LongLeftFlank
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Posts posted by LongLeftFlank
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And then there was the utter misery of the "Repple Depples" (Replacement Depots) whose endless ration of parade drills and chickensh*t busy work caused even badly wounded veterans to desert from field hospitals in order to return to their trusted buddies instead of finding themselves in an unknown new unit.
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Yes it would be unreasonable, IMHO, although modern BLUE soldiers might be more incented to attach themselves to a new group of "friendlies" (wandering off alone in Syria would likely be viewed as more dangerous than going into combat with strangers). The recently added ammo sharing function is about as much coordination as you'd expect to see in RL.
As for WWII, accounts of the Normandy airdrop for example, abound with "orphaned" paratroopers attaching themselves to other units but then largely failing to distinguish themselves in action or quickly becoming casualties when they try (e.g. 2LT Butterbar gets shot when nobody follows his lead).
In the game, a strong leader unit in command will raise the performance of both fragment units but they'd remain functionally separate even if they're in the same location and shooting the same targets.
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... And vanishing into a massive red animated fireball billowing up into the heavens because, well, they were smoking by a fuel truck. I Like It!
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I'd venture to say the tactical spacing of the CMx2 game engine will be more realistic for WWII infantry than it is for modern day BLUE forces in CMSF. Squad tactical drills weren't as refined in WWII as they are for today's soldiers. While WWII tactical manuals do indeed advise of the dangers of "bunching up", especially in column, and noncoms would be barking out "Spread out, dammit!", small teams or even entire squads of green draftees would still tend to do so under stress. Take a look at (unposed) combat pics of WWII riflemen in action -- they really don't look much different than the pixeltruppen.
In my opinion, CM ought to "un-nerf" HE for this reason.
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The slope of the banks depends on the seasonal flood pattern of the river, the surrounding terrain (flat or hills?) and the soil it's flowing through/carrying (mud/silt? gravel? sand? rocks?). In midsummer (even though June was particularly rainy), rivers could well have a dried (and well vegetated) flood plain on each side several times the actual width of the water. The bridge and its adjacent abutments would usually be built to keep the entire road above maximum flood stage.
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Longest Day is unplayable really and not a good game system - Normandy '44 beats it by miles.
Not hard to believe. All AH games above Panzerblitz seem to end up with trench warfare gridlock across the map. Been true since Tactics II. The "exploitation" rules either never work well or create lopsided non-contests (France, 1940).
I never bothered reading the CMC subforum or played Onion Wars, so I actually don't know much about this topic and am curious to know a little more. Resolving even selected battalion level combats that take place in a wargame, even on the smaller scale of "St Lo", on the basis of CM battles seems tricky.
For example, on 20 June the US might conduct 3 successive attacks; the first 2 stall miserably but the third partly succeeds in breaking into the German lines. And then that night the Germans counterattack. How do you handle that? At the end of the wargame turn (1 day?), how do you determine who controls the hex(es) being contested. Or is that simply agnostic to the outcome of the CM fight?
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This plays at a battalion scale too, and the map is a work of art. Never quite worked up the nerve to drop the necessary coin to buy it though. I love those Heer map symbols on the counters -- a nice break from the little "Xs" and "TV sets".
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One good read that hasn't been mentioned yet is SLA Marshall's "Night Drop", a series of after-action interviews which is widely used as source material by other historians, as well as for Marshall's better known works. Marshall has come under suspicion of course for making stuff up to fit his theories, so I make no guarantees on historical authenticity, but many of the stories are riveting. I remember reading the entire thing cover to cover one afternoon in the Ann Arbor public library.
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It was indeed a poor quality product that killed the brand, maybe not the product they were making when the brand died, but a long long line of lemons.
And not just in the "beer can in the door" years. My dad, who worked in the business in the 1990s, used to call it "the death of a thousand MBAs" -- each one trying to win promotion by shaving a tenth of a cent off a part through "value engineering" and "strategic sourcing". Which makes even luxury US brands seem "cheap" compared to their Japanese and Euro designed competitors, even if their reliability has improved since the dark years.
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I'd personally like to see such an extreme FOW option for H2H play.
That CMBO night drop scenario where your paratroopers start scattered all over the village is one of my all-time favourites, and I observed the "first person view only" rule, but I was playing the AI.
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Now tremble all enemies of the Republic!
