Philippe

On many occasions I have had infantry squads lurking in the immediate vicinity of a previously trashed bunker or concrete pillbox, and have sat there gnashing my teeth because in real life I would have sent someone in there to take up a firing position. Bunkers and pillboxes should behave more like trenches and foxholes, and have slightly different characteristics depending on the damage state. If I have a perfectly good heavy machine gun standing next to a ruined bunker, I should be able to move it inside and take advantage of a good firing position. Or if I have a machine gun in a bunker that is about to get trashed by three assault guns, I should be able to tell the guys inside to grab their machine gun and get out of there. I would also like some more flexibility in the graphics of bunkers. That little square wooden house is a bit weird -- can't some of them be open topped, or surrounded by mounds of dirt and sandbags (and I don't just mean painting them on to flat, vertical surfaces). As for the dancing girls, I think we need to start a new thread to discuss the most appropriate selection of exotic dancers. And I'm certainly looking forward to modding them.

At some point I'll have to download the demo and see how it works. I find the SOP screens a little off-putting though. Having said that, I suspect that porting a few SOP features into CM might be worth considering ( TacOps SOP Light?). The Tac AI in CM can do some strange things sometimes, and could probably be improved with a little manual help. Not sure how much is appropriate in the one minute time slice, though.

I still have a couple of the movement pads stored away in a closet somewhere. And still have fond memories of their game dealing with the early development of armored warfare in WWII (can't remember the name, but it was so much better than Panzerblitz).

Realistic is the prime directive. However, sometimes you have to go with the less realistic approach for other reasons. I'm hoping that the interface for handling units in CMx2 is much improved over CMx1. The weaknesses in handling mechanics are what, for example, make Franko's wonderful rules impractical. I love the idea that the 2-D map should be for viewing only. Except...well, some people (and I'm not one of them) actually like to play that way, and sometimes to get the exact right positioning of that movement waypoint when you're micro-managing, you really need the overhead view to see what you're doing. As it stands, I wish there were a close-up version of the overhead so that I can be sure I told that squad to run across the road and dive into that foxhole. So if there's a way to make the 3-D isometric view a little easier to use and navigate in, then fine, limit the 2-D to info only, and people who like to pretend they're playing Close Combat can lump it. Otherwise... Maybe what we need is a view commander's map command, that causes the screen to be momentarily replaced with a sketch map of the battle area that you can annotate. I'd much rather have TRP's on a commander's sketch map than on the actual battlefield. [ February 21, 2005, 06:41 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

Assuming vehicles bug out outside the scope of the twenty-five minute engagement, perhaps a way to simulate this is to have two set-up phases instead of one. You set up. Nothing changes. You play as usual. The alternative is you set up, get a message that you're now missing that tank platoon, you redo your setup, you play. If the time-frame covered by CM battles runs longer, however, that approach does not work.

Best place for something like that would be Scenario Talk, Tips and Tricks, or perhaps the most active forum related to the game you're working on. A lot of things get posted to the CMAK forum because of the traffic volume.

Out of curiosity, what name do you go by when you design scenarios? I think I might be interested in taking a closer look at some of your work.

For whatever it is worth, the fuller idiomatic version of the expression is 'plain vanilla'. When you use the term 'vanilla' and it's clear you aren't talking about food, the word 'plain' is understood and doesn't need to be expressed, except for emphasis. I think I may have seen a plane crash on-map once in CMBO, but it was behind enemy lines and it might have been the explosion and resulting crater from the bomb it dropped just before it bought it. Air defense varies in effectiveness, of course, depending on whether your opponent is using IL-2 or IL-2 FB.

