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Field Marshal Blücher

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Posts posted by Field Marshal Blücher

  1. I doubt the next module will include them; Commonwealth AND Fallschirmjaeger AND SS is quite a lot of forces on its own. I think if they are included at all they'd be in the last module, the tentatively-titled "Battle Pack," that just has some odds and ends that didn't really fit into the other modules. BTW, while CMSF definitely had resistance-type fighters, there would be a ton of work to do to get them in CMBN. They'd need textures, new TO&E (which of course would still need to be mostly made-up), possibly new weapon modeling depending on what sort of weapons the Resistance was armed with, and so on. ;)

    To be honest, I don't know how often the Resistance engaged in direct CM-style action against the Germans, and personally, I don't really care if we ever see them. But fortunately for you, I don't decide what goes into the modules, so I wouldn't rule them out! :)

  2. Is it possible that we could see the 3" M5 make its appearance in CMBN in a later module ?

    No, since it's in the base game. ;)

    Maybe you haven't seen it in any scenarios, but open up the editor and fiddle around with a US Towed AT unit--the 76mm M5 is definitely in there.

  3. Mike - I think that only happens for friendly units (and, anyway, you could mod the flashing version of the icon to be identical to the normal one, which would mask any flashing)

    Yep! Except maybe on low difficulty settings (I don't know, I haven't played on anything under Elite since the CMBN beta started), only friendly units flash when they take casualties.

  4. Just out of interest can .50's kill shermans.

    No, while the .50 round was originally intended as an AT weapon, by WWII it was no longer effective against tanks. Anything lighter than tanks, though, was fair game. EDIT: gunnergoz also pointed out something quite relevant, which is that the Germans don't have .50s anyway! :D

    On busting the bobcage my shermans keep dying and I'm not sure why. I know the infantry have at weapons. At what range are these effective? Same question for panzerfaust teams.

    My guess is either artillery or concealed AT guns. Panzerfausts have extremely short range; I believe most of them to be either 30 or 60 m. Panzerschrecks are longer ranged, although my guess is that if you didn't know what it was that killed your tanks it's probably either artillery or AT guns, since Panzerschrecks tend to get spotted rather quickly.

  5. I have one active project, Die Letzte Hoffnung (The Final Hope), a campaign with Devils' Descent-like mechanics centered around a depleted Panzergrenadier (mot) battalion from the 116th PzDiv in the Mortain counterattack. The first battle is done and I'm working on the second, but there are a lot of maps yet to go and I have no idea when I'll be finished. I've also got two more projects in the back of my mind for when some more modules come out.

    The CMSF forum may be kinda dead at the moment (indicating the much-decreased level of interest in the game vis-a-vis the interest in CMBN), but some of the veteran and highly skilled CMx2 scenario designers have expressed interest in revisiting CMSF at some point and making yet more scenarios, even campaigns for it.

    Yep! At present I'm working on one campaign with Bulgaroktonos centered around the US Army's 1-66 Armor (1 mission done, maps for two more being worked on), and I have several more on the drawing boards.

  6. mmm. Any time you change anything in any of the scenarios, and recompile, you're essentially creating a new campaign, regardless of how major or minor the change is. But, I thought you could use old saves anyway. I'm pretty sure I've worked with incomplete campaigns - dropping in new missions, renaming missions, etc - and been able to use prior saves.

    Huh, well, it would be awesome if it did work. Unfortunately, I don't have any saves from the campaign (deleted them all when I got a new machine), so I can't test this myself, but if someone else wants to try this out, go hog wild. :)

  7. Are you sure about that? You've essentially created a new (or 'different') version of the campaign - I forget the exact proceedure, but there is a way to load saves from a previous version of a campaign into newer versions of it. I'm pretty sure it's covered in the manual.

    Yes, I did create a new campaign. It's called "Devils' Descent (Clean).cam." The mission titles are also slightly different so that I could preserve the originals.

    For example, the first mission's file name is "DDCam 01.btt". The clean version is designated "DDCam 01C.btt" in order to not overwrite the original file. So not only is the campaign file name different, but the mission titles within the campaign script are also different. I highly doubt that the campaign UI would be compatible with the Shift+Click methodology for importing save games.

  8. FMB,

    Thanks to you and BB for the cleaner version. Glad to see it .... I'm currently in the middle of your campaign but if I load the new version, will that cause any problems? I'm guessing not since it sounds like only the text was modified but I thought I would ask anyway.

    Actually, the two versions are completely incompatible; according to the game's logic, they're different campaigns. I'm sorry about this, but I had to do it in order to preserve the original campaign. :( You will need to completely restart if you want to use the clean version.

  9. Several people have, for one reason or another, be it historically accurate low levels of profanity in WWII, or to introduce the little ones to CMBN, requested a version of my Devils' Descent campaign with less R-rated language in it. Well, it's here, and it should be up on the Repository soon!

