LongLeftFlank

So in my Carillon Nose thread I've recently noted some quirks in terms of how infantry use (or rather, fail to use) depressions (as in gullies and streambeds). I did some testing using a custom map and this is what I found. My test map has a nice 2 meter deep gully filled with bushes. It winds along taking occasional 90deg angles. Perfect for infiltration. Alas, the infantry ignores this in order to advance in its usual open country manner -- maintaining decent tactical dispersion (Like!) but wandering around a little to get there (Tolerate). And so you end up with this: 2LT Butterbar about to get his head shot off. So here's the workaround; put a hedge or fence (wire fence in this case) along the floor of the gully -- I use the "gapped" one in straight sections to minimize guys hopping over. As you can see in this "WITHOUT" / "WITH" side by side comparison, when the doggies have a fence to follow, they stay in the gully! (the downside is that they're more tightly clumped)

There is a workaround -- see the separate thread I started.

Good thought, but I don't want them unable to exit. A couple of more terrain playtest shots displaying my current obsession with ditches and small streams. Notice, BFC, how lush and "confined" (not to mention photorealistic) everything looks in these shots when there's dense chest-high+ undergrowth, as opposed to nothing between knee high bushes and mature trees allowing you to see right through all the woodlands in all directions. I've been using the "gapped" hedge and hedgerow tiles for this purpose but there's really no good reason you guys couldn't have included some proper thickets or LOS-inhibiting high brush (not those pathetic low scrub bushes from CMSF). On the plus side, you did a fantastic job with the bridges! I can't get enough of them. Here too the pixelsadsacks refuse to wade along the stream in the nice "safe" gully, they keep leaving it to advance along the banks. Which is great for a route march but not when you're trying to infiltrate hostile terrain.

I suppose one could simply toggle all the icons off, but then you lose use of them for your own forces.

Just discovered that the pixegrunts won't move along the ditches as expected; they keep exiting to go around, instead of through, the marsh tiles (placeholder for small streams since all water tiles default to height 5 which would create huge ravines). In combat that pathing could be fatal. Adding the "cordon line" of hedge doesn't help. Overlaying trenches does work but looks silly. Since I want these things uncrossable by vehicles I'll probably need to use heavy forest instead -- an imperfect solution since Slogging through marsh is about as slow and tiring as a water-filled ditch. I do wish they hadn't removed that CMSF trench tile, as it would have been perfect for these ditches, in spite of the performance hit. Oh well.

Now dats what I'm talkin' about! Pixeldoggies down at frog level, slogging through muddy irrigation ditches to flank a Kraut sniper. Just watch for those tripwires....

OK, I have now carved out the northeast quadrant into a large submap, of which I am detailing the 1500 x 1100m portion shown in this panorama shot. The bocage is starting to take shape.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squad_Leader http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Squad_Leader

1. Slat armour does have an effect, although I'm not an expert since Strykers were never of much interest to me (I'm a Marines player). 2. BFC has said that there will be no more modules or other adds (e.g. patches) for the current CMSF. BFC has indicated that they'd like to return to modern warfare at some point, probably with Eastern Europe (Ukraine?) as a venue, but they're fully committed with WWII at the moment, so you're probably going to wait at least 3 years. Best guess.

Sole access via a sunken road crossing a creek (marsh)

The northeast quadrant of the map (east of La Meauffe) is almost complete (except of course for the bocage fields, orchards and wooded windbreaks). Here's a low-rez pano shot from the east edge looking NW from the farms at la Guillotterie. The settlements I showed above are visible in the distance along the main road. Once I've finished laying out the last settlements in this area (la Preterie and Concho), I'm going to carve out a 1.5km E-W x 1km N-S submap which I will use to test and perfect my own version of the bocage country down to the last muddy ditch! Once detailed, I will release this to the community for use as a large QB map. This map fits within the 25,000 action square upper playability limit suggested by Broadsword56. As noted previously though, über armour and über artillery "queens" will hate this map. I will then in turn carve out still smaller submaps for a couple of "warm up" scenarios -- a platoon-sized probe by 175th Infantry along the Moon-sur-Elle road east of La Meauffe (~June 15), then Baker Company, 1/119th's assault on La Meauffe itself on June 18. About time I actually played this game some!

