Philippe

The fist time I met the term "overwatch" was in SPI's "Firefight" game, which was designed as a training aid during the big US Army reorg of the mid-1970s, with "new" tactics partly in response to the vicarious experience of the 1973 Yom Kippur war. I have never seen it used in any source materials earlier than that (which may, of course, just mean I haven't read enough). [/QB]

Mission statements tend to stifle innovation by encouraging people to think inside the box. I think we should all prefer to have BFC maintain a studied silence on the subject. They're perfectly capable of winnowing the wheat from the chaff on their own, and somebody might accidently trigger a useful train of thought. So let's give them our tangentially relevant ideas, but without interfering in their creative process.

When exactly did the term "Overwatch" come into general use? I've always associated it with US military-speak from the late 'sixties, but I'm starting to get the impression that it is a bit older than that. (I have a sneaking suspicion that it was used once or twice in papers in the forties, but didn't catch on until twenty years later). Similar question for "Bounding-overwatch". Now this one I'm sure dates to the Vietnam era. In the late '40's, what were the normal terms used by the US Army for "Overwatch" and "Bounding-Overwatch" ? Covering fire and and advancing by fire and maneuver ? Leap-frogging ? What did they really say? Same question as above for the Brits, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, and Poles. And finally, what did the Germans call it back then, and what do they call it now ? And does anyone know Russian (and could they give a literal etymology for the terms that were used)? And for extra credit, what does the difference in terminology tell us, if anything, about national military methods and thinking ?

Scenarios sorted by date. If there were a required date field when you design a scenario, you could have all the scenarios appear in date or alphabetical order. The field should be explicit about prompting you for month, day, and year, so non-Americans don't get confused about which to put first. If the scenario is fictional it should probably default to the last day of the month unless specified, and then sort alphabetically. The date wouldn't have to display on the scenario list.

No trouble, lad, no trouble at all. And these wiggling latex enclosed fingers have saluted Royalty. Now, try and relax, and think of something heroic while I'm doing the 'chanter' fingering for 'Scotland the Brave' on your lower intestine... Ah, the pipes. How they console us, at moments of loss and pain. </font>

No trouble, lad, no trouble at all. And these wiggling latex enclosed fingers have saluted Royalty. Now, try and relax, and think of something heroic while I'm doing the 'chanter' fingering for 'Scotland the Brave' on your lower intestine... Ah, the pipes. How they console us, at moments of loss and pain. </font>

Too kind, too kind. But don't bother, really, I just had a check-up. Besides, from what I hear you don't have the reach, and we wouldn't want you straining yourself.

Too kind, too kind. But don't bother, really, I just had a check-up. Besides, from what I hear you don't have the reach, and we wouldn't want you straining yourself.

Oh god, I did it again. I really didn't mean to post in this ...uh...place.

Oh god, I did it again. I really didn't mean to post in this ...uh...place.

I may be naive, but I thought the first part was done with a hypodermic syringe. Why on earth would anyone enjoy that ?

I may be naive, but I thought the first part was done with a hypodermic syringe. Why on earth would anyone enjoy that ?

There's a thin line here, and you have to be careful not to cross it. Medics repairing a squad sounds a bit more like a simulation of a video game than a simulation of WWII. I don't think the normal function of a medic would be to restore morale of a panicked squad. Or eliminate supression. The game already has a mechanism for that. I've often wondered about the concept of global morale, and thought it might be more appropriate to keep track of it on a different basis. It seems to me that the morale crisis of one larger than squad level body of soldiers shouldn't necessarily effect everyone else. Company A could have a morale rating of 10, Company B could have 35, and Company C could be a pristine 80. Not sure its worth simulating on this level, though through the use of aid stations I've hinted at a way to show the distinctions. Aid stations, their equipment, and their wounded need trucks to move around (and even to function, to some extent). And the same goes for ammo dumps and field kitchens (did I mention that I want full modeling of field kitchens, staff headquarters equipment, and latrines?). So if you start modeling stations, kitchens, and dumps a little more accurately, perhaps with some kind of a transport requirement that has to be preserved at the end of the game (or the system counts the asset as partially lost and you get penalized extra points), you won't see many people doing recon with trucks. Or even jeeps, for that matter.

To beat the aid stations thing to death, I think troops treated there don't return to combat for another week or two. Even in operations, if someone is so lightly wounded in one battle that he's capable of going back into action several battles later, he probably wouldn't count as a casualty in the first place. Invasive trauma tends to be a lot more unsettling than most people realize. Another reason why I don't like the FPS genre. The troops that should go back to the front in twenty to forty minutes time are the able-bodied soldiers who evacuated the wounded and then return to their posts, not the wounded themselves. I remember reading somewhere that one of the symptoms of crumbling morale in a firefight is that four soldiers will feel the need to escort a lightly wounded buddy back to the aid station...

