Combat Mission unrealistic

[WineCape]

...Playing unbalanced battles, or even better, battles, you simply don't know, how strong the enemy is, forces you to a much more realistical spreading of the forces. Then you have to hold back mobile reserves, because the enemy could come around from somewhere with big and nasty surprises.

Did someone just described a non-ladder tournament by the name of ROW?

[pawter]

After drawing a posting from BFC (see bottom of page 8) I'm content. Steve is at least aware of the problem I posit. I take the technical limitations as he represents them.

There is no way to resolve this problem. Pity. It diminishes the realism of a game I still enjoy, yet recognise doesn't mirror reality in this aspect.

[MikeyD]

Excuse me while I wipe a single tear from my eye.

[sburke]

After drawing a posting from BFC (see bottom of page 8) I'm content. Steve is at least aware of the problem I posit. I take the technical limitations as he represents them.

There is no way to resolve this problem. Pity. It diminishes the realism of a game I still enjoy, yet recognise doesn't mirror reality in this aspect.

Honestly I am still kind of confused about how you figure the reality part into this. Gameplay I understand, but you are the arbiter of everything one side does. How is it any more realistic to see everything any of your units see as opposed to just assuming you have a decent map of the area beforehand. Granted in reality you aren't always going to have that map, but never would you know the terrain just because some lowly private ammo bearer happened to look over the hill while stopping to take a leak. Unless of course it were tube guy. There just is no way to do a game like this at anything more than a first person shooter level that could realistically include knowledge of the map as FOW.

[LJFHutch]

I have an idea for the OP! No really a fully legitimate idea:

1. Go get ArmA2 + OA

2. Download the WW2 Normandy mod

3. Recruit 128+ hardcore clan members

4. Print a map of the area

5. Grab a pencil

6. Set up a battle in which you and another player are the commanders, then subordinates.

7. Sit in a bush and direct forces using only radio and your map

[ASL Veteran]

After drawing a posting from BFC (see bottom of page 8) I'm content. Steve is at least aware of the problem I posit. I take the technical limitations as he represents them.

There is no way to resolve this problem. Pity. It diminishes the realism of a game I still enjoy, yet recognise doesn't mirror reality in this aspect.

I'll give you that it may diminish realism to a certain extent - although probably not as much as you are maintaining. Commanders do have maps, binos, recon elements, and they make detailed orders so the pixeltruppen aren't just going out in the dark. The troops will know generally that a building is somewhere 'over there' or that an orchard should be 'by that creek'. They may not know with precision what the terrain looks like, but they shouldn't be totally and completely surprised by what they find for the most part.

Regarding how perfect terrain knowledge makes you a superior player - well I hate to break it to you but that's going to cut both ways bud. If you are playing a superior opponent then that person is going to be able to use the terrain to their advantage just as well or better than you will. So depending upon the quality of your opponent you may actually be worse off from your opponent having perfect terrain knowledge rather than you being the one doing all the stomping.

I'll even do you one better though - if you are playing quick battles the terrain may be known, but your opponents forces are not. In scenarios you can have perfect knowledge of both the terrain and the opposing force. You know what? I find that it makes very little difference in the outcome because the superior player will generally win anyway. I played a guy back in CMBB where the scenario essentially had equal forces on both sides - Finns vs Russians where the Finns were basically equipped identical to the Russians. We both had perfect map knowledge and perfect knowledge of each other's OB since it was identical. The victory conditions were also identical for each side. Guess what? It wasn't even close - I annihilated him. All that knowledge gave him no advantage whatsoever because my tactics were superior.

[13]

We used to joke about making the most realistic game ever.

You spend 2 hours in a dark bradley crew compartment, shaking violently, while you hear 25mm go off. Finally, two horns, ramp goes down, sunlight burns your retinas, and you pile out, hopefully not falling on your face.

'OMG THIS DOESN'T LOOK LIKE THE SAND TABLE', you think. 'Oh, wait. That must be K4, and there's building 23. Ok. Yeah, I got this.' As you set up the outer cordon. About a minute passes.

'Yep. The brad's killed everything. There's a goat. It's hot.' During the course of the game, you receive fire twice, but you never can figure out from where. Now off to burn some poo.

Aaaaand so on. Battlefront, feel free to use that as a new IP.

-EDIT-For A-stan, 'Yep. The '64's killed everything. There's a mountain. It's cold.'

[rangerj]

How would they not know the terrain in WW2? These guys poured over maps and sandtable terrain models endlessly so that they knew where things were. The problem is enemy troop disposition and placement - which the game replicates well. Intel would have an idea of what the opfor had and approximations of where, but those obviously aren't static. I don't see much of a lack of realism...btw, it is just a game though. Maybe if you're too awesome for the game you should play something else?

