Wreck

Bil, I have not played multiplayer, but I plan on it. Right now I still need to master the interface better before I waste another person's time. Email would be OK, I guess, but I always preferred TCP/IP. Can you suggest a multliplayer club? Is any of them better known for old grey CMBO vets?

Regarding a simplified interface to CMBN: I do believe it could be done, and relatively easily. Does a newbie need to know how to target and cause his men to fire? No. TacAI does that for you, reasonably well. Does the newbie need to know how to split squads, pop smoke, or any other menu on Admin? No. What commands does the newbie need to know to play a game of CMBN? Just one command: how to move. And indeed, he doesn't need to know any of the move commands except one: Quick. The others are, IMO, useful only in special situations. Obviously, it is controlling the display which is the main problem for the newb. I don't have much to say about that. Mostly, it's just going to be a problem. Controlling a camera in 3-space (4 counting zoom) is inherently complicated. I do think the current paradigm could be improved. As I have previously noted, splitting the functions of any screen edge is an immense UI no-no. I think this is true for users of any level, experts or not. But it surely must be true for a newbie. (I still am not too clear on the exact divider where it happens, because when I am trying to mouse around the battlefield I do not look at the cursor! The whole point of using the infinitely deep edge of the screen to control a UI is you can easily swipe the mouse to the edge without looking at it.) The screen edges should have just one function, and it ought to be rotation, as in CMBO. But it should be mappable, including allowing people who have become accustomed to the way things are to get it the split-edge effect. One other minor tweak I would like is that the speed at which the camera translates relative to the ground should vary with the height of the camera. When at '1', the camera should move very slowly. Way up at '8', it should move fast. As things are, my impression at ground level is movement is way too fast; it's almost impossible to place the camera exactly. Whereas up high, the reverse, although the mismatch is less than at ground level. I agree with others in this thread that an in-game tutorial would be nice. However! There is a big downside here, unlike tweaking the UI: putting in a tutorial mode involves serious programming. Changing the UI controls is pretty much trivial from a programming standpoint: a few minutes of work for the sort of tweaks to the mouse-camera-control changes I suggest above. (Considerably more to make the mouse mappable.) But putting in a scripting layer that channels a player, allowing only certain inputs, triggering events based on in-game occurances, showing dialogs of some sort, etc. -- that is serious work. All in all, I do not think that requiring players to read the manual and play along with a tutorial is a terrifically bad thing. So I disagree with those here who want such a thing. Sure, let the big game mags downrate us by 10% or whatever for lack of tutorial. Big deal. I think the existing training missions are adequate, if not quite as simple as they might be.

