Philipp

The Mac crossplatform feature is just great! I am in exactly the position you describe, Mac laptop, PC for gaming, and whenever I was out of the house I had to make do with SF and Normandy. Very much appreciated, looking foward to playing with the improved infantry movement. Happy holidays to you all.

I'm back to report how the 4th and 5th battle went. Both very good fights, great maps and very good AI plans, so good in fact that I lost the 5th battle... Thanks for the hours of fun again!

Thanks a lot, great news. I used one when making CMBS maps and was quite disappointed when I realized there isn't one for CMFI. Thanks again.

Thanks for the feedback. Always happy to hear that sombody enjoyed the scenarios I came up with.

Just finished the 3rd mission (WEGO on Iron) and again I have to say I liked it a lot. The AI put up a good fight and I ended up with a Major Victory, it was really close even if the end result did not look like it.

Finished the second mission and I liked it even better than the first. This is Combat Mission exactly as I like it. Infantry forces, not too large and intelligent missions that require you to move around and adapt to the changing battlefield. Thank you so much for this, Imperial Grunt.

I only played through the first mission so far but I liked it a lot and want to say: Thank you very much for the effort you have put into this. Edited to mark the spoiler correctly.

Thanks for the feedback. Sounds like the timing is OK now.

I added 5 minutes to the red reinforcement schedule and updated the file here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9849673/Raid%20on%20the%20Pump.zip This should make it a bit easier. I will also submit it to the repository now.

Great news on a Saturday morning! Now I have no excuses to shy away from playing H2H. Small Quick Battle anyone? PM me!

My understanding is that the BW wanted to replace the cold war G3 with a "peace weapon", so the spec focussed on light weight and other features than combat performance. Now times (and missions) are different but of course nobody in German politics wants to admit to this...

Thanks Takoda, no rush, there will always be a next weekend! Thanks George MC. I play WEGO and kind of assumed that time limits would work OK for RT since technically you can do more in RT in the same time since you have more possibilities to give orders. I probably should try RT to see myself how that goes. The whole idea of the scenario is that you have to be quick and not take your time. It should be 40 minutes, unless I messed something up. I enjoy playing CM "against the clock", I know that some people don't, those will probably not like this scenario. That said, the time frame might be a bit tight, I'll see what others have to say.

I finished designing my second scenario. The setting is that a US infantry platoon+ assaults a Russian mortar battery and battalion HQ at a gas station outside Cherkasy. The challenge for the player is to quickly cause a lot of damage to the Russian target formations and then retreat before he is overrun by the Russian reinforcements. The map is semi-fictional. It is inspired by a real world location but I changed the scale and some other things. Blue vs. AI only, H2H might work but I have not tried it. You can download it here for now (I will see if I get some feedback and eventually also put it on the repository): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9849673/Raid%20on%20the%20Pump.zip Please tell me what you think, good and bad, and let me know if you find any problems (spelling mistakes, briefing issues, map oddities, scoring bugs etc.).

Sorry you had such a bad time with this scenario. Unfortunately I am not set up to record a video of me playing this mission but what you can try is playing this from the Russian side and watch th Blue AI plan. Following the same plan the AI uses with better timing should be reasonably good. I really should have included a Tac Map, I'll see if I will make one and update the scenario. Regarding high losses in search and rescues, read up on what happened when they tried recover Bat21 in Vietnam... It is possible to win this battle pretty well even taking some casulties. The scoring is all about keeping the vehicles alive. If you had finished one of your playthroughs instead of quiting you might have won!

I am designing a scenario where US infantry attacks a Russian battalions mortar position (2B11 or 2B14) and would like to hear if anybody knows how such a position with 2 sections of 3 mortars each would look like. Specifically, are they set up in a line? A triangle? Does it even matter? What should the spacing be? Should they be set up in trenches or foxholes to improve protection? What would be the layout of the trenches?

