dieseltaylor

True that some games are great to play again even when you know the surprises. I am thinking very much of Tiger Valley which had enormous replay value even after the secrets were revealed. Very probably larger games with options will be more replayable.

I suspect you are right Nelson. There is almost a golden rule that people who spend lots of time constructing maps are probably not very experienced as players. And good map makers are often not good scenario designers. I actually like the distinction as I think if you are primarily a player your designing is compromised by your eye for combat effects. A map designer will probably go for a realistic map as the primary object. Of course I am referring mainly to my experience in the days on CMx1 - though when CMBN launched I did review I think four maps for eager builders. One of the interesting things for realistic maps is that you can introduce different weather and troop types and it will play differently rather more effectively than a strong player doing a scenario who probably has a certain type of battle in mind during design. For example if a I had a huge map and was planning a Kitty battle my design I strongly suspect would be different from if I was told it was to be for infantry or recon strong. The subconscious cannot fail to suggest some suitable "features".

I think it a cheek to suggest that a scenario designer be asked to consider warning regarding mirrored play. Mirrored play is a travesty of what real warfare is about and it should be understood that scenarios need only carry warnings IF they are designed for mirrored play. The concept of playing a realistic wargame but having each player with perfect knowledge of the enemy forces and dispositions is so wrong. Warfare is about deception and surprise in order to achieve objectives as cheaply, or defend expensively, as possible. I was a member of WeBoB gaming club for many years I am aware of the mirrored games/ladder syndrome. It was often discussed and gradually we evolved to a better system. Better in being realistic war and making unbalanced scenarios central to the process. The correct way to play competitively is for groups of players to play the same scenario. Out of that group there will arise two ladders of one for the best Axis player and one for the best Allied player. If a series of scenarios are played you would hopefully average out the weaker player and blind luck. The nature of scenarios and balance occupied a huge amount of discussion time and also meant scenario construction was a nightmare. Consider the following: 1. BF tweak effectiveness of HMG's accuracy of mortars. Previous games that might have seemed balance no longer are. 2. The playtesters have too great a familiarity with the design and the FOW does not work as it ought. 3. The playtesters are very nice volunteers but they are not very good players. 4. Within the scenario there is the possibility of a single action being make and break the scenario heavily one way or the other. If you design asymmetric battles [not using the term unbalanced] played in groups then the respective performances each side do mean something. PS. We did have a system where scenarios were rated for balance however it was rather crude and really the best criteria is surely did both players enjoy playing it. As you can imagine a scenario of two tanks facing down a bridge could produce probably a host of scores showing that both players had a 50% chance of winning, Fun ? Realistic? I have seen highly improbable maps with mirrored features. I look forward in my dotage to supplying a checkerboard map of ploughed and wheat fields to the mirrored fraternity. : )

Thank you for another example of customer handling. I want BF to remain in business. I also know that if you do not provide a good experience you lose incrementally customers until a viable mass is gone. This is what is so galling is the huge amount of goodwill that exists for game designers. I copy read for free the manuals for Les Grogs. Thanks and a mention no fee required. And I was a happy bunny. Someone in the US surely could volunteer to be keeper of the manual and re-writer! As for flaws and slap in the face that is the art of dealing with your market so that the impression you do not care is erased. Continually repeating errors in the manual when advised is a tough one to explain away. PS I see that a reader has reported a change in Manual V2. I thing it is a masterful way of making everything clearer.

I am not suggesting that BF are engaged in anything underhand however their are beta-testers who do post who do not indicate they are beta-testers. One is left in the unfortunate situation that some people post opinion as fact and some post fact as fact and without background it is difficult to see who is believable. Having said that the game is vast and not everyone who was/is a beta-tester would necessarily be accurate on all things. There is also in my mind the impression that some beta-testers are also not kept very much in touch with current events. Do I play? Not this year and not last year. Last year I was away a lot and with promised improvements with V2.00 I saw no point in learning deeply a system that was being substantially altered. I may play this year but never to the level of the CMx1 series where eleven games at once and several hundred games in all. Do you have some sort of grievance against BFC? Grievance would be the wrong word. I am exasperated by BF. Exasperated because IMO they brought the game out before it was ready, which I could forgive them if they were upfront with the reason why. I have twice quoted Vauxhall who when sending out the first Churchill tanks apologised for the problems caused by launching in a short time frame and stated they would put them right subsequently. If that were the only example of customer handling it would not be so bad but the way that various issues like - what the Manual does not tell you, the void into which peoples gripes disappear until possibly, eventually a fix arrives. I can look at my early e-mails to GAJ about the need for a PBEMHelper replacement which was launched as h2h. I forsaw it would be a great help to players. GAJ runs a great mod forum also which took up the slack from previous repositories. This is customer aiming service to make the CM of more use to gamers. Happy gamers make better customers and spread the word. I do not contribute much to the Wiki mentioned below but it is function of the opacity of the rules and the difficulty of finding things in these forums which lead to its creation. * As I no longer read every post CM related on the forums I may be wrong on apologies and lists - I hope I am.

