Leonidas

My attacking infantry are marching through the forest, trying to flush out the defending infantry. They are at Move speed, because they are expecting contact soon. They are packed close together, so they are all in command. Early in the turn, they discover enemy infantry. A firefight breaks out. But they've got a Move command for the turn, so they fire at the enemy while walking, marching deeper into the enemy infantry during the turn, and exposing themselves to more defending squads. Does this bother anyone else? I think infantry should have a Hunt command, where they will stop moving when they have a target in effective range. Or perhaps this should be default behavior for the Move command. I know that suggestions for more refined commands are generally shot down in the name of realism by the opponents of micromanagement, but is anyone willing to say that this would be unrealistic? To me, the unrealistic part is when the infantry walks casually through enemy fire until told to stop. Realism would be infantry that stop and fire at the enemy on contact, unless they are specifically ordered to Run forward into the enemy position.

I don't claim any special knowledge about this subject, but what's been said doesn't make sense to me. If night/fog favored the attacker, then why didn't all attacks take place at night? After all, the attacker usually gets to choose when he launches the attack. I'll take everyone's word for it that night/fog helps the attacker in CM. But I don't think the actual WWII combatants saw it that way. Isn't that a realism problem, then? Or maybe my history is wrong: Are you saying that a significant number of attacks in WWII actually were launched at night?

Global morale is another consideration. Doesn't it affect the individual soldiers' reactions?

Didn't that same movie have a scene where a German tank drives over a Russian foxhole, and a Russian soldier jumps out of the foxhole and puts a magnetic mine on the engine cover of the tank? I would think a tank driving over a foxhole would be much more dangerous for the tank than for the infantry. But I guess it depends on the depth of the foxhole.

If you're starting out, it's good not to touch the various Quick Battle setup options, besides setting the battle type, points, and nationality of the attacker. The defaults produce a balanced battle, but messing with them can quickly skew things to the attacker or the defender. Get some experience before you try night battles, heavy trees or no trees, big hills, restricted nationalities and force types, etc. And when you decide to try out a new set of parameters, it's best to set up a battle against the AI first, to see how it plays. The best way to know if a set of parameters is balanced is to smash the AI from both sides. Admittedly, that's a nuisance, especially if you hate playing the AI as much as I do. But it's usually better than putting both players through all the work of a full PBEM just to discover that armor vs. infantry in treeless farmland isn't quite balanced. If you don't have the patience for an entire battle against the AI to test your QB parameters, at least generate a couple of maps if you're messing with the map parameters, to get a sense of what you're getting. The map parameters interact in interesting ways. For example, Farmland w/ heavy trees sounds similar to Rural w/ heavy trees, but they are completely different.

Two. I like PBEMs where I can move at least once a day, and usually several times on weekends, so two is about all I can have and keep up the pace.

I was about to say the opposite. I think low visibility helps the defender, because the attacker can't support his front units with his rear units. Another advantage is that the defender gets a devastating close range shot to start any infantry confrontations. My thought is that low visibility must have helped the defender in the actual war, because most attacks were launched in daylight.

I think everyone is pro-realism, but they don't agree on what realism is. The most common assumption is that 'realism' means making the player experience what a particular individual (such as a company or battalion commander) would experience in a battle. The trouble is that a company commander sim would be a really boring game, because each individual involved in a battle has little or no perspective on the overall picture, and a narrow range of decision-making power. Another problem with a company commander sim is that it wouldn't create realistic battles, because current AI isn't capable of imitating human decisionmaking at the unit level. So a one person company commander sim could only show what it would be like to be company commander over a bunch of really stupid people, which I see as completely unrealistic. CM is not a company commander sim. Instead, it puts the player in 'God mode' and allows some degree of player decisionmaking all the way down to each individual squad and tank. So to the extent that the player can control the units, you get realism in their actions. But player control or 'micromanagement' brings its own loss of realism. The trouble is that there's just one of you. In a real battle there are many different commanders all trying to work together, and that produces fascinating problems in communication and coordination that have a big effect on battle. But there is no way to replicate this communication/coordination problem in a one player game. If the player makes decisions for each individual unit (to save them from AI stupidity), then those units will necessarily be much more coordinated than they would realistically be. So the realism problem is not a technological problem, nor is it something that can simply be fixed by BTS trying harder. The problem is that 1) AI technology is still too primitive to make realistic unit-level decisions, and 2) CM is only a one- or two-player game. If you let the player control the units, then the units are too smart and too coordinated. If you don't let the player control the units, then they are too stupid. The only solutions I can imagine are 1) a radical revolution in AI technology, or 2) a massive online version of CM (some 10-15 years in the future) in which each tank, squad and team is actually controlled by a separate human being. Right now, CM splits the difference between the two. It leans towards letting the player make most unit-level decisions. But in some areas (particularly tanks) the player's control is limited, and he must rely on the TacAI to do the right thing. Personally, I find AI stupidity to be more unrealistic than perfect information flow. And more importantly, a game based on unrealistically perfect information flow is more fun and will sell better than a game based on unrealistically stupid units. This is why I always advocate more detailed commands to substitute human judgment for AI decisions.