Remember, a mod will only work in CMBB CMMOS 4.03 (which is what CMHQ and the CMBB SE Mod disk uses) if it comes from CMHQ or the mod disk, or you've written it to make it compatible. There are two or three exceptions, and as far as I can tell these are all CMMOS write-ups on the mod disk that were rushed into production without being fully tested. But in any case, almost all of the mods that you'll find at CMMODS aren't CMMOS mods. So to get them to work in CMMOS you'll usually have to do the conversion yourself. The difference between what you'll find at CMMODS and what you find at CMHQ, by the way, is that the CMHQ material was produced by the CMMOS cabal, a team of about twenty [add favorite psychological insult here] who usually tested their work to the point of oblivion. The CMMODS rulesets are the work of one very talented individual occasionaly backed up by a tester. They are also written for CMMOS 4.05, but that's another story. Making 4.03 material work with 4.05 material is not all that difficult, but you have to be familiar enough with CMMOS to make the adjustments. The advantage to sticking with 4.03 is that 98% of CMBO is sitting on the CMHQ website, tested, retested, and mulled over to the point of madness (mine, mostly). 4.03 does not handle CMAK, however, and 4.05 does. The problem, though, is again the single editor/tester phenomenon. The underlying program revision was done by Gordon Molek (the brilliant original author of CMMOS), but the editing work was done by one very good and talented editor but without a team of testers. And there simply aren't enough CMMOS writers around to keep it up to date. So the bottom line is you might want to look into McMMM for CMAK -- it doesn't have quite the same flexibility, but it tends to be there and fully functional when you need it.

Just got inspired and tried something different. In my version of CMBO it seems that the command doesn't work at all at level one (and maybe level two) and that all movement is around a point. when you move up to higher levels (that I don't use that much), the command seems to work backwards, but yes, I see now that there really is a difference. Not sure I have a use for it, but I'll keep experimenting.

So far I'm rotating 360 around the same spot whether it's on or off, but I'll keep trying.

This is starting to sound like there could be some interesting exploration of group morale. Right now there's global morale and unit morale, and nothing in between. In Napoleonic games you often have to worry about a panic in one unit spreading for no apparent reason to nearby units -- one unit in your line panics at the sight of those Cuirassiers barrelling down on them, and when they turn tail and run they take three or four adjecent units with them. I don't pretend to know enough about crowd panic behavior to suggest what should and shouldn't apply to CM, but I would think that the state of mind of a cluster of units smaller than everyone on your side would influence fight and fright behavior. Panic by platoon may be too artificial (unless the platoon leader -- probably an NCO -- just got wasted), but it should be considered. And I seem to recall stories of soldiers worrying about their officers getting killed, not because they were good leaders or that the men cared one way or the other, but because the men knew that the captain was the only person who could influence events going on outside of his foxhole, who had a map and battalion hq's phone number, and who generally knew what was going on.

I'm sure you can come up with a better solution to the entry-in-column problem than I can. But one approach might be to have the game-map include a 20-40 meter wide entry strip around the entire playing map. Lines of sight should be blocked into or out of any spot in this zone, and anywhere a road leaves the playing map it would continue, abstractly, to run along the side of the map through this zone. The edge of the map would be blocked for purposes of entering this zone (but not for leaving the map), and it would also be blocked for purposes of entering the map, except where the designer chooses to open it up. Reinforcements would arrive by appearing in a blob in the reinforcement zone, as they do now, but they would be able to get onto the road (if there was one) before they entered the playing part of the map. If the designer wanted them to enter the map in road column, all he would have to do is to make the map access very narrow (e.g. slightly less than the width of the road). You would also probably have to add some firewalls in the arrival zone to prevent people from moving around the edge of the playing map outside the playing area, before they entered it. With a little conceptual retooling you might even be able to turn that into a strategic feature, sometimes giving a player perhaps unrealistic control over the arrival route of a particular set of reinforcements (not so sure about that one, though). I don't pretend that this is elegant, but it might (or might not) be easier to implement than figuring out how to get the tanks entering in column and in motion (i.e. without a first-turn command penalty). Or it might help you come up with something that would work better with the CMX2 system. (I'm a big fan of progressinve movement penalities when entering from offboard hexes).