I bought the game figuring I owe BF extra for all the fun I got from CMBO. I've had the game since the release. But I was a little afraid to install it, knowing the likely consequence. Yup, I am sucked in. The game really is lovely to look at. (I never bought any of the modern CMx2 games -- who cares about Iraq or Syria or whatever? WWII is the momma-bear war.) Of course, while I appreciate glitz I don't really care if a game is pretty or not. What matters is the gameplay, not the look. But man oh man, the graphics are stunning. And the gameplay is fine in the canned battles, at least when I am attacking. Compared to CMBO, there's little cover, so it makes playing a rather different feel. In CMBO, you could sit a squad in a building or woods and feel secure from anything except medium to large HE. Even scattered trees made a huge difference in survivability. Not true in CMBN. It makes for paranoia. But I think it is realistic, so it's an improvement. I love the hedgerows. Love 'em -- they seem to cause the exact problems and solutions I have read about in WWII sources. (The CMBO hedgerows were just awful.) Also compared to CMBO, I find it harder to control everything. This is in part because there is more to control -- actually useful subsquads. And partly it relates to the lack of cover -- without cover, movement pathing and scouting are both more necessary to get right. I do wish the TacAI could be smarter about choosing move paths in some cases, but that is hard. It will happily run out into the sights of the enemy if that is the fastest path somewhere. Now, I am content to give multiple waypoints to get the path I want. But it would be easier if the TacAI could do this for me, and (more importantly), if it could do it for me, it should also be able to do it for the AI -- which would be a significant help to it, I think. I would also like if waypoints could be moved ala CMBO. I don't understand why BF took this out -- it makes it easier to control groups. (Give a sequence for a whole platoon, then go back to tweak most of the paths.) I do understand that command delays are gone -- although I am not sure this is a real improvement in sim, it's a vast improvement in gameplay at least. Personally I would prefer to have some sort of small command delays, not under the control of the player at all. I.e., any new move gets a variable amount of delay from 0-15s, which the player does not know. This would prevent undue coordination without drastically reducing the control the player has. So far, I have found several things that mar the experience. Of these, the worst is the weakness of the AI. (I have played no humans yet.) Now, AI is always hard, no doubt. And it is not like CMBO had good AI either. However, because of the aforementioned lack of cover, the AI has been hosed relative to CMBO, because it must spend so much time in the open. This is a shame -- I am not sure quickbattles will hold interest in the long run. The siting for initial defender forces seems off in the QB attacks I have played. Admittedly not many, but still. This may be another fallout from the general lack of cover. Does the AI know about hedgerows? I find the quickbattle force selection to be a step back. In CMBO, via the point limits you could reliably give your AI opponent a well-rounded combined arms force. I have not yet managed to do that in CMBN. I have chosen "mixed" three times now only to be faced by a nearly all tank force (2x on defense, once on attack). This is not fun, even though it is easy enough to cause some casualties with the few 'fausts I have, then run away, getting a small force hiding on the objective to deny it to the enemy. Also, I find the game has an inherently smaller focus than CMBO, and yet you cannot purchase a single company of infantry, much less platoon. (I know, purchase an entire battalion and cut it down.) One more complaint I have is the mouse control system. I played CMBO; I liked its controls. I never got used to CMBB-style control, and I still don't like it. IMO, splitting the functions of the screen edges is just a no-no; the whole point of control via screen edges is that you can "throw" the mouse there without knowing or having to care exactly where it starts or ends. The rotate/pan mouse paradigm used in CMBN breaks that. I would love it if I could remap this. I am not wild about the keyboard controls either (whose idea was it to overload various keys?), but those I can remap. This is good. Generally, the keyboard control system as a whole is an improvement, since it allows the many more controls one can need.

Guys, I have gotten a few email messages this week about the campaign. Thanks for writing! Where there are three questions expressed, there are many more amongst the silent majority. So I wanted to let you know what I am up to. I have not been playing CMBB of recent. Instead I got addicted to Tropico, and I got a girlfriend (Tropico was her fault), and moved all the same time. So I have no spare time at all to work on a campaign. In any case, before I work on any campaign I would want to spend a fair amount of time with the quickbattle generator, to see what sorts of handy new things one can do with all of the great new options that we have. And also I would want to get a feel for the balance of BB, with weather, various terrain, etc. All of which will take a great deal of time. Since I am not going to make time to devote to the campaign in the foreseeable future, I want to hand it off. The rules as written are open-source. Use them as a base if you will, or, rewrite 'em from scratch. The way is fairly clear; there's just a huge mass of implementation details that need to be determined. Weather, terrain, location in Russia, etc. Someone, go for it! Peterk seems to be the Man right now. Can someone else beat him to it? Can y'all develop the new rules collaboratively? Let 1000 flowers bloom.

Sounds like you are well on your way to inventing rarity by availability. However, the idea you have for calculating availability by using actual large-unit TOEs is a great new idea! CM keeps adding more and more historicity in easy-to-use form.

Trenches are the best cover in the game - 9% exposure. If you want to do a test to compare fairly to CMBO, then using a stone building is probably best. Either that, or foxholes in woods. Both are good cover, but not as good as trenches.

Of course, the existence of BB does not negate that of BO, for people that like "attack of the clones" style infantry behavior. People can still play BO. But I cannot imagine any real historical buff or WWII grog wanting to stick with the BOrg infantry as versus the Better Behaved infantry.

