Centurian52
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Posts posted by Centurian52
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So I think the obvious conclusion at this point is that the rules are whatever you and your opponent agree to beforehand. I don't think it's possible, or even desirable, to have universal community-wide rules for H2H play.
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5 minutes ago, Artkin said:
I'll make it perfectly clear: Just let your troops do the targetting. A hard rule has to be set because people can't control themselves and turn every game into a pride match.
You may insist on that rule for your own opponents. I, and I expect many others, will never abide by it.
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13 hours ago, JoMac said:
Ops...I think @Vacillator was probably referring to me...Anyways, my 'House Rules' below.
1. No Off-Map Preplanned or On-Map Arty from Attacker or Defender on turn 1 of a Meeting Engagement...Attack/Defense Games are exempt as Attacker may call-in Preplanned Arty on turn 1.
2. Player will let the Computer AI choose what Targets to shoot at. However, you can still Area-Fire at any spot on Map and set Firing Arcs.
3. When a Player checks LOS at any given Waypoint, then he must keep that Waypoint (and make no adjustments) for duration of turn (next turn you can delete all old Waypoints and start again)...AKA, once you take your hand off the Chess piece you can't redo move.
4. Vehicle Smoke Dischargers will be handled by Computer AI.
5. Turn Off Armor Detailed Hits.
6. Install 'No Tracer Mod'.
7. Install 'RH Invisible Icons' Mod...(However, only install the Invisible Axis mod if you are playing Allied, and vice-versa).
8. Only use Green Troops.
Most of these just seem to be handicaps for the sake of handicaps, with no regard to realism.
1. I agree with no turn 1 arty into a setup zone in meeting engagements, but I disagree with no turn 1 arty at all.
2. I've already expressed my opinion on this one, and it is not favorable.
3. WHY?!?!?
4. ?????????? Why would you disallow a perfectly sensible tactic?????? If you find yourself in a situation where manually using vehicle smoke would make sense, then why wouldn't you use it (especially if you play the Soviets in CMCW, in which the vehicle smoke is not intended for quick getaways like NATO vehicle smoke, but to lay down screens to maneuver behind)? Are we going to just start disallowing any tactic that might have a chance of working until we are left with nothing but unsupported frontal assaults?
5. I do this sometimes when reviewing the action just for the spectacle. But it makes no sense to insist on it as a rule for your opponent. How would you even enforce it? It's impossible to know what visual aids your opponent has on or off.
6. Again, I've installed the no tracer mod on all of my CM games just because I think it improves the visual realism. But it makes absolutely no sense to insist on this as a rule. And again, how would you enforce it? It's impossible to know what mods your opponent has installed.
7. You do know that as a Combat Mission player you are in the shoes of every officer and NCO on the battlefield, not just the overall commander, right? The overall commander may not be able to see all of his units. But each of his units can see themselves. In real life if the overall commander forgets that one of his units exists (which seems rather unlikely (the commander may not have up to date info on where his subordinates are or what they are doing, but it seems doubtful that he'll forget that they exist), but that's the possibility you are modeling by turning icons off) and fails to give it any orders, that unit will still by capable of making its own decisions. If you forget that one of your units in Combat Mission exists, it will just sit there doing nothing. Again, I turn off icons sometimes when reviewing the action for the spectacle, but it makes no sense to insist on this as a rule. And again, how could you ever know if your opponent is abiding by this rule?
8. This only matters for quick battles, which I don't play (in scenarios the experience of your troops is whatever the scenario designer decided it should be). But as I understand it part of the game in quick battles is to decide on the tradeoff between troop quality vs troop cost. Why eliminate that element of the game?
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47 minutes ago, FlatEric999 said:
If you like James Holland (I do!) try the WW2 podcast series he co-hosts with Al Murray, "We have ways of making you talk" - they've recently completed an 8-part series called "Cassino'44":
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/ww2-pod-we-have-ways-of-making-you-talk/id1457552694
Also available from other podcast aggregators. Enjoy
I just finished James Holland's book on Italy '43. A podcast on Cassino '44 might be just the thing to follow it up!
Edit: Also, I'm pretty sure Al Murray was the one narrating the audiobook. I'm guessing that's probably not a coincidence.
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Just now, Artkin said:
As I said it's the lesser of two evils imo.
And I'm trying to explain that it would be the greater of two evils. By a very wide margin.
1 minute ago, Artkin said:You similarly can't possibly tell me that the area target command is more often used realistically in PBEM than not.
