dungeontiger

I just want to say that I have been using this tool for a long time as part of Ian's testing and I think its a great! Its the only way I can keep track of all my turns and different versions. Kudos to Ian for putting this together!

In an epic battle of British vs Germans I have fought against a single Panther that just won't die. Watch the videos below. Basically I pummelled it with a Churchill for a few turns and took out its gun and immobilized it. Then I wailed on it with both an Achilles and a Churchill and it still won't die. These things are scary!!! Nuts.

...let me count the ways.... This is insane. Consider how many times I have pummeled this Panther in the last few turns and then watch these two videos. Clearly its gun is disabled and it is immobilized but it still will not die. I am hammering it with a Churchill and an Achilles...the two most powerful weapons the Brits have. Insane. F E A R T H E P A N T H E R -- Gibson Out

This dang thing just will not die. Its nuts. Enjoy the ricocheting bullets. -- Gibson Out.

Unedited images I cannot believe how much close range beatings this Panther has taken. Damn him to hell! At the end of this, I have an awesome video of up and close action against it. That's it for catching up!

More unedited catching up images.

Communications must have been cut a la "Enemy at the Gates" scene. Here are some images I have captured over the last few turns. They are unedited but it should provide some ideas. I tried to put them in turn order.

Again this turn very quiet with no new contacts. He's dropping some large caliber artillery on the Town that might take out an immobilized tank but that's it. A few other places on the map he's dropping more useless artillery and at one location seems to be executing some area fire with a tank, again to no effect. It might be artillery but it sure looks like a single local gun. -- Gibson Out

First, the town is starting to get infested with rats. Now that I have eyes on some of them, I just want to pound the snot out of those buildings and bring them down on that infantry. However, Ian has the town well guarded. I've lost a couple of armor units already from ghost Panthers. They are lurking there and I know as soon as I move my armor in position to pound those buildings, he's going to nail me. I need to be cautious. Second in fact he is using artillery to good effect this time. He's denied me access to the left side of the town by dropping rounds. I could take my chances and put some armor there but I have little left I'm willing to risk. I need to make some sort of bold move but need to think about it. The real bad luck is near the Road objective. As expected, there was an ambush, but it was with a shrek not a Panther. My Churchill got the first shot off but shot long. The shrek fired...at what I consider long range...and got a nasty penetrating hit on the turret. Tank is still active but 2 crewmembers are dead. Bad, bad news. The tank did return fire and I lost contact with the crew. Are they dead? I don't know. Later the tank admirable fired at a scout team and at least killed one member. -- Gibson Out.

My scout car escaped. I got a few more contacts in the town. HMG and a few rifle squads. Can't get a bead on them though. What is interesting is more artillery is coming in and this time he's aimed well. Did not hurt anything but made me move. Too bad he seems to have used a point target. An area target might have hit me. I reversed my guys out. I just hope he does not have an ambush of Panthers waiting. Actually I expect it. -- Gibson Out.

Bad news for me mostly. Chruch in the town died. Scout car getting nailed by infantry. Here he's dumping more pointless artillery. Good shot of the battlefield looking away from the Town objective and toward the Railway objective. My tiny reserve forces are on the right side. And worst of all one of my blessed Achilles gets nailed (in the foot?) by something from the town. Must be a well hidden Panther. Let's hope for better next turn. -- Gibson Out.

So the Churchill I sent out got taken out AND the Churchill that was sitting in town got picked out by infantry. It was only dismounted but there are only 2 crewman clinging to life. I'm sending a Stuart to support them, but its still ugly. The only fun part is he hits his squad with a spotting round. This Churchill gets nailed shortly after. Here's my Chruchill in the town getting nailed from the right. The crew dismounted. Here's a shot of the other objectives. Some infantry popped up when I [gameily] moved my HQ squad up. I'm sending a Chruchill around the corner to pound them. Of course I will pay because there are Panthers about but I never learn.... -- Gibson Out.