Nice work, Abbott. The infantry really is much more realistic in CMBB. Harder to play on attack, but much better.

My install failed (and after ~30 min, argh). Then I tried to copy the install file onto hard disk, but that failed too (again after some 20 minutes or so). Fortunately, I knew enough to come here and look. Within a few minutes, I downloaded the scenarios and I am running fine. BTS is great! Now I need to check all my polish files to see if they are there or not. Hmm, no rush.

Yowza! Towson, MD. Order Number: 81220 Order Date: Sunday; September 08; 2002 at 3:42 PM

Dr. Osage - there have been no revisions because it is pretty good the way it is, for infantry at least. I had been thinking about adding the ability to do tanks. But then three things intervened: I got extremely busy moving, work has really picked up, and those BF bastards sabotaged me by releasing the BB demo. I figure in about 2 weeks nobody is going to be playing CMBO anyway, and I will have to revisit the rules for BB.

Sunday, ~1542 EDT: order #81220. Given that the order form went up at about 3AM on Sept 7, there have been roughly 37 hours since it was put up. That's 33 orders per hour. By the end of the week there should be on the order of 5000 orders, assuming the rate is sustained.

I have never had much problem finding units in CMBO or the BB demo. I generally play with trees off, bases on, smallest size. On the other hand, I rarely play larger scenarios in part because keeping track of everything is tedious. But even then, it is not the problem of finding specific things that I dislike, but rather the problem of synchronizing the movements of zillions of units, and having to navigate on very large maps. In BB, setting a unit's covered arc (with covered arcs shown) helps to make it more visible. I wonder if FOs can have covered arcs? If so, just set it to be a 270 degree arc, and it will probably stick out very nicely.

bsd - in CMBO if you want a unit to see but not fire, use the ambush command. It will always work for any unit except out of control squads.

(spoilers) My first go at it, I did pretty much what John Salt did. Smoke on the left, with most of my infantry over there. I led with the most experienced infantry, not the least. The battalion commander with his +2 combat had command of the mortars, set up in one big group in the woods on the far right, with maxims spread across the front. The tanks were clustered into two concentrated groups of three, more or less in the center. I laid smoke on the center-left with the arty, and moved forward all the men I could ASAP. The regulars did all right, but few of the greens and none of the conscripts made it more than a few meters. I had company commanders there helping to kick butts to get men forward; it is very helpful to form a sort of bucket brigade of higher HQs so that squads are in a command radius, preferably with +morale, at all times as they work their way forward. You do end up going *very* slowly with the average squad, which seems to me much more like how I have read about combat being than how CMBO works. Meanwhile the tanks gradually moved forward. I did not know how many AT guns were there, but expected more than there were. When the guns exposed themselves they were taken out fairly quickly by my mortars and the tanks, which kept together. By midgame I had managed to get men into the scattered woods (IIRC) on the left, nearing the woods and tall pines where the left side of the German position was. Having exposed no AT guns for a while, I moved the tanks up close and advanced in the gully on the far left, eventually sweeping into the German position. This proved decisive as a platoon or so was flushed and crushed, mostly by tank fire. On the right I had only a green platoon which was moving forward. But each move seemed to serve to expose another foxhole or two, which would then be routed by machinegun and mortar fire. The Germans surrendered in turn 25, as I rushed masses of men into the center woods from the left and the German casualties went critical. It ended 88-12.

