landser

Welcome back mate, it's encouraging to know you may be producing new content, or even only revising existing stuff. Your campaigns are excellent. Road to Montebourg is one of my favorites. On a different forum I wrote reviews for a number of campaigns I played. I thought you might like to read what I wrote about this one. The campaign opens with an infantry attack over a huge expanse of open ground. At the far side of the map a small German force with pillboxes awaits, hemmed in by mines and supported by artillery. When I first saw the map I thought 'no way'. No way I'm getting across this ground without massive casualties. But this mission is a showcase for suppression in Combat Mission. Combined with tactical use of smoke, machine gun and mortar fire I was able to do it with surprisingly light losses. Find, fix, destroy. I think it's the second mission that puts the player in command of a combined arms force for an attack on a town called Ecoqueneuville deep in bocage country. When I played it I used a beautiful three-pronged attack, sending engineers the long way 'round the left flank, blowing gaps in hedgerow after hedgerow to hit the final objective from the flank while my main body converged through town. It all went splendidly until the final hurdle. At the last objective, the German company commander went nuts with his MP 40, defiantly mowing down my troops despite the deluge of fire directed his way. Quite disheartening to have such a well-executed plan devolve in to chaos with the finish line in sight, especially when a single maniac wielding a machine pistol holds off a company of well-equipped troops.. But it also makes it memorable. I wish I remembered his name. Respect Herr Hauptmann, respect. Another memorable mission is called Turnbull's Stand. It pits the player's paratrooper platoon against nearly a battalion of German troops supported by armor. You make your stand in Neuville au Plain, barring the way to St Mere Eglise along the N13. At times it felt all would be lost, but my plucky paras won the day, and the Germans eventually turned tail. I could imagine my troopers rising from their holes, smoking Garands held high, whooping it up as the enemy fled. An amazing victory and one of the shining moments of my CM career. Paper Tiger mentioned in a post that the player is not meant to stop the Germans, just cause as many casualties as possible and get your men off the map. But I managed to send the enemy running. Great stuff and highly satisfying. I use this Turnbull's Stand memory often, as it really did feel great to make the Germans turn tail. Having read the OP, I'm glad I played the 'old version', as I suspect it is about to get harder. Looking forward to playing whatever you cook up.

I can only offer sympathy and that attempting to get any unit set up in buildings in Combat Mission is a matter of chance. Combat Mission is a game of abstracts in many cases, and it would be great if somehow we could abstract the unit as actually positioning itself to fire out the window they are next to. I doubt you're doing anything to foul it, probably just that the action square doesn't fit the room and window properly, or something. I reckon we've all experienced similar. And welcome to the boards mate.

This is why I've given this game a miss so far. It checks most of my boxes. It's turn based. Small unit. Tactical. But they've opted for RNG-based, instead of percentage or probability based, combat mechanics, haven't they? Not inherently bad, and keeps to the Advanced Squad Leader vibe it's dripping with. But also not really for me, or so it seems. Haven't closed the door, and I'm keeping tabs on it. Combat in Second Front seems more in line with a isometric RPG than a tactical simulator. I won't knock a game for what it isn't, but the upshot is I've taken a pass.

No, it's not, but not a statistical impossibility either. But then, Combat Mission has always been overly lethal in the combat results due to it's nature. It's really like a cage match in a sense.

Not a sister company. More like a distribution partnership I'd reckon. Same game.

Yeah SimHQ is lame these days. Thanks for the kind words and I'm happy to know someone reads those posts.

Still curious how you made the connection of landser to DBond. I have said this at SimHQ "I'm landser over at Battlefront' or similar. Do you read SimHQ? Or does my unique style and panache shine through?

Maybe you're talking about Delphi, which is where many new members had come from if I recall anything from 25 years ago. Frugals. Those were the days. Yeah I talked a lot about the campaigns, that was my jam. Flame wars all around but gotta keep the focus haha. Well good to see you again.

So I'm curious. What gave it away? Do I know you from there?

That dude is the worst. Yeah, it's me.