You'll need to tell more than that. Was the MG team staring down the barrel of an enemy tank at the time? AFAIK, there's nothing special about battle lines that determines when a unit surrenders. It's just a matter of morale and local balance of force. [This message has been edited by Leonidas (edited 03-10-2001).]

The tank reaction to AT guns baffles me. I call it 'gun hypnosis.' When faced with a weapon whose sole purpose is destroying tanks, the CM tank TacAI usually sits still and fires at the AT gun until one of them is destroyed. And it's usually the tank. This behavior doesn't seem to depend on whether the tank has any chance of destroying the gun. Right now in a PBEM I've got a Puma (with HE blast values in the single digits) firing at an American AT gun several hundred meters away. The Puma's job is killing AFVs. We have artillery to handle AT guns. But somehow my Puma commander didn't get that memo. The irony is that AFVs, and especially British and American tanks, are so eager to throw smoke and run away from enemy AFVs, even if it's a tank killer running away from a tank. The cover story is usually that the tank crew is afraid. Yet when faced with a weapon that they are not equipped to fight, the tank crew suddenly becomes fearless and stands its ground. I'm not asking for a patch, and CM is a great game despite this problem. But I would like to see this fixed in CM2. The ideal solution IMHO would involve detailed orders and SOPs. But if that isn't in the cards, BTS should at least tweak the tank TacAI so that tanks are generally braver against other tanks than they are against AT guns.

I'm genuinely confused. If the daisy-chain mines are harder to spot, then how are they different from normal AT mines? As an addition to the game, deploying daisy-chain mines during battle certainly sounds interesting from a pure game perspective. It's strange that QBs charge the same for daisy-chains as they do for normal minefields. But I don't yet understand exactly what the proposal is here. Would DC mines still cost the same as regular mines? If DC mines become less visible, would normal AT minefields become nearly invisible? I would think so. I've never understood how you can spot an AT minefield unless you've got infantry really close to it. The difference between DC and regular AT is that the mines are buried, right? So unless you get up close and study the ground, you're not going to know they're there. Someone mentioned how hard it would be to spot even DC mines in grass. Wouldn't the logical conclusion be that it would be easier to see them on a road? Shouldn't mines generally be easy to spot on roads and other non-vegetative surfaces? How would snow affect things: harder to see, because the snow has buried them, or easier to see, because of all the footprints in the snow left behind by those who placed them? How would mud affect the visibility and effectiveness of mines? Should there be a 'Minefield?' icon to indicate that there are idicia of a minefield. Could the defender buy fake minefields (maybe just in an Assault), meaning that he sent some guys out the day before with shovels to dig holes and make patches of ground look like mines were buried there? As one largely ignorant on these topics, I would love to hear a complete proposal on how mines should be improved for CM2, from someone who really knows this stuff. [This message has been edited by Leonidas (edited 03-09-2001).]

I wasn't. I was thinking of other threads with that comment.

(sigh) But you ARE there, because you're not just the company commander. You are also doing the job of every platoon commander and tank commander, except that you aren't given the tools with which to do that job well. A real platoon commander can move around a little and find LOS. What about a command to tell the unit to search around a little until it finds LOS to a given target? Or what about the ability to check LOS from any point in a 20m radius around each unit? Would these be 'unrealistic' as well, despite the fact that they're exactly what a real unit would do? [This message has been edited by Leonidas (edited 03-09-2001).]

What on earth are you talking about? Several hundred meters away? Obviously you're trying to be insulting, but you're not even making sense. The point never seems to sink in, but I'll say it one more time just for fun: The tanker IS on the spot, therefore he CAN determine LOS and hull down position. There seems to be standard discussions that get repeated here. Maybe we could streamline these conversations by getting the basic patterns out in the open. If you like to imagine a better, brighter CM, and you're thinking of making a modest suggestion, prepare for the following: Proposal: CM would be more fun if you could do X. Criticism: That wouldn't be realistic. Real company commanders couldn't do X. Answer: Yes, but CM simulates much more than the company commander's job. Criticism: You can more or less accomplish the same thing already. Answer: Irrelevant. The question is whether CM would be a better game with the feature, not whether there's some awkward workaround available. Criticism: CM is already a perfect game, and any attempt to change it in any way is sure to bring doom on us all. Answer: Stopping the development of CM with that attitude is a sure way to make CM obsolete in a few years. Criticism: You're obviously unskilled, a wimp, or a newbie if you think that CM should be improved. All the inconveniences in CM are actually carefully crafted challenges that demonstrate skill and build character. Answer: Personally I suspect that BTS would prefer to sell fun games that make money rather than sell pointlessly tedious and irritating games that satisfy some extreme notion of realism. And if you would like to see CM3 and CM4, you might like for BTS to stay solvent, too. Criticism: This was proposed and rejected on this forum six months ago. Quit wasting our time. Answer: Just because some previous group of people discussed and rejected an idea shouldn't prevent me from suggesting it. I didn't participate in that conversation. Why should an idea be squelched forever just because the first person to propose it was overwhelmed by criticism, or failed to defend it properly?

