Leonidas

I say let the player decide, to simulate the complex decisionmaking that the 'zook team leader would be making. Any single standard would be unrealistic and frustrating.

What should they have done? The faust team is holding this giant antitank weapon and heavy ammunition. They are watching the ambush point while trying not to get killed by incoming fire. The mortar team is lugging big heavy mortar parts and ammunition. Neither of them is really equipped to engage in hand-to-hand combat, and their training tells them never to abandon their equipment. They don't have orders to engage in hand to hand combat. So they ignore each other. Each of them concludes, correctly, that they can best do their duty by holding onto their equipment until it can be deployed effectively, instead of dropping their stuff and getting into a protracted pistol and knife fight. Sound right to me.

In this case, the decision is pretty complex, because it depends on what else is happening. I can think of a few situations in which I wouldn't mind my 'zook firing at long range. For example, suppose the enemy armor is in LOS of some AT guns that will be firing next turn, and maybe some of my armor will come over a nearby ridge during the early part of next turn. If there's a big armor battle brewing, I might as well throw in the 'zook too. Like Joeski, I'm confused about the problem with hiding the 'zook. On defense, I hide everything, except for armor. Hiding is especially important for AT teams and guns, because they make such poor decisions on their own. Hiding is the big advantage that the defender gets in CM to overcome the attacker's raw force advantage. If the defender doesn't hide until he can get off a devastating first shot, then he's just fighting an attrition battle that the attacker is likely to win.

Three cheers for SOP's! I would like to see a lot of them in CM2. If a real AT gunner gave away his position firing at enemy infantry in the ambush zone (without a direct order to do so), I expect he would be killed on the spot by his commander and hung from the nearest tree as an example for the others. OTOH, I think there is something useful about Ambush zones instead of (or in addition to) firing radii. An ambush zone should carry with it an attack and defense bonus if the men have had time to find good positions and carefully gauge ranges. So I would have ambush zones, where the men get some bonuses if the ambush proceeds and planned. But then I would also have some sort of mechanism like a firing radius to tell the men how close they should let the enemy come before giving away their position.

Is there a way to stop CMBO from making the crashing artillery sound every time you quit the game? I find it so unpleasant I mute my speakers every time I quit, but that's annoying. I'm nervous about randomly messing with sound files, for fear that the exiting noise is also used in the game.

Leonidas was the Spartan commander at the battle of Thermopylae, circa 480 BC. The Greek cities needed time to organize defenses against an army of Persians. A small Spartan force was sent to block Thermopylae - a mountain pass through which the Persians had to travel. There were about 300 Spartans holding off about 10,000 Persians. It was a suicide mission. They held out for about a week, until someone betrayed them and showed the Persians another way around the chokepoint the Spartans were holding. Then the Spartans were surrounded and wiped out to the last man.

I disagree that this would be realistic. It's true that a real company commander would work on the basis of inaccurate information. But a real company commander also has intelligent people under him. Every tank commander, platoon leader, squad leader, and team leader in a real platoon has a brain of his own, some military training, and a keen interest in surviving the battle. The current state of AI technology does not provide anything that can imitate the decisions made by all the leaders in a real company. The individuals are much too smart to be modeled by AI, though they operate on incomplete information. So CM with ultra-harsh FOW is merely a realistic simulation of what it would be like to be commander of a company of idiots - the Lobotomized Company. Some examples of commands the Lobotomized Company can't understand: To an AT gun: Don't fire until a tank crosses your ambush point. If you give away your positions by firing at infantry, you're courtmartialed. To a vehicle: Wait until your passengers have embarked/disembarked before driving down the road. To infantry: I don't care if that machine gun 200m away is bothering you. We have to hold this positions, we're low on bullets, and an enemy infantry charge is expected soon. Don't fire back. To a tank: Enemy armor is sighted in the area. Load AP round and ignore non-threatening soft targets. To a tank: No enemy armor is believed to be in the area. Load HE round and engage soft targets at will. To a tank: Move up that hill until you find a hull down position from which you can view this area. If you want to fantasize about a realistic game that allows you to play company commander, then you'll need a couple dozen people to help you. Put a real person in charge of each tank, squad, and team and you will be approaching realism. Perhaps a distant future version of CM will allow us to do that.