Welcome to the boards. The answer to the quoted question is quite personal, and you'll need to make that call. Sounds like you've done. For me though I skipped it. I'm jaded perhaps. No, I'm jaded certainly. FB just doesn't offer much new to justify the price for me. Snow, a few new units, maps, later-war armor. Too few campaigns. Maybe there are a lot of single scenarios, but I don't play those, campaigns (and occasional QB) only. I was originally looking forward to FB when it was in development, but over time I became less interested and ultimately gave it a pass. No regrets. But I do have Red Thunder to compliment Normandy, and you should have more than one Combat Mission title I think. Some day, Battlefront will make Combat Mission 2 (or 3 or 4 or 5) that will be a single base game with all new content plugging in and usable interchangeably and then I'd be more likely to keep adding to it. As it is, Shock Force 2 is my most recent purchase with no sign of changing. I wish I was new again so it was exciting

I'm fully capable of boneheaded moves, but I struggle to think of this stuff in relation to Combat Mission. Maybe it's not boneheaded, but it made me feel that way. In the CMRT campaign Blunting the Spear, I was playing the fourth mission, an attack on Cimene. After a duel with the assault guns at the far end of the map, losing a couple of Mark IVs, we attacked our main right-side objective, the Brickworks, with four infantry platoons, a platoon of Mark IVs and a host of halftracks supported by artillery. With plenty of time on the clock, I was in no hurry, and using all of my assets, including smoke and recon-by-fire, we took the complex with no losses. It had been held by a single sapper platoon, who are dangerous at close range with a number of SMGs and satchels. In and among the buildings at the site they could have done some damage. But the recon-by-fire made 'em mad enough to shoot back, and the battle dominoed from there. Before long they tried to pull back, but I had shifted my armor on to the flanks in anticipation of this and cut them down. The armor in the open ground on the left side of the map made progress after the assault gun duel until they came up against well-concealed anti-tank guns. One Mark IV was hit, the commander incapacitated, and the crew abandoned the tank. I halted my armor, unwilling to send more in front of the gun. Instead, artillery, mortar, machine gun, howitzer and tank fire lashed through the copse of woods. After ten minutes of this I had remounted the tank and attempted to reverse it to safety and the AT gun came to life and knocked it out. Dammit. The weight of fire dropping on, and lashing through, that stand of woods should have left nothing alive. When I finally thought it safe because there was no sign of life coming out of it, I remounted the crew and boom! Dead tank. Felt like a sucker. As if that AT crew was just sitting there waiting for it. They must have had good holes. I do AARs of all this stuff it seems and I found a shot depicting the scene, which I have not edited for clarity. Apologies. The crew in question can be seen center-left, with the crew icon showing them outside the tank icon, which remains because the tank is abandoned, not destroyed, with the remainder of the platoon halted a little further to the left. The crafty AT gun is the faded icon center-right just below the Cimene N marker. You can see a spotting round just hit to the left of this patch of woods. This was shortly before I ordered the crew to remount their tank. So yeah, maybe not boneheaded exactly, but I felt like I got suckered, and you need to keep every barrel in the line in that campaign to see it through to the end.

Yes, South Korea is about the size of Indiana.

Truth. I don't know if anyone here is in to sub or naval sims, but over at the subsim.com boards there's an AAR of a two-player match up in War in the Pacific. It has been going on forever and a day. An epic undertaking. My post above about three weeks is true, but that campaign was over in June of 1942. My Russian runs take longer of course because the victory conditions are harder to reach since as the Russian you'll spend the first year retreating, the second year consolidating and perhaps making modest gains, and the third year on your own Bagration. I typically finish those in 1943, and that takes considerably longer. And not just for those reasons, but because the Russian player simply has more to do, such as building new units and evacuating industry. The time and decisions involved in just transporting newly built units to the front line by rail is like a game in itself. I said before, or in the other thread, that any semi-serious wargamer should play these games, but now that we're discussing it I'll just say serious wargamer. There is much to do

Better than some, it must be said. The AI in WitE take some criticism from the community but I found it pretty good. It takes a few runs to see this, but the AI has variability in it. It doesn't follow a scripted pattern, allowing the player to work out the 'correct' moves like you're painting by numbers. In one run the Russian may make a stand on the Dnepr say, but the next time he fades away to fall back to another line of defense. Or in one run the AI seemed to prioritize Leningrad at Moscow's expense, but in others the commitment to the Cradle of the Revolution was less robust. What this means is the player must be able to think on the fly, and adjust to crisis and opportunity. No pattern to work out. And this is key to replayability, an opponent which is not predictable. In another example that impressed me.... it was spring of '42 and the mud was waning and I was looking to strike a blow in the Voronezh region to relieve pressure on my forces defending the lower Don in front of Rostov to the south. He's what I wrote in the AAR When that operation was complete, we had ripped open a breach of hundreds of miles in the Russian line. In many games I play I think that would have been irrepairable for the AI. But in this game the AI had papered over the rupture by the next turn. I was impressed. So yeah, I'd rate the replayability high due to the unpredictability and variability in the AI. The game constantly ask questions of the player and tests his ability to react and exploit to an ever-changing and incalculable AI.

