Myles Keogh

This is the second attempt to raise this subject on this board within the last week or so. (Frankly, I'm not sure what it's about. Something about a people badmouthing Battlefront on other boards or some other ridiculous gossipy nonsense that no one above age 13 and not female should care about?) Sock-puppets to build-up the thread's post count and posting on Christmas Day in an attempt to avoid instant closure as what happened with the previous attempt to get a "fight" started between Matrix and Battlefront. Pretty lame, Milhous.

Pure transparent trolling complete with sock-puppets. The OP is undoubtedly aware of Battlefront's thread on this very issue, but decided to start another thread on it. Obviously, he just wanted to start a "fight" and then "win" it by getting the last word in until it's closed or the people who "picked-up his gauntlet" stop responding. In other words, the SOP of the bored troll.

I knew eventually someone would bring up his mannequin. I stopped reading his posts when that bizarre factoid became forum fodder. With nearly 14,000 posts and a mannequin, it was clear that he was a bit "off." Anyway, if Mr. Mannequin has a love/hate affair with Battlefront and CMBN then that's his issue.

From my understanding, the MTO has never been good "box office" in the wargaming industry even going back to the cardboard days. Games set during the Desert War and/or Sicily/Italy have never sold anywhere near titles set in the ETO 1944-1945. Apparently Battlefront found this out when CMAK didn't sell anywhere near as well CMBO. (Sadly, CMBB also didn't come close to rivaling CMBO's sales figures. It appears that not even the titanic struggles of Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin could overcome the provincialism of American and British PC gamers who may take a chance on wargames set in Normandy, Market-Garden, and the Bulge, but not much else.) There are just not enough of us WWII gaming junkies to justify the expense of a Desert War module. Even the much desired CMx2 version of the East Front will be a tougher sale for Battlefront than CMBN and the planned for Bulge game. The realities of our "niche" hobby and running a profitable business are not always a happy marriage.

For just covering the battle for Arnhem, I agree with another poster that Middlebrook's book is terrific. Pen and Sword Publishing's "Battleground Europe" series has some terrific volumes on Market-Garden especially Tim Saunder's three volumes on the fighting on Hell's Highway: "Hell's Highway," "Nijmegen" and "The Island." These books are short, straight narratives of the events with lots of photos, but still excellently detailed in ways the more general studies like Ryan's masterful "A Bridge Too Far" are not.

For the Market-Garden module. I'm assuming we're probably not going to see the return of river crossings so as to recreate the legendary crossing of the Waal River by the 3/504th. So, we may get some Dutch themed terrain features and the Fallschirmjaegers will finally be making an appearance, but what else will make the cut? Flak weapons? They were featured heavily in ground combat by the Germans throughout Market-Garden so it would be nice to see them arrive in the CMBN world.

I agree with LukeFF. There are tons of pictures of combat soldiers wearing their division insignia in combat. (I believe a few pics of 3rd Infantry soldiers displaying blue-and-white emblem were posted in this forum a few days ago alongside photos of 101st Airborne troopers with their "Screaming Eagle" patches on full display. It's actually rare to see airborne units NOT showing their insignia.) I was looking at some of my WWII books the other day: 1st Infantry Division soldiers flashing the "Big Red One" on a landing craft heading into Omaha beach. Wounded members of 29th Infantry with their blue-and-gray yingyangs sheltering under a cliff on Omaha. A 2nd infantry soldier with his "Indianhead" taking cover with his squad in a snow filled ditch. Members of the "Bloody Bucket" after their fight in the Bastogne corridor. An exhaused lieutenant of the Golden Lions briefing some of the few men to break-out of encirclement that engulfed their division. Troopers sporting the "Rolling W" of the 89h Infantry ducking down in a DUKW crossing the Rhine. Yes, there are also numerous photos of troops not wearing them. They were a bit of pain to sew on. And orders sometimes required their removal to avoid tipping off the enemy to troop movements. Plus, many wartime photos were censored with visible division emblems being inked out. However, the claim American soldiers didn't wear their divisional emblems in combat simply doesn't wash with the photographic record. (I recently saw a German propaganda film from Normandy showing American POWs sporting patches of the 1st Infantry, 35th Infantry, 82nd Airborne, and 101st Airborne.) One of the best war movies ever made: William Wellman's 1949 film "Battleground" shows how much of a pain the divisional patch could be. A replacement soldier in the 101st Airborne's glider infantry regiment proudly sews on his "Screaming Eagle" patch only to have his platoon sergeant declare that they're going on a "secret maneuver and that all shoulder patches must be removed. Upon reaching their "secret" destination, they're greeted by German propaganda leaflets that state: "Welcome to Bastogne, 101st Airborne." The platoon sergeant shrugs and tells his men: "Well, sew back on your patches, men." How American soldiers came to sport division insignia is interesting. The idea initially came out of the American Civil War when in 1863 the Army of the Potomac introduced crude divisional insignia as a way to assist organization and reorganization in a war that saw large scale straggling on campaign and units being thrown to the four winds during combat. The Army of the Potomac's leadership wanted a simple system to quickly identify to which division soldiers belonged. Thus, each corps of the army was assigned a geometric shape and each of the three divisions of those corps was assigned a specific color for that shape: red, white, and blue respectively for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd divisions. Soldiers wore their emblems mostly on their caps. By pure happenstance, leadership noticed that the men started to take pride in these very simple emblems of unit identity. They discovered that division emblems were good for morale by boosting unit pride and cohesion. This is why American soldiers still wear their insignia in combat today! World War I saw the introduction of the much more elaborate divisional insignia that are in use today. Although the Big Red One still owes its color to the fact that all 1st divisions (each corps had a "1st Division") in the Union Army were identified by the color red.

