Paper Tiger

It failed so miserably because it was almost impossible to do. A massive drama on a Wagnerian scale fitting of a madman. (Wagner has a lot to answer for.) And we can be grateful that Hitler tried to do it at all. There's not much doubt in my mind that the Bulge helped to shorten the war as Hitler squandered an important strategic reserve that could have held up the Allies advance somewhere for a week or two more and every week of the war counted at this point. With the war within their borders, they started doing terrible things to their own people so this definitely saved a lot of innocent lives, as well as in the concentration camps in Germany itself. For me, Hitler was, for the most part, a good strategic thinker with no real military ability but was an outrageous gambler. In the early days, he appeared to be a very lucky gambler indeed and his success in the face of such odds gave him more confidence. But the 'House' always wins and so, as the war progressed, he made rasher and rasher decisions which made some sense on the strategic level if you consider what would have happened had the Army actually managed to pull it off. Forget that it what he was asking was impossible. What would have happened if it had worked. Viewed like that, the Bulge is actually quite a bold (i.e. insane!) concept. The trouble was that he seemed to think he was possessed of some great gift and whatever he decided to do was supported by 'Providence' as he would put it. And when it didn't happen, it was a result of treachery and sabotage thus adding insult to the heroic efforts the German soldiers made on his behalf.

I've read that 'Courage and Fortitude' is mildly challenging

Thanks for the support guys. Glad you appreciate the work that goes into making all this. Command Ops really is an exceptional game, isn't it. It's AI is the best I've played against. Grigsby's War in the East also comes with an incredible AI opponent as well. So far I'm finding the AGEOD engine to be quite the competent opponent as well. I think we're lucky that AI for wargames is getting to a point where it can give us a real fight, at least for a while, and that's something that I'm very glad to have seen. It's been easy enough to find people to play chess with. Wargames, not so easy and so a good AI opponent is a real gift.