My PBEMs still represent a very small sample size. So whether unrealistic uses outnumber realistic uses or not, I can't say. But what I can say, with an extremely high degree of confidence, is that the game (in all modes) would be far less realistic without it. How often has your lack of use of the target command been unrealistic?
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16 minutes ago, Artkin said:
It's not possible in real life lol.
Tanks instantly sniping infantry the second an infantryman sees them 1km away? A t-72 sniping the exact position your hidden atgm is in?
Lol, come on man. It defies reality and puts CM on a worse level than armored brigade.
It's not perfect. But you are overstating the problem (you can only issue orders once a minute in H2H play, and units still need to have a line of fire in order to use the target command), and ever worse problems would be created if you removed it.
To give an example of how much worse it would be without the 'target' command, in one of my battles in which I'm defending hedgerow country I sprung a couple of nasty ambushes against my opponent. I had my pixeltruppen hiding with short target arcs until his scouts were nearly at my end of the field, and then opened fire. Afterwards I repositioned my teams (which I think must have looked like I was abandoning the hedgerow to him), had them resume hiding with short target arcs, and I was able to repeat the ambush on the next group of soldiers to cross. If there was no area target command I would be able to repeat this tactic again and again with complete impunity. There would be absolutely nothing my opponent could do about it. You can't possibly tell me that that would be more realistic than my opponent firing into my hedgerows with everything he's got, spots or no spots (which he has very wisely, and very realistically, started to do)?
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4 minutes ago, Erwin said:
Am also unsure about the "no preplnned fire in Meeting Engagements".
I'm sympathetic to the "no preplanned fire into setup zones in meeting engagements" rule. Particularly if the scenario designer has not done a good job of making it non-obvious where the setup zones are (the 'no preplanned fire into setup zones' rule in 'Grieshof Meet and Greet' is basically a necessity, since the setup zones are fairly small and it is painfully obvious where they are). But I agree that preplanned fire into areas outside the setup zones should be fair game. Blocking barrages on known or probable enemy avenues of approach are absolutely a thing in real life.
@Bannon I was actually considering using some turn 1 preplanned fire to deny some of your more inconvenient potential avenues of approach. But I opted not to. We only agreed on no fire into the setup zones on turn 1, but I wasn't sure if your expectation was no fire at all on turn 1.
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18 hours ago, Artkin said:
Dont area target your enemies infantry with vehicles that dont have a spot.
Remove the area target command for MP.
I think I've mentioned before that I strongly disagree with this one. You can't implement realistic tactics without area fire. Without area target you can't maintain suppression on enemy positions when the enemy takes cover and your own troops lose the spot, you can't conduct recon by fire, you can't use speculative fire on suspected enemy positions, and you can't use fire to deny an area that you think the enemy might want to go. Fire is a tool with a lot of uses. Only one of those uses is aimed destructive fire against clearly identified enemy units. If you disallow realistic tactics then what's even the point of playing the game?
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33 minutes ago, Vacillator said:
Thanks for the advice
. I fully expect my good friend Dave to kick some, but I'll give it a go. You never try, you never learn 
.
I think all the fundamentals are still more or less the same. So as long as you treat his tanks and ATGMs 2,000 meters away with the same degree of respect that you are used to treating tanks and ATGs with in WW2 at 500 meters I think you should do fine.
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40 minutes ago, Vacillator said:
'it's what he trained for'. Should I be worried
?
Hmm, maybe. Especially if you've never played any of the modern or near-modern CM games before, and even more so if this is the era he's specifically trained for. I definitely felt some differences going from modern back to WW2, but I'm told the shock of going from WW2 to modern is much greater.
I'm guessing you're playing as the Soviets (presumably what Dave is "trained for" is fighting as the US)? You'll definitely want to watch out for the American artillery if that's the case. It's much more accurate and comes in much faster than WW2 artillery. And whichever side you're playing as, "effective ranges" are less of a concern than in WW2. Generally speaking if you can see it you can shoot it. That's definitely true of the fully modern titles, in which 1 shot 1 hit is almost a guarantee. In the Cold War you might encounter some distances in which your tanks might have a less than 50/50 chance of a first round hit. But you certainly won't encounter any distances in which the chance of a first round hit isn't dangerously high if you're on the receiving end (certainly won't get as low as a 10% chance of a first round hit).
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1 hour ago, Bannon said:
I'll bite ... why is that?
