blow56

New computer and new install - I have installed CMSF but can't get it to launch (a test before I load all the modules and patches again) when I click on either the desktop icon or from within the installed program. Is this the DEP problem originally encountered? The fix is no longer available from tech support, so if this is the case, can someone please tell me what to do? Ta

Let me add my two cents to this. The casualties inflicted by cold steel were not, in the main, committed on fighting men - a trend common to history and born out by decades of archaeology. Most cold-steel killing was done on those who had already broken and run. In fact, most killing is done on a fleeing enemy, or an enemy advancing to contact across open ground - not on one standing to fight. Morale is the key here and you can see it manifest most clearly in cavalry combats, peculiarly enough. In 18th and 19th century cavalry combats, one side or the other frequently broke before contact - therein came the casualties. In the combats you mention during the Civil War (I presume you mean the US Civil War, though the analogy stands for the English one as well) one side broke under the threat of cold steel, or the perception of 'withering fire'. Picket's Charge at Gettysburg was not repelled at the breastworks, but in the decimating fire that preceded their long crossing to get to grips with the enemy - and, even then, the defenders' morale wavered the closer the enemy came to them.

Battle One WAS a challenge, Jon S, though not much of one. It was playable, which I suppose coloured my view of it. The rest were game-designed rather than battle-designed.

Maps good, if a little tight. Briefings are fine. Backgrounds are fine. The battles are the worst I have ever seen bar Number One, which was challenging and actually quite good, though more time would have been nice and a bigger map would have added to it. After that it descends into the laughable - a river with only one fordable area, at a mined bridge, under the eyes of the enemy on higher ground? No air, insufficient artillery and even that provided has so few round of WP that it is useless? An enemy dug in in numbers, with AT guns and artillery zeroed in on the sole crossing point? Of course you can win it in the end but the casualties are ludicrously high and the Btn CO would have to be a maniac to pursue it. This is NOT an exercise in trying to recreate some sort of historical warfare, it is an adolescent attempt to make a bad war movie. From Battle Two onward, the entire thing descends into farce. If I want this sort of experience I will watch Kelly's Heroes.

Doesn't work for me, despite rebooting, reloading or anything else. AMD Athlon 64x2 Dual Core 4600+ 2.41Ghz 2GB RAM Windows XP Nor can I reduce the size of the map since even that seems to take a long, long time. Any way you can throw out a pair of 2kmx2km versions for us PBIs stuck in the computer bocage? I know I can handle that size.

I can now answer my own queries - you can't do what I want to do. If you Import Campaign Units from anywhere other than the original Campaign Battle file you stuck them all in you pretty much discover - no units at all!

Having trouble getting my head round this - if you Make Campaign on a battle it has to be in the Campaign Text, usually as Battle One. How can you have a 'separate battle that never gets fought' and still is used to Make Campaign? If you Make Campaign with a battle surely it becomes the first battle you fight? And, if not, how do you avoid it? As for my original point - I am talking about Import Campaign Units. You can import them from any battle - so what happens if, in designing Battle Four of a Campaign, you Import Battle Three's units to be used for that (and subsequent) Battles rather than the original? Will the AI still calculate losses on it?

Here's a Campaign question for long-time designers in SF and Normandy. I have not yet tried it myself yet, but hope someone else will save me the tedious trouble of having to playtest such an event. If you have Battle One of a Campaign, those are the units which become Core units. What happens if you upload Battle Three as Core units? Which would be the original Battle One units plus, say, additional reinforcements you want to carry on the Campaign with? Will the AI pick up on losses as normal? Will it even show up? For instance, I am noticing that Core unit bunkers, foxholes, minefields etc don't seem to carry on from battle to battle and are best created anew for each Battle in a Campaign.

Broadsword56's idea has a lot of merit - but my idea was to get round the fact that 4x4km maps seriously damage your machine's health. By using a rolling map, incorporating part of a previous map terrain, you could have a campaign running all the way to Germany if you wanted, and still play it on a 'normal' machine. Obviously the Cut and Paste tool would be brilliant but I am still not sure everyone has quite grasped what I am trying to do. All that's needed is a bit of sense for the AI, which says that if you delete 90 per cent of a 4x4km map you can add 90 per cent new terrain on one end of it and design from there. Or rinse and repeat that procedure on a series of 1x1km maps to infinity and beyond. At the moment, it won't let you do that, apparently. If you use a portion of an old map and add new terrain it will, eventually, max out at what it reads as the 4km mark of a single map. B

Does not matter if you kill of all objectives, or increase the map in both directions, there is a cut-off point. I am trying to increase southwards in each case and have deleted about 900m of a 1600m map and am trying to get it back to 1600m on the bottom end. By Map 4, this is not happening and I can only assume the AI is calculating all my previous map additions and capping it at 4km as if it was one map.

