RockinHarry

Lots of intense action! Great! 😎

Mashovets writes Russia threw into the battle there PMC "Potok" ("Stream") and "Fakel" ("Torch") of Gazprom. On the northern flank already was invoilved PMC "Veterany" of Shoigu. All these PMCs are just cosplay of Wagner, having poor effectiveness. "Potok" already appeared on Bakhmut direction several months ago, but after first clashes and artillery hits abandoned positions. Russian milbloggers wrote, that as commander of this PMC was appointed employee of Gazprom, retired police officer, who had some security duties in this company. He had no skills in military like and most of commanders of lower levels, personnel had poor training, so first fight they failed in several days, reveiving scorn from Wagners

Russian TG:
Now contact line near Rabotino [ukr. Robotyne] is along this white line. UKR need to overcome just one field to reach northern part of the village

The soldier, who dug up his comrade says him at the end: "Now you will have callsign "Mole" %)

What I like about modular buildings is their flexibility. The ability to add floors, remove walls, rearrange windows and doors and trim,rotate in place and create and cycle through new skins are all wonderful. .... BUT! ... as a modder and scenario creator there are some things to hate. Before I let off steam about my number one hate I want to point out a "silly bit". In the Scenario Editor, modular buildings #2 & #3 are identical as are the pairs #4-#5 and #7-#8. Don't be fooled by the icon which shows them rotated 90 degrees relative to each other. After all the buildings can be rotated by the user. So instead of 9 orthogonally arranged buildings (not counting the diagonal ones) there are in fact only 6. This is further cemented by the fact that the  "pairs" share the identical roof, With 2-3 using roof 2, 4-5 using roof 3 and 7-8 using roof 6. And that leads into my 'hate' rant. I hate the fact that the roof graphics cannot be cycled in the manner that we can cycle the building graphics. This has the undesired result of roof skins not able to match all building skins. For example if building #1 can cycle through stucco, brick, stone and timbre skins, the roof skin is locked into just one option which frequently does not match. The result can be awful - at least it is to me as a building modder. At the very least Battlefront could have made the roofs for the "pairs" of buildings different. And at best, the roofs could and should be cycleable with SHIFT + Left Mouse through a series of user modded options. Blah ....😪

LOL! All a big clownshow for the standard Orc that didn't even know Prig was in Rostov and Wagner was marching on Moscow.
 

Clownshow...

Even weirder?
 
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66023631
 
I took some time to look better at the available footage of the "mutiny" to check if I really saw what I thought I saw.
Compared to every other uprising, coup, mutiny and/or civil unrest I read about, saw pictures or camera-footage of, or heard witnesses/participants talk about, the Wagner-advance seemed to show a remarkable lack of stress, chaos and apprehension.
To me this whole thing looked more like an ADHDfilled teenager-schooltrip, than an "everyone's future and lives are very much at stake" high-stress occurence.
Prigozjin is looking remarkable relaxed throughout, which is quite a change from his earlier recent appearances. He is laying his life on the line, not only because of the "failure means death"-probabilty, but if there would be any resistance against this mutiny, he would be the prime target. But he, and his entourage, are all the time behaving like it is a walk in the park.
And look at the way most of the troops behave. Do they act like they expect enemy fire? Are they using every bit of cover while advancing? Are they nervously looking out for snipers or armor? Does it look like they expect any resistance at all? No, they go for coffee and food, sit very relaxed on parkbenches and cafe-terraces, stroll as if they know there will be no resistance. Very strange, especially when you realise that a lot of those soldiers recently were in combat at heavily contested frontlines, which tends to make anyone pretty anxious and alert in an urban situation where enemy fire can be expected any minute.
 
Every other coup or mutiny (etc) had camera-footage and reports that show chaos, excitement and confusion. People being very nervous/agitated. Adjutants, security-guys, messengers and officers, all running around and looking around and gesticulating and a lot of yelling and shouting going on. A continuous reporting and updating of enemy positions, resistance-levels, progression of advancing friendly units, news from the rest of the country, and so on.
I did not see that on a level that I would expect in a "mutiny" that was so sudden, so big and so powerful as this one. Not at all. While the possible, or likely, enemy force could be enormous.
Even when things were unfolding it almost looked to me as if, at least a big part of, the mutineers knew, or at least suspected, that there would be no real resistance.
Maybe they had perfect intel? Maybe it was Wagner self-confidence? Trusting in being lucky? Or, very possible, is my comparison with other mutinies and uprisings wrong?
I don't know what happend, but the fact that even 'Steve" and "TheCAPT" were uniquely shocked, proofs to me that this was one of the weirdest mutinies, and mutiny-endings, EVER.
 

