Bozowans

I was gonna post this topic myself a ways back, since I had been wondering this same thing. I was also wondering why they chose to put CMSF2 on Steam first. Did they just pick that one out of a hat? Did they think it would sell better? Or were they trying to test the waters with CMSF2 before they put the real WW2 money-makers out? I always assumed that WW2 was the more popular subject, but perhaps not. I will enjoy pretty much anything, from WW2 to modern. I probably have more hours in the WW2 games, but that's probably just because there are more WW2 games. I wouldn't say I prefer one gameplay style over another. I'll also play other wargames covering anything from ancient Greece and Rome to the Thirty Years War to today. Military history is an interesting subject, and it's interesting seeing the evolution of weapons and tactics over time, and how much (and how little) has changed over thousands of years. Wargaming can be like looking through a window to a different time period. I suppose I enjoy the simulationist aspect of the game more than the "game" part. Some other people are much more competitive and are more interested in the winning/losing part. Some might prefer exclusively multiplayer over single player. I always had a feeling that the more competitive multiplayer types prefer WW2, because both sides tend to be more evenly matched. I tend to prefer single player games, so I can tinker and mess around with things at my own pace.

The last time I played CMRT I had a small group of soviet snipers take down 14 germans without taking a single loss. The real question here is why are you moving them within 50m of the enemy in the middle of the woods?

Yeah ive seen stuff like that suggested before and it always makes me think it would be cool if target commands could work the same way as artillery fire missions. What if you could adjust the duration, intensity, and area size of any units fire? I dont see why they can't just re-use the exact same UI commands as you get for artillery. Like giving a machine gun a linear target with heavy intensity along a treeline for 2 minutes, and then he will hose down that treeline left to right as much as he can for those 2 minutes. Or giving a rifle squad a circular area target with harass setting for 5 minutes, and they will slowly pop off individual rifle shots at random points within that circle for those 5 minutes. And of course you would have point targets that would be like what we have now, only you could adjust rate of fire and duration for that point. For BMPs, a harass setting could mean single 20mm shots every so often, light could mean short 2-3 round bursts, and so on up to heavy where the gunner holds down the trigger for maximum destruction. A system like that would make recon by fire a lot more workable, realistic, and with less micromanagement too. When you ask a question like what should you shoot at when doing recon by fire, the answer is, well, everything right? Unless there are some kind of rules of engagement, you would logically want to shoot at as much as possible because you never know where an enemy might be. Yet it's annoying to have to constantly draw new target points for every one of your units, have them shoot at that point for 15 seconds, then have to go and draw new targets for every one of your units for the next area a few meters over. Over and over again. So most players avoid doing a realistic amount of area firing unless they know or have a good idea that an enemy is there already. And then we plaster the hell out of that position and we end up feeling gamey about it. It would be so much easier if you could tell your units to "shoot literally everything" by drawing a huge circle in front of them so they fire at everything in it at random for a specified amount of time. Like sometimes I just really want to tell my guys to "shoot that town" in front of them without having to pick out the exact building and exact floor of each building for every single unit. I just wanna draw a circle over the whole town. And then I just want my guys to sit back and take potshots at the town instead of unloading on it with everything they have like that scene in Full Metal Jacket.

Recon by fire does seem like pretty standard procedure irl. I dont think the game represents it as well as it could though. I wish that CM had another fire command -- something beyond the target light command. Target Lighter maybe? I remember watching syrian civil war footage of BMPs firing randomly at various targets while driving slowly around the streets. They would put just one single 20mm cannon round through a window or whatever, then wait a while, then fire another round somewhere else. They weren't taking any return fire or anything. It's like they were trying to maintain a constant but very low rate of fire so they save ammo while at the same time keep the enemy harassed and on their toes. They would do this again and again while driving back and forth. In CM though, even with the target briefly command, a BMP gunner will hold down the trigger and hose down a target for that whole 15 seconds, burning through dozens of rounds all on the same exact spot. What if you just want to fire one round off and on with the main gun and not the machine gun? There is no setting between "hold fire" and "fire as fast as you can with everything you got" or "fire as fast as you can minus the heavy weapons".

He must be getting impatient if hes moving his armor so far forward. And it's interesting that his armor seems so scattered across the AO while yours are mostly concentrated together in the attack. Could be good news for you. I loaded up this scenario myself and had a look around earlier. I only looked at the german side though so I still have no idea what the Soviets have. Such a pretty map though.

Hmm I thought I remember reading that there was one way back in the day, but perhaps I'm wrong. Anyway I do like the peeking feature and I would rather it be in the game than without. I just wish we had more control of it somehow.

