LongLeftFlank

I'm assuming ELOS will improve the direct fire cover value of unimproved trenches some. But the simple addition of some kind of sandbag "wall" terrain (plenty of sand in the Mideast IIRC ) could put this kvetch to bed once and for all... Unlike stone wall tiles though, these should be placeable if possible either in the middle or the edges of the squares so as to get them right up next to your trench, building or whatever else you're reinforcing. And BTW, in all but the most unpopulated desert some basic topcover can be built for OPs and other small emplacements. Just rip some corrugated tin roofing off a farm outbuilding and cover it with a layer or two of... wait for it... sandbags and rocks. Add a camo net, and MacGyverhammed be praised! But I'm OK to wait on this one (and on wire) as long as we can get some kind of "reinforced" cover soon. (Alert: Whining follows) Do we REEEEEEALLY have to wait for Normandy to get this stuff? Huh Dad, huh? I love CMSF, but I feel like it's only showing "half a war" right now. Send in the Marines!

CMSF now does a very good job recreating the kind of fluid engagements that showcase the Stryker brigade concept under the blitzkrieg backstory. I'd hope though, that the Marines module doesn't just swap in new gear for us to replay the same kinds of mobile actions. I'd hope to see more focus on blood-and-guts infantry assaults and MOUT, the kinds of stuff Marines are known for. Adding a few basic fortification elements 1. sandbagged/reinforced cement buildings 2. wire entanglements 3. sandbagged/camouflaged trenches would go a long way toward opening up a fresh set of modern warfare possibilities for the game system, both for Blue on Red and Red on Red. And for people like me who enjoy Iraq scenarios, the US could be the dug-in defender for a change, with quick reaction forces, Dagger runs, et al.

And shoot and scoot mortar teams are an important part of the uncon arsenal as well.

This gets at the heart of the issue. Units under fire have no "bugout" option -- they just go to ground in place and keep taking hits, even when much safer terrain is close by.

OK, I want to watch "The Beast" again now. One of the great all-time tank flicks, up there with Sahara.

Never figured out the Imageshack thing, but this thread reminds me of... Sea lion pup ... except the pup keeps coming back for more.

Wow, that looks like a pretty cheap vacation getaway spot. Ever try surfing that beach? (Ya smell that?) Expect it's overrun by Aussies though. :cool:

Just so you'll know, this is the specific quote that will get you (re)banned. Steve and the other moderators would like to have real live Syrians on this board, even if your point of view is not what we're used to, but blatantly racist remarks are a no go zone in our world. Rest assured that we'd get banned for using similar slurs about Arabs or Muslims in general, or anyone else. I'm also interested in how Arabs seem to use allegory -- and ascribe to it a much deeper meaning -- than we do in the secular/rational West (although the Old Testament certainly contains its fair share, so maybe it's a Middle Eastern thing in general). So if you can just tone down the racist comments (even if you feel provoked), I'd enjoy hearing what you have to say, whether or not I agree with it on a factual basis.

This was posted WAYYYY back on Aug 21 and I haven't been able to run down any update. It's time for a bone here, especially on item (3). Yet another pitch for my own wish list: - Building shopfronts and vehicle flavour objects - For both sides, ability to fortify and camo-- at least with sandbags -- buildings and entrenchments - Armoured Humvee gun trucks - Western allied, equipped (and maybe led) local forces (jundi, peshmerga, etc.).

This might give you a few ideas... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion_machines

An Undertaking of Great Advantage, But No One To Know What It Is

The first 8 hours would be an all artillery Götterdämmerung -- likely including nukes -- whose firepower would exceed the sum total of all firepower used in all the wars to date. Each side has had half a century to study the other side's positions in detail, and while the North has more tubes (and-- maybe-- the first shot), the US/ROK has precision munitions. Even were some KPA units to survive, tactical movement would be rendered impossible by liberal use of submunitions and FASCAM fields. After Day 1, US airpower would then take over, saturating the entire DPRK defense infrastructure in order to forestall (further) use of nuclear weapons. This would likely include EMP attacks which could slop over the borders, wreaking some havoc there too. Even assuming that the KPA/DPRK effectively ceased to exist after D+7, occupying the place would be no simple matter. The DMZ and the Seoul metroplex would be contaminated rubble and the rest of the South would be a fallout ridden humanitarian disaster area. As for the North... think 20,000 square miles of Passchendaele. Literally bombed back into the Stone Age. A Marine/82nd AB expeditionary force might manage an amphibious landing somewhere in the North around D+30. That would likely also be the time at which the Chinese PLA is able to cross the Yalu in real force. So IMHO if you want combat that is meaningful at a CM level, you need to think China vs. US... with maybe some Russians thrown in for spice.

Jason, given this discussion has spread across 10 pages in 2 threads, could you kindly recapitulate your recommendation for a workable design-for-effect fix, or edit the below? 1. Suppression-based firepower reduction or cover modifiers for stationary units based on dyads (e.g. LOS pairings). Modifiers escalate to "gone deep/total cover" where a unit is all but unhittable (but also doesn't shoot) from a given position -- depending on cover terrain, range to shooter and shooter weapons. 2. Rapid loss of spotting to/from suppressed units. 3. "Spreading" out of area fire effects to (a) improve the defensive effect of concealment ( blunt the impact of the (hard to fix) design that keeps non-moving units bunched into a single 8x8 target rich "slab o' meat" even when under fire. 4. Other

No, it is merely the way of his people to confuse North with South. Comes from walking around upside down down there, and from being descended from convicts who weren't deemed cunning enough to the Poms to be hanged at Tyburn. DO try to be more culturally sensitive in future. :cool:

Methinks somebody read one too many "Hotspur" or "Scorcher and Score" comics back in the Seventies... maybe while getting stoned. But then again, 'tis the season for the Christmas Annuals.

