MOSwas71331

Get this yampa character out of here. He seems a personification of viciousness. In my few exchanges with Steve, the only unpleasantness I've read in his posts is a hint of frustration in reading the same stuff from me over and over. And that hint may have been in my imagination.

I'm hoping to get my copy for Christmas, if family cash flow will permit.

That may be how you operate. Obviously, that's not how I operate. When I start reading a book, I almost always finish it. I rarely walk out of a movie. I really enjoyed the first round of CM games, and I WANT to enjoy CM:BN. I also don't spend time each day trying "Road to Berlin", which I have not yet won against the AI in perhaps a dozen tries ending with my Cease Fire after no more than 15 game minutes and suffering excessive US casualties. My total time spent playing CM:BN is maybe 100 hours. (That's a guesstimate which may differ from other guesstimates I've posted.) With CMBO-CMBB-CMAK, (for other than the first turn) I needed perhaps ten or fifteen minutes to complete the "giving orders" phase. I spent the great bulk of my time replaying turns to see exactly what happened in each location I found interesting. In CM:BN I need a lot of time just to micromanage each unit on each turn, although (according to the posts I've read and Utube videos I've seen) others do this much more quickly.

As I said in the Title, I fully agree with c3k on this topic. I'm finding the discussion interesting.

I find these "Zombie" posts interesting and seek them out, because I'd like to understand why I loved CMBO-CMBB-CMAK and hate CM:BN. As I've said repeatedly in this forum, I loved CMBO from the first time I played the demo. I keep hoping I'll read a post that will somehow result in me enjoying CM:BN. I certainly wasn't a great player and lost more often than I won, whether my opponent was the AI or I was playing by email. But winning or losing didn't matter much; either way I enjoyed the game and seeing what would happen as the units I "commanded" engaged the units controlled by the other side. As (approximately) I said in another post and thread, "With CMBO-CMBB-CMAK I always felt I had a chance. With CM:BN I feel I have no chance."

The only two screen names I got from their critical posts were "MichaelDorosh and killroy."

The review is interesting and full of praises for CM:BN. The accompanying reader comments are a mixed bag, with the ones by MichaelDorosh and killroy very hostile, both to the game and to Steve personally.

FM 23-3, Techniques of Antitank Warfare, Chapter 3, Antitank Weapons, Section III, Antitank Mines, has an eight page, illustrated discussion of how to employ mines. Let me know if you'd like a copy.

I'm a WeGo player. I thought I could fiddle with commands until I clicked the red button to put the commands into effect. After confirming a mortar's fire order, I realized I had made a mistake in the order. The only way I found to cancel the order was to "Cease Fire". (As I recall, the word "emergency" appeared somewhere.) When I try to have the platoon leader issue a corrected fire order, the mortar is in a "CEASE FIRE" state and won't accept a command. 1. How long in game time will this "CEASE FIRE" state last? 2. What is a better way to cancel a confirmed fire order?

Fifteen to twenty minutes to plot, resolve, and repeatedly replay a minute of CM1 now takes me four or five hours in CM:BN. Admittedly I can now plot the first two or three minutes of "Road to Berlin" in about an hour, because I've done it about a dozen times and nothing much happens on the left (farm) side until US troops near the first hedgerow.

I also see no titles and only the list icon on the "Jeeps with Baz/Ammunition" thread and on every other thread I've looked at this morning. Are you seeing titles and icons on these threads?:mad:

This time it worked, but your post, at least on my machine, had no title and the list icon.

What you say is true, but I'm not seeing ANY titles on any posts on any threads. I just titled this post "asdkfja;lskdfj" with the icon. I'll post it to see what appears.

When I follow through various discussion threads, I don't see any displayed titles for posts other than the one starting the thread and the message icon is always the list icon, the one immediately following the "No icon" selection. Am I the only one in this state? If it matters, I'm on an iMac using the Snow Leopard version of MacOS.

The visuals are fine, but the English narrator is talking over German soundtracks of the 88s firing. I can understand the narration during the quiet segments, but I can only make out perhaps one word in three when the 88s are active. The video would have been a lot better if the German soundtrack had been turned down.

Where can we find that mod?

