TrailApe

can't see the photo (I'm at work) but I'm assumong its an AFV in a house so..... "Ok who ordered the deep dish pepperoni with capers, anchovies and extra garlic?"

'Gumby's magical adventure' in a M4A3E8 with double barreled 17lber and a crew of misfits having thrills and spills in the wine producing regions of Germany and France (just think of the terroir) would fit the bill quite nicely thank you. When's the Demo out?

Deffo a DEMO - timings TBA.

Well we have dreary weather, poor education, crap cars and politicians who are so dim that its not funny - AND - I have just discovered we have playwrites who are illiterate, but thank God we ain'nt got anything like you lads have got. I reckon the only black ops that goes on in my parts is whren the lads from 39 Regiment try to sneak their tracked vehicles (432's and MLRS) past the Three Tuns in Heddon on the Wall (apparently the pub's foundations vibrate when anything bigger than a mousefart passes) instead of using the more roundabout 'official' route. God Bless England - there is someting to be said for being generally crappy.

I've got that book, and Bill comes across as if he prefers mobility to armour (the above example being a point in case). I wonder what he would have thought if he had started out in one of the independant tank brigades and had been issued a Churchill? In the instance above he might have had the confidence in his armour to press on - but in an earlier escapade his troop leaped over a canal in a 'tactical withdrawal' - now I cannot see a Churchill being able to do that. I wonder if the driver and hull gunner shared his enthusiasm with his ersatz armoured speedster?

Yeah - they steal our cows, teach them welsh - then slip them back over the border. The result - well how would you feel if you think you just eaten a nice piece of Lancashire or Wensleydale cheese then to be informed that it was in fact Caerphilly? If it wasn't for the fact that us Anglo-saxons are such good neighbours, lord knows what would happen. I dread to think what the french would do in similair circumstances - probably test a few nuclear devices in Cardiff - or even worse flood the Welsh markets with green inedible apples. And we'll not go into what happens to the stolen sheep.......

Oh you may mock - but when they find your corpse slumped over your reading desk in the library, no clues as to your manner of death but a faint scent of narcissi and Caerphilly cheese, don't come crying to me. footnote All Narcissus species contain the alkaloid poison lycorine, mostly in the bulb but also in the leaves. On 1 May 2009 a number of school children fell ill at Gorseland Primary School in Martlesham Heath, Suffolk, England, after a daffodil bulb was added to soup during a cookery class. The bulbs could often be confused with onions, thereby leading to incidents of accidental poisoning. :eek:

From my viewpoint it was the Brit+NATO Modules that really gave this game the edge. Going round with a big gang and knocking doors in with a sledgehammer does has an initial buzz factor, but after a while can get a tad repetitive. With the Brits and NATO you have to sneak about and get past the door by picking the lock - and you haven't got a big bunch of mates to back you up - so you have to be very alert and watch your back. And of course with the modules loaded and if you want to 'think outside of the box' you can do a Rommel vs Monty with a bit of time displacement. I'm sure with a bit of research you could even do a Kasserine Pass + replacing M3's and PzIV's for M1's and Leopards. Because Battlefront design their games with integrity there is no nationalistic bias (although it must be said that the armour of most MBT's are secret so there must still be a certain factor x), so you can really find out the strengths and weaknesses of the main MBT's. In short - I would recommend them.

This is an important point to remember for this particular part of the war - it was the German strategy that had the Allies flailing around impotently (also the natural friction of different nationalities with different priorities and an arcane game plan) however on the odd occasions they managed to get to grips with the Germans, they often gave a good account of themselves. The actual equipment was not that bad (we'll skip over the Matilda Mk I) it was the command and control at brigade and above level that reall sucked, but this is the level that you will not have to worry about in CM2 - of course if you wanted to you could readily simulate this element of the Battle of France by having a French battery - all limbered up and in column of route - heading to set up in a field which has a company of German infantry already deployed there. A workable simile for our North American cousins would be that the Allied Defense was set out to stop the run but the German QB decided to go to the air - and at that point in time nobody on our side had hears of the Blitz Defense.

Bloody Hell Erwin - if anybody from Plaid Cymru reads this and sees you claiming part of Wales for Somerset you are in deep doo-doo. Death by daffodils is a likely outcome if they track you down.

Simples The Kiwis are usually a lot better at rugby union, the Ozzies are usually better at rugby league.

