TheVulture

Ricochet67 : it might be interesting to look at putting a sniper right next to a squad. The squad spots better with 9 pairs of eyes, and (in theory) conveys a '?' spot to the sniper which then has a greater chance of spotting. So putting the sniper next to an infantry squad might improve its spotting. Might be worth testing how much difference it can actually make.

You should patch anyway Some of the original artwork couldn't fit on the CD and had to included in patch 1.01, and there are bugs fixes and improvements in the patches anyway. Plus, it lets you play the scenarios created with later versions of the game. There's no downside to patching.

I'd be surprised if that was precisely the problem. I got the original v1.0 on the disk (surprise) and was able to play the scenarios that came with it. I patched to v1.03 and was still able to play the original scenarios (whose time stamp was unchanged, so they hadn't been updated). A fairly reliable problem issue is trying to play e.g. v1.03 scenarios with an earlier version of the .exe. nbracco - have you patched the game to version 1.03?

The CMx1 games (such as CMAK) don't have campaigns. They do have operations, which are several subsequent battles played between the same forces (plus reinforcements) over the same map, as the front line moves back and fore depending on how well you are doing. Can't remember how many missions come with the game itself, something like 30-40 IIRC. There were hundreds more created at the scenario depot, but I don't know how many of those have been transferred to the depository now. Broadly yes, although less resolved. It is the same 'level' of simulation in that it is meant to deal with the same level of engagement as CMSF, smallest units are squads and individual vehicles, largest organisations are battalion level. Squads are represented by 1-3 men, and take up a single point effectively (and consqeuently infantry behaviour doesn't have the same flexibility as CMSF). The entire squad is in forest, and after moving 1m, the entire squad is then in the open (I gather there were some programming fudge factors to allow more realistic behaviour though). There are some more commands available (seek hull down, shoot and scoot, hunt (which behaves differently from CMSF hunt - the new hunt is the same as the CMAK move to contact). There are the much-loved movable waypoints (you can move already plotted waypoints around, but then, you need to be able to because of the command delay system). There is CMSF functionality missing. No vehicle repair - that is out of game scope as it is for CMSF. In operations damaged vehicles can be repaired and returned to action in later battles though. Vehicle damage is more coarse - vehicles are basically fine, gun damaged (unable to fire main weapon), immobilised or destroyed. Acquiring weapons off fallen troops is modelled to an extent, although IIRC it is mostly invisible, and is out of your control. A squad whose LMG guy is hit may magically (and instantly) transfer the MLG to another guy who has picked it up. Or not. No medals or promotions. Operations carry individual units over to the next battle (on the same map), and are meant to simulate an ongoing battle over a period of hours or a day or so with pauses for resupply, reorganistion etc. Yup. There are plenty of scenarios set in Italy, and the full 1943-45 Italian TO&E is included (barring the usual tiny exceptions). CMx1 games, as a rule, were much less 'one side' focussed than CMSF. Base CMSF is (IMHO) written from a US army viewpoint, while not preventing you playing Syria. CMAK includes the US, UK, Canadian, German, Italian (and others I think) forces and the scenarios and operations cover a whole range of styles without sticking to one 'viewpoint'. Possibly it is just the lack of a campaign (and the presence of blue-oriented campaigns in CMSF) that makes this difference. Basically, think a less detailed CMSF, with some changed features to accomodate the difference between 'squads' vs 1:1 representation, and operations instead of campaigns. And with a greater variety of vehicles and other units. I loved CMBB (and CMAK) at the time, but have found it painful to go back and play them having become used to the detail in CMSF. But I know others who have tried both and still prefer CMx1 games for various reasons.

It's worth noting that, within reason, changes in frame rate have a greater psychological impact than absolute frame rates. Dropping from 30 to 15 fps is a pretty noticeable lag spike. Playing at a completely consistent 10 fps on the other hand is quite serviceable and often won't be problematic. It is also possible to write code that can work one one or multiple processors. Not necessarily easy (and can be a veritable sod to debug)

A British section storming a heavily defended room:

Also bear in mind that this game (marine module, anyway) - unlike Iraq or real-world Syria - features the t-90 which is a pretty even match for the Abrams head-to-head

Conversely, the Brits have access to the LASM (light anti-structure missile) which can be picked up from many vehicles, although I can't say very well how it stacks up against infantry in buildings compared to javelins.

There are 8 scenarios named "UK H2H <something>" which are specifically designed for head-to-head play, and no doubt a few of the others will work fairly well too. Quick battles are unchanged, beyond there now being 226 maps as standard

It took me a while to remember the new AI bug out behaviour. I lost any number of guys to it. Find enemy in building. Roll up some 30mm HE chucker and plaster the building for a minute or two. Run a squad in to deal with the suppressed and half-dead enemy, and find them standing in the next building along happily shooting the hell out of your guys as they charge in. Ouchies. I've gradually learned to plan my moves knowing that this is what will happen now though. Getting LoF to the back of the building is nice if you can. But it makes multi-building buildings absolute deathtraps. The enemy move off to a building segment deeper in, and are absolutely impervious to anything outside. Sometimes you don't have much choice (aside from leaving them there and coming back later from all sides...).