I came up with the idea of doing a rolling campaign - basically, btn v btn, no supertroops or massed tanks, just a couple of opposing btns stuck in the bocage near St Lo. What I wanted was to take a 1kmx1km (approx) initial map for Battle One and then the last third of it or less as the start for a Battle Two map. I discovered an interesting fact - using one map as a template for another eventually results in a limiter for expansion. The last map of a four-battle sequence would not let me add more than 800m to the previous one. I can only presume it is reading it as ONE 4x4km map, even though nothing of the original maps are left once deleted. Any way round this?

Interestingly, I am just playtesting a campaign about 1/901 and associated Lehr elements counterattacking in the same period (Lehr In Action). It has about 7 battles so far and, if everything goes to plan, you get to assault back across the Taute-Vire Canal - before having to withdraw. Originally, the support Pz unit I had (130) had 12 Pz Vs (I had an account of these) but that proved far too strong, so I went back to Pz IVs. The fighting covers July 10-12, with the crucial part on the 11th. As you say - bocage and limited fields of advance means failure to achieve your objectives is punished. Interesting to get your take on it - I will happily playtest for you. Rob

Are mines in CMBN the same as CMSF? In other words - engineers don't remove them and frequently blow themselves up even marking them?

With the pacth I'm good ... What patch? Where?

Good map, no doubt meticulously researched but .... why are the Allies attacking in the wrong direction? Map should surely be the other way round if you want to claim it as an authentic Normandy landscape - the Normandy landings were made NORTH to SOUTH. A minor quibble, I know - but it really irritates me :-)

BenPark - if you want to randomise your initial setup, use Group 1, which is the default (you don't need to and can't actually assign A1 to it). Then paint all the areas you would like troops to be in under Setup. Kill any Orders. You can do the same for Groups 2 and onward, but will have to assign the numbers to the units (A2, A3 etc). Repeat, using different Setup locations for Plans 1 to however many you want. No matter how many areas you paint, the AI will allocate what troops it has logged under that Group to those Setup areas, at random. That means that no game played against a defensive AI will ever be the same twice (or at least seem so if you get enough Plan permutations!). If you then add in Orders, timed to move troops about from place to place, the chances of getting familiar with an AI defence is slight. I do all my games like this.

Sorry, I must be missing something here ... why don't you just kill that building on the map, then do a new one, facing the way you want? And if you use Modular Buildings, you will find they have all round windows anyway - so what is the point, other than aesthetic?

Hopefully, the next add-on to this will include the 1944 equivalent of CM:SF insurgents - the Resistance. Civilians with small arms etc etc would add a whole new dimension - and surely the template for them is there, in CM:SF?

I suppose it read 'balcony' as still being in a building - bit awkward trying to defend the town when Shermans are rolling unchecked down the street, machine-gunning infantry in houses and untouchable by unit AT weapons.

I have noticed that Panzerfaust teams are reluctant to fire from houses, even when faced with a sitting target. Is this a glitch or some sort of realism that has escaped me?

I don't quite get what you are trying to do. As far as I am aware a Core unit in the Campaign starts with, say, 100 men. In Battle One it takes enough casualties to reduce it, in Battle Two, to 80 men. In Battle Three, it is reduced again to 70 men. If you make Battle Three into Battle Two and remake the Campaign, all that happens is that the AI calculates the losses from Battle One on the NEW Battle Two. So adjusting manpower levels is fruitless. Once you do Make Campaign, the AI starts work on the units you created for Battle One and those are the ones you get all the way through, minus losses (and sometimes plus replacements). You can't, as far as I know, adjust anything in a Campaign once you have created the Core units. I have tried (attempting to change Green troops to Regular after three Battles to try and recreate their learning curve) and seen no result from it. They are Green at the start and Green at the end.

Why does it matter? The AI will use the on-map terrain objectives even if you re-paint them, or ignore them if you don't. If you are determined to delete the off-map ones then simply increase the map Width/Depth until you find them, delete them, then reduce the map again. The terrain that was on pre-cut should still be there, off-map. But the AI doesn't care about off-map.

Can't we take a clover/flower tile and include at least ONE dead cow :-)?

Unless you know of another version of it, the PDF manual that comes with the CMBN download doesn't let you cut and paste. That's the problem. But if you tell me the CMSF one is unchanged, then there must be another problem why my units don't seem to be picking up the changes, game to game, in a campaign. When I eventually get my disc copy of the game, I will be happy to find yet another PDF manual on it that I can cut and paste. Until then - and it is some time away, I suspect - I will just have to make do and try and figure things out.

Can anyone post a CMBN campaign script file? I noticed, looking at the sample on in the manual, that it resembled the CMSF one, so I used a CMSF template and it seemed to work. Except that I am not sure if it is picking up the reinforcement, rest or resupply mission to mission. Don't know why, since everything else works. But if anyone has a copy of the CMBN one, I'd be grateful - you can't cut and paste from the online manual and if I start to transcribe it, I will get it wrong, sure as eggs.