George MC

The Ukrainian Hind destroyed a truck that had gotten through with my AGS blocking thr exit out of ammo . thanks guys ! Lol.. Probably a double agent

spoilers
Lovely map, setting and mission, it really looks and feels believable. So many details and on a map small enough to not ruin my frame rate completely with all the objects.
The sniper team at the far left end of the map was really a pain for me, I wasted so much time and ammo on their location just for him to poke out again and again to kill the poor guy who is now supposed to do the buddy aiding to the medic before him. That bastard took atleast 5 of my men out of the fight for good and wounded several - while still being alive at the end of the game, in the same spot. I'm not sure why my BMP-2s and BTR-70s could not convince him to leave his little position - in my experience the volume of lead going his way and exploding around him would've pressed every non fanatic into crawl back a few tiles.
The air support wasn't helping at all and actually counter productive - killed more Ukrs than Russians and I even had to cancel them in the end because they started shooting ATGMs at my convoy, luckily a tree ate it.
I had more luck with the river, one got stuck for a moment. I lost just a single BTR-70 during the mission - he took an RPG to the front after he got out of the water and close to the road where he was supposed to provide overwatch for my Inf clearing the building. Although I had a lot of overwatch covering the BTR they failed to spot the squad inside the building (had Infantry just across the road from the building and they got not a single vague sound marker or anything that could've warned me - blind and deaf idiots ), they repaid the deed greatly though.
Best scenario I've played in any of the CM titles. 

Yeah I played this last week. Lovely mission!
 
I didn't have much luck with Hinds either. I had to cancel one mission because the Hind was obviously shooting missiles at my BTRs....and missing.
 
Also without spoiling much, I have to say, this mission had me use the UAZ driver in creative and slightly sadistic ways   Even after his ride was kaput, he continued to be very useful for my effort. Best UAZ driver ever!

Hands down this is the best Cmx2 scenario ever !

Realistic setting
Beautiful Map
Perfect size
Friendy fire from Hind's
RPG's from everywhere
Trucks getting stuck in the ford
30mm HEI rounds hammering suspected enemy positions
Enemy AGS-30 positions i could not locate till the very end

WOW !

Arent all campaign maps available as QB maps in some way or another? They should be if not.

Will wait for patch and new version and give it a spin. Thanks for all your great work for CM-games

Keep in mind that in the next patch US Excalibur rounds will have their precision slightly downgraded.

SPOILERS***************************
 
 
Just finished this one, and even on elite is was way too easy. And that was my first major tank battle in a modern era CM-game so I expected to fall flat on my face. Maybe I got lucky. The first UAV spot was an SPAA that was taken out by precision arty. That let my UAVs and Apaches roam free. And it was really simple to pick off target after target with precision arty (too much of it?). And they remained stationary all the same. The tanks that made it to face me, quickly got shot to pieces or their "lasing" made my tanks retreat to safety. The few shots on target were repelled by APS. All in all I lost two Bradleys and two Abrams to immobilization (despite dry ground conditions). That's about it. Then I started getting large reinforcements so I expected a major counter attack, but then all of a sudden I got a total victory with 33 minutes left.
 
So, in all, the scenario was a bit of a disappointment for lack of challenge. The only really troublesome event was (something I really liked) when the AI tried to flank me already after 10 minutes. The map is great, and with some alterations to the difficulty, it would warrant a replay.

Maybe this is something for the scenario designers to consider in the future...
 
I have had simular experience with other missions...maybe not to such a degree bit still...
 
- Waiting for precision arty to hit...HIT !, waiting for precision arty to hit...HIT !
 
 
As scenario designers we might have to think about how many STATIC targets we have in a scenario and what weapons the player has at his disposal.
 
When the player has precision arty avaliable maybe fewer veichles should be completally STATIC (AI-Groups allowing)...They only need to move a short distance every now and again to ruin some of the precision strikes.
 
One would think that in RL if one side suspects that the enemy might have this kind of ammunition avaliable....They would not stay STATIC for very long....

That reflects my experience with the scenario.  Started with defining the battlefield and fixing the enemy.  Worked what contacts I had over with precision rounds and Apaches. Defeated several minor armor thrusts.
 
Noted more armor building up further back in the map.  Snaked my forces into positions to observe.  Apaches worked over area where possible tank contacts were noted.  Engaged in long range battle (2000 to 3000 metres) with Russian armor. 
 
Blunted attack.  My reinforcements came in.  Slowly moved forward and engaged enemy as they appeared, taking the major middle objective.  Game ends with Total Victory for me.  Map at ends showed 90% of Russian armored vehicles were destroyed.
 