No, that's not what I'm talking about at all. I find it frustrating that every conversation about how to improve the game becomes a conversation about how to play the game, or about how I must be trying to ruin the game. Is it really that hard to imagine a better game? There are many reasons that could cause a loading/unloading operation to go badly, regardless of how much time you allow. The loading infantry could become suppressed during the turn. Frequently there are traffic jams, which can delay vehicles and infantry as they try to reach the loading zone. Or a traffic jam can mean that the squad has no room to unload. Note that this has nothing to do with the time it takes to load or unload. (Actually, CM currently doesn't seem to take much time at all to load or unload, which I think is correct.) Nor does this have anything to do with trying to move, load/unload, and move all in the same turn. Mostly it has to do with the fact that suppression and movement in traffic jams are hard to predict. I don't know how to put the question any more simply: Would CM be a better or worse game if you could tell a vehicle to wait until it loads or unloads?

I'm with you, Max. I'm in a PBEM right now where I've managed to keep an Assault Howitzer alive to the end of the battle and in good position to pound attacking infantry. But I can't keep the darn thing going! I've wasted turn after turn targeting, then watching it fire a round or two until the unit runs or hides. Then it sits for the rest of the turn, watching the enemy fire at my men... I've already proposed the real solution to this: We need to be able to tell our tanks whether they should worry about enemy armor. Some call this micromanagement, but I call it realism. Tankers knew these things. They were talking to each other on those radios. They were very interested in whether they should have an AP round or HE round ready to load. I say bring on the micromanagement. More information to the troops! It isn't realism to play commander of the Lobotomized Company.

The question would have to be about price, because any unit can become useful if it's cheap enough. I would vote for the flamethrower. It is slow and easily identified, has very short range and little ammo. And it doesn't even catch its target on fire consistently. (My tests show 3-4 shots to ignite a building or patch of woods.) If FTs were to cost 10-15 points, they would be worthwhile. But at about 35 points, you're giving up 1.5 panzerfausts or HMGs, or half of a small tank killer. An awful deal, IMHO.

I've never noticed that walls give much protection, or at least not nearly the protection I would expect. It seems to me that if men are pinned behind a stone wall, they should be impervious to just about any direct fire, even without foxholes. [This message has been edited by Leonidas (edited 02-08-2001).]

Examples of the problem: 1) You want to load some men onto vehicles, and have the vehicles carry the men up to the fighting. So you send the men running to the vehicles, and give the vehicles some pauses followed by fast move orders. Sometimes the men don't move as fast as you expect, and the vehicles drive off before they are loaded. 2) You want to unload vehicles, then use the vehicles elsewhere. So you give the vehicles pauses that you hope are long enough for the men to disembark. Except you misjudge the pauses, and the vehicles drive off before they are unloaded. Either way, half your platoon is standing around and half is being carried down the road. I avoid most troop transport for this reason. I know that you can argue that crazy things can happen in the midst of combat, and there should be some delays involved in all this. That's fine. But that isn't what's being modeled here. Either because of production time constraints on BTS or interface simplification, CM does not allow you to convey a very simple message that any driver should be able to understand - stand still until the vehicle is loaded or unloaded. (In actual practice, it would probably actually be - stand still until we tap on the hull with a rifle to tell you to move.) I'm not faulting BTS on this. I know they're busy, and this isn't a major feature. But it's something I would like to see in CM2. [This message has been edited by Leonidas (edited 02-08-2001).]

There may be workarounds for this problem, but it's still a problem. I would like to see a Wait for Embark/Disembark command in CM2.

In my PBEMs with a friend, we've been agreeing not to look at the operation in advance, to enhance the surprise. But we did agree to look at the parameters screen for each operation, so that we could at least get the basic info on what to expect. Just load each op file (.cmc, I think) into the scenario editor, and click the parameters button.