Yes, I know, that was a jerk thing to say, but you have to admit, then tone of his post is deserving of this response.

[Mord]

Speaking of which, kudos to you if you enjoy games where your opponent has a huge advantage. But I would venture to guess you're in the minority on that, and I don't mean among ladder players. I can see it having some appeal if you are playing a historical scenario where you can judge performance against history, but otherwise I don't see the point of it.

You can mark me down in in this category. Not every game...but I do enjoy it...mostly because being the underdog is fun and seeing how much you can take out with inferior weapons is interesting. And unless you are completely mashed into the ground I tend not to feel bad over that kind of loss. Fun is the main factor for me.

Great thing about CM is there's room for every type of player, from WEGO to RT, to balanced to unbalanced, from Ladder dudes to single player guys....there's no right way to play. Each his own.

Mord.

[RogCBrand]

You can mark me down in in this category. Not every game...but I do enjoy it...mostly because being the underdog is fun and seeing how much you can take out with inferior weapons is interesting. And unless you are completely mashed into the ground I tend not to feel bad over that kind of loss. Fun is the main factor for me.

Great thing about CM is there's room for every type of player, from WEGO to RT, to balanced to unbalanced, from Ladder dudes to single player guys....there's no right way to play. Each his own.

Mord.

I feel the same- some of my favorite CM games, I've lost, but my badly wounded forces managed to pull off some wonderful surprises before they were finally thrashed! Not that there's any chance of anything close to it, but I'd hate to win every game- it would get boring!

[pawter]

OK OK I am maybe not the single best player I’ve ever met. Merely competent which point is what I tried to start from: I’ve learned how to use this system effectively.

Consistently people are posting comments regarding the cause I posit ie: perfect advanced map knowledge (maybe this is not the cause; several posts have suggested others). Repeatedly they fail to address the ahistoric (sp?) way it manifests itself.

THE OVERCONCENTRATION OF ATTACKING FORCE.

This is not a discretionary judgment call as regards what maps, aerial recon (you must be joking?), trustworthy & brave local knowledge etc is realistic. It is a black and white assessment of: do the battles produced by this game system accord with recorded history? If not then we are all refining our aptitude for a computer game. As meaningful as Total Annihilation or Doom or whatever young people play on their Iphones or suchlike disintermediated post-post-modern devices theseadays.

[Waycool]

The over concentration of force is totally a player controlled item in gaming. If frontage distances are maintained you could certainly keep fair distances for maneuvering of platoons/troops. Defining an axis of advance and defense are certainly in this realm and in this regard terrain avenue of approaches, masking, flanking etc. all can be observed. The players can ramp up the level of rigid game play or simply play it as a game. In the end once you breech the defenses you want to exploit the gap with as much concentration of force feeding as much firepower to capture and hold ground as well as prepare for the sure to follow counterattack.

[Her Klink]

pawter, I think it would be great if you designed your own, more realistic, game. Then we would all be able to experience the pinnacle of wargaming realism.

[MajorJerkov]

THE OVERCONCENTRATION OF ATTACKING FORCE

Isnt this how battles are won in the real world? :confused:

[MrSpkr]

How would they not know the terrain in WW2? These guys poured over maps and sandtable terrain models endlessly so that they knew where things were.

At least, they did for the initiation of major battles -- like the Normandy landings and accompanying air drops -- presuming, of course, that you landed in the correct place and weren't miles off course -- and other set piece assaults. Much of the fighting in CMBN, however, is not representative of such situations. They might have maps, but the accuracy of the terrain was not always what you would want it to be. If it were, the Allies would have been more prepared to deal with bocage.

Steve

[Pak40]

Isnt this how battles are won in the real world? :confused:

Used to be. Now all you need is a 40 Billion dollar super tank and an A-10. Those two units alone could take out a battalion of armor.

[akd]

At least, they did for the initiation of major battles -- like the Normandy landings and accompanying air drops -- presuming, of course, that you landed in the correct place and weren't miles off course -- and other set piece assaults. Much of the fighting in CMBN, however, is not representative of such situations. They might have maps, but the accuracy of the terrain was not always what you would want it to be. If it were, the Allies would have been more prepared to deal with bocage.

Steve

They didn't fail to prepare because they didn't know of the existence or location of bocage. Both were evident in detail from photoreconnaissance. They simply failed to anticipate the difficulty associated with the terrain and focused almost all attention on the problems of the initial landings.

