LongLeftFlank

Enclose the buildings and their gardens with authentic walls and hedges and they won't look so odd. For good measure add a crate, sacks or bench. Simple enough.

I used to delight in saying such things to my American friends until one pointed out that the Latin from which these words were taken does NOT include "u" and that moreover all the Brits (and their offshoots) are doing is advertising the sad fact that a thousand years ago we lost a war to the French. Never felt quite so self-righteous after that zinger....

Punk rocker, poet, painter (and Late Empire uniforms grog) Billy Childish. The Youtube links posted above explain all. Thee Headcoats is his most famous band, but Buff Medways is another. Basically, if the Peng Challenge had a soundtrack, Billy would provide it..... If that ain't enuff, Google or wiki "Steady the Buffs" for the regimental history.

More than you think, mate....

Nice work! Putting a "gapped" high bocage abutting the side of a 2-3 story house is a little dense for ivy up close but doesn't look too bad at a distance. It also provides very good additional cover for the ground floor -- bocage is a lot sturdier than stone and brick walls. I'm using this expedient to toughen up some of the walls of my fortified chateau.

Wow, nice looking map! One reco, FWIW: make sure units have little to no LOS deep into, much less right through, those two patches of woodland flanking the Abbey. Those are going to be critical tactical terrain in the game. Right now, I am sad to say the plain CMBN forest tiles + trees aren't accurately representing the dense thickets (young trees and bushes) at the woods edges that in summer heavily obstruct LOS into and out of the interior. They are more representative of "interior" forests where sunlight is sporadic. The method I recommend is to use the hedge tiles that have gaps in them at various angles to represent the thickets, together with the small "orchard trees" and long grass. More info available in this thread. Good luck! EDIT: Some others have suggested tinkering with the elevations or using bocage instead of hedge but I don't personally endorse those solutions as thickets generally offer very little cover (but great concealment). You make the call. EDIT: Oh wait -- are those orchards? Never mind the thicket in that case, but they should definitely have bocage around them.

Yes, buttoned AFVs spotting infantry is on my own Top Three Things To Be Improved list.

As opposed to this (minute 13:25)?

On the one hand, it seems like something like 95% of all infantry attacks in Normandy by either side -- at least in the detailed logs I've read so far -- ground to a halt once the enemy mortars found the range. Snipers and MG nests held up, but rarely stopped, an attack. On the other hand, those mortars did not then proceed to annihilate the pinned down enemy force, entrenched or no, except in a few unusual instances. The mortars are unquestionably overmodeled in the game when it comes to their lethality against infantry in cover.

Thanks for the observations, Steve. I got rid of the ditches (for now) and sure enough, the map now displays. I am just going to avoid the temptation to code any kind of terrain details on the master; all it will contain is the contours, watercourses, road net, placeholder buildings and the outlines of the hedgerows and forests. Ideally, the carve-out battlemaps will have some additional space on them to support the omnipresent German artillery observers (and occasional SP gun) Interestingly, I tried using the water tiles (which are locked to a single elevation) to create gullies and they don't seem to hit the memory nearly as badly -- they're just way too deep for my purposes (I want 2 meters deep, not 5-8). As a general thought for future engine development; the tactical impacts of small depressions, defiles, gullies, drainage ditches, etc. are significant, even decisive -- Mother Earth after all provides far better cover than any above ground terrain feature. So it would be very useful indeed to find a way to let players "lay on" these features without distorting the basic terrain (contour) mesh and creating a concomitant LOS computation nightmare. I can definitely imagine and sympathize with the coding challenges however (same problem with adding any "subterranean" feature like cellars or "true" entrenchments) I am happy to send the current map to anyone who PMs me with an email address.

One of the few detailed sections of my master map; the southernmost section of La Meauffe looking southeast across the rail line. In the background, the Le Carillon height is visible (although it won't be on any game submap.... grrr!)

Thanks for the info. BFC should definitely consider a "toggle grass" feature then. It does seem though like it would be a hassle to go through and "repaint" various grasses, weeds etc. on all the submaps, especially since you're at risk for accidentally deleting other terrain types.

