Grimly Fiendish

Excellent help, yes. I usually approach a battle with the intent to gain info, but at some point I learn the enemy's composition, or the imperative becomes "kill the Panther before it kills you," or it becomes a flag brawl. The next stage is either mopping up or desperate attacks, flag grabs, and "how much can I save.' It's hard to maintain a disciplined approach when opposing forces are equal by definition; thus my interest in some kind of structure. JasonC's drills are useful too. When are tanks supporting infantry, and when are infantry supporting tanks? I get 1 platoon armor attached to a company infy. But what was usual for armor supported by infy? In CM terms, about a company of men could probably ride on a company of tanks. Did they generally ride until they encountered woods, dismount, check the area, saddle up and move on? or did they stay on board until they had contact? (I know the Germans did this at Bastogne as part of their Christmas morning assault from the west, and I have wondered why Citadel Schwerpunkt wasn't set up the same way. Presumably that battle was about a screen thrown up to stop a probing armor company, but why was the company probing without infy? Lack of tree cover?)

OK. Supposing you have only Shermans for vehicles, say 3 or 5 or 7. In each case, would you put 2 in front and 1 or 3 or 5 some 200m behind? That is to say, was the weight always primarily in the rear? Or is the 2-tank point only for operational recon? This matters because contact between a recon force and an enemy force makes a good jumping-off point for a battle. Would there always only be 1 point for up to a company of tanks---would a company ever split up or lead with 2 points and have 8-11 tanks behind both, as infantry might on defense? I'm trying to get a sense of working priorities, because it is so easy to be tempted into trying to do too much with what you have. (Too bad CM doesn't bother to model dismounted recon, because it seems like it would be easy: just split a Greyhound into a vehicle and gunner and an HQ team, and make the vehicle unable to fire or move, or fire AND move, especially if the commander gets beyond earshot.)

This is an instructive point. The lesson I would take is that if you are concerned about tanks geting confused about their roles (and I fully sympathize) then this is a sign you need not more TANKS or HTs, but more INFANTRY. Let the tanks do their job and assign another platoon to squat on the flag. If this leaves you with insufficient tanks, then you may need to reconsider the battle situation as a whole.

That certainly conforms to my experience: you need to use what you have, and combine it, and to have useful equipment you need to have some idea what you're facing. In CMAK, you could waste a lot of time setting up QBs that fail or turn ridiculous, because players have not communicated, and the Allies have set up with armored recon (Greyhounds and and close support Shermans) while the Germans have invested in Panthers. Operationally, that would result in a pullback and a call for backup. That's why I wish for template TOEs, so players could more easily say, "OK, let's do a typical light armor vs light armor, or typical mech vs mech, or a typical heavy armor vs heavy armor." Now we will have CMC, but not for the southern or western fronts. Still, I was wondering about typical historical procedures, not CMAK ones, to translate to CMAK terms. For instance, say you had a standard recon platoon, and it was looking for something not too nasty: a couple of PzIIIs or IVs at most. You've got jeeps, infy, Greyhounds, and a few Shermans. Which goes out first? (After the infy I mean.) (BTW, there's a CMBB thread that answers my halftrack question very well.)

This is great stuff, although putting it to good use may be difficult thanks to CM's abstraction. When heading into an area where the enemy is know to be active (the typical CM situation), what might the variations to procedure have been, depending on force composition? In other words, in CM terms, armor vs armor, infy vs armor, armor vs, infy, infy vs infy. As someone commented, a lot depends on what you have, but what you are expecting must also play a role. It's hard to compose a small force (under 2000 pts) that can (1) move and spot effectively and safely (2) hold off or kill tanks and (3) occupy and hold a flag. Too bad CM doesn't include standard mixes of vehicles, like a armored recon platoon, in the menu. My opponents tend to favor Panthers, schrecks, and flamethrowers. Should I then probe with Greyhounds, available M3s, or Chaffees that can occasionally surprise and kill? (Forget leading with Shermans, that leads to teeth-gnashing and self-recrimination.) And if you lead with vehicles, how do you provide an infantry screen that can keep up in a 20-turn race to the flag? A related issue is armored infantry practices. In TacOps, APCs and rifle squads advance together across clear terrain very effectively. In CM, all you get is halftracks at the objective and infantry hugging the dirt, in the open, halfway between the jump-off and the flag. I have better luck using halftracks like armored schoolbuses. Is there a trick to this?

Midnight Warrior's got it exactly right.

