A Canadian Cat
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Posts posted by A Canadian Cat
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I will tell you what to expect. "I don't expect you to talk, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
LOL Has to be one of the best villain lines ever. Thanks for info. They are still alive and kicking plus the Germans are taking a beating. Hey, I can hope.
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I am playing a PBEM game right now where a Sherman has taken a Shrek hit that killed the driver. Now three turns later the tank has not reversed out of trouble yet (yes I gave it a reverse order). What should my expectations be? Will they replace the driver and get out of Dodge or will they never get around to it?
I realized the job of shifting a wounded or dead man out of the driver seat will be non trivial and right now the gunner and the loader are working pretty hard to keep the German platoon away. So far they are doing well, the Shrek team is dead and at least one squad had been shredded and are surrendering but there are plenty of threats near by. I have sent another Sherman closer to help but the infantry screen has totally collapsed near by and there really is no chance to get them more help.
I am just curious about other people's experience. Do they need to beat back the Germans before the take the time to sort out the driver? How long might it take even if the nearby threats are dealt with?
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How to destroy a French village:
<snip>
5. For best results, spread dust over a wide area:
<snip>
Can we see a shot after the dust settled?
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That's not the case. You can only delete Bttn HQ if you have removed all bar one company from the Bttn.
Yes you can. I did it before I posted to be sure:
What I have selected in that screen shot is a collection of companies with no on board Battalion HQ unit. I did it in the quick battle purchase screen.
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You have a bunch of excellent advice. The only thing I would add would be - consider a sniper team or two. On the attack it really depends on the terrain and your plan if they will work out. A sniper team is excellent at locking up a flank if they can have a good hiding place and a lot of open terrain around them. I recently used two sniper teams to deny movement through a field on my left flank. They were able to hide in the bocage and hit targets 400-500m across open ground. Initially they had assault gun support but only for the first few minutes. Those two teams were able to totally lock up the flank and deny the whole side to the enemy.To be effective they need some open space to cover so they are not always needed or useful.
When I do get snipers I always crank them up to elite and high motivation. Doing that only moves them from 23 points to 27 points and they perform really well - even out of command. Just be careful what you ask them to do because they will do it. Even if you ask them to do something insane.
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Hey Stat, not having played a quickbattle yet myself I was wondering what you meant by "Make sure you keep all of your higher command units on map....."
Do you have a choice?
Yes, you can delete various higher level commanders. For example you can purchase an infantry battalion and delete all but two companies plus you can delete all the battalion level units including the battalion HQ.
Stat's recommendation is to *not* do that and keep the battalion HQ unit.
You can do the same thing with companies and keep the platoons but delete the company HQ.
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A fix for Pointe du Hoc will be in the next patch.
That is excellent. Clarification question is this a Mac only fix for something specific to Pointe du Hoc? Or is this a platform independent fix that will improve things for a wide range of scenarios?
The curious are curious.
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But smoke test are still in order just to see what one can do.
Not a test but some recent experience. Smoke worked pretty well for me in Chance Encounter (for CMBN). In my case the smoke screen was laid down by two Shermans. So, technically that violates your conditions but I was not able to use the Shermans for close support because the had to be in a position to protect the infantry from the StugIIIs as they crossed the open ground.
I used the Shermans' smoke rounds to put a screen along the wood line as deep as the Shermans' could fire - between two to three actions spots into the woods. Then the platoon crossed the open field with one squad and an MG offering supporting fire. It worked pretty well. The screen was not perfect so my guys took some fire but made it in pretty good order - not perfect but pretty good. When the screen lifted all hell broke loose and the Germans went running back into the woods and my guys went running back into the open ground. Thankfully not too far and most of them were still in pretty good shape so I was able to turn them back around in head back into the woods. Now it is an infantry fight in the woods. I think I hurt them more then they hurt me but I am not sure yet.
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Good idea, sadly I have no demo charges and if I get one of my other 105 Shermans to "help" I suspect the stuck tank will not fair to well either:D
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GaJ has it. You can well expect that currently in the game, crashing a vehicle into a building will immobilize it. Perhaps in the future exceptions might be made for some especially tough vehicles, but it really is not the healthiest thing to do.
Oh so it is working correctly. Thing is I did not *mean* to drive it into the building and I figured the way point mapper would have drove around the building - like it does with other obstacles. I can see, becoming immobile being the correct result for a tank driving through a building.
However I am not so sure that is what happened here. I say that because the building is OK and the team inside is OK too. Neither would be true if it were modeling a tank crashing through a building. Plus, I do not remember the tank being immobilized. It just does not respond to moment orders any more. I will have to check the tank's status just to be sure.
In case you were just being funny I was thinking that since the building in question is an auto garage they might be modeling "waiting for parts".