Nice work mate. Just curious (although I know it has nothing to do with your mod) that is a historically inaccurate position for the gunlayer, right? It looks more like he's manning a MG than an ordnance weapon.

LOL! [Fleetingly considers using above as new signature line but then decides against].

As I've said several times in similar threads, I don't think the spotting, timing or accuracy of the mortars are the problem (although I think their blast effects on hard targets like buildings and bunkers are way overmodeled relative to conventional HE shells), it's the unrealistic lack of reaction of the human targets to the "Incoming!!!" before the impact. Even taking into account the relative quiet of falling mortars, giving men, especially Veteran and up, a split second to lie down flat and stay there would help a LOT with the lethality in all but the most coverless terrain. This is well documented in veteran accounts; hitting the dirt when Sarge does was Lesson One in battlefield survival for most replacements. The primary WWII tactical purpose of mortars (tactical unit control, deployed near the the front, short range, high ROF, rounds and fuzing designed to trade blast effect for wide fragmentation) was to force large numbers of attackers to ground, bloodying, demoralizing, pinning and delaying them long enough to allow defenders to react and reinforce. And then to compel the pinned forces to withdraw to less exposed cover or be progressively peppered to death. The other purpose was "stonks"; harassing fire aimed at disrupting enemy activity such as resupply or entrenching. In neither case was the expectation to annihilate entire enemy formations -- even entrenched ones --within minutes through intensive barrages, as happens in the game with depressing regularity leaving sad heaps of huddled corpses. Mortars were rarely in a position to create that kind of concentrated carnage unless the enemy was either somehow hemmed in (e.g. a gully) with lousy cover or blindly insisted on continuing to advance (banzai charge / human wave). Yes, they were the most lethal weapon of WWII. No, they weren't capable of wiping out entire non-moving units to the last man within minutes. Didn't happen except in bizarre circumstances.

...And while I'm thinking about European urban areas, an iron railing (a low stone or brick wall topped by a spiked rail that men can't hop across without breaching) seems like a pretty ubiquitous feature. The other most common city feature missing at present would be a solid flavour object representing a flight of steps 1-2 meters up to a townhouse. Good solid cover for men fighting in the streets. Making these steps climbable would be even better! -- so mapmakers can sink the ground floors of certain buildings into half basements and let troops enter the second floor directly (hint: you can already "fake" this with a Bridge object!). But that's a wishlist feature. For the older districts of Gay Paree, a collonaded balcony type would also provide an interesting building facade with tactical properties -- at first floor, instead of posts reaching to the ground you have thick stone pillars and arches (providing solid cover).

Actually, while we're here, can we expect any new goodies in the way of map / terrain types in the CW module? While I'd love a ground level LOS blocking "thicket" or "high dense brush" tile, what about a flat-roofed industrial building type? (accessible roofs a la CMSF, grimy brick construction and high bays -- basically a "barn" variant). The Caen area was somewhat more developed industrially than the US Basse Normandie sector; we must also start thinking about the Breakout, Falaise and Leclerc's Liberation drive for/into Paris. A nice to have would be a black iron "fire escape" balcony type.... Doesn't have to be an exterior stair although this would rockn if Charles is feeling bored (yeah, right!). You might also want a "long window" that doesn't include a door; prewar factories were big on natural daylight to save lighting costs. Railway rolling stock would be way cool too for railway station / / marshaling yard fights. A (no climbing no LOS nightmare) smokestack flavour object would also look awesome! (thinking it would be a kind of tree so it would cast a shadow and absorb some fire) A few cover-providing industrial flavour objects off the top of my head might include: large industrial vat (wood and cast iron), drill press or lathe, burnt out civilian lorry, large stack of railroad ties or lumber, kiln/furnace (basically a large brick fireplace with a metal hatch).