[LJFHutch]

As meaningful as Total Annihilation or Doom or whatever young people play on their Iphones or suchlike disintermediated post-post-modern devices theseadays.

How dare you dirty TA's name by including it in the same sentence as Doom!

As for how authentic the the battle outcomes are, I recreated 73 Easting a while back as well as I could with authentic forces, distances etc and it was within 90% accurate or so of the real casualties/results. CMA seems to work quite well also as a number of battles there ended with authentic results too.

I'm not sure if you answered this before but have you played CMx2 at all? Or recently?

[pawter]

LJFHutch: no I've not played CMx2. If it resolves this issue I will be pleased (though I infer from the other posts to this thread, insofar as they occasionally address the issue, it doesn't).

Your description of your experience of the "73 Easting" battle so closely matches the recorded results speaks directly to the query I pose. I am glad to read it: I may be wrong. I hope so.

I assume/hope that the creators of CM did a lot of reading of real life AARs and battalion histories etc. A lot more than I have ever done. And are not merely clever computer dweebs who have sucked us all into their virtual simulation, no more representative of the actual event than a John Wayne movie.

[Battlefront.com]

It is a black and white assessment of: do the battles produced by this game system accord with recorded history? If not then we are all refining our aptitude for a computer game.

No, it isn't "black and white". Binary thinking, on almost any subject, is usually a very bad way to go about things. And evaluating a wargame is no different. Here's why:

If you expect a wargame to faithfully reproduce a historical battle's end results, you completely don't understand how warfare works. It's a series of variables controlled by even more variables which, at the end of a period of time, produce a non-predictable end result. Change one variable and you can get an entirely different end result.

A wargame is also a series of variables controlled by variables. However, far fewer than in a real battle. For one, decision making in a battalion sized battle can be counted in the many hundreds, both on and off the battlefield. More importantly, the decision making processes of those individuals is influenced by factors which are extremely difficult (if not impossible) to simulate. Especially because the player is taking an important swath of variables and chucking them out the window because he controls the brains of hundreds of Human beings. We call this the Borg problem. CM takes more of a chunk out of the Borg than any other wargame out there, but there's only so much that can be done without cutting the player out of the loop.

So if you want to think of this as a black and white situation, I'll make give you the only answer that any wargame developer can ever give you... the game is as unrealistic a simulation of warfare as is Tic-Tac-Toe. Therefore, if that's the sort of mindset you approach Combat Mission with, be prepared to be extremely disappointed. Just as if you pray to God to get a billion Dollars, wake up tomorrow, hear your doorbell ring, then run to the door expecting to find a lottery commission rep with one of those oversized checks and a cameraman.

BTW, you apparently enjoyed the far less realistic CMx1 games, which had perfect map knowledge, so I'm kinda puzzled why you seem so dead set to have a bad time with CM:BN because of unrealistic expectations.

They didn't fail to prepare because they didn't know of the existence or location of bocage. Both were evident in detail from photoreconnaissance. They simply failed to anticipate the difficulty associated with the terrain and focused almost all attention on the problems of the initial landings.

You said it before I had a chance to And this gets to what some others have said here... knowing the terrain is a fairly minor part of winning a victory. Knowing HOW to use the terrain is the important thing. Obviously knowing what the terrain is helps figuring out what to do, but the point is that even if you have perfect knowledge of every stick and rock on the battlefield... you can get trounced despite having other odds in your favor.

Steve

[sburke]

Well said Steve.

Pawter there are also other ways of dealing with the issue of force concentration. Use the victory conditions to alter game play. Use bigger maps, smaller forces and distant objectives to force players to decide how split the forces at hand. Use different objectives for both sides forcing players to hold a force in reserve not knowing what the opponents goals might be. There are probably a lot of ways to alter the conditions such that just massing your forces using what you think is the best terrain just isn't going to get you where you need to be. I believe it has been noted before that good scenario design can probably handle what you preceive as problems with the game.

[user38]

One thing really confuses me here: the quest for realism.

My dad fought in WW2. He didn't really talk about it much, but as far as I can tell he didn't enjoy the experience.

A realistic wargame would be horrible. A game is a game and the point of a game is to have fun. Otherwise it is work.

If we want to talk about unrealistic it is probably more productive to talk about flanks. In these Combat Mission games the battlefield is a defined area. You can play on it in the secure knowledge that your flanks are completely secure: no one is coming at you from your left or the right flank and your opponent cannot move its forces beyond the boundaries of the defined battlefield. I am sure this leads to more gamey tactics than a perfect knowledge of the terrain. But what are you going to do. You can’t model a battlefield the size of Europe. And if you did you would never find the enemy and you would never have a fight (which is the whole point of the game).

