dan/california

It feels pretty good to me on first reading. The really cool thing would be to make it adjustable by the scenario designer. Then we can argue about it for years.

I do feel Steve's comments about how things usually work out at the NTC are relevant here as well. And there are times when the other just keeps coming. The relatively recent battle of Wanat is an example.

You can probably get a lot of that behavior now if you set morale and motivation low enough.

So what you are really saying is that most CM battles should be over in about the first 15 minutes because one side or the other would give up trying so hard after the first bad mistake. That is how the U.S. lost Vietnam, I am far less certain it is how we won WW2. In any event you aren't arguing nearly as much for changes in game mechanics as you are scenario design. That or you think games at this scale are pointless and we should all find another hobby.

That is so VERY cool!

The thing about experience is it only improves things to certain point then goes the other way. Too much time under fire eventually causes shell shock/PTSD in almost everybody. This had to be a huge problem for the Germans especially with the endless engagements on two fronts. Their was an excellent British study on this I can't seem to pull down out of the ether at this moment.

When you have thousand forum posts, we will talk about it owning your life.

Well, if I was on the team I wouldn't be so concerned about 1.32 either.

The scenario designer can give either side as much or as little indirect fire support as he wishes, or none. Scenario design in CMX2 is much more variable. There are an entire array of victory conditions to choose from, for instance, and they can be asymmetric. So if you don't like one battle try another.

And that 1.32 will be out when, again?

In a serious fight I could, not counter insurgency, I can easily see pumping 50 cal into every vehicle on the street. As cited above, couldn't the have tried a LAW first instead of the Jav? I'm just saying........

Furthermore, if I am remembering correctly that Normandy has exit zones, so units can leave the map. It will now be possible to simulate a battle where one or both sides are not playing to their last chip. Just tweak the casualty points and allow one side to achieve victory even if they abandon the field, as long as they kill X percentage of the other side and keep Y percentage of their force in fighting shape. By the way if exit zones could make it into the last patch for CMSF that would be fantastic. I realize it is also probably overly optimistic. The Syrians would really like the option.

There are two basic kinds of battles in modern war. The kind where at least one side is not willing to stand and fight, and the kind where both sides are unquestionably willing to stand and fight. Most of the time, you get the first kind. One side sees that further investment at this place and this time will be unprofitable accord to its operational calculus, and gives ground or stops attacking. These kinds of battles result in relatively low casualties at any one time, although casualties may unsustainable in a prolonged engagement of several weeks or more The second kind of battle is when both sides go all in, it is seen as a must win regardless of immediate losses. Tarawa is perhaps the ultimate example. The Marines took nearly five thousand casualties of something like 20,000 men committed and the 5000 Japanese defenders died nearly to a man. Normandy produced quite a a lot of the second kind of fighting because the Allies wanted to break out into the rest of France, period. The Germans, once the General Staff removed Hitler's head from his #@^%^^ realized that the next place they were likely to hold the line was the Rhine, and went all in. The result was a lot of nasty combat where the butchers bill ran way up before one side blinked. At least until the Germans ran out of more or less everything, including soldiers. Patton stopped on the Franco German border a very few weeks later. Mostly because he had out run his own supplies. Proving that both sides were correct about the stakes. There is a subset of the all in, usually between mismatched forces where mass surrender accounts for most of the losing sides casualties. Goose Green was one of these in the end. The Brits got into a position to start killing them in job lots and the Argentines gave up.

I am on the outside looking in, but this cake is in the oven and three quarters risen. The chances of adding ingredients are looking rather thin. All of us,and I certainly have my pet causes too, are arguing for things in either the next module or the next family. If they weren't down to crossing and dotting things this forum wouldn't be open.

That is just so very, very cool! Thanks Steve.

There is an excellent piece of science fiction by David Drake that touches on this subject. A group of insurgents steal the 25th century equivalent of an Abrams from a a dockyard where it it is waiting to be shipped off planet. Unfortunately they spend the next week losing their minds trying to figure out how to tell the computer to open the magazine for the main gun ammo. When they eventually get caught a tanker goes "oh, its this little button over here". Nothing is Simple when you just don't know where to start. Think about trying to drive a rental car from a brand you haven't driven.

Let me preface this comment by saying that I am not a beta tester and have no inside information. However it is my assumption that by the time that you are on the beta test team your war gaming experience, and perhaps actual military training as well makes a LOT of this stuff second nature. Too the point that it is hard too look at it from the perspective someone who really doesn't know that a PZ-III can be almost ignored but a Panther will wreck your whole day. CM has a learning curve, what it is doing is to complicated to be otherwise. The dev team has to decide how much effort to put into smoothing that curve out vs a feature that your will still appreciate after years and hundreds of hours of game play. Every line of code on one issue is a line not written on any of several hundred others. Trust me, I have twenty seven little hobby horses that no amount of riding have moved to the top of the to-do list either.

Its called co-play.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzer_IV http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panther_tank http://gva.freeweb.hu/weapons/usa_guns5.html The three links above should cover a lot of the ground you need for CMBN. I am sure an a minimal amount of googling would produce the rest.

People over think this, a lot. A player need to develop some basic understanding of the relative quality of the other sides armor. In CMBN for the German side this ranges roughly from the oldest short 75mm PZIV to the latest Tiger tank available. You need to know at what point on that continuum that going head to head becomes suicide for an equal number of Shermans. You don't need to know a whole lot more than that tactically really. Either you can attempt this head on, or have to flank them to have a chance.

And even if they don't bail out, a suppressed crew does not function very well. They may retreat out of LOS when you really wanted them to stay in the fight for instance. And suppression can occur from either non lethal penetrating rounds, or just a huge volume of fire rattling off the armor. This is an assumption on my part, but I am willing to bet that with WW2 equipment their gunnery suffers as well. Modern tanks don't miss much unless the target is jinking like mad, and very lucky.

Eighty percent of Gibsonm's issues seem to come down to the lack of co-play. You have mentioned you intend to do that sooner or later, although it keeps sliding towards even later than that. He brings up some specifics about how he would like co-play to work,, still if you committed to coplay the details seem manageable. Most of the rest seem to involve specifics that are known quantities, equipment TO&E ect.. So please do co-play!

you can fix 90 percent of the problem with ten percent of the effort. Use a vastly less detailed set of icons for the opposing side. Its that huge overhead diamond that says "ATGM here"(CMSF) that causes people to area target a company of Bradleys on the poor bastards. You can leave the actual 3D representation exactly as is. If people are willing to examine every detail at 3 feet they deserve to be rewarded for reading all those flash cards. You might be able to add some limitations to low level camera movement 100s of feet from any friendly units, in iron mode or something. So if the camera is a kilometer out in front of the nearest friendly unit it can't go below level 4 or 5. The combination of the above would go a LOOOONG way to resolving this problem. Its not an intrinsically impossible problem like command delays.

I am going to speculate that the reason is it would take somewhere between a week and a month of programming time to make that work right, and it still wouldn't solve the broken hard drive problem.

The only real solution to this problem is co-play with several people per side. If each of those people is locked into what they level of command they are playing knows in terms of FOW,the problem solves its self. The person commanding the second infantry platoon could act in a perfectly rational way based on what he knows, and completely bollox up the plan of the person playing the company commander in the process. This would bear a great resemblance to real life. The ultimate would be to enforce C2 links so the people in question could only chat if they were in C2. Maybe that would be iron man rules? Imagine having to communicate with your FO team this way, Imagine getting the assault timing a little off.