YankeeDog

Scenarios/Maps/Mods are pretty straightforward on Mac. Just right click on the CMBN App and select "Open Package" to get to the internal app directory. Then just put the files where appropriate (e.g., in the "Scenarios" folder for scenarios). As far as I know, all Mods are platform-agnostic. At least, I've never encountered a problem. They go in the "Data" folder, and just as you would on a PC, you should create a "Z" folder inside the data folder as the manual instructs to keep your mods sorted and make sure they're loaded in proper order (i.e., last). PBEMs Mac-PC work just fine; savegame/PBEM transfer file format is identical.

A savegame file would really be best. If the situation is exactly as described, then there may be a bug or issue. However, (and not to cast aspersions on the OP), I'd estimate that 90%+ of the times when we look into an LOS/LOF issue like this, there's some sort of factor, whether it's misreading the lay of the terrain, Alt-T trees, Alt-K smoke, unit stance (e.g., Hiding) or something else that explains it. The other <10% of the time it's genuinely a bug or issue that needs to be reported. Which is why a savegame is so useful; LOS/LOF issues are very tricky and time-consuming to test. Without hard evidence we may spend a lot of time chasing shadows, trying to replicate a problem that may or may not exist.

Units traversing via the Mk. 1 Foot are not treated the same as men in a vehicle such as a halftrack. Men on foot get a "terrain save" based on the abstracted small-scale cover of the ground they are currently occupying. Men in or on vehicles do not. While CMx2 is 1:1 representation, do not fall into the trap of of assuming that it is therefore 100% WYSIWYG. Try this: QUICK an infantry team across ground that offers some decent cover but little concealment, such as rocky ground or heavy woods tile (NOT trees, just heavy woods ground cover). Toss some fire at this team of moderate intensity. Say an LMG ~200m away or a couple of 75mm HE rounds. If the game was designed to represent units on QUICK as simply running at full upright, parade ground double time style, you'd expect an MG 200m away to turn them into dogmeat within a few bursts. Small ground cover like rocky ground or some logs and tree stumps would make little difference, because they'd be upright and therefore mostly exposed. But this isn't what happens in the game. Units on QUICK running through cover actually have a pretty decent chance of avoiding hits from modest intensity small arms fire, and even fairly close proximity HE. I've seen teams on QUICK avoid casualties entirely from 81mm mortar bursts <20m away, and not infrequently which most certainly should not happen I they're supposed to be jogging full upright, with little or no regard to cover. So overall, I think it's fairly clear based on what actually happens in gameplay that infantry on QUICK are abstractly assumed to be taking fairly decent advantage of cover -- running hunched over, keeping objects like trees and bushes between themselves and likely enemy etc. Not as good as HUNT of course, but fairly decent. The issue of SOPs and whether more should be added to the game is a whole other can of worms. For a long time, I was of the opinion that the game would be greatly improved by the addition of an extensive SOP system. Now I'm not so sure. Among other things, it's very difficult to teach the computer player to effectively use SOPs, so unless BFC was willing to simply allow the computer opponent to become a pushover, adding an extensive SOP system would require a lot of AI coding and debug time.

And what leads you to think that this is not what our pixeltruppen are already assumed to be doing on "Quick?" At the CM scale, with contact imminent and/or already happening, I would submit that soldiers would probably "running cautiously" or whatever you want to call it pretty much any time they were running. Regardless, "running cautiously" aka QUICK would still be substantially less stealthy than "walking cautiously" aka HUNT, which in turn would be less stealthy than "crawling cautiously" aka SLOW.

This. Otherwise, the AI could get caught in perpetual spotting cycle which would tie up both the the spotter and the battery indefinitely. The AI isn't smart enough to know when to give up on a difficult-to-call mission. My general rule if that if a spotter can't get FFE in 4 rounds, I should probably give up and try something else rather than risk the mission coming in late and off target. But it's better to avoid the situation entirely. For best chances of a timely, on-target mission, the FO needs good LOS to target area AND a broad swathe of the surrounding terrain, so it's likely he'll see the spotting rounds. This does make calling in arty especially difficult on bocage maps. This isn't unrealistic, though -- Allied forces had exactly the same problem IRL. Lack of observation points with good broad range of terrain made calling in artillery very difficult, and made what high ground there was in Normandy extremely valuable terrain.

They're also useful for breaching wire, walls, hedges, and bocage. Tanks can cross (and destroy) low walls, wire and hedges on their own by simply bulling through, but usually incur a step or two of track damage when doing so. If I have demo charges to burn, sometimes I'll blow gaps in these minor obstacles just to avoid degrading my tanks' running gear.