I always had mixed feelings about that peeking feature. One of my favorite tactics before 4.0 was sticking squads behind buildings to hide them. Then when enemy troops move into the building from the other side, my squad will open fire through the opposite doors and windows. When they automatically move to the corners to peek around though, it gives their position away. On the other hand, the peeking feature can be cool sometimes. I've seen cool firefights from guys peeking around corners and cool RPG ambushes and whatnot. I think the soldier posted at the corner is supposed to get a cover bonus too, to represent that hes not supposed to just be lying there in the open like it appears in the game. I just wish there was a way to toggle that on and off. Sometimes it's good, and sometimes you really dont want a guy to just be hanging out there on the corner all day. I wish you could tell a squad to peek around a corner quickly and then pull the guy backward again.

I must say, CM is a pretty cool game for a zombie shooter.

Kinda hard to tell without seeing what happened in the game myself, but that looks like a tall pine forest where the tree canopies are pretty high up off the ground, allowing you to see right through it depending on elevation.

That does seem like the best strategy for him. That first objective is terribly exposed. There is still the road to Konigsberg, the church, and Waldburg objectives, and it looks like those would be far more difficult to take. Together they would be worth 600 points, while Wardienen (ROT) is 400. So if you only take ROT, he still wins (unless you destroy his whole force I guess). That road leading from ROT to GRAU looks like it would be a horrible nightmare to go down. You would be channeled into a narrow chokepoint, and there are a million great ambush points around those woods above KT2. If I was him I would put lots of tanks and AT guns all over there, hidden in the woods and facing the road. The blizzard would help hide them until they are ready to open fire on your flanks as you move up the road. With all the time it took to secure ROT and move out again, the spotting info about your tanks would probably already be distributed throughout the Soviet C2 network, so they would know you are coming while they themselves are still masked by the blizzard. There is also a little bridge across a stream you would have to cross, and it would be easy for him to have guns trained on that bridge from keyhole positions in the woods to the flanks and rear. You would have no choice but to painstakingly clear the woods on foot, putting you at a huge disadvantage. I'm not really sure how I would attack in this situation. Maybe go way around the far right side of the map? It's more open there at least.

That's probably what I would do in his position. I wouldnt want to face those german tanks out on the open plain like that. I'd just hunker down and try to harass the advance whenever possible and try to get the attackers to string themselves out a bit. That T-34 on the far right is holding up the advance over there. If I was him i would keep that tank there and hold onto those woods as long as I can, then as the german advance gets strung out along the road up and through the village, I could hit them with concentrated flanking fire from the woods. I dont know how well you could see from those woods in the blizzard though. I just know that it's hard for germans to clear Soviets out of the woods. So if he could force you to have to go into the woods in order to deal with him, that's good for him.

I am wondering what role the Islamic State would play in this timeline. They had their origins back in 1999 with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Their goal of establishing a Sunni caliphate had been established for years prior to the CMSF2 timeline. They were quick to take advantage of the chaos of the real Syrian Civil War, eventually building up the al-Nusra Front, although these were anti-Assad fighters intending to establish an Islamic Emirate under sharia law. If Islamic State or Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists were the ones who did the dirty bomb attacks in the CMSF2 timeline, you have to wonder why the Assad regime would be protecting them. Under Battlefront's timeline, Syria is assumed to have learned lessons from watching the annihilation of Iraq's military in Desert Storm and again in the 2003 invasion. It even says as much in some of the mission briefings. I remember the Task Force Thunder briefing mentioning that the Syrians were not the incompetent, militarily inept pushovers the blowhards rant about. At the time this game was made, Iran was a constant target for American threats and saber-rattling. Even though BFC picked Syria for the setting, I feel like BFC was trying to make a bit of a statement with this game, to push back against those "blowhards" who thought the US military was invincible and an invasion of Iran would be a cakewalk. Some of the scenarios if CMSF2 are really quite difficult. While the coalition forces would certainly win the initial invasion, occupy the country and oust Assad, it would have been a much bloodier fight than Iraq and Afghanistan. I doubt the coalition forces would be able to successfully occupy and pacify Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time. I also doubt that Syria would have a peaceful transition to democracy after such a bloody invasion, somehow avoiding all the corruption, mismanagement, and factional in-fighting of Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps the CMSF2 invasion would merely kickstart the rise of the Islamic State years ahead of schedule, leading to a whole other intensely bloody phase of war.

If you think suppression is not suppressive enough, try playing as syrian conscripts against the US army. I think you're gonna need to provide more specific examples of this. What kind of unit is being suppressed here? What are their experience levels and motivation? How many and what kind of units are doing the suppressing and at what distance? Even heavily suppressed troops will sometimes pop up and shoot back in self defense when there are enemies very close by, like if you have an assault team closing in. In that case, the assault team is a much greater threat than the fire coming in from a distance.

