Holman

Just a note for those interested: After many months of CMBB, I find that CMAK's "hidden" unit status line doesn't stand out enough for me. I also think the "rattled" dot in CMAK (being square) is too easy to miss. After days of work with photoshop and AutoCAD, as well as numerous consultations of original Wermacht and Stavka design plans, I have developed a solution: replace the CMAK .bmps with the ones from CMBB. It works better for me, anyway. The relevant .bmp files are 1050 and 1078.

We all know about BTS' excellent history of support and response to questions/problems like this one. I'm guessing that they're too busy at the moment to jump in. (Maybe they're finalizing patch 1.02??) As I've mentioned in my posts above, I suspect that all of this is more an engine limitation than a bug, and therefore is "working as designed."

On a larger scale, I think what is usually overlooked is the problem (even the existence) of civilians. What to do with them? I don't know.

Thank you! Yes, they're in Italy in September 43. You can get PIATs later, but they won't be Airborne teams. Now, can someone tell me offhand if the platoon TO&E changed between late 43 and late 44, aside from replacing AT guns with PIATs? 1943 airborne squads have one Bren. Did they get two later? <off to research!>

It seems that British Paras are even harder to find in CMAK than American Airborne! Can someone tell me when and where they are available? Also, are there any major differences between the TO&E for British Airborne in CMAK and the Red Devils at the time of Market-Garden? You can guess where this is going: I'm thinking of trying my hand at some Arnheim scenarios for CMAK. Thanks.

Just a quick note. Something from the CMBB manual: "Adjusted fire can STILL be inaccurate, though it is a lot more probably that it wil fall on the target than the first strike. So you need to watch the landing of the actual barrage to be able to re-adjust again if needed." (p.134) Some of our discussions above seem to assume that green-line adjustments with good LOS should always fall on-target. This snippet from the manual suggests that they shouldn't.

Treeburst and others, you're doing us a real service! Thanks for the hard work. We still need someone from BTS to tell us whether this is a fixable bug or (as I suspect) a limitation of the current engine. As for the micromanagement involved, I'm less interested than some in watching LOS all turn in order to maximize the number of rounds on target. CM is too much fun, even with its abstractions, for me to ruin my eyes watching for every spotting round! What I do is watch for the pattern of the main strike: when it's way off, I'll know it and adjust accordingly. My sense of WW2 artillery is that it was a sledgehammer and not a scalpel, and I'm willing to accept the occasional hiccup of an engine limitation as an approximation of all the things that made front-line infantry sometimes hate and fear their own side's artillery.

Redwolf, I notice that your rounds after adjustment are (while still off target) much closer to the intended target. This is consistent with a pattern I've noticed in my tests: adjustments might not be on-target precisely, but they're closer (and sometimes close enough for government work). Has anyone noticed whether this is the case more often than not? If so, it might be another instance of Working As Designed. Perhaps the (high) chance of adjusted fire still being off-target is the price you pay for adjusting a plot that (as far as the game is concerned) was blind at the beginning. Retargetting (blue line) with clear LOS will clear up the problem, but of course takes more time. Just wondering. If it's a bug, I definitely hope it will be fixed.

Oh, it does, I know. What I meant was that I'm glad that direct fire is only blocked for the duration of the smoke or dust, rather than for a whole turn even after it clears. *That* would be bad...

Treeburst, I'm glad that you figured this one out. You should be on the beta test team! I guess it's just one of those abstractions that we accept elsewhere, such as only giving new orders at precisely one-minute intervals. I'm just glad that the obstruction of LOS for direct fire doesn't work this way too.

I'm playing Devil's Advocate here: is there anything actually wrong (i.e. unrealistic) with this behavior? Is it actually a bug? Since CM processes turns in 1-minute chunks of time, perhaps the beginning of each minute/turn is the only time when the game checks to see if the FO can spot the target. (Maybe it's too processor-intensive for the game to check for good LOS each second?) If the FO can't see the target when the game checks for LOS at the start of the crucial turn, then the strike is considered to be a bad one until it is replotted. But might not this be a reasonable approximation of how WW2 spotting worked? Obviously this makes spotting and readjusting more work-intensive, since you might have to re-plot several times to bring rounds on target. But did real FOs have it any easier in WW2? Could they count on accurate strikes as often as we would be able to if this "bug" were squashed? I noted in my tests that adjusting fire (green line) brought the rounds closer to the target each time. I tended to run out of ammo before I could adjust more than twice, but I wonder if I might have brought the rounds onto the target accurately after three or four green-line adjustments. (This is something to test for.) Maybe the need to re-plot (blue line) "obscured LOS" artillery strikes instead of just adjusting them (green line) accurately reflects the workload of an FO who can't accurately report on the relation of the spotting rounds to his target. Another note: testing seemed to suggest that smaller-caliber FOs didn't experience the "bug" as larger-caliber FOs did. Since small caliber artillery is usually more local to the FO (being battalion-level rather than, say, Division-level), perhaps this represents the greater responsiveness of working with one's own unit's organic assets. ???

Interesting! Does this go for smoke, or just dust? If smoke does it too, does this consideration also apply to CMBB? I still wonder if all this may be a limitation of the engine as it stands, rather than a new and fixable bug.

