set in Iraq to be more interesting, and Afghanistan-based scenarios are more compelling to me. If I were younger and fitter and didn't have fairly flat feet, I would enlist with whichever branch of the US armed forces would most likey deploy my unit to Afghanistan. I'd be all too keen to stick it to those Taliban scum-o'-the-earth, who murder whoever they please, gruesomely disfigure young girls (by throwing acid on their faces if they think they're going to school), use young boys as sex slaves (and act contrary to the tenets of their own religion in other ways)...and yet people in many areas (in Afghanistan and Pakistan, at least) support them (at least tacitly) or simply don't oppose them! (On the other hand, if there were a "Christian" fundamentalist-extremist group in some backwater of the USA whose members iron-fistedly ruled entire counties and murdered whoever they viewed as a threat, I wouldn't be surprised if not a few others in the USA would support them, even while the police, FBI, CIA, and National Guard opened up a big ol' can of crackdow.) Sorry for the rant (insofar as it could be interpreted as political). If any moderator feels I've gone too far, feel free to remove the offending portion of this post -- I'll understand and agree.

FightingSeabee -- excellent improvements with v1.2! I especially like the more columns in the bottom list window and the ability to sort the bottom list by column/category. The various buttons for Z folder and such are nice too. Once I've used it some more, I'll get back to you with suggestions for v1.3.

What about holding down the right mouse button to pan while locked to a unit (instead of moving the cursor to the edge of the screen)? I think that would minimize the tendency of the view to suddenly zoom off course.

When a tank, even an Abrams, receives a definitive hit -- like an AT-14 hit -- and all the crew indicators go from blue to red, one would assume that means either all the crew are KIA or most of the crew are KIA and the one or two WIA guys have no one to haul them out of the burning wreck so they don't end up KIA too. In the latter case, even if the crewmen are not all KIA by a knock-out hit, it would be likely that they would all end up KIA.

WW2 is a war/era people can still view through propagandistically rose-tinted glasses (especially if they live in the western world), whereas modern war is verschmutzt by words/concepts like "terrorist", "collateral damage", and "mutually assured destruction."

First a couple o' 109s, then a Tiger, then a 190, then a Panther, now this.... I tell ya, they're tryin' to resurrect the Wehrmacht! *shakes fist in mock indignation* =P