HerrTom

CM3 should start with Cold War! It's the best title to start with in my humble and very selfish opintion, lots of units, long distance engagement, huge maps and lots of fun stuff to play with!
 

In other words... CM Space Lobsters is coming in 2024 everybody! We've all waited over 20 years for it and its finally coming. You can all rest easy now. 😁

Trying to replicate that old Kodachrome look. Not quite there yet.  Props to @Pete Wenman for honestly the best maps I've seen in CM to-date!  It's a lot of fun to play missions that aren't always knife fights in a phone booth.

What makes you think that? I don't want to trigger yet another discussion about how good game X is compared to game Y but Graviteam has insane TO&E and OOB, at least for those operations I could verifiy it for. Some other battles and operations are so obscure that there aren't any published sources in English for it. Look at e.g. the "Bird Grove" DLC where a user has compiled a +100 pages book with English translations of the original Russian and German war diaries, including 'exact' notes on what equipment was used, lost, destroyed etc.
In fact, I would say that Graviteam Tactics doesn't really look like a correct TO&E and OOB because there hardly ever was a thing like that in real life, especially from 1942 onwards: so many cobbled together Kampfgruppen and ill equipped 'divisions'. Combat Mission does the same, of course.

I must say I disagree here. The amount of detail in Graviteam is incredible, and they just keep adding more and more. Just recently, they added simulation of exactly where each soldier gets hit by bullets and fragments. Some hits will kill immediately, some will wound, and some wounds will eventually kill - again depending on what part of the body gets hit.
And just to take it to the almost silly levels: I suggested to the developer that Soviet molotov cocktails might in some cases fail to burst if they hit soft ground or deep snow, simply because the bottle won't break. To my surprise, they actually went ahead and used my suggestion and changed the game code to do this.
Which is not only detail for the sake of detail - it means Soviet infantry is now less effective against infantry in snowy and muddy battles.
One can definitely make an argument that Combat Mission is better as a game than Graviteam is, but I think it depends on one's preferences. Both are worth playing in my opinion. CM has micromanagement, turn replay and also better urban combat. But Graviteam has much more detail and work put in overall, as I see it.

No game is perfect and no game company has ever had a game where none of their customers ever had a complaint or didn't want any more improvements. Some people like CM, some like Graviteam, some any of the others of the myriad of WWII games. to each his own.
Until a perfect game comes up we should be happy that the companies we support continue to make improvements and additions to our games.
 

I am really tired of the idea that there is a mysterious cabal of crypto hawks who somehow have the power to influence defense decisions in dozens of countries around the world and are dedicated to ensuring the war in Ukraine never ends. If anything, people in democratic countries have shown time and again that they do not want war, and even when a war does spark off, they certainly don't want long ones. War is not popular with the people. No politicians are running on a platform of "let's keep everyone at war". On the contrary!
Obviously not all decisions made by the government are communicated in detail to the people, but the whole point of democracy is that there is freedom of debate and eventual transparency. There are plenty of anti-war politicians around the world who have an interest in exposing a forever war conspiracy, and yet no evidence has been exposed. So why keep suggesting it exists?
It's true that a handful of actors here and there have an interest in dragging wars out for economic reasons, or believe it might be advantageous for geopolitical reasons, but they are far from "the ones in charge", and their position is not widely popular. On the other hand, we have plenty of evidence that warfare has changed in a way that it is no longer easy to deal out crushing victories against near-peer adversaries. Perhaps it never was.

So if Steve spends a two or three hours each day looking at what's happening in UKR war and writing a few posts of a few paragraphs each, then he is doing nothing else the rest of the day?  And also this war informs any CMBS games going forward, so it's not like it's off subject.  This is fascinating.  I watch ~10 hours of football each week, plus play some CM, plus play some guitar, cook, clean, do laundry, etc.  Therefore I can't possibly be doing my 40+ hour per week job.  

