Renaud

Bunkers are indeed pretty tough (I consider them more like pillboxes, since they aren't part of the terrain, but that's another subject). I put a fusilier battalion (less 1 company) into about 24 bunker/shelters (2 concrete, the rest wood) in heavy woods and pounded them with a pre-plotted maximum/heavy barrage from 3 105 and 3 155 batteries. At the end of the bombardment (all batteries empty) the company had suffered not quite 50% casualties, 2 bunkers were burning and 4-5 had been totally destroyed by penetrating top hits. Many other casualties were caused by shrapnel through the firing slits (I guess). A lot of additional men were lightly wounded as well. The problem was that the entire company was shaken, nervous or broken and very fragile after that, though they were able to exit the bunkers and man a trench system 100 meters away quickly enough (but not under fire). One oddity was that I placed 3 bunkers close together, and somehow 1 of them got walled off on both the door and firing slit side, even though it wasn't abutting another bunker on those sides. So that team couldn't exit the bunker or even see out of it. On the plus side they suffered no casualties, hehe. A footnote is that heavy woods apparently provides extra protection to bunkers by increasing airbursts (which never caused any casualties - i watched every turn) and preventing the groundbursts which shot shrapnel through the firing slits or worse got a top penetration and wiped out everyone inside.

Absolutely...the 'bunkers' in CMBN are like the bunkers in cmx1. I don't consider these to be bunkers, they are stand-alone 'pillboxes' really. I consider a 'bunker' to be a reinforced shelter partially or completely embedded in the surrounding terrain (at least 2 sides, usually 3, possibly all 4 plus top if completely underground). This could be logs or concrete (just like the current 'bunker/pillboxes'). I'm hoping that by CM:eastfront(?) there will be true 'bunkers' modeled, but I kinda doubt it. I have tested them against artillery fire and they do provide very good protection there, though you will eventually get some wounds and casualties through the firing slits (you can't make the men inside a bunker 'hide', so they will stupidly remain standing in front of the firing slit). So they are good holdout positions if you need to hide from an artillery prep, then deploy to your firing positions after the prep lifts. Unfortunately they are expensive, like the cost of 2 good squads for the germans. They are basically unavailable to allies in QB's if you have rarity turned on.

+1...I noticed this on the demo scenario and created a thread (now submerged beneath tons of threads). This is the #1 thing for me right now. I loved CMBB/AK onboard mortar spotting by HQ's, used it all the time. Right now it's super slow...still worthwhile sometimes, just super slow.

Trp's are your friend. Time then becomes 1-2 minutes or so. Any decent company defensive position that's had at least a few hours preparation should have registered at least a few trps. To minimize the spotting time, use dedicated fo's or the most sr. Commander you have on the field. Also the experience of the spotter is important, possibly also the experience of the called battery.

Ah, good point. I have a bias against these shows generally, as the quality can be pretty bad. I just hear the worst now. I failed to keep watching past the balloon shoot. The tree chopping was silly but fun. 450 .303 rounds to chop down a 50 ft tall pine tree...

That's very interesting. One can only conclude that it would be even harder in combat conditions with the enemy firing back at you, etc. I've pretty much reached the conclusion that heavy mg's are modeled about right. It's the morale effect of losses and general suppression that are a bit underwhelming perhaps. As JasonC and others have suggested, green is probably more 'regular' than regular in cm...this applied to cmx1 as well. Edit: one thing I found humorous about this part of the video was the claim by the narrator that directly in front of the advancing troops was the best position to fire from (rather than enfilade fire which is obviously more deadly). Rubbish like that in popular shows is not surprising, but I do have respect for the actual operator of the weapon however. Edit 2: oh and I think 'motivation' may be the key attribute here...I think it's wonderful how 'experience' and 'motivation' have been separated into distinct attributes. I think i remember asking for this 10 years ago or so. Now we can model crack troops who have seen one too many battles, or green troops too ignorant to understand the dangers and thus highly motivated to follow your murderous orders...

Good catch...something to watch out for... If you split off a US SCOUT team, the scout team gets smoke. The squad leader team will also get smoke, so you can potentially have 2 teams with smoke from a single squad. Presumably there are 2 smoke grenades in the squad loadout, so the scout team is (quite sensibly) given 1 of them. Very handy when scouting.

