Aircraft....armamet's

[ParaBellum]

Originally posted by prime^:

But you actually have to pay for TRPs, which makes any arty spotter 90(?) pts more expensive, combining the fact that the generally have less ammo as well its kind of removing the use of artillery from the game :/

What I also meant was that because the artillery is already aware of teh general bearings of the battle, the arty spotters are merely making adjustments, every grid reference would have been pre-sited in a prepared battle as a matter of course, and firing adjustments would therefore have been much more accurate. I havny played with TRPs yet, but it also seems that these can only be useful at the beginning of a round, so not much use if I want to break an emerging strong point or ruin an attack against a faltering defensive position :/

A TRP costs 10 pts, not 90pts. And what do you mean with "...combining the fact that the generally have less ammo as well..."?

Please explain.

Your assessment of TRPs is wrong, too. Why should you benefit from TRPs only at "the beginning of a round"? What TRPs do is reduce the time before the rounds start falling from (worst case) 25 minutes to actually 1 or two minutes.

Why you think this can't be used to break up an attack is beyond me. Maybe you should try to use them.

What you point out with "...every grid reference would have been pre-sited..." is what TRPs are actually for.

It never was common to "TRP" the whole area of operation during WWII.

I've found an interesting example of the german army doing that during operation market garden in '44 with great effect but it surely wasn't standard Red Army tactic.

[ October 13, 2002, 10:17 AM: Message edited by: ParaBellum ]

[Foxbat]

Originally posted by prime^:

I was under the impression that artillery in ww2 was accurate?

Only if it was incoming.

[Foxbat]

Originally posted by prime^:

realism aside, ther was nothing quite so satisfying in CMBO than a big MP game, where ive taken 6+ arty spotters and just raked the enemy side of the map with wide targeted (blind) fire early in the game >

Buy some rocket arty and pre-plan it, same idea better fireworks

[prime^]

It was more the HUGE difference between CMBO artillery and CMBB artillery, the difference seems so huge that i cant believe CMBO got it so totally wrong?

Purely from a gameplay point of view, it makes artillery so difficult to use, and so easy for them to be useless, combined with their relatviely high cost - it just dosnt seem worth taking them any more.. I can have 8 extra tanks! wooo

[prime^]

I mean in CMBO the artillery units had a lot more ammo than in CMBB, thats all.

[Cameroon]

Regarding the plane incident, we'd need the save game

After all, with vehicle morale now, it is entirely possible to force a crew to abandon without causing any casualities or vehicle damage. Doing so is not fast or easy, but a large bomb blast might do it much more quickly. I guess part of the question might be answered if we knew whether the vehicles were Abandoned or Knocked Out.

You could always try to re-create the moment

[prime^]

Now about that aircraft....

[ParaBellum]

Originally posted by prime^:

It was more the HUGE difference between CMBO artillery and CMBB artillery, the difference seems so huge that i cant believe CMBO got it so totally wrong?

Purely from a gameplay point of view, it makes artillery so difficult to use, and so easy for them to be useless, combined with their relatviely high cost - it just dosnt seem worth taking them any more.. I can have 8 extra tanks! wooo

Ok, here I can agree with you.

It definately is more difficult in CMBB. In a current PBEM I have a russian heavy mortar FO and I can't get him to hit anything with his 7 minute delay...

No wonder the rusians relied heavily on support tanks such as the SU152, capable of lobbing BIG HE shells at the germans.

edit: Oh, the plane!

[ October 13, 2002, 10:31 AM: Message edited by: ParaBellum ]

[prime^]

Damn you Cameroon you got back on topic before my request to get backon topic :/

I cant remember, but being that this 1 bomb also wiped out every infantry unit in ... LOS pretty much, and that the bomb dropped and then everything 'instantly' changed to eliminated, if the crew abandoned it would say "bailing out" would it not?

[prime^]

as an aside, is it possible to get crew that have abandoned a vehcile or a pillbox to get back in?

In the game im playing one of my 76mm pillboxes crew took 1 casualty and they bailed out. The pillbox is still intact but they are just sitting behind it like lemons :/

This was an annoyance in CMBO as well, as when something like a wasp took a single crew casualty it became useless (well kinda, i used them to occupy 'safe' flag positions rather than ttying up useful troops), but at the end of the game I might have 3 wasp carriers with 2 crew each, why cant i split teh crew from 1 and make the other 2 useful again :/

[Cameroon]

Originally posted by prime^:

It was more the HUGE difference between CMBO artillery and CMBB artillery, the difference seems so huge that i cant believe CMBO got it so totally wrong?

Purely from a gameplay point of view, it makes artillery so difficult to use, and so easy for them to be useless, combined with their relatviely high cost - it just dosnt seem worth taking them any more.. I can have 8 extra tanks! wooo

There were quite a number of areas where CMBO artillery was pretty wrong. Out of LOS fire, for instance, should come down in the same pattern just not where you want it to. Now it does

As for CMBO vs CMBB, to start with the level that the spotter is at (i.e. Battalion, Division, etc) is now modeled. When the FO is using higher-level resources, his priority to actually _getting_ those resources is lower, so longer delay times.

And, of course, the biggest difference is in going from Allied artillery in CMBO to Allied artillery in CMBB. Soviet artillery was not very flexible

Part of the problem that has come up is that the attacker cannot buy TRPs when, really, they should be able to. I'd buy a heavy, Army level FO if I could purchase 3-5 TRPs. Then you'd actually have those priority targets for quick, on-call fire as the attacker.