The long buildings caught my eye in the air shots and I wondered if a more contemporary aerial or map is available. However that is me being casual about someone else's time - I have no doubt that the time available was better spent in mastering the CM design editor to create a masterpiece. In earlier times when I had more cash I did think I, or perhaps BF, should award annual prizes for best scenario, best map each year. A token amount to be sure but recognition all the same. However that was in CMx1 times. Perhaps on the criteria of realism for maps we could institute the SailorTaylor award : ). With regard to hedges I have seen interesting videos - possibly on Vimeo - of the French getting their act together on restoring hedgelines and looking after hedges. With adequate manpower and suspect supply I was wondering if the traditional country dwellers in the 1940's would be keeping the countryside tidy for kindling, other wood, and hedge food. The current state not being a reliable indicator possibly of 1944 where many pictures tend to show hedges after the battle. Only a thought.

Well not everyone likes as this is the sole quote on UK Amazon However the author has had published this this year: Perhaps it is better? I see he is a co-founder of the History Channel. This may explain how he managed for three books published on Gun Camera footage. I look forward to your opinion as I am sure from your postings here it will carry more weight. : ) PS I can see how he can get up the nostril of the less jingoistic reader - particularly with the quote in here:

I opened up a QB on a huge map - my second ever. Firstly it was the suckiest map I have ever seen in terms of real life or even bad map making. Great advertisment for the game. Setting thinks to automatic buy at no time did I see the cost of my units, ending the game revealed that the VL was worth 500pts so for the defender keeping one man alive there was a draw no matter if he was the sole survivor and the US had lost nothing. This accords with Berto's post repeated in my previous contribution. The reason I opened it was to see if the values of the VL show and I did see three stars above the objective. Is this relevant or if I had three VL's I would not be aware of the actual game values if the designer allocates them unevenly? I am still undecided whether this idea is genius or daft but being unexplained and apparently not in the manual it is still not well-done for the player IMO.

LOS and LOF are by far the biggest bugbears in the game and the biggest turn-off IMO. I do not want to spend my gaming time wrestling with positioning. Given that tanks have no elevation of weapon systems this seems astonishingly one-sided. Giving tanks correct elevation is very hard to code and players would not like it we will not do it......... we can code from spot to spot and players must lump it! even if it makes it highly tedious in terms of player time and "results" when trying to site of fire your main weapon. I think the scenery is wonderful but the faux accuracy with unit spotting and firing just makes the game very kludgy.

Truly beautiful map. The amount of work to achieve must have been immense but the reward you must feel ..... I agree wholeheartedly that designers should give credit if they are using substantial parts of others work. As for playing mirrored games. WTF! I thought that had gone out with the ark. My only difference of opinion over the map would be I would strip out modern buildings/roads etc. but that is a trivial point as he who designs makes the decisions.

Re-telling some of the history does not actually advance your case with detail but seems if anything to support mine by emphasising the German use of combined arms. Which to me suggest intrinsically that you build your force for the job in hand. Essentially you need the correct force mix but even that is no good if your tactics are rubbish. The three German panzer divisions attacking at Medinine In March 1943 lost 53 of 150 tanks to ATG's and artillery with British losses a few ATG. Assuming they had the admired mix of infantry - which I do not know [ yet] - it would appear was not much help. Terrain adequate weapons and good generalship did for them.

womble - just so I understand where you are coming from: 1. Do you just play solo? 2. Are you an insider with BF?

I must admit to a growing sense of dismay at the cack-handedness of a system for VP's which defies easy understanding AND is not even available to players. Sometimes I think BF should get awards for making things difficult in concept and then leaving it for players to discover years after the event how it actually works. If you read the right posts in April 2011 though ... So on the face it a cunning system but leaves one with the unpleasant idea that someone aware of its ramifications is going to do substantially better than someone who has not found out that the terrain and killed values vary from game type. My gut instinct is that there is something not quite right with this approach however I have to go out know - I will discuss it with my fellow CM [*1] today : )

Seems to me that the nature of the war you are fighting has far more to do with the ideal mix than just quoting an infantry to armour number that fighting a war in northern Europe in WW2 seems to be right. I have my doubts about that proportion being right for the Western Desert battles, Partly because of the supply needs, partly because of the very large terrain, and particularly as infantry versus tanks was rather one-sided. Basically if the terrain ain't favourable then you need to adjust the mix.