I think I read somewhere that PBEM++ doesn't work with the Mac version.
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34 minutes ago, Vacillator said:
I'm sorry my friend, I feel I'm partly to blame for this
. Anyway, yes we're close to kicking off...
You may have had an influence. But I only have myself to blame for getting myself in so deep
. Anyway, I haven't had cause to regret it so far.
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Of course this means that I now have five ongoing PBEMs (or at least I will @Vacillator once our game finally gets going). I really shouldn't accept any more until I start finishing some
.
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6 minutes ago, Vacillator said:
You're talking about me now aren't you
?
No, of course not. But even on the weekends, when I can theoretically get in more than two turns a day, I'm still not likely to check my email for notification that I've got another turn waiting for me any more than once an hour or so.
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12 minutes ago, Bannon said:
@Vacillator and @Centurian52, I'd invite you two to a Cold War or Black Sea battle over PBEM+++, but I see you're both general officers and I'm a lowly noncom so I'm not sure how fair that would be.
I'm not sure it would be so unfair. I'm a longtime Combat Mission player, but I'm still an H2H newbie. I'd be up for taking the Soviets for a spin against a human US opponent.
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I've had no issues with PBEM++ so far, but none of my games are finished yet (3 ongoing, 1 not started yet). So I wouldn't have noticed any issues that only come up at the end of the game yet. Loading times haven't been an issue for me. I don't know how long it takes the turns to upload, but considering that I can really only keep up with a couple turns a day or so consistently I can't imagine upload times of 20 minutes being an issue. I'm not sure I'd notice even if it took an hour (for all I know my opponent might not have even gotten around to looking at the next turn yet).
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7 minutes ago, Vacillator said:
I'm not sure how to improve on it anyway
I think the answer is to make it togglable. I think generally speaking you want transparency on when you're issuing orders to troops in buildings. But when you're reviewing the action for the spectacle it might make sense to turn it off. I do something similar with trees. Tree-trunks only when I'm issuing orders through forests, and trees fully on when I'm watching the replay.
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44 minutes ago, weapon2010 said:
What is the effective and optimum range?
Wikipedia says the "effective" range is 6,800 meters. Though I suspect they meant "maximum" range. The thing is that an effective range is always a bit subjective. Just how effective do you expect "effective" to be? I believe German recoilless rifles will generally be capable of firing clear across most Combat Mission maps. But there are no modern fire-control systems in WW2. So if by "effective" you mean "a greater than 50/50 chance of a first round hit" then I'd guess it's almost certainly less than 500 meters. But I don't have enough direct experience using German recoilless rifles to be sure. Generally speaking armies in WW2 were content with much lower hit probabilities than we would consider acceptable today (I remember watching lots of 60s and 70s training films shortly after CMCW came out which repeated with amazement that the M60 had a 50/50 chance of achieving a first round hit at 1500 meters, while we would probably never accept anything less than a 100% chance of a first round hit at any range with a modern Abrams).
Since we want to meet your standards of effectiveness, the only correct (if somewhat unsatisfying) answer is that its effective range is whatever range feels effective to you.
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I don't think there's any way to disable it right now. We could request to make building transparency togglable as a new feature in a future update, the way trees are currently togglable. But there's no guarantee that it would be feasible (every new bit of code risks conflicts with old code, potentially introducing new bugs), or that they would find time to do it even if it is feasible (they have limited resources and lots of other things they are also trying to do).
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5 minutes ago, WimO said:
If there is something in a scenario that you don't like, just load the scenario into the editor and change it (then save as a revised version). You can do that with campaigns too but that is a heck of a lot more work.
Yeah, I actually did that myself a while back with 'The Fleeting Moment' campaign in CMFI. I felt that it was too easy, and it just didn't make sense for the Americans I was facing to have such low experience. So I bumped up their experience to normal and renamed the campaign to 'The Fleeting Moment(edited)' so that I could preserve a copy of the original. I ended up creating a campaign that was impossible for me to win. But I was ok with that. IIRC the Italians got absolutely pasted during the Axis counterattack in Sicily, so I ended up getting a more or less historical result (I still ended up performing better than the historical Italians). It was a PITA though, and I haven't attempted to edit another campaign since then.
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So I think this isn't so much a case of Combat Mission incorrectly modeling reality, as yet another case of people having incorrect expectations of reality. Just like all the spotting complaints.
