Philippe

I'm really surprised the designers never included that in CMx1. If roads can cross a tile on the diagonal, bridges should be able to as well. One thing I have really missed are suspension bridges for scenarios involving large bridges. The standard CMBO bridge looks fine in Normandy, but is completely inadequate for a visual representation of Remagen or the bridges in Market Garden. There's also a problem with viaducts. In CMx1 if you make a viaduct out of a light bridge you have to put water under it. This leads to situations where you have an obvious viaduct with water under it, which is often just plain wrong, but you have no alternative. The other problem is bridging deep gorges. Not really sure the answer on this one. With a suspension bridge you don't have a problem. But if you build like a Roman (and many people do) you'll want to stack a series of arches on top of each other. There are some famous Roman aqueducts in northern Spain that illustrate what I'm talking about. I think what you would have to do is to limit the vertical height that a bridge could be stretched -- any more than that and the bridge will start replicating itself vertically. While we're on the subject of bridges, I would dearly like to be able to specify what the surface of a bridge consists of. I really hate it when a railroad track has to cross a bridge and suddenly turns into a road. It would be nice to have a few bridge surface options like stone, wood, steel, with/without railroad tracks. And railroad tracks should almost always come in pairs, except on trunk lines to a factory or warehouse.

My one suggestion about the site is to make it as easy to access for outsiders as possible, and go very, very light on the fancy graphics and moving parts. I frequently have problems downloading scenarios from TPG when I haven't visited in a while. I've also found that the delays for loading up the download page can be pretty long if you have a slow connection. Perhaps a way around it would be to show a list of scenarios and then give someone a choice between reading the description or going direct to the download. By the time I've researched a scenario enough to decide that I want to download it I don't usually want to wait for a huge html page to reload. Perhaps you should consider doing away with the registration step altogether. After all, why do you really need it? (Unless it prevents bandwidth piracy).

I'm not going to argue this point one way or the other, because I haven't thought enough about it to have convinced myself that I have an opinion worth airing in public. That being said, it probably is gamey. That's why the French did it in 1914. The taxis of the Marne won't show up in a CM scenario very often, but when they do don't be surprised if you get overrun by a bunch of pissed-off poilus.

Just so I understand the concept, isn't that also the case for CMx1 ? Or is CMx1 platoon level with company and battalion not restricted ?

What I would like to see is a sketchmap taken by the player at the briefing before the scenario started. Different ones available to each side. Very few notations on it, many of them wrong. Just a few line drawings and scribblings made with a leaky pen. That way you wouldn't have to worry about it having a dynamic update. You could even have all the shift-L information show up on the sketch map rather than on the real map.

That's alright, I haven't put in mine yet. And when I do I'll be sure to include an entry for Italian frogmen.

I gather that amphibious operations won't happen in CMx2 until many modules into the package. Still, I would like to ask the design group to think about some of this now, because any coding complications that it may cause may be too difficult to deal with later on. Landing craft may or may not be glorified trucks floating on water. The key word is floating, and when they start shipping water they behave differently. Since I get the impression there may be some systems modeling in the offing that becomes a question of fiddling with the movement system. A key difference between landing craft and trucks, however, is the surface they are moving on. Besides being wet, water has a couple of weird characteristics: it gets choppy and it has currents. Choppy water is not such a problem -- you can probably create a terrain class called rough water and leave it at that. It also has an effect on LOS if you're at water level bouncing around in a small boat. The weather won't change that much in the course of a scenario (or at least I hope it won't), but the surfaces that the craft are floating on will move. Currents cause drift, and that's a lot different from what happens on a road or a field. So you'll probably have to figure out a way to have everything in the water move a certain number of decimeters per minute in the direction of the current. And the fun starts when you start trying to figure out if everything drifts at the same rate... I only mention this because a few years back I managed to get myself into a small shipwreck in Yugoslavia brought on by, among other things, a leaky boat, a leaky fuel line, sea water in the gas tank, strong currents, very choppy water (i.e. a strong wind), and some very sharp and jagged rocky cliffs.

Apparently the Vulgarity thread hit a responsive chord.

I would dearly love to be able to shove a bangalore torpedo into an entanglement and blow a path through the wire.

ACW is for wimps. I want the defense of Shanghai by Chinese Gordon and the American-financed Ever Victorious Army during the Taiping rebellion. Think of the modding opportunities, the eunuchs, and the hordes of concubines (most of whom have bound feet). And a more modern follow-up module could be the defense of the Peking legation against the Harmonious Fists.

