Philippe

I was thinking of the shadow on her cheek and the bridge of her nose at sunrise.

You know, if you play a QB you'll probably end up building a force around the tactics you want to use. If, on the other hand, you play an historical scenario, you'll build your tactics around the situation and the forces that are handed to you. The QB's free reign on buying forces probably encourages weird tactics. Historical scenarios, on the other hand, tend to be immersive, and you'll find yourself behaving in a convincing manner (even if you're harboring unchaste thoughts about your girlfriend). So as much as it goes against Jesuit training to say so, you're probably better off ignoring intent. Judge your opponent by his acts, not by his heart (you probably don't want to know, anyway). Maybe you should go cold-turkey on the QB's for a while and pretend you're a reenactor. The question may look a little different to you after a while.

Tactics are always used because they give you an advantage. If the ones you are using don't give you an advantage you have to find different tactics that do. This isn't arm-wrestling. If you want a balanced scenario, play chess. Or shogi. Or go. Balanced is boring. And gamey. It never happens in real life. The intent behind the use of a particular tactic is not relevant. I often use one tactic as opposed to another because I happen to be thinking of a particular part of my girlfriend's anatomy. Are tactics used in the context of lascivious thoughts gamey? Don't tell her that, she hates games. I disagree that half-squads are better than squads (which is one reason I don't use them much). But even if they were, so what? Real men hunt Tigers with Stuarts. I'm not interested in artificially homogenized and equalized war. Probably for the same reasons I don't eat fast food.

How the game looks for the purposes of this discussion is irrelevant. We're not talking about modding, we're talking about simulation. What's at issue is what is realistic. Insisting that players artificially keep their squads together in big, easy targets is no more realistic than splitting squads down to one-man units. No real army that I am aware of has ever been able to maintain cohesion and that level of initiative at the same time. People tend to be a lot more like sheep than they're willing to admit. The smallest meaningful split would be to two-man or three-man groups, depending on the national army. But that would assume a lot more intelligent and self-motivated NCO's than one should reasonably expect to be present at all times in all armies. So the half-squads is a good compromise (though probably a bit generous to early-war Russians). The playability question would be more appropriate if taken up with the game designers before release of a game. Like it or not, this is what we've got. If someone doesn't enjoy playing with an opponent who insists on using realistic tactics he should simply find someone else to play with. I suspect that one is a bit less likely to encounter the problematic hordes in historical scenarios than QB's (which I never play because they're gamey). Split-squad hordes aren't going to become a dominant universal tactic for several reasons. One of them is that the good CM players that I know will hand you your head on a platter if you try it in the wrong situation, and they won't be splitting their squads to clobber you. Just like in real life.

