vossiewulf1212

I remember waaaay back when playing M1 Tank Platoon (which was pretty darned accurate for its day), and my tank took a hit and lost the ballistics computer. I was trying to hit a BMP some 3000 yards away, so I manually elevated the gun for the shot, bang, away it goes, and I watch it arc gracefully through the sky... and hit dead center on an Su-25 Frogfoot which was pulling up off a pass on some of my other forces. I was amazed the developers even considered the possibility of a SU-25 being shot down by an M1 HEAT round.

Rise of Flight has the best graphics and flight models. However, I have a great deal of fondness for Over Flanders Fields because it does a tremendous job of having the entire war going on around you and down below, and you can fly with about any squadron at any time period and they're where they should be flying missions that make sense and what you see going on around you is accurate for the time/location.

Welcome. Yep, I played all of them (as you might have guessed) as well. Send your friends to Mikael Carlson's site. He's built a totally production accurate D.VII as well, and has a couple films of him flying it (though not quite as crazily as the dreidecker). He's a pretty amazing pilot.

<rimshot> He'll be here all week folks, enjoy the veal.

Thanks Jason, so I was basically right, the 74.2 yard target at 17.92 degrees from the battery line is not realistic. BTW my fantasy CM is where you can modify all of the weapon params as part of the scenario design. The Italians got a crappy load of ammo? Notch down the range and ROF (to simulate stoppages) of the MGs. Germans got a brand spanking new platoon of Pz.IV ausf Gs? Crank up the accuracy of the 75mm/L43 to account for new barrels. Or create a very silly scenario where Brixia mortars hit like 230mm howitzers and have a single Italian rifle company assault a reinforced American battalion. I see two types of artillery strikes: dead nuts on target or wildly off, no middle ground. And if it's wildly inaccurate, the observer seems to think this is just fine and dandy, and will happily watch the battery expend all its ammo nuking earthworms into their component atoms in the plowed field 400 yards from the dug in Panzergrenadier company. If they make any attempt to correct once FFE is called, I've never seen it. I cease fire the second I see an FFE round significantly off target, unless something worth blowing up is serendipitously placed where it's landing. That's it, we're just going to have to trash the entire artillery system and redesign from scratch. BF folks, we'll need to discuss this at tomorrow's standup, and we're going to dedicate the next couple sprints to the project. I'll be the scrum master, who's going to write the story issue? /agile dev ftw

That reminds me I've been questioning the CM linear target command. Completely arbitrary lengths and angles would require some pretty impressive realtime calculations by the batteries unless they had some really extensive tables with it all precalculated. And the accuracy in the game seems crazy to me, I rarely see any rounds land significantly off the specified line. Does that make sense? I don't know the details of WW2 field artillery operations so dunno, but it seems much better than I would have expected.

Yeah he was insanely skilled but also in the end stupid to choose that fight. He had two clear opportunities to extend, exit the fight, and call it a day, but instead turned back in. Yes he put lots of bullets into 6 RFC aces and dazzled them with his stick and rudder skills, but he ended up dead. Bottom line is he was very young and overconfident with what would be immediately recognized today as severe combat fatigue, a really deadly combo. But you can assume from my online handle that I have enormous respect for him as well and what he accomplished in such a short time.

Ok since I've taken us off topic might as well have fun with it... Here's something that hasn't been seen in about 95 years- an absolutely production accurate Fokker Dr.I triplane being flown to its limits. By a clearly insane Swedish airline pilot. At 0:45 he enters his first half barrel roll into a split S too slow, it departs at the top and enters an incipient inverted spin at oh... 200 FEET ABOVE THE GROUND. Totally awesome recovery required to not end up looking like Luke's aunt and uncle after the stormtroopers paid them a visit. I love the guy to death for doing this, but I have to think that death is not terribly far off. http://youtu.be/yMBZgmiYIiY Note how the Dr.I could do a 360 degree turn in a space not much bigger than a two car garage and could climb, as Richthofen said, "like a monkey".

Ah, I think you meant Newlife. He was the one talking about that and had figured out they were standing because they were facing uphill on a steep slope, I just thanked him for figuring that out as I'd wondered why my guys sometimes did that.