Gleep, thanks for sending it. I have looked at it (in Open Office! MS be gone!), and I have a few comments, and some criticism, and some places that I would love to see someone do further research. First off, I had not realized that all types of scenarios at a given amount of points always have the same map dimensions. That's an interesting factoid, though I don't know how helpful for most things. However, for my QB campaign I may change the attacks to assaults to help the player fit in the forces. Also I had not realized that Assault and Attack have the same setup zone dimensions, for both sides. I am now curious what the difference is between assault and attack, other than the points. I have understood it to be the distance of the flags to the rear. So here's my call for more research. I should like to have someone set up maybe 10 games at each size, and determine (a) the average total value of flags present (where small are 100, large 300), and ( the average distance of the flags from the back wall of the defender. Presumably one or both of these is different for attacks versus assaults. Now some more criticism. First, the numbers you have come up with are probably very close to the right ones, but I am almost certain that the dimensions of the maps will never vary from even multiples of 20m, and probably 40 or even 80m. In any case, I also suspect strongly that the dimensions of the QB maps will be realizable in the scenario editor; so look in there and see which numbers are possible for length and width. As for measuring length and width, I would suggest making sure that the unit you are using really is in the very corner of the map. If you have bases on, then half of the base will actually be off-map. And be sure to use a flat map to measure. Hills make the LOS tool weird from above, sometimes. In your legend, you have length as "East to West". But you have length as the dimension which changes based on scenario size; that would be the north-south dimension. This is a minor problem, but I thought I would mention it. Another very minor problem is you have some of assault rows switched in label with the attack rows. (Easy to do since they are the same.) One final thing I thought would be nice, would be to have another sheet dividing the tables up by map size (small/medium/large).

Could you send me a copy too?

Great news! Thank you all for your work in the past, and I hope for more great fun next year!

Biltong - I will give some thought to the idea of making an easier start for the thing. I certainly want everyone playing it, including newbies, who is interested. If it is too hard, then it should be easy to make it easier. Perhaps a self-adapting difficulty level... hmm.

German infantry HMGs can also take out American halftracks when closer than about 200m. It is not very common, but it does happen.

A small update: Andy Bass sent me a neat idea, that is to simplify the computation of friendly force size. The result is now up; it is much easier to do. There should be no differences between the tabular computation Andy sent and what was there before; it's just simpler to describe and do.

As for rating individuals, Michael is right that there is not that much to go on. Probably all the crew except TC/gunner would steadily gain experience, if modelled separately. But that does not mean they are indistinguishable, for they may be killed individually and therefore their experience can diverge. However, what that does mean is that they should be best modelled as a group, since their average experience is what will matter for the purposes of modelling the tank as some specific quality level. At this point I am thinking of a system which models the TC separately from the crewmen. So two units per tank. The TC can be injured specifically and also (at least in my model) will disproportionately affect the overall quality of the tank. This gives eight modelled units per platoon, which seems about right to me. It also gives me a commander embodiment, for that optional rule.

Firefly relates an incident where a TC is injured and a crewman (who was a former TC) takes over. What would happen in the general case with tank commander casualties? Would a crewman step up and a replacement for him be gotten? Or would a new trained TC replacement be assigned? Were replacements generally trained in tanks, or were they already specialized to a role? Were commanders differently trained than the other positions in a tank?

I have been toying with the idea of an armor campaign. Now I realize I might track experience for tank crews as a whole. And it might be nice to do a campaign with only, say, four units to track. But I think it might be interesting to track individual crewmen, in particular because it is my suspicion that certain of the crewmen (commander and gunner) are far more important to the effectiveness of the tank than other crewmen are. But I am not really sure of that. So one question I should like to throw out to the grogs is: how much did tank effectiveness vary based on the loss of individuals? Could the loss of one important man (probably gunner or commander) turn a "crack" tank to "green"? Also, I got curious as to what the 5th crewman in some tanks does. I know he sometimes mans the bow MG; is that all he does? If another man is hurt can he fill in? Certainly for the loader or driver, I should think. But what about the gunner and the commander? Were all tankers trained to do all roles? Did they do roles other than their trained one outside of emergencies? Or when a crewman got hurt were there specificly trained replacement gunners, loaders, drivers, etc? Or would you just get a "tanker" who would then the assigned a role? Did crews sometimes switch around roles? American. British. German. Russian even. Discuss.

Thank you all for the games! I enjoyed playing each of the final scenarios, though particularly Twin Valleys. It seemed to have the most... but... perhaps I should not talk about this. What is the status of the Nordic guys?