With the exception of the mosin-nagant (7.62x54) FMJ steel core, the weapons fired were very low foot pounds of power. The mosin-nagant blew both bricks up, and would have sprayed the interior of the building with fragments were it not for the drywall+waterjug backing (drywall was not around in Normal houses i'm pretty sure). A house typically targeted in CMBN will get showered with hundreds if not thousands of rounds even more powerful (7.92, .30...not to mention .50 cal). This would just totally destroy a modern residential building. Cinderblock probably wouldn't fare much better. Of course, old Norman buildings wouldn't be built with modern (crappy) fired-clay residential bricks, but probably with more substantial fieldstone and timbers. But I feel confident in saying that only the strongest fieldstone buildings are going to protect from ww2 full caliber rounds. The 3rd and 4th columns are most important (foot pounds of energy): MV (fps) V @ 200 yds ME (ft lb) E @ 200 yds 7.62x54R (150 SP) 2700 2193 2428 1602 .30-06 Spfd. (150 Sp) 2910 2342 2820 1827 7x57 Mauser (150 Sp) 2690 2278 2411 1729 and the coup de grace...(!!!)...better be behind a lot of rock/stone/timber if this is coming your way: .50 BMG (750 SpBT) 2750 2578 12592 11070 Pistols just don't measure up: .357 Mag. (158 FP) 1830 1138 1175 454 Even the .223 (5.56) is wimpy compared to ww2 full bore rifles...nowhere near the same class when you talk about ability to penetrate stone/brick/wood walls: .223 Rem. (55 Sp) 3240 2304 1282 648

I guess I'll throw in my impression now that I've been at it for a few weeks: this is the best game I've played (wargame or otherwise) since cmx1. In other words, the best gaming in 10 years. I'll be filling up that steelbox with any and all modules (future games as well)...you got me with this one, BF.

Drool...I would be happy with just the map! Obviously some of us are really looking forward to the east. I know I am. Even in cmx1 a 3x3k map was a huge task. I probably spent 20 hours creating a single 3x2k map in cmx1 from a 1:50k topo map...I can't imagine it in cmx2. I'm just now learning how to create a simple slope.

The smell kinda reminds you of home don't it?...yea it does kinda...

Agreed, using an excessive number of troops to hold an objective or in the point assault force is a common new guy mistake. Defense involves covering approaches rather than sitting on objectives. Attacks succeed or fail based on good recon and available support and base of fire. Throwing additional men at an objective without the above simply results in more casualties. The tutorial gives you a lot of time so you can concentrate on honing your tactics. Change the Germans to regulars and reduce the time to 30 minutes and it's a different game.

Assault is good if you use only short hops...if over 100m or so, it gets clunky. Assault is a good crutch for the ai too, which cannot split their squads. For RT play, especially hth, it's probably critical.

Pauses can only be associated with move type orders...you could issue a bunch of really short moves with pauses at each waypoint and different targets at each waypoint. A little clunky for sure.

Nice writeup user38. My approach was very similar to yours. This was the first CMBN scenario I played (from the demo). I've played hundreds (ok probably 1000+) of CMx1 games, but what helped me the most was creating and playing a big wwII style bocage-simulation in 1.3 patched CMSF (red-vs-red, 'allied' side equipped with T55's). It'd been several years since I played CMSF, and those games were totally unlike ww2. Key tactics: 1. broke off 3 scout teams. Used those to identify pretty much every enemy position. Then moved up shermans and support teams to destroy each position. Rinse and repeat. 2. smashing every identified, or even suspected, enemy position BEFORE moving the bulk of infantry up was the key to minimizing casualties. I'll bet most of my ammo (from tanks and infantry) was used on unidentified targets. You have a lot of time and a lot of ammo, use it. Use those .50's on the shermans too! No .50 should have any ammo left at end of scenario. It's worth the risk to your TC's. 3. the 60mm took out the AT gun, which foolishly fired a few rounds at an HQ target well before I moved any tanks into LOS, with indirect point fire. 4. Don't listen to the briefing, the farmhouse is a key position: take it first. I used smoke to cross the footbridge with no casualties, after waxing everything in LOS with 3 tanks on the left. 5. Up the road is a good tactic, but carefully...I actually attacked with left, center (road) and right groups. The road group came up 2nd, the right group last, and both only after the farmhouse was complete under control. Moving 2 tanks carefully up the road (after AT gun is gone) is key, as it provides flank fire and direct support as you jump hedgerows along the right side of map. Keep your infantry right up with the tanks though, or possibly one of those shrecks will get you. As it was I had them all suppressed or ko'd before tank comes into view. 6. The enemy mortars were late/inaccurate and caused 0 casualties, as I blew away their FO and everything else at the back of the map with mass sherman fire. As other's have said, don't hang around after you've pummelled them, move up or risk getting hit by the mortars (which will x2 or x3 your casualties right away). Result was total victory with 7 kia and 11 wia, 25 minutes used. No tanks hit or damaged in any way. I risked my TC's but didn't lose any. I could have suffered a few less kia, if I had respected the center regular HMG team a little more. But otherwise you have to suffer some infantry casualties, or else you might lose some tanks. Later I created a good multi-group/multiorder allied AI and played germans against that...much more difficult. I was able to limit my loss to a tactical defeat by holding the farmhouse and putting flanking fire on everything that went by for most of the game. US suffered 40% casualties but kept on coming. The 5 shermans are used very well by the AI and win the day for allies. I could only manage to kill 3 of them (all with the 75ATG, under 100 meter flanking fire and keyholed through trees). The AI attack is much improved over cmx1, both due to improved tacai and the available groups/orders programming.