If you have tiger tanks I think it's reasonable to assume he has a big swarm of tanks tucked away somewhere to counter them. He's done a good job at keeping everything hidden. Or maybe he will get a big swarm of tanks loaded down with tank riders as reinforcements at some point. Very good thread so far. I've been eagerly awaiting each update.

Probably true for me. Though I'm tempted to say Shock Force overall. Some players don't like it because of the force imbalance, but that's exactly what I find interesting about it. The Syrians are the ultimate underdog of all the CM games. It's always fun seeing them pull off some fantastic ambush against overwhelming odds, wiping out a good chunk of the western forces before gloriously martrying themselves in the process. I like the Middle Eastern setting, the modern stuff is fun to play with, and the gameplay is quite different from the slow, grinding industrial warfare of WW2. The insurgents/uncons are unlike anything in any other title. You get interesting units like technicals, IEDs, spies, suicide bombers, small bands of guerrilla fighters with stealth bonuses. Some of my favorite content is the Red vs Red stuff. The game has become more interesting after everything that has happened IRL since the game was released. After spending years seeing real life major battles playing out over places like Aleppo or Raqqa, it's outright bizarre to see similar battles playing out in the game.

I always assumed that spotting in CM worked like dice rolls. Like perhaps the game engine constantly draws lines in the 3D world between friendly units and enemy units at all times. If that line is intersected by another object in the 3D world, like a building or hill or a tree's "hitbox" or something, then nothing happens. If the line is not obstructed though (or partially obstructed), then the game engine gives you an X percentage chance to spot the unit at Y distance every few seconds. So like a 10% chance every few seconds to spot a unit at 2000 meters. Sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you won't, but if you have 10 tanks all lined up in view of something, chances are that one of them will spot something very quickly even though most of them won't. And then the tanks will talk to each other and share the info. Maybe I am terribly wrong about how all that works.

The airbase HQ did turn out to be a nasty mess of IEDs and I was surprised I didn't trigger any of them. I did make sure to avoid the main road and go at it from a different angle though. I blasted away large parts of the outer boundary wall before approaching so I had a clear field of view for as many of my troops as possible, then I approached slowly and cautiously. All those buildings around there do give you good cover from all the enemies on the other side of the map too. Normally I'm a pretty aggressive player, so it was sometimes difficult to restrain myself from pushing harder to outright destroy the enemy. With how powerful the US forces are, I know I could wipe the enemy off the map if I wanted to, but the casualties will slowly eat away at you and you never get any replacements throughout the entire campaign, so it's always a hard decision whether to push hard or not. That was one of the interesting parts of the campaign for me. Losing a squad here and there hurts but it shouldn't be too big of a deal in the long run I think. The US forces are still crazy powerful even if they are at half strength.

I managed to beat it without any losses, but I didn't try forcing an enemy surrender and got only a minor victory. I didn't even bother to push for the special forces HQ or the control tower at all. I occupied the airbase HQ and the barracks and then just stood back and shot and bombed the hell out of the far side of the map as much as I could from long range, hoping to cause as many casualties as possible before time ran out. I wanted to keep my losses low so early in the campaign, so I just avoided getting close to the enemy as much as possible. I was happy to sit on two of the objectives and hope that points from casualties would tip me over to at least a minor victory. I caused over 100 casualties, but after it was over I was surprised to see how many enemies were still there in places that I thought had been thoroughly shot to pieces. I finished the whole campaign since then, and I'd say you're probably fine with those casualties. In retrospect I was probably overly cautious throughout much of the campaign.

Thanks y'all. Yeah it was Mountains of the Moon. It captured the power of the late war Soviets alright. I liked zooming over to the German side to hear the roar of the oncoming engines getting closer and closer and then watching the Soviet wave slowly cresting into view. Really gives you that sense of dread.