The thing is, games are inherently unrealistic. It is not because the games are poorly designed. It is because a game that accurately models reality would be boring. And hard work. Games are art, and what simulation designers try to do is model the fun bits of reality so that the player can have an enjoyable experience. I myself have flown military jets in simulation. I’m sure if I dedicated several hundred hours of my life (and if any airforce was foolish enough to employ me) I could fly military jets in reality. But I wouldn’t want to play a game which makes me sit through 20 hours of class room lessons before they even let me sit in a cockpit.

Pawter, as far as I can tell what you are looking for is a game which prevents players from using “unrealistic” tactics. Maybe there is a deeper question here: why is it you consider an over concentration of force to be unrealistic. As MajorJerkov pointed out “Isn’t this how battles are won in the real world?”

When I was in the army I was taught to keep my distance from my squad mates. It wasn’t because bunching up would make the squad a less effective attacking force: it was because bunching up renders the squad more vulnerable to attack from mortars and grenades. In real life military commanders are cautious because real lives are at stake. Because it tears them apart when their soldiers die. Because they get court martialled if they screw up.

The real source of the “unrealism” you complain about is not an imperfectly modelled game: it is the fact that it is a game rather than real life. Gamers are never going to play a game as if it were real life because they don’t suffer the consequences of their bad decisions.

I imagine a victory for a real life commander is bitter sweet. I imagine that after a battle, a victorious real life commander does not so much savour the intellectual challenge as mourn the loss of the troops that, through his decisions, he condemned to death. Unless the commander is a sociopath I doubt he revels in the destruction of the enemy. I expect if he were sane and given a choice he would rather not have to fight at all.

Sun Tzu said (something like) the real art of a commander is to win a battle without fighting. And where’s the fun in that?

[LJFHutch]

A game is a game and the point of a game is to have fun. Otherwise it is work.

I have to disagree with that. Games don't need to be fun, in fact I think the whole "games must be fun" is detrimental to the medium as a whole. "Engaging" is more appropriate. The word "fun" for me paints a picture of a lighthearted game where you mess around for s**ts and giggles (even Call of Duty is probably a few levels above fun), Combat Mission doesn't really fit that category in my opinion, it's serious and requires concentration and determination.

As an extreme example would you say that 28 Days Later was "fun"?

Sorry, I'm probably being a little too pedantic

[RogCBrand]

I have to disagree with that. Games don't need to be fun, in fact I think the whole "games must be fun" is detrimental to the medium as a whole. "Engaging" is more appropriate. The word "fun" for me paints a picture of a lighthearted game where you mess around for s**ts and giggles (even Call of Duty is probably a few levels above fun), Combat Mission doesn't really fit that category in my opinion, it's serious and requires concentration and determination.

As an extreme example would you say that 28 Days Later was "fun"?

Sorry, I'm probably being a little too pedantic

Actually I think CM is a lot of fun, and "28 Days Later" too. But everyone has a different sense of humor- some people can laugh at things and get jokes, while there are some people who rarely if ever laugh and think every joke is stupid and that humor is beneath them. Or some people love very rare steaks while others can't eat them unless they're just this side of burnt. Often people will think their "taste" is correct and everyone else is wrong.

That can be a huge problem with a game, a movie or many other things- you're never going to make everyone happy because there will be plenty of people with completely opposite taste.

[dieseltaylor]

user 38. Good points.

I always try to play on huge maps so that players cannot rely on "safe" flanks. Players who like to concentrate forces can then worry about being shot in the side.

I note from the CMBN AaR films that artillery will now also punish concentrated forces more effectively than CM*1

One other advanatge of really big maps is that you can use movement and the terrain to make enemy positions untenable - so achieving victory with relatively little fighting is actually possible. I am not saying it happens often. More often it is by use of terrain cleverly a less expensive force may create problems for what in theory is a better more potent force.

An example would be getting an ATG or two on the reverse slope of a hill that actually denies the enemy use of of the only logical avenue of attack. Given woods or rough ground on the crest of the hill at ank heavy force would be bottled. Of course artillery, smoke etc. may be available to the enemy force but time is also a factor in games and this balancing of time, risk, reward, and what options are avialable are what make the CM games the great fun /challenge that they can be.

Incidentally on very large maps the time taken to travel from one side to the other let alone front to back does mean that pre-thinking what your plan is adds another layer of complexity. So even with a smaller force if it is more mobile,better directed, or favoured by terrain you can achieve success.

Smaller maps maximised the value of frontal armour and minimised the value of light vehicles like universal carriers and armoured cars which left a large amount of the games value unplayed.

Still each to his own.