I find these realism discussions to be a bit odd. The familiar refrain is that "You shouldn't be able to do thus-and-such because a real commander wouldn't be able to." The more important point has already been made that this is just a game and designed to be fun. Being an actual WWII commander wouldn't be much fun, because you wouldn't have much control over things. But I've got another argument against the realism push. It may be true that you have some control over men in CM that a real commander wouldn't have. But it is also true that actual WWII soldiers and platoon leaders were a lot smarter than the men in CM. No offense to BTS here - it's just the state of AI technology. I think gamers forget that real soldiers, being keenly interested in their own survival, think long and hard about how to best engage in combat. A real company commander doesn't have to tell the units exactly where to move, because he has intelligent people under him to make decisions for their own platoons or tanks. The post by DekeFentle makes this point perfectly. Tankers spend a lot of time thinking about things like how to distribute fire when a line of tanks meets another line of tanks. They've already got it figured out. So when tank lines meet in CM, the unrealistic part is not that you have the power to set individual targeting lines. The unrealistic part is that the AI doesn't distribute fire as a real tank platoon would. So CM gives you the targeting ability to overcome the AI's inherent limitations. Put another way, in CM you are doing the job of the leader of every unit under your control - every squad leader and every tank commander, in addition to the job of company commander. So it's natural that you would have more information and more control than the company commander alone would have.

I've done A Day in the Cavalry and Team DeSobry, and I'm currently doing Mortain. All of those have the Advance setting, which has the biggest impact on the game. In Day in the Cavalry, it was pretty easy to slip some vehicles past the enemy infantry and push the map back without doing too much fighting. The Advance setting seems to overly favor the attacker when he slips past the defender. Team DeSobry seemed broken. The first battle was entertaining, and the Attacker was able to make it about 2/3rds of the way across the map. The operation then abruptly ended, declaring a total victory for the attacker. Apparently the operation was set as an Advance, but the map is normal sized, so all the attacker needs to do to win is slip a vehicle or two past the defender and make the map roll a little bit. Mortain is the best op I've played so far, because the heavy bocage prevents the attacker from slipping past the defender. For what it's worth, I also played Red Devils from both sides against the AI, and wasn't impressed. That one isn't an Advance (I forget the name of the setting). The only way for the Germans to win that one seems to be to kill every single Brit on the map, or force a premature surrender. Merely killing most of the Brits and holding the bridge is not enough. Is there a site that rates CM scenarios?

A fair point. I'm no expert on pillboxes, but I think that the conclusion from this discussion is that tanks generally wouldn't try to take out pillboxes, especially those with AT guns. There is a chance that the tank will hit the gun slit, but it's a low chance. It seems that the only reliable way to kill a pillbox is to get right up close to it. On the other hand, it seems that pillboxes are pretty vulnerable to supression from bullets. It's no fun to be in a concrete room when bullets are bouncing around. It seems to me that the conclusion is for a new model for pillboxes. They should be virtually impossible for tanks to kill, but easy for MGs to supress. They have a shield that they can put over the firing slit when they get nervous - essentially the pillbox can button up, but then it can't see or fire as well, if at all. The pillbox should rarely become instantly disabled from one hit. That would only happen if the gun itself were hit. The way to kill a pillbox should be to keep it under MG fire while a squad approaches, and then assault it at close range. Engineers should do a better job than regular infantry. The pillbox should work like a MG squad - it doesn't die until the last crewman goes down, though it steadily becomes less effective with casualties.

That's why the effectiveness of tanks against pillboxes is so puzzling. A pillbox is a major investment of resources, and its immobile, which makes for a high likelihood that it will never see combat. If it also goes boom after three or four tank shots, why would anyone bother to build one? I would think that pillboxes should be like immobile ubertanks - the sort of thing tanks should stay away from. The only reliable way to crack a pillbox should be close range infantry assault.

I partly agree, Tom. Sometimes troops will get killed following orders. And sometimes they could make better decisions acting on their own. But much of the time soldiers get killed when they act on their own, and getting men to follow orders when they don't want to has been the foundation of military training since the phalanx. There has always been a tension between getting the benefits of men who follow orders and support the overall plan versus getting the benefits of letting men make decisions on the spot, more quickly and based on better small-scale information. I think the most common conclusion is that soldiers usually don't have enough information to act on their own, and thus should generally stick with orders, even if those orders don't seem to make sense on the small scale. But there are always exceptions. It's just a complicated issue that depends on many different factors. I recently played a game in which my MG was ordered to Hide, but decided instead that it should open fire at an infantry squad that was crossing open ground. No doubt the MG gunner decided that he had a sweet shot, and shouldn't waste it. But if he survives the battle, his CO will point out to him (just before assigning him to latrine duty for the rest of the war) that opening fire revealed the MG's position, and thus allowed the enemy's tanks, arty and mortars to blast the MG team before the enemy infantry was close enough to take much damage. I think that WWII generally involved more autonomous units than in previous wars, because 1) the weapons were not more effective if used in lock-step (not like spears or muskets), and 2) the units tended to have better communication than ever before, and thus better information about what was going on, so they could make better decisions.