For what purpose? That just adds more of the "blood and guts" that BFC doesn't want to show, and in the past has seen as outside the scope of the game. (Not to say that it couldn't be, just a view based on past comments by BFC.) </font>

And I want some kind of modeling for aid stations and the treatment/evacuation of casualties. I don't want to have to give orders for it (beyond, perhaps, designating where these places should be), and I don't even need to see it. But casualties getting moved back from the front cause fluctuations in the number of available troops, and that fluctuation is what I'm interested in. Especially if it lowers the overall casualty rate (you can't get shot if you've had to drag someone back to the aid station two miles away). And I realize that this kind of thing is a lot easier to model with the current three man squads.

I know that BFC has had a policy against blood and guts in the past, and I'm not advocating that now. I'm not sure that going all the way to having an animation for casualties is such a good idea, but I do think that, especially if they manage to have 10-12 figures in a 10-12 man squad there should be more bodies lying around on the battlefield. Why ? Things are a little too antisceptic right now. I find it a little bit disturbing when I see the few bodies lying around that come with the current engine, and I think it is a good thing if we aren't quite so casual about the death and destruction that we're inflicting. When I play the bad guys I don't want to forget that they're bad guys (I can't identify with something that's swathed in swastikas), and when I get people killed I want to be reminded of what I'm responsible for. I'm not asking for Hollywood blood and gore, I just want my conscience tweaked a bit more. I want to be a little uncomfortable. The Robert E. Lee quote about war being terrible comes to mind.

More on formations. I looked at a couple of WWII photographs of infantry moving around, and mentally compared what I was looking at to Combat Mission. Now I understand that the tiles that we know, love, and loathe will be done away with, but just for the moment I find it useful to think in those terms. An infantry squad of brits moving down a road in column formation seems to take up about two tiles of space. I haven't done any systematic studies, but that leads me to suspect that maybe what CM needs are some infantry formations, a bit like those that show up in Napoleonic games. Nothing complicated, just a marching column (that gets a slight movement bonus and can trigger a follow the leader situation), a normal formation, and a dispersed formation. Normal formation would be what we have now, dispersed would spill into several hexes (mental slip there...sorry). The idea would be that a squad or a team in dispersed formation would be less vulnerable to incoming fire. Not sure how this would flow through the game system, and not sure what authentic dispersal parameters should be, but I think the idea should be considered because as it stands now the troops seem so bunched together you should be able to take out a whole sqaud with a single grenade. Or light phaser...

There is something to what you say. However, I think we should remember that we aren't designing the game, they are. They know what works in the overall scheme, and what doesn't. And if that scheme changes at all, as it probably will, what works today might not work tomorrow. So it makes perfect sense to post a series of threads listing everything that we can think of, because we aren't in a position to know what will or won't work. I suspect that the good folks at BFC they are perfectly capable of relegating to the cylindrical file anything that, for whatever reason, doesn't make sense. This whole exercise reminds me a bit of Plato's cave. Even if an idea is useless, it might suggest something to the designer that would never occur to an outsider. If the discussion were too difuse I'm sure they would have said something to bring us back on track. Now that that's out of the way, it was mentioned in another thread that it would be useful to have an extend game button somewhat parallel to a surrender button. I think it's a good idea that shouldn't get lost. How it works is up to BFC -- one approach might be to require both sides to ask for extension to make it kick in, another would be to make it automatic for a lesser number of turns, but at the cost of a few victory points. And with each extension the VP cost would get higher. How long the extensions should be is anybody's guess.

I wonder what would happen if you ran your laptop in one of the older computer modes (assuming that is an option) and then tried to install. Windows XP wasn't around when CMMOS was designed. Maybe you could fool it into thinking you're installing on a Windows 98 or something. I'd suggest a cry for help in the Tech Forum. Schrully makes wonderful suggestions, but the person whose input you really need is Gordon Molek (rarely around anymore, sadly) or Keith Carter. Maybe if you mention Sitzkrieg in the title of your thread it will get his attention, but don't tell him I suggested doing that...

Not knowing anything about your system, the most common cause of CMMOS failure comes from having CMMOS and Combat Mission installed in the wrong places. CMMOS expects the target game to be somewhere normal like C:\Program Files\CMBO [change game name as appropriate]. A lot of people try installing it to My Games or some such place, which may not interfere with the running of CM but knocks the wind out of CMMOS. In a similar way CMMOS itself needs to be somewhere bog-normal, like C:\Program Files\GEM Productions. Anywhere else will get it confused, knot knowing where it is or where to look for what it is looking for. Has philosophical implications, really.... As for how the program works with newer technology, only Gordon Molek knows for sure. Your laptop may be confusing the installer. I think Keith Carter (aka Sitzkrieg in this Forum) was the person that Gordon consulted on the installer at one point (then again, I'm probably suffering from delusions and a faulty memory -- it's been a while). There's also a faint possibility that CMMOS actually installed, you just aren't looking in the right place. Even after the program installs, you have to load it up with rulesets. Unfortunately I was not involved in the CMBB side of CMMOS so I can't be more specific than that (and as you have probably figured out by now, wasn't involved on the techie side of anything). The mods themselves work a little differently than with CMBO CMMOS. And I suspect its fair to say that, being several years old, CMMOS for CMBB was probably not designed with your system in mind.

