ZPB II

Oooooooo...9 stovepipes! Now I am starting to feel sorry for the Shermans. The "Panzerfaust Rush" is a legit tactic. A few times my hand was forced to select two man antitank teams from several squads and order them to rush enemy tanks in the open from multiple directions while doing the snake dance. Hopefully the smoke would give them a chance. Sometimes when 105mm armed vehicles cook off it looks the same as JDAMs from CMSF and the low range of the Faust means that...they were really brave men.

Sweet, I am liking night battles with the new artificial brightness toggle. But a night battle in a built-up area like that? People will die in there! If I am not mistaken there is by default ambient cricket chirps at night. That, or there are crickets in my home. Maybe I need to do some cleaning.

Little do I know, but I will make the guess that a lot of the testing he does falls under the beta NDA. I would also assume that the beta builds are incompatible with the retail build. So basically we might be asking a guy doing a lot of charity work for us to do even more work by wriggling his way past legal and technical nuances. Just thinking out loud here, no intention to slam anyone's opinion. There is always the possibility of a nasty bug sneaking in a later version.

Great, more DARs! At a quick glance, I would worry about the lack of AT capability. While the German infantry in this time period did have plenty of Panzerfausts, they were of the 30 and 30K variety. The 30 comes from the maximum range of 30 meters. This will likely prove to be a liability. The more potent 60 and 100 variants will enter production at a later point in the war. That single Shreck will need to be babysitted. If your enemy has bought 76mm armed Shermans, that is lucky for you. They are more expensive and they are worse against infantry. The HE round for the 76mm has less explosives in it than the 75mm round and the higher velocity means the shell can dig in before exploding, muffling it a bit. The flatter trajectory also translates into a less than optimal pattern for shrapnel dispersion upon detonation. Can't think of much else to say right now. I would avoid clustering too many men behind a single piece of bocage as a linear artillery strike can wipe them all out.

Send me your email address as a private message.

Well, I have one map lying around that I consider to be pretty finished in terms of terrain, the scenario it is for is still WIP. It's, I think 1600x1200m, not very large but I made it so it has a sharp contrast, featuring both wide-open bits with very long LOS and small, claustrophobic bits with little valleys and forests. I could quickly convert it into a QB ME since there are parts in the middle of the map that should work as good objectives and it has covered deployment for both sides. If you are interested? It would be nice to get some feedback on the map. I can't promise it will be good, though. I did have a quick look at the map and I think the variety could make it useful for this purpose. It won't have a briefing or any of that polish, just the map and objectives. (I forgot QBs never have briefings, silly me)

Heh, I often place units in mediocre locations. I don't want them to be in arbitrarily bad places, but what I do want is to give the player the kind of "Ahaa!" moments as he notices the unit is in a sub-optimal location and is much better off elsewhere, both on the offense and on the defense. "Why is this platoon of tanks deployed next to the road? Roads don't sound like very safe places." "Who put this MG so far forward? It's awfully vulnerable!" "Why is the FO in the church tower? That's the most generic location for an FO to be in, surely my opponent will area fire it!" To address the original question, it completely depends on my mood. If I'm going for a more action-oriented game, a defensive deployment might take 15 minutes without all the fine-tuning. If I feel like roleplaying a real commander who is interested in the lives of his men instead of explosions, loud noises and possibly a medal, the deployment might take several hours. Maybe days, if the roleplay extends so far as to temporarily convert my apartment into an officer's mess with liqueurs and prost- Wait, this is going a bit far. So yeah, hours.

Spotting is random and unpredictable. So is the Internet. This thread is a demonstrator. Makes perfect sense to me.

Since the train derailed and is plunging down into the Offtopic Canyon, there's not much to do except silent horror and acceptance. It's 6am and sleep has yet to grace me. I'm glad people got something out of it. I love camp and kitsch. The song and video is from 2010 but the featuring singer is a reasonably esteemed oldschool artist with a decades long track record. I'd say some of the themes are hypocrisy, rehab, existential pain, guilt, admittance & acceptance, perhaps a man who feels his time has passed? Here's me spending, uh, roughly 10 minutes hastily translating the lyrics. I am fairly certain it will be butchery but I guess it might get the point across: Awake alone staring into the night A restless feeling takes over I spin, I scratch I demand answers from the dark I fear the walls talk to me Silence comes at 4:20 Just as I got used to the voices I knew time was running out CHORUS: When I heard about it, it was too late Autumn took my senses away What to expect from life When your brain is pounding all night When I heard about it, it was too late Everything had gone with the leaves What to expect from life When in a year I get out of here Walls are no longer walls Days go by, my time stands still In the waiting room I hear my name An old man begins his cure once again Hands covered in soil I made it through the autumn Second stage with a pale face From the pharmacy I will receive my salvation A young girl hands the pills Then chorus chorus some more chorus.

