Los

I left there in 78- 82 myself. Cpt Vevon and 1SG Hipp ran B company (Which was renamed from Ground surveillance and had the sensor and radar guys.) CSM of the bn was McKinney, CO LTC Campbell. Good Ole Days! Yes that was the last barracks before the barren wasteland of XVIII Abn Corps. Ok returning to helicopter transports... Los

Hey 96b were you in 313th CEWI? (I was there for a while in early eighties as an 17M, B coy or Ground surveillance) Before that 1/505. Los

A quick point, since some here may think the DOD hides its casualties. If you subscribe to any of the service papers, (such as Army Times), all U.S. deaths are reported in there weekly, training or combat, all over the world including SOF. And its every service. So in the middle of the paper is a regular section, it has a picture of every KIA, what unit he was serving in, and a brief circumstance of their death (IED, small arms, flipped over a humvee on the base). So the information is released and made available by the DOD. In periods of heavy combat this can be a long piece, and every memorial day they rerelase a pic of every person killed that year. Also in the same article is how many troops are deployed to what theater and overall KIA/WIA/and MIA tallies for the whole operation. If you don't see it on CNN, that's the lazy crappy networks fault, not DOD. And the Army times is not a military controlled paper it privately owned, anyone can subscribe to it, and frankly its one of the bets places to find info on the Army, good and bad, including what CO is banging what Sergeant majors wife, or who is getting fire from battalion command for being a toxic leader, or what weapon system has been breaking etc. SO they get the info and report it without problem, then I suppose so too can your local paper or your national news outlet. Just because someone doesn't deliver your information to you on your chaise long on a silver platter doesn't mean its not available, or its a conspiracy, it just means your media sources suck.

I can feel myself getting sick on June 11th....

Still playing and designing scenarios, working on battle of Marjah right now:

BTW this kind of map planning is one of my favorite things to do,as much as the battles.

I always wanted to play this game in first person commander mode (anyone play Scourge of War Gettysburg using Headquarters in the Saddle mode?). The game could make a great Company commander simulator. Of course the single greatest thing you could do for multiplayer realism is make the game coop (Like SOW does) and then play it in realtime, so you have say a two or three guys each running a platoon or what not in realtime, locked to their player character. Not everyone's cup of tea, but if CM did this I'd marry it! Los

Your best bet is to simply take a screenshot of the map from above. It takes a little tweaking to get it right, using either fraps, printscreen or whatever, then alt-tab out and crop it to a tactical map to print or whatever. Five minutes work, I do it all the time. Then while you are at some boring meeting at work and people think you are diligently mapping out your department's fiscal strategy for the next quarter, you are actually laying out phase lines for the next day's assault. Los

I do believe that these very small amounts of time that designers give for scenarios (this goes for lots of wargames as well) contributes to feeling you have to play in WEGO and to micromanage everything. Even in these platoon battles you get sometimes 30 minutes. I like to make my scenarios a little longer and play them in RealTime so it's not a click fest. Not every tactical battle every fought in the history of mankind is the last half hour of little round top where the fate of the nation is at stake. Like I used to tell guys before rushing into a house to clear it: "Hey, you've got the whole rest of your life to get in there so do it right... " Los

BTW lest anyone think these AI issues are limited to Combat Mission, anyone who's every spent time in, say the infantry, is well aware of what its like to have an observer with your platoon OR to be an observer going with another unit. It actually doesn't matter how well trained or elite the unit being observed. When you spend time looking at them or being looked at under scrutiny, you find flaws (Even if they are perceived flaws vs what you think should be happening) and go WTF? Of course the guys being observed go, "Tactics are like assholes, everybody has one" That's before you takie into account that under various conditions humans are apt to not the right thing at the right times. Los

MIkeyD really gives the best advice in his two posts. You know what I do? I try most of the time to play the game in real time using less than a company. (I dont have the time or patience to spend four hours fighting a half hour battle, that's what ASL is for! don't sit there and watch each minute from every angle and then try to lay out the best path that insulates me from trouble in every situation. In Realtime with no time to screw around and under time pressure I give simple yet effective orders and let the chips fall as they do. If the scenario has been developed correctly the AI on the other side returns a reasonable result and play experience. Los

If you are looking for Napoleonic, Norbsoftdev's Scourge of War: Waterloo is due out the beginning of June. Los

Might as well go right to Arma3 I'm sure there is a demo of that out.

Yes, your basic APDSFS armor piercing discarding sabot FIN STABILIZED....

Bottom line training is perishable and requires constant upkeep. Not signing a Status of forces agreement and pulling out completely for several years did NOT HELP the IA. Until a culture of continuous training , introspection and improvement takes hold in an army.,any training you give a unit is as good as that unit stays together, then when everyone transfers out or gets out of the army and you fall below a critical mass of trained individuals the units readiness declines. You can train reasonably proficient infantry quickly, logistical and support forces,...longer. I it take a lot longer to inculcate an ethos of continuous development and improvement in any force. And frankly, through large amounts of personal experience in these matters, I have observed that the general ethos of arabs works against them at every step in these matters. I know we are not supposed to bring up national differences here in combat mission land, but if you've spent any time over there you know what I'm saying. Los

Of course the obvious answer is look down like one line in this sub-forum and see that Keime is taking care of business with his doznes of excellent mods. Los

Why not just rotate your special overlay in google earth to match the editor, much easier.

Yeah don't feel bad about bringing it up. Anything brought up around here typically gets pounced upon by senior members, but as the years go by many features have been added to the game as the team get to them. I think Quintus hit it nicely: "I prefer to think of it from my own perspective as a customer. It's a feature I'd like to see." Exactly! Los

Idle browsing on the CMBS mods and scenarios folder is your friend...

We played a large battle among three of us (all coop against the AI) last year using CMBN. It was a lot of fun but does go kind of slow since the file passes to everyone people before you are ready to hit the red button and have the turn go. In reality only two of us were commanding actual units on the map, the third player was the battalion commander and just age us orders. Our battle was two hours and we were pretty diligent about updates and it went about 6 weeks. You can speed things up in coop at least by running through multiple turns by one guy when little is happening. This requires two key factors. 1 Players have given orders to units and let everyone know their intent if something happens: 2. Absence of control freak players that have to look at every little meter of ground on every replay and people who are comfortable with letting the occasional turn go by. This works best during movement to contact and not in full on combat. Los

Has someone ever created abandoned parachutes as flavor items? Los

Wehrmacht casualties in Poland were more along the lines of 20k Kia/Mia and 30k wia.. Still immense for one month of operations. Certainly there are many interesting actions to explore at the CM level. Los

Dear <deity> please cure Battlefront's allergy towards 1939-1941.

You do get Snow in CMFI!

Amizaur beat me to the punch, the time between lasing and shooting in a tank (Russian or English or American or German is less than a second.) Los