thanks. The trade off is you´ve less shooting and spotting in lowered stances, thus "lowered carnage". That was the initial aim of the concept. Medic makes a difference for sure as this was my starting point for all other stance edits. Otherwise I wouldn´t have had wasted time on those. The modular concept (if beeing used) gives all players choices which the stance settings to use and which not. In my personal set I´ve lowered stance reload anis beeing active all the time. These and medic is good starting point. Every other depend on how much daring or agressive I want the opponents be. Pity that animations is almost all or nothing, as ani files are shared between opponents. So you can´t make one opponent more cautious and the other more daring this way. I.e I´d like having snipers keep a lower profile, but they don´t have seperate animation files unfortunately.

Just for arguments' sake. Could this stranger than strange day have underlying motives like these..
 
Putin and Prigozjin have been friends all along and still are. Never any real danger for either!
Prigozjin told his friend Putin that he wants to leave Ukraine (because he knows his "superior" Wagnerarmy is being massacered and if he stays he loses everything) and needs a way out.
Lukashenko is considered by both to be a growing liability and needs someone close by as a guard against roque behaviour. Wagner in Belorussia gives also more pressure on Ukraine.
Any diversion from the almost endless bad news producing Ukranian-fiasco is welcome. Any diversion.
In order to reveal where possible adversaries are, creating a very confusing scenario where people will (have to) show where their loyalties lie, can do the trick. (Stalin was very good at that.) Those who support a "mutinous situation" will be registered, and dealt with later on.
As long as it will be clear who the final victor is (Putin), a "threatening" situation is not bad in the long run, because the people will remember that Putin still wins, even in very difficult situations.
Test the loyalty, willingness and capabilities of the Army in case of a coup, without it being a real coup.
Be as Machiavellian as can be in order to "divide and conquer". Show fake weakness, trick, deceive, maskerade, lie. Be silent where people expect you to speak, do nothing where people expect you to act decisively. Make as much chaos as possible, because in the end that will benefit you.
Winning in Ukraine? Stop NATO from growing? Restoring Russia's Greatness?
Who cares? There is only one thing that matters, and that is staying in power.
 
 

I'm here to ask you guys some for some informed help.
There have been Ukrainians training in my country for a while now, and this last cycle that just graduated, they have selected 3 dozen or so candidates to go through another X amount of extended training and turn them into NCO's/Officers.
My unit is going to be in charge of that training.
I was talking with the base psychologist, who is going to be in charge of their "psychological" training. She will be giving them half a dozen of weekly addresses, but she has been given no advice or direction on what to teach them. She has some idea of where to start (stress handling, leadership skills...etc) but apart from that, taking into account these guys are headed for an actual shooting war obviously she wants to make an actual contribution and not give them hollow TedTalks.
As people with more expertise than me, I refer to you all the question:
What sort of psychological training would you recommend she prepare given the circumstances? What topics should she cover or what sort of techniques could she teach?
Thank you in advance.
 
PS I apologize if this isn't the correct place for the post but it's the place with the most traffic at the moment and the training isn't far off, so we would appreciate the help. Again, thank you in advance.

yeah, there´s an offset and sandbags rotate around a given center point in a radius. IIRC I once found the Meta Data dealing with just that (Meta 1 or 2 maybe). If changing these it can become tricky to get any CM units aligned to them properly. Though you can make sandbags rotate on the spot, just like most the flavor objects i.e.
I oftentimes find it much more useful to mold combat positions by use of (blue) ditch locking straight into terrain mesh. It also yields way better footprint for protection and vs enemy spotting. Anyway, like most CM forts sandbags are just a bad looking "here we are, shoot at us" features I´d rather avoid using.