I have to admit, I don't see why Grog's input needs to be written off so completely. Is he not a loyal customer? Is he not easily satisfied? perhaps TOO easily satisfied---no car designer will ever get rich off customers like him, unless they number in the millions. Which, as a matter of fact, they DO (if you stick to cars, that is---don't know about games). I don't think Grog was intended to be a fanatic about details. Grog would never go to a forum and bitch about his cupholder---he would simply suffer and make do. Am I wrong? I don't remember him modding his car. He adapted to it rather than the reverse. I wish we could all agree on what a "detail" is. I personally don't give a crap about polygons and textures and tiles or uniforms and mirrors and skins. I do want to be able to do a Somaliland scenario with Mark VIbs (which were on their way to Somaliland before the Italians arrived and might have made a difference, but are not available in East Africa at all), but---more than that, because that IS a detail---I want the reality of game programming limitations to stop intruding on my game experience. There is a lot of talk about gameyness---well, nothing is more gamey than when the game itself rears its ugly head and refuses to play along. The classic example, to me, is when I tell a tank to go tight around a house to avoid getting targeted (just as I see the AI do) and the tank gets inexplicably caught on a corner, spins around, and gets a new hole in its rear turret where no hole should be. (I can lose on my own, I don't need the game to do it for me!) The AI can tell how many pixels away from the house to plot, I cannot. I want to stop playing tank driver and battalion commander at the same time. I am tired of brutally stupid unit AIs that must only want to die with all their ammo intact, and of tediously plotted infantry orders that get thrown out on the next turn. I do not consider these frustrations to be details, though obviously they are relatively minor because I, like Grog, am still here driving my car into the ground. I HOPE they will be addressed in CM2. If they ARE addressed, BFC can do all the polygons and textures and "big ideas" they want, and I will pay double. Am I Grog? No doubt some will want to respond, "If you don't like CM, go play something else." Those people may want to read again more closely or just stop reading entirely. I generally trust BFC to do what it thinks is best because its track record so far is phenomenal, and I am aware of the many limitations and decisions (marketing, technological, artistic) faced by a game designer, but this forum is not for worshipping CM. It is for criticizing it---as fairly and objectively and as ruthlessly as possible. Grog must speak! [ February 12, 2005, 09:37 AM: Message edited by: Dave Stockhoff ]

That question has often occurred to me. And my answer I get is always: DO IT! I'm with Elmar on this. If you must, lie until your opponent distrusts you. Then, tell the truth. Misinformation is never so effective as then! (Of course, this doesn't extend to hard info like a description of a QuickBattle map. That would be unsportsmanlike.)

Tarkus, I think you guys are handling this question quite well! I think that simplicity can be realistic just as much as complexity can. In the battles in the game Legion, you give your orders and watch your formations crash into one another. No platoon view there---command control nonexistent! Gorgeous, elegant, highly instructive and addictive. For a while. No human opponent . . . Clutter can be hidden. i like the extension of the unavailable command feature to expanding SOPs. ESPECIALLY when you might be commanding untrained conscripts, not a professional fighting force. Crack troops should be able to "do a little more" than conscripts, not just "do it better." Not too much, or you have a "campaign" game. Some complexities get tedious in the heat of battle, some simplicities are frustrating in the heat of battle. I think fuzzy orders are an excellent idea to increase clarity at the beginning of a game, when your information is limited. BTW, Lark's pt 3 and 4 date from the 80s and 90s, respectively. Seems you've abandoned your CD collection since becoming addicted to CM!

It's the missing HQ that convinces me. I can see an occasional missing FO and certainly a missing Tiger (however much it hurts), but an army would run out of bullets before it let itself run out of people to fill the role of officer. Even if those casualties were shifted down the ranks, because after all the replacements would come up from below.

I count 19 helmets. Someone's cheating!

keeping in mind that the editor would need to be set up to "paint" a mix of these 20 levels of woods and mixed mud/snow . . . or else us poor saps will be doing them all by hand!

Tarkus: I was actually referring to your first sense of "steep entry," which is just getting past the first turn of the first game. Of course you are right about not winning at first, but you're not going to get past that if you don't get past turn 1. I like the density of CM too, but sometimes it's hard to get your friends to play. As for King Crimson, do you mean Part 1 or Part 2? Or perhaps (shudder) Part 3 or 4?