At the risk of taking this thread OT (but hell, I think the essential point has been made), do you think the CMx2 engine is sufficiently advanced at this point to -- horses and riders excepted, which is tricky but I'm sure Charles can manage! -- create an engaging Civil War game? (With a Crimean War / European Powers intervention what-if module)
Or is the scale of CM (~300 infantry per side, maybe 500 if you have a powerful rig) too limiting to get the really interesting fights? Or maybe I'm underestimating the ability of the engine?
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I. Eat. Your. Sunflower Seeds!
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I suggested sumfink like this elsewhere; a "Titanium" mode where if you haven't clicked on a friendly all you see is a blank (unit free) map. If you then added a function where each player AI group could be given a PIN and a player could only control those Groups he had the PIN for, you could have a very basic form of PBEM coplay....
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Hun 81s. If you play any CMBN scenario I build, your doggies had best keep moving. The moment you go to ground, you'll start to die....
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Steve indicated a few months back that this is fairly high on the "To Do" list, together with being able to label the AI groups and plans just as you can label reinforcements now.
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Soooo... if you're pretty sure your German opponent will buy cats in a QB, what's the best thing in the mid-'44 US arsenal to counter them IYHO? M10s? Swarms of zooks? Piles of artillery smoke?
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(right side) Do these leopard-print camouflage trousers make my arsch look grosse?
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I wouldn't worry too much about it -- I found you could capture the "being there-ness" of a well-documented historical location quite nicely using the existing toolset. Having been one of several scenario designers who have tried to push the CMx2 engine editor to its limits (and then some), I must say I am favourably impressed.
My only "ask", as always, would be some form of cut and paste so that we could manufacture libraries of Norman farmsteads, villages, etc. Steve's mentioned it's on BFC's "want to do someday, just don't know when" list.
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Whose bearded Impressionist in straw hat painting the mademoiselles mod are they using?
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Once you've reached the point where your troops are hemmed in against the map edge with no place to hide, my guess is that you've already been totally defeated and losing the remnants doesn't matter. But maybe I'm misunderstanding your question.
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The poor sap carrying teh crap launcher is gonna be weighed down. Stalin called them useful idiots
Wait, wasn't it Lenin, and wasn't he referring to Communist sympathizers in the Western bourgeoisie? So you're saying the launcher should be carried around by left-wing hipsters?
That's already been thought of by my countryman who never met a Communist he didn't like,
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Gimp ought to be able to do everything Photoshop can as far as transparency but I'm not expert on either. Mord modded the icons recently to create greater FOW, but I notice he hasn't been doing much posting lately.
Have you considered simply toggling the icons off when you don't want to look at them?
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The TacAI definitely has some bias toward paved surfaces; on my Ramadi map, vehicles consistently left the roadway at one point to get onto the cobblestoned surface adjacent to it. I had to put in a wall to prevent it.
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One complicating factor is that -- assuming they haven't changed it -- is that the small road tiles run only at either right or 45deg angles (the big highways are more flexible but aren't going to be prominent in Normandy), so there's going to be a certain amount of "fudging" required to translate a physical map to CM no matter what you do.
In adapting the Google Earth imagery of Ramadi to CMSF, I found that once you established the distances between the key landmarks, that was sufficient to create a basic framework for the CMSF version and that I shouldn't get too hung up on whether these landmarks were in their exact relative horizontal and vertical positions. If you end up having to put a bunch of kinks in a road that should be straight for example just to make it fit, you're doing more violence than you need to to the tactical authenticity.
A Couple of Mapmaking Questions
in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy
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Like roads, wall segments enter and leave the map grid square only at 45 or 90 deg angles. So you need to do some matching, but it isn't really that hard once you get the hang of it. I am still over the moon about the addition of "T-junction" walls to the engine, but hey, I'm a total loon.
Slightly OT, but is there a tall (say waist high) "rampart of sandbags" flavour object that we could use to create our own building strongpoints? In other words, something that will soak up bullets and shell fragments. The CMSF workarounds are low wall segments, but I wanted something a bit more versatile and sturdy than a stack of crates and higher than the existing "sacks" objects.
More broadly, I'm worried that Norman farms and other buildings might be a little too easy to clear using firepower alone, just as CMSF buildings are now (either mud brick or poured cement for the most part). Whereas, between their sturdy field stone walls, timbered ceilings and root cellars, even if you blast the things into rubble you could well still be facing infantry who can only be winkled out by other infantry. Bottom line: it should be virtually impossible for an armoured force stripped of its infantry to secure a building complex. In CMSF it is currently very much possible to do so.