I've played through the first three missions. First Mission: I ended up with a draw because I was just able to get troops onto the victory locations to deny them to the Germans. I got slowed down going through that orchard because I was firing at phantom snipers with multiple platoons. Wasted a lot of ammo and time. Second Mission: Scored a major victory by making the Germans surrender. The key was the fact that I moved so slowly in the first scenario that I didn't chew up the platoons that were available for this mission. Plus, my 95mm Churchill with 6 rounds of HE was present to help break the German defenses. (I had lost the other Churchill to an AT mine that immobilized it in the first scenario.) Third Mission: Scored a tactical victory with a German surrender with 24 turns remaining. I mishandled my limited AT assets and so German armor was able to inflict very heavy losses upon me. However, one of my sections was somehow able to destroy a Tiger with hand-grenades and with massive artillery support I was able to slaughter the German infantry. (However, I'm puzzled why all my platoons were back to full strength at scenario start. These were the same C Coy platoons that fought in the first mission. This would have been a tougher mission if my units were still depleted from their previous fight. Isn't that the point of a campaign: forcing the player to husband his forces so he can fight again another day?) Anyway, I'm really enjoying this campaign.

He's complaining that once units run out of ammo then they'll do nothing to fight each other since the game does not model hand-to-hand combat. (For those who don't have access to youtube: he has an American team and a German team both presumably with no ammo loadouts walking within 10 meters of each other in a featureless field and they're not fighting. He then wonders in his text about how could an award winning wargame not model fighting with bayonets, knives, rifle-butts, and fists.) Hand-to-hand combat, like tank riders, flame weapons, burning terrain all which were also modeled in CMx1, was sacrificed during CMBN's development as not being cost effective to being coded in. (More specifically it probably was coding the animations of the individual soldiers that made it cost prohibitive.) I'm sure Battlefront would have loved to model it in, but to do it properly would have taken an inordinate amount of time for something that didn't happen too often on WWII battlefields despite a billion war movies showing the opposite.

mk: Thanks for the answering my question. I was just curious if there was a division insignia mod for armored infantry units and it appears there currently isn't. As for your suggestion of a generic service patch for the armored divisions? That would be the way I'd go if I had any modding ability whatsoever.

I really love this mod especially in conjunction with Mord's "patch" portraits mod. I admit that before playing a historical or semi-historical campaign or mission that I make the changes to both the unit portrait and uniforms so that the American units will properly display their division insignia. (The ivy of 4th ID in Road to Montebourg, the gray Cross of Lorraine of the 79th ID in Courage and Fortitude, the Octofoil of the 9th in Die Hoffnung ect.) However, there doesn't appear to be any uniforms representing the armored infantry battalions of the armored divisions. Is there a uniform mod that has infantry uniforms with possibly a generic armored division patch (the tri-colored triangle without the unit number designation)?

I was a bit surprised tank riding didn't make the cut for CMBN because it was always a feature of CMx1. (However, so were flame weapons and terrain features catching on fire which also will purportedly not make an appearance in CMBN and its modules.) Battlefront's argument for not coding in tank riding in CMBN is their same argument for not coding in horses and motorcycles in CMx1: battle has been joined and thus there's no need to display transport capabilities that would not be important to actually fighting a battle. (Still, I remember many a CMx1 scenario where I would load up my infantry on tanks to rush them into the fight or off the map for victory points.)

