A.E.B

I'm a challenge/fun player, by which I mean it’s the battle that is the important part, winning or losing is secondary (though winning is better). So for me what is important is: That a game be internally consistent - .i.e. to follows a consistent pattern where you are able to predict and thereby control what happens in the game rather than relying on "dumb luck" or for things to go right. The game must be fun. Fun means that the challenge comes from the game play not from bugs, the UI, or bad/unexplainable design. The game must offer variety and balance. Hence you should be able to do things differently, and stand some chance regardless of side. I never bought CMSF but have now been given a free copy. So I thought I'd give it another chance. Sadly it fails on all three levels. While 1.05 is better than the abysmal original demo, it is still impossible to separate out bugs from bad design from correct but non-understandable design. I won't bore everyone with a reiteration of the issues, but at no point do I feel confident when giving orders that I can predict something as simple as movement. Fun: CMSF isn't my idea of fun. Going past the above, micro-management of a few units in an urban setting is worse than commanding a whole battalion in CMX1. You need to baby sit units given the bad pathing and almost absent AI. The UI certainly does detract. For god sake I play EvE Online - so my tolerance for bugs and bad UI is high - but CMSF is a turn off. Too much work for too little fun! Variety and balance: CMSF doesn't offer much variety. Too few settings, too few units. As for balance, any modern sim or wargame featuring the current US Military is obviously going to be about asymmetric warfare, and hence not balanced at an individual unit level. If CMSF had handled real asymmetric warfare properly it may well have been a great game. It doesn't and it isn't. Instead it is like playing CMBB with the reds only having 1941 conscripts and the blues 1944 German elite. The fact that people mention playing Red v Red or Blue v Blue merely highlights this. Note that this is only my subjective opinion and I am sure that plenty of people enjoy CMSF. Note that I am not comparing CMSF to CMX1: I am comparing it to other games I can buy and play now that are not necessarily wargames. Also feel free to tell me that "I just don't get it". Maybe I don't.

The thing I find funny is that we are already talking a fictional scenario, whether it is based in Syria or no. So how much fiction is too fictional? Try as I might I can't get excited in the Scenario as initally presented, nor can I interest many of those I played CMBB/AK against? This of course isn't an issue if BF.C has another target market in mind. Basically the whole thing is too limited - ignoring the potential flak regarding the politics/religious conetations of the setting. Basically the Red Forces are way too lacking. Given we are talking the war-fighting period of a Syrian invasion, all the firepower available to the US forces will be available to the Blues in CM:SF - by which I mean the Syrian TO&E will have been dramatically reduced by the non-liberal application of firepower within the first few days. So it seems inevitable that battles will devolve into - BLUE forces need to clear/capture/secure a village/town/rough terrain from RED forces that are light infantry equipped with small arms/RPGs/ATGMs and maybe mortars. All the expansions I have heard mentioned involve adding new BLUE forces - Marines, Brits, etc - but given the scenario you won't have any new RED forces. I am sure the Scenario designers will come up with some interesting variants, but CM:SF's problem is that it is like playing CMBB where BLUE is the Germans and RED is a very limited subset of Russian infantry. CM:SF to me seems to be a play once, wait for the next module expansion game. I really, really hope to be proven wrong, but I can't see much replay value given the limited tool kit in CM:SF. 1. Play campaign. 2. Play a couple of variant scenarios of hunt the RPG team in the village. 3. Play a RED vs RED battle. 4. Play a BLUE vs BLUE battle. 5. Congratulations, you have now exhusted the possiblitities of CM:SF. Please wait for the next game. Sadly I think that BF.C has ruined us by giving us games with such infinite possibilities and years of replay value in the past. I fear that CM:SF will seem short and small by comparison. Just my opinion.

But you do plan to launch the game by 2007 right? So you simply wind up using 2007 OOBs and tech in 2009. After all - a year or so after CM:SF is released many of the same things will have changed anyway.

