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AKM

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Everything posted by AKM

  1. Having read through the entire thread at once and having had some pick-up game experience under my belt now, seems to me that Gibson about hit the nail on the head early on with the distinction between "Simming" and "Gaming," and with regards to training tool versus "Beer and Skittles" mission design. I have about twelve years of experience organizing multiplayer games for other sims and some games. You have to delineate between the two approaches. I enjoy learning, it's why I've always been in the simulator niche. For me, an interesting lesson and something designed to one hand while drinking a beer with the other brand-of-entertainment are the same; this is not the norm. I was able to draw in a pretty good cadre of players who like a realistic challenge (all of them military, ex-military or deeply involved in that way of thought) and we've been going strong since then. But when you gain (in the case of SB Pro PE, functional) mastery of a topic, another lesson becomes boring. Sure, you might learn some little new trick or something like that, but the odds are pretty low. Entertainment promises some sort of emotional feel-good return by whatever method. Usually this is some base exercise of dominance and wreaking virtual havoc. It's a hell of a lot of fun, I play a lot of games too. The entire discussion of game balance and so on revolve around that dichotomy. All the pick up games I've played have been, basically, exercises in gunnery. There's always been a selection of vehicles, generally either Leo 2A5A2DK and M1A2 SEP, and conditions for gunnery have always been perfect. It's been of the 1991 "Hulk Smash" variety. One mission was much more involved, and that was much more entertaining - for me. One vote, while the bulk voted for variations on a theme of DESERT STORM. It's perfectly legitimate, comes down to how you prefer to use your time. A more rigid distinction between gaming and simming could be made; rather than trying to bring in as many bods as possible, smaller realistic scenarios could be made to reduce span of control issues and entertain a hard core of simmers, while there seems to be no shortage at all of the more game-y scenarios. There's also the opportunity to have a REDFOR commander play chess against a mostly human BLUFOR, and I believe that's been used to great effect in some campaigns - Nordic Battlegroup for instance. Such a structure might provide the best combination of challenge and "break some shit" gaming; just put the guys with a beer in one hand into the main effort and let them blast their way forward.
  2. The Finns also retain one of the largest artillery parks outside of Russia in Europe. Great that they're getting more tanks and retain the conscript military. I like the general "one finger salute" attitude towards General Makarov's commentary earlier this year, about "Finnish defence exercises are unnecessary! Fraternal love for all Russo-Baltic people!"
  3. Good data, thanks! I look forward to playing any scenarios you might create from the inspiration these sources may provide.
  4. Standing about in a Chapters the other day when I saw a M2A2 on a cover. Gave Carnivore a quick skim and I'm not sure what to make of it. Seems to be sanctioned by the US Army. The tone of how it's written is distinctly different from all the other memoirs I've read. I wouldn't pay full price for it, but it's probably worth giving a read prior to some Bradley'ing in SB Pro PE.
  5. Very good AAR, a good read brought down to my grade level with the inclusion of a metric f*ckton of screenshots and most importantly, maps. :luxhello: I particularly like the idea of "Pause/Discuss/Resume" as a technique. Did you encounter any limitations to it other than the unavoidable breaks in the action? I imagine as a learning technique that is preferred in any case; for evaluation one would just run things real time to allow a student to become overwhelmed by the situation if that was on the cards I imagine.
  6. Just wanted to bounce this back to top, replayed it this morning and it's as good as ever. Definitely lost my touch while I was abroad, because I waltzed the Combat Reconnaissance Patrol Machine right into the gaping jaws of H-series Death. Bit of a "clench" moment from the commander's seat, seeing the distant treeline light up with muzzle flashes. Compliments to eSim games for the incoming rounds sounds, very effective. "Driving as the water flows" followed with the T-72 platoon, effectively approaching Objective NORTH, but doing a bit of a crap job at area recce thereby. Just short of the village we stumbled into the rear left quarter of an M60 pair, who were promptly dispatched by yours truly from the lead tank. It's been so long that I forgot that the T-72's automatic loader isn't serial automatic, in that if you have one round type selected it will automatically reload the gun with that ammunition until ready stocks are expended. So as the second tank began to react to his friend burning, I had an opportunity to exercise some Russian non-normative vocabulary while hosing the other Patton down with the coax; which at least broke his tracks and kept him from swinging his hull around to face me. My wingman put a round through his turret from approx 600m and once I remembered to push the [non normative adjectives] button he caught fire from my round. Shortly before entering the village that takes up the bulk of the objective area I lost a T-72 to undetermined means, and whatever it was that shot it disappeared because my remaining vehicles were able to occupy the objective and come out with an 87% Major Victory. This quite surprised me. The M60s took quite some time to respond to being bumped by my T-72s, I don't know if this is a one-off thing or if v3.002 might not get along the best with older scenarios or what. I might have just gotten really lucky.
  7. AKM