Those "fragile" troops seem able to knock out tanks covering the US platoon advancing on the right, and, at the same time, to fire at the platoon advancing toward the hedgerow on the left while covered by other tanks. It would also be nice if US troops could sometimes see the OstBattalion soldaten with AT weapons before they engage and destroy US tanks. The only significant German weapon my troops have been able to see and eliminate is an HMG, and that took about a dozen mortar rounds and the rifle fire of three US squads. I fully agree with those sentiments. I doubt I'll ever feel sufficiently competent to try RT.

You needn't worry about losing your Shermans. One fellow claimed in his post he beat the Germans in "Road to Berlin" without using the US tanks. I don't think he explained what he actually did with them. Having all five clustered around the US entry area would have made quite a traffic jam.

I'm having the same problems. It's particularly annoying to read so many posts / threads complaining about how easy ("as pie" according to one fellow) it is to win against the AI. I really enjoyed CMBO-CMBB-CMAK, but the only fun I've had so far playing "Road to Berlin" was trying different prep fire patterns with the US mortars to see how they worked and how much damage they inflicted. (My best result was eliminating 15 Germans including one heavy machine gun.) You can find plenty of "sure fire" tips on how to play by reading the threads on which I've posted. None of those tips have yet worked for me, but perhaps your experience will be better.

I can understand "Senior Member" and "Junior Member". What does it mean to be "Banned"?

If you examine the threads in which I've posted, you'll see many questions / complaints I've raised about problems placing waypoints, troops, foxholes, and fortifications. In one of my postings, I observed that I wanted to place foxholes in a particular field, one of the four fields bordering the intersection of two perpendicular hedgerows. The placement cursor indicated that the spot it pointed to was legal, but, when I clicked, the foxholes appeared well away from the corner. The Battlefront programmers could speed up game play significantly by displaying a white dot (changing to red or black when a placement there would be illegal) at the center of the action spot. Rather than having a cursor move smoothly over the entire map, making the cursor jump from action spot to action spot would show players quickly what they can and can't do.

I've watched that video repeatedly, and it certainly has a lot of good info. I had no idea before seeing the video that mortar fire could be called in during the scenario set up, and experimenting with various fire patterns and seeing their results gave me the only fun I've had so far with CM:BN. However, the video has never shown me much about what commands are given the US troops. I can see the paths they will follow, but I haven't seen much beyond that. (A few times in the video, pending commands to a unit were cancelled, and I didn't know how that was done. I asked, and a few posters explained the use of the "stop sign" icon.) Giving a lengthy Quick movement path to a mortar team will exhaust the team, yet the video shows such a path with the team reaching the end of the path in a fully effective state. Somehow the real-time movement of the mortar team must have included pauses to "catch their breath", but I saw no such commands.

I send my troops up the left side and then cease fire after taking excessive casualties trying to take the farm on the way to the crossroads. By "excessive" I mean more than the handful reported in the posts describing "how I won the demo against the AI on my very first attempt." Except for not saying it was your first attempt, your "Easy as pie" post is pretty typical. Only two things are stopping me from throwing in the towel on CM:BN. 1. I really enjoyed CMBO-CMBB-CMAK, right from my first game, so I want to enjoy CM:BN. 2. I'm not the only person too stupid to beat the "Road to Berlin" demo against the AI. As for the manual helping me, I'm sure everything is covered in the manual. I just can't immediately find what I want in the table of contents or in the index. Sometimes I keep reading until I find useful information; sometimes I give up.

You seem to be right about the force discrepancy. I thought there were a lot more Germans on the map than seems to be the case when I Cease Fire on set up at each game level. What I'm seeing now is always 139 US against 102 Germans, very close to 4 US to 3 Germans. As someone said on another thread, the variation is just the "fog of war" setting. In any event, whenever I advance my infantry platoon leader, his three squads, and an "attached" MG team and ammo bearer past the hedgerow before the objective farm on the left, my troops get fired on from multiple directions. Some of them are killed or wounded, and I suppose the ones shown as "cowering" are considered suppressed. My Shermans do glimpse Germans and fire off a few MG rounds, but in nothing approaching the numbers I've seen in dakuth's tutorial video. When I try sending out scouts, they draw German fire and die without providing useful info. Their extinction isn't always immediate; they sometimes cower a while before death.