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<snip>
A few posts say that recon vehicles are not appropriate for these missions as these vehicles would be used before we got to the point of the mission start. <snip>
I was going to point to Huzzar and I see George already has so I'll just say that CMBN will let you design a scenario where ACs are useful and fun. I am playing Huzar with a friend right now (blind we have not played it before nor did we look at the other side's briefing and order of battle). Reinforcements have just arrived and the real battle has begin. We had a great time with the recon phase and are really enjoying it.
So, I would say that scenarios can be designed to make good use of ACs - good jog George. They don't belong in all scenarios though - that is true.
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Oh, I failed to mention I am running the 1.01 patch on a PC. This happened in a huge quick battle I am playing via PBEM
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I inadvertently gave a move order right though a building. To my sock the tank obeyed and drove into it and part way out the other side. It did not complete my order but stopped most of the way out of the building. I have tried reversing out and moving forward more but so far it appears stuck.
Admittedly the building is an auto repair shop so there is a big door that the tank drove into:
Now stuck part way through the other side:
I have the saved PBEM turn if this is a bug that a tester wants to report. Just say the word and let me know where to send it.
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Your observations about the same action, button or key doing different things being frustrating is spot on. However, adding confirmation dialog or actions is the wrong thing to do. In the GUI design business we refer to that as "stopping the proceedings with idiocy". Fixing the true problem - confusing button meaning or overlapping key meaning - is the way forward.
I also liked your suggestion of combining the movement and combat menus. I often find issuing combinations of movement and combat commands and switching tabs so often is annoying and distracting. I do not find that I combine commands from the other tabs a much (except for deploy).
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<snip>In the old game when you saw a tank then it when out of LOS or you heard a tank you would get a a generic tank marker... I miss that...
Sure but now you get the ? icon instead (or a star or a cross if you are using Niessuh contact icons). In the new game there is no special marker for sound contact.
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<snip>It's a composite of screen shots from the editor stitched together. The clever bit, if you can call it that, is that before taking the screen shots go into the elevation section of the map editor, and the screen shots will show the fixed elevations as black dots. These were then the guide I use for painting the contour lines.
If you do this using layers in PS you can add locations, annotations etc.<snip>
Excellent, thanks for the information a bit of work to put together but nice for making plans, briefing maps.
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Playing mostly scenarios HTH that have a defender/attacker situation I find I do move slower and still need to lay plans for artillery when I expect my troops will be in position to take advantage of it and have also been caught under my opponents fire. That in turn leads to me needing to split teams and disperse them as otherwise I risk losing whole squads at one blow. Typically they are in mk I eyeball view of one another when they are hunkering down in the preparation phase but far enough apart that hopefully they can survive an arty barrage.
Thanks for offering your view on artillery use during an attack / defense scenarios. I think I will start mixing in some more attack / defense QBs and scenarios into my play. I am playing Huzzar! right now and even though it is still much like a meeting engagement there are enough on the board German forces at the start that I did not feel like I could just rush forward and was quite careful with my recon units and ran into some nasty surprises. We are quite enjoying that scenario.
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<snip>in the real battlefield everything by default is isolated and fighting their own battle. the isolated elements do not know much if anything of each other -- they are preoccupied by their own battle.<snip>
Brilliant explanation of how things hang together IRL. All of which further points out, to me anyway, that we move our troops around the board too fast. It takes more time to coordinate your platoon and company to make mutually supporting moves from cover to cover as you approach the enemy. Each person simultaneously trying to follow the plan and stay safe. No platoon just runs across the field hoping their sister platoon is in position to cover them. The run across the field when they know their sister platoon is in position (and they have spent a few moments observing and sucking up their own courage).
Again I am, sadly, not able to offer a solution other than my earlier suggestion to play less meeting engagements. I'll have to try my next QBs as attacks and assaults to see if it forces me to play differently.
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<snip>artillery spotting is so exquisitely realistic/complex, I've just about given up on it. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder how artillery was ever used at all in WWII.<snip>
Lots of interesting ideas snipped...
Re artillery:
I have been thinking about this for a while now. Mostly triggered by my disconnect from people's experience with artillery being powerful. I have yet to have my troops caught under an artillery barrage (amazing, I know, and I have been playing the game since it came out - mostly meeting engagement QBs). I think I know the reason - we are moving our troops waaaaay to fast. I know that when I started playing I had my guys picking their way forward carefully, expecting the enemy to popup at any moment. But of course they did not because they started at the opposite side of the board. After a few battles where I got slaughtered because my opponent rushed to take the objectives and left me trying to attack into their defense with an equal force I decided I was playing the game wrong.
The thing is, given how quickly we react to known enemy positions and the assumption that in a meeting engagement we have safe space to move into artillery is just too slow. Having to wait 6 or 7 minutes for a barrage to start means no one is there any more. I have switched to using artillery in a ground denial and shield role instead. More often than not I have made an attack plan that includes preplaned barrages to shield and conceal my force movements rather than directly targeting known enemy positions.
