Sakai007

I actually had this assigned to me as a tactical problem while in OSUT at Ft. Benning. I was not shy about letting people know about my shooting and wargaming back ground. Well, they put me to the test one day, and wanted me to wargame out an assault on a trench network. I failed in an epic way, choosing to assault the trenches head on after an arty and mortar fire mission with all the 240B's the weapons platoon could muster. Afterward, the Company CO showed me why I had failed (VMI grad even, a good and fair man IMO) You just can't assault a trench from the front, no matter what kind of support you have, in the modern warfare era. If there are even six or seven men in that trench still alive with assault rifles and maybe an RPK you will suffer horrible casualties. Besides, trenches protect men very well from indirect fire, unless your rounds land IN the trench, it's a no go. The way I was taught, and the way I TRY to go about it in game, is to assault the trench from it's flanks. If you are advancing and meet a fortified line, STOP!!! LoL! Use the forces at the front to provide suppressing fire so the other elements of your unit can pull back some out of danger. Get any heavy weapons you have, grenade launchers, machine guns, maybe an IFV if you have one and enemy AT fire is light or ineffective. This allows you to move your forces around to the flanks of the enemy position. It is important to keep the fire on the defenses, as we don't want the enemy to shift his forces as you redeploy. If the next spot you advance on is to strongly defended, attempt to pull back and try another spot. With luck, he will reinforce that spot while you strike elsewhere. If you can find an honest to god 'flank' of a trench line, this is where you strike. Once in the trench system, it's a slow process of clearing the surrounding trenches to open a route to your rear so reinforcements can come up to carry the fight through the rest of the defensive line. It is all summed up in the old saying, Find em, Fix em, Flank em, and Finish em!!! Granted, casualties are going to happen in a battle. But sound tactical reasoning can really minimize the losses. As I play more and more CMx2 campaigns the notion of preserving forces for the next mission becomes even more pressing. ALSO - Almost forgot this, and that's not good at all, being sneaky can help a lot too. If you can stay in some sort of defilade you can close to grenade range in before being spotted, use it!!! Your route to the expected point of contact should be executed like any other movement to contact. Scouts out front, squads in formation within the platoon, platoons in formation within the company. As they say, your forces should flow like water does. The low lands will conceal you from observation, and the closer you are the more effective your weapons will be when you open up on his trench line. This is vital in CM:A as both the Muj and Soviet weapons are pretty much crap at range. The enfield .303 being one notable exception. This isn't like in CMSF where the closer you are to the enemy, the more effective THEIR weapons are. Get close, and kill the crap out of them!!!

Thanks a ton MikeyD!!! There is a solid chance I was the one talking about that. It's a story related to me by my best friend. I was playing some CMSF while he observed. After having a Bradley shrug off a hit, he told me this story. Very interesting design. Wonder if it works as well in practice as it does when the specs are put out. Would be very discouraging to finally get a new RPG, shoot a round at an IFV, and have the thing ricochet and explode harmlessly. LoL, that guy was having a very rough day.

This pic is from a Yahoo! News article about the Syrian government lashing out at Saudi Arabia for openly talking about arming the Free Syrian Army. It shows a highly mobile (chuckle) RPG team going down a street in what I believe to be Homs from the articles text. I have never seen this type of round in my studies thus far. Granted, I am no expert in the RPG, but the rounds I am most familiar with are the standard HEAT, Tandem HEAT, and the skinny little HE round. My guess is that this may be a thermobaric, or Novel round. Here is the pic so the more educated among us can identify it. Thanks in advance, I know you guys eat this stuff up, since I do when someone else posts. Uploaded with ImageShack.us

When I get the urge to play Red vs Red, I normally load up CM:Afghanistan I do like to play the newer Red equipment against peer opponents, as the BMP-3 is just a beast of an IFV. I find that I have far more fun with IFVs and infantry then all out tank battles in CMSF. I like to use the forces at hand the best way I know how to kill the enemy, and reduce my losses to an absolute minimum. In scenarios like that, say you get a single M1 Abrams or Leopard 2 as reinforcement, you can truly see the power a modern MBT can bring to the fight. Amazing 'game' we have the privilege to play isn't it???

