LongLeftFlank

I think this is just fine just as is, given how the game models vehicle movement; the wrecks don't block movement, they slow it. If BFC is going to tweak something, I'd rather see vehicles able to squeeze slowly through half square (4m) sized gaps in walls and hedges. At present, they simply refuse.

IMHO the Chinese would stay out of it militarily. Among other things, keep in mind it would be over before they could mobilize. Also, don't they already hold the disputed territory? Like Iraq and A'stan, nuclear detonations aside (on home soil?) the invasion of Pakistan would be far less difficult than the subsequent occupation. India has a domestic "Muslim problem" of its own (i.e. Hindu birth rates are plunging overall, Muslims are still having 8 kids and all are surviving) and would have zero desire to reabsorb another 100 million of them. And NATO enthusiasm for nation building isn't much greater.

Nah, no harm in daydreaming. This forum is pretty quiet otherwise. Glad the game's caught your imagination.

Aircraft wrecks block LOS but are practically useless, even hazardous, as cover. Most civil aircraft also tend to flee airports in advance of fighting, since insurance doesn't generally cover wartime losses. Inoperative planes would generally be in hangars. So for all these reasons, even IF BFC were adding to CMSF I'd doubt this item would be very high on the list. One man's opinion.

Endorsed. Especially since a NATO intervention would necessarily involve airborne forces raiding heavily guarded bases thought to contain nukes -- high risk ops where close air support is critical for an outnumbered attacker with little armour. And an Indian invasion from the east would likely also occur, creating more even tactical matchups between ground forces in the ATGM era. I also predict you'd get a mass of new Indian players.

First, BFC is done with CMSF, so there will be no further modules or patches (unless an issue crops up in the Mac release). Israel, Fulda gap and Vietnam have been frequently requested by others in the past but it's really a moot point. There are Balkans war mods and scenarios out there, as well as a Korean Peoples Army mod. As to the redneck part, there's also a "Lone Star Shopping Mall" scenario featuring Marines vs US Army and a "Dukes of Hazzard" Humvee mod. Search the repository.

More great work, guys! Some great unedited footage here of US attacks on caves in Peleliu and Okinawa. The "unedited" part is especially important -- no History Channel mix-and-match BS editing here. Nice spooky Blade-runneresque synth score as well. Not the twitching heaps of bodies and hand to hand dramatics shown on "The Pacific" (I enjoyed the series and all, but they really threw authenticity out the freekin' window in favour of some Hollywood liberal's desire to rehash the opening scene of SPR over and over and over again), but the slow, systematic advance of small combat details, preferably supported by armour, to isolate, incinerate and entomb an enemy who rarely showed his face at this stage of the war. For those interested, here is a US documentary on Okinawa made in an earlier era, when actual veterans would be watching. Footage and narration is vastly superior to the modern stuff. Highly recommended. Personally, I find it appalling that the Obama Administration is caving in to local pressure to vacate Kadena -- these kids paid for that land with their blood. Both the US and the Japanese may come to regret it.

Ooh, ooh, now tell the waiting masses about the REALLY good part -- how your landser aren't just heavily outnumbered in the standard Normandy pattern, but also start shell-shocked from the horrific US pregame barrage, with their C3 all ripped to hell and with badly depleted ammo (including for the all-important 81mm mortars). And they're facing the American hordes on a god awful patch of ground where the fields all run athwart the likely axes of attack and the slopes are so gradual that you can forget about your superior ranged weapons because your standard engagement opening range is under 50 yards. Oh, and did I mention the low ammo?

But you do have regular Brits, right? As 666 pointed out, the Paras have too many Stens per squad to accurately represent regular IJA or SNLF. Do I need to buy you a module?

Great work! I'm thinking that pictures I've seen of the Taliban show them sporting a mix of traditional garb and modern paramilitary gear they've picked up in Peshawar. Is it possible to mix and match this mod Mord's awesome Mixed Combatants mod? Some bareheaded or young beardless faces would also make them look a little more human; that's why I like Mord's mod in place of the 100% hooded terrorist look.

Just keep in mind that the FSA supply of RPG rockets is limited. Those T72s are pretty formidable beasts and like I said, you ain't making it easy to get a flank shot, much less a hind shot. All those men would just get mowed down in heaps if they come face to face with you. Your troops' body armour helps too. PS I'm thrashed from work, so probably no turns incoming tonight.

Model swapping seems not to work as cleanly in CMBN, Ryujin, so if you can work some magic on the Japanese that would be awesome. CoonDog's done awesome helmets and faces but the cut of the Brit infantry uniforms is all wrong for IJA, especially the gaitered boots... the German tunics and trousers are much closer and their jackboots could be modded to puttees. Also, the Type 99 service rifle looks a lot more like a K98 than a SMLE. Here's hoping!

Very professional combined arms house clearing tactics by SBurke here in our H2H playtest, as glimpsed by my omnipresent Spies (he has a lot more infantry combing this boulevard but they're only visible to me at moments). So far he hasn't left me many openings to whack his armour from the flank or rear. But then, he's only a couple of blocks in.....

Wow, you might get me to pull the trigger and finally buy Brits and NATO.

Try out the VBIEDs too, although you need to program at least one AI Order for them (including destination zones) or else they're easy to spot and destroy as stationary targets. They will engage (KA-BOOM!!!) anything they encounter en route. One tip though: each AI group must have more than one unit in it or it ignores its orders.