That might help game-wise, but historically it has problems. It would be pretty easy to spot the fellow lumbering along with a giant heavy backpack and a nozzle in his hand. I find that FTs are darn near impossible to use, and wildly overpriced in QBs. They are slow, have short range, and aren't all that effective once you get them into place. I assume that they would be much more effective in jungle, or in towns where the buildings are not built on the 'one building per 60m square' plan. But I think what's really missing is that infantry hiding in a building can't get hyper-defensive and refuse to expose itself to enemy fire. Because defending infantry in CM always makes itself reasonably open to enemy infantry fire, anything a FT can do in range, a squad can do about as well.

Agreed, but you don't go far enough! Most infantry should turn nearly instantaneously. How long does it take a squad to do an about face? A second, maybe a second and a half. MGs and mortars are a separate case, I'll admit. But the turning model for other infantry units is strange. They seem to have a fixed degrees per second turning speed, like a vehicle. Having pointed out the problem, I'm not sure what the solution is, because there are other features of turning a team or squad that might be tricky. For example, I imagine that infantry is always checking for the nearest direct fire threat, and using available cover and concealment to counter that threat. After all, that's the reason that infantry is so durable when used properly. So while an infantry unit could about-face instantaneously, it might need some time to acquire a new set of protected positions, depending on the immediacy of the threat. If the squad is getting ready for a 100m firefight, they would probably take the time to set up defensive positions. If the enemy squad is at 5m, then I imagine they would about face and start firing immediately. [This message has been edited by Leonidas (edited 02-05-2001).]

OGSF, IIRC, a change in the latest patch was that any AFV that saw armor would stay in 'armor only' mode for the next three minutes or so, and refuse to engage infantry. This was part of how they fixed the earlier problem of tanks obsessing over fleeing crews and getting their turrets out of position for the next enemy AFV. Perhaps that was why your PSW 234 didn't engage infantry. Given the informational constraints imposed on the AI, it's a fair compromise, IMHO. Wouldn't it have helped if you could have radioed to your PSW 234 and told them that all enemy armor in the area had been destroyed, and it should concentrate on infantry? Don't you think that a real company commander would have done that? Apparently, many CM players insist that this level of realism not be introduced to the game. So I think you will lose your PSW under the same circumstances in CM2 as well.

Sig, I think it's a fine suggestion, especially for creating scenarios. I think CM would be improved with the ability to give more detailed order to units, but there are clearly many players who love the lack of detail in orders. For me, the inability to give precise orders breaks away from the sense of historical accuracy. This is illustrated in your example. A real company commander could give very detailed orders to his AT gunners on when to spring the ambush. (Whether they would follow those orders is of course another question.) But for reasons I still do not fathom, many players insist that the ability to give more precise orders would somehow ruin the game. But surely even those who dislike any increase in order detail wouldn't object in principle to improving detail in scenario design. Surely designers should have access to any tools available to make their scenarios more interesting. There would still be a question about whether giving scenario designers those tools would be an efficient use of time and effort by BTS, but that requires an understand of the programming issues involved.

I'm confused. How do they know where the AT guns are? Do they have FOs looking at the guns, or are they just blanketing the area with artillery?

I think that the PBEM system is best described in terms of what happens during the battle, and leaving the setup exchanges alone. It's a three step cycle: 1) One player only watches the movie. 2) The other player watches the movie and gives orders. 3) The first player gives orders, and generates. In the next cycle, the players switch positions in the pattern. The part of this that seems a bit excessive is that this cycle is set up to alternate the player who performs generation. If you wanted to speed up the process, you could have just one player do the generation, and accomplish each turn in just two steps: 1) Player A watches the movie and gives orders. 2) Player B watches the movie, gives orders, and generates.