Marines was an obvious must by for me! Not just for the Devildogs, but also the new Syrian units, which I use all the time in missions since they can really give NATO/US/UK units a hard time. The next module I picked up was NATO. Besides the THREE allied countries, with their varied TOE and kit (except the Leopard MBT, but several versions are included) I finally got my Syrian trucks, ZSU-23-4 Shilka, AND Red air support. Red air support can make a serious impact on what would otherwise be an awesome day for Blue forces. The newer birds (new is a relative term here) like the Su-25 can carry some really devastating precision guided munitions which will knock out ANY Blue or Red tank on the battlefield. One scenario in particular that ships with NATO has you defending against an Armored attack with OK troops. The Reds have air, and it makes all the difference!!! UK was the last CMSF module I bought, and this was only a few months ago after getting all hot and bothered over the Commonwealth module for CMBN. GREAT buy!!! No new Red units, I know, but you get the whole UK army plus a new formation for the US Army, an actual factual light infantry TOE with a new truck to go with them. The smoke shells from the Chally 2's and the 'knee' mortar carried by infantry HQs are awesome and unique weapons that bring a new dimension to the fight, really love that stuff!!!

LoL, in the spirit of the flight simulation community............two weeks!!!

I will third the request for more groups. As I delve farther down the rabbit hole that is scenario design, I am finding AI plans to be the most fun, and most challenging, aspect of designing missions. You can really frustrate a player with too good of an AI plan, and this is not the objective of the mission, fun is. Unless it's a hopeless defense type scenario, the player should win right??? Making this happen sometimes means I must program 'mistakes' into the AI plans that, should the player see and exploit these, makes for a fun and victorious scenario. I find CMSF to be GREAT training for building in CMBN. The range and lethal nature of weapons like the TOW and AT14 make it critical to time and coordinate AI planning. In CMBN, ranges are shorter and engagements seem to last a bit longer, meaning a little less precision is OK.

I am not talking about making Iran dependent on the US. Far from it, we have far too many dependents as it is. I am talking about preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear armed state, that is all. We let Pandora out of the box in 1945, and since then several nations have acquired the bomb. There are more then enough all ready to make sure responsible states don't use them at all, prevention of nuclear war through the major parties having the ability to wipe out the world. I don't see a need for any more nations to have the ability, none at all. Israel has non confirmed nukes, this we can be almost certain of, but they have never stated that they WANT to bathe Tehran in a sea of fire either! Iran is the definition of a 'rouge' state, and they should be treated as such. They should not be allowed to responsibility of nuclear arms until they have proven they can treat their own citizens with respect, let alone the citizens of other nations (including Israel and other 'zionist' states) and done so long enough for it to be considered routine, not extraordinary. If military action is required to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, then do so, and do so quickly. If the world waits too much longer, it will be too late to do anything about it and Iran will be able to hold the threat of nuclear war over all proceedings after. Not acceptable!!!

Exactly Blackhawk, that's the whole story in a nut shell. A news story I heard earlier compared Iran now to North Korea a decade ago. We put put while they split the atom. We wake up one morning to a nuclear armed North Korea. That is just what Iran wants, and if we think they are 1 year from the bomb, it's probably closer to 8 months. They want us to think we know it all, and when you are giving out the info, you know what they know, which is very dangerous in today's world. We need to hit them now, no messing around, hit them hard with every dirty trick we've got.

You need to play CMA like you would play CMBN with everyone rocking Stg44s!!! The weapons are light years ahead of WWII, but the Mk.I eyeball is the best spotting tool in your inventory. That means it's hard to see the bad guy, but real easy to die if he sees you first.