I don't like the work of Stephen Ambrose, and it's certainly not because he wasn't "groggy enough." In fact, I love the work of Max Hastings, Rick Atkinson, and Anthony Beevor, and they certainly aim for the same reading audience as Ambrose did. However, there is good historical writing and there is bad historical writing. Hastings, Atkinson, and Beevor write the former, and the Ambrose the latter. Dr. Stephen Ambrose was a documented plagiarist who realized that there was money to be made by concocting romantic tales about America's WWII experiences and marketing them to baby-boomers nostalgic for their parents' dying generation. Thus, he cloaked himself in the mantle of the unofficial "spokesman" for the "greatest generation" and their struggles during the "Great Crusade." His WWII books consist of recycled (or stolen) secondary source material and his lazily conducted oral interviews with septegenarian and octogenarian veterans whose old soldiers' stories he accepted without any attempt to verify as to accuracy or veracity. He would then add a bunch of completely unsupportable and asinine assertions as to the unsurpassed fighting prowess of the American combat soldier in comparison to all other WWII combatants including our British allies. Unsurprisingly, this fluff made American hearts swell with national pride and it sold like hotcakes which eventually caught the eye of Hollywood. Thus, did Stephen Ambrose become a very famous and wealthy man despite being a p*s-poor excuse for a historian.

I'd be very pleasantly surprised if we ever saw motorcycles, sidecars, and horses in ANY Combat Mission release. They were never included in CMx1 because Battlefront stated their relative uselessness on an actual battlefield wasn't worth the additional effort and cost of coding them into the engine. Motorcycle and cavalry units almost always dismounted before going into battle, and the few times in WWII where they didn't just doesn't justify the considerable amount of time it would take to create the code to stimulate such conveyances. (They've applied similar thinking for not coding in tank riders for CMBN.)

The "Battleground Europe" series by Pen & Sword Publishing has some excellent Normandy volumes featuring the British Army's battles around Caen. They're similar to Osprey's Campaign series- straight narratives about the subject battle with lot's of photographs in less than 200 pages. Their quality can also vary widely from volume to volume. Still, the volumes by Ian Daglish and Tim Saunders are pretty good. Tim Saunders' volume on "Hill 112" is best of the entire series. He also wrote a volume on "Operation Epsom" and for Market-Garden three excellent books about the American airborne divisions' and XXX Corps' fight for "Hells Highway," "Nijmegan," and "The Island."

I downloaded it from GaJ and I have same issue as patboy: the 30th Infantry's "uniform set 3" has the blue and gray ying-yang of the 29th. Still, this is a great mod and goes terrifically with Mord's "patch" portrait mod. I'm playing the Road to Montebourg and it's nice to see the 4th ID with its Ivy patches. So a big thanks to mjkerner for his work.

One of the worst things about that horrid book was the trashing of poor Herbert Sobel. The man was dead at the time that book was published and was unable to defend himself against the slanders perpetuated against him within it. I'm sure he probably had a entirely different take on things in comparison to Major Winters and the handful of NCO buddies of Winters' that Ambrose chose to interview. (Ambrose could have done some real research and tracked down Sobel's family for information as to any former 101st comrades who may have been willing to speak on his behalf. However, Ambrose and "real research" are two things that did not mix.) The irony is that Winters and the Currahee vets that Ambrose interviewed all admit Sobel whipped them into a very good company, but then out of the other side of their mouths say what a terrible combat commander he would have been. It's classic double speak and leads one to wonder where their animosities towards him truly lay. (Some have surmised that latent anti-semitism may have played a role.) Maybe Herbert Sobel was a lousy officer, but "Band of Brothers'" completely one-sided portrayal of him was decidedly unfair and should be taken with a large grain of salt.

My Dad and father-in-law were both combat veterans of Vietnam and both enjoyed war films. My father-in-law served as a "grunt" in the 8th Cavalry back in '65, but he loves war movies. I guess it depends on the individual.