Okay, it wasn't the Battle of Kursk with both sides madly rushing at each other but the battle unfolded as I wanted it to.  At no time did I feel that I didn't have a grip on the situation and I controlled the tempo of the battle the entire game.  
 
Yeah, it was slow unfolding battle but I have seen longer ones watching US forces in Iraq in real life (like the one in which an US mech infantry company took 3 hours to move and secure three buildings that were 1200 metres distance.  Most of that time was waiting for air support and artillery to be allocated and work the area over.

So I just finished playing the scenario First Clash as the Americans vs the AI and I'd like to share some thoughts. The mission is to lead a tank heavy force a Russian spearhead. The map quite big and open with subtle undulations. I begin by slowly and cautiously moving the force forward and things go quite by the books at first. My dismounted infantry spots one or two enemy units, UAV + precision artillery or Javelin kills it off.
 
Things get pretty crazy fast though, suddenly it seems the whole Russian armoured forces have been amassed against advance. So I decide to sit tight and wait for reinforcements, while at the same time trying to kill off as many tanks as I can using air and artillery support.
 
Normally I expect, given the numbers of both friendly and enemy tanks on the map, this scenario to be one big tank duel-fest. However, the Apaches and precision artillery are so good that I never really got to use my huge tank force. The Apaches both expended their 16(?) hell-fire missiles, my UAV fired 2 more and I expended all precision artillery rounds on static targets. This means that most of the action happened on the other way of the map, about 3km from my position without my main force taking active part in the fight. Most of the scenario consisted of waiting for air or artillery support to arrive.
 
Things only got hairy twice when two platoons of enemy tanks rushed down my right flank. I finished the scenario with a very "passive" feel. I wonder what your experiences were on this?

I get a 'Fatal error - we should have had a valid file ID' page when I click on your link.

Thanks George.

This scenario was originally released as part of the CMBS game. Whilst the intent pre-release was to create an intro to modern armoured warfare it appears many players post release considered it too easy – mainly due to the strength of the US forces arty and air support. Whilst doctrinally correct it did make the scenario a bit easy for the US to win. In addition all US AFVs had APS. The preponderance of APS equipped armour did mean the M1s were pretty unstoppable.
 
 
This version tones down this. Overall the changes aim to make the scenario a more challenging proposition.
 
This scenario recreates a US company team attack against a Russian Forward Detachment of an armoured tactical group – the first contact between both sides ‘heavy’ forces. The map is a large one - around 4km x 4km although the OOB on each side is kept manageable at around reinforce company level.
 
Both sides have a fairly ‘typical’ OOB (organisation, units and vehicles) plus supporting arms (air assets, anti-aircraft assets and artillery) for the missions they have been tasked with. As such this scenario serves as a useful introduction to commanding a modern combined arms unit at the company level.
 
This scenario was originally designed to be played first and foremost from the perspective of the US side against the Russian AI. There is also a Blue AI Plan and potentially it is playable head to head (H2H) but has NOT been playtested for balance in this regard.
 
There are two distinct Russian AI plans and one US AI plan – thus allowing some level of re-playability.
 
You can grab the new version at the following HERE
 
There was an earlier thread discussing the stock version that was packaged with the game HERE. I'd appreciate any comments regarding the redux version are posted here - just to keep em separate please?

Oops my bad. It's working now. Cheers for the heads up guys

helloheywhatsnew, according to several polls we had over the past couple of years, the average age of the community is approximately 40 years. Also this:
 
 
is by far the most agressive and disrespectful comment anyone in this thread has made yet. It is disrespectful because it generally devalueates the opinions of all people older than you as crap and it incorrectly makes the generalized assumption that people older than you are incapable of keeping pace with technological developments. Furthermore you seem to confuse your own personal taste with knowledge, disproportionally even calling it "education" to tell people what you think they should like. I am genuinely sorry that you have MS, but trying to invoke pity in order to discourage people from stateing opinions that disagree with yours is quite a dishonourable and weak rethorical tactic.
 
 
 
Basically that is why i dont think it would be interesting (or, with other words, not worth the effort it would take to implement the feature). You can just take a look at the AI plans in the editor if you want to how it works and reacts. But watching a scripted AI fight itself is really just like c3k said it: two blind men with bulldozers fighting eachother.

Can it burke. Ain't nobody got time for your old man blather. Wiggum expects to get bugs looked at and fixed. He clearly means that he thinks the "ai" still is in red thunder configuration and still hasn't been changed in this iteration - maybe they are. Who knows. We are unable to look ourselves. His point is as valid as any of yours.

My initial thoughts...this movie will bite the big one.
 