I'm sure that is rhetorical, but I'll answer anyway, at least based on WitE. My first grand campaign (as Germans) took three weeks playing a few hours every day. This was one month after purchase. I spent a week playing a few of the primer scenarios several times over to get it down to where I was dangerous. And then three weeks to play one year of the grand campaign before victory. These Grigsby game have quite complex mechanics, as I'm sure would be assumed by most. The manuals are really good, but it takes a good deal of reading to learn how things work, especially logistics and supply. Anyone can just jump in and go, the game is essentially pushing counters around isn't it? But to play effectively there's some time required to learn the finer points, more than most games I reckon.

Until Combat Mission adds strategic or operational layers I think the 'island hopping' nature of the Pacific war objections fail. From a tactical viewpoint I think it would work fine.

No, but I play War in the East, and that's large in scope. See thread below

My pleasure and if you give it a go I hope you find it suits you. Quick correction -- in addition to corp and army group command, I left out the mid-manager army command. These three positions are manned in War in the East.

Dead weight, that dude Each commander has ratings -- Political, Morale, Initiative and Administrative. Also how well they handle certain formations and each has ratings for Mechanized, Infantry, Air and Naval. These ratings flow downstream, so the OKH headmaster is very important because his ratings have some affect on every German unit as he's sat on top of the pyramid. I assessed Kluge as superior where it matters for such a lofty position so Halder was sacked. Getting your best men in to positions of command is a game within the game here. Real-war division commanders have no command in the game, only corps and army group do. So all of those division commanders in real life are sat cooling their heels when you start the campaign. Cashiering commanders and replacing them with someone better is a key thing in War in the East. Men like Balck and Rendulic start with no command and I certainly want them leading important formations. But the player is limited by admin points in the moves he can make, with opportunity cost high. Further, the general's rank plays a part in which level formations he can lead, or more accurately, the cost in admin points for assigning him to a new command. I really enjoyed this facet of the game, assigning these commanders to the right units in the most important spots, to improve the effectiveness of the troops under them, and it's plainly evident the effect it has when you get it right. But yeah, Halder had to go.

The quoted bit doesn't reveal much about what convinced you. Is it the prospect of encirclements that did it? It's rather like an art form in this game, as the pocketed units need only a single hex opened to 'national supply' to avoid isolation penalties. It's one thing to form a kessel, it's another matter to do it securely. And as I talked about in the AAR, your own units conducting the encirclements are often vulnerable to finding themselves isolated the next turn. Quite interesting indeed. This happened to me in the wake of the capture of Kiev as we tried to trap the retreating Red Army against the Dnepr. Luckily I had Kleist's 1st Panzer resupplying after the Kiev battles and they were able to swing the tide of the see-saw pocket battles to the south of the city, clearing the way to the Don bend. Players will take different approaches to the game, and for me it became evident early in the grand campaign that my objectives in the first year shouldn't be geographical necessarily (aside from Leningrad) but instead to tie nooses around as many red formations as possible. It is said that in order for the German player to give himself a proper footing for kicking off the 1942 campaigning season he should aim to eliminate at least 4 million Russians in 1941. And to do that it requires encirclements. I really enjoyed this facet of War in the East. Envisioning, preparing, staging and executing these operations is good stuff.

To add a little more to my post earlier... Although I am clearly warning potential players about the massive micromanagement involved in War in the East -- and most Grigsby games it must be said -- there are a number of alternative primer scenarios that are far less involved. The 'Road to' options like Smolensk, Minsk, Kiev and Leningrad. These are short scenarios lasting just a few turns that serve as tutorial campaigns so you can quickly (relatively) run out some different plans to crack them. The grand campaign, even with the shorter 260-point option, is a massive beast compared to these bite-sized scenarios. So if you think the game would interest you, but are hesitant to dive in to conducting the entire war, there are a number of easily manageable scenarios to play. In my case I did Road to Minsk, then, using what I learned, stepped it up to Road to Smolensk. I played this one several times until I had a solid plan and scored a decisive victory which took several attempts as I learned the rules and finer points. What it did was give me multiple shots at the obvious double-envelopment in AGC's sector of the front. So that when I started the grand campaign I was able to get off to a good start. I resisted playing the others like Kiev and Leningrad so that these operations were novel to me and I would have to work it out on the fly with no practice in the GC. Of course we have War in the East 2 now, so I don't expect many will be keen to give the original a go. But it's well worth your time if you like these grand operational/strategy games, or if you have a keen interest in the war in Russia. At the sale price it's a good deal on a fantastic war game.

