Freyberg

I would like to agree with Centurian52's comment regarding player expectations.
I remind myself that the CM series are simulation 'games' and a lot of fun to play. Although there are numerous quirks that I personally don't like, I can live with it, comforting myself with the knowledge that my opponent (real or AI) is experiencing the same issues.
Graphically the series is dated and constructing maps and scenarios is like working with Lego blocks but ... what other game gives me an editor to create new maps and scenarios? Maybe not ideal but still wonderful! Very wonderful.
Although the orthogonal and diagonal constraints of the map building blocks frustrate me daily, it still remains my 'go to' game and editor.
If there is something in a scenario that you don't like, just load the scenario into the editor and change it (then save as a revised version). You can do that with campaigns too but that is a heck of a lot more work.

My experience of empty roads is that if your movement orders allow time between vehicles such that they don't bunch up, and are also short enough to follow the road turn by turn, then you can get it work.  If one vehicle gets held up, it might go off road or cause others to go off road. 
Micro-management - yes.  Part of the game - yes.  Has BFC tried to introduce 'convoy orders' before - yes. Did they work flawlessly - no.  Is it being looked at again - yes.
Did I mention I quite like micro-management 😉?

LOL stop driving your stuff in mucky places. I am unaware of any bugs related to bogging so I do not think there is anything to fix man.

I'd go with hunt. It'll wear them out, but I believe their situational awareness is a bit better with hunt, and they'll stop moving if they hit a mine. They'll tend to start running after hitting the first mine if you use move, so you'll be more likely to get mass casualties.

Ok remade the Fullajah Map Jolan District and here are a few screenshots of it. Still adding some flavor objects and stuff. Would love to really add in a bunch of flavor stuff but it's a big map with a heavy population of buildings so don't want to slow everything to a crawl. Its dirty city, I tried to make it as accurate as the editor would let me. In reality a lot of the buildings were crammed in tight so I still needed it to be playable from the games stand point. But hopefully it will be fun to fight through. Now to get those 3/5 Marines busy.
 
http://www.mediafire.com/folder/jgx0jjygy6tbznu,kfbxcwadf5kwe2s,jy3wn9a4ywrdzt0,gl523a939mj9l6a,jyssx4r9qgvo27i,178a4fs25r90e61,fmqkc3vu2xnvm67,2mk34tgbawxepmb,94wp3zh77iy4smh,vijk8zqy9qkk2s7,8mpl64tabsqagky,frvenlw1fdxpwlz,r9g1d7kwh6qycch,bakzynx58ym9ftb/shared

There is an element of the dice roll about it, but a few things to note:
You haven't got very good cover, poking up over a low hedge (through the hedge in the case of the left TD); None of your TDs are keyholed, so they're spottable from all angles; The goodies have a lot of infantry that can see you (more than you have deployed forward), who will be passing on spotting intel (the forward-deployed infantry you do have are panicked); The Sherman is a tall tank, so may be getting a slight spotting advantage in tall terrain with a lot of low cover (fences, hedges, low flora); The spots you are getting are probably just a view of the Sherman's TC, which is why you can't shoot at it.

There is an element of the dice roll about it, but a few things to note:
You haven't got very good cover, poking up over a low hedge (through the hedge in the case of the left TD); None of your TDs are keyholed, so they're spottable from all angles; The goodies have a lot of infantry that can see you (more than you have deployed forward), who will be passing on spotting intel (the forward-deployed infantry you do have are panicked); The Sherman is a tall tank, so may be getting a slight spotting advantage in tall terrain with a lot of low cover (fences, hedges, low flora); The spots you are getting are probably just a view of the Sherman's TC, which is why you can't shoot at it.

Hey please don't get offended - I'm not having a go at you
I just picked your message because you were commenting along the lines of what a group of really hard-core users have asked for, which is totally cool and that's your right.
I'd just like to make the point that for some of us, the gamesters, more micro-managing is not a feature we would like. I think the balance is good, and I like the level of clicking about where it is now.