Ok, we'll need to do a couple more things before we're exactly on the same page, but we're almost there. Let's focus on one particular mod that we won't have too much trouble finding. Let's install Juju's Trench Mod, an important mod and a vast improvement over the standard graphics. You're going to find it in the Miscellaneous section at CMHQ CMMOS. Make sure you've downloaded and installed the Miscellaneous Ruleset at the top of the page. Now download the zipped Jujus_Trench_Mod_Cmmos file and put it in an easily located and safe place. Now fire up the CMMOS program and look at your control page. Make sure that the menu option in the extreme lower right hand corner is set to CMBB and not CMBO. Click on the tab that reads Miscellaneous. What do you see? If you've installed the ruleset you might see, among other things, an icon that read "BFC default trench bmp" when you move your cursor over it. [Let me know if you have that or not, it's important]. If you've managed to install the specific rule for the mod you should see an icon that reads "Juju's trench pack" when you move your mouse over it. You may not have this icon, and in that case I need to know. If you do have the icon and the mod is not installed, I would expect the icon to be greyed out, or to have a European one-way traffic indicator in its place. Otherwise you should see an icon with a trench (not the BFC bmp icon) in full 64 by 64 pixel living color. So I need to know how much of that, if any of it, you can see. And the reason we're doing it with this particular mod is that you won't have a whole lot in that particular ruleset, so it will be harder for things to get lost -- the Schweinesstal dunkelgrau ruleset is about the worst place to learn CMMOS in, so that's why we aren't fixing your Pz 38(t). This, by the way, is the first line of defense. Looking at these screens tells you what the program thinks you have. If you don't see something that you have in there, it means that you're either looking in the wrong place, or the program doesn't think you have it. That can be for one of two reasons: there's a mistake in the way the rule or ruleset was written (there are a few cases of this -- and it happens a lot when you roll your own), or you did something wrong when you tried to install it. Now armed with this preliminary focus, try installing Juju's trench, and report back what you see. It's entirely possible that you won't see anything, and that's when the fun begins, because we'll have to figure out why.

First, truth in advertising. I can help quite a bit with CMMOS 4.03 for CMBO, and may be able to provide useful insight into the workings of CMMOS 4.03 for CMBB. These can both be found at CMHQ, and, in the case of CMMOS for CMBB, on the CMBB SE mod disk which I don't think you have. You'll have to tell us exactly what you've got, exactly how you tried to install it, and exactly where you tried to install it to. CMMOS is a wonderfully flexible tool, but it requires a lot of care and precision to make it work. So describe which CMMOS you're using and where you got it, how and where you installed it, what it looks like when you click on the CMMOS icon, and what mods, if any, you've managed to install. If you haven't managed to install any, we can talk about one particular mod and go through the drill to make that one work. Be aware that CMMOS won't work if a) it's installed in the wrong place; CMBB is installed in the wrong place; c) the rulesets and rules that run it for a particular mod and set of mods aren't installed; and d) the mod that you're trying to install in CMMOS isn't a CMMOS mod. a) and are less important in CMMOS for CMBB than CMMOS for CMBO.

If the designer has more control over how reinforcements come in, I wonder if that implies that a column of vehicles entering as reinforcements along a road can be made to be or look like a column of vehicles (as opposed to semi-deployed)? That would be truly satisfying, especially for those of us that really love moving large columns of vehicles around the map (with as little micromanagement as possible).

How would the removal mechanics work? The reason I was thinking in terms of point penalties is that I would hate to see several tanks suddenly vanish. That strikes me as much less convincing than moving them off the map yourself. Now, on the other hand, if it were possible for units on your side to suddenly come under irreversible AI strategic and tactical control, and for the AI to march them off the field, that's another story altogether. But that assumes things like the battle is reinforced company size, the map is big enough for three reinforced companies, and you only control the reinforced company in the middle, with the AI in charge of whatever is to the left and right of you.

You're the local commander assigned to take some objective or other. You've just been told to go ahead and take it, but send that platoon of tanks we just sent you back to battalion, someone needs it more than you do. In game terms you go ahead with the assault and the platoon starts on the map. If you hijack it and use it in the assault and it doesn't leave intact by the end of the scenario you lose a lot of points. The variation is that you get a message in the middle of the scenario saying that if such and such a platoon isn't sent back by the end of the scenario, there'll be hell to pay (= you lose points). I think both those situations work within the time-frame of a 30-45 minute battle. And allow for a bit of insubordination. Maybe deduct a point or two for every shell fired...

