7. How can I attach one HQ to another HQ?
This is not in the OC manual.
1. Open the "HQ side window"
2. Click on the hex containing the regimental HQ
3. Repeatedly click on the arrow left to the HQ icon
in the "HQ side window" until the corps HQ icon
is displayed
4. The "attach" button will be activated and you just
press that
8. What’s that young woman on the calender saying when I
click on her picture?
She’s says "Don’t, Please".
Apparently, there are several different sources of information on this
particular femme fatale.
This particular femme fatale graced the nose of a captured B-17
called the "Shady Lady". It was used by the Luftwaffe to train its
pilots
for attacking the Fortresses (K. Zabalaou)
The picture is from an airbrush portrait by Alberto Vargas (1896 –
1982),
"Something for the Boys," that appeared in the June, 1943 issue of
ESQUIRE
magazine. Mr. Vargas work spanned the 1920′s through the 1950′s: he
was,
as THE NEW YORKER’s "Talk of the Town" column (January 11, 1941) said,
"an
artist who could make a girl look nude if she were rolled up in a
rug."(P. Popejoy)
According "Strangers in a strange
land" by Hans-Heir Stapfer (Squadron signals publications, Inc.
Number 6047) She’s name was Shady Lady, a noseart of a B-
17G (42-97385) of the 398th Bomb Group based at
Nuthampstead, England. Crash landed at Rechicourt Le Chateau,
France on 8th September 1944. American fighters destroyed
the bomber before it could be recovered by the Germans (J.
Seppane).
9. In OC, where are my supply dumps?
The depots ARE on the map. Your enemy’s are not see by you,
but yours look like little towns. There are several on the map
edges. The Axis have one each around Bir Hakim, Gambut and
Bardia. The Allies have 2 that move around the middle of the
map. (They done move DURING the game.) You can hide the
troops and scan the map for them. We intentionally didn’t list
them and then move them around, so that the bad guys don’t
zero in on them. (Atomic)
10. What happened to minefields?
The effect of minefields is factored into the overall effect of
fortifications
11. Hey, the brits don’t have any engineers, what gives?
Needless to say, a controversial topic.
Eric Young, the games designer/researcher feels that at
this point in the war, the British did not use their engineers as
homogenous entities, as did the Germans. Instead, they spread
them out among all of their units and the AT values of the
British units reflect that. In response to the question about
then allowing the British HQs and such to build fortifications, he
says (as best as I can remember) that they didn’t during this
battle. (Atomic)
Why shouldn’t the British be able to build fortifications?
Though it was not in their doctrine to have combat engineers,
they did have engineering assets assigned to Division and at
Corps level. They should probably be allowed to convert some
of the wadis to trail hexsides also since they did provide 8th
army with bridging equipment. Gosh, us wargamers are picky!
(B. Wood)
12. PBEM How to
The Not Nearly Canonical Treatise
on How to Send Binary Files
Through the Internet
by Carl D. Fago (c…@psu.edu) (Comments and corrections welcome)
Mac details provided by P. Gabrillo (GABRIL…@STU.ADMIN.USFCA.EDU)
During the playtesting of Atomic’s Stalingrad wargame I found that
many people on the Internet didn’t know how to send binary files to
someone else on the internet. This is necessary if you have
internet access and want to play the game using the excellent PBEM
facility included in the game. In addition, the ability to play
computer wargames via PBEM is expanding as the capabilities of the
programmed artificial intelligence for these games continues to be
on the order of a bright lemming. (Apologies to the lemmings.)
First, a little history. The internet was developed as a non-
centralized communications and command and control system that
would survive a nuclear attack. Thus, there is no one place that
is the internet. It is a collection of linked mainframe,
workstations and personal computers at government institutions,
universities, businesses, and personal homes.
As one can see, this system would be inherently chaotic and it is.
There are innumerable configurations of different hardware
platforms and capabilities.
Now for people to be able to communicate with one another some
unified system needed to be developed to exchange written
information and ideas. Computers use 8 bit bytes as their main of
information. Each byte has 256 possible bit combinations. To
represent our alphabet, not all 256 possible combinations were
needed. Plus, communications back then were not nearly as reliable
so the system designers reserved one bit to use for error checking
leaving 128 bit combinations (7 bits out of 
to represent text.
Thus, the most basic email system only looks at or transmits the
first 7 bits in any byte that gets transmitted to it. The 8th bit
it would use for its own purposes of error checking.
