Blackcat
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Posts posted by Blackcat
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The sad part is after many hours enjoying UK Mud Marines, I feel that it's too flawed. You do what seems logical, you think you're doing everything right re checking mobility issues on slopes/cliffs, as well as using squad rockets and position engineers with satchel charges next to bunkers and you don't get the desired result. The designer must have played this through. Am disappointed that nobody here seems to have played this scenario.
I think the Royal Mud Marines is impossible. I tried it many times, spending about a week of real time on it (the joys of retirement) but with the small squads, low ammo load-outs and grossly inadequate re-supply levels I eventually gave up. The USMC version was a lot of fun and comfortably doable.
On topic, in both versions I had occasions where those bunkers in the woods by the first objective were taken out as one would expect and times when either I couldn't destroy them and/or take out their crews no matter what I did.
However, I have also seen the same in other scenario's. One that springs to mind is the one in the USMC campaign where there is a Bunker in a walled courtyard by one of the objective buildings. Sometimes my pixeltruppen took out that bunker with infantry weapons, sometimes they couldn't.
My conclusion is that there is a deep-seated bug with bunkers. Most of the time they behave as one would expect but now and then they, or their crews, do not. What circumstances cause this problem to arise I have no idea, though I don't believe it has anything to do with woods, witness the Semper Fi campaign example above.
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Admittedly i havn't been watching the news as much as normal recently but it seems to have been a while since i heard any news of fatalities. Certainly compared to the summer of 2009 when we had a really bad time
Alas your impression is, regretaby, false. The 299th fatality was in the newspapers this morning. I think that is the fourth or fifth this week and the 300 mark will probably be crossed in the next few days (WIAs don't make the news but there have been more than 1,200 since 2006).
Erwin is wrong if he thinks the current casualty levels are more than the UK can take. The reporting of casualties has now become so common that it reached the point where it has little impact on Joe Public. That said there never has been any great enthusiasm for the war, and the reporting of it in the UK media has been woeful (not least because of MoD restrictions).
However, to take the discussion further would violate the no politics rule and, anyway would have no bearing on the game.
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This flashing has also annoyed me over the months. However, my video card has now given up the ghost. Can anyone recommend a reasonably priced non-NVidia card that works well with CMSF?
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Yoe tell em ME!!
YD - ic an really believe it. I have been on most of the worlds oceans and a big storm can be seriously interesting ... let alone a frickin typhoon and 80 degree lists. Halsey was a complete tit.
Excuse my ignorance, but what was it that Halsey did that caused the Hull to be lost?
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"A German Panzergrenadiergruppe should have 6 soldiers and that is what is stated in the screenshot too..."
And good luck with that. The British seven man squad is bad enough, though maybe the designers will give the German sections a decent ammo load out.
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"You had to grow a mustache when you joined the British Army many years ago (I'm talking turn of last century at the latest)..."
Turn of the last century? Not sure about that, I joined 40 odd years ago and moustache growing was de rigueur in my unit. I've still got mine, nothing fancy like handlebars, mind, just a good old fashioned walrus.
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Tim A, siad above:
"In this day and age there are tons of game engines that have MUCH more going on than CMSF and can easily handle multiplayer and full playback."
Is he right? I have my doubts. Every man and every round fired in a battalion isezed game (i.e several hundred shooters aside) seems to be a lot of processing to me. I am not aware of any other game that comes close. Which game engines does he mean I wonder. Someone must know becuase apparently there are a lot of them out there.
Mind you, if there are "tons of game engines" that can handle the CMSF workload and more, one has to wonder why BF went to all the bother of writing their own.
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Wotcha Johnny,
British forces these days tend to fight using battlegroups. These are, depending on the circumstances generally built around an infantry batallion, with armour, artillery engineers and support units added as necessary to complete the task. So a battlegroup might consist of a armoured infantry battalion e.g. 3rd Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, together with a troop of Challengers from a cavalry regiment (or The Royal Tank Regiment - which is of course a corps not a regiment), a recce troop from a cavalry regiment (Scimitars), a dedicated battery of artillery from a regiment of the RA etc. etc.. Battlegroups are temporary structures put together fro a particular mission/camapign.
