TrailApe

But where's the Bren Tripod?

I concur - around about this time of the year, especially in the half term holiday's coming up (blackberry week) we kids would go and play in the corn fields, the crops would be in and the farmer would not object too strongly to kids mooching about in the fields - as long as we didn't mess about with the straw bales too much. Maize just doesn't get grown around here much, and certainly would be non existent in the 40's. This 'what is the terrain' discussion came out just after CM:BN landed on our PC's and I think a lot of the folk that had skipped CM:SF and were still used to CMX1 were a bit lost as they wanted to 'know' what % factors would be associated with hiding in certain types of terrain. Q How will I know if my tank will get bogged in a field? A Drive it across the field and you will find out. I think the LOS 'problem' really irked quite a few folk as they wanted a quick tool that would make things easy to pick the best spots on the ground for observation, but as in real life, there is no easy answer - you have to go and look (ie waypoint/target).

As for the prosecution of war I follow Mr Rimmer's stance: Rimmer: What are you waiting for? Gloop him. Lister: I can't. He's not armed. Rimmer: Lister, this is not a scout meeting. We are not trying to win Best Behaved Troop Flag. Gloop him. Lister: What? In the back? Rimmer: Of course in the back. It's only a pity he's awake. Lister: You mean you can happily kill him if he was asleep? Rimmer: I can happily kill him if he was on the job. Go Rimmsy!

You are 100% right, it is just a game and should be there for enjoyment, but enjoyment is a very subjective thing, one man's fire mission is another man's platoon cut to shreds. Question is - did the deliverer enjoy it more than the recipient hated it? As stated by someone previously, the smaller unit actions are those where artillery is conspicous by it's abscence, so plenty of scope there.

As a former gunner, I laugh at your piffles and make wind at you! One of the French monarchs has 'The Final Argument of Kings' engraved on his artillery. Traditionally artillery has dominated battlefields and since the latter stages of WW1 it's importance has become more evident. If you de-powered artillery you would be moving away from the realism that is so treasured in this series. Now there MAY be a case for improving protection for troops who are well dug in, but that is not the same as emasculating the indirect fire power.

This has been recently debated (again) on the Normandy board. There are valid reasons for allowing the crew to bug out and then re-man the gun at a later date, however I feel that the vast majority of people that are 'for-it' seem to disregard the fact that anything that can incapacitate a crew, can also damage a gun - and the bigger the gun, the more complex and vulnerable is the recoil system and other elements that those not familiar with field guns tend to forgat about. Even the most basic part - like a sight bracket, can be bent and mangled even by a rifle bullet and without the ability to use the sights the gun just becomes a glorified tube. As for abandoned guns being crewed by the opposition - well if the gunners have legged it they will have taken vital bits of kit and the gun will be unuseable, and if the gunners have died in situ around the gun, well its likely the gun will be damaged also.

python! is there nothing they havn't tried? Blackadder knows his fruit also....

Jolly Good Show Chaps - two dates I have been yearning for - the release of the demo and the start of the rugby season. Looks like I'm going to be as happy as a pig in **** very shortly!

Are you sure it was an apple? I thought the 'go-to' fruit in an emergency were pineapples to simulate grenades......... especially if they are still in their tin ('can' for our transatlantic bretheren) "I know an old bloke and his name is Lord Jim, And he had a wife who threw tomatoes at him, Now tomatoes are juicy, don't injure the skin, But these ones they did, they was inside a tin".

Whatever kills the gun crew is more than likely to damage the gun. Remember they are not just lumps of metal, they are quite intricate mechanisms. It was ok for the gunners at Waterloo to run and seek safety in the infantry squares as those guns were big lumps of metal - although even these could still be spiked with the right equipment. If I was an A/T gunner coming back to my gun after a heavy bombardment on the locality, I’d be damned sure to give that gun and any stored ammunition a good going over before firing it. So if they ever get to the position of allowing us to re-crew A/T guns, I would expect a time penalty to be incurred to cover this – or – have the possibility of the gun have a premature or even more fun, the ordinance fly off the carriage backwards (possibly taking out an ammunition number) because the recoil system was goosed. That would be one hell of an animation sequence.

If you decide on the Churchills - pick the MkIV, the 6lber on that can give the panzers all sorts of problems - if you recall, the first Tigers and Panthers claimed by Allied tanks in the West were taken out by Churchills with 6lbers. Very good at putting holes in things - athough if you have a lot of infantry to supress, best bring a long a support Churchill with a 95mm to scare away the pixelgrunts. Whilst the Panther's cannon can ventilate even the Churchills, remember that the ranges that they were fighting at in Normandy did not allow the Panthers (and Tigers) to exploit this 'stand-off' advantage to the full, so the bringing along a 6lber armed afv is not as daft as it sounds.

Well when you are famous - remember the 'community'.

So..... instead of Schwerpunkt we are saying tsunami? You could be onto something there - "The use of hydrostatic force in manouvre warfare"

Yeah RepsolCBR, We all expect CM to portray the environment in a realistic way, and believe me, there is nothing realistic about young bored men lying stock still for considerable periods in all kinds of weathers – unless they are sufficiently motivated or trained, so why should our pixel truppen be any different? In the ideal world CM would give us different animations for the different levels of experience and motivation. The green gun crew would start fidgeting after two minutes, after five minutes they would be standing up searching their pockets for cigarettes, in ten minutes one would get up and take a pee against the nearest tree, with fifteen minutes gone they are all standing up and throwing dried dung at each other and just generally larking about. The ‘elite’ gun crew would freeze like partridge chicks when a buzzard is overhead – perhaps blinking one in a while and would maintain 100% efficiency throughout. (after the battle the elite crewould then move across to the remains of the green crew and nick their kit and ciggies)

The experience level of the crew must be the major factor here - a badly trained crew would give the position away more quickly by their actions - movement, noise etc. Even the set up of the gun - for example hiding any spoil from digging - must be effected by the training of the crew. Could this be why some guns are spotted more easily than they should be?

