altipueri

I have an Acer 5620z laptop with XP and Intel x3100. It runs all my PC games - CMx1, AGEOD, Paradox upto a couple of years ago. CMx2 is really blocky and slow so not really playable, nor AGEOD Pride of Nations or WW1. Hearts of Iron 3 is Ok, but not Crusader Kings 2. So, for old games it is fine - Sid Meier's Gettysburg; TOAW; Civilization up to IV.

He certainly got an A for effort. And it led to lots of wargames, movies, books. He should have moved into publishing and rights and got a good agent.

Ugh another 58.

I've got a collection of old PCs and laptops just so old games will be fired up occasionally. The variety of new settings gives me brain ache and I add to it by connecting laptops to external screens. Just occasionally I get a brilliant result - on a Win 7 with HD graphics CMBO was great. Netbooks are really cheap now and although only 1024x600 screen you can get external screens secondhand for nothing or a tenner at a charity shop and they will play at 1024x768.

Well that should confuse them.

Whereas many of those who actually served, such as my mum who as a twenty year old was in charge of an anti aircraft gun in Brussels in 1944/1945, thought he was inspirational.

Wot? No Firefly in CM. You Bastards. Etc.

Those who play WEGO are in a cult whilst RT players are a sect. Or is it the other way round?

This is beginning to sound a bit like it's leading to: "You're only supposed to blow the bloody door off"

Probably about 200 yards then. Less if you're a Brit. I think we did pretty poorly in NATO gunnery competitions. My dad passed his 'musketry' as it was quaintly still called in about 1942 even though he says he didn't recall actually hitting anything he was supposed to. However he claims to be one of few men still alive who know how to deploy and use a heliograph.

But you can only see one screen at a time whereas with paper you can have it all over the place, so to speak. Any Dutch people look at this thread? If so, how come you are so clever that your tax code is only some 500 pages and we are so dim that ours in the UK is 15,000? US tax code - possibly worse still?

OK, done tax return and the amount of tax to pay has decided where I am on this $10 bollocks. Frankly, I don't care whether it is worth it or not (I actually think not), but the point is if you can't afford ten bucks you shouldn't be wasting time playing wargames or dicking around on web forums. Spend the time teaching yourself a programming language, or a foreign language, or how to knit, sew, repair stuff, sell stuff or parts of your body; just get off your butt and earn some money. There rapidly comes a point where earning money is much easier than trying to save it. Read Wordsworth: "Resolution and Independence"

Keep it going guys. I'm doing my tax return so I just keep popping back here for a bit of amusement. Nobody has lost their rag for at least an hour. Come on, quick... I've done all the adding up now I've got to go online for the useless Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs online tax return with a 50% chance of failing online and making you start again. come on.. I dare not look back now until I've done it... Bollocks to you. But.. I'll be back.

Is it a bear market for bears? "Are you gonna talk with a bun-cha communiss?" EDIT NOTE: I was searching for something from Catch-22 but had to settle for "A Confederacy of Dunces."

"The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril." Churchill.

I play basic training with multiple re-loads. I don't care. It's a game.

So if troops are moving perpendicular to the line of fire they could move 20/30 yards in the time of flight of 4.7 seconds. "Why, at that range they couldn't hit an elepha..."

Somebody told me Russia took part in WW2; just cold war propaganda I suspect. Of course if you go to some French villages they have a war memorial - "Died in the War 1939-1940." Now if only they had tried a bit harder. Of course against the Italian invasion of Maritime Alpes it was about 5,000 Italian casualties to French 8 (8, not 8,000). I've no idea why I'm typing this largely irrelevant bollocks other than to play on my new net book thingy. Drone................

Well I just spent 50 bucks today buying Panther Games - Command Ops Battles From the Bulge because it was on Matrix sale. An impulse buy to the extent I never really knew about the game until yesterday scanning through the website. But people on the forum seemed to like it albeit a bit of bleating about a patch being delayed until January. But a deal is a deal. Any of you guys got the game? This of course has nothing to do with the price of eggs.

Penetration tables and algorithms are not anything to do with it in my view. It gave a quick view of the rough strength and threat of vehicles, weapons etc, it was a great period information part of CMx1 - just click on a vehicle/tank hit RETURN (I think) and you instantly got what CMx2 now makes you go and dig up in pages 154 to about 195 of the manual (has it been updated for CW or CMFI, I don't know). Not an improvement in user experience.