Now also available on the repository: http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=314&func=fileinfo&id=3514

But you quoted the menual there yourself confiming what I said earlier! Green is the right rating for reserve troops without combat experience. Thats what I want for the green unit in this battle. The other units are regular or veteran were you can think of regulars as replacements for previous combat losses. Anyway, if you dont like to play with green and regular units, change them to veteran in the editor. In my testing the ratings worked well as they are.

John, I did not want to imply that the National Guard does not have great skills and there certainly are individuals or whole units whose skills surpass those of regular units. But the NG is a reserve military force which by definition means it is not comprised of full time soldiers. Relative to professional soldiers, in the CM skill rating which only applies to skills used in CM, meaning shooting and coolness under fire, it is reasonable to assume that most NG units rate below regular units. Otherwise, why have regular units in the first place? I understand that in the last decade the NG was used extensively in foreign deployments, so if a scenario designer decides to make a NG unit elite because it has served 1 year every 5 years (which is what the theory says, I think it is actually quite different in reality) he is absolute free to do so. Apart from all that, it sometimes makes for a much better game to command a few units that are not uber-soldiers but have to be used carefully, no matter what the story explanation for that is.

Thanks for giving it a try. Making the map was surprisingly easy, I first wanted to use a QB map but could not find one that suited my needs.

Glad you liked it Wiggum15! Oh, that typo annoys me... You might think that all US troops should be rated regular or better, but I disagree. Your average infantry might be well trained and thus should be considered at least regular, if not veteran. But that does not hold true for second and third line troops such as National Guard or logistics personnel let alone replacements after 3 months of intense fighting.

Show me the soldiers who never freeze in place and always make perfect decisions about where to find the best cover. You can complain about bugs or bad AI. Or you can just take as what it simulates.

I think the fact that in CM humvees who took a casualty DO NOT complete their order but instead do something human (i.e. stupid like full reverse) sets it apart from the zerg-rush crowd of other games. I love the CM games for how they simulate the chaos of combat and the feeling of having influence but not quite beeing in control. Sure, some chaos could be bug and there sure are some, but I usually don't see bugs, I see things that went terribly bad, sometimes without obvious reason. But wait, thats what grandpa said what war is like!!!

I finished my first scenario and would like to share it with you. A small US combat patrol tries to recover a downed Air Force pilot that came down near a Russian OP. Best played Blue vs. AI. Tiny battle in a wooded area. 30 min. +< 10min. 4 AI plans for Red and 1 for Blue. Playing Red vs. AI might be fun, depending on how good a day the AI has, it might also completely mess it up since the job that the Blue player has to do is not something the AI is good at and also hits some limitations (e.g. AI can't remount vehicles). Playing H2H might work, but I did not test it. The forces and victory conditions are quite fair I think. I wanted something similar to the outstanding "An August Morning" in the sense that the map and the forces are tiny but Blue has to cross the map to touch an objective and then retreat. To spice things up I throw in vehicles! Since the repository does not seem to get updated (I submitted sometime early this week), here a dropbox link for now: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9849673/Airman%20Down.zip Please criticize, I want to improve my scenario making skills.

You can work around the elevation bug by setting an elevation on the left border of the map. But patches are always welcome of course.

I play WEGO on Iron and the AI is a nice chellange in most battles. I typically win with plenty of total and major, for the American campaign I had only total and major victories for example. Oh, and I never reload or play the same battle twice except for small battles with plenty of variety. And I don't care too much about winning either, a good battle for me is one were what happened was believable and dramatic. If that is the case or not depends very much on the scenario though. In the WW2 games I almost only played PaperTigers campaigns since I just loved the difficulty level and the immersion. I probably also learned a lot from that because some of them are very clever designed and unforgiving. In BS the quality of the campaigns and battles seems very high and the scale less daunting than in RT. Hardly played that game because battles with more than a company and gigantic maps are not my thing so much. But I digress. Bottom line is I think that beating the AI in most scearios in BS is doable, with some practice. The AI is only as good as the scenario designer and some scenarios are meant to be hard. And some scenarios are decided by some lucky ATGM hit, which is also fine by me as long as the fight is believable and dramatic.