While I like the mustard analogy, you shouldn't lose sight of the fact that because many of us were exposed to it at an impressionably young age, Panzerblitz informs our conception of what should and shouldn't happen on the Eastern Front. For many of us it coincided with our first exposure to German and Russian TO&E's, and has probably resulted in many fantasies about division-sized engagements.

It would also be rather useful for civil war scenarios.

By the way, I think mounted infantry may still exist. A few years ago I looked at a small import financing by the Chilean government: they were buying saddles from a small private saddle manufacturer in Germany and wanted another set of saddles (probably to give them another unit to patrol the Andean border with Argentina). Horses can go places and do things that motor vehicles can't. They can climb narrow mountain trails in single file, they don't need petrol, and they can reproduce.

Horses are pretty skittish. Since CMx2 is going to do 1:1 modeling, imagine what you'll have to model if an artillery barrage falls on the spot the horses are tethered. Lots of screaming hysterical horses running around at random all over the map, breaking their legs in every pothole. This would get Steve a visit from PETA for sure... I think my mobile field kitchens were probably pulled around by horses.

You may be right. There are three or four clods of dirt, but I think they may only get used in big explosions. I was probably confused when I wrote that because I had recently been looking at grass doodads (don't ask). Testing the clods is simple -- just paint them some outlandish color and see what happens. I think what goes flying around when bullets hit the dirt is too small to be the clod bmp's.

Clump of colored books may mean that you need to open it with Winrar, rather than just clicking on it.

Clump of colored books may mean that you need to open it with Winrar, rather than just clicking on it.

Beg to differ. That is quite vulgar. And I'm hoping that it will be modeled in the game along with ammo dumps, prisoner collection points, field kitchens, and first aid stations. A good officer knows that finding the correct site for a latrine is very important, especially if he is going to remain stationary for any length of time. Disease has traditionally been a bigger threat than enemy action.

I always turn vehicles off before I tell the passengers to dismount --easier to highlight the passenger that way. The problem is that if you're at level 5 staring at 20 halftracks, and only one of them has a passenger, which one do you click on?

I'm not sure if this is a deliberate design feature, but it's sometimes annoyingly difficult to figure out which halftracks have troops in them and which don't. I don't mind having to hit enter to figure out exactly what a halftrack is carrying. But I find it odd that the only way to tell if there is someone in a halftrack or not is to get up close and look at it, or to highlight it and hit enter. I don't necessarily need to be told on the front of the interface who is in there, just that someone is. This becomes an issue when you're playing a big scenario on a big map. Because you have so many units to control you tend to play from a higher level than normal. So you can't tell that a halftrack has someone in it or not by glancing at it. And you won't move the halftracks that close to the front line because they explode as soon as someone looks at them. So your infantry will dismount when the halftrack is at a safe distance from the front lines. More specifically, when it is in the rear area where your halftrack-mounted FO is probably loitering. So when you come back to play the next turn a few days later, you discover you're playing button-button with your artillery observer: his halftrack is nicely camouflaged by the dozen empty ones that the infantry was using. So it would be really nice to be able to tell, by clicking on a unit, that the halftrack has 59 rounds of machine gun amo left, and that it has as passengers Hans' squad of Katzenjammerers. I don't think this was left out as a realism issue, and was probably just a minor design oversight that was on the original list of things to do.

For what its worth, several people play with the sound turned off. You don't miss that much, but there is a little information that is hinted at from time to time that it is helpful (though not absolutely necessary to know about). If you play without sound and have to depend entirely on sight, what you might want to do is to install Juju's Hollywood explosions. I think they're the brightest out there, and they'll give you a good visual cue for when a gun fires or a shell bursts. The other mod you should take a look at is the tracer mod. There's no tell-tale explosive burst when small arms are fired, but there are a few tracer bullets. So what you'll want is the brightest and most contrasting tracers available. Captain Wacky did a mod of some really garish tracers, and one of these may be just what you need. Both of these mods can be found at CMMODS. The only other thing that I can think of is that when bullets strike the ground they sometime cause little tufts of dirt to fly around. I'm not sure which bmp it is that is affected (two or three very small ones, I think). But it might help if the flying tufts were tinged in extreme colors: not realistic, but they would call attention to themselves. That mod hasn't been done yet, and may not be worth doing if you don't play at a low enough level to notice it anyway (only really shows up when you have the camera at Level 1 -- modding it might make it visible to Level 3, but only if you were already looking for it). Easy enough to do. If you're interested I'll look into it.

