Lethaface

Good to see the veteran (asymmetrical) scenario authors form CMSF1 still in the mix with new plans! If needed I'd be willing to playtest those, time allowing. The CMSF2 demo got me back into playing CM a lot. Less workrelated headaches also helps Anyway I'm curious to see what all of you can cook up with the new possibilities in CMSF2! Who knows one day i'll have a more serious go with the editor.

I presume this is for CMBN with CW and MG modules? Don't really understand the comment regarding the Holland terrain, as it is modeled in CMBN.

With regards to CM scenario's a big difference is the element of surprise. In a CM scenario you know there is gonna be an ambush and, depending on the size of the map and objectives, approximately where. So for any H2H game the RED player needs to trick the BLUE player in such a way that his ambush isn't counter ambushed.

Yeah, the 3 story house is a good spot for them

Don't rule out 'luck'. Hunt with a small team plus plenty of overwatch and suppressive fire is my goto choice for clearing woods of enemies (if I really need to do that). Still one should factor in casualties when coming into close contact with enemy troops waiting for you while holding automatic weapons at the ready. I think in the Alamo scenario you will have sound contacts / suspsected contacts in the woods. You also have mortars, artillery, marders and leo2's. Shoot up that forest before trying to go toe to toe. As for breaking the bank, I haven't played that one through yet. I looked at it though and made some plans. All buildings, apart from the objectives, are cleared for fire support. You have plenty of fire support available, but only 2 platoons of infantry (with one coming later). Without playing a minute I came to the conclusion that just going in the next row of buildings isn't an option, unless you want to lose a lot of men. I was looking at the extreme flanks and thinking of using smoke and artillery to force an entry into the city. It's probably called 'breaking the bank' for a reason, might be one of the harder scenario's to crack. Like SimpleSimon and others suggested: do pause and think if you really need to clear those buildings first thing. Also, domfluff offered a valuable link to real army tactics for such situations. And finally: you will take casualties.

In the Red Thunder stock campaign scenario I seemed to get quite more fps. While giving everyone orders and looking around the fordings, I now get 20-40 fps (saw one spot of 15), where last time I checked it it was more like 15-25 (and plenty of 15 spots).

I agree. A GSYNC monitor might help though. Interesting. Disabling 'threaded optimization' does indeed seem to give extra FPS, although I haven't tested thoroughly.

AFAIK it depends on the caliber. Above small arms fratricide is modeled, although I'm not sure about .50.

The above plus make sure to swisscheese the building before entry, the higher caliber the better. It's always better to enter a building with all the occupants dead.

Interesting post! Back in CMSF1 I played quite a couple of PBEMs with RED. Although those were all scenario's, since the quickbattle format wasn't up to speed yet, so the force selection was done by the scenario author and for good scenario's the objectives were asymetrically balanced. My most basic lesson was more on the strategic level (for both regular and irregular RED forces): * Kamikaze: all assets should be considered expandable to the mission. When you look at it realistically there is little chance for an individual asset to survive a contact and still be combat effective for follow up action. Besides troop and equipment quality, the main reason for this is IMO observation and C2 advantages, coupled with on call accurate support fires. Hence, you usually have only one chance for a unit to achieve their goal. One can learn from how the Japanese dealt with a similar situation: kamikaze tactics. * Ambush. Hide and covered arcs are your friends: long range firefights will usually lead to your forces getting annihilated without getting much done in return. Ambushes where you can gain temporary local fire superiority are the way to go. Of course there are exceptions like ATGMs, which can and should be used in long range ambushes. However, shoot and scoot is difficult, since near instant accurate heavy return fire is usually a given. So I like to put ATGMs in positions where they can get a nice shot on enemies flanks/rear and have some opportunity to fire a good number of rounds before they get annihilated. In other words: don't put them directly facing the front or their will be a good chance they take 120/20mm HE to the face before their missile has actually reached the target. Packing up and running from a building is possible at times, but more often not. In the field I think ATGMs can be more easily packed up, however they are much more prone to being detected when not hiding in a building and an easy target for indirect fires. * 'force multipliers' like RPG's and ATGMs are key to causing casualties. Use them during a firefight to tip the scales in your direction. Don't save up ammo, fire off all rounds asap. A round that doesn't cause casualties often does cause suppression, while rounds laying next to WIA/KIA pixeltruppen are usually not easy recoverable. * Vehicles. Vehicles are in a tough spot going up against all those thermals. Usually I keep them behind hard cover, only to pour in fire on a objective or important enemy asset after a firefight has started. * Isolation: your c2 is poor, much poorer than the enemy. Don't rely on C2. From the moment the firefight has started it's mix and mash. A hidden reserve comes in great to punish enemy mistakes and or take on targets of opportunity. For example: Blue is attacking a town. Our objective is to deny them the objective and or cause heavy casualties. Setup a few sentries on outposts for spotting duties. Have the actual ambush take place deeper inside the town, where direct support fire from outside the town is limited. Have some ATGMs on overwatch in high rise positions. 1. Lure the enemy towards your ambush. 2. hide and wait 3. Give them some false sense of comfort. Spring a small ambush here and there, a little sacrifice to keep them from worrying to much about your main ambush. 3. wait some more 4. Unleash the ambush at close range. Ideally with an IED of course. And fire those RPGs, use area fire and or Target to make sure they let them fly. 5. Have the units you had hiding, now bypassed by the enemy, move into blocking positions behind/flank of the enemy . They can pour in fire from unsuspected locations or attrit reinforcements that think they are going through a 'safe zone'. 6. The ATGMs now unhide and target enemy vehicles moving to overwatch/firebase positions with LOS/LOF to the ambush zone. Or else just shoot them at strong enemy positions. Shooting up the cavalry now without their infantry support will psychologically attrit your enemy. 7. Victory at any and all costs!