The link and the book recommended by FM above will give all the details of extant regiments.
P.S. You said, "i presume infantry regiments are either light,mech or armored and are not mixed within the regiment?" They can be The Rifles is a regiment which has light and mechanised battalions. However, British infantry regiments never fight as a regiment. Battalions are brigaded with battalions from other regiments as needed.
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The briefing stated that taking the road ahead would be suicide and advised me to take the scenic route and put two objective there. What was is a man to do? Tell me? TELL ME?!
Fight the battle your way, not the enemy's way.
As a general note for the campaign, Bardosy seems to have put a lot of effort into crafting his briefings - following his suggested plans is not a good idea.
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Sorry, wrong game. If you use armour you will in effect be using (general) ground burst shells but will get a tighter group than general. Therefore, I find using armour gives the best results against buildings.
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In my experience the best results are obtained from using general ammo with armour as the target type (armour produces as tighter group and so leads to more hits on the building).
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I'll try the scenario again. The objective I have to take are located inside deep forests, so going around them is just not an option...
It is perfctly possible to win in that mission without getting bogged down in fighting through the forest. One just needs to think a little more creatively and put together a plan which plays to the British strengths (i.e. the fireposwer provided by the large number of vehicles) and not their weakness (small squads with poor ammo load-outs).
If I remember correctly the briefing suggests you should take the village then turn right and follow the road through the forest. If you do as the briefing suggests you will take a lot of casualties that are unlikely to be replaced and so you will suffer in the rest of the campaign (and British squads are weak enough at full strength).
This was my "AAR" post on the Warriors in the Sands thread on this site:
"Today I finally got round to finishing the second mission of this campaign. It was enjoyable, but not a stretch - possibly because I ignored the briefing and worked out my own plan (advancing through a forest struck me as a recipe for high casualties).
I lost 8 dead, 20 wounded, 2 Scimitars and 2 Land Rovers and got a surrender with 50 minutes left on the clock. The Brits in this one have more than enough firepower to do the job (one platoon, my reserve, never fired a shot) and more javelins than you can shake a stick at. About half of my casualties were caused by me pushing a couple of patrols onto the forest, which I didn't need to do, I just got bored/careless towards the end."
Fighting a battle the way the enemy wants is always messy and rarely successful.
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I don't believe there is a satisfactory answer to your question - fighting in forests always gives the defender a huge advantage and the attacker will always take disproportionate casualties.
In that scenario the solution is not to try and fight your way through the forest. There is a perfectly viable route round to the south(?) of it. Take the hills by your starting position and fed your reinforcements off to the right through the col and across the open area in a wide arc. Worked like a dream for me.
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Wiggum,
I do apologise for having sort of hijacked your thread, vary bad manners on my part.
My answer to your original question is that it is a bug - or at any rate an error in modeling.
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Ken,
It depends what sort of unit you are talking about. If armoured then, as above, you can load up with 5.56 and 40mm so that you get to the same sort of ammo scales as a US army squad, but without the possibility of re-supply later on. Ig you are playng Brit light Infantry the the resupply trucks do not have waht is needed in the first place.
Now, I know the UK is basically broke and I know that HMG has held the army on insufficient budgets, but I do not believe that in a full scale war a British infantry squad will go into combat with less ammo than its US counterparts.
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Rather a long post, but Flaming Knives wants reasons for my opinion.
With regard to the British infantry ammo loads, I do maintain they are too low. In tests I have run a British infantry (full full load and excellent kit) squad has enough ammunition for three minutes of firing with UGLs and 4 minutes of rifle fire/LMG fire. That doesn't accord with anything I have read about operations since 2006, indeed if this were the load-out British troops would have been over run in Afghanistan on many occasions - they haven't been once.
In game terms a full strength British light infantry squad has two UGL equipped SA80s and there are five bars of UGL ammo. Each bar seems to represent 3 actual grenades (the manual is silent on this point so its hard to be sure) for a total of about 15. This is considerably less than would be carried by the squad in operations (every man carries at least a couple aside from the dedicated "grenadiers", who carry more). For armoured troops with their seven man squads and only one UGL the situation is even worse.