Michael, In total agreement with your points - but #2 - well it happens more than you think - I'm not saying miles off, but if the battery centre is off by a couple of hundred yards (and the map is not 100% accurate) this will make quite a difference in the opening adjustments and will continue until the battery do a registration shoot, which should account for a few of your points - although how often they could do this is open to conjecture. To add to the complexity of this for the CMBN FOO, a lot of the calculations that are nowadays done in the CP then had to be done by the FOO. For example the modern FOO just needs to give a direction from themselves to the target (a compass bearing will do) and he can then adjust from his point of view, however the CMBN FOO had to know the location of the battery and factor in the adjustment of Gun to Target not FOO to Target. I have untold admiration for the standards they reached with the equipment available.

Ahhh - those few words send an arrow to my heart. So no A9's patrolling the desert dunes.

Ahhh - so we are not talking whacky baccy here I take it - I thought we might have been discussing the problems inherint in the next module (perhaps delayed though?) after our pixeltruppen have passed through Amsterdam.......

I might be extrapolating a Bridge too Far here, but didn't CMAK have the Italian theatre in it? Could it possibly be, that we might conceivably, perhaps mebbes, might see the rest of the area of operations depicted in CMAK in CMx2's glorious engine??? (I can dream can't I?)

Blinkin' flip' -- ther great deciever - Rommel - himself couldn't have pulled off a more unexpected flanking manouver. The Tedeschi had Ferdinands in Italy didn't they?

John, Thinking about it, I wonder if some of these ’bugs’ we bleat on about are actually not bugs but ‘features’. CMBN does abstract a lot of the procedures that FOO’s had to go through and calling in fire missions is a lot easier in theory than it is in practice, I mean to say, what’s so hard about looking at the target, getting a map reference and unloading a ton of HE on it – how hard can that be? so I wonder of one of the developers (perhaps a former Gunner – who knows) has built in an embuggerance factor that brings the end result (ie a shedload of HE onto the right target at the right time) a bit nearer to real life (not as much HE as you wanted, not quite where you wanted it and 10 minutes later than you ideally required it). I’ve never fired live in anger – so all of my missions were on artillery ranges in Europe – and the thing about artillery ranges is that on the whole they are like the blasted heath in Macbeth, not a lot of anything on them apart from impact craters and old tanks. It’s easy to get into the bunker or trench or whatever with all of your whizzy kit (radar, thermal imagers, lasers and GPS) and blast the hell out of an old hulk – never mind 12 rounds adjusting, with the kit you get now you should with confidence open up with 1RND FFE, a quick adjustment of left/right add/drop 100 then pile it on with 5RND FFE. However, if you then go and run around with the infantry on a dry (dry! Oh yes! –if it aint raining it aint training) exercise in ‘normal’ urban areas you suddenly find that it’s not as easy as you thought. Even things which sound so simple - like organising a quick Fire Plan or keeping the signals log – become difficult as you are jogging, crawling or marching along with the Company Commander – you try filling in a form, whilst dictating and with your arms are full of heavy stuff (which keeps banging you in the face at the slightest opportunity) at the same time you are doing a cross country march. And they are just the minor problems. The real killer is comms - you have to drop down to backpack radios, so they can quickly descend into a farce and the other real problem is Line of Sight and also current location. Now if it’s bad for your modern gunner with modern lightweight dependable kit and accurate maps, how bad must it have been for our forefathers especially in Normandy with it’s claustrophobic hedgerows. So, sorry for the diatribe, but mebbes there is a reason that once in a while, artillery support is not as useful as it should – in theory – be. (would still like the lost adjusting round indicator though)

. Altipueri - remember one mans incoming is another mans perfect fire mission. If you really want stimulation over simulation (and there's nothing wrong with that) there are a lot of games out there that will cater to your prefences. If I'm enraged by CMBN (usually because I've done something stupid and got a platoon wasted - I can accept the current limitations of the game) I fire up World of Tanks. It's free, not really historically accurate, but quite fun. Then, when I've been blasted off the map too many times (because I'm VERY average) and I have a garage full of tanks 'still in mission', full of hell and cursing about noob campers I go back to CMBN. Come to think of it, these hobbies of mine are probably doing my blood pressure no good at all.

