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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:The Combat Mission games are legitimately good. It sucks cause they used to be great. No paid patches, and they put so much content in the old-engine games there was never a need for expansions. Barbarossa to Berlin covered the entire eastern front from start to finish, had a massive unit roster, and all the Axis minors with their own units and art assets.
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Apr 15, 2019 17:21
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I always like to build a couple of big (like 12-14k), good CAs if I didn't start with them. Since early battleship fights are indecisive, you want to sink enemy cruisers for your VP. I try to avoid building battleships until I at least have heavy secondary battery.
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May 22, 2019 21:18
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BtB was more fun than any of their games in the new engine. So much content. Playing as the axis minors (or curbstombing them as the Soviets) was so much fun. Now I wonder if people here would put up with the ancient graphics for a retro edition of our combat mission LPs.
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Jun 5, 2019 21:16
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Kind of tempted to re-buy BtB just to get a DRM-free copy and try to show battlefront that see, sensible distribution isn't so scary and maybe we can rethink your other silly practices while we're at it.
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Jun 11, 2019 17:29
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Combat Mission time: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3915552
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Feb 28, 2020 04:37
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I've only mucked around in the new UI so far but the loading and turn speed alone are a breath of fresh air.
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Apr 14, 2020 15:11
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Saros posted:Cool. Once it reaches a bit more of a stable state would there be people interested at all for a sucession style game/LP where people do their best to explain different sections of the game as they come up? I know a couple of people were interested in doing LP's and this could be a way to get one started without overloading one person and it could be given up easily enough as the game continues to update. I mean war of the worlds was probably my favorite LP of any game, so I’d be all in for another one in that format.
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Apr 15, 2020 14:07
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Demiurge4 posted:Oh yeah I've already done that. There's also a thread on missing features from VB6 that aren't in C# so things should be moving along. The distance measuring tool is on the to do list apparently. A distance tool just got added btw: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=11010.msg127366#new
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Apr 23, 2020 19:48
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I'm really hoping we get a queue for ground unit training. Or just a way to define/construct a higher level template that includes the subordinate templates and the field positions. Right now it's pretty tedious to make a build task for every single battalion or whatever, then drag it into the OOB spot and set the field position. God help you if you've created a force structure that's delineated down to companies or platoons.
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Apr 23, 2020 21:00
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Yeah, the reason Aurora fascinates me despite all the annoyances is how much freedom you have. Really the only "rule" I follow is that engines take up 25% of most classes. Having some fixed percentage for your engines is helpful since that makes it easy to keep your whole fleet the same speed. Beyond that, I like to gently caress around every game.
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Apr 28, 2020 04:20
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Show yourselves, shadow devs!
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May 1, 2020 14:37
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Arrath posted:Another Aurora question: A longer range fire control is always better, even if the weapon can't reach that far, since accuracy degradation is based on the FC range.
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May 6, 2020 18:49
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Fray posted:I'm really hoping we get a queue for ground unit training. Or just a way to define/construct a higher level template that includes the subordinate templates and the field positions. Right now it's pretty tedious to make a build task for every single battalion or whatever, then drag it into the OOB spot and set the field position. God help you if you've created a force structure that's delineated down to companies or platoons. Looks like the first one is coming next patch, thank god. I'm thinking once I need a break from combat mission I might do an LP. Kinda want to steal the "Earth is gone and now everyone's trying to survive" thing from Children of a Dead Earth.
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May 7, 2020 15:40
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Bremen posted:My main point was that we seem to be at the end of the emergency bugfix patches and Steve is setting up for a more thorough features/ease of use patch, so it's probably time to decide if we want to run the succession game now or wait for the new version. Given he'll probably run a test campaign for the invaders and his work rate pretty much entirely depends on his personal enthusiasm since it's just a hobby, that could be anywhere from two week to six months. I'll probably wait a while longer to do an LP, if I do one. Both to avoid colliding with Saros' and in the hope that ground combat gets some more work. The new system feels like the classic grog case of complexity over usability.