IIRC, "It is all Rum, Buggery and the Lash" is First Sea Lord Churchill's famous retort when Royal Navy "tradition" was cited as an argument against oil-fired (vs. coal-fired) warships. "Rum, Sodomy and The Lash", in contrast, is the title of a Pogues album. Evidently the word "Buggery" was unacceptable to respectable music stores. I, personally, prefer the original quote.

But including just these very 2 items -- rusty Fiats/Toyotas and some piles of cement rubbish and rebar -- as flavour objects (I honestly don't care if they have any effect on LOS/LOF or not) would make the urban landscapes so much more photorealistic and less generic and "sterile". Pleeeeeeeeease, pretty please (grovel, bow, scrape) consider adding these items for the Marines module (I have no dignity left, I'm a married man ). Oh, and I'm very glad this thread still has legs, as resolving the casualty curve issues will have a HUGE payoff for the CMx2 game system as a whole, regardless of theatre or era. Everyone who has posted here so far seems to have the very best hopes for the game, and we're down to really short strokes now. Hang in there!

Sir John Hackett's "The Third World War: August 1985" is still my fave. Never been a big fan of Clancy -- nice tech detail, but his characters are about as lifelike as a 1930s radio serial.

Agree wholeheartedly on the RPG accuracy. Makes MOUT with vehicles virtually impossible even against a complete rabble. While I feel that BFC are doing a great job, that CMSF is the only game worth playing right now and that it is getting better by leaps and bounds, I've got to agree that the basic infantry combat model -- even as of 1.05 -- makes it very difficult to replicate real world behaviour (and yes, there's ongoing argument over what that is in different situations) of men against fire. As BFC and others point out, lethality is EXTREMELY high in the first few seconds of a fight, particularly in modern warfare... whole squads will just melt away in the kill zone IF they stay there. What happens then, however, reminds me of the old high school explanation of calculus: your dog does it rapidly and instinctively when she spots a squirrel... as does the squirrel. In other words (as JasonC pointed out earlier), anyone who isn't hit or caught exposed on the worst kind of pool table pavement figures out nearly instantly where to go to be safe and goes there, tout suite. Except in the very worst cases, there's no drawn out "crawl of death" (except by those already wounded), and no weird milling around the action spot. If the unhit guys have to sprint back 20 meters into the next room or the trees to get out of the kill sack, that's what they'll do, then rally from there. Some more guys might get shot in the back during the bugout if the unit was badly exposed, but thereafter lethality falls steeply (though not to zero) for both sides. Until the next "bump"; lather, rinse, repeat. That's where the CMx2 model still falls short IMHO... squaddies under fire remain stubbornly mired in their "hex" even when it's patently obvious that staying there = inevitable death. There needs to be a "bug out" vs. "go to ground" (or even "charge the enemy if it's a point blank ambush and we're high quality troops") decision logic baked into the AI.

I like Jason's analysis very much, and it reconciles with my observations about only a limited number of guys shooting at any given time. At long last we might see the end of the hated "crawl of death", as the crawlers quickly find cover and fade from sight. Also, I've long bemoaned the inability of either CMx1 or CMx2 (so far) to realistically model infiltration tactics that are such an important part of asymetric warfare even in the era of night vision gear. Functionality as described here would likely address that issue.

Yeah, I usually use conscript/fanatic settings for Red (uncons)... this also takes some of the edge off the RPG accuracy.

I personally feel that the NUMBER of shooters at any given moment, not the accuracy of their fire, is what's overmodeled, at least on the Syrian side. I've posted on this issue before. I've pretty much exclusively played tiny/small Iraq MOUT scenarios in this game to help me understand the situation there (eagerly awaiting the Marines!). I've been annoyed with how many casualties I take as the US player even when I'm being careful and the enemy is an utter rabble (at this point I pretend that US casualties are just unavailable for orders for some reason, not hit). And the conclusion I've come to is that the enemy's volume of fire is just too great. If you look at combat footage from 1939-present (and yes, I understand that combat recorded by film crews isn't necessarily a representation of "normal" combat), what you normally see is 1-3 guys or a single SW team doing the shooting or grenading or flamethrowing or whatever and the rest mainly watching from cover... not cowering but not active. I call this the "union road crew" effect, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has driven past one. The "mad minute" -- where everybody in the squad is pouring it on -- is generally limited to situations where the enemy is (a) at point blank range or charging in full view and it's kill-or-be-killed (think Episode 2 of BoB), or ( is not returning much fire (and it's safe to be a hero). If you look at the copious YouTube footage from Iraq/Afg, US and British squaddies show high firefight participation, presumably a result of training, but also relative paucity of enemy return fire (I'm sure the presence of the cameras helps some too). But even there you frequently see the "union" effect. And it's pretty much all you ever see from the jihadis (although I wouldn't compare their fire discipline to that of regular soldiers). In game terms, what I'd expect to see is a sharp dropoff in fire effectiveness of non-MGs depending on how much return fire it is taking, as well as its level of training.

I have similar problems trying to make out the status of the "button" / "unbutton" toggle.

Only a Hero can save us now!

OK, this quote is almost good enough to become a new sigline for me. Let me sleep on it. Illegitimi non carborundum, Steve!