No, you can't. As for why not, I suggest volunteering on a trail cutting crew to learn what it actually takes to cut even a footpath through heavy undergrowth and dense trees. It's hard, slow work. I used to do it a fair amount in my younger years. Cutting path wide enough for a vehicle like a tank would take much longer. You can drop trees with explosives if you set the charges right (this does take time; you can't just slap a chunk of C4 on a large tree and knock it over). But then you'll end up with a jumble of fallen tree trunks and stumps, which will probably make an even more effective tank barrier than the upright trees did. You'll have to cut up the tree trunks and move them aside, which is time consuming manual work, even if you have a good chainsaw and winch available.

First of all, upper stories of towers and other very tall buildings are BAD places to hide. A unit in such a position is usually visible to a broad swath of the battlefield, so even if the chance of any specific observer spotting a unit in such a position is very low, there are likely to be many observers, and chances of someone spotting the unit may therefore actually be fairly high. Stationing an actively engaging sniper and an FO in the same building was also a very bad idea. Once the sniper started shooting, this drew the focus of your units towards the building and that's probably why the FO got spotted. The game does track specifically where units' attention is focused, and a unit in close proximity to another unit that's firing or otherwise drawing attention to itself is much more likely to be spotted, even if it is not firing or otherwise actively engaging. As Sailor intimates, the game also assumes that an FO who is in the process of calling in an artillery strike has a lower "stealth factor" and is more likely to be spotted. He has to be heads-up, in a window (if positioned in a building), observing terrain for landmarks, searching for spotting rounds, etc. WWII-era radios also often didn't work very well from building interiors (esp. in buildings of stone and/or steel construction), so the radio op. might have to stick the antenna out a window or similar to maintain a good signal. Antenna sticking out of a window would be a dead giveaway. So overall, I think the situation you describe is quite believable. The tall tower was a really obvious "hiding place" that could be seen from many places. The sniper firing from building drew focus. For the FO to do his job, he had to be in a window looking through binos etc., and therefore got spotted fairly easily once enemy units were looking at that specific building.

The "purple smoke" CAS call as presented in the film is largely a myth. Smoke was sometimes used to help direct air attacks, but this was nowhere near as fast or precise as is depicted in the film. Smoke is not a great way to direct precision airstrikes There's a lot of smoke and haze on the typical battlefield, and it also moves around with the breeze; even with the use of colored smoke it's still very prone to error.

Actually, it's stayed quite on point. Think about it. If people here are complaining that they have to "fire into every building", just in case there are enemy inside, then infantry inside buildings actually aren't very easy to spot from outside, are they? If infantry inside buildings were easy to spot from the outside, area fire preceding entry would be unnecessary; all you'd have to do is move units into the general proximity of a building and they would spot any infantry inside and engage directly. Clearly, this does not happen for most people most of the time, ergo infantry inside buildings are not easy to spot, at least as a general rule. (Parenthetically, once again I do not agree that the game system requires you have to "fire into every building." If you are doing this, you are being tactically unimaginative. You only area fire at buildings that (a) you need to enter or clear and ( you think have a decent chance of containing enemy units. This will only be a fraction of the buildings on an urban map. Yes, sometimes you will guess wrong and one of your units will get wiped out entering a building that you thought would be unoccupied. This is the nature of urban combat and is perfectly realistic. Urban combat is a meat grinder; it chews up infantry at a frightening rate. Again, read up on the combat in e.g., Aachen, Stalingrad, Fallujah to understand why this is the case.)

The problem isn't with the player assuming both high and low levels of command; this is definitely part of the game and I have no issue with this. In this game, you are simultaneously the Squad Sgt., the Platoon Lt., Company Cpt., in many cases the Battalion Lt. Col. and in some capacities even the Regimental and higher level COs. My issue is with the level of specificity that the player is able to control air strikes. When a WWII Divisional Commander requested Air Strikes to support a planned attack, he didn't specify the precise target point for each aircraft as can in CMBN. At best, the commander could specify a broad target area like "Town X" or maybe "The forested ridgeline 1km north of Town X." What I would like to see is a pre-planned only option for air strikes that allows the player to control the target zone in a broad fashion. So the player would be able to specify, say, a 200m minimum radius circle for the air strikes, but nothing more more specific than this. Attacking planes would bomb and strafe within that circle randomly, with some chance of pilot error leading to attacks outside the specified area, especially for low-quality pilots. Anway, that's how it would work if I ran the circus...

