mjkerner

I agree wholeheartedly with Broadsword. The downside for me is that if anyone in the command group is going to take a hit, it inevitably seems to be the commander, and not the assistants. Broadsword, that has happened to me twice in our "little" dust-up at Carentan.

Lol, they're no doubt effective when my men aren't shooting them! I mostly play Axis lately, and in a campaign at the Few Good Men site, i'vet generally had pretty poor troops. Schrek quickness and accuracy has been abysmal, and 'zooks against me have been missing a lot from 100-125 yds, hence the caution. But listen to zbpII anyway, he has very good advice.

John, regarding fire discipline, two words: Covered Arcs And, unless they are very good troops, 'zooks are not going to hit very often under 100 yds or so. Under 75 is even better.

Well stated, pazuzusmiles. I want my local police, fire dept, EMTs, my doctor, and BFC to all be well paid!

Play the basic training campaign "Devon". It will help.

I see a new sig line in someone's future. Back to the regularly-scheduled program. (Sorry, noob!)

Sory, I didn't catch the name. Mort?

Noob, I prefer Axis side for the time being, but I'm not married to that.

Sure thing, SkipG. By the way, if you do a forum search there have been several threads about this, and one of them has some really good illustrations from the game about various blasting techniques.

Put the Blast order laterally down the bocage row from where the engineers are (on the "friendly" side, of course).

My birthday is August 4, also a Saturday. I am pretty sure Steve and BFC are planning on giving me a big surprise this year.

noob, I've been following your development of this system with interest, and not a little awe, seeing all the time and effort you put into this. Clearly a labor of love. I have PZC Normandy and a few other titles from the series, but I haven't played them in years. I always did like the ability to tweak the OOB, and the unit artwork as well (but not particularly the 2d map art). Anyway, I wish to put in a bid to be a subcontractor. References and resume available upon request.

I agree with you completely, slysniper. The game really should be named "Queen of Battle" or "Poor Bloody Infantry".

And over our lives. They will be prying the mouse (computer, not trouser:D) out of my cold stiff hands while pixiltruppen await further orders on the monitor when I kick the bucket.

Too bad you didn't use some of John K's contacts!

Lol, don't teach him how to do it! Conspiracy buffs never seem to see how ridiculous their "arguments" are, hence they are so much more enjoyable. By the way, this was the funniest part. I'm a big Gary Larson/Far Side fan:

I give, what's a DLC? And don't laugh, I'm an old guy and really don't know. [Don't laugh, and you get to play on my lawn. Laugh, and out comes the shotgun loaded with rock salt.]

Yes, he did exactly nail it. That's how I've always dealt with the games various problems and shortcomings. I refuse to let them destroy the overall enjoyment this simulation brings me. Bad things are simply c'est la guerre! And, BFC will, in fact, eventually take care of most issues.

Good points! I started with CMSF and always played RT, because the stop-start method drove me nuts, even though I missed the ability to go back and watch my own, homemade war movie. With CMBN, after a few RT games, I went to WEGO and never looked back...mostly for the reasons you state, WriterJWA. But the reason I do that is at least two-fold: 1) I really do like to watch what amounts to mini homemade war movies, and 2) for the reasons I tried to get at in my earlier post, which is that studying the ground and being involved in the minutae of combat at the pointy end has fascinated me all my life, and anything I can do to better understand that is a good thing, since many loved ones and millions and millions of others had to had to actually do the real thing and not in the comfort of their mancave.

Oh, another thing. Since I first started playing war games (and actually before that after reading "Education Before Verdun" as a teenager--older brother had a lot of war books!) I have a tendency when driving through the country side, or hiking it for that matter, to constantly be looking at terrain for good defensive positions and offensive avenues of attack relative to some piece of terrain, or the road itself. It's just sort of a game with me, but I know some combat veterans often do that, my brother for one (the protagonist in E B V does so at the end of the book after the war while out on a picnic with his sweetheart--IIRC he was a machine gunner in the Kaiser's army, and was constantly checking fields of fire in his everyday postwar world). Anyway, I don't do it as much anymore now that I can do so in a game, and at least with some purpose!

Sburke, I took note of his comments as well. I never played CMx1, so for me a better comparison to ASL is the John Tiller series. Regardless, CMx2 is more than an electronic version of ASL. It is a serious computer representation of my 50 years of hearing first hand accounts, watching innumerable documentaries, war movies and TV shows, and thousands of books, magazines (for you young folks, they were like books but without the hard crust!), and even comic books. ASL was a cardboard representation of that, but of course too unwieldy and labor intensive. It did keep my imagination working in order to visualize what was taking place on the game board, but with CMBN and beyond, I don't need my imagination to visualize things (albeit in a very sanitized way). CMx2 does something else, which perhaps CMx1 did--I just don't know-- it has given me a better understanding of the "smallness" of WWII combat. What I mean is, I had always had a problem understanding when a veteran would say that they had no idea what, say, 1 squad was doing over there across the street while 2nd squad was getting hammered by a machine gun over here. Or better yet, how just 50 yards away, one squad is being blasted to hell while another is in relative peace and quiet. I just couldn't get it in my head (usually) around how that could be. I mean they are just 25 yds from each other according to this map I am looking at. Movies didn't help much at this, either, because ofcourse they will show you as much or as little of the movie set battlefield as theywant, and from the perspective they want you to see it. So, for me, CMBN really, really, reinforces the reality that a battle is made up of many little individual bits of combat, each little action being very personal to the small units...even to the point where one section or squad is terrorized by mortar fire, while their neighboring squad sits in relative piece.

Rip what MP you have in it already, Steve, and don't look back. P.S. I'm an old guy, so get off of my lawn!

There she is at 1:00...Abwehr says she's from Kansas and works with a dog. Her first strike took out some poor old lady sweeping her sidewalk.

It will conflict with the smoke part of Vein's mod (they use the same bmp image) but will not interfere with his explosions, rocketman.

Thanks for the link, JonS. I haven't seen his cartoons for quite a while. Great stuff!