The FOO's assistant should 'grip' the young gentleman and tell him to sort his life out. Honestly.......Ruperts.... The unobserved spotting round is not something unusual, in real life the FOO would have made an appreciation of the ground and noted areas where a round’s impact might be obscured – so when ‘splash’ occurs and nothing is immediately seen, he would quickly scan the ‘dead’ areas looking for clues. If nobody see’s anything then it’s a frantic check of the map and signals log just to make sure the right information has been passed. If everything is ok, then that’s when the FOO earns his money, either calls for a round on the same data (‘repeat’ in modern parlance) or makes a bold correction to bring it into view – although obviously he is making an assumption on where he thinks the lost round has impacted. All exciting stuff and certainly breaks the monotony of a dull morning on the ranges. I understand that the Arty Spotting process is abstracted, but it would be a nice item if the CMx2 engine alerted the player when the Fall of Shot had been missed – flashing icon or something – and then the player can allow for this without wasting precious rounds.

That's the RTR for you. Now if it had been a 'cavalry' regiment they would have legged it, if it had been a Guards Armoured tank they would have tried to ram it. (slowest vehicle chase in the world - a Churchill pursuing a Tiger)

Hit the mark there. Remember when CMBN first came out and those that had skipped CMSF were annoyed at the lack of information that was available? where are the command lines? where is the box that tells me the armour/gun data? why can't I predict if I'll get bogged in? etc etc. From what I've read, the weirdest of things would happen out there. Shermans being hit, the crew bailing and the tank trundling on without any lasting damage, to be recrewed later. Entry/Exit holes of an Tiger's 88 that when joined by a piece of string, indicates the commander would have been blown in half, but all he gets is a scratch on his leg. Mortar rounds exploding right next to people and not killing them, shrapnel going underneath a tank and killing someone sheltering behind it - the list goes on. One of my favourites is where a Cromwell's crew- in desperation - gun the engine in their tank and leap over a canal. Everybody is puzzled at the ability of the tank to be able to do this, until they find out that the AFV in question is some sort of training/prototype vehicle and has substandard armour (and should not be overseas) and is therefore lighter than your average Cromwell I think the game brings in these weird occurances and whether they planned this or not is beside the point. I'm off to test the water obstacle jumping capabilities of various tanks - lets see if this is programmed in.

Heh heh, I can already predict a good portion of what the CMx3 will be about"It wasn't like this in CMBN" "Can we have action spots back" "I liked the C and C system of CMx2 - why was it changed" "The realistic modeling of antenna cababilities in CMx3 is too complex - in CMBN there were no dead spots and terrain didn't effect the ability of HQ's to contact their sub units - it's not fun anymore and IMHO the game is now unplayable. I cannot play it anymore Goodbye!" " In CMBN hedgehogs stayed put and you could anchor your defences on them. The new ability of Combat Engineers to destroy hedgehogs in CMx3 has now totally changed the balance of gameplay and the game is now fundamentally flawed" " Why can't we have those lines of C&C that we used to have in CMX1?" "The Indirect Fire is wrong - fact - my artillery is nerfed and the UI's is too powerful - fix it" "The xxx version of xxx vehicle had a fuel cover flap above the offside rear wheel - in CMx3 it's there I'll grant you - but it looks like it would open the wrong way - my immersion level has just receded and I cannot believe I spent xxx amount of currency on this piece of crap" " I used to like the three man squads - whatever happened to them?" "It's not fun anymore - I can't hear the screaming in my head"

At this stage in the proceedings, would the dead wood not have been winnowed out leaving a core of troops that could handle artillery fire? In his book Accidental Warrior, Geoffrey Picot makes his assaulting troops (he's with them) to its lean on the barrage as the opposition had shown time and time again (and in the previous war) that they can quickly get their act together following an arty barrage. In the example he gives, they just get to the objective in time, a few seconds later and they would have faced the business end of an MG. I must admit, I've been in Cpt Mikes position, spitting feathers as my sure fire plan unravels like the seam of your favourite drinking trousers when you bend down too quickly, but what doesn't destroy us makes us stronger (after a few minutes kicking the dog and twenty minutes cool down).

I'm British so I expect this kind of customer service. In fact I would only be happier if there was a virtual queue to join. With virtual rain and pushy little old woman with razor sharp elbows and 'I fought in the war for the likes of you' attitude.

WinOrLose Yes that's it exactly (it was a looooong time ago)