I didn't bother to go see it in the theater.  I read about a dozen "professional" reviews, and literally hundreds of wargamers' and military history buffs' reviews on this and several other forums.  I knew it would suck--from all the hype it received.  I knew it would suck when I saw the trailers--from the grim seriousness of the actors' portrayals (and the actors' commenting on the making of the film. I knew it would suck because it is a Hollywood production with no doubt an anti-war message as big as the Goodyear blimp. I knew it probably would suck when my youngest son and his girlfriend said it was great and that I really should go see it. (He's never been interested in military history or wargaming, and is quite the pacifist, bless his heart.) And I knew it would suck when I read about the crossroads battle scene. I knew it would suck because in one way or another, every Oscar-bait Hollywood movie usually does.
 
Last week, when it became available on Pay-per-view, I figured I would give it a shot just so I could take the moral high ground when dissing it later (can't do that if you don't actually watch the movie).
 
I wish I had gotten over myself and seen it in the theater! I really, thoroughly enjoyed it.
 
LemuelG and slysniper hit the nail on the head, as far as I'm concerned.  The crew was surprising believable...2nd Armored, been in the war since North Africa, would tend to have an older crew, and with the ravages of war, they look close-enough to late 20's for me. (My Dad was 23-24 years old in the Pacific, and the pictures of him after hostilities ended on Saipan show a man somewhere between 30 and 40.) There in-fighting at the dinner table rings true to me, just like my extended family when we get together on the Holidays... someone is always bitching about /fighting with someone else--usually over politics--but woe to the outsider who tries to diss one of us.  I wonder about the forced execution scene, and how likely that type of thing would occur, but who knows. More importantly, the war-is-hell and we are gonna have to take it to the enemy with balls to the wall sentiment rang true to me.  Again, only going by my Dad's experience, his outfit had that attitude in spades in the Pacific.  can't imagine it would have been much different in Europe at the end..."let's kill as many of these bastards as possible, as quickly as possible, and get this damn thing over with. I want to just get home already." 
 
The overall dialogue was way above what I thought it would be.  Face it, SPR's dialogues was mostly hokey, corny and cliched as hell. And Matt Damon just plain sucked.  Band of Brothers and even The Pacific did a much better job in that department. And frankly, so did many of the great movies listed above (and I like or love them all).  To me SPR is only good in the first 20 minutes and the last battle scene.  And come on, both have WTF? moments--in the landing scene, a German in sandbag emplacement on the ridge gets shot, falls forward, and the whole emplacement just falls apart by the weight of his body. How the hell did it stand up to the pre-invasion bombardment, fer chrissakes??? And the last battle scene, unhistorical and relatively improbable to boot.  But regardless, both those battle scenes were excellent eye candy, and were so far ahead of any depiction of WWII combat than anything before it, who can not enjoy them?
 
Fury does that for armored combat, in spades!  (Battle of the Bulge, anyone?) Those freaking awesome AP ricochets were freaking awesome, the crews' teamwork was well done, and to be expected in a crew that survived that long together, and the tension and intensity of combat was well depicted and believable.
 
Note to sound modders...Oddball, Waclaw and AKD and anyone I missed...I hope you are thinking of lifting sounds from this movie.  There's a particularly good, close-up rrrrriiiiippppp-ing MG 42 in the crossroads battle, hint, hint. And did I mention those awesome AP ricochets?
 
And seriously, even if you didn't care for the movie, you gotta hand it to the set directors and costuming departments--everything just looked right, tanks, equipment, uniformsoy the sets, uniforms, etc., etc.  Those 41st Armored Infantry fellows looked like I would expect them to after just coming through a gruelling winter campaign in NE Europe.  (As an aside, I loved the armored company CO.  Well done.).  
 
So for me, grog factor, production and drama, as LemuelG categorized the movie elements, all worked for me in this movie.
 
That said, a lot of the tactics sucked, as they do in most war movies.  But even there, there is some saving grace.  The attack straight at the AT guns, as has been pointed out, was done to cover and pull out a trapped infantry platoon.  I really liked the tactic they used--uncovering the platoon, and having them get behind the tanks, but of course could be argued that they should have tried flanking the German line.  Who knows, maybe more enemy covering their flanks? And, apparently, Wardaddy did came at them from a flank, or at least not directly at them down the road which the ATG's had covered  (his comment to the infantry company CO).  
 
The Tiger scene was believable in that they were ambushed and then were backed up against a tree line, with only one recourse left...to charge forward and hope to get a flank shot.  Those trees looked pretty skinny, and should have been easy to retreat through  (but I assume there were heavy forest tiles underneath ).  The worst part was the Tiger's tactics.  It was in a covered position. If they wanted to get out from the smoke, then they should have reversed and gone left or right and sat there, blasting the 3 Shermies as they advanced. And was it supposed  to have come direct from the factory...no camo, unit markings, or anything?  In fact, the paint scheme looked like it came direct from Sicily. 
 