Debunked by who?  The decisive press of infantry attack was central to European military thinking in lead up and in the opening of WW1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_offensive#:~:text=The cult of the offensive,and therefore choose to attack.
Now do not take wikis word for it, note the refs.  Azar Gat is one of the leading historians on military theory evolution over the last 200 years.  I have his works and we use them as textbooks at war colleges.  Snyder and Taylor are now slouches either.
Your example of a single RUSI article actually supports my (and their point), militaries do not waste ink on hard doctrinal “knows”.  If European observers had seen the character of warfare shifting there would have been all sorts of articles published, because stuff like that gets attention.  They were not publishing because everyone already knew what they knew.  The same phenomenon can be seen in recent history - we get thousands of articles on cyber but no one has revisited combined arms doctrine since the 90s (recent Ukraine war generated thought excepted).
I suspect that militaries were all hoping that rapid offensives would prevent an opponent from being able to dig in and establish hard defensive positions - so double down on offensive…because that was all they were built for.  If they knew trench warfare was coming, then why did innovations like flamethrowers, creeping artillery and tunnelling/cratering take time to develop? Why were they not ready on Day 1?
 I am not sure where this WW1 revisionist history is coming from but “observed well beforehand” and “1500 dead per day” - on a normal day, does not compute.  If someone can point to actual historical research that back this up I would really like to see it.  I suspect that the senior leadership suspected that something was up, hard to miss really, but the preparations and planning do not match hard doctrinal conclusions.  “We saw it coming but had no ideas.  So we sent them over the top anyway.” actually makes things worse, not better.
 
 

To avoid “two guys talking on a forum” we should start with some references to frame things a bit:
https://web.stanford.edu/class/polisci211z/2.1/Glaser %26 Kaufmann IS 1988.pdf
https://web.stanford.edu/group/fearon-research/cgi-bin/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/The-Offense-Defense-Balance-and-War-Since-1648.pdf
As can be seen this is a pretty deep topic - and a controversial one - that cannot be framed by battlefield tactics alone.  For the Civil War, I recommended this:
https://www.amazon.ca/American-Civil-Origins-Modern-Warfare/dp/0253207150
As you note these are more themes of strategies of exhaustion vs annihilation and which one plays out better in a given time in history.
Regarding the US Civil War and as to whether it signalled that a shift was afoot.  I think it is clear that the North and South we both trapped between the classic Euro-centric doctrines that had been taught to entire generations of generals on both sides and the realities of 1) The scope and scale of the war - e.g. Gettysburg had 2.5 times more troops engaged than Waterloo, 2) the size and type of terrain being fought over, and 3) The introduction of industrialization and technology onto the battlefield.
Both sides struggled with a massive mobilization challenge while also trying to build the systemic backbones of then-modern militaries.  What we becoming very apparent to the generals fighting the war - and was preached and developed before the war by Denis Mahan, an influential professor at West Point - was that war in American, in that time was different than the Napoleonic wars from 50 years before.  
The driving military theory, as reflected by theorist such as Jomini and Clausewitz was concentration, offensive action and decisive engagement.  These ideas created a cultural mindset - something tactical analyses miss.  A cultural mindset that once embedded is incredibly hard to break out of.  Militaries will keep doing things well past the point they make sense as a result of this phenomenon - the history of which is well recorded going well back before the time periods we are discussing.  One could argue that failure to adapt has lost more wars than any other factor, far exceeded “adapting ahead of reality”, which does happen but I argue nowhere near as often.
So back to “Was the writing on the wall?”  I argue “yes”.  Your examples of “close order massacres” were also seen in the battles of the US Civil War.  The evidence that lethality and range of firepower was changing the requirements to mass effects was there, yet militaries of the day clung onto “the press of the bayonets” as a central doctrinal concept.  Even though in the Age of Rifles this was already an antiquated idea.  Defensive and Offensive primacy are really about relative costs as much as they are about culture. The cost of mass on the Offensive vs the cost of equal mass on the Defensive.  “Cost” is a significant concept that goes from institutional to operational - in the end we dumb it down to ratios.  So to oversimplify, Offensive primacy appears to occur when cost/benefit projection of effective manoeuvring mass outweighs static mass.  And Defensive vice versa.
I for one cannot see how one can view the key battles of the US Civil War and not see the trend of projected manoeuvre mass failing.  The war started with Lee’s operational offensive approach dominating the Eastern Theatre.  As the War progressed it became more clear that rapid projection of mass was not working.  In fact the costs were outstripping the South’s ability to force generate replacements.  The North adopted the slow grinding war of exhaustion - it first great victory was a defensive one at Gettysburg.  Even as Grant took over the war took one a grinding attritional nature to it.  
Of course Defensive primacy does not mean “defend only”.  It does mean that offensive strategies are going to be different.  They tend to be grinding and attritional as opposed to decisive - we can see symptoms of this all through 1864 to the wars end.  I disagree that the Franco Prussian War was a counter-example of offensive action.  The war began with rapid force projection, seeking decisive battle (which the Prussians found at Sedan), but ended in long sieges - Paris the notable one.  In many ways the Franco Prussian War was a WW1 teaser - opening with rapid force projection and manoeuvre which gets bogged down in sieges as the modern realities of capacity, organization, communication and firepower set in.
As to WW1, I think the latest wave of revisionist history is too kind by a half.  But to be fair, and to your point, the generals on all sides were not stupid, they simply did not have other viable options.  They were trapped in a reality no one was prepared for - Defensive dominance.  No force ratios were enough to breakthrough.  Even if they could, they could not move fast enough to exploit compared to the rail lines and their opponents ability to mass defences.  This was all a culmination of a trend going back to the US Civil War - effective manoeuvring mass was rendered inert.  Grinding exhaustion was the only card left in the deck.  First it worked on the Eastern Front, then the Western. Manoeuvre was not dead, it was still being applied in farther flung theatres but as soon as mass was created, it would bog down in places like Gallipoli.
I will only pull on this one quote (I hate quote by quote debates).  It is the fact that they still had a pseudo-Napoleonic system, after US Civl War, after Franco-Prussian, after the Boer War, after two Balkan Wars, after a Russo Japanese War that is the issue.  Why they still had that “pseudo-Napoleonic system” after all of those data points is not excusable in my opinion, but it is explainable - military cultural mindsets.  They invented “modern warfare” in four years because they had largely ignored, or saw only what they wanted to for previous 50.
And we stand here once more.  Evidence is starting to pile up that war is shifting again.  We will likely cling to Manoeuvre Warfare and Mission Command as tightly as pre-WW1 clung to bayonets and the cult of the offensive. Despite the evidence we are seeing suggesting warfare is evolving in other directions.  Manoeuvre is becoming Corrosive, Mission is becoming Hybrid, whether or not western militaries are able to evolve at pace remains to be seen.
 
 

I shared and referenced this on Discord. A mandatory read in my opinion.

I didn't have a chance to respond to one of @The_Capt's post in the How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get thread this weekend (too busy sleeping, visiting family, and playing video games). Since it took me so long to get around to it I figured my response didn't belong in that thread anymore, hence the new thread. But military history and tactical development are hobby subjects for me, so I did want to get around to responding. Though my opening post is on tactical lessons and development leading up to and during WW1, I'm going to make the topic of this thread generic to tactical development in any era. I think a discussion of tactical lessons learned, missed, or miss-learned in the past could be helpful for grounding our understanding of tactical trends in the present. Understanding that the tacticians of the past may have had good reason, based on the evidence and analytical tools available to them, for reaching conclusions that we now know were wrong may help us have humility in our own conclusions about tactical trends in modern warfare. And understanding that they actually got more right than they get credit for may prevent us from too hastily rejecting the received view on a subject, merely because it is the received view.
I think it's arguable just how obvious a shift to defensive primacy should have been. The Franco-Prussian war certainly wouldn't have signaled a shift to defensive primacy for any casual observer of the time. The Prussians overran French defenses with hasty (bordering on reckless) attacks in battle after battle. If anything the war repeatedly demonstrated offensive primacy until the French field army was defeated at Sedan and the Prussians settled in for the Siege of Paris. While the Prussians weren't able to storm Paris's defenses, that alone didn't prove defensive primacy since it couldn't set it apart from any other siege that had been conducted over the last several thousand years of warfare. For all of recorded history up to that point there were field battles and there were sieges. Field battles lasted from a few hours to a few days, while sieges were attritional slogs that lasted for weeks or months. In fact even the Siege of Petersburg would have looked just like any other siege. It and other months-long sieges in the American Civil War would not have alerted anyone to any sort of shift towards defensive primacy. In fact, far from the participants of the Siege of Petersburg noting some new form of warfare, reports and letters from 1915 refer to WW1 as if the entire war had become one giant siege.
It's fair to criticize the French, who went into the Franco-Prussian war believing in defensive primacy, for overcorrecting and assuming absolute offensive primacy. But it's clear that the overcorrection didn't come out of nowhere. I'll note that the French seem to have a habit of overcorrecting too hard, assuming defensive primacy in the Franco-Prussian War, overcorrecting to total offensive primacy in WW1, and overcorrecting to total defensive primacy in WW2. Another tragic downside of Prussia's reckless attacks during the Franco-Prussian War being met with repeated success is that it led the Germans in WW1 to think that reckless attacks were a good idea. I think the Franco-Prussian war may have a number of cautionary tales for how we derive lessons from wars.
Defensive or offensive primacy are useful as broad concepts. But each is brought about by specific factors, and soldiers in the field still need to adapt to them with specific tactics. The difference between close order and extended order formations is not trivial. Close order means fighting in a multi-rank formation (normally two or three ranks deep) with each file brushing shoulders with the files next to it. Extended order means fighting in a single rank (technically Napoleonic skirmish lines were multi-rank formations, with filemates forming small teams, but I'm focusing on the late 19th/early 20th century here), with several meters between each soldier (as few as one or two meters in the early 20th century, but 5 to 10 meters is more common today). A close order formation is the classic Napoleonic block of infantry. The dispersed formations of modern infantry are examples of extended order formations (even if no one thinks to call them "extended order" anymore).
With the invention of smokeless powder bullets had enough penetration to tear through multiple people, so no only is a close order formation a much easier target to hit, but each hit is sure to inflict multiple casualties. Add in artillery firing high explosive shells and a single shell could inflict dozens of casualties on a close order formation, where it may have only inflicted a handful of casualties on an extended order formation. For a worst case scenario, at the Battle of Magersfontein the 3rd Highland Brigade was caught in quarter column, the densest formation possible for British troops, by Boar riflemen and was virtually annihilated. The British suffered nearly a thousand casualties at Magersfontein, 700 of them were suffered by the 3rd Highland Brigade in the first few minutes of the battle. Over the course of the 2nd Boar War British infantry in extended order were frequently able to overcome Boar defenses, albeit with heavy casualties. But every single British unit that attacked in close order was massacred. Even the Japanese, at the Battle of the Yalu (1904) took such heavy casualties while crossing the river in close order that they stopped in the middle of the battle to extend their order.
The importance of extended order was not the only lesson drawn from the wars leading up to WW1. Mostly what I have are lessons learned by the British army (it seems that most English speaking historians have a preference for writing about the British (which is very annoying for me, since I'm interested in everyone)). The importance of snap-shooting, and the ineffectiveness of volley fire, was taken to heart by the British after the 2nd Boar war. Post-Boar War British marksmanship training is some of the earliest that I'm aware of to feature pop-up targets. The need for the cavalry to be armed with the same rifle as the infantry was learned through the frustrating experience of cavalry armed with carbines being repeatedly outranged by Boars armed with rifles. This was a lesson that was apparently only learned by the British, with the other cavalry forces in 1914 going to war with carbines. The need to conceal the artillery, rather than firing from the open, was a lesson that was theoretically learned, but not taken to heart by every artillery officer. In 1914 it seems that even trying to keep the guns in concealed positions wasn't good enough, and they needed to be pushed back to the rear where they could only provide indirect fire support. And of course that introduced the problem of infantry-artillery coordination which would plague armies for much of WW1 (it's a lot easier for the artillery to know what to shoot at when they can see what they are shooting at).
And unfortunately, defensive primacy doesn't mean you can get away with just defending. You can't win a war by sitting in your trenches forever. Sooner or later you need to figure out how to push the enemy out of theirs. You have to find ways to attack successfully despite the primacy of the defense. This means finding specific countermeasures for specific causes of defensive primacy. The most frequently cited cause of defensive primacy in WW1 was the firepower imbalance between the attacker and the defender. The machinegun, being relatively immobile at first, provided more firepower to the defender than to the attacker. It was easier for the defender to use artillery effectively, since they only needed to put up a screening blanket of artillery in front of their positions, while the attacker had to figure out how to get the artillery firing on the right targets at the right time as the infantry advanced, all at a time before man-portable radios had been invented. The solution that was found for the firepower imbalance essentially came in three parts. The first was to get better at creating an artillery fire plan to support the infantry as well as possible (WW1 artillery tactics could, and probably do, fill entire books). The second was to invent tanks, which could provide more flexible direct fire support, engage targets which had been missed by the artillery, and continue providing heavy fire support to the infantry after the artillery fire plan inevitably broke down. The third was to increase the organic firepower of the infantry by introducing light machine guns and rifle grenades. All of those were important, but that third point in particular is not to be underestimated. Imagine playing as Commonwealth forces in CMBN, but your infantry have no Bren guns, only SMLEs. Attacking with rifle-only infantry, with no automatic weapons of any kind, is unthinkable on any post-1917 battlefield.
Another cause of defensive primacy was that armies had gotten so much larger. That, plus the increased dispersion of troops necessary to survive modern firepower, meant that armies could hold an unbroken frontline along an entire border. So you can't attack the flank of an army the way you might in the Napoleonic wars, because there are no flanks. It's frontal attacks or nothing. The obvious solution is to create some flanks by breaking through the frontlines. Unfortunately railroads make it easy for the defender to bring up reserves to plug a breakthrough, or to prevent a break-in from becoming a breakthrough. And the lack of mechanization, and the difficulty of trying to bring a field telephone up to recently captured positions, makes it difficult for the attacker to push reserves through a breakthrough to exploit, or into a break-in to turn it into a breakthrough in the first place. Another difficulty is that the dispersed battlefield makes command and control far more difficult. The obvious adaptation to the difficulty (near-impossibility, prior to man-portable radios) of issuing new orders to a unit in the middle of a battle is to script out every step of the attack in advance. This makes the battleplan rigid. When things went according to plan, the initial stage of a battle could go very well (the first day of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle). But even if things went to plan, the script would inevitably run out, with the result that any attempt to exploit initial success would fail miserably (second day of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle). And of course, things didn't always go to plan (first day of the Battle of the Somme).
The solution to these problems came in two parts. The first was to stop the battle before the script runs out. Give up on trying to achieve a breakthrough, or indeed on achieving any single decisive battle, and instead focus on wearing down the enemy with a series limited objective attacks at different points along the line. The hundred-days offensives which broke the German army in 1918 were a relentless series of limited objective attacks up and down the line, never letting up the pressure on the German line, while being careful to never press any one battle past its culmination point. The second was to accept that complete, centralized control of a battle was no longer possible. A single commander could not issue timely orders to react to developments in every corner of a dispersed battlefield. The solution was to invent the modern concept of mission command. Delegate greater authority down to lower and lower levels. The basic tactical units got smaller (from company at the beginning of the war, to squad at the end), with leaders at each level empowered to make decisions based on their local situation without being expected to wait for orders from above.
The trend in WW1 scholarship over the last couple of decades has been to reject the "Lions led by Donkeys" narrative (see Blackadder's portrayal of British high command (great comedy, terrible history)). The emerging view is that the leadership of the major combatants of WW1 (with the possible exceptions of the Russians and the Austrians) were generally competent and did about as well as could reasonably be expected (they certainly made no shortage of mistakes, but I've played too many wargames to judge them too harshly for that). In any case, they invented modern warfare in the space of just four years, with a pseudo-Napoleonic system as their starting point, so they must have been doing something right.
PS: I definitely have to grant that you have a point about the Austrian cavalry. But I think it's worth pointing out that the Austro-Hungarian army was a train wreck even by the standards of the time. Even the Russian army was less dysfunctional than the Austro-Hungarian army. And the only respects in which the early 20th century Russian army was better than the modern Russian army were that it could raise more troops and produce more stuff.