Anyone willing to try the scenario "Green Game" as an H2H??? It's Blue vs. Blue, and considering the conversation here, seems right up the 'balanced' alley. I am going to d/l it, anyone who wants to try go to the repository under CMSF base game missions, or I will send it to u myself.

I am gonna d/l it and give her a run. Need some small unit UK action in my wargaming menu. You need a balanced diet of small and medium scenarios, with an occasional large scenario but not all the time, too often is bad for a balanced diet!!!

Very cool! Seen architecture like this in the FPS Day of Defeat. Interesting to have a fight underneath the buildings, one side to the other.

LOL, pics or it didn't happen!!! j/k, that's too much though, I would have laughed so hard I may have had an accident :\

Grenades do cause FF last I checked. I know they did in CMSF at least. I am pretty sure I have lost men throwing grenades who get shot and kill 3 of their friends.

After reading so many times that the difference between the two was strictly the ignition, it is refreshing to see there were some other differences as well. The M1, M1A1, and M9 all used slightly improved rockets over the previous versions. I am curious to know if the sight will make a difference with the ability for a soldier to hit a moving or longer ranged target. I know the PzFaust3 in CMSF benefits greatly from it's computerized sight, so perhaps the M9 does as well from the reflector sight.

It is very hard to 'balance' a Blue vs. Red match in CMSF for the simple reason of force quality. In the manual it even states that a 10 - 1 kill/loss ratio for Syria is what to expect if you want to shoot it out with the western forces in a conventional style match up. To really balance a H2H match, you need to force the western troops to close with the syrians before they can engage them. I feel that the skill of forces is less important then motivation and leadership. You can have elite syrian airborne with high motivation and leadership get routed by 'average' US forces from outside the range of their weapons since US firepower is devastating at range. Those same troops could cut down an entire US platoon that walked into their field of fire. For an H2H, red vs red or blue vs blue is the way to go for a 'chess' style match.

The AI is hard to manage until you have that one 'lightbulb' moment, and then things make sense. I have played CMSF since the beginning, and only figured out the AI editor a month or so ago. But once I did, it opened up a vast new world for my own personal mission building. I always loved the CMx1 QBs, and the CMSF QB system was lacking to say the least. I started by loading QB maps into the full editor, choosing my own units for each side, and fighting it out using the AI plans that came with the QB. This can get old, but is a great way to test certain forces against one another. Then, while doing this one day, I assigned a unit to a group on accident. I then ran to the manual real quick and BLAM, I could build AI plans. I tried it out with a combined US Lt. Infantry/Brit mech platoon attack on three small villages held by skilled Syrian mech troops. They deployed and fought how I planned with minimal tweaking, and I got my but handed to me. Thankfully, the QB system in CMBN is far in advance of CMSF (one thing I wish they would retrofit with a patch or something) Even with the new QB system, AI play can be lacking, and playing the same QB map more then a couple times will teach you the enemy deployment routine. If you are really looking for an enjoyable single player match, I say make your own. To keep the element of surprise, I would say you need to build a minimum of three AI plans for the enemy side. Granted, you will know the make up of the enemy force, but you can vary reinforcement times and also the time frames that the enemy has to execute orders inside of. I have been surprised by my own AI plans, so if I can anyone can. Granted, the people out there who take all the time required to research and hand craft a map and scenario to go with it are in a class apart from folks like me. I might upload a mission one day just to see the reaction, but I just don't have the time these days that is required in crafting a worthy mission that others can play too. I can't recommend this type of play enough, as it makes the replay value of CMBN go right on through the high bar that it already sets.

The small amount of AKM ammo carried by the APCs is just sad. If you have troopers equipped with AK74s, you're all well and good with the ammo, but if you have AKMs, your looking at like 400+ rounds. That's just not enough to get the job done when you need to put down area fire like you do in CMA. If you have BMP-1 or -2 IFVs then you're alright since they have good firepower on their own. But if you're rolling in BTRs, that 14.5 just doesn't have the same effect as the 73mm RR at killing and suppressing bad guys.