First, just Vossie is fine I had been away from here so long I had to create a new account, but I used to be just Vossie. Go look at GreenAsJade's CMMODs to see the stuff I did for CMBB (mostly vehicles) and CMAK (lots including a full interface makeover). Second, forgive me for being slow, but what does sangars have to do with the mortar problem and my suggestion that infantry in general in CMx2 are too vulnerable?

Your delivery sucks, and it's pissing me off! Grognards exist in many fields, not just military history, and they're all pedantic as hell because the entire point of their existence is to get every nuanced detail of every fact exactly right. It's how, as you said, the knowledge is refined and disseminated. When I was watching that recent military channel series WWI in color (which was quite good, I thought the colorizing they did was appropriately not overdone), they had that classic film of Richthofen climbing into a Fokker triplane, and the plane was colorized red. I shouted at the screen YOU IDIOTS the only all red triplane he flew was 425/17, and this is CLEARLY one of the three Dr.I prototypes, as you can see on the side it has the F.1 designation of the prototypes while all the production versions were marked Dr.I! And then laughed at myself for being such a geek. While we're at it though, we should remember those three prototypes went to Richthofen, Von Tutschek, and Voss, and Voss died in his in the famous dogfight with McCudden and Rhys-Davids and the rest of No.56 squadron, and those prototypes didn't have the wingtip skids of production Dr.Is and had a different, curved tailplane profile... /we should start a Pedantics Anonymous group

Ha, yeah I've seen that too and was befuddled as to why my guys were standing up, didn't make the connection of facing up a steep hill. Good find, that is indeed a problem as well. The best way I have of demonstrating the problem with mortars is to pose this question: given a choice on attack in semi-open terrain that we mostly have in CMFI, would you take two full platoons of panzergrenadiers, which would mean 12 organic MG42s plus all the other rifles and grenades, or take three US spotters with six 60mm mortars? Anyone in the real war would choose the former. In CMFI, I'd choose the latter in a heartbeat and be way more successful doing so. Another question, does anyone else think infantry in general in CMx2 are way too vulnerable? I had tons of infantry-centric battles in CM1 that would involve long firefights with classic infantry maneuver, use two squads to pin and another to flank/assault. I haven't seen anything like that in CMBN or CMFI. Soldiers get wounded or dead very quickly in CMx2 and squads panic and stop listening to orders, firefights at anything less than like 500 yards begin and essentially end very very quickly. Between that and the mortar problem, it (to me) makes infantry almost irrelevant and that's disappointing, because with a bit of tweaking these games could be really amazing. Not to say CM1 was perfect, it had lots of problems too like AT guns being pointless because one nanosecond after they fired, every enemy armored vehicle within 50 miles had them spotted and targeted. Somewhere between CM1 and CMx2 is a very nearly perfect WW2 tactical sim, I just wonder if we'll ever find it.

I'm guessing you play real time? Indirect 81mm barrages for me often have spotting rounds and the barrage in the same turn or very close to it, by the time you can put in new orders it's way too late. But I agree direct fire is worse, the first round is often right on the money or close enough, and squads/teams in a seemingly large area get shaken/panicked and there's nothing you can do but watch them die. There are these problems plus (IMO) infantry are just too vulnerable. I've played 20 or so scenarios now with CMFI and it's little different from CMBN, I've played many of them leaving most if not all of my infantry behind in attack because they achieve little except dying- I take the commanders, spotters, MGs, and some scout/recon teams and the armored vehicles. I very rarely see anything approaching what could be called an extended firefight like we had regularly in infantry battles in CM1.

WRT Brixia, it's almost like they wanted to give the Italians SOMETHING that was effective. Otherwise, they have rifle squads that couldn't supress a baby panda, they panic at incoming fire heavier than silly string, and have armored vehicles that can be killed by a couple kids with straws and spitballs. But yes in general I think mortars are way too effective in CMx2. In CM1 60mm/50mm mortars were just harassing weapons unless they got very lucky, and an 81mm barrage was survivable by rifle platoons. Here 60mm mortars are critical heavy weapons for US forces and 81mm barrages mean rifle platoons cut to ribbons. There's a middle ground between the two that I feel is more accurate. And at the same time there's strange survivability too. I was just playing the second Troina campaign battle and I dropped a really heavy 155mm barrage on the top of the hill, where there were a series of dug in troops including an MG42. Two minutes later the MG42 pops up and starts shooting again. I look, and 3 of the four foxholes where he is have 155mm craters and I know I saw at least three rounds airburst right on top. I'm sorry, but you don't survive one 155mm shell hitting two feet away from you, much less three, and with no top cover a single airburst is going to kill you. Even if you miraculously escape shrapnel, the blast effects from that range are going to rip you apart and turn your insides into jelly. I've seen that a bunch of times, AT guns or infantry survive multiple artillery hits literally right on top of them.