I'm continuing to make minefield markers for CMBO that are compatible with CMAK, and have moved on to the French. A bit under-researched, but a first step in upgrading the minor nationalities. The French Anti-tank minefield marker looks a lot like the American one, except that the French tend to be better sign painters (has something to do with their obsession with handwriting). The French Anti-personnel minefield marker is a bit more idiomatic: Many of the French were Vichy sympathizers. And some of them were just plain nuts. So in compliance with the law of July 29, 1881 we get this: The French have a strong pre-1944 military tradition ( how's that for understatement!) so they would have been very likely to revert to whatever method they used in 1940. Until I find out what that was, this will have to do. I'm also concerned that while "gare aux mines" may be idiomatic civilian French, militaries of all nationalities have a habit of inventing their own incomprehensible jargon. Unfortunately I no longer have access to any French veterans of WWII. So any assistance with this project will be appreciated. I'm sure the Polish situation would be somewhat parallel to the French -- Commonwealth in style, but with that little extra something. Does anyone know what they used, or how to say "mines" in Polish ? The fun will really start when I move on to CMBB and try to do it in Finnish, Magyar, Russian, Soviet-style Polish, Italian, and Roumanian. Looking forward to making signs in Cyrillic.

Actually, it won't. I have one of the few working copies of the Semiotics mod installed on my computer (which doesn't exactly push the envelope) and it already does most of what I describe with CMBO. Not CMAK, CMBO. So it wouldn't take much more than a little planning to enable the virtual uniform museum.

Bitmap Redundancy. Why? Right now I have to suffer looking at infantry shoulder patches on tankers, because Allied infantry and tankers share the same sleaves. And if I give in to Darknight and put sergeants stripes on one of my Commonwealth uniforms, everybody in the squad, all three or all twelve of them, is a sergeant. And even if I look closely at one of my infantrymen, what do I see? One of his shoulder patches is always reversed. And the same thing goes for numbers on the sides of tank turrets, which means I'm really getting sick of having every tank in my army numbered "888". BFC could map out the architecture for a truly fully modded CMx2, and the modders could take care of the rest. Squads would have a dozen figures, and one of them would be an NCO. Tanks would all have different turret numbers (or seem to). And if you put a divisional insignia on the front of a jeep's windshield, you wouldn't see it in reverse when you looked at the windshield from the back. And the same goes for fenders. These and similar problems were the result of shortcuts that BFC had to take or the original engine would have been cut off at the knees. These are dumb, trivial little things, but if attended to systematically in advance, there are enthusiasts ( i.e. maniacs) out there who will fill in the details. Now that he's got his database together, Darknight would mod in the shoulder patches for the CW in a heartbeat. And there are three of us (myself included) who could do the same for the US. And with a little prompting and a slightly easier palette to work with something similar could be done for the Germans -- just take a look at the uniform notes in Grog Dorosh's German website. The kind of obsessive uniform modding that I'm describing makes no sense being carried out by BFC -- but if they smooth the way by adding a few bmp's here and there that they don't need for the program, but that modders will, they can turn CMx2 into a living virtual museum. A bit like walking through the vast armies of lead soldiers at the Invalides before they sold most of their collection. Creating the basis for a living virtual museum would be quite an accomplishment in and of itself. I'm assuming, of course, that CMx2 will be compatible with some kind of CMMOS-like texture-switching program that will have to be programed from scratch once the new game is released. And how wonderful it would be if such a system existed were developed that was native to CMx2.

To parrot MikeyD, Boats. I want boats. And not just rubber dingies. The real thing, with some limited modeling of destroyers, submarines, and the odd freighter. I want boats that can sometimes shoot back, and can even move a little (but probably not under player control). Why ? When you think of WWII you think of D-Day. But so far you can't really play D-Day. I think a lot of people were slightly crestfallen when they went to play D-Day scenarios...and that island out there at the back of the map with the FO's on it gets to role-play being a destroyer. Or a monitor. Or whatever. And how do you raid St.Nazaire if there isn't a ship in sight ? I want to dodge Teller mines and attach explosives to a submarine pen. And I don't want to do it playing Commando. CMx2 needs native amphibious assault capability. And there's no shortage of native amphibians. British destroyers can stage commando raids in Norway. Operation Sea Lion can overrun the South Downs by landing the Wehrmacht from river barges (assuming they don't swamp in the Sleave). Commonwealth troops can stage several invasions of Madagascar against Vichy French who fight back. US troops can land in North Africa wondering if the Vichy French will continue to fight back. Everybody can invade Sicily, and get shot at on the beaches. And Salerno, and Anzio, and Normandy, and Southern France. And even that theatre of operations that will remain nameless where amphibious operations were regular occurrence. You don't have to pretend you're NWS. If I want a ship simulator, I'll buy one, assuming that Silent Hunter III ever gets released. But the naval combat environment needs to be addressed. And speaking of D-Day, how about having paratroops coming down as unit smaller than teams scattered all over the map. And the one next to it. And the one next to that. And the one next to that....