niall78
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Posts posted by niall78
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Great battle report! I'm eagerly awaiting the next instalment.
It will be interesting to see what you opponent thinks of your spoiling tactics when this battle finishes.
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Excellent work Steppenwulf. A great addition to the game.
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Just digging about the internet on this topic and came across this piece of trivia :
Standard piece of equipment for a Lewis gun team I wonder?
You'd have to think that the completely exposed underside of the magazine when attached to the weapon or carried as spares would have been a nightmare in any type of muddy, dusty or sandy conditions.
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I've loaded all the files needed into my z folder and the difference is striking. Great piece of work.
I haven't added the SweetFX stuff. Is this necessary? Does it make an even bigger difference to the graphics?
Great work Worghern. Truly super.
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Interesting topic. It probably goes without saying that any commander that launches an attack without having a decisive local advantage has theoretically failed badly in their job. Of course it is a situation that is impossible to impose on the enemy in most battles.
Most of the battles in World War Two were slug-fests where ultimately logistics won or lost the day. Battles and campaigns were meat grinders where armies fought and died in highly attritional ground combat until one side collapsed due to failing supply, manpower and logistical support.
Combat mission represents tactical actions within these battles very well. There is a large time compression involved in WW2 CM battles in many cases - in my opinion - that can make the game seem slightly less realistic for a history grog that reads a lot of combat reports or eyewitness accounts. Maybe it is this time compression rather than the scenarios portrayed that can make the 'nature of CM battles' seem a bit weird.
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17 minutes ago, IanL said:
Either I missed something in CM1 or you are miss-remembering. As I recall the squads in CM1 were represented by the three stooges (with all the respect deserved :-) ) there was no rag tag look, no representation of specific weapons nor even ammo for that matter.
There was a panel on the bottom right-hand side of the screen that gave the weapon load out of the selected squad. Not that it really mattered as firing was abstracted in any case. CMx2 is many levels more detailed than CMx1. Harking back to a few weapon pictures that were abstracted isn't really telling the full story.
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On 18/04/2016 at 1:53 PM, rocketman said:
I had similar behaviour in "Lions of Carpiquet" second mission that felt unusal. Even flail-tanks would take a long detour to find a small gap in wire rather than just going over. That was under 3.11.
I had this same issue in "Lions of Carpiquet". I found the wire to be impenetrable to any vehicle. The first time I tried to move though some of it some of my armour went on a massive detour that lead them into AT fire.
Artillery and tank fire had little effect on this wire. This had the effect of funnelling my armour attack in a way that was highly unrealistic even when I eventually found a gap or two to advance through.
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I'm not even sure a 'move in formation' button would be any use. A 'follow button on the other hand would be super useful - especially on the winding Ardennes roads we have in CMFB.
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1 hour ago, mbarbaric said:
engine has far more important problems than fire. some of them were mentioned and i'd add that we still don't have movement in formation for our squads which is absolute basics of any infantry combat. yet you want fire? at this stage, i'd say it is no more than an eye candy as it should be.
I have zero issues with moving my forces in formation. Moving in formation is very possible there just isn't a 'move in formation' button that would make the process easier.
Fire however is missing completely from the game. And fire in my option plays quite a large role on many tactical battlefields. The game is poorer for its omission.
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4 minutes ago, MikeyD said:
"Do you remember in CMx1 games..."
Huh. An interesting question. Now that I think of it, no. I don't. Not really. CMBO showed up sixteen years ago. Before 9-11, before the Red Sox won the World Series. Before the series premiere of 'Alias' and 'Scrubs'. Before the 'Harry Potter' and the 'Lord of the Rings' movies. That was a looooong time ago.
I recall about 3 years ago I fired up an old copy of CMBB for nostalgia sake but I had completely forgot the keyboard commands. 5 minutes on it and no more nostalgia for me.
I fired up CMBB a few years ago. It was probably my most played game of all time. Thousands of hours over years in a time before kids. I found it virtually unplayable.