Cool, dude.

Graargrar, that bit is way too catchy. It's really hard to sleep when you have an earworm!

Cool, the perfect window of opportunity to post a random Youtube music video while rolling a relaxing jazz cigarette. Hey Ken, psst.

Also, gray vs. gray scenarios are for some reason truly Götterdämmerung stuff. I once played a scenario on a smallish map that had a company of Jagdpanthers facing a company of King Tigers. Both sides had infantry and a plentiful sprinkling of Nebelwerfers and heavy artillery. Needless to say it was nonstop chaos, a near constant stream of noise and explosions. After the dust settled, it was hard to find parts of the map left untouched by the devastation. Trees and buildings had mostly ceased to exist and the cratered landscape eerily resembled, say, Verdun or Somme.

As far as I know, infantry close assaults are abstracted in this way. A bit of a compromise, but seeing as the end result is somewhat realistic (players needing to keep tanks away from infantry) I don't have a problem with it. Tanks rarely seem to get knocked out this way, usually it's immobilization or other system damage. Close assaults with demo charges are a bit different. Very big booms usually. I lost several Guastatori as they tossed satchels over the edge and inside a T30 and the entire ammo load detonated.

I read my post again and I could have written it better. Basically, I accept the penetration model as being great. What I had a problem with was that I think CMx1 did not model enough hits on the weaker plates or weak points in general. Stug IIIGs took a lot of punishment from the front and Tiger Is took a lot of punishment from the sides. There should have been more weak point penetrations and subsystem damage. If I remember right, in CMx1 if a shot didn't penetrate it was unlikely to cause anything at all. Gun hits and immobilizations were rare. If T-34s run into a Tiger perpendicularly, I would guess that Tiger would have been immobilized rather quickly. I was the one gloriously (ab)using StugIIIGs and Tigers since very little could touch them in, uh, I think it was spring-to-autumn 1943. Sure, kind of par for the course but I still think they weren't vulnerable enough.

There might be a saying that goes along the lines of "If something sounds like zero work, it isn't." But yes, I agree, it would be nice. Personally I just alt-tab and Google/Wikipedia something that I want to know. Fast and smooth, even on my Cold War era computer. IIRC, Japanzer had a WIP tool that did exactly that, a third-party unit info window. I have no idea what happened, I think there was some compatibility issues regarding Japanese and English versions of Windows. Or sumfink. Then there's the whole grey area about what is considered hacking and what is not. If I remember right it was non-intrusive and didn't tamper with the executable. Or is that even possible? It might have been the hex editor route. Anyway, maybe someone who knows better will step in.