.Agree 3 PC says it would require effort for BF to do it. This sort of begs the question what was war movie mode trying to achieve? OK a faux realism which may be interesting for a few minutes but nothing else. I am not ungrateful that BF look at increasing the immersion level. I do wonder though if they think it all the way through or just go here is a quickie tweak which will read well when we launch CMGL. What is revealing though is there is player demand for a true "clean" variant for recording the battles as war documentary. Hardly surprising given the efforts put into great graphics.

I am surprised that you don't think it applies to Allied tanks also .... However in terms of loss on the battlefield as opposed to travelling to and from a battlefield I think there is a not insignificant difference. Particularly for the German kitties. Fortunately as most Tiger losses are recorded I am sure you can see for yourself that most were lost by being overrun in depot, out of petrol and destroyed by crews, or combat, rather than transmission failure on the battlefield. In game terms really quite rare and not likely to amuse players when it did happen. Given the present major bodges on movement that discriminate mainly against German tanks it would seem a bit rich to devote any effort to a rare event.

http://www.efour4ever.com/infantry_tanks.htm

I think BF has missed a trick here. For the gamer the "movie mode" is not very helpful but I do know there a number of people who would dearly love to make war movies. An untapped market. Is it possible to code the crosses out or change the colour at least to khakhi. The red is just so obviously glaringly wrong. There really really is a market out there for players who would make some excellent movies. PS If umlaut is right then BF should have no problem making movie mode more like a real movie mode.

I am very surprised that the movie mode did not remove/prevent all the red crosses.Surely that would be the main point of having a movie mode is to make it as "realistic" as possible.

A consideration I have now as I grow older is that perhaps losing a war quickly as the Italians did in Libya was actually a much smarter option in preserving Italian lives. It may sound heretical to suggest that not dying is actually a very acceptable outcome for most combatants. Obviously the officer class and the politicians being that much further away from death can afford to be brave longer. It helps of course if their children are not in danger either. As it happens there were many overly brave Italian soldiers and many sensible ones where preserving Mussolini in power seemed a very poor reward. Ditto the French who having bled the most of the Western Allies in WW1 and having a series of rubbish Governments did not wish to fight to the death. Sensible. After all Germans taking a country and retreating out with terms as in 1871 was surely an option worth considering compared to losing 4% of your population and 10% or your remaining population carrying wounds as from 1914-18. Where you have a large moat like the UK and the US it is much easier to be heroic and be scornful of other nations not blessed with the right geography. BTW the French "jokes" are normally applied to the Italians in the UK. Possibly a better education means we have heard of the Napoleonic wars. This was when France trounced most of Europe for a number of years around 1800. : )

Reminds me of when my brother played the original CMSF where rather than turn at a gap in the dual carriageway the vehicles felt it smarter to drive up towards the enemy at the head of the road and then turn to come down the other side of the carriageway. Speedy maybe but remarkably stupid when you know where the enemy are! Does changing the unit movement speed order engender a higher degree of caution so that they will stick to crawling under the vines rather than dashing out and back??? Does it revolve around the time taken to move out and to the closest end and run back? So if it is a long long row then going straight through may make sense for two or three rows but not for four. ?

Very moving. Thanks for posting the link.

At the weekend I bought this Cyclopedia in the David & Charles reprint which covers only the "Manufacturing Industry" and I was surprsed to find a lengthy piece on air-guns. http://archive.org/stream/cyclopaediaorun01rees#page/470/mode/2up "Manufacturing Industry" is a misnomer as the five volumes also covers incidentally production processes, history, and such as the gazometers and aerostations, some towns and people. One thing of great surprise was the deadweight of livestock increasing dramatically between 1700 and 1800 - this in a section London!.

I am shocked by the adverts per programme. We had "Parks and Recreation" recently and the show on BBC lasts 21 minutes. I assume if I am in advertland it is a 30 minute show. SO roughly a third wasted time for watchers. Bizarre. And of course the loss of continuity and atmosphere. Its criminal. ................................................... As for BF and their shipping policy [or more like sod the rest of the world] it seems to me that they have never leveraged the genuine goodwill of their early fans on the distribution and growth side. If I had known they has a fistful of books to sell I could have met them in New Brunswick in 2012 and brought 20-50 home to the UK for places like Bovington or IWM possibly. Or even sold them directly from here. Its not like I don't know a dozen people into WW2 locally. OK so perhaps a 2 hour drive up for them but hell better than remaindering stock.

And me. I wonder why snow would make the wires less of a problem. I would think crawling under the bottom wire, having cut it would become harder. And snow in Italy is hardly upto Maine depths!! BTW is it now in game that there is a different in troop speed going with the line of the wires as opposed to across them?