I favor detailed commands generally in CM, on the theory that actual low-level commanders in WWII were not idiots, like most players seem to think they were. Surely a real WWII tank commander was capable of finding a hull down position relative to a given point. Ergo, CM2 should allow the player to order the tank commander to do so.

I wasn't impressed by it. It's very . . . foreign. It's full of sentimentality and not much plot. IIRC, it has lots of German soldiers sitting around looking unhappy and disaffected, talking about how unhappy they are, how cold it is, how hungry they are, etc. Martin may be right about the quality of the war scenes. I don't remember that part.

I never purchase any kind of AT mine, unless there are going to be massive forests on the map. If there is much room for the AFVs to maneuver, then the likelihood of an AFV hitting your little mine patch seems remote. Another major problem with buying mines is that you can only deploy them on your half of the map. In most battles I've played, attacking armor doesn't enter the defender's half of the map until the end of the battle. If the map is open enough, there's rarely need to come into 'zook/'schreck range. I suggest allowing the defender to deploy mines anywhere outside of the attacker's deployment zone.

Because real tanks aren't told to move to precise coordinates. The real orders to the tank would be "move forward bearing 017 and engage enemy armor." The tankers themselves, wanting to stay alive, would figure out that in doing so they should try to stay hull down. Y'see, CM is already far from a simulation of the company commander's job. The player is already making many of the decisions that tank commanders and platoon commanders already make: Exactly where to fire and on whom to fire. Exactly where to move the squads as the platoon advances through the town. The company commander doesn't decide any of that. So the CM player is doing the job of each tank and platoon commander, but he does it without any of the control or precision that the actual commander would have. New question: What if infantry units had LOS judged from several points in a small area around the unit, to reflect the fact that those units can scoot around a little to get LOS? Having squads judged as if the men are all at one point produces some awkward results. For example, suppose I'm defending a town. I've got three squads at the front, one to a house, and the platoon commander behind them. If I move the squads forward in the houses, they lose LOS to the HQ and go out of command. But if I move them back in the houses, they lose LOS in the direction of the attack. Wouldn't a real squad fill the house, and be able to look out of all the windows at once?

This is pretty much the response I expected. I guess CM2 will be another brilliant simulation of what it would be like to be a WWII company/battalion commander with a really good map and complete idiots for subordinates. BTW, none of the responses paid much attention to the big LOS problem, which is not elevation, but trees. Of course you can get down on the ground and see if LOS is blocked by elevation changes. But you can't do anything like that with trees. You can just put up the tree sprites and guess about whether the LOS is sufficiently blocked. It's worse for trees on hills, because you also have to guess whether the trees are tall enough, in addition to thick enough, to block LOS. Another point: Shouldn't the defender in a PBEM get better LOS information than the attacker? Presumably he's had a few minutes to check these things out. Actually, in a PBEM game the defender already has an interesting kind of tool to predict LOS from any point on his side of the map. So I guess I'll keep on defending to avoid the frustration of talking to FOs standing behind trees.

But doesn't it seem a bit silly that you can't even get a LOS map? After all, that information is available to you, if you're willing to tediously check LOS to every point using the existing tool. As for the requirement that we guess about LOS in a new position, I guess I'll keep having the same conversation with my FOs when I march them up the hill, into that little patch of woods for some concealment: "FO Alpha, call in fire on the town, centered on the church." "Negative command, we have no visual on the church." "What can you see in the direction of the town from your position?" "Just a tree sir." "Please repeat." "Just a tree, sir. We marched to exactly the spot you ordered, and there's a tree between us and the town." "Understood FO Alpha. Your new orders are: STEP AROUND THE TREE and walk ten feet forward. Out." You gotta love realism.

