Loaf

One of the biggest differences between CM1 AI and CM2 AI is the way armour is handled... In CM1 it was common to end a battle against the AI and discover armour assets that it had kept tucked away in dead ground for the entire battle, and in combat armour was generally employed in a tentative fashion. The first time I saw an AI armour "rush" in CMBN my jaw hit the floor! I too have had the AI chop me up by this type of aggressive action - at first just because I never considered it a possibility. It seems to me that this type of tactic has a greater chance of success in CMBN than it did in the CM1 games... Maybe it's the lack of Borg spotting?

What might we see in a Market Garden module that would make it a compelling purchase after the release of the Commonwealth module? I don't know enough about what vehicles/units were at Market Garden that we won't have after Commonwealth...

Took a look at Keegan's "Six Armies in Normandy..." In some places on Juno the tanks were on time, in other places they were late. Overall it sounds like the tanks were pretty on-time considering the conditions, and played a major role in shooting the infantry ashore. It seems to me that the impression that the tanks on Juno were late arises from a couple of incidents that involved small numbers of troops and relatively short delays, but were very nasty for the men involved. B company of the QORs had a bad time - they landed in the wrong place with no armour right in front of a gun emplacement with two 50mm guns and seven MGs, and took 65 casualties before a 3-man team managed to get grenades through the gun slits... The whole action took only 15 minutes. Keegan does not mention when the tanks arrived. Keegan also states that a company of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles took heavy casualties in the surf and during an unsupported charge up the beach into heavy fire - in that case the tanks were a mere six minutes late. Meanwhile, when the assault company of the Regina Rifle Regiment got ashore they found that their supporting armour had already landed. So it sounds like in scenario terms no armour should be more than 10-15 minutes late, if that. I think the lesson here is that if you were an infantryman in the first assault wave, it was REALLY important that the tanks arrive exactly on time. 6 minutes could mean the difference between very heavy casualties or minimal ones... Of course, given the weight of men and armour poised to land behind the first wave, these incidents would have had little bearing on the overall battle - the initial assault wave was a small fraction of the troops on hand. But it mattered a lot to the units concerned.

My recollection is that the very first assault wave on Juno had no armour on landing because the DDs couldn't swim ashore through the rough seas. Of course piles of armour was landed shortly after, but in those first critical minutes the assault troops were fighting on their own against largely intact German weapon positions... That is what people are referring to when they state that there was no tank support at Juno, I believe. The Queen's Own Rifles at Nan beach in particular took a lot of casualties as a result of having to fight unsupported, as I recall...

Reminds me of this great photo of Canada's former Prime Minister...

Funny... I knew the Mk III was British, but it seems that whenever I see a Normandy photo with Mk III helmets the soldiers are always Canadian. I had formed the impression that either the Canadians were the only ones wearing it in Normandy, or had a large percentage of the helmets in service. I just had a look at the Wiki for the Mk III, which states that both British and Canadian troops wore the helmet in Normandy - but then all of the photos show Canadian troops. Weird...

I was wondering... For game purposes, what differences can we expect to see between British and Canadian troops? Not counting insignia and (probably) American accents! Does anybody here know if there were any notable differences between the organization and weapons used by the Brits in Normandy vs. the Canadians? What am I saying... Of COURSE somebody here knows. Several somebodies, I`m guessing... The only significant visual difference I can think of would be the "turtle" helmets that seem to have been exclusive to the Canadians in Normandy - at least that`s my impression.

Does anybody know why the military likes to use open trucks with a fabric cover rather than a conventional box for the cargo area?

Good point... But it is hard to make yourself "un-know" stuff! I have tried... Often when I replay a scenario I deliberately set up for a generic assault at the outset, trying to ignore the things I learned about the enemy the first time I played. I often find myself cheating (on myself) however!

Interesting... I like YankeeDog's ideas of somehow limiting the scope of actions an out-of-command unit can be ordered to do. It occurs to me that I never really thought about this issue in CMSF, because I usually played as Blue and thus units were virtually always in C&C. I was thinking about the limitations of the TacAI, and the inability to simulate realistic orders that have conditions attached. This issue also arises when creating a scenario and making an AI plan... It seems that a conditional order such as YankeeDog described above would usually have to do with what happens when an enemy is sighted or a unit comes under fire. The game already contains orders that allow the player to (in a limited way) determine what a unit does upon contact. Examples: "Advance to Contact," "Advance to Contact" followed by a "Hide" command, the old CM1 "Hunt" command for armoured vehicles. What if contact reaction could be linked to a waypoint? Let's call one such type of hypothetical waypoint a "Fallback" waypoint for argument's sake... Take YankeeDog's example of a real-life order in such a game environment: You would set a waypoint on the first hedgerow, followed by one on the second hedgerow. The second hedgerow waypoint has an associated "Action on Contact" waypoint located on the first hedgerow - the "fallback" waypoint. If the unit comes under fire or sights an enemy during the advance across the field, it will fall back to the first hedgerow. I am imagining a scenario where any waypoint could have an associated "Action on Contact" or "Fallback" waypoint with an associated movement type. The AoC waypoint would not have to be for retrograde movement - enemy contact could trigger a Banzai assault order if the player was feeling reckless... Once you start musing about this you start imaging capabilities that would probably make Battlefront's hair stand up... What if the 1st squad coming under fire triggered a flanking assault by 2nd squad? Etc etc... Fun to think about though.