Screenshot dump from one of the Fire and Rubble scenarios. Soviets get something like 900 men and a crapload of tanks in this one. Soviets are attacking a series of hills against dug-in Germans. I chose to mass my forces in multiple huge waves and attack the Germans head-on, going straight uphill. I made especially sure to keep my tanks massed together in one big group, advancing in close coordination with the infantry. As I expected, there were a lot of Germans deployed in reverse slope positions all over the place, but I was able to completely overrun them. Most of the Germans were not able to get more than a few shots off before they got blasted by overwhelming return fire from the masses of onrushing troops. There were some intense last stands from a few German troops here and there, but it was mostly a rout. This panzerschreck team fought to the death, taking out a tank at point blank range and gunning down several Soviet troops: I got lucky several times, like when this Stug got shot right down the middle of its gun barrel: The Soviet tide rushes on. At times I was advancing so rapidly that I simply bypassed several enemy positions. Here you can see some Germans fire into the flanks of my advancing troops. They mostly had bolt-action rifles, which was pretty ineffective. Rifle fire nipping at the flanks of such a huge force felt like nothing more than mosquito bites and I just ignored them, heading straight for the objectives. Whenever my force did halt, the amount of firepower they could deliver was devastating. The 152mm shells from the ISU-152s were especially devastating. I can only imagine how horrifying it would have been to have to sit in a foxhole and face down an attack like that in reality. One of the highlights of the battle was when I had some men charge at a German AT gun, pinning down the crew with small arms and grenades for several minutes while I ran a flamethrower around the side to BBQ the survivors. The Germans totally collapsed, losing 363 men to my 108. I kinda want to try this again as the Germans just to see how I could stop such a powerful Soviet force. Seems like it would be difficult even against the AI. What I was most afraid of as the Soviets was artillery, but the German artillery was way off target and didn't do much. I would think good use of artillery would be essential for breaking up a massed attack like that.

I liked Blunting the Spear but I might consider it to be a little too big for a newbie, at least for a first campaign. You get such a huge mechanized force with a million vehicles and it can be a pain to micromanage and click through everything. Of course some players might like that sort of thing. I'm not quite sure what would be best for a first campaign. Maybe something from CMSF2 as one of the western forces. The default Task Force Thunder campaign is pretty simple and straightforward. The battles are not that large, the pacing is pretty fast, you get to play with the modern US Army so you can afford to make mistakes, and many of the missions are just simple exercises in fire and maneuver tactics against weak enemies deployed in fixed positions, so it's good practice. A lot of the time you get to just sit back and pick apart enemy trenchlines with your fast-firing mortars and artillery and follow up with a textbook assault with hardly any losses. Some of the missions can be a challenge though, and the Syrians are still capable of giving you a bloody nose especially with their ATGMs.

My favorite was when I had AT infantry run up to an enemy T-34 in the middle of the dark. They failed to spot the tank for several minutes even though they were literally right next to it. They were so close that they could reach out and touch it. They even had to run around the invisible tank in order to find a spot to lay down. The buttoned-up T-34 spotted my infantry first and machine-gunned them all. Even despite silly things like that, there is still nothing else out there like the CM series and I still get a lot of enjoyment out of them. I agree with the OP honestly.

The 152mm shells from those ISU-152s are pretty ridiculous. This German position was pretty much vaporized in one hit. Poor saps could barely even get a shot off before they all went boom. Saw one survivor running away from the scene afterward.

Infantry using the hunt command used to duck down instantly upon taking fire in previous versions of the game engine. It got removed for some reason. I don't know if it's a bug or intentional. Now, infantry getting shot at will keep moving until they get a confirmed spot on an enemy or their suppression meter goes up enough to make them duck down (often because they end up taking casualties from refusing to duck down). I'm not sure how long it's been like this now. Years? It worked better before IMO. Before, infantry were very sensitive and might duck down even when they're not getting shot at, like if an explosion went off 100m away or something. If a single bullet flew over their heads they would duck down. It made the hunt command useful for slowly creeping forward without taking too many casualties. Players would use it like a "move to contact" command. Perhaps they changed it because they thought it was too sensitive. Perhaps they changed it so that "hunt" means more like what it says - the soldiers are actively seeking out and hunting the enemy in a more aggressive manner without being too overly concerned about incoming fire. On the other hand, the normal move command has always worked the same way as far as I know. Infantry will walk forward, and if they get shot at, they will eventually start breaking out into a run unless their suppression meter gets so high that they get pinned. Only then will they duck down.

So the target arcs are having no effect. I saved the game right before I ordered the FO team into that building, and each time I play the turn, the same bug happens regardless of what I do. So I can replicate the issue at least. Let's say I order the FO team to go into the building and then give a face command to the opposite side of where the bug is happening. They run through the building, out the opposite door into the street again... and then turn to face the exact direction I ordered them to: Now let's order them into the building again with a different face command, in a different direction. Same thing happens. The same thing also happens with a normal move order with no face command or target arc at the end. Interestingly, the leader of the FO team is the one who always runs through the door out into the street first. His radioman partner always goes where he is supposed to at first. He stops inside the building briefly at a normal spot you would expect, posted in front of a window. Once the leader finishes his move though, the radioman will always move to join him out in the street. So far, the suggestion of using a permanent pause command is the only thing that seems to help, but it does not solve the issue completely. This is what happens with a permanent pause command: The FO team leader moves out into the street like he always does, but the radioman stays put at the correct spot. The scenario is "Point Blank" from the Task Force Thunder campaign, using the latest Steam version of the game.