Welcome! Yup, you can't rely on the AI to place, or properly use, IEDs in setup zones. You need to place them by hand during Deploy Units and have them start in that place. They will work in that case, and quite lethally too. Do some playtesting; you'll figure it out. Minefields might work better if you really really want stuff to appear in a different place each time for replayability.

Sweet! Got into model swapping, eh?

Agreed. A childhood friend of mine who does PTSD certifications for the USVA says that a lot of the most horrible stories from all wars, Iraq/Astan included, come from tankers, infantry and the occasional aircrewman trapped in burning vehicles, for reasons that I'm sure are pretty obvious. The WWII and Korea vets had mostly intended to take their nightmares to their graves unshared, but have to tell their stories to a psychologist in order to qualify for PTSD compensation ... it's usually for their spouses. My friend has some pretty amazing history books he could write, except it's all doctor-patient confidentiality.

Oh, and for those of you readers who may be feeling a little queasy about my seeming to make light of very recent and tragic events afflicting real people in Syria, or to turn their suffering into frivolous entertainment, believe me as the blessed and fortunate father of a little girl I have shed plenty of tears over videos showing shot-up-kids there. This is a military analysis project for me and only secondarily a "game", even though it isn't something I get paid to do. If I ran the zoo, at bare minimum the Obama admin -- maybe endorsed by the Hague -- would have at least put Maher Assad and the Fourth Division command very publicly on the Big S**t List of wanted international war criminals. And without explicitly saying so, we would effectively put them on notice that they had better sleep in a different tent every night, otherwise they might receive an unsigned Hellfire or Tomahawk suppository. Whether or not we ever followed up on that threat, it would give those bastards a lot of pause, and very likely make their subordinates look at them sideways and perhaps be a tad less enthusiastic in implementing their murderous orders.

Absolutely! Half the fun of designing hyperrealistic (TIDSSM*) scenarios is capturing action screenshots. Don't have the time to do YouTube vids though. * Though I Do....

There's a lot of silly mythology still floating around about the Missile Crisis, even after the Russians subsequently got to tell their side. It was basically the legitimizing act of the Kennedy Administration, which up to then had been viewed as callow, uncommitted and indecisive, deeply disappointing the various liberal Democratic constituencies that had fluffed JFK into power in 1960 (sound familiar?) The Crisis also made the academic careers of a whole bunch of Ivy League intellectuals who didn't otherwise fit into the military-industrial complex (they were incapable of building a bomber), and they were pleased to overinflate and overanalyze it for the next 40 years. "How We Smart Guys Saved The World" The Russians were simply neither prepared nor willing to start WWIII over Cuba in 1962. They would have had ample enough reason to do it earlier over the American Jupiter missiles that had been installed in Turkey along their own border in 1958. Once the Russians broke silence on the topic in the 1990s they agreed that the risk of WWIII was high, but it wasn't because they were planning to push the button -- they thought the Americans would. And why should they have done so? Pro-Soviet "peoples movements" were rising up all over the globe (including in Western Europe). The long run tide of history seemed to be running in a socialist direction; even the American press seemed to think so. Khrushchev was a brutal, cunning peasant, but he'd rolled from Stalingrad to Berlin with the Red Army and knew his enemy well enough to realize that he wouldn't win WWIII (either the Americans or nobody would). Had the US finally attacked Cuba, they would have started in classic American style with massive bombing, which would have given the Soviet engineers plenty of time to blow up the missiles and installations before the Rangers came floating in to secure them. The subsequent Marine reoccupation of Cuba would have been a walkover militarily, opposed largely by guerrilla action. Castro would simply have gone back to the Sierra Maestra for a while, whilst the UN tut-tutted about the American Bully and finally imposed a political settlement that effectively put him back in power. The dangerous time for WWIII IMHO was the period 1970-1982, when senile a**holes like Brezhnev who hadn't heard much actual gunfire in the Great Patriotic War plus self-promoting know-it-all technocrats like Ogarkov came to the fore and started to drink their own Koolaid about how the awesome modern Red Army was going to roll over the drugged out hippie draftees of the rotten West in 48 hours with their superpowered Operational Maneuver Groups and Pioneers and Backfire bombers and Spetsnaz reidytaktik, etc. etc. Fortunately, the 1973 Yom Kippur War gave them some pause, and the Afghanistan quagmire discredited them altogether. FWIW, Soviet defector and writer Razun (Suvorov), while generally a crackpot, also floats a very interesting theory that Nixon/Kissinger deciding to install nuclear mines at key points along the German frontier (basically "use em or lose em" demo charges) made it abundantly clear that in the event of a Pact invasion, the US would indeed go nuclear, and would do so immediately. I have never seen independent corroboration of that theory (it may still be classified), so definitely take with a huge tablet of iodized salt, but it's interesting.

FSA combat groups of the "Farouk Battalion" shadow the army column, seeking revenge for the weeks of unrelenting bombardment of their district.

There is one problem. We ahh no longer the Knights who say "Normandy"...

Bad Erwin! Bad! (spritzes with squirt bottle). See ground rule re whining about FTs in my OP. But in the Melanesia and Micronesia archipelagos (and on Ko Samui for that matter), coconut palms are ubiquitous. Coconuts float.

You can play BLUE on BLUE in CMBN. Mod up the Airborne for rebels and the Army for Castroites. Same face mods would apply for both sides.