Don't be silly. Of course you don't area fire into any building any more than you would area fire at every single action spot of bocage or heavy woods. In a dense terrain environment, you have to choose which terrain elements are important, and focus on those. Pick which buildings are tactically the most valuable (offer the best cover, fields of fire, etc.) and focus on seizing those. If the enemy wants to hide units deep inside other buildings where they can't affect the battle, let him. Less for you to deal with. This is probably the most common mistake I see inexperienced CM players make on dense terrain maps -- players seem to like to try to totally clear the enemy from the town, bocage, patch of woods, etc. To try to do this within the time constraints of a CM scenario, they disperse their force and lose local superiority. The denser the terrain, the tighter your force should be, and the more you should focus on controlling specific, important areas, rather than the whole map. "Mop up" operations -- actually clearing out every single building in a large settlement -- are a slow, tedious process that's largely out of CM's scope. You can simulate this type of operation with CMBN pretty well, but it's boring as hell to play. Surround town so nothing gets in or out without your permission. Set up bases of fire that major control streets and intersections so enemy units can't move from sector to sector within the town. Then execute infantry sweeps to clear each sector in turn, one building at a time. Occasional area fire at highly suspicious buildings, but mostly just slow, carefully coordinated movement and lots of pausing to listen and observe. IRL, you'd also be interrogating civilians and any captured enemy to get intel on the location of any enemy holdouts. Of course, situations like this, most of the surrounded and divided enemy usually surrender before long as there's virtually no chance of escaping alive, but it's not difficult to find historical examples of fanatical forces that hole up in buildings and take as many of the enemy with them as they can before being destroyed.

I use this technique sometimes and it works well as long as you're confident the unit won't be taken under fire on the way in by another enemy unit outside the building as this will make them stop in the open. The advantage of using HUNT over QUICK or SLOW is that the unit will stop *immediately* upon spotting or getting fired upon by the enemy inside the building, rather than finishing their move first -- units executing QUICK or SLOW will react and fire on the move, but this fire is lower volume and is less effective than if they stop and fire, as they do on HUNT. I go back and forth whether it's better to HUNT into a building that might still have active enemy inside, or simply QUICK in accompanied by heavy suppressive fire. Never really experimented with using SLOW as part of a building clearing procedure; I may have to try this. Regardless of which method you use, unless you are willing to sustain very heavy losses, NEVER enter a building that might have active, good-order enemy inside waiting to ambush. If you think the building might be occupied, prior to entry you MUST toss enough suppressive fire into the building to at least push enemy units inside to Pinned status. Then you can charge the building and clear out the cowering survivors. Further note that short of the "Nuke from Orbit" option, there is no perfect solution to the enemy occupied building problem, nor should there be. Structure clearing is a nasty, dirty business, and even with good tactics, and numerical and firepower superiority, you should expect to take some casualties. All it takes is one surviving enemy soldier rallying enough courage to toss a grenade or loose off a burst of SMG fire, and you can lose a whole team. Perfectly realistic. Read AARs from e.g., Fallujah 2007 to understand why.

Eh? lethality of HE is slightly toned down to account for the fact that infantry in CMx2 don't more widely disperse when under artillery fire as they would often do IRL in order to reduce the chance of multiple men being taken out by a single shell. The goal of adjustment is to make HE roughly as lethal as it would be IRL. You also need to revise your idea of "massive bombardments." In terms of # of shells fired, there's probably a lot less artillery fired in most CM scenarios than were used in similar situations IRL. In WWII, a lot of mortar and artillery shells were fired per casualty caused. Worth noting that many experienced players (myself included) consider artillery to be somewhat more effective in the game than IRL. IMHO, this is largely due to the player's "God" perspective, which makes it easier in CM to call in artillery quickly and accurately than it would normally be IRL. This is a difficult thing to compensate for and I myself don't have a good solution to this issue. Regardless, it does sound like the OP's situation was a bit of bad luck. As noted, a lot depends details like available cover, unit quality, whether or not the units are dug in or not, etc. But IME, a 2-tube, 2-minute, heavy 81mm concentration will pretty seriously saturate an 80m x 30m target area. On average, I'd expect enemy units in the target zone to be at least heavily suppressed, if not WIA/KIA. But it is also a game of luck; as the described result also doesn't strike me as impossible as a "this happened one time" result.