Now, a binary file as would be generated by a computer game
system to be able to exchange information during PBEM play relies
on all 8 bits of each byte. If you were to send the binary file to your
opponent using email, each 8th bit would be corrupted as it would
be used by the email systems. Thus, your opponent would receive
the file but it would be so much garbage and you both would be
frustrated that he couldn’t use the file. But people still wanted to
send binary files via email as that is often the only way some people
have to exchange files. So some bright person came up with the idea
of encoding the binary file so that it could be represented by a file
of text that an email system would transmit without corrupting. In
short, this system takes each 7 bits of the binary file and writes the
corresponding alphabetic representation to another file. This second
file would appear as text and since it is pure text, it can be sent via
an email system without being inherently corrupted on the other
end. Also, as you can tell, the second file would be generally 8/7 the
size of the original file.
Now, as the recipient of such a text file, one would only need to
reverse the algorithm to reconstruct the original binary file.
There are actually a couple of different algorithms that can do
this process. Sample algorithms are uuencoding (on PC, Mac and
Unix) and BinHex (Mac and PC at least). Some differences in
encoding schemes would be which alphabetic characters it would use.
Some computers 20 years ago wouldn’t send lower case characters so
some encoding schemes would use less than the 128 7 bit
combinations. It really doesn’t matter what encoding scheme is
used so long as you and your opponent use the same encoding
schemes.
So, now, to send a binary file to your opponent, you would have a
program that encodes the binary file. You would run the program on
your binary file. The output would be a text file that you would
send to your opponent via your favorite email program. One way to
do this is to import the text file into the text editor that your
email program uses to let you write your messages.
Having received your mail, your opponent would save the message in
a file, decode the file with the decoding program and then use the
resulting binary file. Real simple!
On unix systems there are often utilities included that are named
uuencode and uudecode.
For PC compatibles, there are a number of possible utilities. My
favorite is uuencode.exe and uudecode.exe developed by Richard
Marks. It is available from many different ftp sites such as
oak.oakland.edu or ftp.wustl.edu. Look for a file named
UUEXE???.ZIP where ??? would be the version number.
For macintosh systems there are similar utilities that are
available. UULite, UUundo and UUTool are some example encoding
programs for the Mac. UULite is the most common because it is
robust and bigger than the others in terms of handling files. FTP
sites where these utilities can be found include sumex-
aim.stanford.edu, nic.funet.fi, src.doc.ic.ac.uk or ftp.wustl.edu.
Ok, there is one other useful utility that can be used in this
process…a compression utility. It is always easier, and
sometimes cheaper, to send a smaller file than a larger one. The
PBEM files generated by the game can generally be made smaller.
The compression programs examine the binary file for repeating
sequences of bits. They then replace the long repeating sequences
with a smaller tag keeping track of what long sequences are
represented by the smaller tags. When a compressed file is
uncompressed, the smaller tags are then substituted by the longer
sequences to reconstruct the file. The more repeating sequences,
the more the original binary file can be compressed.
There are utilities available that implement the compression
algorithms making the PBEM files significantly smaller. Popular
algorithms are pkzip, zoo, sit and compress.
A popular unix compression scheme is ‘compress’. Files compressed
with ‘compress’ have a .Z file extension. To reverse the process,
the unix utility ‘uncompress’ would be used. Utilities are
available for the Mac and PC than can compress and uncompress
these .Z files. PKZIP and ZOO are popular on the PC while SIT is
popular on the Mac. SIT is actually not a very good if you send one
between mac and pc. Try ZipIt, Zippop, Macgzip, Macunzip, and
Maczip. they are all compatible with pkzip/unzip files on Dos.
Again, there are utilities available for each platform to deal with
the compression schemes used on the other platforms. To get one of
these programs, check the ftp sites I listed previously.
An additional advantage of the compression routines is that many of
them include error checking so that if the compressed file gets
corrupted along the way, the routine will tell you that something
went wrong. Your opponent can then ask you to resend your file
without possibly screwing up the PBEM game by running
a corrupt PBEM game file.
Note that I have not mentioned exactly how to use the particular
encode/decode/compression routines. There are too many out there
to go over each individually. As you obtain the routines, they
will each have their own instructions and possibly more detailed
explanations of how they work.
Also note that cross-platform games are now possible because there
are common compression and encoding/decoding routines. These
routines also allow cross-system (CI$ to GEnie to Internet) play
since they rely only on email capability. The Mac user on CI$ can
play a game with a PC clone user on GEnie.
To conclude how to exchange PBEM game files via email, here is a
short synopsis
1) Generate your binary PBEM game file that you want to send.
2) Reduce the size of the file using your favorite compression
routine.
3) Convert the compressed binary file to a text file using
uuencode.
4) Email the resulting text file to your opponent.
5) Your opponent saves the email in a file.
6) Your opponent decodes the text file with uudecode into your
compressed binary file.
7) Your opponent decompresses the binary file with the compliment
of your favorite compression routine.
Your opponent now has your original PBEM game file.