Almost nothing going on. I sent a Churchill out flank his units and encountered an infantry squad. That's about it. -- Gibson Out

This hurt. I really cannot afford to lose Achilles. These are the teeth I have against the Panther. I have no idea what fired the shot. It seemed like it was a ultra long range Shrek round fired from the tree line but that would be right behind my Churchill. I don't know what happened and that is worrisome. Nothing else really happened this turn. Calm before the storm? Oh ya. My Churchill fired more MG rounds at the infantry squad in the town and then another of his spotting rounds landed very near by to the squad. -- Gibson Out.

And as predicted he's dead. His yet-another-artillery salvo seems to be lobbing spotting rounds on his units. Here's just a gratuitous view from the Town objective toward the other two. From the same angle, my tank crew is having 'fun' emptying their service revolvers at two Panthers. Not the smartest thing to do in my book. All in all, not a very exciting turn. I'm guessing that won't last. -- Gibson Out.

My Churchill destroyed yet-another-Stug. And for good measure nailed that HQ unit in front with an HE follow up round. He knows where I am however, and there are Panthers about. Not sure what's going to happen there. He continues to move mud, but also nails a recon car with a previously unseen yet-another-Stug. Shortly after the scout team gets owned by a tank crew with P-38's. I guess the HE shell from the Stug helped suppress the scouts too. Still hurts however. Massive duel between this Churchill and Panther. Highly one sided but massive non the less. The Church took about 5 rounds to the face before becoming immobilized and having dead crew. Its not long to this world I'm afraid. I did manage to smoke some infantry in the town just ahead of the Railway Crossing objective. That's got to count for something. Not a good turn, not at all. -- Gibson Out.

He's making his first contact at the Railway Crossing. A Stug gets a bead on an Achilles and a penetrating hit. The Achilles does not even return fire and takes a follow up shot from the Stug. They bought the farm. Not good. Not good at all for the Brits. -- Gibson Out

At least I get a little action here. I moved up this Chruchill and he gets a bead on a Stug. No idea if its still combat effective or not but at least I hit it. Now over to the Orchard. Again he's got more stuff than I expected. How big is his force after all? I don't have *that* many Chruchills Here you can see that my immobilized armored car (not marked as such, I marked the other units as immobilized for reference; they have been immobilized for a long while) gets a partial penetrating hit on a Stug. Sadly its not good enough. The Stug returns fire and takes him out. I'm going to withdraw from the Orchard *again*. This strategy is not working so well. What I need to do, I think, is let him attack and then flank with my reserves.

Not a good turn for me at all. This is starting to get ugly. Finally his infantry is making a difference. Above the town you can see here the second of my Chruchills I sent out getting his by either another Shrek or a Faust. He's dead Jim. Just above that you can see my scout car getting nailed by another Stug. How many Stugs does this guy have left??? I'm going to have to call off my little insurrection here. I have nothing much left and he's got more there than I expected. Behind those two Chruchills and at the entrance to the town you can see him moving more mud. Wasted! However, that is exactly where my Chruchills were a few turns before. So by moving them up [and getting shredded] I did manage to kill some of his infantry with them. Can't say it was worth it but I can say that if they died in the barrage it would have been worse. In the town, where the Panthers were, he again hits me with infantry at close range. He sent in a scout squad which I sent crying, then hit me with either a Shrek or a Faust again. I saw the Shrek team and a couple other squads. I'm not immobilizied. What a mess. This is what it looked like before I took the hit.

Now on the other side of town I sent two Chruchills to support my scouts. Here you can see one firing at something and hitting a tree. Some enemy leg popped up. In the top of this image you can see that his AFV crew made my scout squad flee like [WARNING: inappropriate analogy follows....] screaming school girls. What's this? An ambush? A Shrek Crew! Its like he knew I could not resist and would have to attack! Yes he knows me by now I guess. And another immobilized Chruchill...what will the neighbours think? I need my luck to return. -- Gibson Out

Lots of exchanges between Churchills and Panthers...well at least a couple. First, on the edge of town again. A Chruchill exchanges shells with a Panther. I think I got the worst of it being immobilized. Now an Achilles got a bead on the second Panther that appeared in the town. A crewman is dead and the Panther withdrew. Let's hope its combat ineffective. Where things stand at the end of that engagment. In the upper left corner is that artillery falling again? Come on. Do I send this Chruchill to get the wounded cat? I say yes. Get the getting while the getting is good (or something like that).