    Special thanks to BloodyBucket for doing what I did not have the time to do: editing the many, many .txt files to clean up the characters' vocabulary. :)

  10. It's excellent.

    Is it possible to edit the briefings and notes? I have a youngster I'd like to hook on CMBN, and I think this campaign is the perfect bait, but I'd like to tone down the salty language.

    Not quite, but send me a PM with your email address. I can email you a .zip file with the briefings in it. You can edit them, send them back to me, and I'll re-compile a "clean" campaign. :)

  11. Next question is what is the difference between CM1 and CM2 that prevents this then?

    I'm not trying to be annoying, but that is the difference. ;)

    CMx1 and CMx2 are completely different game engines. CMx2 shares (if I understand correctly) approximately zero code with CMx1; everything needed to be built from the ground up. And my guess is, either something in the way that terrain or campaigns (or both) is handled makes it difficult/time consuming to code persistent terrain deformation in CMx2. Probably the only person who really knows is Charles.

  12. FMB,

    Greetings. The following position is academic in nature, and therefore totally irrelevant. Having said that - I am a retired paratrooper of 21 years service. If I haven't heard it - it has not been said (profanity wise). However, when we consider the cultural identities and zeitgeist of the generation of the soldiers portrayed, I would suggest we at least consider that profanity (even in the uniformed services) was not as common place or pervasive as Hollywood would have us believe. Make no mistake, they cursed in the 40s, but it was not as lasse faire as we find today. I have read a couple of Revolutionary War letters that were sprinkled with language that might surprise, but it was frowned upon then as well. Having said that, it doesn't detract from the excellent work you have produced. Just thinking out loud.

    MCB

    Yeah, I actually do know that. :) Basically, I had to make a choice between going for period-accurate dialogue, or dialogue based on real people that I knew. I knew that each one would sound forced to somebody (since the period-accurate dialogue would be harder for me to write convincingly), so I went with my gut and wrote it based on dialogue that I hear every day. Thanks for pointing this out, though. It's an interesting conundrum, and this ties in nicely to my response to thejetset's post below yours:

    Basically, the main reason I'm debating writing a narrative for the Germans is that it'll be harder for me to do it convincingly. Not only would it be difficult to accurately capture the mannerisms of 1940s German soldiers, but I'd also need to tread VERY carefully around the ideology of Nazism and how to portray it. I'm not ruling out the dialogue, it's just an issue I'm still debating internally. :)

  13. I will give some feedback on the narrative at least for the first battle. The story is plausible but the dialog needs some work, it should be more natural and less forced. The swearing is fine if that's what your characters do but in some cases it seems as if a character says something for no other reason other than to drop another fbomb as if its just being added to shock the reader.

    Then you must know classier people than I do. ;)

    Seriously, the reason the characters talk like that is that real people that I know talk like that. There's one sequence in particular in a later mission where Evans and Bautz exchange two lines of dialogue that contain a horrific percentage of profanities, but that's based on an actual exchange that I heard between two of my friends.

    One thing that you'll note as you get deeper into the narrative is that the characters are distinct. Evans and Bautz are very, very profane, Ford and Johnson less so, Spurgin swears very little, and Blaes does not swear at all.

  14. Wait, what? I haven't seen any AT guns!.

    Heh. I did say the campaign had meaningful choices. :D If you guys enjoyed the campaign, you might want to play it again and make a different choice in the second decision mission; it can substantially affect the way the campaign plays out.

    To everyone in general, I have some more comments:

    First of all, I'm overwhelmed by all of the positive feedback. I put a lot of effort into this, and I am so happy to see that you guys are enjoying the campaign this much. :)

    Second, regarding difficulty (or lack thereof :D): I think the campaign came out a little easier than I intended it to be, but I'm going to leave it as is for now. There are a couple of reasons why it's so easy. First, it was always intended to be in the "Medium-Easy" range of difficulty from the start. Second, the vast majority of scenario design and testing took place during the early to mid Alpha testing phase. I'm afraid of going into specifics, but suffice to say that there were some bugs around back then that made the first three missions substantially more difficult than they are now. Not only are those missions easier, but the last few missions were designed with the mindset that the player would have taken heavier casualties in the first few missions than you guys are experiencing. Overall, I'm OK with the result, as it produces an entertaining campaign that's accessible to CM newcomers, but my future CMBN campaigns will be a step up in difficulty. ;)

    Third, there are definitely some more projects in the works. At a bare minimum, I hope to continue this specific storyline into Market-Garden when that module comes out. As to more current projects, I'm in the process of designing a campaign with similar decision mechanics (I'm not sure yet if there's going to be a narrative for this one) about the 116th Panzer Division in the Mortain counterattack. I'm also considering a new CMSF campaign using the decision mechanics as well (although there will almost certainly be no narrative due to the inflexibility of the CMSF briefing format). So rest assured, there will definitely be more like this on the way. :)

    -FMB

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