vulture

I have to agree with GreenAsJade to some extent. I've only used the Scenario Depot a few times (being a relatively recent and fairly infrequent CM player) but I found the previous system much more convenient in terms of finding a good scenario of the type I want to play. Today, for example, I want to look for an Allied Attack scenario (Medium size), which can be pretty well vs an Axis AI defender. That gives me 62 options, which I then have to look at one by one to find which can be played well vs Axis AI defender. With v1 of the Scenario Depot, it was much easier to find such a scenario quickly. It could be ameliorated to some extent by allowing an extra search field for 'playable vs Axis AI', and it being up to the designer to give fill in some kind of field for whether a scenario is suitable for that kind of play. My other problem is that I haven't been able to use the scenario depot at all from the computer I actually have Combat Mission installed on. It's Windows XP, pretty much straight out of the box, but clickingon those nice buttons such as 'download', 'submit review', or anything else with that style of button completely fails to do anything. Now although this is almost certainly the fault of my security settings in some way, it's also the only site on which I've noticed any problems at all.

On the flip side, capturing Moscow didn't do Napoleon much good, and the Russian army didn't mysteriously curl up and die at that point. WWII was a different proposition than the Napolenoic wars though. But I still find it hard to believe that taking Msocow (assuming that that's what would have happened) would have made a significant difference on its own.

Imagine a situation (not uncommon) where your big gun / AFV / whatever is blocked from a target by a smokescreen, but another unit of yours 500m away has LOS to a target behind the somescreen. Courtesy of borg spotting, it would be possible to direct 'blind' fire at the right location, even though the gunner might not be aware that there is anything behind the smoke, never mind what, or where it is. An infantry advance covered by smoke would be incredibly vulnerable to large caliber HE still, and you'd only need one sharpshooter hidden somewhere near the enemy positions to act as a spotter for this. It would effectively make smoke all but irrelevent. It seems to be one of those realism vs game balance scenarios. It is unrealistic not to allow blind firing, but allowing would break things far more seriously.

I'm designing a scenario (Russian attack) which is based on the old 'cross that river' type of thing. It's going to be fictional, but I want the default German defensive setup to be moderately historical in style. The map is going to be fairly large (3km square, maybe 4 km), with a few small villages / hamlets (two, three max), a fair amount of tree cover, and hilly terrain - i.e. short LOS for the majority of areas on the map. What did German defensive doctrine call for in this kind of situation? Defenders are going to be dug in - they'll have been holding this line for a while. I'm thinking that the 'obviously wrong' approach would be for the Axis troops to dig in near the bank and shoot across the river at advancing Russians. My best guess for a good German approach would be to set up the defenders in positions hidden (as much as possible) from the Russian side of the river, and able to fire on the crossings (bridges or fords) and on kill zones on the German side of the river. That way Russian units come into the firing line one at a time to be picked off, and they can't mount and decent suppressive fire on the defenders (aside from that 152 mm artillery barrage...) Would that be a 'realistic' approach for defending a river (in CMBB terms anyway, where a river crossing in inflatable boats in the dark can't be modelled so easily).