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May 8, 2020 17:17
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Bold Robot posted:Is there a separate Aurora thread or are people just fielding questions in here? I'd be curious if anyone has a set of tutorial videos they recommend. There's no aurora thread, but this is the biggest collection of tutorials I'm aware of: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=11003.0
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May 22, 2020 22:44
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Bold Robot posted:Some random Aurora questions, about 20 years into a conventional start, haven't messed with jump points or other systems at all yet (nor do I know how to): 1. Negative wealth is actually pretty bad cause it applies increasing penalties to various things, most importantly research rate. Build financial centers, build other industries so your population become workers so you can tax them, and research the racial wealth tech under the Construction category. 2. If you select the mining colony in the economy window, then go to the mining tab, there’s an option to buy the minerals or just tax the colony for wealth. 3. This is a pretty general question so I don’t have a better general answer than to check the wiki for info, and the wiki admittedly is sparse. It’s a hobby game and it’s documented like one. I can tell you the power plant one: Your cap recharge tech level tells you the power consumption of each beam weapon (except gauss cannons since they don’t draw power). So you need enough power plant for the number of non-gauss beam weapons times the cap recharge rate. The power production per ton of your plants depends on the power plant tech you have.
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May 25, 2020 18:10
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Bold Robot posted:Is Alpha Centauri supposed to always spawn as your closest system? I've got 3 systems adjacent to Sol in my game, none of which is Alpha Centauri. I haven't gone out past those yet. If you have the 'Known Star Systems' option checked then yeah, Alpha Centauri will usually be adjacent. For autominers it mostly depends on how fast the rock is going to be exhausted. If a bunch of the mineral types are due to exhaust within about 30 years, I stop adding miners.
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May 26, 2020 19:08
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SIGSEGV posted:I remember that black holes and nebulas were impossible in VB6 Aurora, at least that's what the wiki told me back then. I know nebulae were in it; we ran into one in Saros' LP. Can't ever recall finding a black hole or even what they do mechanically. Honestly the wiki is chock full of stuff that hasn't actually been in the game since the aughts.
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May 26, 2020 19:32
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SIGSEGV posted:I missed that Saros's LP was on real systems, I guess the wiki was wrong. Lol that's so dumb.
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May 26, 2020 19:40
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Since it hasn’t been posted in here yet: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3928980 Nobody knows what might happen, so if you’re not on one of the grog Discords now’s the time. Make sure you have some kind of external connection to the rest of us. Fray fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Jun 24, 2020 |
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Jun 24, 2020 14:55
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A ton of us are on this Discord as well: https://discord.gg/w7ypcbZ
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Jun 24, 2020 15:35
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pointsofdata posted:I vaguely remember reading somewhere that a very significant amount of German arms production when into Flak - does anyone know what the source might have been? That may have been Wages of Destruction and yes, air defense did eat up a shocking amount of German armaments capacity in the latter half of the war.
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Dec 14, 2020 16:04
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Barbarossa is one story after another of the Soviets mobilizing these gigantic mechanized formations for a big counterattack and then losing more than half to nonhostile causes just trying to form up and move to contact.
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Jan 15, 2021 05:35
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Yooper posted:It's really a great book. Between that and the recent works by Stahel it really highlights how turbofucked the Germans were on multiple levels. It makes it that much more maddening when people debate that the Germans were "one weird trick away from victory". I love Tooze for demolishing two of the most annoying and oft-repeated myths of the war: That Germany was lazy in its war mobilization and just not trying as hard as the allies, and that this was all fixed by the wunderkind Speer in 1943. No, the reality is that Germany was pushing as hard as they could from as soon as Hitler took power, and they were still hopelessly outmatched. Ed: For real, read this book if you're interested in WWII at all.