I know of no summary such as you describe, but most scenario designers give plenty of information in the briefing that open up when you click on a scenario (the one you see before you choose a side). Also, there's a convention of putting the date in the scenario title, although not everyone sticks to it. (I hope that the next version of the CM engine allows a player to sort scenarios by date.)

Quick question: what does "FFE" stand for? Free-Flying Explosives?? No, really...

I've done another test, using exactly the same set-up as I outlined before, only this time I used 105mm arty spotters (3 min delay minimum) instead of the quicker 81mm mortar spotters. The results seem more consistent with the bug (if it is a bug) that has been described here. 1) Firing without dust, all is well. 2) Firing with dust between the FO and the target, rounds go way off. 3) When the dust clears, retargeting with the same FO (green line) still has rounds landing way off target. I noticed, however, that the subsequent (green line) shoots were all closer to the target than the first shoot. There's still a possibility that things are working as they should. Is it perhaps intended that a shoot that has been way off in the first volley will still be off (although less so) with a green line adjustment? Maybe this is to model the fact that completely retargeting (blue line) is bound to be more accurate than adjusting an initially inaccurate shoot. But that doesn't quite seem right. I would imagine that (in real life) the bad shoots would function as a whole series of spotting rounds off of which the FO is walking the shoot. Still, the lesson is that, in the desert at least, an FO should completely retarget (blue line) whenever dust has thrown off the shoot. I'm still hoping that BTS will weigh in here. [ March 26, 2004, 05:22 PM: Message edited by: Martyr ]

I've just done a test of my own, and my results don't match what's been posted here. My test: I made a flat, very dry, arid rocks map on which I placed two Priests and three 81mm Forward Observers. I tried various permutations of targetting the FOs on a bunker (facing away) at about 500m range. I used the Priests as area fire to set up dust clouds right in the LOS of the FOs at various times in the targetting cycle. All FO fire was done one at a time so I wouldn't confuse one guy's fire with another's. 1) When I used the Priests to raise dust that blocked the FO's line of sight *before* he targeted the bunker, the FO's rounds landed far away. In other words, it was blind fire pure and simple, just as if smoke or terrain had made LOS impossible. 2) When I targeted the bunker with clear LOS and *then* had the Priests block the FO's LOS with dust during the waiting period, the FO's fire landed in a correctly targetted pattern centered on the target. In other words, blocking the LOS during the waiting period seemed not to throw off the targetting. Spotting rounds fell and the FO used these to get his rounds on target even if he couldn't get LOS to target at that moment. (i.e. I did not see the bug that people are talking about here.) 3) When I raised dust, targetted blind through it, and then let the dust fade *before* the spotting rounds landed, the spotting rounds worked and the FO's rounds were on target. 4) Just to check, I changed the map to wet ground and got all the same results using smoke rounds instead of dust. 5) I repeated all of this at least three times. Not an exhaustive test, to be sure, but consistent. The upshot of all this is that dust only threw the FO's aiming off when it blocked LOS to an extent that made it blind fire from the beginning (just as smoke always has). I didn't get any of the weird effects described in this thread, such as retargeting being inaccurate. Dust seems to be working just as smoke always has. I saw nothing of the bug we're discussing. Did I do something wrong in my test? [ March 25, 2004, 11:51 PM: Message edited by: Martyr ]

I'm hoping that someone from BTS will weigh in here. If true, this is a bug that needs urgent attention.

I don't think it should work that way at the CM scale, Blow2. Spotting a dust cloud two miles away gives you the idea that a unit is over there, but I can't see how it would add accuracy to an FO's strike. The dust won't make the coordinates he has already given any more accurate.

Question (probably naive): Isn't it the case that artillery can go off-target even when the target is spotted cleanly by the FO? I recall having in happen in CMBB (i.e. no dust clouds). Retargeting *usually* brings the rounds closer, but there's still a chance of being off. I imagine it depends on the experience and state of the spotter. Have you ruled this factor out in these dust tests?

Thanks all!

Hi all, Would someone let me know where in the bmp list the user interface begins? (Specifically, I'm going to try replacing CMAK's subdued "hiding" bar with the more visible one from CMBB. I'm also going to replace the CMAK "rattled" square with CMBB's circle. I find it easier to see the latter at a glance.) Thanks!

They're not. "Recon Squad" just refers to a particular TO&E. Of course, a scenario designer can give recon squads more experience to reflect specialization (and they should usually have a leader with excellent stealth bonuses).

Panzerman says: But that's not it. The engine has changed enough (new movement commands, new ballistic routines, covered arcs, etc.) that we want to be able to do the European theater with CMAK too. Considering that CMx2 is at least a couple of years off, the thought of playing Normandy, Mortain, the Siegfried Line, Arnheim, the Bulge, etc. in CMAK is pretty attractive. If the inclusion of the few more necessary vehicles (ported from CMBB and CMAK) is feasible, I hope that BTS will consider it. [ March 23, 2004, 08:15 AM: Message edited by: Martyr ]

I've searched and searched, but I can't find a thread telling me where to get a chart (excel perhaps?) listing the availability dates of all units in CMAK. Yet I feel certain that I've seen a reference to someone doing this. Would someone help? Thanks!

On the other hand, it has never before been the case that an older game in the series could supply models to a newer game. (There was no need for an Achilles or M-10 in CMBB, after all.) It all depends on how much work is involved in making the older models available...