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Personally I think it is fire is the biggest missing feature from the modern series of games.
Anyone ever see any real life WW2 "action" pictures or film where fire and smoke wasn't present?
It plays a big part on any tactical battlefield especially urban environments.
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8 hours ago, Juju said:
Thanks, niall, but like CMFDR above I don't really understand the issue.
Sorry Juju my bad. I thought all the C&C icons were in the options folder and I was wondering why there were no German icons.
I've now seen that the German C&C icons are in the main folder.
Thanks again for this amazing piece of work. The game is fantastic played as vanilla - an amazing and detailed simulation. With mods like yours and many others (yours especially!) this product is boosted to even greater heights.
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Great work Juju. Amazing as always.
One small issue. All the C&C icons that feature visual representation of soldiers all seem to be the same.
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On 06/04/2016 at 4:01 PM, LUCASWILLEN05 said:
Actually I would like a CM Blitzkrieg covering Poland, France and maybe Greece/Yugoslavia. I think it will be a very long time coming as, fairly or unfairly, it is a definite minority interest. Eventually we will likely see a CM Barbarossa in perhaps five or six yearrs if we are lucky and enough of us keep rattling BF"cages" loudly enough for long enough! :-)
Realistically when it comes to BF Blitzkrieg the phrase "Cold Day in Hell" springs to mind! :-)
Maybe BF could run a Kickstarter to gauge interest and get funding for CM Blitzkrieg?
If I could just win the damn EuroMillions lotto I'd sort it myself .............
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15 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:
That´s what I meant to say further above. Most the guns can be placed in ditch locked -1m depressions, mid to heavy size craters and all that. Other alternatives is sunken roads and rear slope positions. The latter also has some advantage vs. direct fire HE. There´s nothing behind the gun that catches the shell and creates a near hit which can be lethal. The incoming arcing shell keeps flying downward (behind the crest) and explodes way farer behind the gun. That would also be the reason not to place the gun in or near other terrain that catches HE like trees and buildings do. That combined with key holed positions gives the guns a reasonably good survival chance on the battlefield. The problem is, unless prepared by a map maker, there´s not many such positions on most the available maps, hard to find or at the wrong place. But these remain the rules of thump for placing guns.
At the moment for proper prepared positions that make the best use out of AT guns I think we need designers to build them into specific scenarios.
Until the player can 'buy' such prepared positions as a fortification before the battle such guns will never be super effective. Even with such prepared positions such guns 'usefulness' will still be highly map dependant.
Here's a question that after decades reading WW2 historical books I can't answer. How effective were towed AT weapons on the Western Front in WW2? They get a lot of mentions in the desert war - mainly the 88s effectiveness. You get many mentions on the Eastern Front - the Pakfront concept was developed here. They don't seem to get as much attention in Western Front literature. Was the artillery advantage of the Western Allies in 1944-45 a big counter to towed AT during this campaign?
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13 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:
Is the german egg hand grenade (Eihandgranate 39) now in CMFB? Always wondered this one did not make it into the games yet, beeing at least produced and ditributed in equal numbers than the potato masher. IIRC this one also was the one prefered for use in confined terrains like MOUT and forests.
Was the German egg grenade a fragmentation or a concussion weapon I wonder? The Germans seemed to favour the concussion weapon when it came to hand grenade design. Unlike nearly every other arms producing country at the time who went with fragmentation designs.
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5 minutes ago, iluvmy88 said:
that just sounds like a nightmare lol, ill stick to my mollee pouches ty, just seems too big and cumbersome at least for me, i would prefer small and compact. not to say if i was wandering by and saw a potato masher i wouldn't have a little fun tho. i have never used one before but they seemed a bit more dificult to use, something about unscrewing the bottom then pulling a string or something, twist pull pin all day for me.
I think the arming system on the stick grenade was much safer than the pineapple grenade. A person couldn't snag the pin and arm the grenade accidentally. I think many veterans taped the rings of their grenades to the main body of the device to minimise such accidents.