"Pork Chop Hill" is indeed a truly great, but underrated war film. (The "unloved" Korean War strikes out again.) It was directed by Lewis Milestone who also directed the original 1930 version of "All Quiet on the Western Front" and 1945's "A Walk in the Sun" both of which were very realistic and terrific war films for their eras. Some older WWII films that did make an effort to be more than patriotic, popcorn fare are: "Battleground" (1949)- HBO's "Band of Brothers" aped entire scenes from it. "Twelve O'Clock High" (1949)- Gregory Peck stars in one of the best films on combat leadership ever made. "Attack" (1956)- WWII combat veterans Eddie Albert, Lee Marvin, and Jack Palance in an extremely gritty war film (albeit low budget because the U.S. Army refused to cooperate with it producers) "Hell is for Heroes" (1962)- Don Siegel and former U.S. Marine Steve McQueen at their best. "The Bridge at Remagen" (1969)- Very much shaped by the ongoing Vietnam War in its depiction of war weary U.S. soldiers.

I agree with the poster who stated that the one should concentrate on what the film got "right" because it would be a much easier (and extremely short) list to compile. When the first lines of the movie state: "...with Patton's 3rd Army to south and Montgomery's 8th Army to the north..." you know that you're in for an ahistorical fairy tale. And the rest of movie with Francisco Franco's Spanish Army playing both the Germans (in their M-47 Patton tanks) and the Americans (in their M-24 Chaffees) is a historical farce. That being said, I've always enjoyed it. As a 1960's action/adventure flick, it's not bad and Robert Shaw is pretty darn good as "Colonel Hessler."

I fought the first mission for a Major Victory. I didn't get under 10% friendly casualties for the Total Victory despite trying very hard to minimize losses: sending scouts out and lot's of fire supression before making any move. However, I still lost 15 killed/severely wounded and 7 lightly wounded. One thing I do love about CMBN over CMx1 is how actually seeing each individual casualty represented really strikes home how careful you've got to be with your pixelmen's lives. In CMx1, I often acted like a deranged Soviet commissar by ordering Larry, Curly, and Moe to take incredible risks with their lives. That has not been the case with CMBN. I still shake my head over some of my losses from the opening scenario: a single mortar round knocked out my entire heavy machine gun team except for one man, and later a building collapsed on the 1st platoon's HQ killing the lieutenant and the platoon sergeant (I'm still not sure what caused the building to collapse other than it was already badly damaged when the platoon HQ entered it. Another German mortar round, perhaps?) The first platoon also had a couple squads shot up at close quarters. One squad assaulted a building and ran into a semi-deployed MG-42 team positioned behind a hedgerow next to that house. Five men had entered the house and only one was able to flee back to the rest of the squad. Another 1st platoon squad split into assault and fire teams. I sent the assault element into a heavily wooded area to hunt down what I assumed were broken and fleeing Germans. Instead, they ran into a German platoon HQ that promptly shot three of the four men including the squad leader. I would have never remembered these sort of incidents with CMx1, but CMBN really does strike home how deadly a WWII battlefield could be.

"Last Defense." It's a remake of the first demo scenario released for CMBO which for many was their first experience with Combat Mission. (It was for me.) I always liked the original so I played it a few times yesterday as the Americans. I humbly admit that I was hammered the first couple of times. In the first game, an early artillery barrage knocked out all my mortars within the first few turns. And I'm slowly learning that small teams hiding behind hedgerows are not invisible even to tanks if that tank is on that side of the hedgerow.

I learned all this the hard way. I was playing the Bocage scenario as the Americans and ran into heavy resistance on the right flank. I immediately called in every artillery asset. I did point targets with the 60mm's, but decided to do a linear on a German trench with the 81mm's. Further, since i was taking a beating, I called in the 81mm's as "emergency." My spotter was up on the front line. So he had a good view of the area he was spotting. However, he was under fire. A few minutes later I learned the errors of calling in an emergency FFE while spotting under fire: almost an entire squad, the platoon HQ, and the spotter were wiped out by the 81mm fire mission that fell a hedgerow short! That was the end of my advance on that flank.

Alt-S is not working for me either. All other commands work except for Alt-T and Alt-S.

I'm having the same problem with Alt-T. It's not working. Everything else with the game appears to be working fine. And other menu commands appear to work. (I haven't checked out whether ALt-S works.) Alt-T not working is annoying because I wanted to remove the trees during the set-up phase of Battle in the Bocage to be able to properly position my units without having to duck under the trees to see where they were! Yet, the game wouldn't remove the trees no matter how many times I hit Alt-T. I too have a 64-bit Windows 7 w/ATI HD4850.