I've been toying with ideas for some modern 'War of 1812' scenarios, with Yanks, Brits and the Syrians cast in the role of native American forces. Might have a crack at a battle of Queenston Heights scenario / mini-campaign. Back on the point of the thread, I'm not a tester and so haven't seen anything of the Brit module yet, but I would note how different even the pure infantry squads of the marines and US army play, and that's just 'minor' changes in numbers and organisation. Same basic weaponry (SLAW aside) but it is enough that they play very differently. The 'hidden' changes of different rifle types, numbers of LMGs / MMGs, grenade launcher, organic AT assets, grenade loadout might not look like game changers, but they can have a dramatic effect on gameplay once you notice that squads are more or less effective in different situations, and you adapt how you use them to optimise their behaviour. It has a knock-on effect to how you organise your whole battle plan.

It is pretty definitely the case that firing units are more easily spotted than non-firing ones (as everyone knows in game MOUT situations, you don't spot enemy units in buildings at all until they decide to shoot at you unless you are in the same room). So firing generates extra chance of being spotted, but there is no extra benefit for spotting the muzzle flash graphics. It would be nice if individual dust clouds were indepedantly spottable, but a) it might be very hard to retro-fit that to existing code (depending on how everything is implemented) and it is potentially an awful lot more LoS calculations. You can't make the dust plume a single object, since it can be very large and only parts of it may be spottable. So you have to break it down in to 'sub clouds' - and each unit can conceivably have quite a lot of clouds associated with it (but at least that is a linear rather than a quadratic problem, since you don't have to worry about calculating LoS between different clouds). But is also breaks the existing enhanced LoS system. Currently LoS is pre-calculated for each action spot and height setting (of the 5, 7 or whatever it is standard heights). But clouds aren't constrained to those heights, and it is precisely the clouds at heights above any vehicle or unit (aside form aircraft) that are interesting. Which means either a great deal of time-intensive on the fly LoS calculation, or potentially massive pre-calculated tables and dust clouds only at certain 'standard' heights (cue the complaints about how LoS calculations for dust clouds don't exactly match up with the geometry visible to the players).

Targetting smoke commands is something BFC had said they planned to introduce. I vaguely remember Steve saying it would be in the next patch.

The problem is that it only helps sales once. Sure, they could make CM:SF so that you can mod new vehicles, weapons etc. in to it, change TO&E And it might improve sales, although I'd be very surprised if it gave them even an extra 50% sales, to be honest. And as cabal23 mentions, before too long you'd have every modern army in the world modded in to it - at which point, you really don't have much to sell by way of modules, or any other way of generating more revenue. Which means that over a 3 year period, you have considerably less revenue from the game. They are trading off extra up front sales vs repeat sales of modules to a smaller install base. I assume that this is because they've looked at their market data and research, and figured which way to go. Steve has said before that the moddable version, according to their figures, is great way to get people saying "CM:SF was a great game. Too bad the company folded...".

It's been reported on before here a few times. IIRC Steve said he'd look in to it and hopefully get it sorted for the next patch.

Looking at 75 separate 4 km tank drives (which is what he did, 25 per run) is much more representative though. 19 immobilisations in 300 km - one every 15.8 +/- 3.6 km. That's enough stats to be pretty reliable.

Don't know how much of this is due to different AI plans / setups, but I didn't have too much trouble with this mission. Or maybe my definition of "not too much trouble" is more casualty-tolerant than yours, 'cos I certainly took losses in the house-to-house fighting in the town. 3 casualties is pretty light - I'd wager you'll take a fair few more than that before you're out of the town, and yet more covering the open ground to the east. Only lost one AAV though, to an AT team hiding somewhere, and the enemy arty never bothered me. Possibly because my mission 1 sniper team holed up in the mosque, and seemed to draw the AI arty, which trashed the area, caused a few causalties to the sniper team (all sniper teams have taken a beating in scenarios throughout the campaign under my gentle leadership), but didn't hurt any of the main marine platoon or vehicles. But you will take causalties in MOUT, since you can never spot the enemy before they open fire on you. It's split-squad recon by death with rapid and lethal response on the Syrian defenders. And of course, the AI changes mean they bug out of the buildings under fire fairly quickly, and finder a better place to hide, so try to cover their escape routes too. It is slow, patient work.

I did notice in my tests that a fair number occured almost immediately as the tanks started moving. From memory, 3 or 4 tanks bogged wiothin the first tile, out of the 60 or so total boggings observed. Since the map was 200 tiles long, you'd expect 0.3 tanks to bog in the first tile - 10 times higher is pretty significant. Recollection isn't great data though, so might be worth testing. But it raises the possibility that tanks have a higher probability of bogging when accelerating, or just starting a new movement order from a waypoint (or, indeed, when turning). Since precious few tank movements in game involve single 4 km fast moves along a straight road, the bog rates for tanks doing stop-start moves, multiple waypoints, turning etc. may be considerably higher. Burn the heretic!

Yup - 2 SMAW with standard ammo loadout at the start. But if my memory is correct the reinforcements include a javelin team that has no javelins to start (but you can acquire them from the AAVs) - made that mistake once running the team to a firing position only to then notice that they had no ammo on them.