I have a funny feeling that people who have spent a lot of time playing Napoleonics have a very different take on this from those that haven't. It is normal to switch from skirmish formation, to line, to column, to square, to marching order, and back again, and to feel cheated that there was too much abstraction in that limited set of formation commands. Players frequently make the wrong formation choices, and the AI sometimes makes worse ones. Telling your men which basic formation to adopt is well within the ken of a company commander in CM, and a brigade commander or higher in the 18th century. The tactical reality of CM is taking place at the level of two- and three- man groups. It is abstracted, so you never see these groups or what is really happening when you operate with squads and half squads. Having the single choice between concentrated in one clump or spread out in two clumps is not exactly a plethora of options. Is it my favorite design choice? No. Are there better ways of doing it? Yes, but the designers clearly decided to go light on tactical sub-routines. Light, but not eliminated. The ability to split squads does reflect a set of legitimate tactical alternatives: concentrate your forces or spread them out. There are plenty of good reasons for doing both, and there are plenty of good reasons for avoiding both. The level of tactical interference that a player engages in when deciding to split or not split is probably less than what goes on when he decides to move a tank from cover to cover, sometimes in move, sometimes in hunt, sometimes in fast. Micro-management is not my favorite design feature, but there is nothing inherently gamey about it if you are using it to simulate something that is going on in real life. Left to their own devices units in CM probably make better choices than the average player more than half the time. But they will panic and do stupid things, like bunch up into a knot of men just before someone tosses a grenade at them, or run towards incoming fire (I first remember reading about this in accounts of WWI, but it's a natural human reaction). That's why you split the squad. You can't have the sergeant spread them out into a realistic footprint, but you can make that footprint more realistic if you split the squad. Spreading your squad's fire across two targets seems like a good way to fritter away your firepower, but if you think it's a good idea, fine, do it (by splitting your squad), and suffer the consequences. If you split your squad to increase survivability, if you're going one on one with another squad you've just opened yourself up to defeat in detail: his combined squad will silence your split fire team before you can silence him, and he'll then move on to silencing your other team. The real life event involves one squad spread over twenty meters taking on another spread over forty. The game mechanics that I've just described seem completely consistant with what would happen in reality. And the flip side, the fire team and the maneuver team (discussed in pretty much those terms by the game designers when they explain the rationale for who goes into which half squad) launching a co-ordinated attack against a single target is text-book stuff. May not be perfectly modeled, but the design intent is clearly deliberate. And they've left it up to you to make the bad choices. One of the things that really flummoxed me many years ago when I first started playing board games against people I didn't know was what to do when someone made a bad move. Often you can recognize it for what it is, but sometimes you expect him to play the same way you do, and by playing badly your opponent confuses you and gains a temporary advantage. If you stay flummoxed and don't punish him for his mistake, you have no one to blame but yourself. Split squads aren't gamey. They're a real life tactic, and overuse of that tactic in the wrong circumstances presents the side that isn't splitting with an opportunity that should be exploited. And that's how it works in real life. Tactics are a bit like playing scissors-paper-stone: if he comes at you with scissors, grab a rock, but don't complain that scissors are gamey when they were part of the designer's TO&E.

Motorcyles. Because I want to do an ahistorical mod of a topless biker chick (feathers not included).

Somebody earlier on complained that there wasn't a reform teams into one squad button. I complain about that every time I try to do it, especially when I don't get it right. I think what is being simulated is the loss of cohesion that occurs when you split up -- less cohesive units are harder to reform, hence no command. You can get them to reform most of the time, but every now and then you get it wrong. That seems eminently realistic to me. And what is realistic cannot, by definition, be gamey.

A squad can fire at two targets. Or its two halves can fire at one. What is gamey is that it can't fire at three. Concentrating your fire is good tactics. Just because something is not the best tactics doesn't mean it's gamey. Something is not gamey because of your own personal interpretation of what the designers may or may not have intended, even if that interpretation happens to be correct. I just reread the relevant section of the CMBB manual, by the way, and it sure doesn't read like a prohibition against squad-splitting. What it seems to be saying is that we've modeled squad-splitting on how squads worked in teams (a bit of an oversimplification for three-man German teams), you can mimic real-life to your heart's content with fire and maneuver elements, but be warned, your troops will be very brittle. But whatever your interpretation of the intent behind those three paragraphs describing split squad usage, the designer's intent (which tends to be in the eye of the beholder) is not really what determines gameyness. Suicidal truck and jeep recons are gamey. Why? Not because the designer didn't intend you to do it but because it wasn't done in real life. [And I'll say rude things in the general direction of anyone who quotes that D-Day story about the possibly anti-semitic unit commander who sent the least experienced, least useful, and most under-armed member of his company down the road ahead of his men in the hopes that he would draw fire and get himself killed]. Trucks and jeeps are valuable assets off the battlefield, and you don't waste them by exposing them to fire, or rushing suspected positions, or driving back and forth across roads at high speeds to exhaust enemy ammunition. Something is gamey because it wasn't done in real life. I worked on an excavation many years ago with someone who had driven a recon jeep in Patton's army. He was always several miles out in front, almost always alone, and very, very careful. And he didn't rush enemy positions to draw fire. And he had an uncanny way of knowing whenever the ceiling of the tunnel we were digging under that cliff was about to cave in. Were squads split in real life? Yes. Did people split their squads up and scatter the teams all over the battlefield in real life? Yes, sometimes. But their careers didn't last very long because they eventually came up against someone who understood the German dictum of striking with your hand in a fist, and not breaking your fingers because they were spread apart. Artificial penalties built into the game to prevent unrealistic behavior are gamey. The point penalty on losing crews is gamey. But a necessary evil. A good model allows you to do something stupid, but at a price. A better model gets the price right. I probably don't split my squads as often as I should. I tend to split them up on defense to get the extra foxholes that I would have had in real life, but then I run like crazy to reform them into whole squads. And I really hope that the next person I attack likes to split his squads to the max on defense -- and stays that way. Crossbows are not gamey. Putting them on the index of forbidden weapons is.

