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rexmonday -> Matters arising campaign wise (8/31/2000 6:31:00 AM)
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Here is a report about a couple of weird things I have run into recently during my long campaign. I'm about 30 battles into the UK WWII campaign, and am still stuck in North Africa, I've got to El Alamein and its July '42. Since I got kicked out of Western Europe I have not seen one road, a river, a single tree, or even a blade of grass. I have seen one small stone building. Staring at those desert maps can start to go for the eyes somewhat. Currently I am enjoying the new thrill of using 6lb'ers. A couple of ATG a few battles ago, some Grants, and now the mighty Crusader III. Don't laugh, you players of Russians and US and German forces - this is finally some serious kick-ass fire-power for the British Empire forces... of course I am checking the horizon for the first appearance of the dread heavy PzIV variants. I reckon I have about two months to savour the Grant as a super-tank before it gets very much outclassed. Still, at least there is about a year to go before the Panther rears its ugly head.
Enough preamble:
A few battles ago my AO HQ unit got destroyed when those friendly Germans decided to drop a shedload of 155mm artillery on it from above. Having read the discussion about upgrading the A0 I knew that this did not mean an instant end to the campaign, unlike in other SP versions. What did happen struck me as slightly odd. In the post-battle repair screen the AO came up with 50 points of damage and I just hit fix all to sort out all the casualties. What appears to happen is that the AO just gets resurrected. The unit still had eighty-something experience and its 3 kills. The command ratings seemed much the same as I remembered them as well. Is this what is meant to happen, or is something going awry somewhere? I expected a new A0 unit with average experience and no kills, and a fresh set of command ratings. Is this what is meant to happen or not.
I've also managed to find something else strange about Grants... we know that the secondary gun was playing up because it was in slot three instead of slot two. This time its a 'Z' key glitch. When the Grant is instructed to bombard a hex in LOS with the 'Z' key the first gun fires okay, targeting the selected hex, but the second barrel aims for what appears to be the last selected indirect fire bombardment hex (as called in by the A0 or a forward observer). Mighty strange. I know that something like this happened sometimes with mortars when they were equipped with more than one tube, but had never seen it happen before with a tank.
Finally - the UK get the chance to buy off map 78mm howitzers. This is fine, except for the fact that they only have a range of about 40, and they lose about 25 of that for being situated off map. This gives them an effective 15 hex depth of coverage starting at your side of the map ... and ending pretty damn quickly hundreds of yards behind your deployment boundary. Result - a set of guns which 99 percent of the time you would have no reason to fire, yeah, unless maybe you want them as anti-commando artillery, but I doubt it. Seems to me fairly pointless to categorise them as off-table arty.
Enough.
Thanks to all those involved in the project.
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