BletchleyGeek

Thanks for sharing that deeper insight Scott.

I'm sorry, sly, but seeing Brad Pitt firing a .50 cal without even looking where he's firingt at and blowing the heads of a two-man German LMG... well man, sure you can find a WW2 anecdote where something like that happened. My main problem is that you can't make a "good" WW2 movie where you put together every single one of those unlikely occurrences (allegedly that is what the screenplay writer says about it) and try to keep an straight face. You could also make a "novel" by picking up randomly the least common English words from the Merriam-Webster dictionary index. Would be a 500 pages novel - featuring every two pages very nice illustrations of tanks - but that the text was made up of sentences like "Alsike yogh futhorc kalian?" - all of them perfectly valid English words - be a good one? Another analogy that might give a better sense of my negtivity. Think of Chevy Chase' National Lampoon 2? or 3? when he takes the family to Europe. I'm pretty sure that, at some point in the past, some American tourist in Europe has experienced one of those out of context problems. Now, you collect all of them together by brainstorming friends and family and you make one cracker of a comedy. But, make in the movie feature some real WW2 tanks, some war crimes and some dead civilians, and presto! you got a VERY SERIOUS war film. Or at least, that was the way it was marketed: with those stories of **** LaBeouf not having a shower for a month to get "under the skin" of US WW2 tankers. If Fury works for you, all the power to you. My personal take is that this is an overrated film, which will be probably remembered by Brad Pitt playing very much the same character as in Inglorious Basterds but without the irony. EDIT - removed the hyperbole.

I'd like to point out that there has been a thread like this for pretty much every release since Market Garden, when some massive optimizations hit loading times in general. The 3.0 patches have really brought CMBN and CMFI a long, long way forward. CMRT with the 1.03 patch is being also awesome. What I think has changed a lot is the map making in most scenarios and many QB maps that feels more... artistic? true to nature? Regarding shadows: just go and find a game where you find shadows to be realistic and also 1) allows you to make your own "levels", and place objects mostly arbitrarily, 2) allows the same degrees of freedom with the camera, 3) features such a wide variety of lighting conditions. There are not many, really, and there are good - technical - reasons for that.

Getting a bit late to this thread... but I just watched it over Google Play. The movie is, sincerely, rubbish. The only okay bits were 1) the ambush in the woods that gets the leading tank and 2) the Tiger ambush and 3-on-1 tank scrum that follows. The battle scenes reminded me of one of my very first PBEM games with CMBN, where I was doing the same dumb stuff we get to see those - supposedly - extremely experienced tankers do in the movie. Still waiting for a good biopic about Audie Murphy, though. Plenty of action and drama there to be appreciated.

This thread has gone to very interesting places - including the DAR itself, of course.

Using the initials might be out of the question...

The first stepping stone towards hardcore logistics being on CM? Scenarios could come with little Sokoban-like puzzles to ease the wait for fire support/etc Now seriously, Godspeed Team BFC!

Welcome to the amazing world of Creative Assembly's Total War series - where history is there just for flavour, and if it gets in the middle of a good tale, well you can draw your own conclusions :-) Didn't know that onagers were a Roman invention - I was, apparently, under the incorrect assumption that the Roman contributions to the art of Poliorcetics was one of optimization of designs. Or in this case, "simplification". Thanks for that, John ----------- Leaving jokes aside, looks like Bil has recovered his elan! I most interested in seeing to what degree the 21st century equivalent of a system of flèches makes Scott feel like he won at Borodino

double post

Not a big deal, really, other than the uncertainty that might rattle the shipbuilders trade unions. Those top of the line French ships have plenty of potential buyers. I wouldn't be surprised to see them acquired by Vietnam or the Philippines.

Throwing rocks at stuff is underrated... ... these things don't show on thermals! H4XX0R!!!

Your nickname made me smile. In Australia, it is a way of saying "piss".

Just checked your profile, and you joined these forums like 4 days ago? So far I think you have made a few valuable contributions. I think we can give the benefit of the doubt to any newcomers Regarding the will to fight of the Ukrainians... A friend of mine, who lived in Luhansk and fled for Kiev last June, leaving behind his apartment and invaluable GPW documents collection, was very cynical about that. He pointed me to the example of the Russian Civil War, when the Ukraine became independent and was "retaken" with very little effort. According to him, most Ukrainians are too "civilised" as to contemplate total war against Russia. Also, in his reckoning, a sizeable proportion of the Ukranian youth isn't precisely looking forward to become "blue livers" in the Donbass. That last statement might well apply to a substantial proportion of the Russian youth.

