LongLeftFlank
-
Posts
5,363 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
15
Posts posted by LongLeftFlank
-
-
Since I'm in the camp that says non-gap Low Bocage should be crossable by men and vehicles, albeit at some risk of bogging, I usually stick in a Hedge segment or two on top of a Mud tile to give a crossing point.
Like Schultz, I use gapped Hedge mostly for added underbrush (the existing Brush is fairly useless desert scrub) although it doesn't stand in for a thicket (i.e. doesn't block vehicle LOS).
-
Think about what bocage is for.... to shelter the patchwork of small fields against bitter winds coming off the Bay of Biscay, especially in the Norman highlands. The original mounds are spoil (rocks) pulled by the ancient Celts from the fields to allow cultivation of the relatively poor soil. Hedges are then allowed to grow up on top. Starting in the 1500s or earlier, improvements in commerce drove the rural economy from subsistence to export of dairy products and apple brandy, on the Ricardian model.
OK, so what? Well as you move inland and downland onto river plains with better soils, winters aren't so harsh and more of the land is given over to seasonal crops. That means bigger fields as medieval strip farming gives over to tenant-farmed manor estates. Fields are still enclosed, but in low rock walls which evolve into lower hedgerows over time. Pastures and orchards still need windbreaks along their western and northern margins to protect their comtents from the aforementioned winter winds, but stands of tall trees make more sense than high bocage.
-
"That man is the biggest nuisance on the beach."
-
My apologies if I put words in your mouth. As I've noted subsequently, I believe most of the solution lies in better map design. If you don't want to be selective about maps or muck about in the Editor, then I suppose you're right -- not much you can do as a player. But if it's any consolation, I strongly suspect you will see major improvements in the CW module.
-
Yup, that's all too common an experience. My suggested fix is simple: go into the Editor and everywhere you have a forest tile with trees that's adjacent to non-forest (i.e. receives sunlight), drop in a randomly selected and "gapped" Bocage, Low Bocage or Hedge segment to represent the bushes and smaller trees that would in RL make LoS through this "forest edge" terrain spotty at best in summer. The gap is there to allow infantry movement.
Suddenly you will find you are playing a VERY different game. Uberkitteh fetishists and on map mortar abusers will howl with dismay when they actually have to think hard about where they place their "superunits". And suddenly the Allied tactics of seeking flank shots from multiple angles against solo Tigers don't seem so futile.
I swear to you: 9 out of 10 of the supposed "Fatal Flaws" © in this game (and CMSF) are simply a function of hasty map design. Mapmakers: spend a little time at ground level with the Target tool. Is the visibility meeting your intent? Does it seem like June? in Normandy? Throwing down buildings, roads and trees on a Google Earth footprint ain't enough.
-
Fighting Seabee's Pont du Hoc scenario is excellent too.
-
Cover seeking and cover has been tweaked some since the initial release of CMSF and is noticeably improved since those early days, though it remains a work in progress. However, I disagree that 1 to 1 modeling is inherently futile at CM scale -- it requires a lot of micromanagement, true, but to my mind delivers more satisfying results than more abstract tactical games like ASL, CM1 or PC. YMMV.
At this point, prone Cowering and Hiding units in any kind of cover terrain, especially entrenchments are pretty invulnerable to all but direct hits and very near misses. The major missing component that accounts for the outlandish kill rate is getting them to "hit the dirt" in a timely manner when the shells are coming in and I have a feeling that fix will be made sooner rather than later.
One other observation about mortars: most CMBN maps are wayyyyyyy too open -- you can see right through copses of trees for hundreds of meters, settlements don't have walls or hedges, map designers didn't bother to put in gullies, ditches, elevated road or railbeds, etc. etc. that would otherwise break up the LOS. When most of the map can see most of the rest of the map, this massively favours the player with the most lethal ranged weapons, whether 88s or mortars.
-
Back on to the point of the original discussion. Is it just me who thinks that a light mortar of 60mm calibre is able to take out 50 or 57 enemy troops and not think that something might just be wrong with this type of result? That's more than 1 casualty per mortar round fired!
No, you are hardly the only one. My own opinion is, it isn't the mortars, it's the failure of the pixeltroops to take cover promptly and stay down.
-
Yeah, George's maps more or less set the standard, for both quality and playability. I spent a lot of quality time with this one to learn how the CMBN editor differed from CMSF.
-
Yeah I'm abit sick i think.
I would have loved to see some blood on the soldiers once hit..I also wish the soldiers didn't disappear once killed in a truck etc but just slumped over.
My opinion, but it's probably adequate to have corpses lying next to the vehicle.
Mord's war-ravaged German and American faces mod and some of his voices should give you all the gore you need. Damage decals of all kinds have been long requested and CMBN has indicated it may get them into the next interation of the engine.
I think someone did a mod where the casualty base marker looked like a pool of blood. That work for ya?
-
Jeez, I am tempted to delay release of my La Meauffe town map so I can include these beauties (might happen anyway
).On the bloodstains: eww!