Not exactly. The type of advance prep by air strike you're describing was generally done well ahead of the Forward Line of Contact on the ground. In CM terms, this means they'd be over before friendly forces ever arrive on the map. Nor did local commanders on the ground have specific control over where and how these strikes went in. At best, a ground commander might be able to request that aircraft drop ordnance and/or strafe in the general vicinity of town X or crossroads Y at approximately time Z, but nothing like "target your bombs on this specific 8m x 8m square at exactly time HH:MM" as you can do with pre-planned airstrikes in CMBN. The most realistic way to portray this type of advance air prep in a CM scenario is to put a few bomb craters on the map, damage and/or destroy a few buildings, and adjust the defending force appropriately to assume a few of the defending positions have been damaged or destroyed by airstrikes. No player control over timing or specific target at all. Arguably, Point Target pre-planned airstrikes are the least realistic in CMBN, since they allow the player to direct an airstrike at a very specific point at a very specific time, anywhere on the map. At least with non-preplanned, the player has to go to the work of getting an FO into a place where he can see the target point, and deal with the uncertainty of a variable time delay.

Unless, of course, Paper Tiger's intent was to demonstrate how difficult it is to make good use of on-call CAS in a tight-quarters environment...

Chances are, every shot in those videos is producing a flash, but the camera isn't always catching it. Specifics depend on what kind of camera was used and how it was set up, but on typical settings what a digital video camera is doing is capturing 30fps, with each image having an exposure time of 1/15 second. So there's an approximately .067 second time gap between each frame that the camera does not capture. For most types of action, this doesn't matter and the visual impression is of continuous motion. But extremely fast, brief phenomenon like muzzle flashes can fall "between the cracks" of the frames and therefore if the timing is right won't appear in the video at all.

Hm. I can't say I've ever had this problem. I routinely HUNT units into buildings; my SOP is to QUICK up to the action spot containing the door into the building, and then HUNT into the building. And I can't say I can recall the last time one of my units moving into a building on HUNT got spotted by a distant enemy once inside the building. Sometimes if I misjudge LOS they get spotted in the open ground while approaching the building, but not once they're actually inside. An enemy infantry team in a nearby building might spot them, but certainly not a buttoned AFV ~500m away. Unless of course the unit opens fire from inside the building. Similarly, I can't recall the last time one of *my* buttoned AFVs picked up an enemy infantry contact in a building from ~500m, unless said enemy was firing, or the AFV already had some clue of that enemy's location due to prior contact or C2 info. Not sure why your experiences are otherwise... One possibility: Are you actually putting full squads into a single building? I almost never do this. I generally follow a rule that buildings (or one section of a large, modular building) get at most one team per floor. sometimes I will hide a fighting unit on the first floor while an observing unit (with a short cover arc) is stationed top floor. With certain exceptions, this is usually the most I'll put in any one building or building section. Type of building may also matter. I've never tested, but some game behavior leads me to suspect that light buildings like barns offer considerably less concealment than heavier buildings. Light buildings definitely provide less cover. Finally, re HUNT and SLOW: SLOW is a LOT slower than HUNT. About 1/3 the speed. It's also a lot more fatiguing. But IME it can be useful at times to SLOW into buildings if you think the enemy is very nearby and you want to get your men into the building and deployed before they engage. As a general rule, I only use SLOW when I'm pretty confident the building I'm actually moving into is unoccupied, but I'm concerned there may be enemy nearby (<200m or so) with LOS/LOF to the building.

This is from the foggy recesses of my memory and so could be wrong, but IIRC the German Pressure Mine first deployed in 1944 was not a completely new mine body, but rather a new fuse that could be placed upon existing mine bodies. As such, it would be difficult to know whether any given picture was of a pressure mine or not, as the fuse is a small part of the mine as a whole.

Again, this has nothing to do with realism (in fact it's quite unrealistic), but one of the odder side effects of the way CAS works in CMBN and CMFI is that Point target CAS mission arguably have less of a danger zone than mortar and artillery missions. As previously noted, Point target CAS missions never target the wrong spot; if anything, they just scrub and fail to come in entirely. They also never involve spotting rounds, and it's really the spotting rounds that dictate "danger close" distance for mortar and artillery in CMx2 -- they can be hundreds of meters off and therefore potentially dangerous to friendlies a considerable distance from the intended target point. So for gameplay purposes, you can actually move friendlies in close to a CAS Point Target mission with less risk than an artillery mission involving similar-sized warheads. 200m safety distance is no problem for lighter ordnance CAS missions like strafe or 5" rockets, and you can get this close even to the bigger stuff like 500lb/220kg bombs as long as your units have good intervening cover like a wall or building. Aerial Bombs are only very rarely more than 100m off target in CMBN/FI, so 200m + something that blocks the larger bomb fragments that fly long distance is usually just fine.