Misleds are part of the game. Call it disinformation or Maskirovka. But you can do it in more creative ways actually. While BFC does not allow to "reveal" particular enemy units dispositions, there´s some workaround to get it into a mission nonetheless. However.... who says that an enemy unit (most the time beeing unspotted at mission start) is and will remain at "known" position? You can make the AIP move them off via scripting, set up traps or simply...misled.
Yep, standing patrols is something doable in the game. I´m sure the wishlist threads are full with good ideas, but it likely remains like that. Many good ideas that never get picked up by BFC. So us players and wannabe mission makers need to be creative. However, while doing ingame recon can be and oftenly is fun, parts of that can eat lots of mission time, both for battle planning and its execution. If it´s missions with limited execution times (game turn amount) then it can lead to hasty playstyle and applying not well thought out tactics and battleplans. Of course this can be made a particular mission type, but IMO needs beeing combined with other mission design measures for credibility. Just making a mission with limited game turn amount and declare it "difficulty level" is bits of...well, not my desired playstyle at least. But that´s all matter of tastes of course. 🍻
all made in GIMP. Basically captured the original ingame maps overhead looks with FRAPS, then apply some filters for certain effects. Above map/briefing style is just an example from couple years ago. Worked that out with @GeorgeM during CM1 (BB, BO and AK) high times. Today I simplify even more (sketch type) and outsource unnecessary info to a PDF or Word file. But depends on mission type and other things.

wow, looks cool and highly elaborated, thanks! 😎 Hope I´d find time for it anytime soon! Good luck and have fun with other interest then. I´m in very similar situation btw. 🍻

https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/tsd3/combat-mission-battle-for-normandy/cm-battle-for-normandy-campaigns/mission-boston-objective-la-fiere/

Video of K-2 battalion of 54th mech.brigade how Wagners assaulted small UKR position near Verkhniokamyans'ke (Lysychansk direction, between Soledar and Siversk). 8 UKR soldiers against 30 Wagners, which likely approached to position along dense tree-line and started assault, outflanking UKR position.  UKR infantry called mortar fire on themselves - shells hit in approx 20 m from our trench and several airburst explosions eliminated most of Wagner group (dead Russians are blured dynamcally on the video)
This is the same location, which we already could see on previous videos - with single tank attack and Wagners attempt of advance. For this time as it seen, UKR troop advanced along the tree-plant and seized T-crossing of it
Part 1. To be continued...
 

Gorgeous, Butschi! 😎💯 Yet need for WW2 titles as well (CMN, CMFB and CMRT)! 😐
Btw, that would be the right moment for BFC to contact you and discuss/work out an interface! Well... earlier would´ve been even better.

I decided to create a new topic for this because "tool to set elevation in the editor" is no longer really a good description. Finally (from my perspective 😉) I managed to release version 2.0.0 of CMAutoEditor.

https://github.com/DerButschi/CMAutoEditor
Woah, Butschi, wait a minute CMAutoWhat? What the hell are you talking about? CMAutoEditor is a tool that takes "external" data, like elevation, and automates clicking in the CM scenario editor. This way it kind of works around "missing features" in the editor. Wouldn't it be nice to import something like a heat map instead of clicking elevations in the editor? Of course I can't change the editor but by letting CMAutoEditor do the clicking it does something similar.

 
Version 2 is really a major update as it now includes importing data from OpenStreetMap. This way you can basically use CMAutoEditor to create a whole map for you.
Still, feature creep and being overly ambitious is certain to kill such a small project so I had to triage what makes it into this release and what (maybe, provided there is enough interest on your side and enough time on my side) gets postponed to a later update.

The cut affecting most of you is that for this release only CMCW is really supported. The reason is that there are differences in what is in the scenario editor for each CM title. That means not only are there buttons at different positions but there are also different buildings, roads, flavour objects etc. which need to be programmed as a "profile". I intend to modify CMAutoEditor in a way that the community can help with that but I am not yet sure how best to do it. So, for now CMCW only. CMBS should work for everything but flavour objects.

Another thing I had to cut is support for Windows version older than Windows 10. I know, there are quite a few of you around who still field Windows 7. However, python is only supported up to version 3.7 on Windows 7 and a few of the libraries CMAutoEditor depends on require python 3.10. In addition, I don't have a farm of PCs idling at home where I can test different Windows version so I can really only develop for Windows 10. Sorry for that but maybe this doubles as a friendly reminder that nowadays Windows 7 is a security liability and you should upgrade to Windows 10 or 11. 😉
There is of course a long list of things I'd like to improve eventually and given that this is a rather complex piece of code the chances that it is free of bugs is close to zero. So, feel free to contact me here or on github if you find something!