-
Yes, now that I've seen these shots on a larger screen the yellow is a little overwhelming. Maybe this is a good look for the IPad version of CMBN
-
Don't think the spotting round process is affected by the factors you mention, although it can be disrupted by pinning the observer or mortars. The perfect first round was a fluke, gamewise. However, once the stonk gets going it invariably gets increasingly accurate vs a point target. You dont want to be moving (or much of anything else) once you're a target at that stage.
-
From this 1947 paper by Battalion S-3, 3/137th Infantry:
During the course of the day's fighting all of the battalion staff had occasion to remark of the large amount of individual and crew equipment strewn about the battle position. Everything from meat cans to machine guns. It should be recalled here that this was a new unit in combat, undergoing their first baptism of fire, and of course had entered battle carrying full equipment, including such items as signal panels, extra shoestrings, etc. However, in all fairness to members of the battalion, a large part of this equipment resulted from casualties. When a man was wounded, and started for the rear he would drop all of his equipment, further the aid men would relieve a man of all his equipment prior to carrying him out.
It was found that a resupply of rations and small arms ammunition was not required. All companies reporting sufficient rations for the next day. All reporting that the men had not eaten during the confusion and excitement of their first day in battle. The status of small arms ammunition was explained by reason of the men not firing until they had a target to shoot at, and so very few targets had been seen during the day.
This doesn't speak specifically to ammo loads of course, and this was a green outfit. But this is just one of numerous anecdotes regarding the tendency of US soldiers particularly to leave a trail of discarded gear in their wake. I was also browsing a site where some French guys are excavating the Hill 108 battleground and finding all kinds of gear everywhere.
-
Just downloaded 1.40 to a My Documents subfolder, but I keep getting an error message "Not configured correctly" at launch. I reinstalled -- same thing. I don't have WinZip on my PC (I use 7Zip freeware instead) -- does that have anything to do with it? I noticed there's a library.zip file in the folder. Any insights?
-
... my first scenario and submap for the Le Carillon sequence. This is a Tiny (reinforced platoon) 1+ hour historical recon mission played on a 1x1km stretch of farmland and orchards east of La Meauffe. Playable as US vs AI (RT or WEGO) or H2H.
Anyone who wants to playtest this puppy and provide feedback on everything from the game balance to the briefing to the map, please send me a PM with your email and I'll send you the file. Broadsword, I'm preemptively emailing you the file along with a polite request to PBEM me as US.
The following background is from the German briefing, and lays out some of the context for this entire series (don't worry, there are no spoilers here):
June 15, 1944
In the two critical weeks since the invasion of Normandy, German Seventh Army had been unable to either drive the Anglo-American forces back into the sea or prevent them from consolidating their beachhead and moving inland. The frontline German divisions had suffered terrible losses in the lowland fighting. Their new front in the bocage was increasingly manned by a patchwork of kampfgruppes and skeleton formations attached to other divisions. As American forces began pushing up-country in ever greater numbers, LXXXIV Corps was tasked with rendering their advance as slow and bloody as possible in order to buy time for the panzer forces slowly building up in the area. Key to this brutal attrition fight was German control of the heights north of St Lo.
The Vire river, which bisected the American southern front, was also tactically important to both armies. Defence of the eastern bank and blocking the major road (Highway 3) and railway that ran along it, fell to the battered remnants of 266 Infantry Division, now attached to 352 Infantry Division. As elsewhere, the staying power of this defensive scheme rested almost entirely on its ability to stall the American forces in the dense bocage, and then batter them with artillery directed from the commanding heights around le Carillon. II Battalion, 899 Grenadierregiment established its main line of resistance (MLR) along a 3km front anchored by a bend in the Vire at the small town of La Meauffe, then running ... to the Le Mare - Le Carillon heights.
Yesterday, June 14th, an unidentified American Armeekorps [the newly activated XIX Corps] launched a fresh offensive in the direction of Villiers-Fossard. A secondary flank screening attack down the Vire bank secured them a ridgeline around Amy, placing the Americans on the outskirts of La Meauffe and face to face with the German OPs at le Carillon.
II/899 has been conducting a token defense in these areas, avoiding protracted stand-up fights, but .... has now dug into a forward defensive line in and around La Meauffe itself. This line is now coming under American mortar fire from the ridge. Last night, American light armoured forces cut the main road east to Villiers Fossard and are expected to appear on the eastern outskirts of La Meauffe today....
Mission
The main axis of advance for the latest American offensive lies east of here. This leaves their right flank increasingly exposed to the La Meauffe-Le Carillon position. Being dogmatic and predictable, the American commanders will impulsively order a subsidiary attack to reduce this salient, using forces that are either understrength or inexperienced, or both. To compensate, they will try to pulverize the town using a heavy artillery programme, or perhaps airpower, plus direct fire from tanks advancing up the north road and railbed.