QB is indeed a Quick Battle. However, the AI has been implemented, as each QB map has a couple AI plans for both attack and defense. You are able to choose your forces, and the enemy forces if you wish, and have at it. It is also the best way to have a H2H match, as you can make sure things are even, if that's what you wish anyway

I use more area fire in CMA then in any other CM game, and I mostly play as the Russians so firepower is on my side. I didn't understand the phrase 'use the available fire power to your advantage' until after a few mission, I would pound everything in the area where a round would come in from. The closest CM game as far as play style goes is CMBN imho. The lack of spotting gear is what makes all the difference. As was stated, let your truppen stop longer in between moves to scan for enemy troops. If you think you know the general area, assign a cover arc and let them sit. If the unit has Bino's, you will have em cold!!!

I am curious so I will ask those with more knowledge in TOW1 then I. Can this mod pack be applied to the Steam version of TOW1???

I am up for a game as well. If you feel like taking two PBEM at once, I would be glad to start a match with you. I have all four modules, and don't mind playing any side, but prefer Red v Red when I am playing red, who doesn't???? Do you prefer scenarios or QBs??? And would you be interested in a Blue vs. Blue (Maybe Brits vs Germans or something, pretty even match in capability for a PBEM) Or maybe a scenario where Red has a healthy numerical advantage so the Blue doesn't stomp them too badly.

About the casualties my pixel truppen have suffered using Pzfausts, yes, I was that close when the warhead went off. Happened twice in the same scenario actually, one of the ones that came with the game, can't remember the name ATM. When the Amie's counter attacked with Shermans, I had my surviving troops in ambush at the hedges. Infantry that strayed too close got sprayed with MP40s, but then their buddies killed my AT guys. I had some enemy infantry actually pass by my AT teams and they were able to kill 2 Shermans while suffering 1 casualty on each attack. The range was such that I couldn't tell if it was the 800 g of explosive from the warhead, or the tank itself exploding.

Hey buddy! Long time no see, virtually at least Miss ya over at the WG, not the same without ya man! My thought here is that, there isn't so much a new element on the battlefield that requires a new base game, but that the lessons learned, mistakes made, and new features developed can make it into the game engine on a more frequent basis. As the Shock Force series shows, most of the added features that came with modules were either first proof of retail quality content (on board mortars and tank main gun smoke rounds) for things that CMBN would offer, or polishing the engine to a high degree of shine and adjusting the code as they went along to make it easier to add new models, terrain, TOEs, etc. After the Commonwealth module, we will get Market Garden and a mop up module to finish out the CMBN series. Granted, Normandy and Market Garden are not small battles by any means. However, from the Battle of the Bulge until the end of the war, europe bore witness to the largest tanks battles of the western front, and the largest airborne drop, Operation Varsity. We have the crossing of the Rhine, the closing of the Ruhr pocket. These are some huge scale battles compared to some of what CMBN has offered. There is also a great diversity of weapons and forces that are involved. This all seems to set the engine up for the next installment, the Eastern Front Personally, I see a pattern here that makes good sense. Look at the previous CM titles for example, CMBO is the grand daddy, simple yet elegant. I still play it for crying out loud. Then CMBB offered a whole new mess of features and commands. This is great, but why can't I retrofit these new features to the CMBO engine? Can't be done, CMBO is obsolete. Then comes CMAK, with most of the primary features in line with CMBB, but better textures (IMHO), an entirely new set of terrain tiles, and a switch back to western kit. A bunch of the 'toys' from CMBO didn't make this one since they never served in Italy or Southern France. So now we are stuck with three engines that aren't compatible, each with different units and features that all sorts of people find desirable. I think the new method of doing things, base game and modules, will allow for the best continuity between main titles, without leaving anyone out in the rain as far as, "I want these units but with these engine features!" as the time period and difference in combat theater will be much smaller then it ever was before. I hope this all makes sense to the reader, get a little over excited and sometimes type faster then I think, leading to errors between the brain and keyboard