LongLeftFlank

I agree that it seems like your defensive scheme has worked well so far: seems Bil's Italians got too fixated on clearing your outpost line and made themselves a juicy target for your guns. But what's the purpose of your "counterattack" at this point? Just to kill more Italians? I haven't read Bil's side yet, but those guys seem like a spent force already; their casualties have likely made their morale brittle as all hell and some mortar fire will keep them that way. And do you really want to retake that exposed ground now, especially now that Huns with better ranged firepower are showing up? Just food for thought.....

Which is why prepared defensive "belts", which the Germans had become masters at setting up very quickly during 3 years in Russia, were vastly more formidable for the Allies to assault even when the defenders were severely undermanned. As you know, this is far more than digging deep holes and roofing them over; it's identifying good sites for OPs and MG nests, and clearing obstructions (i.e. Brush) to open fire/sight lanes and "death strips", and mining/mortar registering any blind zones. All this is largely missing from the CMBN experience to date; I know, because I've been struggling (sporadically) to recreate just such a "textbook" German battalion defensive position (La Meauffe-le Carillon, where documentation is ample). What happens instead -- just look at those super video AARs on YouTube -- is a greatly simplified "fire superiority" strategy that is decisively resolved at vastly longer ranges than would historically have been the case. Which favours ranged weapons (or rather, compounds their existing advantage). And the reason is simple: absence of ground level LOS blocking terrain above waist height, except in bocage country. Result: LOS is too easy, particularly for vehicles and it's too easy to mass accurate fire on distant targets. This also contributes to much of the extreme "uberness" of artillery we've all observed. Look, I'm not calling the baby ugly, nor am I saying the existing maps all suck, or denigrating the right of players to get in touch with their inner Wittman without having stupid thickets interfering with their set-piece massacre of 30 Shermans. I'm just saying a key, ubiquitous piece of real world terrain -- clumps of bushes/small trees between 4 and 12 feet tall is.... simply missing. For no good game engine-related reason I can discern. And that matters for those of us who are striving to "get in the boots" of the tactical leaders.

Kind of like this nifty don't-try-this-at-home-lads move "Hellman of Hammer Force" used to cross an AT ditch... Amazing, the stuff you can dredge up on the Interwebs....

Well if it really truly bugs you, you can download a free hex editor and repoint all the roof textures you don't like to ones that you like. Or even simpler, copy the bmp files for the roofs you like into your Z file and rename them as the ones you don't like. However, I personally like the sheet metal roofs for representing industrial workshops and sheds. But yes, it wouldn't seem so hard to allow folks to toggle among different roof textures, especially since toggle functionality already exists -- it just doesn't do much right now in the case of Modular buildings. But on the other hand, this isn't a model railroading kit, it's a wargame. The small development team deep dives on some things and leaves placeholders for others. Take comfort that CM will eventually provide flat-roofed "industrial" type buildings, and that at that point Charles or Philip might be willing to take a fresh look at the roof textures.

Very nice, great stuff, but can vehicles or infantry with a few metres of elevation advantage still largely see through and well beyond it? That's the terrain element that still seems to be missing -- the dense stands of bushes and young trees that grow above waist height up to about, say, 12 feet. And many larger trees have leaves that spread nearly to the ground, instead of leaving a nice open shady space beneath them. It's high summer right now; go to the edge of your city/town and take a look at the foliage around you. How much of it is too dense to see through and beyond? A good proportion, I'll warrant. I know I sound like a broken record on this, but relative absence of ground level LOS obstructions very much skews the overall game dynamics in favour of (German) ranged weapons, as well as artillery FOs. These units can take advantage of an unrealistically "open" and visible battlefield to deliver accurate sustained fires at standoff ranges instead of the sporadic keyhole shots or area stonks that would be far more likely until the enemy had closed to within about 200 (?) metres and started becoming subject to crossfires. And yes, I do get that this is Sicily, not Normandy; there's piles of dense brush and stands of small trees there as well. Pity the poor Italians trying to advance across this open environment with huge unsplittable squads. It's amazing there was anyone left to breed after the war. Rant complete.

Just noticed this thread. Great read, thanks.

Still trying to do something interesting with the haystack doodad. After several unsuccessful attempts to create a bushy Sago palm, I tried to render a "tropical" haystack of cut cane grass. Unfortunately, I think it's a Fail; the original object isn't too pretty either though. The Type 4 crops don't make very convincing cane grass either.

You can change roof colour for some of the Independent Building types (e.g. Cathedrals). For Modular buildings, the choice of roof type (slate or metal) and colour (black or red) appears to be hard wired to the building's shape, angle and, sometimes, number of stories (i.e. single story different than multistory). When you control+click on the roof, the texture appears to reverse or something, but it doesn't otherwise change.

AFAIK, lawyers and corporate ass-covering caused it. PrintScreen makes it "too easy" for people to grab images of copyrighted material and Microsoft doesn't want to be dragged into some BS lawsuit. So they force you to obtain third party software to do this stuff, which shields them. Similar thing happened to that useful little Photo Editor program they used to bundle free with Windows.

And I for one would like to see some pixeltroops, especially vehicle and gun crews, fighting in their field caps, or even bareheaded on occasion, instead of in their helmets. Regulations or not, some men definitely chose to fight helmetless, particularly in very hot weather and/or close terrain where the limited protective value of a steel pot against bullets was offset by the weight and heat. (I made the same choice in my dirtbike riding days in Southeast Asia, foolish though it now seems in hindsight)

Music to my ears. Seeing gullies in the screenies too -- good work! Alas, no "high brush" or thicket/stand of small trees though. That remains a major -- and tactically decisive due to its LOS blocking characteristics -- missing terrain item, with only "gapped" High Bocage segments able to fill the role.