All of the above applies to off board artillery not close support light mortars which are quite effective when used as direct fire.
Now if we were moving our troops slower and making sure they had a secure position before moving to the next location FOs with the help of scouts would be able to get that 6 minute artillery to drop on the forest were you company was forming up for their assault on the town.
I am not sure how the game can be changed to help us move slower. Perhaps we should be playing attack and assault QBs instead of meeting engagements. That might help.
Thoughts?
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I have found many worthy opponents on this ladder:
As you can see I sort the list by ELO score not participation score. That way it gives you a better idea if an opponent's skill level. I certainly have had my a** handed to me buy more then one guy at the top of the rankings. Try one of us lower down on the ladder for a start:-)
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Light AT gun somewhere at 12 o'clock, mortar shelling your boys at 9 o'clock, 200 yards. A couple of well placed HE rounds could fix the mortar... the problem, your driver is RETARDED. Every time I give a fire order he turns the hull, even with a paused movement order. To make it worse as the hull sits there and slowly turns the fast turret keeps cycling through rotating aiming rotating aiming rotating aiming until the hull is done. ...and now the 5cm gun that was in front of you has a penetrable surface to aim at. There is no way I have found to leave the turret waiting to fire at something to the side and the hull a different way... and there are MANY reasons to do this: ambush, a quick reaction without changing intended movement direction, and the fact that a tank's armor is NOT strongest from the direct front. (A Tiger's armor is actually strongest about 35° from front.)
PLEASE: even as a quick work around, make the hull stay put when there is a paused movement order.<snip>
Yeah I have seen that too and it is extremely frustrating to watch. I have found my self yelling at the screen over this. IRL I suspect that the tank commander would yell at the driver to stop messing around too:-)
As far as I can tell the problem is the movement order. Even though it is paused they driver faces the vehicle towards the next movement order's direction. The work around is: plot a short movement order directly forward (or directly backward) so that there is no need to turn the hull to face the direction of the first movement order. Pause the tank for 15 or 20s targeting the mortar then let the tank move forward and target the AT gun. I think that should work it has worked for me in not quite identical circumstances.
In my case I was trying to extract the tank from its dangerous position but get a shot off before backing away. Your situation might be different because you are targeting the lower threat target and trying to get them to ignore the more dangerous target. I am not sure if that will effect my suggestion or not.
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You can't shoot AT weapons from in buildings, and as soon as you step out of a building.... boom, you're dead! I don't have a good clue how to do this right...J
What worked against me was a slow and careful surrounding of the tank. The guys ran between the buildings and hid inside. My tank crew's turret was swiveling a over. Once he had guys on three sides he attacked with a large team from one side and smaller teams. from the other two. I am sure he took lots of casualties but he kept the tank buttoned up and had guys on different levels of buildings keeping up some fire on the tank.
The other time I lost a panther to close combat (yes I have lost two on the last two games I have played) it was to a flanking zook team. The panther was nose into the bocage nd preventing him from crossing the field. The stugiii on my left was hit a couple of times by a zook team and shaken up. The stugiii backed off and was engaged with other infantry when the zook team snuk forward and got a flank shot on the panther at close range. The crew took a casualty and bailed. The infantry that crossed the field in the next minute destroyed the tank with grenades and the crew eventualy surrendered.
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Oh that was disappointing:D
I thought you had some amazing story of an heroic act that saved the day complete with pictures
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How do you get them to close assault a vehicle? Assault command?
Then what happens? Do they need anything in particular? (Like grenades)
What does it look like animation-wise? Haven't seen it in CMx2...
Just normal move / target commands - that I am aware of.
I recently lost a Panther to a platoon + of infantry in an urban close quarters fight. The tank was doing pretty well at holding off the assault moving around and pining the attackers until a bazooka team wrecked one of its tracks. My opponent then spend the next minutes working his way around on all sides. The tank crew did a good job of making him pay but once it was really surrounded there was not much to be done. The attacking soldiers moved in and out of buildings up and down floors around the tank. The tank turned and turned and fired a many of them. In the end the tank was engaging a large number of attackers in the front when a team came out of a building behind it and lobbed a grenade onto the engine deck. That did it.
I have no idea how many hits the tank took. There were countless grenades, rifle grenades and bazooka shells over the many minutes before it was taken out.
Tank driver a casualty - what should I expect to happen
in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy
Posted
Update: it has been four or five minutes now and still no movement but again the crew spend a busy minute fending off more German soldiers. The are now only coming from two directions but still there are enemy troops with in 100m of the tank. I can totally see why they have not replaced the driver. Right now and for the foreseeable future there is no way exiting and remounting will be a safe thing to do. I will just have to assume they will not be going anywhere and help them out as best I can. The other tank is doing a good job of distracting one squad and I do have a mortar unit that can provide some fire support. Their current state is "Nervous".