Welcome to the forums Vadim Arma 2 does a pretty decent work of immersion when you play the infantryman. For anything else, well, there are as many tastes as colors, I guess. CMBS specialises in the same kind of combined arms operations as CM Afghanistan. But here forces modeled have quite similar equipment, maps are bigger, terrain is better modeled (water, bridges, etc), the TacAi is smarter, the UI has several very nice "quality of life" improvements and the graphics are prettier. Check out the CMBS manual, there's an entire section devoted to put people whose last CM was Shock Force up to date with all the changes since then.

Well, alt tabbing to some application that allows you to chat in real time, exchange IPs and you're set. That chat application could be the Steam client itself, pinging your contacts for a game.

That was a lot of pain coming in the way of those two Abrams. It's interesting that they didn't auto-magically spot your BMPs which were quite well deployed. I am still totally in the dark about what is Scott's plan. Probably too early to tell, but I am not seeing a lot of finesse, really. What's the status on the Power Plant assault? Are you scrubbing that? If you had infantry with AT-14s that would be an awesome position. But since that doesn't seem to be the case, I wonder about its relevance.

Actually that thing of taking the camera to the eyes of the "Commander" of a given unit would be quite useful for WW2 titles. I do that all the time (as ChrisND does in his WW2 videos). For these near future titles, unless we get a "thermal" rendering of the simulated battlescape, is less useful.

Are still US armor tactical guidelines dismissing the high ground? Or that idea was eventually abandoned? Re: dismounted ATGMs. I would have expected the Russian heavy infantry to have AT-14 on their BMPs, similarly as US heavy infantry and NATO do have Javelin or Milan on their IFVs. That's an interesting assymmetry. Looking forward to the next update.

This isn't the kind of battle where I am used to see you fighting, Bil - it will be interesting to see what kind of tactics you come up with. I have only seen you just once really playing on the defensive (a CMBN scenario on the bocage, where your command was a company of German parachutists). You really put the grief on your opponent in that one, establishing killzones and pulling back when his force became overwhelming. The biggest challenge I see in this - new battle - is that it isn't obvious how can you use the terrain as a force multiplier. I am not sure what you can use: the sensor platforms on the US forces seem to basically turn pretty much everything but thick concrete walls (or reverse slopes) as useless for concealment. If nothing can be hidden from the Lidless Eye, the alternative is to create a "distraction". And I am skeptical that is possible with the current arrangement of the playing pieces. But the North Korean guys can totally work with a US Pyrrhic victory

Good. Now onwards to victory(*)! (*) The North Korean spin doctors attached to your command can do magic.

Bil, is the game over or you guys are too busy with real life?

Fair enough

I think that has been the tankers' lot since World War 2. If your tank is to become your coffin, its size, quality of internal fittings or looks don't really matter, other than making harder to easier to recover your melted remains.

ScoutPL and Bil, at least at some point in the past five years. And let me say that JK is right re the QJDM. If you try to use the model yourself, you'll appreciate there's several quite "magic numbers" in the model, like "Surprise" or the "Comparative Effectiveness Value". Or more technically, plenty of opportunities for overfitting. It always works best when "fitting" the past, tweaking the many knobs on it, than predicting the unseen by deriving plausible outcomes by working on first principles. A bit like the Ptolemaic model of the orbits of the solar system, compared with Newton's. The former works very well on our Solar System but is useless when trying to account for Alpha Centauri. I do find personally that it doesn't account at all for what Robert S. Leonhard refer to as "maneuver warfare", and is very biased towards "attrition warfare". Which is understandable, as Dupuy models were basically invented in the 1960s, a time US doctrinal thinking was obsessed with firepower alone.

It was a great holiday break read - along The Lord of The Rings - it has been something like 15 years since the last time I last read both of them. Indeed, the themes in the Silmarillion are more "mature" and not too different from what we can read on George R.R. Martin (mediating the conventions of JRR times and upbringing). Too bad that JRR departed for Aman before getting around "finishing" the Quenta Silmarillion into a tragic and epic tale of its own. I am ambivalent about Peter Jackson's take on The Hobbit. This thing he has with warrior princesses is quite tiresome, honestly. On the other hand, interleaving the tale from the Hobbit with the stuff in the Unfinished Tales and the last part of The Silmarillion puts The Hobbit in the context of JRR's "vision".