You'd be surprised. Creating content while a product is in beta does occur and can lead to some unforeseen problems and redos of aspects of scenarios as stuff under the hood changes. Known risk you take. Luckily, the general consumer doesn't have to worry about that.
Remember that BF only announces products once development is well into the pipeline. The Utah Beach Battlepack has been the exception as that was first announced basically around the same time as a green light for the project was given. There was nothing "in the editor itself" so to speak. Just design plans and research paperwork. I'd hazard a guess there would of only be some kind of announcement that the BP existed around now based on where we're up to.
There's also quite a few perfectionists behind the scenes trying to marry up the history with the tools and features available in the game engine. For example just for the Carentan campaign, I've tried to reflect all the units involved in the fighting and their relative strengths at specific points in the roughly two weeks of history I'm recreating. That's not a quick process to do right and try to validate sources. In the Carentan campaign you will command five different parachute/glider battalions plus add-ons at varying points. It's pretty big but you'll still probably be crying in parts if you know what you'll be throwing them  against.  I mean I could race forward and not care about historical accuracy at this point and have you pushing down Purple Heart Lane with a British Armoured Battalion because it would be 'cool', rather than a recreating the 3/502 of the 101st Airborne... but I think there maybe a few protests from the player base.

From my point of view you have these "official" BFC endorsed battle packs that are integrated into the DRM with a license key and such and make a small bit of money for BFC to do whatever. The guys who make them do a top quality job and have the BFC template briefings and I guess the proper playability in all 3 modes (H2H, vs axis AI and vs allied AI). These guys do it out of pride and loyalty to BFC and I guess do not get a sliver of the profits. I have no idea. None of my business.
In my 2 cent opinion, I think BFCElvis is the only real productive member of the BFC team. He is on top of so much and can be on the Golf course and handle an issue with somebody. I THINK he is the guy who mails/mailed the old hardcopy CD-ROMS and booklets. I think. Steve is 24/7 manning the Ukraine Thread working on his PhD thesis for post-war exploitation and sales of BFC training products such as "CM Pro" or whatever it is called. Charles works 60 hours a week according to Steve. Maybe we'll see the fruits of Charles's efforts at some point. Picture in picture drone video? Flares? Jack in the box turret explosions? You got me. I do sincerely wish BFC the best of success. 
I am obviously disgruntled to some degree because BFC doesn't do what I personally want. That is life. I moved on and try to extract the maximum joy out of the game.

 

Yes.  
Please be aware that the Battle Packs are led and being made by volunteers who have day jobs/mortgages/bills/significant others etc. I can't speak for the others, so maybe they have less demanding jobs, are retired or have secretly won the lottery and are living an Armchair General's paradise I'm just not sure.  Just please be aware we aren't employed by Battlefront working full time on content creation.
The first half of this year virtually nothing progressed because of my real life work skyrocketed, dominating my waking hours. If you can pull a 10-12 hr work day five days a week and then back that up with an additional few hours a night in the editor let me know.   Progress jumped ahead as I took much needed extra time off work in August. Two of three planned campaigns are now in the testing phase. My own testing for my vision of the Carentan campaign also didn't play out as expected. It just wasn't fun. I had to rejig that. It all just takes time.
Maybe I'll be able to post a bone or two soon.
I keep @BFCElvis in the loop on developments as they occur.
My personal secretary trying to keep my life balanced and on schedule, seen here looking up at my monitor trying to work out the differences between a StuG III (mid) and StuG III (late).

Apologies for reviving a dead thread, but I found this essay disputing and refuting many of the claims in that video with detailed sources and references. Here is the original post, which is split into 5 parts and here is the entire essay in one place.

It's a long read, about 30,000 words, but it is very detailed and does seem to show that the original video contained quite a number of misconceptions even when it tried to debunk other misconceptions. I think it's an interesting read for anyone interested in WW2 tanks, even outside of the context of it being a rebuttal to the video as the essay draws upon the analysis of multiple respected historians such as Zaloga, Michulec, Glantz and others, which @Erwin might be interested in.