Harry Does your book go into the Christmas Day panzer attack toward Bastogne? (I know, wrong theatre, but it's a favorite of mine ) The usual sources (forgotten them) describe the successes of the TDs covering the German approach and mention Shermans moving to back them up, but don't seem to follow through on the performance of the Shermans. I'd like to know more. Back to CM: Wonder how CM factors training into the game, if at all. You get the specs on hardware when you buy, but nothing tells you "Trained to kill tanks"/"Not trained to kill tanks." At the same price, merely having that info might make you think twice about your purchase. (Imagine if your Volksturmers were labeled "Not trained to fight.") It's a revelation that Sherman crews weren't trained to kill tanks. After all, what else do we purchase them for, with our precious points? It would be good to know if we are buying something other than speed, big guns, and open-top paper armor when we buy an M10 vs a Sherman.

You certainly don't see this in CM. There's another post (in the Wish List?) in which the suggestion is made that crews should carry some secondary AT capability. Fine for gun crews, but CM certainly doesn't follow early-war "doctrine." And it shouldn't. What makes sense to a man sitting at a desk (or sitting at a computer game) does not necessarily make sense to a man just blown out of an M10. And now we see why CM doesn't arm TD crews. Reminds me of the Audie Murphy MoH incident, in which a TD (wonder what it was, it had an MG) got hit and burned, and AM climbed on top as the crew snuck away and hid in the woods. A far smarter and more useful deployment of commando skills. (Harry, you must live just across 410 from me. I'm in UP.) [ October 21, 2004, 05:27 PM: Message edited by: Dave Stockhoff ]

exactly! We all started out this way, probably. Sometimes I still do it when I want to check out a scenario but realize it's too big and I just don't have the time to go through that first order phase. The "entry" into the game just doesn't need to be that steep. And think of the number of potential players turned off on turn 1 of the demo . . .

Speaking generally, I think that "planning," not better command-control or worse realism, is a good way to look at this idea. We all know that plans get rejiggered on contact with the enemy. This doesn't mean, though, that plans aren't important. Rather, both the plan and the rejiggering are important. It's both educational and fun to be able to mutter to yourself, as you do your 1st turn orders, realistically clear but fuzzy orders such as the following (for this moment, I admit, I like to pretend I'm the company commander): "ok, platoon A, go right, through those woods, hold the church; platoon B, advance to contact in that jumble of houses we assume are occupied by the enemy; platoon C, hold back" compared with the other alternatives, which are, at the extreme: (1) "Who knows where the hell the enemy is. Everybody forward! We'll react when we get shot at." (grab entire force, hit M) (2) "Smith, take 4 men and go from these woods to that house to that patch of brush to that ravine . . . ." (repeat 18 times, once for each team) These last 2 approaches suck. Am I right? You need a balance, or you get a mess. Option 1 results from boredom and helplessness, and engenders further frustration, because you have no idea what you are doing or how you screwed up; you never had a plan to do a postmortem on. Option 2 is a tedious, unrealistic waste of time, because on turn 3 you either delete everybody's orders because they turn out to go in the wrong direction and can't be adjusted, or your teams are pinned and have lost all your orders. You didn't have a plan, you had a fantasy. Every battle (especially QBs) involves this shift from concept to reality, from top-down to bottom-up, from general to specific. Seems to me that both aspects should be made easy to carry out because neither is "bad." I have often wished I could just grab a platoon leader and say "Go there," knowing full well that "there" would change, and I can't imagine regretting this power later. It all depends on whether the balance is done right.

Yes, and since we already have control of the "friendliness" of map edges, why not control simple effects that lend some meaning to it? The game already has a means of observing when units cross the edge, and I believe the "green zone" for exiting can be turned off. A 10-meter or even variable (editable) "red zone" to signify random danger (better, yellow for "caution") would seem a no-brainer. Too bad we're not in charge here!

Hoolaman, i offer 2 simplifications. For the map flank, you wouldn't want to introduce gameyness. If free forces could be triggered, you'd have everyone finagling free reinforcements. Far simpler would be for units on map edges to randomly---and rarely---receive bad combat effects. A squad gets inexplicably pinned or suddenly breaks and runs, a tank loses its commander or gets a track hit. See this happen just once or twice and you will learn to not take map edges for granted. It wouldn't affect play---many times I have lost a vehicle without ever learning who got it, or not until much later. You'd hardly notice if you didn't know. For the borg spotting, what if the quality of information started lower and increased with the number and rank of units spotting it? Consider this confirmation of a sighting. A ?tank? that a forward squad could see at 100M would only harden with time, contact, additional squads spotting it, or the HQ spotting it. To some degree, this is already the system, certainly for enemy infantry. LOS would then be affected as well, as you already can't blue-target a ?tank?. that is, perhaps the forward could target it but the HQ could only area-target it until the next turn or 2. This would roughly simulate the delay in both IDing and reporting a sighting to HQ(s). especially if radio contact is gone. On another note, I'd like to see an AI victory judge that can step in (if turned on) to end a QB that has reached exhaustion. Surely few battles outside Stalingrad were fought until everyone on the map was exhausted and out of ammo. Although maybe this is what a cease-fire is for?