I may get flamed for this, but I think CM2 should have improved LOS tools. Specifically, you should be able to get a map overlay that shows you a LOS map: every point on the map that the selected unit can see. Steel Panthers had this, IIRC. It's just a more useful version of the point-to-point tool we currently have. Why should we have to do boring work to turn the point-to-point tool into what we really want? In addition (and more importantly), you should be able to calculate that LOS map for a given unit from any point on the map. I think it's foolish that we have to guess about what the LOS will be like at a particular point. I expect that there are die-hards who enjoy figuring out (really guessing about) LOS on their own, but I find it a nuisance because it only emphasizes the stupidity of my troops. Suppose you want to move your Arty FO onto a hill so he can get LOS to the enemy position. Or suppose that you want to get your tank into hull down position, looking down into a valley. Why should you have to guess whether your unit will be able to see from that particular point? Is your unit really so stupid that he can't move a few feet one way or another to get LOS to the target? No offense to BTS here. CM's AI is as good as you'll find in any game. But game AI generally does a poor job of imitating humans. And when you're trying to imagine that these little figures are real men, it ruins the suspension of disbelief when your tank has no LOS for an entire turn because you misjudged the hull down position (due to poor LOS tools) and the tank commander can't fix it on his own. I know what the counter-arguments will be: "Real company commanders didn't have perfect maps and perfect knowledge about LOS." That was probably true in most cases, but real company commanders also didn't have brain-dead units incapable of finding LOS on their own. Figuring out LOS is tedious, non-fun guesswork. Give us some real tools, BTS.

I would say that CM is at its worst as a tank sim, because tank tactics require precise maneuvering that the AI can't fathom and the player is denied. Tanks can't acquire hull down positions on their own. They can't pull right up next to buildings for ambushes. They can't be given orders to stand in place no matter what until further orders. The strength of CM is in everything else: infantry, artillery, fixed guns, and AFVs-versus-infantry fighting. Tank-on-tank is the least enjoyable. I hope that CM2 will either have 1) extremely sophisticated tank AI, or preferably 2) much better player control over tanks, or 3) both.

The book that comes to mind here is "Easter Day, 1941." It's a great little tale about some Brits in North Africa in a captured Italian armored car who have been left behind after an attack by Rommel. The author describes how they knew what types of tanks Rommel had, and could generally distinguish them by engine noise. They knew the thickness of the enemy armor, the penetration capability of their own shells, the thickness of their own armor, and the penetration capability of the shells from various German AFVs and guns. Now maybe that particular author was puffing his own tale, but it sounds entirely realistic to me. If I were going to battle in a tank, I would sure as heck spend as much time as possible finding out what to expect and how to survive. Another good book is "Wings of Morning." It's about a bomber crew instead of a tank crew, but it gives a good feel for the intense training that WWII recruits were put through. Maybe the tank crews weren't given as intense training as airplane crews, but I doubt it. In fact, the information and training for the men was mostly about maintenance, which was a really complicated subject. Tankers, like airplane crews, were expected to know their machines intimately, so that they could maintain them properly and cope with damaged equipment. Compared to tank repair, I would think that basic information about armor thickness, ammo types, ballistics and resulting tank tactics would be pretty simple. The reason I make this point so emphatically is that I think CM would be a better game if players could give more detailed orders and SOPs. But if I just come out and ask for more order detail, this is shouted down as 'micromanagement.' So I'm taking a step back and trying to argue that the people under the company commander were not idiots. They did make good decisions, based on substantial information. That's why it would be more realistic to let the players give detailed orders all the way down to the tank or platoon level, subject to morale and command delay limitations. [This message has been edited by Leonidas (edited 03-07-2001).]

I do my directories a little differently, because I couldn't train my PBEM opponent to name the file 'gamename01' instead of 'gamename1'. Without that leading zero, the files get tangled after a while when Windows lists them, because 'gamename10' comes between 'gamename1' and 'gamename2' alphabetically. I use the /PBEM directory for all current files. That way the path on WinZip and the email program always stays the same when I'm doing simultaneous PBEMs. Then I have a system of folders underneath PBEM that are archival. Every week or so, I move files out of the /PBEM directory into the appropriate archival folder, so that the /PBEM folder stays clean and I never have to search through a mass of files to find the current one.

I've always used sequential numbers, though I've got a PBEM opponent who wants to do something like what you describe. The first problem I see is that the abm system doesn't tell you which files you can open. Seems like you would need another piece of information in the name of each file to know which file was to be opened by whom. A nice advantage of sequential numbers is that you merely have to remember whether you open odd or even files in a given battle. I also find the lettering ambiguous, because you would need to know whether you are referring to how the file was produced, or what to expect when opening it. I would expect file 01m to contain the movie-only file for turn one, the first file in the three step sequence of movie only, movie-plus-orders, orders only. It looks like your file 01m contains the turn two movie produced during the orders-only step of turn one. It all seems pretty confusing. I'll stick with sequential numbers.