I was also a serious player and modder of the CM1 series and have been back playing these. Bottom line is they are different engines, and CMx2 has considerable improvements over CM1 but also stepped backward (IMO) in several important ways. For example, we just got moveable waypoints back in CMFI, the earlier games if you screw up a waypoint placement you have to delete it and try again. Which brings us to another step backward, in CM1 you could place waypoints very precisely, CMx2 has this action square concept which I'm sure considerably simplifies certain parts of the code logic but which I still find frustrating, particularly in try to get vehicles hull down. WRT real time, it's a double-edged sword. You can control your units much better and avoid some of the vehicle pathfinding nightmares you run into with WEGO, but there's no rewind button. So if you're watching one part of the field and turn around and see a tank dead on the other side, you have no ability to go back and see what the hell happened. You also don't get to rewind and just watch all the cool little war stories that can happen all over the map in bigger scenarios. My opinion (YMMV) is that realtime is better and more fun for small scenarios. For big scenarios, I play WEGO because I find the ability to rewind and see what happened everywhere is too important. For playing against humans (and I really really recommend you do this- yes you'll get your butt handed to you the first few times out but it will also very rapidly increase your skill level), I haven't tried realtime; unless the scenario is very small my guess is you better be an avid RTS player with the ability to scroll click and order very very quickly. I stick with WEGO for head to head play. Other people have answered this, but this is another issue for me- many of the battles and the campaigns that come with CMFI consist of assaults uphill with almost no cover against infantry and AT weapons entrenched in positions lovingly crafted on subtle reverse slopes (to the degree that in real life that would have taken a couple weeks of engineers surveying) so that it's extremely difficult to even find a position to get artillery on them. In most cases for me it ends up being recon by death, split off scout teams and send them out there to die so you can figure out where the bad guys are, then spend 10 minutes trying to move a commander or spotter into a position where you can get artillery on them while everyone else stands around waiting. Infantry in the CMx2 system seem to be considerably more squishy than in CM1, using them effectively on attack is very difficult, they take casualties, are suppressed, and panic more quickly than in CM1. Artillery in CMx2 is also much more effective than CM1 and dominates the play to a greater degree. IMO Niscemi Highway is the best of the out of the box scenarios, and is entertaining with significant reinforcements that result in the tide changing directions several times. The Conrath's counterattack campaign is reasonably good but devolves into find the insanely well placed AT guns in some cases. Avoid the Troina campaign and the Ramparts of the Palikoi scenario unless your idea of fun is getting repeatedly hit in the face with a baseball bat. Actually the Ramparts scenario is good for a giggle playing the German side, you can literally win it in the first two minutes by setting your two 150mm batteries to linear targets covering the entire width of the map right where most of a US infantry battalion is going to be running across open terrain. More so than CM1, the AI overall is better. It's gotten quite good with artillery, you _must_ keep your units either out of view entirely or moving if they are visible. If you leave an infantry platoon visible and stationary for more than a minute or two, they're going to be vaporized by an artillery strike.

Try a 14in battleship barrage. I did that on the map I was making for the hell of it, and let me assure you it done blowed up the whole town reeeel good.

Yes the PIAT was kinda a poor-man's API blowback design in that the "bolt" was still moving forward when the round was fired.

You mean besides the out of memory errors which render all large battles and a goodly portion of scenarios/campaigns that shipped with the game unplayable for a significant portion of those who purchased the game? The only scenarios I can get through rank in the tiny/small range (and I have a top of the line machine), and I gave up on this game until these problems are addressed. I for damned sure won't be paying for an expansion unless that expansion contains a fix.