Interesting! Have you tested removing grass? If it makes such a difference BFC should consider a toggle... Of course that may only provide a temporary reprieve, sijce I'll invariably go a "gully too far" again

Well, further development of this project has now ground to a halt, at least in its current incarnation. I can no longer view my 2.6 x 2.8km map in 3d without crashing CMBN (it doesn't even give me OOM, just terminates). Looks like gullies and steep-sided streambeds are the culprit; I am trying to render 2-3 meter deep irrigation ditches with ~30 degree sides, and the number of elevations I have to lock is ridiculous... nearly every square. I really wish BFC had kept the non-FOW "trench" terrain type in CMBN, as that was a useful way of rendering ditches and small depressions without so much clicking. The streambeds, railbeds and sunken lanes were critical features of the battlefield, allowing troops to advance and infiltrate unobserved. I'm a little frustrated by all this, as I've put a LOT of time into research. Not sure what I'm going to do yet... I guess I'm going to have to leave my master map relatively devoid of details of any kind and start figuring out the submaps. Or shelve this frustrating project altogether and return to pooltable-flat Ramadi.

I've read a lot of those accounts too, and they need to be taken with a LARGE grain of salt. The guys who wrote them were typically middle-aged officers who were not eyewitnesses to the events (or possibly, to any other frontline infantry combat). But they had been brought up in the traditional pikeman "spirit of the bayonet" culture that still formed a very fundamental component of infantry training and doctrine. So for these guys, it somehow wasn't a real fight if it didn't involve spitting the Hun. I mean, it's not like it never happened, especially at night as ammo ran short. But in an era of mass-produced handguns, machine pistols, semiautomatic rifles/carbines and grenades, more reliable and longer-ranged alternatives were available for killing enemies once you saw the whites of their eyes. Stabbing and clubbing a man to death face-to-face was strictly a last resort. The Civil War was a very different era tactically, with infantry combat having more in common with the Napoleonic era than with the 20th century. Introduction of the bolt-action rifle (more likely the single-shot breechloading cartridge a la Martini-Henry -- think Zulu War "volley fire") was the swansong of the medieval pikeman.

Framerate impacts likely wouldn't be much worse than "fog" weather conditions. And there is a toggle option for smoke already. I'd personally love to see more ambient battlefield smoke in general -- belching fumes, weapons smoke, longer dispersal of explosions, etc. A huge immersion adder, and seems readily doable by tweaking existing effects. I wanted this in CMSF too, to the point where I considered putting some random RED indirect fire in my Ramadi map just for the atmosphere.

His fault for living near a beach convenient to midget submarines. Oh, and whose grass mod are they eating?

Fires in vegetation take quite a while -- several minutes or more -- to get going once lit, especially in the unseasonably damp conditions that characterized Normandy in June - July '44. So you aren't going to get a lethal wildfire or even a good smokescreen for some time. Probably explains why it wasn't used as a RL battlefield tactic much. Buildings are easier to torch in all weather, but the resulting fire isn't necessarily going to spread readily beyond immediately adjacent structures.

Wow, that would make issuing Target orders to that squad.... interesting

My focus was 81mm, but I have definitely seen about 30 rounds of 60mm direct fire demolish structures and hedgerows and decimate wood bunker occupants. I can live with the first and last --I assume they used some of the demo rounds but the lethality against bunkers is just too reliable. I think Harry is right about the firing slit being an Achilles heel.

Yes, not to ignore a serious bug or anything, but my instant reaction on reading the OP is if you're depending on that 2 man fragment of a depleted unit to accomplish any combat objective, you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel! (We've all been there!)

I have no problem with the accuracy or ROF of CMBN mortar rounds, or with their lethality against unentrenched infantry, or direct hits on infantry in open entrenchments; indeed, all that seems about right. Based on my reading, once the mortars ranged in, advancing infantry tended to go to ground pronto and stay there, for good reason. All those tiny fragments flying around were simply lethal. However, it is my opinion that the concussive / destructive effects of ordinary frag rounds (not the special demo rounds, whose very existence affirms what I'm saying) against terrain, buildings and wooden bunkers are significantly overmodelled. Same goes for lethality of non-direct hits against entrenched infantry. Mortar frag rounds and fuzes are designed to maximize AP fragmentation by impacting on (or above) the surface, not to plow into the ground before exploding as do conventional shells. The blast force is far from zero of course; for example, much of the lethality of treebursts is the bomb shredding impacted tree limbs into splinters. And mortar rounds could certainly bury themselves in wet ground (as depicted in that BoB clip), creating an impressive vertical shower of earth but muffling most of the lethal fragmentation effect outside the immediate impact area. On the other hand, a buddy of mine used to pick up the tailfins of 81mm training rounds from the center of the impact spot, which he said in rocky desert left far more of a scorch mark than a crater.

...or we can hope for the blast effects of mortar rounds (frag, not demo) to be significantly reduced. I should really not be able to breach hedgerows with 60mm....