Apparently a full marine squad (12-13) could be crammed into 'defrocked priests' (main gun remove) used in the pacific. The extra loaders would be handy to perform all the ammo lugging/sorting/arranging/fusing, before and during battle. I'm not sure that all 7 would actually be inside the M7 at once...the most i've seen inside the vehicle in photos of the M7 in a firing position is 5.

look on the bright side...you will never carry a balance and thus never pay interest or fees, so the card is a convenience paid for through the interest payments of those who do carry balances!

Don't forget torsion bar suspension made it all the way to the Abrams!

Considering the thousands of hours of play testing that have gone into this thing, I'll want to play a few dozen games before venturing comments to the effect that this or that is right or wrong. Right now im only up to my 6th game. A lot of depth and experience built into this baby, you have to respect that first.

I was playing elite if that matters. Now that I know I would have simply put the mortar crew into the hedge so they could direct fire. More risky though. Also I like the options of area and linear fire...really useful. Would be nice if these were available when direct firing as well. Since I'm engaged in wishful thinking, a cool option would be land lines...wire has some unique advantages over wireless of the time. Possibly wire could be an available 'fortification' for purchase by defenders and placed like a trp...any defender hq in that action spot would get a time reduction when calling fire. To simulate vulnerability of wire, it could be destroyed by a lucky HE round.

That really makes me want to go out and buy the matrox and 3 monitors, hehe.

+ 1 to this...you should be able to place fortifications into one side of a hedgerow. This should give an additional, if not 100% cumulative, protection from explosions and direct fire coming from the berm side of the hedge (as well as providing the normal 360 degree protection). A fortified hedgerow provided more protection than an unfortified hedgerow, from all types of fire. The entrenchments in a hedgerow should not be any easier to spot than troops in a hedgerow, possibly even harder to spot than unfortified troops - the germans expertly concealed this type of position. It might look ugly graphically, but the foxholes already look ugly. Maybe something that can be added over the course future modules or games. After all, CMBO was pretty basic compared to the later CMBB and CMAK.

I had a 4th platoon weapons platoon leader at a hedgerow with the 4th platoon 60mm mortar 8m away on the same side of the hedgerow. The 4th platoon leader called indirect fire from the adjacent mortar, 60meter linear target. The delay was 4 minutes. I later adjusted to a point target on the 3rd or 4th minute, which added 1 minute adjustment time (to clobber an AT gun spotted in the intervening time). 4 minutes delay seems rather long when the spotting and firing units are 8m apart in eye and voice contact. 1 minute seems more reasonable. This was road to berlin by the way - regular units. The spotting platoon leader was taking some desultory rifle fire from 250 meters or so, but not pinned. The mortar team of course was unsuppressed and out of LOS, well behind the hedgerow. Thoughts?

+1 for armor cover arcs. Lack thereof could be a big problem with tank+infantry fights...no way to prevent my tank from firing on that scout team just prior to enemy tanks appearing. The idea of setting stunted cover arcs, or just hiding, is OK unless you are trying to cover a keyhole approach - human players will know they can either lead with a scout team to make you uncover, or move fast to clear the covered area before end of round. In WEGO this is a problem, not so much in a small RT vs. AI game, since I can pause anytime and give orders (I hate playing RT, I end up pausing the game every 5-10 seconds and micromanaging everything...games take 2x as long to finish). I also ko'd the road-to-berlin AT gun easily, before moving any armor into view, because they stupidly opened up on infantry in a hedgerow from long range and were spotted...mortar then made short work of it. This significantly reduces the threat of AI AT guns. Perhaps this behavior can be adjusted through AI plan tweaking. Somehow I spotted a '?' there even before the AT gun opened fire, and subsequently was able to hose the area with MG/small arms. Could the recon by fire have caused the AT gun to break cover and open fire at a stupid target?

Hmmm...is there any way to remove a squads AT weapons to better simulate ww2 squads? T55s look ok as a tank to use.