Muzzle flash varies a lot from weapon to weapon. It mostly comes down to how completely the powder burns in the chamber and barrel, and how much burning powder escapes the muzzle. In general, the amount of flash from modern firearms is pretty modest, but some weapons are known to have a larger than usual muzzle flash -- an example would be the FG42. How visible any muzzle flash is also depends a lot on ambient light conditions in the vicinity of the weapon. Under direct, bright sunlight, very few modern small arms produce much in the way of discernable flash. But it doesn't take much to make the flash visible -- even just the shadows of trees or buildings can reduce the ambient light level enough to make the muzzle flash visible. It's also important to keep in mind that weapons produce other signs for firing -- often, at least some smoke, and MGs especially will often kick up dirt and produce movement in e.g., leaves and grass close to the muzzle. The game doesn't graphically represent these small details, so you could also interpret the flash as an indication of these other signs. In regards to visible muzzle flashes in game, IIRC this is intentional design. There are variable levels of spotting in the game; it's not just "nothing" or "spotted". At the intermediate levels of spotting, if you're observant you will see some clues as to where the firing enemy might be before you actually get a "?" spot. For example, you might see part of the tracer arc or the muzzle flash.

Disclaimer: the below has nothing to do with "realism", rather with how the game works. "Area" CAS targets tell the aircraft to "Hunt" within the designated target area. Aircraft executing an Area target will only open fire on a spotted target. It will try to find an target within the target area, but if it doesn't see anything within the target zone, it's quite likely to go "off the ranch" and target a unit it does spot outside the target zone, without much regard to whether said unit is friendly or enemy. In contrast, "Point" target tells the aircraft to target that specific spot on the map. It will, as best it can, drop bombs/shoot rockets/strafe at that spot, regardless of whether there's any units there or not. IME, a Point target only goes awry if the aircraft can't see the target point (e.g., smoke or tree cover obscures the view), in which case the aircraft simply scrubs the mission and fails to drop ordnance (of course, on executed missions, there is always some variation in actual impact point due to inaccuracy of the weapons system). There is a third type of mission: A Point target targeted directly onto an enemy vehicle which the spotter can see, in which case you get the "Target Vehicle" notice when plotting the order. IME, these missions also never go awry (i.e., the aircraft never targets another vehicle or location entirely), but these missions have a high scrub chance -- I assume the aircraft has to actually spot the targeted vehicle itself for this type of mission to succeed. Take away from all this is only use Area target missions if you're pretty confident there's enemy unit(s) within the target zone that will be easily spotted from the air -- for example, if you know there's enemy tanks in the open in the target zone. In most other situations, you're probably better off using Point targets. Ordnance falling blindly on a designated map coordinate is more useful than ordnance falling randomly on a unit somewhere on the map, without regard to whether said unit is friendly or enemy.

Yep. Units will also react to the presence of enemy units whose location they learn about via the C2 chain, but have not actually spotted yet. For example, tanks will rotate their turrets to face a known, but as yet unspotted threat. This can be a huge advantage in certain situations.

Throwing multiple grenades in quick succession is a part infantry training; true in WWII and true today. Not used for every situation, but definitely used in some. However, it's important to recognize that grenades are agnostic -- they're dangerous to everyone in the vicinity, friend or foe. And while the radius within which a hand grenade is likely to kill (50% casualty radius, or whatever you want to define) is fairly short, the radius within which a grenade might kill is much larger. Most types of grenades produce at least a few large fragments that fly a fair distance. So such multiple grenade salvos take careful preparation and coordination in order to reduce the chance that a friendly misses the signal, leaves his ass hanging out in the breeze, and as a result accidentally gets fragged. It's usually less of a "grenade shower" and more of a volley of 2-5 thrown more or less simultaneously, follow by a long pause while everyone takes cover and waits for the grenades to detonate. Then rinse and repeat, if necessary.

It's a tricky scenario. Looks like you scored a tactical defeat mostly because the Germans managed to achieve the objectives before the battle ended. If the Germans hadn't gotten the objective points, you probably would have had at least a tactical victory. If you time it right, it is possible to withdraw quickly enough that the Germans fail to reach the objectives before you finish your withdrawal. Remember to hit Cease Fire as soon as you're done withdrawing. Plan your positioning and routes carefully for a quick exit. Try to save some of your mortar rounds to use for immediately prior to withdrawal as they can pin down and stop the forward line of enemy infantry while you start to bug out. Defending aggressively and keeping the enemy a distance from the objectives until you start to withdraw also helps. Once you've nailed the AFVs, pay particular attention to destroying or routing the forwardmost, mobile enemy units (i.e., assaulting squad infantry) that are likely to achieve the objectives first.