Bon

Saw a bazooka team do that last night- initiated when they spotted a Panther tank through bocage. My pixeltruppen are rarely so accurate.

What dismal writing: littered with typos and ugly prose. I haven't read Wargamer in years and now I remember why... I first played CM:BO after reading about it in a column in PCGamer magazine (I believe it too was titled "the Wargamer" but I can't recall) and still remember finding the manual incomprehensible. I got lucky enough to play a game against Fionn but at fifteen didn't really have the patience for PBEM. (He rocked me, of course. I don't know where he went, I left the forums around 2006 and just bought CM:BN.) I played BB too. The Stalingrad maps were savage: I remember a Pavlov's house map in particular. I guess this wind up is a way of saying: a franchise this respected by gamers deserved a better review. The examination is cursory, the reviewer doesn't seem to appreciate properly the level of historical accuracy built into the mechanics; he also appears to ignore battlefront's trademark strength in ballistics modeling. I also disagree about the AI. Even on Iron the AI has real problems with advancing, planning a competent defense (I.e., abandoning positions and reforming behind secondary lines, or redeploying in response to a flank attack) and it rarely surprises an involved player. Maybe I need to switch to mp, however. Don't even get me started on this kid saying the Normandy setting is overplayed...

A question of etiquette: what sort of opening barrages are considered gamey by the community, generally? I'm a little startled by the cheap power of the Sherman Calliope rocket- if I buy four of them and deploy them against an AI opponent at the beginning of a game, I totally slay them and they rarely recover. Of course, I wouldn't begin a game against a human opponent with a barrage like that- it feels instinctively gamey. But some sort of barrage against a presumptive enemy position seems totally appropriate. So what's over the line? Is there a consensus on this? And, incidentally, why are the rockets so damn cheap, in both points and rarity? Were they really EVERYWHERE in Normandy and the Cotentin Peninsula? And were they that devastating?