@2SquadsUp As someone whose location is given as Canada you may already know about "Little Stalingrad" : The Germans also concealed various machine guns and anti-tank emplacements throughout the town, making movement by armour and infantry increasingly difficult. The house to house fighting was vicious and the Canadians made use of a new tactic: "mouse-holing". This tactic involved using weapons such as the PIAT (or even cumbersome anti-tank guns) to breach the walls of a building, as houses within Ortona shared adjoining walls. The soldiers would then throw in grenades and assault through the mouse holes, clearing the top floors and making their way down, where both adversaries struggled in repeated close-quarters combat. Mouse-holing was also used to pierce through walls into adjoining rooms, sometimes catching enemy troops by surprise. The tactic would be used repeatedly as assaulting through the streets inflicted heavy casualties on both Canadian and German troops. Later, in a particularly deadly incident, German Fallschirmjäger engineer Karl Bayerlein demolished an entire house packed with Canadian soldiers; only one soldier survived. The Canadians retaliated by demolishing another building on top of two German squads, killing them all. After six days of intense combat, 2nd Brigade's third battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, joined the battle together with tanks from 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade's Three Rivers Regiment (Régiment de Trois-Rivières).

My missus even keeps the label on.

Agenda? What are you talking about? ""Just as the Soviets had learned a lot about urban warfare, so had the Germans. The Waffen-SS did not use the makeshift barricades erected close to street corners, because these could be raked by artillery fire from guns firing over open sights further along the straight streets.[19] Instead, they put snipers and machine guns on the upper floors and the roofs - a safer deployment as the Soviet tanks could not elevate their guns that high. They also put men armed with panzerfausts in cellar windows to ambush tanks as they moved down the streets. These tactics were quickly adopted by the Hitler Youth and the First World War Volkssturm veterans.[19] To counter these tactics, Soviet sub-machine gunners rode the tanks and sprayed every doorway and window, but this meant the tank could not traverse its turret quickly. The other solution was to rely on heavy howitzers (152 mm and 203 mm) firing over open sights to blast defended buildings and to use anti-aircraft guns against defenders posted on the higher floors.[19] Soviet combat groups started to move from house to house instead of directly down the streets. They moved through the apartments and cellars blasting holes through the walls of adjacent buildings (for which the Soviets found abandoned German panzerfausts were very effective), while others fought across the roof tops and through the attics.[19] These tactics took the Germans lying in ambush for tanks in the flanks. Flamethrowers and grenades were very effective, but as the Berlin civilian population had not been evacuated these tactics inevitably killed many civilians

Civ 2 was well worth the $60. Civ 1 came out 1991 Civ 2 came out 1996 Civ 2 added the isometric view instead of top down, probably equivalent now to moving from 2D to 3D And Civ 2 gave you the greatest invention in gaming - the witty advisor - "Build more troops - so they may sheath their swords in the beating hearts of the enemy" or some such, plus ELVIS - "No complaints,.... King"

Panzerfausts were used in the mouseholing city fighting like in Stalingrad and Berlin to make way through walls from inside rooms and basements. PIATS were a strange animal - I was going to write something but this copied from Wiki is similar: Training for using the PIAT emphasized that it was best utilized from a slit trench with surprise and concealment on the side of the PIAT team, and where possible enemy armoured vehicles should be engaged from the flank or rear. It was possible to use the PIAT as a crude mortar by placing the shoulder pad of the weapon on the ground and supporting it with a monopod, giving the weapon an approximate range of 350 yards (320 m). The PIAT was often also used in combat to knock out enemy positions located in houses and bunkers. Despite the difficulties in cocking and firing the weapon, it did have several advantages; its barrel did not have to be replaced or require high-grade materials that were expensive to produce, there was little muzzle blast that could give the user's position away, and the size of the barrel meant it could accommodate relatively large calibre munitions. However, the weapon did have drawbacks. It was very heavy and bulky, which meant that it was quite unpopular with the British and Commonwealth troops who were issued with it. There were also problems with its penetrative power; although the PIAT was theoretically able to penetrate approximately 100 millimetres (4 in) of armour, field experience during the Allied invasion of Sicily, which was substantiated by trials conducted during 1944, confirmed otherwise. During these trials, a skilled user was unable to hit a target more than 60% of the time at 100 yards (90 m), and faulty fuses meant that only 75% of the bombs fired detonated on-target