There are so many ways to play a game. Yes, the UI could be better. Yes, the game mechanics could be better. I still don't experience the kind of gameplay some people here say. I have bound hotkeys and use the camera controls (which seriously does not take very long to learn, but there are no tutorials on this) in such a fashion that if I feel the need to inspect LOS from a certain location quickly, I can do it with a few clicks and presses in the matter of seconds. Most of the time the terrain makes sense to me that I don't even need to check the LOS because I assume it works because hey, that's what it looks like on the map. Heavily forested maps and urban maps are very tricky, I admit. Strangely, part of the charm might be that combat locales that are particularly hellish (say, bocage or urban) are reflected pretty well. Sometimes there are jarring glitches, but I find that they happen rarely. I don't obsess over details, many times I simply let the pixeltruppen choose their own targets and force suppressive fires when gravely needed. When I start a scenario I fly over the map both high overhead and then glide over the most important bits of terrain. Then I give orders from a very high camera angle and magic happens. It works pretty well. The strange thing is that I have had some control freak tendencies in computer games (UNLOCK ALL ACHIEVEMENTS, MAXIMUM DPS!!!) and one would think CMx2 would be poison. Long story short, I don't think the action point system and LOS is as bad as some people make it out to be. I think it's somewhat easy to understand and does not require deep studies in action point black magic. I've seen opinions from people who want Combat Mission to be more like Rainbow Six (the good R6s from days yonder, not the generic COD clones) where you can play through the entire campaign from the planning screen, simply making a plan with such precision timing and control that the enemy doesn't know what happened. For me, playing CM doesn't feel like I have to exert tremendous amount of work to get around the system to actually play a game. I feel like I'm playing a pretty realistic game that depicts the random chaos of combat quite well. I guess the spectrum goes from having an omniscient and omnipotent integrated combat controller robot thingamajick overseeing an entire company with precision timing to having 500 dices rolling around in a tumble dryer deciding if it's a win or a loss. EDIT: This is actually a really interesting topic since there is quite a lot of chaos going on the games industry. Basically, put in the most black and white and exaggarated form, big game companies are going belly-up (rumour mill says EA and Activision-Blizzard are in trouble) because they've been producing games that require zero effort to play. And then come indie developers who sometimes make really hard games that take tremendous effort to succeed in. And it feels really rewarding. Games are primarily entertainment, but it seems like a fair share of consumers are bored of the current state. And no, I'm not saying CMx2 should be arbitrarily kept a really hard game to play. Just that it might not be as bad as some make it out to be. Also, hypothetically, if you select a squad or a vehicle and press the "Show LOS from this unit" button, does it work so you select a single soldier and it shows his LOS or does it give a rough estimate of the entire squad/vehicle LOS? I can see problems with both implementations. It would be a nice tool nevertheless.

Had to Google that up, no, I'm not much of a baseball fan. Got this name from this forum. It was supposed to evoke visions of a horrible tentacle monster from deep space. It was much later that I found out Zebulon wasn't just something that sounded like sci-fi. Sigh.

I expect winter will be handled by finely balancing the current morale, motivation and fitness system to reflect the conditions. I just wish it will be pronounced, since sometimes I feel the pixelguys pull off superhuman stunts on a maybe too regular basis. Loading your guys with all the extra ammunition and bazookas and everything doesn't seem to slow or tire them as much as it perhaps should. You know, how that .50 cal team sometimes effortlessly runs ontop a mountain without slowing down or breaking a sweat. Could be just a perspective issue. Also, when I first read about CMFI and then CMA my reaction was something like "Yawn, sounds a wee bit booooooooorrrrrriiiiiiiiiiing." When I played them I was blown away. There's just something especially poetic and tragic about forgotten conflicts. Not saying Normandy wasn't poetic and tragic, but it isn't exactly forgotten. Sometimes I've felt that this McDonalds effect has cheapened the conflict, taken away from the memory and become something of a commercial spectacle. I wonder if there are people out there who think Normandy is just something movie and game studios came up with instead of an actual conflict where blood, guts and excrement was spilled. CMA is possible my favourite subject matter out of all CMx2 titles so far. I wish for a remake with possibly the CMx2 7.0 engine, but seeing how that thing Snowballed...

Yes, that's the idea. I went the minimalistic route instead of dramatic camera angles and rides or juxtaposition. The video description tells a story, but basically there's a trench on that ridge and as you can see from the explosion, the explosion happens inside the trench and kills a Platoon HQ that was calling in mighty 150mm rounds to come crashing from the sky. I thought about showing the end result but then the video wouldn't be as nonchalant anymore. I just thought it was funny because that's a freakin' game deciding beam-riding SACLOS rifle grenade right there. Well not really, just a lottery ticket, but. Heavy artillery came in a bit later and turned everything on that map into mostly dust and holes in the ground. Also, yeah, I'm lazy.

It is possible to load some CMFI scenario files into the CMBN editor. I don't know where exactly the cutoff is, full scenarios with all parameters set will not load, but some test maps and templates will load, but won't show up in the editor or will mess up the editor. I was thinking "F*** me, this will end up breaking my CM" and I didn't have the brass balls to actually try running those scenarios. (I don't seriously think it will do much harm but I won't encourage people to fiddle around breaking games and ruining licenses ) But I wouldn't advise it. I'd say if you try it you will run a extremely significant risk of ending up with a corrupted scenario file by the end of the day. If you must, rather do the basic terrain in CMFI editor, then screenshot it extensively and use that as a visual aid in CMBN. Even this would require two monitors or quite good visual memory. And it wouldn't really help all that much. All this seems like such a fuss when CMBN 2.0 will probably come out soonish. EDIT: The more times I tried it the more I'm convinced it will never work. As I was expecting.