Ok, I don't know. I know it is off by default from Nvidia.

And a video of some of the cavalry action:

The Geforce FPS counter doesn't work and the ingame overlay menu bugs out if I use it in CM, but my monitor has a button for FPS. The FPS is indeed below 20 especially if many troops bunch up in fording the river, but the game responds fluently and there is no stuttering whatsoever. There is a reason I bought a 165hz monitor and yes I do appreciate high fps. CM doesn't have it, but plays fluently in my view. There is no audio stuttering during action, the game responds to input fast and the action plays 'smooth'. Of course this is all relative, it might look like a slideshow to you. Anyway the first mission of the stock russian campaign plays similar to the above video:

Yes: Although I don't think the AA settings have anything to do with it, at the time I was happy it seemed to have fixed the problem while looking good too.

Some screens from Alamo:

In my first quickspin playthrough of Alamo the Tornado was indeed destroyed. Giving it another go, the Tornado got of 1 maverick although it missed. On the second pass it was fired upon by 3 Shilka's, during the orders phase I could see the Tornado's status was 'evading'. It didn't make another pass but survived over a minute of heavy AAA.

@Hister While eating I was reading the forum and saw your Nvidia settings again. I changed my settings mainly due to the fact the game crashed and that someone got the same problem fixed by tweaking the settings. Never hurts to try right? I copied his settings and made some further changes and that seemed to work. If anything I think the 'fix' was disabling MFAA, enabling triple buffering or setting maximum prerendered frames to 4. Now I was going over my profile again and compared it with yours. There is one thing I'd try to disable if I were you: 'MFAA'. I see you have it turned on globally, whereis in my global profile it's off. I'm still contemplating what looks better and since the crashes seem to have disappeared for me, whether I should go back to stock Nvidia settings.

I didn't fire CMRT up on this machine afaik. So I started the campaign 'Road to Minsk' (only later realizing the original campaign is Hammers Flank. Both run 'fine' for me, I made a video of the 2nd minute in the first mission of Road to Minsk. The first minute I made a movie too but I forgot do check that shadows/shaders are enabled. Anyway since I played and finished (which was quite a feat imo) the Hammers Flank campaign, I realised it isn't the same one. I did also fire up Hammers flank, it ran similar as in I couldn't detect any difference in running. Although in that mission there is some texture shading flickering, I think due to the rain and overcast. It's mainly visible on the gun shield. I made a video of that too, but am going to eat something now and after try to play the game. This was with stock Nvidia settings AFAIK as in no custom profile yet. Is the performance on your machine worse? The only thing bothering me is the duration of the bluebar (first few minutes are worst) and the tree draw distance. Video quality is a bit shoddy here and there, don't know why. Recorded and uploaded in 1440p.

Ah ok, understood. I thought the upgrade didn't give you a significant performance boost across the board. Happy to hear that's not the case. I didn't have my expectations to high for improvements in CM, but playing larger battles has definitely improved.

Ok, nice if it seems to have fixed your problem! I'm reluctant to link it as a solution, since I don't know if it fixes the problem people are experiencing. I am not having any troubles with the demo myself. Feel free to link to it if you still feel it has fixed your problems after your latest playthrough. Also Hister explained that AA transparency above multisampe will create some visual effects, best change it to multisample.

Strange. I encountered the crashing problem with CMBS a while ago, but managed to fix it by tweaking the Nvidia settings. However for the CMSF2 demo I haven't setup an nvidia profile yet and I am on the latest Nvidia drivers. So far no crashes and I have spend a couple of >1 hour sessions in the Alamo battle.

The Milan in CMSF2 has a minimum range of 400m orso, so probably that was the problem. Unbuttoning isn't necessary.

My experience differs: I had one that had been raked with .50 sniper fire, take out my Tornado.

And you didn't get a lot of performance, even outside CM?