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Mar 21, 2021 15:26
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817 posted:My favourite Tooze factoid is how Germany maintained a higher female labour force participation rate from the day the war started to the day it ended than any Western Allied country reached at any point during it. And yet you never, ever, ever, ever will reach an end to clickbait websites pinning Rosie the Riveter posters on their top 10 wacky WW2 fact listicles. Your average American's understanding of WW2 comes from great grandfather's half-remembered propaganda newsreels, 1950's segregated Americana flashbacks and embarrassing Hollywood action flicks, stuffed into a brain cavity and blended into a cloudy slurry for eight decades. And then finally delivered as a cloud of aerosolized spit onto the faces of us groaning foreigners with conviction that would make a North Korean tour guide girl blush. I couldn't be more glad that genuinely talented historians like Tooze still exist. Not like the market for that is anywhere near what it is for telling people what they already know but just want to hear again. A lot of it is that Speer himself spent his entire postwar life spinning endless self-serving bullshit, both about his accomplishments as Armaments Minister and about his warcrimes culpability. Cold War historians were embarrassingly credulous towards him, as they often were with retired Nazis. A lot of these myths come from Speer telling everyone who would listen that he alone was responsible for turning the armaments program circa 1943. He would have everyone believe that the German state didn't know to take the war seriously until he showed up to tell them. The reality is that he arrived just in time for a bunch of earlier industrial investments to start paying off for Germany, the European food crisis of 41-42 was passing, and the guest/slave worker program was finally working effectively (in turn largely due to the food crisis passing).
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Mar 22, 2021 20:15
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Popete posted:Does any of that change if Germany captures Moscow? Like would Russian leadership collapse and industrial capacity have dwindled until they surrender? Well this has been argued to absolute death, because nobody really knows. Could somebody in the Soviet leadership have taken a shot at Stalin if things had gotten bad enough? Maybe? The Soviet Union was not Napoleonic Russia. We'll never know. What I can tell you is that "if Germany captures Moscow" already presupposes a lot. Like the Germans got close geographically but not that close in a military sense. The Soviet forces in and around Moscow were formidable, and in hindsight were not in serious danger of being dislodged by a German army that had been shockingly degraded by then. But if we sprinkle some fairy dust for fun and assume that the Germans get Moscow, the Soviets would indeed be in huge trouble. It was absolutely essential to the war effort as the linchpin of Soviet industrial infrastructure. Everyone knows the Soviets evacuated factories and equipment to the east, but there are extremely important things that can't just be picked up and moved: railroad track and roads. Those largely had to stay put, and Moscow was the indispensable hub of the Soviet transport network. For bulk goods to go from A to B in the Soviet Union in 1941, chances were good they would have to pass within 100 miles of Moscow. The USSR in 1941 was still waaaay behind western Europe in this sort of capital, and this was the only region in the Soviet Union where the infrastructure quality and density looked like, say, France. Don't forget a rail system isn't just locomotives and track, you also need endless support facilities to service, load and unload your engines and rolling stock, and then there's all the roads needed to move goods to the railheads. That stuff was all around Moscow. The Moscow Oblast also had very important dams and canals. So losing it would have then been materially catastrophic. The rail system was already teetering in late 1941 - there were suddenly all these factories relocated to areas that didn't remotely have the track, roads, or rail facilities to support such dense industry. Over time the Soviets adapted to their rail situation by emphasizing vertical integration in their manufacturing, i.e. putting a steel mill right next to an engine plant right next to a tank assembly plant all within the same complex. This smartly minimized rail freight requirements at the cost of some economy of scale. Contrast with the US, which tended to concentrate production in specialized facilities, with ample freight capacity to move intermediate products between them. Fray fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Mar 22, 2021 |
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Mar 22, 2021 21:04
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ZombieLenin posted:The quickness of the Battle of France is something nobody expected, and it gave Hitler and many Germans an unrealistic assessment of what Germany and the Wehrmacht was actually capable of. Yeah, I'm not sure they (or people today) appreciated just how close they came to actually getting beat by France. Funnily enough they may have been saved by the allies capturing the first version of the invasion plan. It was pretty much a Schlieffen rehash, and it's exactly what the French expected and had spent the whole interwar period preparing for. If the Germans had executed that plan, they probably run smack into the face of the French army in Belgium, get attrited to death, and that's the war. But knowing that plan had been compromised, they were basically forced to go "Fiiiine, we'll do that silly thing Manstein was harping on about." Even following the plan they did, they may well have gotten screwed if the French airforce had been just a little more on the ball and nailed those oh-so-vulnerable columns moving through the Ardennes.
