36mb WMV Buzzard (working buzzard rather than “promo” buzzard).
There are almost indepdent battles going on in town and north of me, towards the FB south of me and a big air-furball over my head, all of which is eating into my visible player count (and fps), but I was on-duty watching the bunker.
And if I’d thought to swap sides, you’d see more blue tags – the guys actually trying to attack, than red tags.
Hindsight is 20/20.
I give you: Kalmthout. 36Mb – Windows Media Player v9 or higher codecs required.
I could probably have afforded to render it at higher FPS, but I was running a debug build on top of everything else so my FPS wasn’t that great anyway ;)
kfsone's pittance 
12 Comments
very cool, you guys really need to make an effort to create videos like this using the buzzard. It’s the best way for people who don’t play to get the scale of the game. I think it would be the very best way to interest new customers.
Perhaps follow an assault from start to finish, then cut it up and turn it into a proper video.
Scale of the game? Looks like fantasy mech wars as usual. Why don’t you just let tanks hump tables and get it over with?
big-mo
The battle lasted some 2.5 hours, during which 3211 infantry died in the area of Kalmthout, only 168 tanks, armored cars at guns and trucks and 208 aircraft.
Under 15% of the infantry died to armor.
Since I was on-duty watching the bunker my video covers the bunker, which it only makes sense for the attackers to try and cut off from reinforcements.
I have a question for Mr “Fantasy Mechs”: Were you expecting a to-the-letter exacting re-enactment of the actual war or are you just so inexperienced with computer games that “fantasy” and “mechs” sound like the right things to say to try and rustle up an insult?
PS. Was it “fantasy” when Rommel ordered Flak gunners to rip off the guard and depress their anti-aircraft guns against tanks? For a lot of people part of the mythos of WWII is the sense in which it was a war of discovery; so many new technologies and concepts that had no battle-hardened or proven doctine at the start of the war.
Please share all of the log details so we can really evaluate your claim of real infantry action.
Any why don’t you ever capture it on film?
If you look carefully when the buzzard is perched over the bunker and you can see the town in the back, there’s a whole mess of red and blue inf fighting it out in the town.
In a siege situation like that, the defending inf are usually (the smart ones at least) holed up in a comfy spot with a nice field of fire deftly picking off enemy inf running in and around town. So you’re not going to see much motion anyway.
Granted, this game needs to move away from town siege warfare, it’s way too static. If you ask me the Rats have inadvertently created a perfect siege warfare MMPOG. Siege warfare is perfect for a medieval combat game. Replace all the WWII units with archers, swordsman, knights, ballistas, etc. and the Rat game world would make perfect sense. :D
WWII has some of the largest examples of siege war fare. It wasn’t referenced as Fortress Europe without a reason.
D-Day was probably the largest scale example, there are others look at Catania in Sicily, Salerno in Italy, Stalingrad, Leningrad, Budapest, Königsberg, Breslau, I think you can count every Pacific Island assault a siege.
We start in static positions on the map, it devolves instantly into static warfare (i.e. Siege) roving tank battles. If the Allies had to start 2 Divions 5 CP’s back from the front. I think there would be more dynamics to the game at the start.
If you’re going to ride your high-horse, try facing its head instead of its rear. I said from the offset this was not a promotional video. Like the video says, this was the story of the bunker.
The video is for folks who were there, especially those who insist on acting like there has only ever been one kalmthout battle and the battle at kalmthout was won by cheaters. It’s possible someone clipped at Kalmthout at some point in the past, but this last weekend there were buzzards watching the whole time.
As to whether it was a real battle of note, I think this forum post says everything that needs saying:
Read the author’s name again :)
You cherry picked some statistics to prove your point. Please share the entire log for this period so we can see all of the data. Simple really.
We know that there is a murderous little game of tag played by a few at these radio spots. My point is that is not appealing to the masses, hence the lack of infantry playing the game.
Look at the screen shots used in the last few weekly updates. Its odd that no one can capture infantry play that you say exists.
big-mo, let’s say you’re right for a second, how would you fix it?
The Rats have on their hands a tough nut to crack. Balancing WWII infantry against tanks, I would argue, is a near impossible thing to do in any sort of combined arms way.
WWII infantry had no really effective capacity against tanks, it was actually the whole idea behind tanks to flat out run over infantry positions. The majority of tanks were killed by other tanks, then air unit and ATGs. So it’s completely realistic for infantry to gel slaughtered by tanks, which is what happens in game. And you can bet WWII infantry said the same thing about tanks: this is not appealing to the masses. :)
For WWIIOL to get over this issue is not trivial. What they probably need to do is to convert some of the larger towns into no-go zones for tanks, so they become accessible only to infantry. And they wll need to find a way to make maneuver warfare workable, so that tanks will have something else to do.
It’s easy to just sit around and bark at the Rats for these issues. But if you think about it, these things are not so cut and dry.
There are more infantry out there today, than there were day 1.
I’d bet there are 10 times more infantry now than on day one, no maybe even 100 times.
For some reason everyone wants to drive tanks, and fly planes. No one wants to pound the ground.
When buildings blow more rubble needs to go out onto the streets, this will make it harder for the Tanks, just like in real life. Towns were death traps for Armor. Then again the models for buildings would need to change or a way to have models dependent upon a buildings state before they appear.
Nothing is ever really simple.
They don’t have to re-do the towns with rubble and all that…they can’t anyway with their manual methods. So it’s all just talk anyway, but it would be *great* if they can convert 5-6 towns for players to test.
A simple conversion could be to incircle a town with either a tank ditch or a rock wall like you see in the countryside. If they go with a ditch, the roads in and out of town would be made into narrow bridges that vehicles can’t use. If they do a rock wall, they can block the roads in and out of town with some of those big iron X-X-X tank barriers. The wall has the added benefit of inhibiting tank fire into the town. These towns would have infantry only brigades, so there would be no armor in or out of the town.
There is one thing that’s unquestionably true about WWIIOL, and it is the fact that infantry play is the heart and soul of this game. It’s the one part of the game that if it was improved drastically it would result in a much larger player base. Infantry combat simply appeals to a much broader range of people.