It has been suggested that if you set a QB to unrestricted force-type, that you can buy TRPs as the attacker. I've not tried this, so I don't know. But its really not a very good solution.

[Foxbat]

Originally posted by prime^:

Damn you Cameroon you got back on topic before my request to get backon topic :/

I cant remember, but being that this 1 bomb also wiped out every infantry unit in ... LOS pretty much, and that the bomb dropped and then everything 'instantly' changed to eliminated, if the crew abandoned it would say "bailing out" would it not?

I think there was athread on the kill-all bomb a while back, apparently a bug (little one) that peeps up every now and then and that also happened in CMBO.

[EDIT]This is the thread but it looks a damn sight worse then what you are describing, so might just have been a very big bomb.

[ October 13, 2002, 10:43 AM: Message edited by: Foxbat ]

[Cameroon]

Originally posted by prime^:

Damn you Cameroon you got back on topic before my request to get backon topic :/

I cant remember, but being that this 1 bomb also wiped out every infantry unit in ... LOS pretty much, and that the bomb dropped and then everything 'instantly' changed to eliminated, if the crew abandoned it would say "bailing out" would it not?

Heheh

If the crew bailed immediately then the thing would say Abandoned or Knocked Out. If they were all Knocked Out, then I would feel it was a more suspect occassion since it would seem most unlikely that they would all actually have suffered vehicular damage to that extent.

After all, I had a large bomb and 2 aircraft-rocket barrages fired at two Tigers sitting on a hill in a QB. All 3 were direct impacts and the worst that was suffered was that the one Tiger had the TC killed (silly man, didn't button up!).

[Edit]

And what Foxbat said.

[ October 13, 2002, 10:44 AM: Message edited by: Cameroon ]

[prime^]

Hmm, but it didnt kill everything, just "nearly" everything, i believe one infantry squad in the middle of all the dead ones had "broken" and 2 people left in it, and all of my units that were out of LOS from the bomb were un affacted (all 6 of em - needless to say i gave up on that mission straight away).

[ October 13, 2002, 10:46 AM: Message edited by: prime^ ]

[Foxbat]

Originally posted by prime^:

Hmm, but it didnt kill everything, just "nearly" everything, i believe one infantry squad in the middle of all the dead ones had "broken" and 2 people left in it, and all of my units that were out of LOS from the bomb were un affacted (all 6 of em - needless to say i gave up on that mission straight away).

I'm going out on a limb here and I'll say in advance that I don't know how the game mechanics work exactly, but here is how I think they work.

If in real life a bomb is dropped it creates a blast effect and shatters shrapnell all around it, since it isn't feasible to recreate this in the intricate detail that reality provides us with this is abstracted in the game.

And this probably works something like this; the bomb has a certain footprint and all units in that footprint are queeried as to how they are affected (ie a die is rolled to see if and how much damage/morale hit they take).

Since there is no hard upper limit to the number of casualties a bomb can possibly inflict -and this was also apparently a pretty big bomb- it is entirely conceivable that every unit in the area had a bad roll (statistics will do that to you once in a while) and you end up with a field of dead guys (500m isn't very much to begin with, from the bomb's perspective ). Just tough luck, no bug, no Überbomb, just one of those things that happen every once in a while..

[ October 13, 2002, 12:07 PM: Message edited by: Foxbat ]

[Silvio Manuel]

Originally posted by Cameroon:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by prime^:

Purely from a gameplay point of view, it makes artillery so difficult to use, and so easy for them to be useless, combined with their relatviely high cost - it just dosnt seem worth taking them any more.. I can have 8 extra tanks! wooo

There were quite a number of areas where CMBO artillery was pretty wrong. Out of LOS fire, for instance, should come down in the same pattern just not where you want it to. Now it does

And, of course, the biggest difference is in going from Allied artillery in CMBO to Allied artillery in CMBB. Soviet artillery was not very flexible

</font>

[Mud]

Also, prime^: Read some history books, like John Erickson's _The Road to Stalingrad_ and _The Road to Berlin_. Late-war, the Soviets often used 30-60 minute long preplanned preparatory barrages... a technique which suggests that they felt that it was better used then, and that they likely lacked the flexibility you're claiming that should be in the game.

The game does lack some probably reasonable techniques, like a rolling prep barrage (right now, you can specify only one target for each FO doing prep barrage... and it'll take all the FO's shells, too.), and the ability to specify preferred groupings beyond tight/wide. Maybe it'll be overhauled for the engine rewrite.

[Silvio Manuel]

Mud,

I guess you can simulate the rolling prep barrage by using 2+ spotters for prep, and staggering the delay times from 0 to x minutes for the 1st echelon, x+y minutes for the 2nd ,etc, and advance behind them.

Although you can realistic only do this w/ cheaper (i.e. weaker) arty units, b/c they shoot all of the shells at the one blind-chosen target.

[ October 13, 2002, 02:22 PM: Message edited by: Silvio Manuel ]

[Mud]

Hmmm, might work... need to check how fast the non-Katyusha spotters go through their ammo, I suppose. A scenario designer could toss it in by strictly limiting the FO ammo counts and requesting that the player follow certain instructions, just like the ol' "Your FO is authorized just as a bridge destroyer" deal.