ASL Veteran

Either 'The Blitz' or 'A Few Good Men' would be good sites for finding opponents. I think they both have ladder games, but you can have casual games at both sites as well. If someone wants a ladder game they will usually specify that they want a ladder game when looking for an opponent.

SS executed Canadian troops at Ardenne Abbey on June 6 or 7 in 1944 and of course there was the little incident during the Battle of the Bulge. The title of my scenario 'Surrender Invites Death' comes from a quote by a Canadian officer who basically told his troops that surrendering to the SS amounted to an invitation to suffer a premature death at their hands. So yeah, the western Allies regarded SS troops as different than other troops, although probably not to the extent as was normal on the Eastern Front. Certainly not all SS were executed on sight, but it wouldn't be surprising for SS to be executed by Western Allied troops.

Fair enough. The size of the force makes the incident come off a little better, however Brad Pitt seems to feel that he can do what he did in the presence of soldiers he doesn't know without any fear of punishment and that implies that it is both common and consequence free throughout the entire US Army as a whole. If the infantry weren't in the scene then that would mitigate the institutional aspect of it for me. They could have done the same thing with just the tank crew and maybe an infantryman or two present and it would have gotten the point across. Adding the infantry platoon isn't necessary in the scene in my opinion and it is that aspect that made me stop watching the movie not the execution itself. Well, that and the thing with the women which I had trouble watching. You stack both of those together and I was like 'okay, I'm done - nothing of value to see here.'

I don't remember exactly how many guys were there, but I seem to recall Brad Pitt being in charge of a battlegroup or task force of some sort which is typically going to be about a battalion in size. So I'm accounting to what I would expect would be the size of the task force since there would be those standing in the immediate vicinity and then there would be others nearby out of the camera's view. If it was just two platoons in the entire task force then I think it would be a bit more palatable, but once again I think it was poorly done.

The problem is in the scale and who is present. What if Major Winters from Band of Brothers was in command of the infantry and Brad Pitt was doing his thing? How do you think Major Winters would react? I think he would react poorly. That's the thing - Brad Pitt doesn't know any of those infantry guys and yet he feels comfortable enough in those unfamiliar surroundings to force the new guy to execute a prisoner in front of everyone.

Yes, but in SPR the difference is in the scale. Captain Miller only has about a squad of men with him when these things take place. The Czech guys are what I would describe as 'heat of the moment' type of things. The radar site is the closest approximation to the AT gun in Fury but the scene in Fury has an entire battalion standing around. It is much easier to do something with just a squad of men around that you know and have fought with for years rather than an entire battalion of guys you don't even know. Presumably there might be one officer in a battalion who might think that maybe the guy has something of value to tell the S2 rather than simply putting a bullet in him. Brad Pitt doesn't know any of those infantrymen who he is in the task force with so how would he know if there were any Colonels or Captains who might not appreciate what he was doing? He would be taking a risk - perhaps a small one but a risk nevertheless that someone might make a big deal out of it. The group dynamic in SPR is done much better than the dynamic in Fury. Fury comes across as ham fisted and disrespectful. Yes, I also know that the scene was the vehicle to develop the new guy, but there are other ways of doing it.

The problem for me with the AT gun scene is not necessarily that prisoners were shot and killed by individual soldiers. I'm sure that happened. I'm sure American soldiers did it on occasion in the heat of the moment. Perhaps even fully controlled German prisoners may have been executed by American soldiers in instances where they weren't certain of being able to move them off to POW camps. Certainly in the Pacific so many Japanese soldiers were hiding grenades and other things that it was probably difficult to trust any Japanese soldier who was attempting to surrender since it was a rarity and when it did happen there was a high probability of being tricked. SS soldiers who surrendered or were captured would frequently act like arrogant jerks from what I have read and so I'm sure if someone was giving you attitude that it would be a lot easier to pull the trigger. The problem for me with that scene is this - prisoners have intelligence value. Units send patrols out to capture prisoners as their main objective so commanders know the value of prisoners. Brad Pitt is not the only officer present during this attack or the aftermath. Where was the infantry company commander? Was the infantry a battalion sized group? I don't remember. If so where was the infantry battalion commander? Where were all the other company commanders and platoon commanders? That's the problem for me. The scene appears to portray Brad Pitt executing a German soldier with the full cooperation of every single American soldier who happens to be standing around after the attack. That changes the execution portrayal from one of 'well that's just war and people do things that are unsavory' to one of 'well that's war and American soldiers institutionally executed enemy soldiers attempting to surrender." If Brad Pitt's character simply shot the guy and everyone else sort of looked around and thought - what just happened? Well that's one thing. That's not how the scene went as I remember it. The entire American task force was basically standing around watching with approval as Brad Pitt executes a German soldier. If the German soldier was in the SS then perhaps it would be a little more believable / understandable but because it is just a random dude who isn't a fanatic it makes no sense (at least I don't remember him as being in the SS - if he was then my opinion might change although I still probably wouldn't like it). Commanders understand the intelligence value that prisoners have and for Brad Pitt to go through that whole scene without a single officer from the other units present at least making an effort to talk him out of his execution during his long diatribe with the prisoner seems more like an attack on the US Army as an institution than the portrayal of a soldier who had been desensitized by war. After the scene with the women and the scene with the AT gun I basically couldn't watch it any more and had to turn it off. They had some stuff with shooting Germans attempting to surrender in Band of Brothers and there was some of that in Saving Private Ryan too and they manage to pull that off okay. This movie takes it to an extreme though.