Now, with all the caveats out of the way let's move on to the more pleasant stuff. 🙂 What's new in version 2? Well, of course OpenStreetMap data. You can import forests, rivers, roads, streams, railways, farmland, grassland, bushes, buildings and even bus stops, wayside crosses and much more. I improved the tools to import DGM data so that now arbitrary rectangles can be extracted. The information from this can be loaded into the OSM data converter so that you don't have to manually enter bounding boxes. (The geotiff tool is unfortunately among the things that didn't make it for this release so you are left with the previous capabilites). CMAutoEditor itself is now also much faster. Please note, that it may be too fast for what your PC can handle. If you experience "holes", e.g. when setting the elevation, that means the CM Editor is not responsive enough. I will make the parameters that determines the rate of clicking selectable from the GUI in a later update. Last but certainly not least there is a GUI for all the tools, so no more going to that evil shell, typing commands - kudos to @Dawntaker for supporting me with GUI making!

One more thing. I won't repeat the mistake and not have a manual or tutorial video ready at release: Since my previous tutorial video is now totally deprecated I am doing a new one. This time, instead of just telling you what the different features do, I'll do a step-by-step tutorial in four parts where I will create an actual map. This way I will certainly miss a few features but you should get a better feeling of how to actually use the tools in reality. Part 1 is finished already and it covers "installing" (i.e. downloading the .exe files) CMAutoEditor, installing other necessary tools, selecting a location for the map in map.army, finding and downloading elevation data, downloading OpenStreetMap data and getting historical aerial imagery and working with it. So, basically the boring stuff, some of you might say, but possibly the most important part. 😉
In the future I'd like to adapt CMAutoEditor to one of the WW2 titles, I think CMFB or CMRT would be best. Obviously present-day OpenStreetMap won't do for that. So, instead I'd like to make another tutorial showing how to use and old map or aerial image to make "OpenStreetMap data" from scratch and feed it into the CM scenario editor. Drawing polygons and tagging them is still - in my view - much more comfortable than clicking in the editor with some semi transparent overlay. So, if you have good material, go ahead and make a suggestion here. 😉
I hope you enjoy this new version of CMAutoEditor and the tutorial video(s)!

thanks QP 😎 That 3D effect is intended actually. It´s part Reshade DOF (depth of field) filter, further enhanced with GIMP´s soft focus filter put on top. Other things is white point and contrast improvements, but nothing else. 😎
Yes, I tell you. lol 😅 Original map setting is clear hot summer (august) 1944. Didn´t change it. Luckys´ mods is activated in my CMRT by default and after opening the maps first time, I didn´t see a reason to change anything. Though I added some foot paths to simulate vehicle tracks in the greenery. That was just for the snapshots and aren´t part of the original map. Yeah... LuckyS added lots of nice optional stuff in there (or variations) and swapping some to something you need or want is fairly easy. I just normally swap some ground textures to some I tweaked myself. Like i.e making foot path texture look way darker in wet weather (ground) and so on. 🍻

Lots of intense action! Great! 😎

Lots of intense action! Great! 😎

Not combat actually, but pics from (near) the frontline. Map is from latest Zverovboy1´s Baltic map/battle pack here: https://community.battlefront.com/topic/142405-baltic-mini-map-pack/ Forces is not from actual battle. Bits of spiced up with Reshade and some GIMP filters. German SS Engineers checking soft ground in front of an armored column.






 

thanks QP 😎 That 3D effect is intended actually. It´s part Reshade DOF (depth of field) filter, further enhanced with GIMP´s soft focus filter put on top. Other things is white point and contrast improvements, but nothing else. 😎
Yes, I tell you. lol 😅 Original map setting is clear hot summer (august) 1944. Didn´t change it. Luckys´ mods is activated in my CMRT by default and after opening the maps first time, I didn´t see a reason to change anything. Though I added some foot paths to simulate vehicle tracks in the greenery. That was just for the snapshots and aren´t part of the original map. Yeah... LuckyS added lots of nice optional stuff in there (or variations) and swapping some to something you need or want is fairly easy. I just normally swap some ground textures to some I tweaked myself. Like i.e making foot path texture look way darker in wet weather (ground) and so on. 🍻

Lots of intense action! Great! 😎

I have this evening posted my 82nd Airborne in Normandy campaign, "Mission Boston - Objective La Fiere" at the scenario depot.
This is my final contribution to CMBN. With that I am retiring from all things CM and moving on to other interests. I will check in here once in a while for the next few months to see what's new.

Gorillas in the Mist.