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Mar 22, 2021 22:42
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Again, we're talking about the Germans following the initial plan that very clearly doesn't lead to encirclement cause they're going to end up in a frontal pitched battle along a narrow, dense front. At that point it's an infantry and artillery show, which the French were very much capable of winning. Panzers aren't going to get to do their thing cause there's not going to be any exploitation to do, cause the Germans aren't going to crack that front. Remember, panzers exploit, they don't do the hard work, and they suffered pretty poorly whenever they tried to. Infantry and artillery are still meant to do the bulk of engaging of the enemy's forces, and panzers are supposed to stay away from anything that can shoot back coherently. The root of their success in France comes really comes down to a successful strategic deception, making the French think that they were still executing the original plan through central Belgium. Deciding to pass their main army through extremely narrow corridors of the Ardennes, without getting bombed, without the logistics or traffic ruining it, and hoping the French don't have anything significant to oppose them at the Meuse, was all an enormous gamble. Which is why the general staff originally told Manstein he's nuts and only resorted to his plan when forced by freak circumstance. And as Huskies says, Barbarossa is a whole other thing where the Soviets are utterly unprepared to even have a war at all. They're often getting overrun before assets can even reach their staging points, or if they do they have no supplies to conduct operations. More of their stuff was getting abandoned for lack of fuel or breakdowns than getting destroyed by the Germans. Even the "creme" Soviet mechanized corps in Ukraine were typically under half strength before even making contact. Their officer corp was hopelessly overloaded cause they've had no time to learn to control units that are way bigger than they're used to, and Moscow is repeatedly ordering them to launch big counteroffensives with literally a day of notice so that no preparation or planning whatsoever can be done. Ed: And the Gulf War is actually a pretty apt comparison in that it made excellent use of strategic deception to bypass and unhinge the enemy core strength. Fray fucked around with this message at 02:13 on Mar 23, 2021 |
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Mar 23, 2021 02:02
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Drunk in Space posted:Aurora 1.13 is out: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=12521.0 Been waiting on this a long time before doing an LP.
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Apr 25, 2021 14:01
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Squiggle posted:Didn't the Red Thunder expansion come out just yesterday, too? Oh drat, I didn't even hear that was coming. RT is my favorite one, but the narrowness of its scope was always a bummer.
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Apr 30, 2021 18:06
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Fray posted:Been waiting on this a long time before doing an LP. This is now up! Come argue about spaceships! https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3970652
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Jun 14, 2021 21:59
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Kangra posted:It would unfortunately fall apart far too quickly (either due to cheating or rage quitting), but I wish there were a Combat Mission LP where as you go up the chain of command, you add a minute to how often the player can interact with the thread, and nobody at the low level is allowed to own the game. Someday I’ll run one that’s real time on twitch and it’s just chatgoons howling at their inputters for an hour.
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Jun 28, 2021 03:25
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DrankSinatra posted:I have two questions as someone fairly new to wargames: Barbarossa to Berlin was always my favorite of the old titles. It fixes some flaws of BO and contains a huge range of content. And eastern front is just more interesting to me than the others.
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Jul 12, 2021 23:52
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The more calibers you have, the more confusion for the enemy! Jackie Fisher was a fool!
