Profile of squippy

This is a library, there should be books in it, right?

The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945
Richard Overy

Just finished reading this; really interesting examination of an aspect of the war that, while hardly unknown, is seldom seen as a whole, or from all sides of the conflict in the European theatre. Overy covers the way armed forces and civilians thought about and anticipated war from the air, how they geared up to deal with it, how they carried out bombing and responded to it, and what kind of overall effect it had. Of perhaps particular interest was the bombing of Italy, by both German and the Allies, which seems to attract little attention by comparison to the famous Blitz and the pounding of Germany near the end.

Some time ago I read Olaf Stapledon's sci-fi future history, Last And First Men, which was published in 1930; this features apocalyptic air wars bringing an end to modernity. What I had not realised was that this perception was actually widespread; that civilians and military alike expected that the next war would feature heavy and extremely destructive bombing, which would erase the distinction between soldier and civilian. Thus, everyone went into the war expecting to bomb and be bombed. Nor was this perception ultimately unfounded, although the world was mercifully spared the use of mustard gas and similar, which meant it never quite became as apocalyptic as had been feared. Indeed, everyone severely underestimated the difficulties involved in finding and bombing a target, and overestimated what effects bombing would therefore have, even with the use of incendiaries; both the Germans and the British found it so difficult to tell what the intended target had been that they erroneously concluded the enemy was simply bombing at random. As late as 1942, the British managed to kill only 2 Germans for each bomber they lost, and all parties, except the Italians, managed to maintain and increase industrial military production in the face of aerial bombardment.

This was an insightful book that really fleshes out an aspect of the war that is well known but not deeply understood, and anyone interested in roundning out their picture of the war should find it useful.

Maybe so, but as against that, you're now up against 3-4 opponents making armour, so your allies armour is always outnumbered, and where once your CAS might kill a game-winning proportion of enemy armour, now it's only knocking out a small proportion.

Anyway, I don't really have a dog in this fight. The sheer popularity of CAS suggests it may benefit from some tweaking. These kinds of discussions would be much more useful if we actually had some numbers to look at, wins per commander type stuff. Without them it's all a bit if-then-but.

I don't think that can be true. There's no point writing code that generates very large numbers if you don't have to; those numbers have to be stored, at least temporarily, and that takes memory and processing.

In fact the more I think about it the less I understand what you mean. Generating a random number is quite a lot like rolling a die, except you can specify how many sides it has. I don't know how CoH's code works, but I could probably construct a fair pen-n-paper approximation of the outputs with 2d10 and some tables. Maybe 3d10, because that would generate numbers from 0 to 999, and I can't see much need for finer resolution than that.

In that sense, there can be as many aces, or 999's, as there are rolls, or checks, or tests, or whatever they are called, but it certainly cannot be infinite.

If you have multiple units selected, and right click and a hold and drag in a direction, they will move to that point, spreading out to form a line 3 units wide, facing in the direction you indicated. If there are more than 3 units, the remainder will form into a second line of 3, etc.

It's not limited to esports either; the shape of a rugby/american football ball makes it;s bounce nigh on impossible to predict, and every now and again that results in an errant bounce falling into just the right hands for a try/touchdown to be scored. And that's why neither football nor rugby are popular sports, right?

Obviously it's possible for there to be too much randomness; hence, there are no world coin flipping championships. But some degree of randomness is not inimical to competitive games, and it's certainly appropriate for the subject matter of this one.