Sgt.Squarehead

Oh do come on, we are still Christians after all. PS - But TBH I prefer playing the 'Godless Communists'.....I suspect the sort of tactics I use might rather upset some of the more genteel players hereabouts. Let's just say that I'm not at all kind to the scenery.

I was very irritated by the Platoon HQ, he was my first casualty and the whole unit went down.....If I'd blundered into enemy fire, fair enough, but this was just annoying. As soon as the shot whizzed past he was off through the nearest gap in the bocage like a ferret up a drainpipe. He wasn't actually even in a Bocage tile at the time of the shot either, he was adjacent to one. IIRC it was the guy with the poorest leadership value, which I suspect may have contributed to the issue.

This could make sense.....The TRPs could be taken to mean free fire within an agreed radius. However it also zeros every artillery piece in the battle onto that position.....As a defender I think I would actually prefer to take the random direct HE fire! PS - Anyone who believes Soviet Heavy Assault Gun Regiments ever waited to be fired on first is in cloud cuckoo land! Being fired at is not what Heavy Assault Gun Regiments are about at all, TBH there's a clue in the name.

Some nations were more fond of that technique than others: "Comrade, that village is a known fascist, execute it immediately!"

I play Iron mode as a matter of course, however sometimes I do step outside of the rules.....The 'tank driving blindly into the field of fire of an AT gun' example would be a good one. If the tank in front explodes, I will stop the vehicles behind.....Regardless of C2 state, because that's what tanks tend to do when one of their comrades explodes right in front of them. Now a Hunt Order might do this for me (depending on the proximity of the blast), but should I really have to rely on the foibles of the game engine when making common sense, life or death decisions for the men on the spot?

Big question for me is.....Where did the damn grenade come from that took out my Panzer? I was sure it came from a building.....Whether it was an AT grenade I honestly do not know.

Now this comes down to scenario design and in particular the briefing IMHO.....Frankly I hate writing them, because I know both how important they are and how difficult it can be to get the nuances of the scenario across (without turning them into a step by step manual). That's not the scenario I described.....I was talking about an assault on a known enemy position, but one of sufficient complexity that his exact positions are unknown. Any rule hardcoded into the game would have to handle both situations.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that policy tended to be to send HE before sending men.....Nobody gave a whit about 'wasting valuable HE', that's a gamer speaking. What soldiers really, really did care about was not getting killed.

Sorry fella, that's just not how it worked.....Ask the villages in Normandy! That is not the product of strict ROE.....HE we had aplenty, men we did not. And then there's the Soviets.....

Nope.....I managed to sneak men very close to the german postions and we had played a very interesting game of hide & seek in the orchard on the left, but then I had a really unfortunate outbreak of Bocage-Bug (platoon HQ decided to commit suicide after a single rifle/sniper shot freaked him out), so I quit my session. Will give it another go though.....It reminds me of some of my own MOUT stuff, tight map, small forces, savage placement. So I really want to beat it.

What about when assaulting a village, or a fortified position? Are you saying that tanks should not be allowed to fire on positions without a contact marker in those situations.....They have to wait for the enemy to start killing their friends before they can open fire? Looked at from that perspective this rule would be unworkable IMHO.

Not sure that would be appropriate.....It would prevent a player using HE to suppress likely enemy positions.

I just tried that one based on the various comments here.....Kudos to @Bulletpoint for fiendish unit placement on a very tidy little map.

It's not an enormous issue TBH.....The 'Heavy Rocks' & 'Sand' tiles are very common on the wider desert map, but not so frequently found in the city itself. Once it's been trimmed down to the urban area (which is a tiny portion of the overall map), I can smash it up a bit and use the rubble tags as normal.....Two maps for the price of one! I can never tell when you are serious.....But on a purely technical note, I'm rather pleased with it; it's almost as impassable to vehicles as the marsh it replaces (I used Heavy Forest tiles to restrict movement) and it does blend in with the rest of the environment rather better, don't you think?

Interesting podcast focussing on the Stryker MGS: https://mwi.usma.edu/podcast-spear-fighting-broken-gun/

Anyone remember this? I think I finally found them: http://ciar.org/ttk/mbt/armor/Modern_Armor_I.pdf

The official 'Shock Force Plotline' seems to be a replay of OIF set in Syria TBH (but with real WMD & America having a few more friends).....I'd love to see a module bringing the game up to date and providing options for the actual Syrian war. @MikeyD's Turks could form a part of the basis of such a pack.....The T-72M1V(2001) could be reintroduced as the T-72BA, T-72BM etc. There are several other vehicles & aircraft that could be ported from other titles, notably armed drones (which combined with a few SF types and a lot of UnCons could form the basis of a whole campaign). C'mon @Battlefront.com.....Take our money! PS - Don't forget the bloody Breach Teams this time!

Cheers fella.....I appreciate that from a man of your talents. If you ever fancy doing something Libyan any time.....

A sad babble? Do you see what I did there?

A shoot & scoot a day makes Javelin go away! PS - The game's T-90SA & BMP-3s are pretty much spot on for Iraq's re-equipped (again) 9th AD: Even the camo is kind of close!

This. Driving tanks next to enemy occupied buildings should be suicidal (doing so so is described in pretty much those terms in just about every account of urban warfare, right up to today).....The game already allows tanks to elevate their guns to angles that would make SPGs envious to engage infantry who are above them in buildings, IMHO this is advantage enough. Players dumb enough to drive their tanks into enemy occupied urban areas should pay the price IMHO.....Without the designer needing to somehow explain to the AI that tanks are outside and throwing explosives at them would probably be a good idea.

Little more: Reckon I can call that bit of the terrain done (the river extends the full width of the map, over 2km): Next up is adding some random rocky outcrops to break up the very featureless desert slightly here & there.....CM:SF2 has a much better toolset for mapping than its predecessor, it's a joy to work with by comparison. It's a shame so much of this map is either sand or heavy rocks, it means I can't use the various 'Rubble Tags'. Once the main map's done I may make a (massively) cut down version featuring a bashed up variant of the urban area, using those tags. TBH that one could be quite a while down the road, I've got 9km2 of desert to deal with first!

This always makes me smile: Kind of bright out there now though! Sadly my test game fatally crashed shortly after this.....Which has me kind of worried. It really shouldn't have. It's not that big a battle.

With my map-making excursion to Asia completed for a while, I've finally got back to work on Bishr.....The techniques I learned making the Delta map are already proving their broader usefulness, I reckon this marsh: Looks a lot more realistic than this earlier effort (at the same area): No mods, I just used different terrain tiles.

Me too.