For some reason I'm not surprised that the CMBO Archer is too easy to use. Is the CMAK Archer more cumbersome? Sounds like there should be an extra time delay to go from firing mode to moving mode while the driver clambers back into the vehicle -- and finds his seat clouded with cordite fumes.

What many people don't realize is that you can do layers in old-fashioned out of the box Paint. It's a bit cumbersome and requires some advance planning, but as long as you don't need a transparency effect it will work. Just make everything white transparent, use bmp's that are the same size as your target, and only paint the area in the layer that you want to show. If you have a tank and want to show the paint wearing off at one point, just paint on what is underneath the paint that's showing through, and nothing else. When you copy/paste that on to your target (keeping the white area transparent) it will look like you've scrapped off paint, when in reality you've painted on whatever is underneath.

One of the side effects of building the game around the game engine and not the graphics is that screenshots and concept art probably aren't quite as much in evidence as with an FPS. I want good graphics, and moddable graphics, but the game engine is more important. Let them get the fundamentals right by concentrating on what's underneath the hood, then move on to the immersion factor and the paint job.

I thought they had scrapped Agincourt but were doing Crecy and Poictiers instead.

Never mind. Just figured out what you were saying. My brain battery really is burnt out tonight -- I was reading 100-95 as 100 to 95, not 100 minus 95.

Hmm...are we quite sure about the math? The battery in my calculator is dead so I'm doing it in my head, but I'm coming up with a rather different answer (the battery in my head is burned out, too...).

It's back up again! I can go back to downloading. Mabybe today isn't a total loss after all...

Yikes! I can't raise CMMODS ! I hope the rush to download your mod didn't crash the site. I've only managed to download one Panzer III J -- it looks great, but I want to see the rest of them. Panzer III's are so confusing...

Archers are not assault guns. They are meant to be used nimbly, not aggressively. People who don't like Archers probably don't like hunting Tigers with Stuarts.

I don't have CMAK so I can't comment on the Archer in CMAK. But I have used it in CMBO and, with the right handling, it can be deadly. The key is to understand the difference between what it is (an anti-tank gun with a very powerful weapon that can fire when limbered) and what it isn't (a tank or a tank destroyer), and to use it accordingly. The fact that the gun points backwards is only a problem if you have trouble switching back and forth between the left and right hand sides of your brain: it's great for fast exits. Think of the Archer as an automatically limbered sniper canon. That 17 lb. gun can do some pretty amazing things.

I will recover eventually, but after looking at those screenshots my eyes hurt. I think you really need to visit CMHQ at combatmission.com (the old semi-official CMBO site), download CMMOS 4.03 and all the CMMOS mods, and do something about those visuals. The world really doesn't have to look like the morning after a week of prolonged chemical substance abuse. I can't believe the shade of vibrant green. Maybe Charles really does live in jar full of blue colored water... Get Strontium Dog's Grass for starters. For buildings you'll need Tanks a Lot, Panzertruppen, and Magua's Normandy, and should switch back and forth between them, depending on the scenario. DD made the best hedges and bocage. Ed Kinney came out with an ultra high resolution wheat mod (at CMMODS in the CMAK section, I think) that looks incredible. Try Juju or Ed for stone walls, Magua for trees inside of Normandy, a combination of Ed, DD, and Old Dog outside. Strontium Dog did a great paved road and water as well, though Magua's Normandy water is really good (the water you use should depend on the sky conditions because it's reflective, so you'll need four or five of them).

