BletchleyGeek

Thanks for taking the time of producing a video @Ithikial_AU, just finished watching it. That sounds solid to me, but I am not sure the campaign scripting system will allow to implement something :S A completely different approach, still requiring the intervention of a human umpire would be to have the branching of the campaign done programmatically, on the basis of the information that this tool that @Japanzer built many years ago (or a variant using different software) that app could then also reuse the other app @Japanzer made, that use the kind of software MMORPG macroers use to setup the scenarios automagically... This requires a bit of lateral thinking I think there were some guys trying to come up with similar tools for CMBS, I think I read a couple threads like that a while ago.

That was actually quite common, in the Allies and Soviet armies. A notable example we can read about a lot is the US Army in Tunisia and Italy. Solid battalion leadership was a highly sought after commodity, and eventually Clark instated a policy to spare the few surviving experienced and surviving battalion CO's in 5th Army to become "the US Army's next war generals". Atkinson trilogy An Army at Dawn, A Day of Battle and Guns At Last Light does a good job of looking at the highs and lows of leadership and command in the ETO.

I have been doing experiments with this over the years: - Certainly, having the campaign "flow control" to traverse a table is possible, but it gets difficult quickly to manage the files. If the timeline is broken down in say 2 hour slots, and you want to cover 8 hours, you end up keeping track of 16 scenarios. - Shorter scenarios is more game. Meaning that the shorter the battle, the easier is to playtest things and make sure the scenario provides the experience you want. Setting deployment areas and intelligence levels smartly reduces the need of allowing longer times for recon etc. - You really want to use a Master OOB scenario as a centralised DB. - And you would also really like to be able to track casualty levels while playing... some player aid would help managing the battle. - AI arty spotting can break the campaign by causing massive casualties. It can totally work but it's not a one man job if you want to tackle a regiment level operation. On the other hand there are a number of already done scenarios - the CMBN CW/MG and CMFI biggies for instance - and master maps to either use as a base or use directly. Also, by using historical OOBS one observes that British and American generalship tended to commit and feed troops into battle in dribs and drabs. From a standpoint of playability, this needs to be considered. As an object lesson in history, is well worth the ride.

That's quite interesting, thanks for sharing!

Looks to me that the way it is implemented - in the game - is that the "behaviour" is put in a queue of "jobs" which are served on first in first out basis. How often the queue is peeked to select the next task/behaviour to execute is another matter. Charles could have implemented that in a number of ways.

Interesting, thanks, @Thewood1

Thanks for writing that @Thewood1. We live in a funny time where we would like such networks to be more "open" to optimise better power flows, yet exposing them like that would be suicidal. The kind of reaction times we see in those simulated Abrams would be correct under the assumption that the US Army has developed a system that tracks potential threats in real time and then takes control of the vehicles from their human operators to ensure that the Abrams offers its strongest aspect to the incoming missile. Technically is completely possible: CAWS and AEGIS aren't cutting edge systems any more, and have similar capabilities. What I doubt is that such a system would be accepted by human operators sitting on the tanks themselves. As with self driving cars, such elbowing out has been proven to be dangerous at best. Your car deciding in short notice to swerve so to offer the back to am oncoming hazard would be a suitable analogy. Good luck with that working as expected once out of every ten times.

The project got funded on Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1366362068/general-staff-game-of-military-tactics-and-wargami/posts/2092289?ref=backer_project_update I was one of the 297 backers... We are still far from the 1,000 imaginary line I had set n my previous post. Ezra seems very happy and I am happy too to see how this "concept" war game got the funds / support it asked for.

The real deal would make terrible TV.... or great Slow TV. Just imagine sitting down for two hours through an artillery preparation, see the guys leapfrogging, being hit, blown to gorey bits, or curling up in a ball. Characters you like or appreciate die in random grotesque ways. All dialog boils down to sentences constructed around the word sh*t or variations of it, and the screams of the hurt and dying. Good luck selling that to a TV network.

That's pretty interesting @JonS.

Having said this re: antecedents, I find the fact that Maoris used earthworks to great effect is just the result of human intellect coming to the realisation that terrain can be engineered to enhance the defensive capabilities of a force equipped with fire arms in very specific ways. I doubt very much any Maoris were at Borodino or under Wellington under the Peninsular War investing Ciudad Rodrigo. But it is obvious that there were a number of very talented Maori individuals, who grasped very well the "tactical facts" of firepower, and came up with methods which were similar to those used elsewhere in the world. The interesting thing is that they certainly seemed to grasp these "tactical verities" better than the average British officer of the time.

