ZPB II

What drivers, Nvidia control panel settings and in-game settings are you using?

I recently had an entirely opposite experience, having no other expectations of an AT-5 BRDM other than spectacularly explosive bait, I slow-moved it to peek out of some woods and these absolute kings in their mighty war chariot took on an entire platoon of M60A1s in defensive positions and emerged victorious without taking any return fire. They emptied the entire cassette of 5 missiles in maybe 20 seconds or so. I was impressed and my view of ATGM vehicles was forever changed. Do you have a savegame of this behavior?

Three-Body Problem fans are absolutely delighted that the same two dudes who crashed & burned Game of Thrones will be doing the Netflix adaptation.

JFK has both a space center and a lobster stew named after him. "Super bundle" contains the letters "S" and "L". Coincidence?

Sneeze at the wrong time and things can happen. The Terminator looks supremely cool, but raises many questions. How often do targets that require dual autocannon fire to succesfully engage come up? It seems jam-packed with sensors, making it highly expensive, how many of these can a struggling economy build and maintain? The BMP-3 tried to fit as many weapon systems on a single platform as possible and I'm under the impression it was deemed a bit of a failure, but was it? What should I cook for dinner?

As a habitual off-topic enthusiast, watching a commercial announcement thread go random is a guilty pleasure, even though it probably shouldn't be. Word on the street is 8 out of 10 reptilian overlords react positively to the Super Bundle.

I vaguely remember something about production nightmares regarding Lynch's Dune. Something about the producer hyping it as a Star Wars killer and a money printer to execs and this compromising the artistic vision. Emperor: Battle for Dune was a lovely game, better than the lukewarm critical reception it received at the time.

This part from the Dune 1984 soundtrack is possibly the greatest single part of the movie. That, or Sting. I just watched a trailer for the Foundation series. It could be the trailer for a new Marvel movie. Same looks, same sounds, same frenetic tempo. Some irony if they messed up a book about self-awareness and perpetuation by dumbing it down. There's some deep universal metajoke in there.

I braved the pandemic and broke from hermitage to go see Dune in an IMAX theater after reading rave reviews and recommendations on how the IMAX experience elevates the movie and that it is such a unique experience to view it in IMAX. The visual, aural and mental experience was sublime. I couldn't get the movie out of my mind for days. Dune is such a topical evergreen with it's themes of consciousness, AI, superdetermism, free will, the concept of randomness and time, resilience etc. list goes on.

The drone threat has been mainstream for 15 or so years at least but anti-drone drones still aren't a thing.

Sorry. It was tongue-in-cheek to drum up discussion.

The secure computing paradigm. UEFI, TPM, Win11 itself etc.

While I do understand that people need to eat, it's still fascinating how many people see no issue in having a black box decide what you can and cannot do with your computer. It is for our own security, after all. Glorious leaders would never dream of misusing such control.

Bren tripods, anyone? I feel like this is the moment when we should be talking about Bren tripods.

You never know what is real on the internet but the comments gave the impression of a "bring your spouse to work" kinda thing. Also, grog-esquely, there's the notion of this being either a T-64 or a T-80 due single-part rounds.

You're right. I jumped from thinking about business into simply losing edge. Warhammer was supremely bleak, dark and depressing. All the characters and all the factions sucked, there were no good guys anywhere. Now they talk about how "it's important to write likeable chararacters for everyone" and everything they produce just feels like fan service. Total Warhammer 3 is coming out with new re-imagined Russia and China-esque factions. Since GW wants to make money on emerging markets, they will likely not dare to make any kind of parody or mockery. The end result will likely be boring with no edge. Grumble. Got a massive headache so my rambling is more incoherent than usual.

Sometimes spouses have arguments.

While I do understand where a lot of the complaints are coming from and I don't judge people for wanting things, I find it amusing, in a cute and innocent fashion, to read year after year. CM has always been artesanal and boutique in nature. It's the original indie game. Mainstream is mainstream but CM is a counterculture institution. So many businesses have sold out and lost their way when expanding. Something happened to Games Workshop and Warhammer. The original crew created a nihilistic, fatalistic counterculture hobby with some decent social and philosophical commentary. Now it's a soulless, faceless corporate juggernaut that churns out bland Disney-tier material. They became a parody of themselves. A similar thing happened with the Simpsons. Counterculture became mainstream. CM is an amazing game but the slightly anachronistic "stick it to the Man" attitude is what elevates it to such a special place. But then again I'm a weirdo, so there's that.

Where are all the ads? I don't know what to buy and it's making me anxious. How does the data mining work here, do I have to manually send my data somewhere? There's also not enough outrage bait, I'm kinda addicted to feeling outraged and offended by something. It's a nice effort and I appreciate it but it feels hollow.

Synchronicity and quantum mechanics is spooky stuff. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02456-5

I thought so too at first since the rate of fire is very low but then again the impacts seemed big for 14.5×114 MDZ.

I remember seeing a video where a Shilka in Syria was firing perpendicular at targets behind a highway, pausing whenever a truck, bus or other civilian car is about to cross the line of fire and then resuming firing. The traffic didn't even seem to slow down as they approach the stream of tracers. The human condition and so on.

With the amount of exposed sensors next-gen vehicles are packing, shotgun & flechette type precursor rounds will likely be quite useful. The Jaguar is a fascinating example of expensive, fragile stuff outside armor protection:

Also, from personal experiences I feel SLOW might be an under-appreciated command when moving into contact or I'm just experiencing statistical outliers. I've actively started using it more and I'm seeing great success. High-experience units moving into contact with SLOW will often spot enemies really well and will immediately return fire if engaged and don't seem to suffer from suppression as badly. It's really tricky to use since it will exhaust your troops really fast, but doing those final move into contacts manouvers with slow has proven useful. I usually used Slow when moving ATGMs, MGs, FOs and such into positions but now I've been using it to enter buildings and crest terrain into contact. Be careful when using it in the open though.

There are definitely a ton of weird stuff that happens in CM, it's a computer program after all. But in long term the way CM emulates trends of reality quite well, it's not supposed to be easy to advance without taking casualties. It's frustrating when a plan and orders that one meticulously plotted doesn't go well, but atleast personally the biggest charm is that it never goes as planned, playing CM is all about controlling chaos. It's a punishing game, cruel mistress, femme fatale kinda thing like Dark Souls or Escape From Tarkov. What gamemode and tempo do you maintain? I play WEGO so waiting 5 ingame minutes to allow troops to observe and listen to their surroundings can be done in 20 real-life seconds. Advancing without taking casualties is a painstaking process, but if you methodically move from cover to cover, always maintaining excellent command & communication, always have overwatch covering a manouver element and always Target Brief the most potential threatening vectors while having a constant recon screen and support on call one can improve the odds. I can play maybe one "methodical" game in one day before it gets mentally tiring and but I can play a dozen scenarios in a quicker fashion where I take more casualties. I only recently got back to playing CM after a long break and at first I was frustrated at how I felt my troops were doing stupid stuff, but then I adjusted the way I play and I'm seeing less casualties.