A couple of points about when vehicles enter a new waypoint location. If the designer places a rectangular block of say - eight wide by four deep - then the vehicles will normally tend to distribute themselves evenly throughout the painted block. However, there are occasions when, for some unknown reason, the AI will attempt to place two or more vehicles onto the same block and there is absolutely nothing that the designer can do about it. This is most frustrating when you want the vehicles to unload troops at a specific waypoint. When this behavior occurs the first vehicle to arrive will occupy the spot and then the subsequent vehicle (usually it is only one other vehicle when this happens, although more than one can do this on rare occasions) will stop next to the location it wants to occupy. The vehicle that is attempting to enter the occupied location will then sort of .... move in place a bit and turn ever so slightly which prevents troops from unloading since the vehicle never fully 'stops'. It does this until the vehicles move to the next waypoint. Sometimes this can be a side effect of a waypoint that has been painted too small, although it can also happen with a waypoint of any size so when it does happen there really is nothing the designer can do about it other than keep repainting the waypoint until it doesn't happen during testing. I don't know for certain what is going on in the image, but it could either be the game or the designer. Once again, unless the designer chooses to join the thread or someone looks at the scenario file itself we won't know what's going on in this particular scenario. The different vehicle facings do suggest that either the waypoint is too small or the AI vehicles are attempting to occupy the same spot since they would normally all be facing the same direction (the next waypoint or a spotted enemy) Keep in mind that the when the designer puts in the AI plan he has no idea where the player will be with his forces at any given point in time. Triggers help some, but if the player does something completely unanticipated the AI will not react to what the player is doing since the designer is essentially creating a plan to fight an opponent while completely blind as to what the player is doing. Imagine fighting a scenario by laying out all your plans before the scenario starts and then not adjusting or altering anything no matter what happens during the course of the battle. That's how an AI plan is created.

Without knowing what the designer's intent was it is difficult to figure out why these vehicles are sitting where they are sitting. My guess from looking at them is that the designer probably didn't expect the player to have LOS to that location at this point in time in the scenario. I would also guess that perhaps they might be a reinforcement group that appears at that spot as opposed to somewhere near a map edge and that they are scheduled to move somewhere at some future point in time - either by trigger or by time. Judging from their facing one of two things is going on. Either, as a reinforcement group or as an initial force, the designer neglected to position and face them and it wasn't caught during testing (I don't know if this scenario came with the game or if it is additional community content) or this particular AI group's next waypoint is located in the direction that they are facing and they are waiting for a trigger or point in time before they proceed. If this waypoint is not their initial waypoint then AI troops will face in the direction of their next waypoint although that was somewhat recently changed and additional tools were added so that the designer could face vehicles and even have them use reverse. I haven't created anything in a while though so I don't remember exactly when those improvements were added.

I can't imagine a situation in 1945 where the Western Allies actually push Soviet forces back and drive on Warsaw. With the scale of the forces arrayed against each other for both sides the most likely outcome in my opinion, for several months, would be a sort of shifting stalemate until one side or the other wore down enough to make a difference. I doubt if the soldiers of either side would have had very much enthusiasm for fighting an entirely new war against a dangerous and veteran foe. I think most soldiers from both sides were probably ready to go home happy that they survived as long as they did.

The Soviets had a demonstrated advantage in the jet department as was shown in Korea, although the US adapted fairly quickly once they realized the disadvantage. Pershing / Super Pershing and T54 would be interesting.

The Chinese communists hadn't even defeated the Chinese nationalists on the mainland by the time the Japanese had been defeated.