He's got infantry in the Town objective and I don't like it. I know as well he's got at least one Panther. I have to be careful. This is where you all will remind me that I need infantry. I'm going to hope to HE him to death with Chruchills. At least Tommies don't have Fausts! I'm sending in more Churchills into the town. Behind the Town my scouts are still sweeping across to see what they can see. And near the Railway objective, in the Orchard, I am going to attack - again. Yes I still don't learn but its really annoying. I'd like to break through there. So attacking on all fronts! Short post today because I had these images for a while and did not take the time to post. So here it is. I hope to keep up better now. - Gibson Out

This is most unfortunately. The right thing for me to do at this point would be to walk away from this thread. But when my credibility is attacked I'm compelled to respond. I'm sorry you feel I'm a 'professor'. I'm a seasoned software engineer who has worked for some of the world's best software companies for 20 years. I have code that I wrote which runs on warships in some parts of the world and extensive amounts of business software that runs the biggest corporates in every major country of the world. Its likely you are indirectly using software I wrote without even realizing it. I *think* I know a little about software engineering and clearly I am not a professor and I think have proven that I can survive in the real world and understand market pressures. [calming down] Like I said its unfortunately that you made such a rash assumption. Certainly you don't have to agree with anything posted here. I just felt that I wanted the record straight regarding my background. I will not respond to the rest of your comments directly nor replying to this thread any longer since it clearly would not be productive. Stephen.

Thank you! It will be very interesting to see how the end game turns out and it will be even more interesting to read his side of this DAR.

Steve, I was enjoying this tread until you add the above statements. Now you are really scaring me. Automated tests are only good for crashes? Are you serious? Automated tests and unit tests do not general test for crashes. They specifically test for expected output. You must know what is expected as output from your algorithms. It must be deterministic or it would not work. Sure, it is unreasonable to say build an automated test that runs any case and identifies anything you did not expect. That's too generic. However, it is totally reasonable to expect you to create isolated situations using part of the code and give it input and verify you get the output you expect. Consider the wandering crewman problem. You have enough logged turns with this issue to reproduce the problem and identify what caused it. Now you can create a test that takes only the minimum to replicate the problem. It could be a turn with a single crew served weapon in a specific terrain. The input is a new command to the crew. The expected output is the micro commands that your engine gives to each soldier. Obviously one member is receiving a bad micro order (I'm speculating on how your engine works of course). Your unit test would verify that they did not receive this bad order. Once you automate it, you can guarantee that this bug will never come back (be reintroduced) because you are testing for it each night and before each check in. Automated testing and unit tests don't generally prevent new bugs in new code. There primary job is to prevent old bugs from being reintroduced and ensuring that code that worked before checking in work continues to work as expected after the check in. How else can you be sure that you did not break something when you check in code? Automated testing and unit testing is one critical tenant of any serious software project. Not having automated testing and unit testing is like not using source control or having nightly builds (if you don't have that please DON'T tell me, I'm scared enough as it is now). Yes, it definitely requires an investment to implement automated and unit testing. In my young and foolish years (now I'm just foolish) I felt such work was a waste of time. "I'm smart enough to keep everything in my head and I test like a customer so why should I waste time on this?" Now I know better. I cannot tell you how many dividends have been reaped because of the time and effort I put in to ensure my code was properly unit tested via automation. In all seriousness, I'm sure your engineer(s) is much smarter than I am. Seriously. But that does not mean you don't require this framework. If anything, once the investment has been made, it will free up the brilliant mind(s) you have to safely implement the new features we are all clamoring for. Please, I don't want to sound negative or ungrateful. Your pricing model is great and your quality is generally higher than most products. I have no problems to support you. It just sounds like you could be even better and stronger with a little more software engineering principles. Stephen. (boy, I sure feel a little slimy writing this. "Ye of no sin..." and all that. Please take it in the light of "here's some hard won experience that I think could make your wonderful product even better.)