I too am having trouble modding bocage and hedge foliage sections; a modded segment either becomes totally invisible or is ignored altogether in favour of the default bmp. Anyone have any better luck with this?

I believe modern squad tactical doctrine -- at least in asymetrical environments where ambush from concealment terrain is the main threat -- says to put multiple guys in your scout element; it's more pairs of eyes looking around, plus ambushers will hold fire hoping to catch the main element in the killsack. In that case, the scouts are well positioned to counterattack, being already well into the enemy position. SEAL teams even put one of their SAWs up in the point element for this reason. The preferred outcome, of course, is to spot the ambush before anybody has entered the killsack... I don't know if these tactics were pioneered in WWII (e.g. jungle fighting or partisan warfare) or even earlier (Phillipine insurrection?), but it wouldn't surprise me.

But didn't German Stukas and Ju-88s sink a number of Allied ships during the landings? I find it hard to believe the Allies would secure forward airstrips so fast as to sweep them from the skies for at least a week or two thereafter if not longer.

NY Times editor Arthur Sulzberger's memoir "A Long Row of Candles"'grimly relates the aftermath of an unsuccessful Bersaglieri attack, with the wind blowing feathers into the Greek positions.

You can absolutely mod tree and bush leaves, or even replace them with a blank (transparent) bmp to leave a denuded trunk and branches.

Why don't you simply deselect the unit prior to taking the screenie? Or is it critical to your purpose to have the unit info screen display? Also, didn't people do various faded bases, rings, etc., to make the bases less conspicuous? Or am I thinking CMSF?

Slightly OT, but I guess we won't see M3 Medium/Grant/Lee tanks in Sicily, will we? Looks like the US 2nd AD and British 4th Brigade landed with only Shermans and Stuarts.

My instant thought upon looking at the screenies of those huge Italian 10 man rifle sections is that every single moment they aren't actually moving and are outside hand grenade range, those boys ought to be Hiding. Otherwise, they're going to get picked off like flies by the Americano automatics and be near useless as a combat unit by the time they get to grips! There's just too much human flesh packed into a small area, and that's the only workaround I can think of. My other thought is: Sicily is a lot more arid than Normandy and wouldn't support large girth tree trunks. And most trees that did reach that size would also tend to get cut down by the voracious population: hint, there's a good reason so much of the US Italian population hails from Sicily and Calabria). North Americans: think Texas chapparal. Is there any way for Charles to tweak the wireframe? You can leave the foliage as is (modders will take care of that). Even better would be to have 2 smaller sized deciduous trees (e.g. the olive tree from CMSF) instead of 2 big ones. Map designers: use those big trees sparingly! Oh, and note the gullies (i.e. sharp folds in terrain that provide great cover for all those poor Italian kids in their stifling parade uniforms). Gullies gullies gullies.

Well, many of these officer had incinerated Nuremberg and Tokyo 20 years earlier in their careers, so millions of civilian casualties weren't as instinctively repugnant to them as they might be to us. The Cold War was seen very much as a war to the death between mutually irreconcilable political systems, and this too was not a surprise to the Greatest Generation. Time and other news magazines from the 1950s talked almost glibly about the chances of war with the Russians. While many voices even then (Churchill, Einstein) spoke of the likelihood of WWIII would be apocalyptic for humanity, remember that the mainstream credibility of much of the New Deal Left in the US was hopelessly compromised by its continued embrace of Soviet communism (McCarthyism didn't come out of nowhere), even after Hungary. Whereas the average veteran turned union steelworker looked at the Red Army and accurately recognized a totalitarian force. By the Sixties, things had eased off and public opinion had returned to the center, but there remained plenty of islands of the "old thinking". On the other hand, with the military offering generous early retirements, demographics worked its magic mercifully quickly. The "Jack D Rippers" and their Soviet counterparts were replaced by a bright new generation of technocrats who then proceeded to get the US stuck in Vietnam and, eventually, the Soviets stuck in Afghanistan. All with the best intentions of course, but at least our part of the world didn't blow up....

We're puttin' the band back together!

Nah, it's been done to death in shooters. While Carlson's raid *could* be done enjoyably in CM (and my map covers some of the King's Wharf area, it really isn't best suited to the scale IMHO. In any case *I* am more interested in the tactical challenges of securing a beachhead at battalion scale, while staying within a PBEM (H2H) scenario timeframe of ~2 hours. That's the main reason I chose Makin, together with it being very thoroughly documented. And yes, I do hope to convince BFC that a little CMPTO game is well worth doing at some point I didn't want to start with a Betio, Iwo or Peleliu bloodbath, even though John Wayne (and Spielberg) and most of us who didn't have to bleed and sweat there love that sh*t; there really isn't that much for the higher commander to decide, frankly. The plan has gone sideways and all there is to do is for the doughs or Leathernecks to slug it out, spider hole by spider hole. Oh, and there were no flamethrowers available at Makin on D-Day; the oxygen tanks got misplaced. Convenient at this stage of CM development, since I strive for historical realism in my map/scenario design.

The PTO terrain mod hasn't really changed much since v1. I swapped in the taro plant for the other broadleaf but that shouldn't matter much. I am still hemming and hawing over my high Bocage mod-- still worried that it misleads players into thinking they can see or move through the tiles when they can't. Plus the base embankment looks really ugly. I'm also still hoping to do something with the haystack object and make the ocean horizon water tile blend in a little better. That stuff all takes time as I'm not a photoshop wiz.

Thanks, I'll take you chaps up on that at some point, but I'm out of town and CM-less for the next week. Canada Day, and that Other thing those traitorous Yankee ingrates celebrate.