Nobody said it would be easy, but the idea that the Soviet Air Force would be able to brush aside and manhandle a very large and experienced heavy bomber force is also ridiculous. B17s were also used on troop concentrations and I never mentioned nukes. It's entirely plausible that Soviet refineries in the Caucasus could be rendered unusable from the Middle East. Port facilities and shipping in the Black Sea and Baltic would be attacked by both sea and air. There is also a political angle to be considered since the Soviets were attempting to set up 'friendly' governments in the nations that they were occupying. Allied bombing raids would make the process of installing friendly governments a little more difficult to pull off once they declare they are part of the Soviet Bloc. How encouraging would it be for anti Soviet partisans when the Soviets can't seem to control the skies overhead? Medium bombers would destroy rail yards and attack roads, air fields, and rolling stock throughout Eastern Europe. Yeah, both sides would take heavy losses at first, but these raids would go on day after day, month after month and let's face it, the Soviet air force had zero experience fighting off massed bomber raids of the type that attacked Germany. When you consider the fact that the German air force was able to continue operating in the east in ways that were impossible in the west I think you are placing a very large discount on the capabilities of the Western Allies air forces if you think the Soviets would be able to gain and maintain air superiority. Soviet ground attack doctrine didn't even allow for attacks more than ten miles behind enemy lines until 1944 so they didn't even have much experience in gaining and maintaining air superiority deep over the enemy battle space. German ground troops could still move around on the eastern front in ways that would be unthinkable in the west during the same time frame. The Soviet air force was just not as capable or well trained as its Western Allied counterparts.

I would have liked to have seen the face of the first Soviet fighter group commander who had to scramble and defend Soviet territory or troop concentrations from 1000 B17s in box formation covered by hundreds or thousands of P51 and P47 fighters. You can't just ignore them because you would have no idea where they were headed. Certainly it would have been a new and exciting experience for Soviet fighter command. They would need to develop an entirely new set of tactics and operational procedures in order to deal with it. I suspect the Soviet Flak defenses would have been considerably lighter compared to what the US was dealing with over German cities as well.

Saying the Soviet Union defended 'us' is a bit of a stretch I think. They defended themselves and just happened to be fighting against the same opponent, but the Soviet Union wasn't too concerned about 'us' when the Germans were overrunning Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, France, Greece, and Yugoslavia. Good thing the Soviets sent the UK all that Lend Lease equipment during 'The Blitz'. Oh wait. Nobody knows how a conflict between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union would have gone, but the Western Allied Air Forces would have been difficult for the Soviets to deal with. I don't know how many fighter aircraft each side had available, but I don't think that the Soviet Union had anything close to the type of heavy bomber force that the Western Allies had. The Soviet air forces were probably not as tactically adept either. The Western Allied ground forces were smaller, no doubt, but the manpower reserves of the US had barely even been tapped yet and there were still several new divisions ready to ship by the time the war ended. There were also millions of US troops fighting in the Pacific who, once the Japanese surrendered, could have easily gone into the Soviet's Pacific coastal areas and the Soviets weren't going to be able to leave those areas undefended. US Air Force and Naval Air Force assets in the Pacific were substantial. The Western Allied ground forces were also much more mobile and mechanized than even the Soviet forces were by the time all those lend lease trucks made it to their motorized forces. It is difficult to imagine how mobile the Soviet forces would have remained once the Lend Lease faucet was turned off. Certainly after a few months of fighting the reduction in mobility would have become more and more noticeable. I don't think it would have been a cake walk for either side.

The jungle combat angle really is overdone by those who aren't interested in the theater. As pointed out the terrain was varied and not at all restricted to jungle fighting. There was also urban combat and there was some tank combat as well - especially in the retaking of Manila although tanks were used extensively in Burma too (mostly by the Japanese early on because the British didn't think tanks would be useful in that terrain. I am particularly interested in the fighting leading up to the capture of Singapore. There was plenty of fighting in China and of course there were the pre war battles with the Soviets. However, there are a lot of limitations with the fortifications as they currently exist in CM that makes the theater less appealing. No cave complexes for certain so that makes something like Iwo Jima difficult. There are also a lot of limitations with night fighting and that was the preferred time the Japanese liked to attack. Without a completely revamped game for night fighting (flares? Non reciprocal LOS, muzzle flashes, HMGs firing on fixed lines, etc.) a lot of the appeal is lost. I was reading about Khalkin Gol and the Japanese conducted a night tank attack against the Soviet defenses during a lightning storm in heavy rain in what was virtually a desert. Imagine driving your tanks around at night in a driving rain waiting for the next big lightning strike to light up the battlefield for a split second to spot the enemy.

Except that every scenario that ships with the game doesn't have the experience and motivation parameters that he says they do. Note that he stated that this 'issue' exists with every scenario since he has 'played them all'. All you have to do is load up Breaking the Line as the Germans and you can see that his assertion is suspect. My mistake - he said more than half. I remembered him as saying he had played them all but when I reread his post it appears he has either dialed that back or I misread it when he first posted it. I think he should have withheld judgement until he played them all.