The thing to remember about pillboxes is that they only face one way and can't rotate. If you aren't up against an anti-tank gun pillbox, I've had suprisingly good results with tank destroyers. Two or three of them working over a pillbox for a few minutes often takes it out with a shot through the firing slit. On reflection, it's probably too easy to knock out a pillbox that way: real pillboxes were more resiliant. Pillboxes don't fire to the flank, and they have undefended back doors. Slip a team with demo charges around the back and they'll take it out pretty quick if you get them in close enough. Bazookas also work on the back door, as do handgrenades, if you have enough of them. Classic pillbox busting tactics involve using a flamethrower to super-heat the metal door and the air inside the bunker: I can't remember if this works in CM (I think it does) but there are some sweat inducing accounts of Germans on the receiving end of these tactics who were lucky enough to surrender without being killed by either side. Human waves aren't necessary. One squad should do the trick, if it's armed with the right equipment and you put it in the right place.

The anti-censorship patches at Mark Gallear's site were written by Schoerner, I believe. He seems to have had the foresight to post them to CMMODS as well. So go to CMMODS, register if you haven't already (it's quite painless, private, and the registration probably keeps bankdwidth leeches at bay), and a few minutes after you do you should get an e-mail with a password. Log on, go to the CMBB section, go to the designer section, click on Schoerner and keep clicking on your choices until you see the list of patches. I haven't checked them out, but I believe CMMODS should be running as usual. You might want to drop Schoerner a line letting him know about the download problem at Mark Gallear's site. You might also try asking him, while you're about it, what difference, if any there is between the Mark Gallear file and the CMMODS file. He takes censorship issues very seriously (as I do) and is very likely to get back to you. You are wise to load up on this kind of thing at this juncture. In the wake of Prince Harry's fox paw they'll probably ban anything that smacks of realism. So stock up on your potential contraband while it's still legal. I have the US CDV version that doesn't suffer from censorship problems, so I don't have a copy of the anti-PC patch.

Best way to get inaccurate results in a sample is to ask an incomplete set of questions posed with unexplained obscure abbreviations that only a few will understand. You're going to get badly skewed results. And no one plays in one single way, so you probably need a percentage spread. A bit of redesign may be in order.

The old semi-official site that has 95% of the CMBO mods is CMHQ at combatmission.com. Pay it a visit, and go into the Third Party mod section that you'll find in the upper left-hand corner. Find the German tanks and flip through all the pages. Somewhere in there there should be a Normandy Tiger by Gordon Molek. If you can't find it in 3rd Party, it will be in the CMMOS section. CMMOS probably works best with CMBO at this point because it covers almost everything that has been done. There is at least one Normandy camo Tiger in CMMOS 4.03. The nice thing about the old cmbo cmmos is that everything is clearly labeled once you install it. If you don't want to install it, just find the Tiger that you need and strip the extension off the bmp number. However, if you dig through third party mods you'll find the non cmmos version (with a picture) anyway.

I think our posts are crossing in the mail...

In fact, the NKVD unit does have its own icon. If you look at the manual on the page that lists what the different icons on the screen menu mean (page 18 in the US CDV version), you will see that it lists eight non-guard Soviet unit types and gives their color codes: infantry, mechanized, cavalry, mountain, airborne, ski, naval, and NKVD (red on red). I know that nobody pays any attention to this because it's too hard to remember, which is why I'm trying to come up with a simplified but elegant set of icons, drawing on the best of what's out there and filling in the gaps with my own work. Now that I've poked around in the editor a bit, and have visited the depot, I'm starting to get the impression that the eighth icon (if it isn't meant to be present but invisible) may be a design relic of something that BTS forgot to finish when they were making the game. Or maybe they never intended to include NKVD units and didn't tell the menu icon designer. It's a shame. A quick search on the boards turns up lots of WWII NKVD regalia for both frontier and internal security troops (hats, badges, patches, and shoulder boards that may or may not be authentic). And there seems to be no shortage of miniatures that show the famous blue hat. The reason for this, besides, their notoriety, is that there were more than 20 NKVD divisions in the war. The Germans would have run across them any time they broke through a Soviet line because some of them were stationed immediately behind the line to shoot deserters. But there were also frontier units that apparently fought in the front line, and not just in the early stages of the war. So I'm afraid this may be a relic of something that BTS intended to do but that got lost (or abandoned) in the shuffle. [ January 22, 2005, 02:55 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]