I'd actually go for a "all the small wars start holding hands" scenario. Move the date to say 2009. Have the Coalition forces withdrawing from the Gulf due to problems elsewhere/job done/whatever. Just when peace looks possible across the Middle East a previously unheard of group stages uprising in a number of ME countries with the aim of creating a new Pan-Islamic or Pan-Arab state. This new force can be backed indirectly by foreign powers (ie Russia and China). In response small mobile units are rushed back to the region in a effort to stem the collapse of "friendly nations" and then roll back the new threat. Throw in a oil crisis or something for flavour. Then you can have a ME war without any existing or identifiable nations or groups taking part. It would also allow the Blue forces to be initially highly outnumbered and on the defensive (think Early Korean War), followed by a gradual rollback of the Reds. Also allows for allied forces on both sides. This may also avoid the perception (hard to shake) that CM:SF will be a turkey shoot (our boys beating on the insert non PC term for Syrians), or that it will become Iraqi occupation Mark II). Unless of course CM:SF is actually a military trainer disguised as a game. The important thing is any setting must be (a) interesting, ( have enough believability to suspend disbelief, and © appear to present a range of challenges. The issue I have with CM:SF as previous described in the perception that basically it will be solely USA assaults against infantry in built up areas or broken terrain, simply due to the disparity in forces.

LongLeftFlank I agree that SLAM was the first to bring a Time Motion approach to the study of combat and its effect on the individuals who take part in them. I totally disagree that SLAM was a positive contributor in this field. Sadly, a lot of SLAMs supposed life was a sham. It is now accepted that he never saw combat in the First World War. If anything he was a journalist in uniform. And his conclusions in MAF weren't just wrong; they were backed up with bogus data. If fact the few real interviews that SLAM really performed in the Pacific totally contradict MAF - in that men fired too often and too uncontrollably - rather than not firing at all. Fire discipline, not reluctance to fire, was the problem. But, on the basis of a deliberate lie, SLAM created both a career in the military and a career as an author. Men who had actually seen combat knew that SLAMs ideas were crap, but SLAMs status as "the authority" allowed him to stop and even destroy others who had a far better grasp of reality than SLAM did. The problem was that you had a deliberate lie being accepted as the truth, to the point that people who should have know better like John Keegan would accept SLAMs 25% rule without question. How much time and effort was spent debating and trying to fix a problem that didn't exist? SLAM was a wannabe warrior who never faced the enemy; ignoring his bogus actions in WWI, who produced a deliberately false work (that even contradicted the little real data he had) to claim that 75% of WWII American soldiers declined to fire at the enemy, who then used this fame to promote himself to the detriment of the US military, and who damaged a unknown number of other soldiers and academics who dared to question the great man, until no one was willing to risk taking him on, and whose deceit was final uncovered years after his death. IMO the negatives far outweigh any positives when SLAM is concerned.

S L A Marshall is a textbook case of arguing from authority. Basically there is no evidence that the interviews SLAM claimed to have conducted ever took place. But on the basis of these bogus interviews SLAM became "THE" authority on the matter and then used that authority as a method of deflecting criticism until his death in 1977. Therefore you cannot accept that any of the claims made in Men Against Fire have any real value, as without a factual underpinning to support its conclusions, MAF simply becomes one man's opinion, regardless of who that man may be. Bogus is bogus.

At your age Mike you need the game to be coded to remind you to unbutton your fly when you take a piss! A.E.B

Before he was Zebulon Pleasure Beast, can anyone remember who this guy was. I seem to remember a person who looked like Frodo and who StumStebber wanted to drill for core samples. "It is your arse that is in danger of being invaded by Belgium!" Oregen or something I think. A.E.B

d) being a BT series tank, when threatened by a superior foe (a opel truck), it instinctively turns its strongest armour to face the threat, or e) the tank was being driven by the AI Driver from T-72. A.E.B