I've made close to 100 scenarios for CM1 and I've made about 34 scenarios for CM2. None of those made for CM1 were included as part of any releases. I just say this so that we all know that I have 'extensive' experience with both editors. Without question creating a scenario in CM1 was easier to do than it is for CM2 and for very obvious reasons. This has nothing to do with the intended audience for the editor or any UI or design focus. I think the first thing that anyone who has made scenarios for both games will notice is the scale difference between the two games. A 2000 meter square map in CM2 is orders of magnitude 'bigger' looking than an identically sized map in CM1 when you go into the 3D view and look around. The obvious result of this difference in scale is that map making in CM2 takes, I would say probably roughly twice as long to do for a similar sized map as it would in CM1. Because of this scale difference there is a lot more 'stuff' that you need to add to the map in order to make it look 'full'. Not only do you have to add more 'stuff' to the map in general terms because of the scale difference you have to add even more 'stuff' to the map in order to make the map look like a real place since the player sees individual soldiers instead of just Mo Larry and Curly. This means fencing, flavor objects, walls, individual trees, mixed forests, different types of grass, and creeks. I didn't have to worry about any of that in CM1. I'm sure that anyone who has made an effort to translate a map from CM1 to CM2 would notice this. Map making is the first basic step of scenario creation and map making in CM2 is much more difficult to do simply because the terrain needs to be much more detailed than it had to be in CM1 and an equivalent map area between the two games is not similar in 3D view. Once you have conquered the new map in CM2 you now have to create an AI plan. In CM1 you didn't have to create an AI plan so that wasn't even a factor. Sure, you had to put the objective flags out there in such a way that the AI could follow the bread crumbs and in some cases a scenario was impossible to make that was playable against the AI, but the fact is that the AI plan creation step in CM2 didn't even exist in CM1 so that is just one more factor that adds to the difficulty level of making a scenario in CM2 vs making one in CM1. Once again, this has nothing to do with UI decisions or any conscious attempt to make the editor more difficult to use in CM2. It is just a side effect of how the new game works. Victory conditions can be more complicated than in CM1 if the designer wants them to be since the designer has many more options to choose from. Once again this adds to the complexity of scenario creation in CM2 vs CM1 and is just a side effect of how the game 'is'. Finally even the briefings are more difficult to create than in CM1. I don't remember having to make all these briefing maps for CM1 as we did for CM2. I think we only had to come up with a picture and a briefing text for CM1. I think with some work most aspiring designers can get proficient enough at map making to create a scenario map. However, AI plans, Briefing creation, and victory conditions can combine to dampen the enthusiasm of many who created content for CM1.

An updated version with a heavier bridge was added either in a patch or in an upgrade I'm not sure which. If you look at the bridge and it looks like it might be a bit extra long then you have the fixed version. Actually, I remember now. The original version has a canal bridge and the fixed version has a longish stone bridge. So if the main bridge looks like a normal stone bridge then you are good to go.

The Americans entered St Lo sometime around 1800 hours on July 18 and the Germans retreated from the town that night and the early morning hours of the 19th. While there was some fighting on the eastern outskirts of town on the 18th the extensive rubble in the town was caused by Allied bombing not by ground fighting.

Green Hell, which comes with the Commonwealth module, is located just east of St Lo and was part of the fighting just before the Americans entered the town proper a few days later.

Without trying to replicate exactly what you are doing - the main thing with bridges is that the endpoints need to be the same elevation. You don't need to set the elevation levels between the endpoints. The water will already be at the level of the lowest elevation point that it touches so you have a lot of 'extra' elevation points that aren't needed. You can basically delete every elevation point between the end points and the join point between the two bridges (including the blue ones along the bridge itself). I also wouldn't set the lower elevation points immediately adjacent to the bridge endpoints - just let those points find their own elevation (without using the blue CTRL elevation points - just use normal ones). The tricky part is joining two bridges together - at the join part you need to have at least five elevation points (one under the join point and one in each cardinal direction). IIRC the blue elevations means that you are using the CTRL key when selecting an elevation point and those are typically used when creating irrigation ditches since they give a sharper edge so I'm unclear about the context that you are using them in this map since you would typically be using the blue elevations in between two higher or lower elevations to create a sharper edged channel or berm of some kind. Without placing higher or lower elevation points on both sides of the blue elevation points I would expect that you would be creating a step instead of a berm.

It's a feature not a bug. The problem is that you have an MG crew with the main weapon being the MG and then if the gunner dies you don't want to rely on buddy aid in order for the gun team to retain possession of the gun. Sure, you may be able to take the time to perform the buddy aid if you are the player and you leave the crew in place, but the AI isn't smart enough to stay until the buddy aid is completed. So you would end up with a bunch of MG teams running around with no MG because the gunner gets killed and the team doesn't do the buddy aid to retain the weapon. It makes much more sense to have the weapon automatically re manned by another member of the team rather than force the entire team to lose the weapon because nobody picks the weapon out of the cold dead hands of the gunner. If the weapon is set up on a tripod then the weapon wouldn't be moving, but rather another team member simply repositions to take control of the weapon when the gunner dies.