The crossroads battle was preposterous as executed, but their orders were to stop the SS battalion from getting to a supply column.  What ya gonna do?  A wiser course would have been to blast them with all guns blazing while they were in march column, set charges to blow the tank, and run like hell before the Germans regained their composure.  But it's a movie, and many others (SPR for example) suffer from the same type of unbelievability in parts as well. And for what it's worth, the actual number of German casualties depicted in that fight appears to be around 50-60, which if they had blasted them in column could probably be about right...just saying.  When I saw Pork Chop Hill as a wee lad in the theater, I remember thinking that practically the whole company was wiped out in the initial attack up the hill--how could they have gone on and captured and held it? (It was after all, basically a true story.) When watching it again years later, I counted the actual number of men depicted as being hit, which was only about 25--manageable under the circumstances, it would appear.   If you assume that the SS troops were likely green and yet fanatical, I can see their initial tactics actual being as depicted, and casualty numbers reasonable. I remember one story from A Bridge Too Far, and many from books about the Bulge, that relate green German infantry committed to similar disastrous frontal attacks.  Still, I have to agree with the detractors of the movie that it was just too much of a stretch. 
 
So, overall, I wanted to hate the movie before i saw it, and ended up truly, thoroughly enjoying it.  In fact, I purchased the full HD package off Netflix, and it is well worth it if you liked the movie.  I have watched the first two battle scenes (but not the last battle  ) about 8-9 times over the last week.  There are about 50 minutes of deleted footage, too. None are added battle scenes--well, there's an extended scene showing the plastering of the plaza area when the girl and her apartment block get blown up, that shows the armored infantry CO getting killed.  But there is an important 7 or so minutes of exposition when Wardaddy and Norman are shooting the **** sitting on top of the tank as they are headed to what will be their confrontation with the Tiger, in which Wardaddy reveals why he has taken a bit to Norman, wants to toughen him up, etc....has to do with Wardaddy's girlfriend and his younger brother...and it goes a long way toward explaining Wardaddy's motivations.  It is one scene that I think should have been included in the final cut.  
 
Anyway, I rambled more than I planned, but put me in the column that enjoyed the movie--really enjoyed it.  I have seen almost every known WWII movie in existence that I could get my hands on over the last 55 or so years, including many foreign language ones.  I own about 45 on DVD, last count (Belle and Blade video is an excellent source for all war movies of any era).  Many of them are overall better in either screenplay, or acting, or whatever, but this one will remain solidly near the top, despite my initial desire to hate it.
 
YMM (and it apparently does!) V

Yup I crap my pants every night as a lay awake stressing about this.

Yup I crap my pants every night as a lay awake stressing about this.

If someone panics are they not, by the very definition of the word acting irrationally and hence do stupid things without thought to the outcome?

Hi Rinaldi
Thanks for the video playthrough. I really enjoyed watching how someone plays this. Great fun to see how you went about it. Good effort by the way
 
Re the update - yeah the new patch did make changes to the TOE. If you have redone the scenario I'm happy to re-upload the revised version to the repository and update the scenario. Likewise if you get onto 'Huzzar!'. I'm pretty committed to doing some Black Sea stuff at the moment but if you've done the grunt work I'm happy to re-upload.
 
Feel free to drop me an email to george at coldclimbs dot com if you are up for that? 
 
Thanks again for the excellent video report.

Order 'fast' then your armour will drive at full speed - ignoring the 'laser' warnings - to their most likely, but glorious deaths. Works for me. 
 
On a more serious note - laser warnings are enemy units using lasers as part of their target acquisition - hence why your units become spooked by it. Next stop is something nasty in the crew compartment...
 
Ordering 'fast' will see your units move forward and ignore the 'laser' warnings but this means that whatever is lasing them can/could also kill them. When you know something is 'out there' lasing units you can go for the balls to the wall all out charge and hope you have enough to ID and kill whatever it is or you try IDing where the possible shooter is and see if you can have several AFVs move against it. It'll only be able to lase one of your AFVS and hopefully the other may get eyes on an engage.

Sorry but sadly Bil is toast. Those M1s will just roll in, shrug of any rpg shots and machine gun (iirc buildings might be preserve options) any Russian infantry sheltering in the buildings. Once Bil runs out of a/ T90s b/ anti tank assets nowt left to do but surrender. A company team with a plartoon of M1s and two platoons of BIFVs would have made for a more balanced challenge IMO.

I was just about to start a thread about this one too.  Played it yesterday and it's a great scenario, if you haven't given it a go yet I highly recommend it.  The map in particular is stunning, and I expect to be back for that alone.
 
I thought the time worked out pretty well; it definitely gave me one of my more memorable CM moments.  Some spoilers: