The_Capt

Soviets are tricky and it also depends on a lot of factors (year and weather conditions, time of day etc). So with the Soviets you have to remember that optics and spotting are not their strong suit (and I know some people will argue the opposite but on the whole it is true). This makes sense as Soviet doctrine was never to elegantly out maneuver an opponent; their aim was to overwhelm through speed and mass. Basically the choice for the Soviets is "die all at once and maybe win" or "die slowly and definitely lose" "Uh that is nice Capt but what does it mean on the board?" Well here are few rules of thumb that you can play with: - Take your time picking the line. Soviets were all about speed and violence but they were not stupid. Look at the ground and pick a line of assault carefully and then once you have decided...commit hard. - Make a Hole: strip off the US AT assets early and do so through attrition. So here you actually try push in and engage US tanks and AT first, probably why Soviet doctrine has tanks leading. BRDM AT systems are brutal little bastards here if you can get them. In this gun battle you do not need to win the firefight, you just need to strip the US down until holes start to appear in their line. Here trading 1 for 1, or even 2-3 for 1 is acceptable. And concentrate, concentrate and concentrate along your line of assault, do not try and take them all on. - Get in close and start chewing. The Soviets are brutal in closer terrain and here the BMPs really can make the difference in close up fights. Trick is that you need to get there. - Arty is not a paintbrush...it is a bucket. Drop it early and hard. Soviets are hard to delicately time rolling drops so just wait long enough to get a sense of where your opponent may be and then drop the sky (lots of "Maximum"). Smoke works very well against ATGMs. - Weather plays a very important role. Soviets are in real trouble at night and in fog; however, they actually do much better in damp or wet conditions. The reason is that guns do not kick up as much dust so their optics work better. - Speed, never enough. There is a fine line between suicidal and effective momentum, judging that takes time and experience. Finally, if you are of legal age in your country/state, try vodka, it helps. [note: BFC official policy is to always remember to drink responsibly while wargaming but clothing is always optional.]

Ok, well lets unpack this. I, for one, do not think you are a troll (perhaps trying hard to impersonate one but...), you are a paying customer who appears uninformed and we aim to both educate and entertain. So looking at the the ol' scenario list AND not counting the extra versions based on dates (more on this later) AND the US Campaign (1982) ones we are at 23 standalone scenarios. Now one could say that the Soviet Training Scenarios do not count, which based on the number of YouTube videos is pretty unfair, but let's be brutal on ourselves (sorry Justin). This would bring our paltry total down to 19 standalones. Now BFC policy for a base game release is 15-20 with emphasis on the 20, if we can get to it. So here we fell one scenario short of the upper end of content range. Now in our defence CMCW requires large maps in order to really show things off, much larger than other titles, so that played a factor. Now as to the "why the multiple years?" question. Well we did that because CMCW covers off a 4 year period in which available equipment varies significantly year to year. These differences create pretty interesting and noticeable variations in gameplay. For example in 1979 you could see M48s vs T55s and in 1982 we have M1s vs T80Bs, the balances is very different between these dates. So we thought, "hey there is a lot of kit here and maybe players don't really know the ins and outs of all of it. We should create different time versions so they can easily see and learn how different equipment stacks up." Now as to "rushing". I am not sure what your scenario design and building experience is, or is not; however, it is no small task to create multiple versions of the same thing. For example, the work that went into the 1982 vs 1979 US Campaigns was such that it probably would have been easier to simply do two completely separate campaigns. The testing and play balancing is a long process, as is the deploying of units and AI. Finally, as to the the "cheating" US Campaigns ported over as standalones, there are 10 in total. Well the thinking here was that these should really be bonus content. First, not everyone is going to finish the US Campaign, or play all its battles, so this gives the player a chance to play and try any of them up front. Second, it allowed us to offer them for H2H play, which should be very interesting for some. Again, as to "rushing", porting the campaign scenarios over into standalones actually took more time as Red side briefings and Human vs Human considerations had to be made. The US Campaign alone has over 190 square kms of map work btw, again very big maps required all tied to the actual ground in the region (seriously, check it out on Google maps). To this we add one NTC campaign, and two versions of both the Soviet and US campaigns, I would sincerely hope that the average player can squeeze out at least of 60+ hours of quality play time, before hitting the QBs or Scenario editor. So there you have it. As per content guidelines, based on past titles, we are safely in the upper end of content requirements by about any metric. I will leave the qualitative judgement to all you fine grognards.

Check this out:

So the ol "Ma Deuce" is really effective against BMPs at close range, so I use M113s as a local reserve within a company or platoon. Only pulling them up when the assault is right on top of my positions.

A good one on Coy Teams from the period. https://books.google.ca/books?id=My8-u2rYNVoC&pg=PP1&lpg=PP1&dq=tank+and+mechanized+company+team+fm+1977&source=bl&ots=qqIQKfV9MT&sig=ACfU3U00aPRhU6AIK2f45OySHMo3SQX7Xw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjkj9nanKnwAhV2Ap0JHeqIBQ0Q6AEwEXoECAgQAw#v=onepage&q=tank and mechanized company team fm 1977&f=false

So this brings up another point...style. These are clear choices by the designer, which you may not agree with but are not errors. In the US Campaign for example, a choice was made to do it in first-person narrative style with deliberate lack of clarity on the tactical situation. The reason for this was 1) to create a distinct feel of a story being told and 2) in service of the large demand by players for realism in gameplay. Some may wonder about the "realism" point and be frustrated by the vagueness of these briefings, well then it is working as intended. No real fight plays out like it does in most CM scenarios. The leaders on the ground do not get nice neat briefing graphics or a clear write up of the problem. What you really get is usually nothing more than "Head down that road and keep your eyes open cause some guys got killed there last Tuesday. If you see something try and kill it. If you can't, shout for help...orders end." Now you may very well totally disagree with this design decision and that is totally fine and to be expected. But just because you do not like something does not make it an error (seriously, we have entire generations who could make life a lot better for everyone if they just took that one nugget in).

Oh yes that is true. Word does not pick up proper name misspelling (and German towns were murder for this) so that may add to our total somewhat. But if one is not familiar with the locale I would hope that they would not lose sleep or in-game enjoyment...except in this case obviously.

And a quick follow up. So looking at grammar and punctuation (here again MS Word has a very handy "double blue line system) we are looking at 86 errors in total so an error rate of about 0.4% of the briefings sampled. These were mostly Word disagreeing with coma placement but there were missing periods, missing hyphens and the dreaded double colon. Plus a few spacing issues and the odd dropped 's' which makes for some weird noun-verb alignments. So based on this, our spelling is not that bad but we could use some work on punctuation...and flossing, always getting in trouble for the lack of flossing.

Now this one is disconcerting...we will follow up.

So, because this was becoming a rather vocal issue, and I began to doubt us for a second, I exported 19 of the standalone scenario briefings (both Blue and Red) out of the commercial scenarios and cut and pasted them into Word. That came to 20727 words in total. Scrubbing through them all and using the Word spelling checker, we come to a grand total of 15 real spelling mistakes (not military slang or funny abbreviations) out of the sample. This yields an error rate of about .07%, which in just about any industry standard is well below the accepted manufacturing rate errors (outside of the nuclear and space industry). It is even lower than accepted experimental error in engineering. (https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/virtual_lab/LabZero/Experimental_Error.shtml#:~:text=Engineers also need to be,analysis techniques to get any). The worst offending scenario had 5 spelling errors and the writer is not a native English speaker, but we can make sure we get help with that. So now I am going to do a grammar and punctuation check but from that I can see so far (again thank you MS Word) we are doing better than a lot of adult students I know. Now we will continue to try and get better in all things in order to continue a solid wargame to you all...thank you for your patience. [Note, I am sorry but I cannot share the Word Doc here as it is company IP etc.] Oh and as an aside, I hold a Master's degree and still managed to spell "Frankfurt" wrong in Valley of Ashes, so human error happens.

We have just finalized three candidates, hopefully we will pick one or two and have demo(s) up shortly.

Medium Girder Bridge....a symbol of freedom and victory!

Weighing in here a bit, first off criticism accepted and we can always do better (our unofficial motto). Anytime one does something creative and then puts it out there with a price tag, one has to be ready to accept criticisms by paying customers. Some is useful, some less so but one does have to take it into account moving forward. In this case, I do find it both odd and ironic that the original poster's main complaint seems to be poor briefings which impact in-game experience through lack of clarity, while at the same time the criticism itself is also lacking in clarity but let the healing begin. So first questions - how did the briefings impact your game experience? Were they distracting or did the issue mislead or create for poorer in-gameplay, if so how? If you could pick three scenarios to fix, which one would they be? Some scenarios/campaigns are written from a stylistic point of view. The US Campaign, for example, is written from a personal in-the-field journal style, so a lot of writing conventions are going to be removed to emulate the style of a scared, tired leader in-combat. Some briefings are written from a Soviet point of view, which is stark and minimalistic. Further many others are written in what I would call a deep-military writing style, this could very well explain the "incomplete sentences", which emulates Frag Os and the type of written orders veterans recognize from the field. So if we could separate style-decisions from honest errors, that would be a first good step. As to the typos etc, well we can go back and correct the most egregious, particularly if they mislead the player. Moving forward, I am thinking we will move to 1) putting all briefings in Word docs first, before moving them to the in-game text docs and 2) hiring an editor to review all briefings before release (I have the hook and very good one) because right now the content team of contributors (nice alliteration Capt!) is basically totally unsupported, so that is on us. And finally, as always you are free to exercise the BFC return policy if you are unhappy with the product and same will apply with Steam etc.

Muphry’s Law right there.

See the other thread on this, the TOWs in-game actually have trouble firing through smoke. M113 and that .50 can do well against BMPs, seen many kills at sub-500, have to catch them in the flank. I am pretty sure the troops have to be fully embarked to acquire.

I kinda like this idea but to be honest it would be more of a mash-up between Final Blitz and Red Thunder, as opposed to a CW module. If they were to go this way, it probably would be the RT team to pull it together into a DCL for those other titles. If Unthinkable happened the Cold War would have started later (if at all), this is really an extension of WWII. If/when we move out on a DLC it is gong to remain in the 70s/80s context, I can say that much.

The "Hunt" command is critical here and it does work for ATGMs. If you send them on Hunt waypoints they will stop and fire (the have to be re-plotted for movement afterward) but is basically a "move until you shoot" waypoint. It reduces the micro management load and works very well as the player does not need to plot out "halt-shoots" manually.

So we have pushed this to Charles to see if there is anything that can be done. I would not expect it to be solved in the first patch though as I suspect this is a deep AI coding mechanic with all sorts of implications (particularly if we see it in other titles).

Ah, good question, couple ways actually. First, chemical rounds do look different than smoke for LOS (they used to teach us that), smoke is greyer and heavier, chemical weapons tend to be lighter and whiter. Second, the NBC alarms would start going off (we had those), and third, someone starts to do the funky chicken. In reality if chemicals were expected, everyone would be in a stage of MOPP/TOPP before the battle even began. From TOPP Medium, it takes about 10-15 seconds to move to TOPP HI, which could effect the battlefield but probably not enough to warrant the effort of modeling the whole thing.

"Unhook the Leash" standalone. Soviet campaign has M1s and Bradleys in some scenarios...if you make it that far.

And if that doesn't work, try this fix:

I have seen this on my own setup. First thing to do is to check and make sure that CM is running on your graphics card and not an integrated graphics chip (that was my problem).

Learning through burning is the most fun.

Bil was abused as a young sprog there and now he must pay it forward.

Yes, so the normal progression seems to be one of two branches: - A series of wins up to Neuhof "Bear in the Sun", then a loss, then "A Hill to Die On", which is beatable but a challenge. - An early loss, then Neuhof Bear in the Mist, a win and then Dollbach Heights for a win. I really want player to make it to Battle 5 without too much pain or high risk being dumped out of the Campaign early. From 5 onward, well that is another story and the campaign will end if you take a loss (training wheels come off).