I think the sharp-rock terrain is a fine idea. It would be no different from the soft ground terrain and probably wouldn't need much changing code-wise. You would simply see a TRACK DAMAGE/IMMOBILIZED message instead of BOGGED. You'd think they would have put such terrain in North Africa, where there must be damned few wetlands.

Some comments: 1) Certain people like to use dismounted crews as scouts and annoyances. Imagine if these crews could actually do more than crawl and cower. However, when crews are still manning their guns they could protect themselves a bit better. So armed vs "unarmed" (no primary weapon or mount) is an important distinction. 2) Assaults are hard, and should be. But setting up an urban defense appears to require little thought. Determined squads ought to be able to advance briefly in the semi-open (what else is there in Italy and Africa?) against them if they are suppressed enough or low on ammo. I haven't seen this. 3) I've read of paratroopers at Bastogne "reaching for the nearest bazooka and opening up" when they saw Tigers appear. Even gunners. So that means that even at Bastogne (which, granted, was originally behind the lines but still was poorly and irregularly supplied) there were enough bazookas to be available to all kinds of soldiers. Seems to me there could be an editable field for such weapons, even if the default value for QBs were zero.

Somebody call Dan Rather! I hear he's an expert in military documentation. The high number of casualties officially inflicted by the 761st is perhaps explained by the references to "assisting" in operations by necessarily larger units and by the manner in which the battalion was attached to numerous divisions, both facts clearly cited in this thread. Seems reasonable. There was an antitank battalion at Bastogne that was deployed in support of various infantry elements. I'm sure its members would be incensed if their unit did not get credit for assisting in the siege as a whole and contributing to the total casualties inflicted on the Germans, especially as they helped stop cold an attempted breakthrough by a panzer battalion during the siege. Had they not done what they did (eliminating a third or more of the enemy armored force), perhaps other defensive positions on the perimeter---even those on the opposite side of the city---might have been compromised, and Bastogne might have fallen. It's always a group effort, and official estimates of casualties inflicted by individual units will always sum to more than the actual number. This inflation should never be taken as self-inflation, unless a unit claims to have done something entirely on its own.

My experience: ATI: No fog. NVidia: Fog. Open and shut.

I have always wanted SOPs, as in TacOps. However, this is not so much so I can control them, but so they are set realistically for the scenario. They should be set in the editor. Standard operating procedures would also allow an expression of a unit's historical character or discipline or ideology: German tanks would unbutton as much as possible and use radios intensively (moving independently); Volkssturmtroopers' SOP would be to duck on contact and stay down. Green American tanks would fail to kill disabled enemy tanks; veterans would not. Green infantry under mortar fire would hit the dirt; veterans would run through it---and I don't mean because they aren't afraid, they're not just tougher---I mean that experience has taught them how to survive bombardment, they consciously choose to run forward. Italians after '42 would desert (joke, but seriously). Bastogne defenders could be told to save ammo. Dennis is right about the theory behind CM command control, and I accept the basic combination of Goddishness and gruntishness. The problem is that, while I "am" the tank driver, I'M A LOUSY TANK DRIVER. By that I mean, not that I don't know what I'm doing or how to do it---that is true but theoretically I can learn (Not with the current interface . . .). The problem is I don't have the feedback I have when I drive a car or walk across a room. i don't know how close I can get to a patch of woods without getting caught in its pixels, because I didn't grow up in pixel-land! CM needs more competent drivers. Tanks might live long enough for civilians to learn to use them. [ October 06, 2004, 05:07 AM: Message edited by: Dave Stockhoff ]

Speaking of CMAK omissions and East Africa, I was reading up on the 1940 Somaliland campaign and saw that there were MarkVIB tanks due from India [crewed by Indians, that is, as far as I can tell], as well as some Scottish troops, but they didn't make it in time to defend Berbera. So the Italians got Somaliland and the MarkVIB got left out of CMAK until the North Africa campaigns. I'd use an alternative but there are none. http://www.battlefront.co.nz/Article.asp?ArticleID=116&hl=somaliland Note: This is a different Battlefront---they make miniatures. [ October 07, 2004, 05:11 PM: Message edited by: Dave Stockhoff ]