War in the East is an epic grand strategy game. I've done quite a few of the grand campaigns, for both sides and different point targets. Perhaps grand operational game is more accurate. It's a great what-if generator, allowing the player to pursue alternate-history paths. I only wish the player could opt to set the starting state instead of being limited to the historical start. I'd love to see what I could do if I were to mass AGC south of the marshes for example. It impresses me with how complex it is while at the same time hiding this complexity beneath the surface. Every shot fired in a battle phase is calculated. Yet it does this under-the-hood stuff nearly instantly. Yeah, it's old and we should expect it to run well on modern hardware, but it's still tight design that distills massively complex calculations down to such minimal presentation. The logistics and supply model is probably my favorite in any game of the sort. It's rather brilliant in my view. How it drives home the shoestring Barbarossa actually was, how essential railheads are to an army, how important headquarters units and their proximity are and, the effects of raputista, blizzards, partisans on supplying your front line units. You are even required to manage the rail conversion, hex by hex using far too few resources. Now, decide on which rail lines get the attention, and hope you didn't choose wrong! In one of my runs, the whole of Army Group South, and later Army Groups A and B, were dependent on a single rail line for supply. If partisans cut this at any spot along it's hundreds of miles the front line stops dead in its tracks. Do not even think about this game unless you embrace the micro. In the grand campaign, every turn you are considering hundreds of counters. I remember the reorganization I undertook when Army Group South splits upon reaching Rostov. One of the game's mechanics is command overload, where HQ units suffer penalties if they have too many subordinate units. When this split occurred I saw an opportunity to reorganize and hopefully fix this command deficiency since we gained a new Army Group. Here's what I wrote in my AAR about this process, which some will never even have the chance to do. But it highlights the micro demands the game places on a thorough player War in the East also shines in the operational sense, the massive encirclements you can pull off from concept to execution. Tying the noose around several enemy armies at once is heady stuff indeed. On the other hand, it's not without its weaknesses as I see it. And top among these for me is the fact that the German side is strictly tethered to history. Only units present in the war are available, and departures and arrivals occur on a strict timeline to reflect actual history. But the Russian player has no such constraints, he can build new units, armies, air fleets and, well, everything. The German player can build nothing, not even a lousy HQ and this disparity in the rules is the biggest drawback in this game for me. Both sides should play by the same rules, even if the underlying resources and potential varies. That's a long post but just skims the surface of what is one of the grandest war games of all. Every semi-serious wargamer should play it, but steer clear if you don't embrace micromanagement on a colossal scale. The AAR can be seen here https://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/4454240/1

My box has a Ryzen 5 and no issues with Combat Mission.

For me the ideal showcase for suppression in the series is the first mission in Road to Montebourg for CMBN. When I first opened the scenario I thought no way. No way am I getting across this open ground with nothing but infantry and a bad attitude. But of course suppression is a thing in Combat Mission, and I was able to finish the mission with surprisingly light casualties. This is the map. Wide open, and enemy dug-in on the far side, hemmed in by mines, and supported by pillboxes and artillery. It's a killing zone of the first order. You have no heavy weapons, vehicles or armor. For me, crew-served machine guns are rather ineffective in this game for whatever reason. They rarely contribute the sort of kill numbers I'd expect. So instead of using them as a means to destroy the enemy, I see these weapons as suppression tools. Find the enemy and fix him with machine gun area fire. Just keep pouring bursts in to the position. You're not going to kill anything, usually, with an occasional exception. But you can keep their faces in the dirt. For the mission above, it was a combination of this area fire from my machine guns, combined with liberal use of smoke and artillery. It takes a long time to move the troops across this much open ground, and so the suppression effort has to be kept up throughout so that you can maneuver the troops forward and avoid having them in turn become pinned down. It's a matter of fire superiority I reckon, and the AI doesn't use area fire much if at all, so the player has this advantage as long as the ammo stocks can support sustained suppression. My example may not help the OP much, but I'd recommend this scenario for anyone who wants to see a perfect example of how suppression can work in Combat Mission, and how to accomplish it in a scenario which is designed to make it essential to success.