    Leopard 2A4 Skin

    Fantastic work Snorri, looking forward to whatever else you might decide to retexture.
  8. Excellent work as always dpabrams, thanks a lot.
  9. There's Flashpoint: Germany and Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm, both available via Matrix Games and the latter released quite recently. They're both designed to fit exactly the bill you've laid out. FPC:RS is the successor to FP:G, designed to be dramatically more expandable and with much easier map construction; plans for a lot of Central Europe to be mapped and most probable combatants of the circa 1985 era to be TO&E'd in.
  10. I will note it is necessary to have them do your bidding before giving them beer. Campus engineers are distinctly squishier than military engineers, particularly in terms of ability to withstand alcohol's insidious effects.
  11. I've always thought the vehicle textures were well done, it's one of the things that first caught my eye several years ago. The improved graphics of 3.0 will of course be welcome, especially to the environment. The replacement of infantry sprites with 3D models was quite the improvement as-was. I don't know what the average computer setup is like in in the SB Pro PE community, but I can certainly take some more visual glory and splendor in without having to sacrifice scenario scale and I imagine most are in the same boat. SB Pro PE is pretty efficiently coded for its core tasks, it seems... but that statement probably just elicited crazed laughter from one of the software ninjas of eSim.
  12. I was going to put this in the Content Wish List given the current VDV topic, but... .
  13. Part 5 up now. Good photos throughout, showing off some texture detail.
  14. I don't know what the inside of a CVC looks like, but a familiarity with consumer electronics suggests that you should be able to find an appropriately sized headset with whatever input/output you want (3mm, USB, so on) and simply replace components as needed. Certainly this was my approach with surplus Soviet tank helmets, rather than harassing the electrical engineers on campus/bribing them with beer until they do my bidding.
  15. It might be possible, BigBadVuk, to handle that through the joystick's drivers depending on model and the like, and it may be possible to set it so that those conditions are only true for SB Pro PE rather than all games. I agree it would be good to see that functionality in SB Pro PE, that may serve as a stop-gap solution though. That's a really impressive number of new platforms and all. Will there be manuals and familiarization missions for the bulk of them?
  16. Probably only makes sense in the context of their neighbours they're worried about. A battalion of good SPGs and tanks makes a difference if the fight is only going to be about brigade scale. Recently read a book (Simpkin: Race to the Swift) which suggested that it didn't matter how big the Soviet Army was because they could only fit approximately 24 tank or motor rifle divisions into the bits of Europe they controlled or hoped to soon control, as I recall. He came to this conclusion as a function of how much space TDs or MRDs take up on rails or on road: you could have more parked somewheres ready to go, but they can't go until the grid frees up. So in the context of a country half the size of Wales, probably all they really need. If they burn through that number of vehicles there probably won't be time to bring up reinforcements.
  17. Everybody knows that SSnake lives on 32 Bullshitstrasse in Nowheresdorf. This theme song has become a very popular marching tune in the Russian Armed Forces. I'm not sure how this happened, because they also have a no tolerance policy towards drug use.
  18. Shit, sorry lads, I didn't mean to open this can of worms. Both articles I listed the title of are available online for free, in full. Several journals carry them and they've been copied elsewheres; the Why Arabs Lose Wars article is very popular in particular and quite old, I think it even predates OIF.
  19. Marko, read De Atkine's Western Influence on Arab Militaries and Why Arabs Lose Wars. While I can't speak to the veracity of his claims regarding culture, it is clear from open source information that all the Arab nations operating advanced kit like this seem to have it for parades only, and their logistics situation could easily become a nightmare under any real pressure. A lot of platforms from a lot of different places. At least contracts like this keep KMW afloat so there is the potential for these vehicles to enter service with NATO nations at some point in the future. Perhaps the very distant future.
  20. Weld on a couple handholds and it's golden, Eisenschwein. Your ability to insert the Leo 1 (cast turret, natürlich) into anything is an inspiration to me. :drink: Marko, I think you'll find that the Marder has one grevious flaw... not a Leopard 1 with Cast Turret. It would be very good to see a Marder, though, round out the combined arms team for the BW a bit.
  21. AKM

    "Back to Basics"

    Oh right, the thing where the NorKors are being dicks again. I'd forgotten - of course there will be more in the defence news now about the return to basics thing. And now to think of it, this cropped up again when Canada announced its withdrawal from AFGH. Yes, context, good.
  22. QRH at Hohne on Challenger 2s - good to see the tanks out again. Is this indicative of a "back to basics" push for the British as well as the Americans and the Canadians, who have returned to look at their conventional war doctrines and TTPs? Seems to me that if this is motivated by budget, they've forgotten how expensive the conventional wars of the past have been. But since we haven't recently had one aside from OIF, perhaps it is perceived that peacetime soldiering and training on a conventional war routine is less expensive than the last ten years.
  23. This looks promising. I liked how in their Achtung Panzer series they focused on smaller, lesser-known engagements and it's good to see they're covering the fighting in SA during this time. It's a pretty solid series of realtime tactical with a turn-based element (a little like a scaled-down tactical Total War series game) as well. I dunno if they retained that last feature in the rebranded game or not.
  24. Syrian tanker regarding his ride. Apologies if this has been posted here before, I don't remember where I first saw it.
  25. Slated to get hammered by snow beginning in four hours, and given what's happened the last few times that's gone down here I will probably not have internet. Be there if I can be, looking forward to it.
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