Nah, the point of a wargame is to have a credible platform for role-playing. Different people want to role-play different things, depending on interests and personalities. Me, I'm hoping that CMx2 has lots of logistics so I can mod a mobile field kitchen and bakery.

After several years of owning CMBO and now CMBB, and many sporadic bursts of experimenting, I'm now ready to admit that I haven't a clue as to what Shift-J accomplishes. Could someone explain what the difference is between having it activated and not having it activated? I thought I had figured it out, that it meant that if you're at level one and centered on a unit, if you put the mouse cursor at the edge of the screen the view will start rotating. Fine, that is what happens in CMBB with it on. But that is not what happens in CMBO with it off, and the view seems to rotate in CMBB regardless of whether it is on or off. So I have to conclude that it must refer to something else, and I simply don't understand what that something else is. I will be grateful to anyone who can lessen the fog of my befuddlement.

You can focus on tools, or you can focus on result. Designing around tools doesn't guarantee that they will relate to each other correctly. I can't imagine anything more central to a discussion of design. So pace of combat is exactly on point, because recreating that is supposedly what all this design brouhaha is all about. Having said that, I thought I was posting in one of the more public threads, and wound up in here by mistake.

I hope the question of the pace of combat gets revisited. I've always been under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that when a platoon comes under attack at moderate range from a less than overwhelming force that the platoon commander would essential have the a choice between deciding to slug it out or pull back. That decision doesn't really seem to be present in CM firefights, because the losses that will be suffered when you attempt to disengage will outweigh any of the benefits. I think in the long run there's more realism in getting the overall picture right and the group relationships right than in getting the exact caliber of the bullets, the number of buckles in the Sam Browne belt, or the penetration values of a Pershing relative to poorly rolled steel. You can often make things more realistic by intentionally skimping on the details and making things more abstract -- simply because that extra detail often creates the illusion of realism rather than a realistic model of interrelationships. So I would make the heretical comment that it might not be a bad idea to have 1:1 eye candy, but I wonder if true 1:1 modeling might cause you to run the risk of being so busy with the nits that you lose sight of what you're really trying to model. Ty Bomba at (the now defunct) Command Magazine understood that simpler is not always less realistic if you can consistantly get the right outcomes.

Actually, in a way it does, if an army didn't have the concept, or if its version of the concept was different in some significant way. The American Army supposedly didn't have the concept before the year-end training exercises that I think I'm alluding to (it's discussed at various points as a somewhat seminal event in Closing with the Enemy, an otherwise unreadable book). The concept was a distillation and learning from experience based on all the things that had gone on in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, but especially France. To use the term indiscriminately would be a bit like advocating the use of stosstruppen tactics in a wargame covering 1914-15.

Overwatch is an American term that supposedly came into existance in December 1944. It refers to assigning a body of troops or weapons to prepare to lay down covering fire, often in the context of another body of troops moving forward. Think in terms of fire and movement, only one unit is firing and another moving. (This brings to mind the D-Day quip about the officer's response when his commander asked him if he was advancing by fire and movement -- yes, they're firing and we're moving). The term overwatch probably shouldn't be used ouside of the context of American forces after December '44 or January '45. I'm pretty sure that bounding overwatch is an anachronism from the seventies. Not sure what covering the advancing forces was called in the German or Commonwealth armies.

I can help you out with any problems you're having with CMBO CMMOS 4.03, but I'll need to know some particulars first. Reread the illustrated readme file, make sure you're trying to install a CMMOS mod, make sure we're talking about CMBO and not CMBB (works very differently), and describe exactly what you're doing, whether you've managed to get anything to work, and the exact paths that you're using for CMBO and GEM Productions/CMMOS. That error message just means you're doing something wrong. To figure out what, you have to establish which of the dozen or so steps you've done right. In CMBO CMMOS you install rulesets and rules manually into GEM Productions/CMMOS/CMBO, and manually copy the mods with extensions into Program Files/CMBO/BMP. In CMBB CMMOS it doesn't work that way at all. So give us some info and we'll try to sort you out.