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May 18, 2023 22:24
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I’ve had a half-finished Barbarossa to Berlin scenario for like three years now that I periodically poke at. The RL stuff that killed my Aurora game still hasn’t fully gone away, but CM games with team inputters mostly run themselves if I can just push through all the scenario creation and testing. Plus, Battlefront is significantly less awful these days.
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Aug 13, 2023 23:38
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glynnenstein posted:There was definitely a Black Sea let's play where I got pissed when whoever was doing input ran our tanks into an open field instead of behind a treeline and laughed with the observers about how it was gonna blow up. Like, bro I can get my own poo poo blown up pretty easily without any help, thank you. Yeah, experience shows the team inputters are a must-have. In particular, I've noticed that we need it for attacking to be viable. It's notable that in matches where the GM handles everything, attacking teams almost invariably get taken to the cleaners, yet they did very well in mine. I suspect that without that finer, more flexible control, it's just too hard for teams to execute attacks coherently, so we need it if we want competitive matches. What's funny is that, in the balance of my recent scenarios, I had deliberately tried to compensate towards the attackers based on their dismal past experience, but upon reflection I suspect it's not necessary since inputters themselves are such a game-changer.
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Aug 14, 2023 18:14
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Alchenar posted:I'm philosophically against attack/defend missions because attacking is hard, defending is boring, and the GM has an absolute devil of a time trying to work out how to balance the scenario. Usually I try to mimic an actual historical engagement that jumped out at me in some book, and I build the actual terrain from satellite data. I I don't exactly follow the historical event; I do tweak things for balance or to just add an interesting wrinkle. And yeah, I can confirm that match balance in this sort of scenario is really hard, but my preference is to risk some slop in the name of rendering something unique. Actually, my favorite match ever was Abongination's which was extremely asymmetrical. Something I've belatedly realized he got right is that explaining a lot to the teams up-front makes everything better, and goes a long way to smooth over balance roughness. Since this discussion is making me itch to finally complete my current draft, I'll do just that now. I want to do a representation of the first day of Uranus, covering both the initial breakthrough of the Romanian frontline, and then the action of the German/Romanian mobile reserve to oppose it. The aim is to create a sort of hybrid of attack/defend and meeting engagement, and generate more back-and-forth than we normally see. To enable that, I'm thinking about some experimental reinforcement rules that are more dynamic than how we've done things previously.
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Aug 15, 2023 16:14
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Jobbo_Fett posted:One way to do things, especially for a goon-v-goon matchup, is to have it be based on % survival of force composition. I haven't nailed down the scoring yet, but I've considered something along these lines as the CM engine does actually allow unit-specific casualty scoring. In the end it probably will be a sort of "onslaught" scenario like Abongination's, where the attacker by all rights ought to eventually hold the map, but the question is how well the defender does compared to history. I've picked the specific piece of front that I did because it's where the Romanians seem to have held their ground the best.
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Aug 15, 2023 17:19
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I think playing in the old engine could help with leveling the field between armor and infantry; armor in general seems to be less bullshit in it. Buttoned tanks seem way more blind, and I also see spalling, track mobility, and morale kills more often in testing. Cannons also just seem less accurate. And there's the scenario design, like Ace said. Snow, rain, impassible tiles, streams, etc to make vehicles stick to specific paths or even roads, which limits their ability to command huge fields of fire. I'm also thinking of being way more liberal with AT mines and roadblocks in the attack/defend scenarios, like having actual belts of them. It was super common historically, the whole point was to constrain armor or force the infantry to go first and clear paths with charges. Ed: Or, speaking of things that were extremely common, antitank ditches. They could be built right into the map. Fray fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Aug 16, 2023 |
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Aug 16, 2023 16:40
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Jobbo_Fett posted:I say play with Theatre of War and not Combat Mission Does it support PBEM? I vaguely remember people talked about it years ago and it sounded like no.
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Aug 16, 2023 20:11
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