And that’s it. I hope that this has helped and I invite corrections
from those who know more than I do. t
13. The OOB for Operation Crusader is located at
http://atomic.com/cru/OC_FAQ.html#axis
and
http://atomic.com/cru/OC_FAQ.html#allies
14. The Terrain Effect Chart is located at
http://atomic.com/cru/OC_FAQ.html#14
15. OC tactics/strategy
The best strategy/tactics ideas are found in the manual, but here
are some general and scenario specific comments.A place to discuss
our favorite use of some units, methods of carrying out our
missions, and general strategy. As for strategy articles, be
careful, your PBEM opponent may be watching.
1.The Italian Army: Strengths
1.A. What are Italian light tanks good for?</h4>
Though certainly not armour in the sense we would like to use
armour, Italian light tanks are useful.
1) Local reconnaisance, you don’t feel too bad when one gets
crushed.
2) They are overrun proof, so stack ‘em with artillery or HQs,
just in case the enemy gets some marauding armour behind
your lines. An idea might be to split them up and assign one to
each Axis HQ for security.
3) Dump security, a good place for those unmotivated, yet mobile
blackshirts too.
4) Mobile AT units, better than AT companies for having a bit of
an armour value (see 2).
5) Stack them behind a defense line. The brits might be a bit
taken by them; they could be M13/40s. While in the back,
dig in fall back positions.
1.B Italian Foot soldiers: These boots were made for climbing.
Weak, lacking equipment, and easily destroyed by armour, the best
use for them are:
1) They are the only units that can cross escarpments or wadis
at non-track or non-road hexes. They could help you get that
bridgehead to capture ‘the Angle’ (That hex near the south
edge of the N-S escarpment with a track running through it);
not to mention the difficult terrain around Tobruk.
2) Other than that, send some to guard dumps and use ‘em to build
and maintain defense lines (most of them will be doing this
around Tobruk).
1.C. Italian Mg Battalions:
Weak on the attack, they do have high mobility, good defensive
values and excellent AT values.
1) Reconassiance, deep in the enemy rear they can survive at least
one attack from enemy Reccs, one of the more common things you
will run into once the enemy finds out he better send something to
guard his supply lines. They can then run so fast, you can get lost in
the sands.
2) Important component of a mobile defense, especially if the front
line consists mostly of foot soldiers. these guys can do pretty good
damage to Stuarts, and paired with Flak, can stop Cruisers. (B. Wood)
2. General
2.A. Bunker Busting, killing tanks, supply
HQs can be bombarded greater than two hexes and be hurt if
the odds exceed 1.0
Bunker Busting; another superb tactic I experienced as the Allies
in Tobruk and use now myself is using probes to inflict fatigue
points on units in bunbker hexes or any tough nut for that manner.
This takes time, but it will were a defender out if you keep it
up. My favored way to use it is with NZealanders at night, esp AT
companies and the 5NZ as probers(even 0.0 odds will do harm and if
units are not too far apart in size, damage is @1%) then hit them
with at least one assault with a stack or two of strong
NZealanders at 2am followed up with assaults all day. Great for
reducing Bardia or prying Germans out of Escarpment passes.
Raids on Depots: Take them at 6am for maximum capture of supply,
2am for stoppages. The latter does not work too well with road
depots, their never seems to be anything there at 2am and nothing
seems to arrive if you leave and come back.
Killing tanks; absolute best way is artillery. Set up artillery
killing zones and lure your opponents armour too close and slam
them. Armour is also vulnerable to air of course, but I find
artiller too be far more reliable. I prefer air for stoping strong
enemy stacks or bombarding hexes I know the enemy is in that is a
natural strong point, like for the axis, the escarpment passes in
the north.
In Crusader, some of the depots are not even mentioned, most
importantly a huge one (a conduit actually, for it seems all axis
westedge supply sources comes through it) at or near Bir Hackiem.
Take that on a 6am turn and ruin the axis supply for a few turns.
(B. Wood)
2.B Zones of Control (ZOC)
The rule book explains the mechanics of ZOCs quite well, but their
are some subtleties we all should know. ZOCs are reduced when you
attack a unit, the higher the odds the better it seems. ZOCS are
reduced from fatigue and disruption. ZOCs are reduced in bad
weather. Units having superb quality ratings relevant to bad ones
they are in contact with have a good chance of infiltrating the
weak guys. Combine these undestandings with say, my bunker busting
notes, and you can bypass bunkers to cut them off. Also good to
remember if got to extract some folks or to cut up an enemy line.
Another thing, All out Assaults can provide a means of bypassing
enemy ZOCS. If someone is defending a hex near a bunker as
otherwise it would be cut off, any odds (>3.0) All out assault may
well make his predicament worse. (sometimes it is best not to
defend a hex). If you have a tough nut to crack, maybe a night
attack in a storm or no moon will be the solution you need. (B.
