Peterk

Actually...a little after it's ready. Takes time to shrinkwrap.

Game looks great. Eyebrows and expectations go up. Goes to SC section of website to see what's happening there. SC Forum looks like it's home to a bunch of aliens who are speaking some sort of weird variant of English I'd need to take lessons to learn. Is it just me??? The CM cesspool seems warm and inviting in comparison.

Hmmm...I would argue that the number one AI problem in CM is that when defending and a flag is lost, even if victory is still atainable by the AI depsite the loss, it will compromise its defenses on the other flags it holds to try and regain the one it lost. Have a feeling that is more what lucero had in mind.

..and I'm NOT looking forward to doing the maps for that one! I thought Stalingrad would be IT for me too, but I changed my mind recently. I can't help feeling that a huge map of only rubble/buildings will get kind of boring/gloomy/depressing for days and days on end. Exactly the same sort of thing the real soldiers forced to fight there complained about. A small/short one however maybe at the entrance to the city or the suburbs might be kind of fun. I think we're all going to get overwhelmed just at the sense of space there will be on those maps and being able to do stuff we never could before because of it. If you want to see what I'm talking about, create a random 2km x 2km map and stick two companies of infantry on it. They're almost swallowed up by the terrain.

Just trying to turn some of this lurking into constructive conversation. What specific actual campaign or what type of situation are people looking forward to the most? Are people planning to play mostly against the AI, against a single human player, or multiple human opponents? Just curious.

Just wondering if Leland is still around and whether v1.12 did the trick for everyone? I'm having a massive amount of trouble getting 2km by 2km maps going. It's related to not waiting long enough when the compass buttons are hit. 1km by 1km takes under 2 mninutes on my computer but 2km by 2km takes about 90 minutes and the maps are unusable. Off to try the "export as operation" trick to see if it makes a difference.

Doesn't padlocking keep the unit in position until they are fired on? Thought that it did. CMBB needs something similar to the ASL No Move counter to keep defenders defending.

Padlocking would work even with 4 flags onboard. On a normal defense mission padlock 75% of the AI forces, on an assault defense mission padlock 90%. If reinforcements come in on a flank, fine they will attack - and it's not too far from actual German doctrine of immediate counterattacks. So that way you still get good defense around the flags with just a touch of offensive activity (patrols?). Forget about CMC; this is a feature which would be great in normal CMBB as well against the AI IMHO.

The solution in my eyes for most of the AI limitations is not to have any unposessed flags on the map for the AI to attempt to capture on defensive missions. That and/or padlock most of them in place so they don't abandon defenses. Trying to prompt the AI to run off map is another can of worms altogether. Have no idea if it's doable.

Based on my attempts to sim. Red Barricades in CMBB, the AI does not react at all to the points handicap. It just wants flags. All of them. Easy enough to test. Set up a small map with the computer AI on defense. Give it a huge bonus so the attacker (you) can't possibly win the game. Now stick two small victory locations in the attacker's setup area. I'm pretty sure the AI will go for the flags.

Yeah I was thinking the same thing. I've seen MG's wipe out entire running squads almost instantly...not at this range mind you.

You can't think of CMBB in ASL terms. The HQ most definitely provides an advantage. The second they are out of command, they are more likely to break when fire comes in, even if there is no additional bonus due to the quality of the leader. I've seen this over and over in my games. Looked at the replay. The key to your win was getting the positive spot on turn 12 which is nice and early. The runs are dicey. It's a nice way to get completely chewed up by the MG. But it seems to have worked here because the guy on the right got close enough to the crater before hitting dirt. BTW, it's a 426.

Guys..there's a little dip in the ground way back if I remember correctly where you can spread out, out of the Stug's LOS. Separate before you start to move forward!!! Handling the infantry is pretty annoying in this one. I try to use them as bait.

Well it would basically be the Red Barricades style of OOB management from Advanced Squad Leader campaign games. There's limited quantities of certain types of forces available and you have to decide what to bring on map. It liberates you from trying to be 100% historical and different "purchase" strategies can lead to very different games. But I don't know if it makes sense for CMC since the maps will be much bigger. It might make more sense just to have everything on board and have the player move what he wants to the hot-spots.

By hiding aren't you minimizing your chance of a spot? It means those guys have their head in the dirt and they're not even trying to spot. It looks like you were depending on your moving guys to get the positive identification.

CC'ed to Michael Moore. Coming soon to a big screen near you.

Might have been just lucky. You should do it again to prove your mastery of the situation.