Hi all,
Just wanted to say hello and I hope I get to play some PBEM against some of you when I get better.
I'm a huge history fan, and also a fan of Graviteam Tactics: Mius Front, but it never quite did what I wanted. Games like Gates of Hell: Ostfront, looked gorgeous but were tactically shallow experiences that in no way represented the battles I've read about in books. The closest I could get was warg ames like War in the East 2, which still were fairly abstract. 
I found out about these games a few weeks ago and...Well, with the Steam sale I've purchased CM:BS, CM:SF2 and CM:BN, plus all the respective DLCs. I've been wanting games like these for years. Can't wait to start building the hours. I've clocked up 30 hours in two weeks which, for me as a 37 year old with a job and girlfriend, is fairly extreme.
 
Cannot believe I didn't try them sooner. 
 
Nice to meet you all

Hi All, 
First post here, I'm a 44-year gamer who plays a bit of everything but my main interest is anything WW2. I've been playing Gary Grigbsy War in the East, Steel Division, Panzer Corp, Hell Let Loose, and pretty much anything related to WW2.
Took me until 2 weeks ago to actually hear about Combat Mission (probably did but never took note). I took the plunge and picked up Battle for Normandy and have already clocked up 120 hours and barely seemed to have scratched the surface. 
I am so amazed at how low profile this game is considering how addictive and rewarding it appears. I am already installing mods and now pay little interest in graphics, UI, and presentation. It really takes me back to a golden age when you actually bought a good game, book, or film and indulged yourself in it, and keep going back to it! 

"It is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not that it is done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” 

"It is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not that it is done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” 

So it's better than Google. Yay. And by "better", I mean "chattier". What does it give you, beyond the initial question, that wouldn't naturally arise from taking the initial proposition and opening the scenario editor? I see: dimensions; several villages crammed into too-small a space. What else?
I'll reiterate that nothing  I can see in that response is specific to CM. What am I missing that is? It could equally well be a scenario generator for Flames of War, or any other computer game that works at Company level and lets you make up scenarios. And still it ignores vital elements of the "experience" (force ratios for D v A; ; the difference between H v H and vs AI; mortars). It has just added a lot of useless verbiage to the original proposition.

What about this constitutes "impressive"?

As usual with ChatGPT, the quality of the language is impressive. The content is next to useless. Empty speech under a magnificient varnish cover.

I disagree strongly. It's anodyne generic pap. It adds almost nothing to the original premise offered to the engine.
It includes almost nothing (actually I think it's absolutely nothing, but I'll hedge my bets) specific to Combat Mission. It mentions nothing about the relative morale and experience of the two forces, let alone getting into detail about CM 'soft factors'.
It understands nothing about the necessary force ratios to make a hasty attack-to-overrun a "fair fight" for two human players given the single objective. Conversely, it offers no insight about how to make the AI defender work.
It completely neglects to mention any indirect fire assets, even the organic mortars each company will have. Smoke would be invaluable for the Soviets, and if it's offering "Briefing hints", that should be mentioned. The briefing hints it does give are so generic as to amount to "Use your forces and terrain to defeat the enemy," and it mentions "AT weapons" in the Russian half, which don't really exist outside the tanks; AT Rifles have specific limited effects, at this stage of the war; just assuming that because they might have "Anti tank" in their name they can "take out" a PzIVH while on the offense is perhaps dangerously misleading. I'd also expect some Panzerschreck on the German side, as well as Panzerfaust; looks like they got cut  by the "list 4 infantry weapon systems for each side" rule.
There's more, but I really can't be bothered. It'd be impressive if you could ask that question and it posted the scenario file to you. Whether it was a good fight or not, that'd be impressive.
 

Well as a good commander you will of course value your special weapons teams since they have valuable skills and are hard to replace. So, you likely have a standing order that they withdraw to the rear once they are out of ammo so as to not risk loosing them to enemy fire.

I'm one of the guys who would NOT like to see a lowering of TOE attention to detail. IMO it ups the immersion when playing and it is also helpful when designing scenarios on my own.
 
 

I would buy early War, I would buy mid-War, I would buy WWI back to the last Ice Age - I will buy anything you release, because I love the way the game works.
I sometimes wonder if the frequent critics, who focus on what isn't there, have ever played the game, and noticed how much it does include - I've been so engaged with the units and maps added in the recent updates to CMFI and CMRT that I've barely looked at CMCW, despite it being such an interesting period.

I would buy early War, I would buy mid-War, I would buy WWI back to the last Ice Age - I will buy anything you release, because I love the way the game works.
I sometimes wonder if the frequent critics, who focus on what isn't there, have ever played the game, and noticed how much it does include - I've been so engaged with the units and maps added in the recent updates to CMFI and CMRT that I've barely looked at CMCW, despite it being such an interesting period.

I would buy early War, I would buy mid-War, I would buy WWI back to the last Ice Age - I will buy anything you release, because I love the way the game works.
I sometimes wonder if the frequent critics, who focus on what isn't there, have ever played the game, and noticed how much it does include - I've been so engaged with the units and maps added in the recent updates to CMFI and CMRT that I've barely looked at CMCW, despite it being such an interesting period.

Thanks for the update -- you guys sound like you've been amazingly busy!
I love Battlepacks, especially when they have Master Maps in them! Looking forward to them