Let's calm down a little, shall we?
This unpleasant "discussion" made me dig out a test I did some time ago. I've been doing data analysis for basically all my professional life, so I always suffer a bit when reading these threads. So, as we've been discussing on page one or so, anecdotal evidence ("here look at this battle, spotting is broken!!!!") is meaningless. But also doing "experiments" is only as good as the experiment itself plus the evaluation afterwards. First of all, if you do experiments, control the variables! Eliminate everything you are not directly interested in. If you want to look at spotting, do it on a flat surface and make both opponents hold fire. Because, as I often see, if you measure time until first shot, or kill, you are skewing the spotting process. Next, don't look at averages or medians alone. Look at distributions. And don't eliminate outliers. My text book about statistical data analysis said that, eliminating outliers, although done often, should really only be done if you know what you are doing, e.g. when you know that your outlier is actually some measurement error and not some rare event.
So, here's what I did:
I put an M60 TTS and a bog standard T72 (the exact models aren't relevant for the method) on a flat map with paved ground, roughly 2 km apart. I set both vehicles to hold fire. I then measured the time it took for each tank to first get a partial contact and then a full contact.
Here is the raw data:
t72 = [84, 17, 78, 4, 174, 65, 77, 321, 289, 444, 31, 3, 290, 2, 40, 120, 40, 159, 57, 69, 15, 54, 80, 95, 19, 58,
       23, 672, 154, 154, 17, 14, 342, 12, 386, 43, 84, 12, 378, 123, 30, 44, 240, 311, 110, 2, 68, 181, 137]
t72_id = [7, 21, 7,28, 7, 35, 14, 0, 56, 0, 35, 0, 7, 70, 42, 7, 35, 35, 0, 49, 0, 7, 0, 0, 0, 63, 28, 7, 14, 0,
          7, 7, 7, 49, 7, 21, 14, 21, 14, 0, 7, 14, 28, 0, 14, 7, 28, 56, 77]
m60 = [89, 68, 41, 38, 71, 10, 73, 0, 20, 9, 4, 55, 91, 34, 31, 8, 14, 116, 64, 4, 18, 63, 116, 38, 3, 18, 71, 132,
       39, 73, 43, 73, 116, 210, 207, 36, 180, 27, 88, 48, 102, 3, 52, 77, 176, 22, 18, 80, 24]
m60_id = [7, 7, 7, 0, 14, 14, 0, 14, 14, 7, 14, 0, 7, 14, 35, 14, 7, 0, 7, 14, 7, 0, 14, 7, 7, 7, 14, 35, 7, 0, 7, 0,
          0, 7, 0, 7, 14, 14, 7, 7, 7, 0, 7, 0, 0, 7, 21, 7, 7]
Times are in seconds, the entry t72 is time until partial contact for the T72 trying to spot the M60, the one with  "_id" is the difference between partial and full contact. The same for m60. And in order to get the distributions I made histograms with 30s bins for plots 1 and 3 and 7s for plot 2.



So, what do we see here? Well, first of all, I should have taken at least ten times the data or make make larger bins. I didn't have the patience for the former and doing the latter would mean that we don't see much of a distribution. 😉 Anyway, from the raw data we see: time until partial contact can be any number, time to ID (which is what I call time to go from partial to full contact) is always a multiple of 7.
The histograms tell us the following: Although it is not possible to get the exact distribution, this is definitely not something symmetrical where average or media are easy to interpret. If you look at the bins with the highest counts, those are at low times. That means, players will usually see that their T72 or M60 are often quick to spot their target. Nothing to complain about or make a forum "rant". But for both (!) tanks it is quite possible that it takes several minutes - more likely for the T72 but also the M60 TTS had an event with over 3.5 minutes. The time until partial contact is consistent (no more, no less) with an exponential decay which you would expect when counting the number of dice rolls necessary to roll a specific number - only that the M60 TTS rolls with a D6, while the T72 rolls a D20, so to speak.
Now, is spotting "broken" or not? For me, this is really not a meaningful thing to say. Because by "broken" people usually mean "takes too long" without saying what "too long" is and why. With the above distributions, it is possible to never spot the target. Right? Wrong? Broken? This is a game/simulation and as any such thing, at least if you want it to run in reasonable time on a consumer machine, it is simpler than real life and abstracted. A meaningful discussion would be "Is this spotting model adequate? Could CM do better by applying model XYZ, instead?". I'm not sure if the long tails (what some call "outliers") are working as intended (although I find @The_Capt analogy with the barrel quite convincing) or if it is a model that is just designed to get the "center", the common situations, right, accepting that every now and then it produces something odd. But getting the tails of an exponentially decaying distribution right is brutally difficult - in fact, come to think of it, my whole PhD thesis was about modelling the tails of a similar distribution correctly.
 

Wartime production T-34s having similar optics to a T-72 made in peacetime 39 years later? 
Nah. 
Also think hard - who are the additional two crew members? Lmfao they dont have optics do they?