But I seem to remember seeing burning crew bailing out of their Warrior from fear that the ammo would explode. Knocking down walls and crushing toyotas is one thing. Dealing with a pack of crunchies surrounding and showering your MICV with burning petroleum is another. A.E.B

Someone gave me Forgotten Soldier as a gift, the book is at best entertaining faction. Sajer knows just enough to make his books seem believable, but I kept picking up errors all over the place. The only really sucessfully use of tanks to kill entrenched infantry occurred during the first Gulf War when US tanks with dozer blades buried pinned Iraqis in their trenches. But, simply put, no sane tank crew is going to deliberately drive into an entrenched infantry position without close infantry support as it was a perfectly good way to get yourself killed. Many tanks cannot see objects within a few metres of them due to the location of vision devices and the angle. Infantry can stand beside a tank like a Panther and be invisible to the crew when buttoned. A.E.B

This still going? 1. Tanks have very limited visibility, especially close in, so running down infantry is far from easy. 2. Dug in infantry are unlikely to be killed by a tank overrun unless (a) the ground is soft, or ( the tank stops and rotates. My relative who crewed a tank in Nam remarked that VC bunkers kept firing as tanks and APCs drove over them. 3. A slow or stopped tank among infantry is terribly vulnerable. The crew have terrible vision close to the tank, so infantry can easily close-assault with explosives and AT weapons. Even molotovs can be a danger (as a British Warrior discovered in Basra). There are a couple of good photos in the book Blook Soaked Soil from the Cherkassy Pocket of KOed Russian armour in and around German Trenches. The tanks were stripped of their infantry support. As the Russian Tanks drove on to the trenches, they were destroyed with TNT and Teller Mines. A.E.B

I predict that they'll surprise us all. CMX2 will be a faithful recreation of the little-known Flem vs. Wallonia gay bar wars of 1973. CM:BG - Combat Missions: Bent in Ghent. A.E.B

I can once one question. I have footage from a Documentary on the fall of Berlin that showed Guns (76mms and those big mothers on tracks) being used by the Russians in street fighting. The best clip was a 76mm in action. It was being pushed down a street (so was on pavement) slowly with its trails spread but not spiked. It fired twice, and each time the gun moved. There were three crew behind the splinter shield. However, guys (whether other gun crew or infantry - they had slug rifles and SMGs) kept running up to the gun carrying ammo. What wasn't shown was where the ammo was coming from, but given the delay, probably 100 yards or so behind the gun. So my guess is a gun is deployed in its Form-up area, complete with ammo stock. The whole crew pushes the gun forward to a new location, probably carrying minimum ammo. Once the gun is relocated, part of the crew operates the gun while the rest ferry rounds forward from the original FO loc. The speed at which ammo could be delivered would depend on size, whether it was fixed case or bagged charge, and whether it required fusing. The other possibility is that other infantry could be roped in to carry the ammo forward as well. How you could represent this in CMX2 I don't know. Maybe an abstract "just-moved" gun should have no or very limited ammo, and then rounds are received over time. If the area between the gun and the ammo became unsave? A.E.B

Zalgiris 1410 There was a scenario called "To the Volga" in CMBB that was a 15,000 pointer. At the time CMBB hit the market, few PCs could really handle the processing required, meaning that after hitting the GO button you could read War and Peace before the turn finished processing. Several years down the tracks, most modern PCs can process a turn that size in a few minutes at most (my PC takes 20-30 seconds for a 5,000 pointer with a lot of combat). So, if I am hearing correctly, there will be no force limit in CMX2. If people want to play a multi-company monster, nothing is stopping them. What BFC will do however is tailor the game and its demands on CPUs so that the bog-standard PC can easily handle a company level battle with all the eye candy and extra processing for things like relative spotting. As the average PC gets better, bigger CMX2 battles become more practicable. That is what occurred with CMBO and CMBB, and BFC didn't plan for it to happen (have they never heard of stealing the credit????). Now, back to the import issues of PBEM and a campaig............ A.E.B