Make 'im an Elite FAC and his squadron can try to cover him a la BAT-21 or Bridges at Koto-Ri. (whose Mickey Rooney in a top hat mod are you using?) Feliz Navidad, all!

I have to work tonight (as in, the job that pays the bills -- just call me Bob Cratchit) but I did have one "a-ha" moment when viewing my CMBN handiwork at ground level. The only parts of these settlements that are generally visible at any distance are the rooftops. Which make good aiming points for artillery, since you can see spotting rounds -- especially mortars -- impacting on them. Which may be a really good practical reason why buildings (at least highly visible ones) were NOT favoured as defensive positions in the bocage, regardless of how thick and protective their walls might have been. And in that vein, those of you who have become accustomed to locating an enemy MLR and then plastering it with artillery or AFV direct fire before mopping up will be in for a bit of a shock on my map. Good luck getting LOS to an enemy position without walking right up to it. There's a reason FOOs had the shortest shelf lives of any personnel in the Allied forces.

And one by one, the little Norman hamlets and farmsteads appear, enshrouded behind overgrown walls, bocage and orchards. All these have been carefully laid out in their authentic Google Earth footprints, with reference to the 1947 shots. Most of the buildings are unchanged today although the bocage has been largely removed. La Caillourie -- innocent looking, but shields the entrance to a tactically critical sunken road.... The manor farm at Launay, first waypoint along the advance route of 2nd Battalion, 137th, toward the fortified heights at Le Carillon, June 10. INCOMING!!!!!!!!! If you're curious, these villes take about an hour apiece to lay out, using two computers -- one with CMBN open and the other with (a) Google Maps / Streetview ( the 1947 image in GIMP © my gallery of buildings so I can match the textures and door/window placements as closely as possible. And I'm not fishing for compliments here, just sharing ideas with my fellow map designers.

I'm waiting for BFC to offer a discount for Brits + NATO only and then I will buy them.

Well by the time I finish my monster bocage map I'm hoping you'll all be sick to death of Holland and want to go back to it for a bit.

This is partly a map design issue; frankly, tanks should not normally be able to pull in behind stands of mature trees and fight through them in summer. Low branches and thickets of smaller trees on the edge of the wood would make LOS largely impossible. Keyholing through a gap is a different matter. An AFV in a fighting position in woodlands is generally concealed in brush, not sitting amid trees; the latter is a hiding place from air power. There are exceptions, sure, but not the rule.

It simply needs to link to a low stone wall that's in the action square occupied by the tower. The "follow the wall" movement logic seems to override the "don't climb cliffs" logic which is how the units scale the Pont du Hoc cliffs (hedges, not walls in that case). I use a right angled tile to provide egress to both the church building and the churchyard although I havent checked the former configuration yet. Units in the base tower level can exchange fire with adjacent units in the churchyard. I also played around with laying a 16m footbridge through the middle of the tower to let units enter at the higher level. This works, but only one-way... Once the units "realize" they are in the church tower, they won't go back onto the bridge.

The church tower at St Martin was a linchpin for the German defense at La Meauffe. Its thick sandstone walls provided solid cover for artillery observers and a machine gun nest dominating hundreds of meters of surrounding fields. There's a smaller bell tower across the river in the chapel at Bahais that served a similar role for both sides. It just won't do to have these critical positions simply leveled by a bunch of 81mm rounds early in a game (FOs and gunners can be replaced but good overwatch is scarce on this map). However, the shell-resistant 8 story cathedral tower provided with the game is too damn tall for a rural church -- it looks like there should be a giant flaming eye on the top. Here's my solution; bury it 5m deep in the ground and steal Seabee's Pont du Hoc trick of having a small stone wall that helps troops climb in and out of the pit. The ground level also makes a solid bomb shelter (the godless Huns had heavily fortified this church and the adjacent chateau with poured cement pillboxes, etc.) Notice I buried the church 1m as well, to give troops a "half basement" level to fight out of.