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I think they're probably both pretty good at long range. So I don't think the range would be much of a factor in which one I'd choose. One of the benefits that LMGs provide over other types of automatic weapons like SMGs or assault rifles is that they can provide stable and accurate automatic fire at long ranges (though not quite as stable and accurate as tripod mounted MMGs or HMGs). Something you might notice in the modern titles is that your assault rifles provide accurate fire at long range, and automatic fire at close range, but only your MGs can provide accurate automatic fire at long range.
One thought that did occur to me as far as Bren vs MG42 accuracy is that I believe it was a point of doctrine for the Bren to use semi-automatic fire at long ranges in order to make it difficult for the enemy to figure out where it was (it blends in more with all of the rifles if it's firing single shots). Perhaps firing single shots with the Bren at long ranges led many gunners to believe that it was more accurate than other MGs, when in fact most MGs are that accurate. It's just that most MGs are rarely used to fire single shots.
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In any case I'm guessing that the differences between the Tiger's optics and the T-64's optics aren't so great as to make it unlikely that the Tiger might spot targets first just through sheer random chance (whether we're talking about the real tanks or the game tanks). And even if the T-64's optics really are significantly better, I would still expect an experienced and alert Tiger crew to spot faster on average compared to a relatively green T-64 crew (crew experience matters both in reality and in the game (the Soviets often have lower experience levels in a lot of scenarios, which may account for why so many people are so frustrated with their spotting abilities even though the T-62's optics really shouldn't be that much worse than the M60A1's optics)).
There's a limit to how much an experienced and alert crew can make up for inferior optics of course, especially as we move into the modern era. The most alert and experienced crew in a Tiger, or even in a T-64, is extremely unlikely to spot targets faster than even a relatively green crew in an M1A2 SEPv2 Abrams. Eventually the influence of technology overwhelms the influence of factors like skill. But among tanks using more or less the same technology for their optics, I would expect skill, alertness, and even luck to be the dominant factors.
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2 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
Absolutely this. It's always very difficult to draw the distinction where the line is drawn between accountability and excuse for actions, be it personal or societal. We all struggle with this all the time, even in our personal lives.
You see someone laying into a retail clerk and you think "boy, what a prick!" then you find out that his wife had just been murdered that morning and you think "oh, well... that's different". Someone who was raised in a drug addicted household becomes a drug addict, someone else does not. How do you judge someone for simply not being strong enough to keep themselves from not beating the odds and the other for doing so?
This is a conversation I've had with my dad (he's a philosophy professor). When is it fair to blame someone for their actions, vs when do the circumstances around the action (mental health, broken home, etc...) add up to the point where it is no longer fair to blame someone? My father considers himself a pragmatist, so it should come as no surprise that his answer is that you should direct moral blame against someone when it works. His view is that the purpose of moral blame is to change a person's behavior. Humans are generally social creatures, so having a bunch of other humans telling them that they shouldn't do a thing should generally make them less likely to do that thing again in the future. Healthy humans are usually very uncomfortable with a bunch of other humans strongly disapproving of their actions.
He uses a thermostat as an example. If the room is too cold, you adjust the thermostat. If the thermostat is broken, then adjusting it won't work. So there is no point in trying to adjust it. If someone does something that we think they shouldn't do, we leverage moral blame to get them to stop doing it (and to deter other people from doing it in the first place). But if a person's brain is broken to the point that moral blame is no longer effective at getting them to stop doing the thing they shouldn't do, then there is no point in blaming them for doing that thing (I believe our discussion at the time was mainly about mental health).
So, when do the circumstances around an action add up to the point that it's no longer fair to blame a person for their actions? According to my father, it's when the circumstances around the action add up to the point that no amount of moral blame will be effective in deterring someone from doing that thing again under similar circumstances.
So, by this logic, can we blame the population of a country for their actions? Maybe? I think there is some precedent for aggressive ad campaigns saying "you shouldn't do the thing!" getting the population of a country to do a thing at lower rates. I doubt there's much we can do to change the behavior of the Russian population, simply because I don't think western media has enough penetration into Russian society. In any case, moral blame is certainly a much fuzzier concept for populations than it is for individual people.
PBEM Player Guidelines
in Combat Mission - General Discussion
Posted
This is reminding me of why it took me so long to even give H2H a try. I want a challenge. I want to face an enemy with human-like intelligence and flexibility. I just wish there was a way to get that without having to interact with actual humans (I'm not complaining about any of my current opponents, you have all been great so far). The only really satisfactory solution would be a better AI.