I don't remember exactly which game it was in, but I think that was one of the more common lines used by a certain class of opponent in a space combat game. So it might just be possible to extract that sound file and come up with an especially vulgar mod.

Mods can only change the contents of a particular file that already exists. So a mod can change how something looks by replacing a visual texture with something else, or change how something sounds by replacing one sound file with another. The closest I've ever seen to what you've described is a Pop Art explosion mod where the word "Bang!" was written across the middle of the burst. My downstairs neighbor is hyper-sensitive to noise, so I've learned to play everything with headphones on. Actually, a good set of headphones gives you better quality sound than incredibly expensive speakers, so it is a more than acceptable compromise. As for disturbing the wife... Well, based on my experience of having been married once, the best way to ensure that your gaming does not disturb your wife is to point out that the only alternative to Combat Mission is sex. She'll be conspicuously asleep in no time.

Maybe another way to approach this is to think about how many command issues you should expect someone to keep track of comfortably in the space of a turn. If you have to examine the position of too many units and ask yourself if you need to do any micromanaging, the game can become a bit of a chore. Depending on your personal stamina and levels of obsessiveness, I suspect that the outer comfort limit is probably something like a hundred decisions, with a quarter of that being what you really want to have the game flow smoothly. I don't know if CMx2 will increase, decrease, or net out to about the same number of decisions per company. I suspect that it will be about the same, 1:1 notwithstanding. If that's the case, then we're talking about controlling a couple of companies each. I agree that CM doesn't really address what goes on much above the platoon level. I would really like to see some of this filled in, which is why I've sometimes called for prisoner collection points, first-aid stations, field kitchens, ammo dumps, and the battalion motor pool. The problem is, just representing these elements on the board is a bit like making a Napoleonic mod of Rome Total War and calling it a Napoleonic simulation: if you don't include several fairly complex layers of underlying mechanics, it just looks like the real thing. If you have a system that accomodates really big maps, you might want to consider simulating more than thirty minutes out of the life of a battalion. I'd love to see a tank recovery vehicle (the german ones looked stort of like stugs) come down from (divisional?) motor pool to pull your immobilized Tigers out of the hypothetical mud. I'd love to see German bakers making bread in their white aprons in the field kitchen (I have some great photographs of that, somewhere). And I think what Steve would say to me at this point, if he were feeling polite, is that what I am really talking about is WW II: The Sims, and not CMx2. But I can still dream. How can you refight the battle of Islandhwana or Carrhae without ammo resupply rules?

I know it isn't supposed to happen. I think the intended scale for a CMx1 battle is probably something like reinforced company fighting same with map to match. And at that scale the big HE chuckers are only supposed to get into the act if they're being overrun. That's the theory, but it doesn't seem to work that way in practise. Maybe because scenario designers insist on making the maps and the scenarios bigger than the authors originally intended. Maybe because my hypothetical premise of intended scale is simply wrong. But what does seem to happen, every other time I get one of those weapons (e.g. a Priest or a self-propelled Howitzer), is that I sit around scratching my head until I find some terribly clever way to use them without getting blown up. Now I'm not going to say that most of my solutions are gamey. Most of them aren't. But I can't help but get the feeling that what the scenario designer left out of the scenario when he gave me those four Priests, was the two HQ jeeps with the spotters and radio, just in case I had to set up an impromptu indirect bombardment. I realize getting guns that size to do indirect fire is a bit more complicated than having the platoon commander spot for the 50mm mortar (and I'm still wondering about that one, but it seems just within the range of credibility). The primary function of a lot of the HE chuckers is indirect fire. They will get into direct fire situations from time to time, but they shouldn't be prohibited from acting normally if occasion arises. I don't know exactly what that would require in each national army, but I suspect that it would look like the occasional presence (or absence) of a couple of radio-toting HQ sections and some unusual command and setup rules. I didn't put this in the Real Artillerymen thread because it is about a game function rather than reality, but I hope some of them wander in here to tell me I'm being ridiculous ("Hey, Franz! Go tell that good-for-nothing commander of yours to rupture himself climbing that steeple so he can spot for you !").