Does it have to be a capercaillie - would a black grouse not do? (helluva a lot smaller ) Actually this discussion highlights how brave many of the Italians units were. They were using obsolete tactics with some crappy equipment, yet when the circumstances favoured the employment of their doctrine, they gave a good account ofthemselves. Their defence at Keren (Eritrea 1941) springs to mind where they gave the 4th and 5th Indian divisions a torrid time. Their achilles heel seems to have been anything remotely approaching manouvre warfare.

Chek - oh yes - in those few lines you have managed to encapsulated the whole business. The Bard himself could not have done better! Thanks for the feedback BF.

I think we are all fully aware of this, but this awareness of its unavalablity will still not stop us twatting on about it. I suppose if it wasn't Friday and I was my usual twisted bitter self it would go something like.....

Two whole weeks - oh!!!! the exquisite agony. I'll buy the Italian stuff when the commonwealth module chips in - saving for the next Normandy module at the minute, but want to experience a bit sun amongst the vines and olives. (Well - when I say saving, me and my eldest are 'positioning' the purchase of "another one of those bloody computer games" to my wonderful better half)

Getting back to the space going smerfs. I didn't go to see it, but my 16 year old lad went to see it, and was not impressed. He recounted the plot to me and I thought - hang on, that's the plot of 'Midworld' by Alan Dean Foster (1975). If anybody likes science fiction its worth a read. I'll not spoil it, but the actions of the 'hero' indigenent is nothing noble, it's just because he wants to show off to a girl in their tribe, so it's a much more plausible scenarion than the 'noble savage' which is so beloved of our film industry (as in Dances With Aliens ). Although at the bottom of it, the resources of environment is the driver for both opposing parties.

Once on Salsbury Plain, hanging around in an OP location, waiting for the civilian staff to open up the telephone switchboard and thus allow the fun to start, we noticed some squaddies, one who had a beard. Now they were in the British DPM, but that didn't mean a lot, as quite a few Commonwealth and NATO armies used DPM or something very similair. Now us being Civilians in Uniform, Weekend Warriors, we were quite nosey, so we bimbled across and had a chat. Turned out they were sailors and were the Navy's equivalent of an FOO team (FIST to our USians). So to say:- is as irrelevant as saying ALL artillery support is a force magnifier and NGS is different from mud based artillery only in that its floating offshore - the shells hit the ground and go bang - the only difference being that 16" naval shells go BANG louder, but arrive less frequently than 25lber or 105mm shells from field artillery. So why you should intimate that the Jolly Jack Tars have been written out of history any more than - for example - Spike Milligans lot, is the question. I don't think that anybody who plays CM has any problems with using ANY flavour of artillery, and from reading these forums, most of the community is well read and will fully appreciate the role of artillery in operations, floating or otherwise. One role that MAY be not as fully appreciated as should be is what we know nowadays as Forward Air Controller. I have read somewhere that the early loss of the FAC in Operation Goodwood had a significantly adverse effect on the operation, especially when the battle moved out from under the umbrella of the guns.

It might be part of the conditioning I absorbed during 20 years of being a Weekend Warrior, but when somebody you respect says they will do it when they can, I then accept that without question. I respect BF (and I bought into CMSF as soon as I could arrange to get it without using a credit card - and boy did they really turn that came around!) and I'm more than happy to accept what they serve up and when they serve it. If they say they can’t/won’t do it, well that’s good enough for me. I trust them. I think a online co-op play like World of Tanks would be a brilliant concept, but I can't think how it would work in the real world. WoT's is a 15 minute (or less if you are as 'average' as me) investment of your time, whereas any CM game is going to take much longer - hell - just think of the pre-combat discussion between the various elements if say 4 guys are running a company attack - that's going to take hours - to say nothing of the PowerPoint presentations that we will use to try and validate our particular strategy. In fact just thinking about it, if every session starts with a Casablanca style bicker-fest, real-time-on-line-co-op-multi-play might be a VERY bad idea. Nobody will be speaking to each other. As an aside, I play WOT and have never, and will never, spend a single penny on it. I can see how people can get caught up in the whole thing (efficiency rating, Win/Lose ratio, hit ratio etc. etc.), but I just do it for fun and I reckon I can have as much of a laugh with a tier one tank as somebody who has shellacked out a load of cash to buy a Big Bad Beast. I just get killed a lot more, but then getting wiped out in WoT is not nearly as painful as losing half of your squad to a mortar attack, then the rest getting wiped out by an MG when you relocate them to avoid the mortars - now that really hurts. In conclusion - keep it going BF (just do it a bit faster )

Well, all very interesting, but anyone who tries to validate an argument by using the approval of British Royal family, has in my mind, totally lost the plot. The Royal line from Plantaginets to the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha's were as mad as a box of frogs to start with and then 4 or so centuries of inbreeding along the way has only added another few pounds of fruit to an already fruity bunch. Any non US folk out there have the same troubles with black helicopters, government spooks and UFO's that our friends on the wrong side of the Canadian Border ()have ? It would be intersting to find out.

:eek: Heresy! HERESY! Stone Him, Stone Him!

It will never happen - nothing to do with the indomitable nature of the average Englishman (if you can drag him from his football and beer) but mainly because Lizards Need Sunshine And we don't get any. The French, Spanish and Greeks get loadsa sun - but have you seen what they will EAT? So basically for the Lizards Europe is a no-go zone - either it's under a deeply depressing grey blanket of cloud 99% of the time, or you are considered part of À la carte.