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10 hours ago, MikeyD said:
I once joked that the US had an advantage in WWII because our national sport was baseball. Every American kid grew up wanted to be a professional baseball pitcher. Now every American kid grows up playing console games and our grenade throwing skill may be suffering as a result.
I remember reading ages ago that the German 'stick' grenade was much easier to throw than the Allied 'pineapple' grenade. I think it was easier to get more distance with them as well. Balanced by the fact that the stick grenade had less of an explosive and shrapnel effect.
I could of course be completely misremembering.
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1 hour ago, bwgulley said:
Perhaps I'm wrong but isn't the point of an assault gun to roll up to darn near point blank and blast away with heavy artillery.
It might be if you were tackling a heavily suppressed bunker or house. Any other time I would suggest such a tactic is a death sentence for the assault gun and its crew.
Putting any kind of a tank, assault gun or half-track into close contact with unsuppressed infantry is asking for losses for little result.
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5 minutes ago, Sgt Joch said:
It was discussed but the 90mm gun was almost exclusively used in rear areas. It was not felt the investment was worthwhile for the few times it was actually used in combat.
Is there a major issue with adding 90mm guns to the game that makes this decision somewhat understandable I wonder?
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I wonder does the use of half tracks and TCs differ between people that play campaigns heavily and those that play one-off games heavily?
A case of more reckless use of such assets due to zero long-term consequences for such recklessness.
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19 minutes ago, Bud Backer said:
^^This.
i also used to lose tank commanders often. Because I had my tank commanders do things I personally would never do which is stick my head out of something that puts me ten feet above the ground in plain sight of riflemen within 200 or 300m. It seem suicide to me.
I also feel this is the issue people have with casualties in half-tracks and opened topped semi-armoured vehicles. Again I used to take a lot of KIAs using these units. I constantly tried to get their guns into the heart of the battle. Now on an open map I use them for long range suppressive fire or even long range direct fire but on many maps I now view them as nothing but taxis to get troops near the fighting without tiring too much. Again in campaigns it becomes about force preservation. Why lose cheaply in this battle a unit that could be far more effective in the next scenario?.
Imagine sitting behind the limited protection of a gun-shield while a squad opened up at you at a couple of hundred metres. Dozens of rounds a second smashing into the armour. Those rounds then fragmenting and flying all over the place. The chances of remaining unhurt - even over a very limited time period - in my mind would be near zero.
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I used to take an awful lot of TC casualties. I don't these days. The trick? I try never to expose them to any kind of effective small arm fire. That means never exposing them to any small arms fire under 500 metres. Shrapnel is still a danger over these ranges if any kind of artillery is in play - I recently lost a TC to a mortar round that landed 30 metres from the tank - but TC KIAs have dropped dramatically. As I love playing campaigns TC retention is a must to maintain force effectiveness if units are used repeatedly within a campaign.
Would anyone playing this game stand up in a tank turret while ten or twelve guys shoot long rifles at them from three hundred metres? I certainly wouldn't.
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Great piece of work Poesel. Might we see CMFI and CMRT added to this map in the future?
WAS THE RUSSIAN MILITARY A STEAMROLLER?
in Combat Mission Red Thunder
Posted
Niall Ferguson is a well unknown for his contrarian views on a lot of subjects. Not necesssary a bad thing for a historian but unfortunitly Ferguson allows his personnal contrarian viewpoint influence his writings and in many ways writes counter-factual history because of this or distorts history though ommission of vital facts.
His history of the British Empire is fawning. He credits it with every development in the world during its hayday while ignoring the genocide, murder, servitute and theft that it actually entailed. His view is the British Empire was a great thing for mankind. His books tries to reinforce this view point instead of giving a balanced view of history.
I try to avoid such writers like the plague. Lots to read and my time is limited. I can make up my own mind about a given subject given good sources of fairly unbiased information. I don't get that from Ferguson. I find tawdy propoganda dressed in the clothes of history insulting frankly.