Similarly with the 7.62 GPMG. The game shows a Gimpy team as having 600 rounds, that is no where near realistic. In my time a gunner would carry more than that on his own (I know I was one), his second would have more and every member of the section would also be carrying another belt. Granted that the game models GPMGs as non-section weapons, which was "doctrine" a while ago, but even so the ammo available is far too low.
I don't know what the bars for 5.56 ammo on the display represent, again the manual seems to be silent. My eyes are not what they were but I count the number of bars as about 14 for a fully equipped British squad. That cannot be the number magazines as even on 1970's official scales an 8 man squad would have at least 35 and in those days there were not the minimi's and the ammo was 7.62. So I can't estimate what number of rounds the game says a fully equipped squad will be carrying. I can only repeat that in action after action in Iraq and Afghanistan (2006- 2008, so in the Game period) British squads have been in full-on-get-the-rounds-down combat for more than four minutes, without resupply.
Which brings me on to the issue of resupply in combat. The armored formations seem reasonable but not the light infantry "TUMs". Play the Royal Mud Marines scenario and you will see what I mean.
As for the warriors, I am more than happy to accept that BF did their best and applied doctrine as they were able to find it. The 4:1 ratio of AP to HE may well have been accurate. I also understand that BF couldn't model the fact that the British army is not, and never has been good at following, doctrine, it is always far more pragmatic. However, then having, and apparently, keeping the bug that enables the warriors to fire precious HE when AP is needed does, in my view, make the Warriors broken.
None of this a game killer for me, just a source of irritation and a I reason why I don't enjoy playing the Brits as much as I would have liked.
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PSY, thanks for posting the link. Some of the photos are well known but there were a lot I have never seen before and very interesting some are too.
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To my mind the Warriors in the game are broken. Battlefront decided upon an ammo load-out that does not reflect the reality of British Army practice and then compounded the problem by introducing a bug which entails the wrong type of ammo being fired at armoured targets.
Whilst here I might add that the British Infantry ammo loads also seem wrong compared to what happens in the field. Maybe the problem stems from Battlefront looking at policy not realising, being Americans, that in the British Army policy and reality are at best only on nodding acquaintance.
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"i think nobody still uses a singlecore today"
You think wrongly.
Also please remember the development cycle. What is being designed today will be played on the machines of two year's time.
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Thanks, Stingray, very nicely done.
Mind you, now that the repository is back I find I can't log into it! Damn thing refuses to accept my username and password. I am sure it is all my fault.
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GreenAsJade hosts a variety of CMx1 and CMx2 mods and scenarios, which was mentioned here recently.
Thats the bunny! Thanks, Mr. Vulture.
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Well, I am still on strike and my resolve is hardening.
I have played to death all the scenarios and campaigns that I have and am now urgently in need of some new meat. On one of the threads discussing the prolonged absence of the repository someone posted an alternative site that had scenarios up for download. Unfortunately, I didn't make a note of the site's address, can't now find the post and my google-fu is week. Can someone oblige?
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Haven't the Russians developed some rather nasty anti-ship missile sytems? I know the SSN-22 Sunburn was developed in the Soviet era, but I am sure I recall reading that they have moved on to even "better" things since.
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Well done, Stoex! One more has seen the light (dark light in your case)! Spread the word comrades!
Soon the plutocratic pedlars of jolly good wargames will understand that the workers and peasants will not buy their excellent games until those games are released! Nor will they use the Repository until it is, once again, available!
Victory to the proletariat! Viva Uncle Joe!
Red vs. Blue balance
in Combat Mission Shock Force 1
Posted
Revenant,
My answer to your question is that the way to solve the issue with quick battles is to play scenarios.
For reasons that seemed sensible at the time, Battlefront went away from the points based system of quick battles that had been used in CMx1 games. The results in the end are less than one might have hoped for. There are umpteen threads on the subject going back to day one of CMSF release and even, if memory serves, during its design stage. It is unfortuate but there it is, the QB system is basically naffed.
The good news is that it is being redesigned for Normandy.