And since the subject has come up, that reminds me of a question I had: will the air support interface be much the same as in CMSF? I figure probably not, since in a modern setting the communication between aircraft and ground forces is pretty good, while in WWII it was non-existent. So I'd guess that being able to set point targets, area targets for aircraft and have them turn up in 5 minutes isn't remotely realistic for Normandy.

More in-game testing for the masochistically inclined. Test 4: t-34s on dirt roads, damp conditions (same 4km drive x 30 tanks as before). 20 runs, 0 boggings. That's 30 t-34s driving 80km each with nary a glitch between them on damp dirt roads. That sounds better than what I'd expect in real life, not that I'm an expert. Beginning to wonder if my copy of CMBB includes bogging at all (despite knowing damn well I've had it in the past). Test 5: 30 x t-34 on dirt roads, wet conditions, and we finally have some action. After 5 sets of runs, I have a total of 10 bogs, 5 of which give immobilisations. For one tank, that is a bog every 60 km and an immobilistaion (in game terms) every 120 km. No idea how realistic that is. At the other extreme, lets have some hot tiger action in the same wet conditions. test 6: 30 x tiger on dirt roads, wet conditions. 5 sets of runs again (5 x 30 tigers x 4 km). Total of 47 bogs observed. 35 of those freed themselves, 12 became immobilised. That's a bog every 12.8 km for a tiger, and an immobilisation every 50 km.

Dragging this back from the middle of the thread... No, you don't. Since my wife and son commandeered the good computers to play World of Warcraft for a while, I was relegated to the laptop, so decided to run some CMBB tests on road immobilisation rates. Test 1: July 1943, southern theatre. Dry conditions, paved road, 4km long map. 30 parallel roads, with a regular t-34 (early) on each. After 30 test runs, 0 tanks bogged, 0 immobilised. Okay, so that is testing pretty much the ideal situation, where you expect the lowest bogging. But we still have 3,600 km of t-34 road driving without a single problem Test 2: replace t-34s with 30x early Tigers, since they are notoriously unreliable. Another 30 test runs. Still 0 boggings observed. Test 3: Make things a bit tougher. Put the tigers on dirt roads, still in dry conditions. Only had time for 10 test runs. 0 observed bogging events. Since tests 2 and 3 should result in more boggings, it is fair to say, I think, that we have the equivalent 70 runs of t-34 on paved road (doing 70 runs of t-34 on paved road ought to result in fewer boggings than the actual 70 runs with a misture of tigers and dirt roads thrown in). URC's real world data is of 5-10% losses of t-34s on a 300km road march (road quality, weather not specified). 5% losses in 300 km would give a typical time between failures of 6,000 km. I have 8,400km of tank drives, so you'd expect 1.4 immobilised tanks in that time (not factoring in CMBB immobilisations should occur more frequently since they include any problem that can't be fixed in CMBB battle timescales under combat conditions). So either something is screwed with my CMBB copy, or if they are actually undermodelling 'bogging' on road driving

<Has sudden vision of happy wargamer being slowly surrounded by ASL counters> Sinister...

Perversely, that happened to me in a game a few weeks back. The mountainous one in the marines campaign. Humvee driving along the road bogged and became immobilised without leaving the road. Can't say that it ruined the game for me however... I did plenty of off-road driving with tracks and wheels in that scenario on wet grass with no other bogging mind you

Or maybe I just don't think it is an obvious error (unlike the CMBB turn rates of stationary vehicles or turret slew rates, which seem insane to me). What does seem obvious to me is that driving a vehicle along a road (whether safely in friendly territory or deep behind enemy lines) is a very different beast to driving a vehicle rather frantically after the tank next to you brews up, you see a tiger lining you up for the next shot, and you thrash the engine in an attempt to get in to cover as fast as possible, without much concern for potholes, tree stumps or any other hazards in between you and safety. Those may be opposite extremes of the 'oh bugger I've broken my tank' spectrum, but both are identical in CM terms - a fast movement order. Both have the same bog rate (until such time as they decide to code some situational awareness algorithm that attempts to discern what kind of 'fast' move you are making). So you have to make the bog rate some kind of hybrid, meaning (inevitably) that you will likely overestimate bogging on roads and underestimate it in rough terrain. You also have to fudge thge variety of vehicle states. From brand new, well maintained vehicles to ones that got knocked out yesterday, and have been barely jury-rigged in to some kind of running order and thrown back in to the fray. One more random observation: roads aren't always well maintained highways either. An East German friend of mine told me (back in the early 90's) about how roads where he lived were so riddled with cracks and potholes, that they had special signs to indicate when the road ahead was good enough quality that you could drive normally. And having driven in Romania and Bulgaria, I've seen plenty of roads that are simply made by pouring tarmac on to the ground (with no real ground preparation or foundations) and when the ground inevitably shifts the whole road breaks up. CMBB roads have no guarantee of being decent, or even servicable, quality. Whether CM bog rates are right I have no real idea. I just have no problem with the idea that they don't match up well to good quality vehicles driving at constant speed on good roads.