altipueri

Fifty years of playing wargames.

I agree - and they are not the only game company that put new players off by making things difficult to the delight of their "hard men" fans who like kicking the daylights out of new players and showing off how much they know without having to look it up. It's all about realism - yeah right - as if sitting nice and warm at home playing wargames is real.

And where do those discarded shoes end up?

Blimey, I almost thought there was first ever CM wedding in the offing.

How much does a beer cost in Sweden? How much does CM cost? How much is unemployment benefit in Sweden?

This Tout? : Ken Tout, who served as a tank gunner and tank commander in the 1st Northamptonshire Yeomanry in Normandy in 1944, described the effect of mounting a 17-pounder in the Sherman: The Firefly tank is an ordinary Sherman but, in order to accommodate the immense breech of the 17-pounder and to store its massive shells, the co-driver has been eliminated and his little den has been used as storage space. ... The flash is so brilliant that both gunner and commander need to blink at the moment of firing. Otherwise they will be blinded for so long that they will not see the shot hit the target. The muzzle flash spurts out so much flame that, after a shot or two, the hedge or undergrowth in front of the tank is likely to start burning. When moving, the gun's overlap in front or, if traversed, to the side is so long that driver, gunner and commander have to be constantly alert to avoid wrapping the barrel around some apparently distant tree, defenceless lamp-post or inoffensive house.

It's getting like an FPS where you select your weapon of choice to blow up zombies.

He was certainly a fan of it and blocked or tried to block work on bigger better armed tanks if I recall Belton Cooper in Death Traps.

Ok so is this the difference: LOS/LOF is physical - i.e. it is or is not possible to see or hit Spotting is whether you have spotted something? I find I can't even go for a walk in the countryside these days without looking at a clump of trees and trying to work out if I could spot anything hiding there. In fact as I write this I'm looking out the window at some trees and buildings about a 1000 yards away - they are in LOS/LOF - but I'm buggered if I would have time to react to anything moving in and out of sight. There's just too many trees and buildings!

I basically agree I think with John. What you can do as a cool gamer sitting in front of your PC isn't what a couple of 20 year olds would do if their "Skipper's" brains are suddenly spread around the turret and his twitching body is oozing **** and piss and getting in the way of deciding whether to use smoke AP or HEAT or whatever.

Blimey this is like stuff I did in 1970 with a Polish wargamer called Bish Iwaszko - google him. We had a rule book several inches thick including a logarithmic distance scale and armour penetration data and detail like on the CMx1 games where you press enter on highlighting a vehicle. Bish Iwaszko was leader in WW2 wargaming.

Yeah, that's good enough. Stephen Amrose has a book on Pegasus Bridge which I enjoyed, although I know some people don't like his books. I like the words of one of the glider pilots said over his shoulder to the paras the moment the plane came to a halt after breaking in two - "We're here, piss off and do what you're paid to do." Although I've read it elsewhere more along the lines of "I've done my bit, now piss off and do yours"

Blimey, good job I've found out I can run CMx1 on my windows 8 laptop - which ironically I bought for its 8gb RAM so I thought I could play CMBN and other games that struggle or fall over on the old pc. I only play 'em, I don't know what makes 'em work. Arf, Arf, Arf.....That's my other dog impression.

It's much smaller than that girder bridge I seem to recall. Not like Arnhem, just single span and not much more than a vehicle width.

Tried two small QB meeting engagements with random selection. The AI drove its tanks onto the edge of the lawn, and then did nothing. Turn after turn, yet I had the objective point. Also, it sure likes picking M8 HMCs. Looks like it's back to CMx1 for QBs. PS playing CMBN 1.11.

"Just drive down that road until you get blown up." That was Patton's instructions to a recce unit wasn't it?

300 hours! Thanks for letting me know before I even try. 300 minutes is about 3 times longer than I can take.

Thanks JasonC. So the answer is : Yes the US did use skirmish line form of advance because it was a reasonable response to the German keyhole/pencil type of defence. And if the skirmish line does get caught in the open by a machine gun with wide arc of fire they get chewed up.

What happened to my skirmish line?

OK for completeness I got CMAK working too. In both cases there are some flickering graphics on the horizon (four bands) and some pop up menu things - like re-inforcements don't have the text displayed so you have to hunt around a bit clicking with the mouse. All in all - try to avoid using Windows 8 if you can. My machine: HP Pavilion g6 notebook. AMD A8-4500M APU with Radeon HD 7640G - I've no idea if that's good or bad! PS - smoke and fog seem to show up on screen and work - this surprised me. Good luck trying to keep these games going. Re-furbished XP laptops can be bought in the UK for about 100 to 150 pounds.

Ok after more time wasting it sort of works if I'm patient and don't mind fuzzy graphics. On starting a scenario it seems to hang, but after waiting a bit, then going to control panel, then starting another program, exit and back to CMBB it runs.

Well now it's acting just like a tempremental tart. Sometimes perfectly reasonable, sometimes really difficult and useless. Being male I have absolutely no idea what I've said or done wrong. However, it does seem that it works better second time round. That is, start-up, it goes jerky, eventually exit Alt-Q. Then start again and it's reasonable - albeit 1024x768 on a 1366x768 screen- but we strategy players aren't worried about graphics are we? I've a HP 6gb AMD laptop. Oh, and it really doesn't like trying to work on an external screen. Hope that helps - but yes stay off Windows 8 until you have no choice I say. Edit: I was talking CMBO. Just tried CMBB and can't get anything - it just won't load graphics. Oh well.

BAR would have been useful at Agincourt, but we had the longbow, which was pretty much the rapid fire weapon of choice for the time.

Thanks for your replies. I didn't really mean how to use overwatch and bounding overwatch in CMx2 what I meant was what did US troops actually do in autumn and winter 1944? If a skirmish line - which sounds OKish in time of muskets - was what happened then I guess that's we should use. Sounds like suicide or at least a recipe for one between the eyes to me. Actually, now I'm writing this does anyone have a copy of "Those Devils in Baggy Pants" by Ross S. Carter? I seem to remember towards the end it is just around Christmas and they are sent to advance and their tank support hasn't turned up so they set off in a line and get chewed up. Finklestein caught on the wire with his grenades exploding. Anyway, if anyone has a copy could they look it up. For others, it is a good read about 82nd Airborne by one who was in it.

Quite right. Must have been a brain fart. There were some scraps that went on because news of the Treaty of Ghent and its ratification were not known in time. Maybe the Internet was down. There's some scenarios in the AGEOD game WiA. Maybe I said that already. Also the Brits paid compensation for freeing slaves.