However, the bulk of this extravagant firepower will fall on houses and on largely vacant German positions. Their infantry will then advance into a narrow wedge of ruins on low ground, under nonstop German counterfire and it will be very costly for them to maintain this position or to build up forces there to mount a further attack. If they withdraw, German forces will reoccupy La Meauffe, lay more mines and force them to repeat the entire operation.
Your ... current role in this defensive scheme is to keep the American advance forces from securing an eastern approach to La Meauffe. This will force them either to attack this area in full force, in full view of the le Carillon artillery observers, or to attack La Meauffe head on from the north along the river....
Fiendishly clever. And that's more or less exactly how it went down for the 175th, then the 119th until the full 137th Regiment finally broke the logjam head-on in July.
-
Not to rehash the other thread, but wow! this gives the game a really compelling visual "style" -- reminiscent of period combat footage without being black and white. The intense daylight "sun-washes" the colours and masks a lot of the (inevitable) imperfections in the terrain and models and draws you in. Really beautiful and immersive without literal photorealism. If BFC is looking for a distinctive "look" for future evolutions of the engine without the depressing grey look of most shooters, this could well be it.
-
Well "fatally flawed" certainly depends on the expectations one brings. That said, the core engine is still very much a work in progress. As a content developer who has put significant time into the game, I personally could wish for at least a partial "forward portability" of features like maps and AI plans so all my work is not lost as BFC moves to newer platforms.
-
Thanks, Erwin, again for sharing. This is very interesting stuff.
Some form of CoPlay seems essential for any serious training purpose, so that the command trainee can only directly control units in voice or visual range (or perhaps less) of his personal unit and must relay all other orders and receive situational information via a referee.
CMSF seems to me particularly valuable in teaching infantry and armour leaders how to cooperate.
-
These rules are for infantry on the attack or on the move though, ja? A prepared defensive position would typically keep more ammo on hand, assuming that there was time to bring it up.
BTW, one weakness of the CMBN HMG teams is that as the team takes casualties (e.g. those pesky ubermortars!), the ammo supply is reduced sharply. That's true even if the position hasn't moved. So you can truncate the firepower of a machine gun nest by picking off the riflemen. Another good reason to add a static "ammo supply" unit (say 1k rounds) that never does anything but HIDE but will "share" ammo with nearby units using the game mechanism.
-
Is this kind of attitude really called for? He is having some issues, maybe part of it is him doing something wrong, maybe not. Either way this is inappropriate coming from someone partly associated with BFC and exactly the kind of thing people from "other" forums complain about.
+1. MikeyD you really need to stop and think before you jump down people's throats all the time. This is not an unreasonable post and he went out of his way to say he likes the game. We have all encountered moments like this -- I imagine I'd be pretty frustrated too especially if I was well into a highly competitive H2H game.
BFC does not need a self-appointed Defender of the Faith.
-
@LongLeftFlank: Yeah, I'd go for modding, but is it as cumbersome as it ever was back in the CM days?
I didn't mod back in CM1 days, and my CMSF efforts extend only to building facades but it isn't all that hard for those willing to learn GIMP or another program. M1A1TC did a Korean War part II mod for CMSF including Korean faces... They don't work right with the CMBN wireframes but would probably work with some manipulation. The Para helmets will do for later war IJA with some good helmet netting. For uniforms and webbing you'd need to play around a bit but probably doable -- the biggest challenge would be the footwear - the Japs did that bandage thing instead of gaiters. If you don't like them toting SMLEs you might texture swap those with K98s which look more like IJA service rifles. A search of the forums will tell you how to do texture swapping.
Bottom line: start a CMBN Pac War mod set and you miggt find some modders pitching in to help you. But by now I think you've got the message that an official BFC product isn't in the cards.
-
Plenty of combined arms in the CBI Theatre. Also during the fight for Manila and some of the bigger islands (Bougainville, Okinawa). Meeting engagements betweeen mech forces, not so much (a couple in Burma).
But as I've observed elsewhere, heavily modded British Airborne troops would make adequate Japanese.... Bren for Nambu, 2inch mortar for knee mortar, etc. No offense intended to the Red Devils.
And believe you me, I am finding CMBN more than equal to the task of simulating dense vegetation, albeit on smallish maps. No grass huts, sure, but they'd provide about as much cover as the outhouses and shelters now available as doodads. And a Ryujin texture swap of the CMSF palm tree for the Type A oak would create a pleasing simulacrum of the PTO. Lots of tall grass, marsh and gapped bocage segments to limit LOS. Plus plentiful small watercourses to enhance infiltration and severely restrict vehicle movement. Banzai!
-
Well evidently there wasn't much backblast. I don't think the launcher even has a vent tube (correct me if I'm wrong), and if the gunner isn't getting his eyebrows burnt off I'd presume that people behind him aren't either.
).
CMBN-Commonwealth MODS
in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy
Posted
I suspect anyone with a prerelease copy is beavering away testing and finalizing the core content at the moment.