All I can think of right now is that the 88mm dismount fire thing is a bit exaggerated. Basically as far as I know the gun when in this semilimbered state can only engage targets in a very limited arc, the entire trailer has to be turned and there is a risk of the recoil damaging it and possibly toppling it over. Properly modeling this sort of behaviour in the game would take time to get it right. Also, I don't think the 88 can be moved once deployed? Not sure. And not all gun crews are created equal, so the devs try to strike somekind of balance. I do think that Elite/Fanatic crews setup their weapons faster than regular ones. Will be intesting to read about this, I remember that in CMSF there was something funkycrunky about the setup times of a few ATGMs and recoilless rifles that I think were tweaked after feedback. I have this vague idea that the 17-pounder was somewhat hard to manhandle and setup. A single guy could theoretically load the gun and fire it while it was limbered and knock out a Royal Tiger on a crest 1200 meters away, but properly modeling this in the game could be tricky. He might not have his 17 pounder left after taking that shot. Regards, ZPBII, not an expert but would love to think of himself as one someday.

From my vague memories full of holes, I think it was either Steve or Mike who said something along the lines of this being the era of easily accessible information. The manual and the game provides the basic info about what a unit is supposed to do and with what tools. More specific than that and there's the danger of venturing into essay territory and that is something that can be alleviated by Wikipedia and Google. The theme would be that most information you can dig up about a particular piece should be reflected in the game. Not everything obviously, but. Having to write about design decisions and how they parallel reality would put up an enormous work strain. Since basically only the guys who made it know how it's done and if they spend their time telling us how everything is done they wouldn't get nearly as much stuff done. So, uh. What was I babbling about. Not really being helpful again. I'd love to read BFC's take on everything but I don't see it happening. But I think much of the lessons learned from CMx1 do apply. Only everything is more deadlier I guess. My biggest gripe with CMx1 was how 80-82mm German plates were pretty much invulnerable to Soviet 76.2mm fire in CMBB. This made game balance really wonky (CMx1 was much more of a game than a simulation IMO), and I had a hard time conceptualizing how the war went if that really was the reality on the field. The worst manifestation of this problem was the impervious Super Stug phenomena. It felt like the entire frontal sector of the cheeseStug (StugIIIG I think?) was treated as solid 80mm all round with a very very slim chance of weak point penetration. I won so many games by having a wall of Stugs facing possible approaches and bouncing off dozens of rounds one volley after another. It's been a long time though, so I may remember wrong or have misinterpreted sumfink. I think there was a lot of talk about when the APCR round was fielded and so on. What made this issue so bad was the lack of weak points to punch through.

I'm fine with leaving out Yetis. That book about bloodsucking yetis ripping apart SS troopers and wearing their inside bits as costumes in the Caucasus is highly controversial to put it mildly. Hungry bears, however, should not be left out. I've read about several instances of UFO activity disturbing and waking up bears which then proceed to rampage supply columns. Usually at night during aurora borealis. I would provide a link but the Stavka archive is down for maintenance.

As far as I know, it was much easier to provide this data for CMx1 due to how much simpler the game was. The armour penetration algorithms were legit, but the actual models were simpler and weak point penetrations and such were much more probabilistic than actually modeled. Having a single plate of uniform strength is pretty rare. You have welds, seams, rivets, curvature, sponsons, embrasures for sights, optics, MGs. The engagement angle is rarely perpendicular. Extrapolating a probable outcome and telling this to the player is harder than might initially seem. I've been playing under the assumption that realism is BFC's aim, and I've been pleased that the results have been mainly in line with expectations I have had personally. Now, I understand that this is problematic since a player will want to make informed decisions. Armour damage in CMx2 has been much more realistic than in other games I have played. Basically, not even an übertank will want to be hit by small caliber fire due to the inherent risk. A simple rule of thumb for me has been trying to not get hit at all. Treating all guns as dangerous and all plates as vulnerable. I realize this isn't very helpful.