The battle discussed in the podcast took place in 1845. Trenches had been long used before that during sieges, with M. Vauban's well known treatise on the siege of Maastricht compiles the practical knowledge accumulated on siegecraft in the age of gunpowder. I couldn't find anything on the internet but I do recall reading about similar tactics being employed by the Ming, Japanese and Korean armies during the Imjin Wars (1592-1598). Ellaborate fieldworks and their assault were a prominent feature in Yorktown (1781) and Borodino (1812)

Thanks @JonS, the show was very enjoyable - worked very well for a long drive I did this weekend. Didn't get what was all the fuss about "Maoris inventing trench warfare", probably I missed some context to the discussion, the claim itself sounded a bit far fetched.

Just one of my favourite pictures... that gunner was good at his trade as f*ck, and with early 1940s gear

Australia Post is quite awesome Ken, so don't fret. They even do drones https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/nov/14/australian-posts-new-delivery-robot-an-esky-on-wheels-says-expert that one I am afraid is not going to be a winner design... most definitely nobody will want their stuff to be delivered at the same pace Opportunity strolls over the surface of Mars taking pictures of rocks.

The perks of living in the same continent the books are made

I received my copy a couple days ago... those who are waiting for it are in for a treat.

That announcement was kind of surprising - or not. They have had a "proof of concept" tank sim mode in IL-2 for a couple (?) years now. Nothing very groggy, but I found it occasionally fun (for me the fidelity of Panzer Elite 44 was just at the right spot between visuals, realism and playability). I don't get the same reward as @kraze does from clicking stuff on the screen. The only sim I remember playing featuring that - IL-2 CLOD - It made me feel like I was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. I felt it was super slow, distracting and my wrist bones actually hurted. That's a bit of an immersion breaker for me: if I am on a Spitfire I should move around like someone in their early 20s, not in his early 80s.

No worries, @Mord. It is true, that's a curious oversight. You may want to go and make the suggestion on their forums.

Great games, I still play them from time to time on DOSBOX. That way the memory doesn't fade away. For a number of years Erik Rutins and Ludovic Coval were pushing a game called Battlefields!/Combined Arms. It went quite far but the AI was totally out in the weeds and development kind of collapsed. I read recently that they were trying to restart development... that was over a year ago. There are some green shoots @JonS - it's not all doom and gloom. In the tubes we have Desert War 1940-42 which is currently under closed beta http://www.matrixgames.com/products/676/details/Desert.War.1940-1942 It was slated for release after summer, but seems development hit a snag too. Last, there's also Armor Brigade http://www.matrixgames.com/products/685/details/Armored.Brigade Which is pausable real time, with a User Interface that aims at minimising "mandatory" micro. If it comes with PBEM over impulses we then would have a high fidelity, WEGO, grand tactical sim. A true successor to TacOps and Command Ops.

There, you got your +1. Well done.

Steve? Love the disclaimer at the end of the OP: Also, notice that it is my personal understanding of the problem. I may be wrong somewhere - if so, please feel free to correct me. Just remember: before saying stuff like "I cannot see anything beyond 60 FPS", make sure that you've actually tried it on scenes that are able to deliver a real difference - I guarantee that you will see a difference up to 200 Hz, at least, with the right way of testing. He could have written at the beginning the sentence ACHTUNG QUATSCH! Anyways, thanks for the pointer, invaluable contribution to the understanding of human vision. He should send a research note to Nature.

Link to scientific paper, please? There's a difference between the response time of the photorreceptors in your eyes - which can be very short indeed - and the time for that signal to be picked up and integrated into higher level signals which then your frontal cortex assesses for relevance for whatever you're doing. From a good pop sci article on BBC http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150727-what-are-the-limits-of-human-vision Any change below that resolution, well, it's completely lost. It happens that PC Gamer ran an article on this very same topic recently: Link: http://www.pcgamer.com/how-many-frames-per-second-can-the-human-eye-really-see/ Cheers!

This is pretty much SOP for me - there's no point in making the hardware work harder, stressing components and reducing useful life, to generate pictures your eyes will be picking up but won't register in your brain

Fair enough @JonS