A screenshot from a scenario by @kevinkin
FR40B FIREFIGHT AT ANNELLES
We are preparing the SILVER PACK for release in a week or so...

I am sure there will be some little issues spotted. So, what the heck. Here it is now!
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/l7vq1tkou7jdx0f/AAAzqnXwNR9eXvqQk2SDdt_Pa?dl=0
@Bootie If you want to please place it up on CMMODSIV at your convenience sir. Thank you for your too often unsung service to the CM community. Use the below as the description.
FR40A BRONZE LEVEL INSTRUCTIONS
April 2023
WELCOME!
This is the CMFI France 1940 Mod "Bronze Level Release"!
THANKS!
My thanks to all those who helped make this possible: 
Damian45, Falaise, JM Stuff, kevinkin, Juju, sbobovyc. Others not listed.
Some mods displayed may be very old mods and I do not know who made them.
Mods such as CMBN buildings and such.
EASY INSTRUCTIONS!
1. Put scenarios in your CMFI scenario folder.
They have a prefix of FR40A.
2. Plop the mod folder in your CMFI z folder. 
If you have tons of extra German helmets in your z from other mods...you shoud temporarily pull them out. 
Or you will see an odd camo helmet on the France 1940 Germans. That would be sad.
3. Look at the "Nice to Haves" folder and make some decisions.
a. Do you want a different splash screen while playing the mod? Pick mine or Damian's. 
b. Plop the music in your z if you want a different tune as it loads.
c. The loading screens by Damian45 are awesome. I recommend them.
d. The String file changes the names of stuff. It is not dangerous.
But just know it should be removed out of z if you do other stuff.
Standard disclaimer. Use at your own risk. 
All materials are licensed work of BFC. 
I did this for free.
Best regards,
kohlenklau
 

In a week shy of 2 months, I and about 3 other guys have created a France 1940 mod of damn decent results. 
Call me an a-hole, but I think a few heads should hang in shame!
Get it here
 

Part 2 continued...
we will take a break for lunch...

Hi Steve,
Can you please give me some small amount of support to my CMFI France 1940 Mod?
1. Can I get the "raw" texture photoshop files (with layers) for a few vehicles? Removing camo patterns is very difficult.
2. Can someone help me with a few of my vehicle mdr hacks? I just have a few little problems that an insider might clear up.
A few man-hours of somebody's time.
Thanks and I hope you say yes.
Phil

To put your mind at ease....YES ! they have.
If they did not like the game why then would they ask for more.

Hold fire command button, and open fire (although Clear Target is basically that) setting an ambush with sectors of fire being very short is a hassle - a simple hold fire would be much easier.
Minefield instead of a single mine. As a way to place the mines, could be a 50m long box with mines inside it at some density to match doctrine. Perhaps even with frat fences built in. Would make defense much easier to set up.
Hescoe barrier walls, T walls, concertina wire in modern games.
Squads and Fireteam moving in formations rather than gaggling everywhere. Would need some commands for file, wedge, vee, online.
Set a sector of fire or targeting *at* a waypoint that doesn't take effect until you reach the waypoint.
Instead of having to always select the highest BN level formation and back off from there- build up from a smaller unit. You can already add single vehicles and small teams into a formation - if there was a command to add a HQ level (which ties into the chain of command flow) we would be able to build up a task org/ORBAT
Or, perhaps have an option for what level of formation to show. So instead of BN level, click a button for CO and only see the company type formations.
Resupply vehicles. Make acquire something that can happen automatically at a resupply vehicle/unit. Move a unit there and soldiers will reload up to max combat load without having to go through the acquire command.
Medical ambulances. An ability for any unit to move wounded (to a casualty collection point) then have ambulances that can pick them up, and if they make an exit point the wounded have much higher chance of not dieing.
Wreckers- allow recovery of vehicles. If evaced out to a exit point (or hooked up at mission end) the vehicle can be repaired for next mission in a campaign.(less important than medics given the shorter timeframe of the battles)
Terrain objective that is the opposite of occupy. Gain points for making sure enemy never reaches it
If this then that branching in AI plans!!!
Export the elevations from the map as a greyscale bmp or some other elevation matrix file
Export the map as an image file- without us having to take screenshots
In scenario editor- be able to edit text right there instead of export, open in another editor, save, re import. For the one line text- like scenario title - be able to move cursor around without backspacing and deleting them retyping.
For Deploy in the scenario editor- a way to save/set the camera start position instead of just being the last position when the deploy was ended. This would help with going back in and making edits without having to go back and make sure camera was moved back to desired start position every time you make a tweak or check something.
Clean up the AI plans and what happens "in" a step. Could probably move some things to be clearer what is set at start of step (perhaps move to prior step for entry) and what happens at end of step.
Know how we can combine teams back into squads - what about something like that for platoon, or even company level?? But not like the squad combine that actually makes them group together- more just a UI thing. Default now is that icons are shown at "squad" (and team/crew) level. If we bump it up to platoon level then one icon would be shown over the center of each platoon, and clicking it selects the whole platoon (like double click the HQ) so you can easily give commands to the whole unit. Maybe even bump up a level for Company icons. Just a way to declutter the UI and early in a battle when moving whole platoons around it could ease things. Simple button/keypress to move the display level up and down the chain of command.
 