Very good question. I also hope that the OOB can be heavily customised by the user. The designer should still be able to determine WHAT is available and in how much quantity, but would be great if players could decide what it is that they want to rush to the front.

...especially when you have an idea for a campaign you want to try but you don't have your CM maps ready yet. Yes it'll be handy. I have a feeling map making is what's going to take the longest.

I'm playing the ASL version of Red Barricades by e-mail, and also by using solitaire rules to practice... http://thewargamespot.blogspot.com/ ...but I have also played 2 Red Barricade style long campaigns using my own rules and scenario file using CMBB. They might still be around here somewhere in the Scenario section of the board. The CMBB version worked well but lacked a little bit of Stalingradesque chrome that the ASL rules have (fortified buildings, mortars on rooftops). I was the first playtester (I think) of Little Stalingrad and yes it is a fun operation. There was/is a gamey method of pushing the front line back without fighting too much that hurt it a little though when I played it back in CMBO days. So when is this CMC thing going public anyways (taps fingers impatiently on desk)

Not a grog either, but I think the common practice was to send pairs out on patrol to find enemy positions. And that would have happened before the CM mission starts. This would be for cases where the front line is fairly static at start and the enemy is entrenched right in front of you. Sharpshooter as scout has a high probability of not working. He can get killed before you get an approximate spot. Might work in a forest where there's no line-of-sight, but if there's many places where the sharpshooter can be hit from, you might not get any useful info.

I think it's largely academic anyways. What owner of CMC is going to be able to resist jumping into CMBB to play things out? I _do_ plan on using the auto-resolve to quickly get a good general feel for things I'll work on though. And I'm hoping that that alone leads to something that's playable and fun, even if it may not be perfectly balanced per-se right off the bat. ======================================== Mike, do a search on Red Barricades in the Strategy And Tactics section of Warfare HQ. Lots of good Red Barricades strategies there. Little typo up above...it's the Armored Blitz and not the halftrack rush. I don't think people try it too often any more but you still have to defend against it just in case. Are you planning on playing RB, or just reading up? I've been playing it solo for a bit and just started a PBEM of it. Quite intense.

True that auto-resolve will not know much about the actual terrain or about the players intentions (maybe other than basic stance). The question is...is something unusual happening in some CMBB battles enough to undo a campaign design and make a campaign unbalanced? I don't know if you play ASL but there's a nice analogy in the Red Barricades campaign. Tons of weird extreme strategies have been devised by players over the 20 or so years that this game has been around and they even have names like famous chess openings (Halftrack Rush, the ELR game, etc., etc.) . The designer probably (almost definitely) did not think of all or any of them. And they cetrtainly weren't tested, since they came to light after the game was released. ..and Red Barricades is still considerred to be extremely challenging and a well balanced contest...because equally inventive defenders have come up with effective counter strategies which have also become well known. Just because players come up with something unexpected that the designer did not test explicitly does not necessarily mean there's going to be a problem, if there's enough flexibility built into the campaign from the start and if the campaign is long enough. By the way, I would hope that the auto-resolve is "chaotic" enough to show most of the results you listed above - infiltration, more movement than fighting, fortifications/bad weather stopping an assault cold are fairly "normal" occurences in my eyes. CMC can maybe use unit stances to determine probability of most of those so it's not totally random.

<quote>In ASL I can see the entire map. I know exactly where your units aren't.</quote> Yes and no. HIP and lots of dummies create doubt. Honestly sometimes (most times even) in CM there's too much fog. I'm playing a RB scenario in ASL right now. There's a couple of houses and rubble locations close to the front line that I know are unoccupied. In CM I wouldn't know (I've played a Red Barricades campaign in CM too). But the thing is...if my guys have been sitting on the front line for most of the day looking accross the street...they SHOULD know more or less where the enemy is (and have some contacts on the map on turn 1) before they take their first step into the open. Pinpoint accuracy? I wouldn't call a 50% penalty on your firepower pinpoint accuracy.

But you've got all this in CM too. It's called a sound contact. And firing on a ? counter is pretty damn close to area fire on something in CM that you don't have an ID for yet. And seeing ? on the map at game start can be seen as the results of preliminary recon before the battle starts. It's not _that_ gamey and is actually kind of elegant. The one type of scenario where ASL shines compared to CM, IMHO, is when one player has to handle a fixed defense where not too much will be moving around. In CM, there might not be much to do if the set-up is sound; is ASL the defender still has to call the shots and is quite active. And as for playing against the AI - hate to say it but defending against the "AI" using solitaire ASL guidelines can result in a much better game than defending in CM against the AI. Different games each with their own strengths. It's kind of futile to compare them.