Not sure if this has been addressed elsewhere... I couldn't find a mention of it: I notice that if a unit is out of command, ie it has no visual, voice or radio links available to its next higher echelon, it will still respond to orders. For instance, a squad can be on the opposite side of the map from the platoon leader with no communication links showing, and still respond to an order (as long as its morale state allows it to, anyhow). I was wondering what the rationale for this is... Is the idea that the squad leader has taken the initiative? Obviously this allows for unrealistic outcomes (the squad leader moves to a location to support a unit he ought to be unaware of, for instance) but that would seem to be an unavoidable side-effect of the fact that the player will always have the "God's-eye" view and know the state of all units he commands. Or alternatively, is there an abstraction that a runner has been sent to the squad? I would tend to think not, given 1:1 representation and the elimination of command delays. I was musing about this issue... I was imagining a scenario where an out-of-command unit does nothing but follow TacAI behaviour until C&C is re-established by the player. Or maybe at the start of a battle a player could have the option to give general battle orders to units (to take a certain route, or head for a certain objective) as an alternative to having them do nothing when out of command. In that case a unit out of command would behave like an AI controlled unit on the offensive (or do nothing if the player chose to give no general orders at the start of the battle). A scenario like this would force players to pay a lot more attention to C&C. Would this notion be of any value? I must say the current game makes out-of-command units so brittle in combat that you are already penalized pretty heavily for losing C&C. Would taking it to the next step as I have proposed be feasible? Would it be fun, or annoying?

Well played, sir.

I would not be surprised if the desire for an all-white Free French formation was politically rather than racially motivated, and stemmed from De Gaulle's desire to present his Free French forces as the true liberators of France. De Gaulle's political campaigning ensured that the Free French 2nd Armored got to liberate Paris, after all... De Gaulle wanted to create a myth that Free French forces and partisans were instrumental in France's liberation - essentially, he wanted (and seems to have succeeded to a remarkable extent) to convince the French that they more or less liberated themselves from the Germans. This involved massively over-playing the numbers and significance of both partisan and FF formations. At the same time, French collaboration with the German occupiers was under-stated. I don't think it would have fit the De Gaulle spin to have a bunch of non-white colonial soldiers roll into Paris - he didn't want the French to think they were saved by their colonies. For obvious reasons, even white FF units were disproportionately made up of men from the colonies, and I don't think that fact got highlighted much by De Gaulle either. He wanted people to think that the FF forces were made up largely of people like him - men who refused to accept Vichy France and fled to Britain to carry on the fight. De Gaulle was thinking ahead to post-war France and his desired role as its leader. The US and Brit leadership saw De Gaulle as a pest, but he got a lot of what he wanted from them. Anyhow, my larger point is that Ike's interest in any Free French formation would be marginal and his goals would be A) appeasing De Gaulle; maximizing the propaganda value of French participation in the Normandy invasion; and C) maximizing the benefits of the limited manpower available from Free French forces. Probably in that order... So I very much doubt you could get to the bottom of the whole decision to ban black French colonials from Normandy without considering the behind-the-scenes political wrangling between De Gaulle and the Allied leadership. The decision could have been a result of straightforward US institutional racism, but I would be willing to bet there was more to it...

My grandfather served as a platoon leader in the Canadian army in Normandy... He was wounded by shrapnel from a German tank. When I was a boy I asked him what kind of tank it was, and he said "A Tiger - that's the only kind of German tank I ever saw." From a distance a Tiger I and a Mk IV would be easy to mistake for each other, and WWII soldiers hadn't spent decades studying photos of German tanks like most of us have!

Beach landing scenarios are a bit dull IMO... You are under fire right from the outset, which I tend to dislike in any scenario. You have no choice over how to move to contact. If played realistically a beach scenario would be more of a platoon-level than a company-level game, since there was very little large-scale coordinated effort involved in getting off the beaches from I have read - just small bands of soldiers using their own initiative to get out of the kill sack and move inland. I played some of the CM1 beach landing scenarios (including a HUGE one that had all of Juno beach, and included a sprinkling of British Commandos along with the Canadians) and I always found that the actual get-off-the-beach part was not as fun as I expected. And once you're off the beach, then you're playing standard CMBN scenarios anyhow... Many people over the years have come to the forums and asked for landing craft, DD tanks etc. so they can get the full beach experience. But until they disembark, the troops are cargo - what would the player do? Give orders to landing craft and swimming tanks that can't fight? Sounds underwhelming... Not worth the enormous programming time.