Wood)
2.C. Headquarters (HQs)
I would have to say one of the most wasted combat units in the
game are HQs. HQs? you say. Yes. Though having no attack strength
they are proven (for me) good assets in a battlefield role.
Usually they have very good AT strengths and good defense
strengths. These only get better as the game goes on with the true
combat units beating each other up. Avoid putting HQs in the front
line, but plan to have that happen. Stack two artillery units
together (also possesing good defense and above average AT
strengths) and a HQ together, and while you artillery sets up or
fires away, use the HQ to dig in. Use your HQs in coordination to
build a base line/defense where you are going to commit offensive
operations. This base provides a variety of functions.
1) Safer places for HQs and artillery (combined um def strength,
@12, AT, @12)
2) Excellent anvil for enemy penetrators to run into and then
trap with as your counter attack forces hammer the enemy
penetration point and forcing the enemy onto the anvil.
3) A superb rally point in the event of withdrawing beat up or
worn out units for recovery.
4) Flank protection. For the really guttsy, HQs can make good
dummies as long as you stay on your side of the Battlefield.
Some may complain about HQ step losses giving ‘away’ VPS,
but I say worry about VP in the last third of the game and
the crippling of the enemy army in the first two thirds.
Ruining of an enemy army while saving something of yours
will guarantee VP sites in the end. (B. Wood)
2.D. On the use of Dummies
How to trick your opponent into believing that he is facing
a panzer regiment when in fact all you have is a few propellers
mounted on trucks ? Obviously you want to make your opponent
aware of the _presence_ of your units (by way of the dust clouds
they will be creating) without giving him the opportunity to
_identify_ what kind of units they are.
Therefore in "WatW: Operation Crusader" you should be aiming at
keeping your dummy units exactly TWO HEXES away from the next
enemy occupied hex. This way your opponent will detect their
presence but he has no way of identifying the unit type.
If by contrast you move a dummy unit adjacent to an enemy
occupied hex it will become clear to your opponent that he is
facing a dummy (or at least a very weak unit – the unit stats
are only up to 50% inaccurate) and the chances are high that
your dummy unit will not survive the next turn.
Because of their vulnerability dummy units are of limited value
for reconnaisance purposes. If you use your dummies to scout
out an area which is free of enemy units you are fine but as
soon as they run into something their days are counted. In the
worst case they will get ambushed, suffer 100% casualties and
dissappear. As a consequence you will soon lose all the info
on the enemy position you wanted to gather.
Dummies on the defensive:
If you have established a line of defense it is a good idea to
place dummy units in second line, one hex behind the defenders.
There are two advantages to this strategy:
1. An enemy unit moving adjacent to the line of defense will
be two hexes away from the dummy, hence your opponent will
see but not identify it (see above). He might be tricked
into believing that your line of defense is a lot stronger
than it actually is.
2. The dummy may dig in, thereby providing the defending unit with
an improved position to fall back on.
Dummies on the offensive:
Never start a fake attack with dummy units alone. It is much
better to advance with a number of low strength units (anti-
tank units or infantery/tank units that have already suffered
substantial losses) first and let the dummies follow behind.
When the first echelon has made contact with the enemy position
move the dummies one hex behind (i.e. two hexes from the enemy
occupied hex). Again your opponent will see the dummies but he
will not know what they are. The longer you can "protect" your
dummies from direct contact with an enemy unit the longer it
will take your opponent to realize that he is dealing with a
fake attack.
The timing of a fake attack is also important. If it is started
on the last night turn there is a good chance that your opponent
will be allocating more supply to the defenders on the following
morning turn – possibly at the expense of the area that you plan
to attack for real.(A. Brehm)
3. Questions
1. I don’t understand this. Is there a benefit to fortifying a hex
that is already dug in? Can’t you fortify a hex to its full
capacity of 9 companies? (Surely you can.)
Fortifying a hex provides more benefit than just digging in.
Check in the manual for the exact specs. (e.g. AT strength is
doubled in fortified hexes, as opposed to 1.5 times for being dug-
in.)
Fortifications represent trenches, mines, bunkers… Digging in
is mostly just foxholes/sangars plus the organization of the units
into a defensive stance.
The advantage of digging in over-capacity is because fortifying a
dug-in hex reduces the stacking capacity (of those works) by half
(FRU). The motivation for doing this sort of thing is to maximize
the engineering batallions. It takes an engineer 12 turns to
build a 9 companie fortification. Whereas it takes an engineer
only 4 turns to "convert" a 15 capacity dug-in into an 8 capacity
fortification. You *can* dig-in enough capacity for 15 companies
in a single hex, even though that many units cannot actually be in
that hex concurrently. This is done in case the hex gets
fortified. Remember that the capacity of a dug-in hex in reduced
when it gets fortified.