Well - graphics that looks 10-15 year old and still run very slow on modern hardware does not help the sales - and more sales brings more features and modules to the ones that have no problem with the 2006 looks. And with a modern graphics engine you can spend your CPU cycles on spotting etc, with super optimized capabilities built into the engine. But more importantly focusing your time on logic that is not built into UE like unit behavior's under fire. And what to do if you spotted something... Or the tank nearby did with a bad radio. Some small caliber munition ricochets off your turret. Close the hatch or not?
So, for a small team you can focus on what sets you aside from the competition instead of the work needed to do a game engine. And the Battlefront games are truly unique in their value delivery as a tactical battlefield simulation. Even really big studios have stopped building their own game engines as the time spent to build your own is not worth it.
Just imagine something that looks and works like WARNO - but plays like CM2...

Yes, they'll do it but they will start with spring of 1918 and work backwards, they promise! The first basegame would have Germans and US Army. No winter terrain. The next module would have British and the next module would take it to 11/11/18.
 

This isn't unique to game software. 😀 
I just retired from a 38 year career in radiation shielding design. We use a mix of our own and commercial software. But even using commercial software, the incredibly detailed model of the submarine shielding is the key, and it takes a huge effort to make that model. Likewise, our home grown software has developed and evolved over decades to where it is today. Many times (always, really) shoehorning a new capability into this software ends up being MUCH more involved than we first expected. And we've been the recipients of the "It should be easy to add XYZ. Why is your estimate so high?" comments.  Yeah, sure. We'll see.  
I can sympathize with Steve on this.
Dave

ORIGIN OF THE PART TIME NOTION:
Not sure about anything anybody else has said but I had it in a post in this thread of harmony and love a few pages back as basically for Steve to please confirm or deny the idea that Charles worked elsewhere at another software company and only was available to Steve/BFC at reduced man-days per year.
Now Steve has fully answered that notion. Steve says that Charles not only gives 1 man-year to BFC but cranks it out and gives almost 1.5-2 man-years of coding effort on a 12 month basis.
I was actually hoping that Steve would say Charles WAS just limited availability. It would explain or justify more in my small brain of why we hear limited development time.
Maybe he is off writing code for exploding turrets and drones dropping 60mm mortar rounds? It took a while to get flamethrowers so maybe he struggles for months or a year to achieve these new features? Is he also the animation guy? I don't think so. I thought that the 3D modelling all or mostly all came from Casio Lima Studios down in Brazil.
The one thing about the constant feud-war-romance between BFC and the forumite customers is that BFC has all the actual sales data of course and knows at a gut level what time and effort a module takes. The Early War crowd has no such central core to approach BFC with a proposal backed by signatures like a petition and indeed can't really have one. BilH had a great pitch AND an awesome angle as a veteran of that Cold War era AND had a team AND did a bunch of legwork AND Steve was in a good mood SO something magical happened for CMCW fans. The funny thing you hear over in that CMCW forum is how it is selling way better than they ever predicted. I can only say that the same low predicted sales but higher actual sales could be true for a CM Early War.
HAVE A GREAT DAY CHARLES! Remember to get up from the keyboard every hour and do some stretches.