We've all heard it said, usually as a warning when someone is being irresponsible or too care-free. 'Life is not all fun and games'. That games gets mentioned in the same breath tends to suggest that games are frivolous, light-hearted affairs. But there are also serious games and we're all fans of at least one serious game. There's nothing frivolous about CMBN. The subject of the fun value of CMx2 games has come up in one or two discussions I've had in the past year and a half and I've recently been giving this quite a lot of thought. It seems to me that my idea of 'fun' when playing a serious game is very different from some others and this has caused some friction between me and a small number of posters. I am making this post so that I can have something to link to should these issues crop up again in the future. This is not going to be a short read and it's probably not of much interest for most of you, but here goes. I consider myself to be a serious 'serious gamer' as are most of us here. Don't get me wrong, I like the occasional light game from time to time. I have been a serious gamer most of my life. I was the captain of my school's chess team for my last two years there and in my capacity of captain, I played games of chess against the other school captains in competitions. To stay at the top of a very competitive group my chemistry teacher, Mr Milne, who was a great chess player himself, encouraged me to study the game deeply to understand opening theory, middle game and end game strategy. It was the end game that I excelled in and if I could survive the other player's onslaught and get through to the end game, I was usually home and dry. But, after leaving school, when somebody found out that I played chess, they would ask to play a game with me. Most of the time, this turned out to be an uncomfortable experience as I would beat them effortlessly and it made me feel like I was bullying them or just showing off. (That's not boasting. It just happens to be the result of hard work and study.) But if they played a good game they would have my full attention and that was always a more enjoyable experience. I also discovered wargames when I was at school. Although I started out playing WW2 table-top miniature rules, I came to board games quite quickly and WW2 wasn't really my favourite period. That turned out to be the Napoleonic Era and the American Civil War. But there was one board game series that eventually came to dominate my game-time and that was Advanced Squad Leader. When played against another human, this game offered me as much of a challenge as a game of chess could. And when I didn't have an opponent on hand, I would play both sides to the best of my ability and still get that 'hit'. ASL also provided me with a very broad range of missions to play. I could play with a handful of counters on a small board for four or five turns, half an hours play sometimes, or I could play a massive campaign like Red Barricades for example. I didn't get many opportunies to play the three historical modules, including Panthers in the Mist and Pegasus Bridge because of the size of the maps and the density of counters so I played the scenarios that shipped with them instead. Having two cats didn't really help either as they really seem to enjoy sleeping on them when you're not looking. For most of my life there's always been a cat around and so my board wargaming habit was always under threat from the truly catastrophic intervention of my furry little friends. So when home computers started growing up, I was looking for a computer wargame that I could keep set up indefinitely. I tried quite a number of these but in most cases the AI was truly appalling and so the challenge died on the vine very, very quickly. Two notable exceptions were a game called 'White Death' (I think) covering the battle for Velikie Luki and a naval game called 'Action Stations'. However, these days, the AI in some games has developed to the point where it can do much more than just provide an opponent for a newbie to learn the game mechanics. Obviously, I've spent an enormous amount of time playing BFC's CM series of games, both CMx1 and 2. The real hook for me was the scenario editor which allowed me to create my own maps and scenarios and that is what kept me really engaged for such a long time. But, up until recently, there is one other game franchise that I have played and loved just as much and that is the Civilization series. I reckon I've spent more time playing the Civ series than I have CMx1 and 2 combined. I found Civ 2 when it came out and I've played every game in the series for a countless number of hours, sometimes sitting with the duvet wrapped around me in front of my computer at 2 in the morning on a cold winter's night playing 'just one more turn'. But I've lost my interest in Civ now because the game no longer offers me a challenge when I play it. Civ V's new 1-UPT rule basically took all the challenge out of playing against the AI for me. It's too easy for me to destroy the AI side with tiny, but very well placed forces. I was disappointed quite early on when I was playing a game as Russia. I clearly wasn't going to win that game as the Indians had built up a huge empire and were far ahead of me technologically and militarily. So I decided to go down in a blaze of glory and declared war on India. Sure enough, huge numbers of mech and armour backed up by missiles came at my small civ but I beat them off easily because the AI had absolutely no idea how to do war. This happened in my games time and time again and so it became harder and harder to work up any enthusiasm for starting up a new game. Gods and Kings got me back in for one game but it was just the same. More units, more civs but no military challenge whatsoever. Where's the fun when Alexander the Great threatens you in the game and you know that if he attacks you, you'll be able to take down his massive army one-handed and blindfolded? It just reduces him to being a Paper Tiger. Of course, it's not a game about war but conflict between civilizations is a very important element in the game play and that part holds no challenge for me anymore. As a result, my love affair with Civ has died and I don't see me picking up the Brave New World expansion later this year unless they do some major work on the war AI part of the game. Although CIv has varying difficulty levels, the AI doesn't get smarter or raise its game in any way as you ramp up that difficulty. It just gets more and more production and research bonuses as you climb the difficulty ladder. There don't appear to be any bonuses to combat which would make the combat side of the game a bit more challenging. Basically, the AI cheats and even though it makes the game more challenging this robs the fun for me. Another deep strategy game that I've played a lot of is 'Hearts of Iron'. I picked up the first iteration way back while I was waiting for the computer version of another classic board game "World in Flames' to arrive (and am still waiting). One thing that happens when you up the difficulty is that the AI side gets combat bonuses (10% at hard, 25% at very hard). This doesn't make the AI smarter but it's more effective when it does what it does. This meant that I could set up and enjoy a campaign as the USSR in HOI 2 (Armaggedon) preparing for the German invasion. The Germans could put in a very powerful Barbarossa in 1941 at the higher difficulty levels but eventually, I would stop them in the winter and then usually end 1942 in Berlin and on the road to Paris. it was fun while it lasted and I'd usually quit after I'd steamrolled over mainland Europe in the west and China in the east. It looked like HOI was going to go the way of Civ series and that prevented me from picking up HOI3 until late last year.The franchise-saver for me was that HOI 3 provided me with the option to have the AI manage my forces for me and this renewed the challenge once again. Now I could give my army groups, armies and corps objectives and stances and avanues of approach and then I'd sit back and watch it do its thing. This really works for me as my forces are being handled by the same AI as the computer opponent are. It's not able to plan as deeply as I can and so, barring a massive material disadvantage, I'm probably going to emerge as the winner. But I have to think and plan carefully to get that win. It's not easy to achieve and so feels like the time invested in playing it is worthwhile. Now that's a long story :eek: but we've firmly established by now that I don't find 'easy to win' to be a quality I value in a serious game and that it is the challenge that gets and holds my interest. Naturally, this is going to influence my designing in a major way. But difficulty is not everything. The missions must be enjoyable to play as well. I won't get into my philosophy of scenario design as JonS is doing that for us all already. However, I will say that enjoying playing a mission is a very close second to difficulty in my book. There are so many different things that can make a mission fun to play for me so I won't go into them either. I've designed quite a broad range of missions for CMx2 and I've really enjoyed playing almost all of them. Finding the right level of challenge in a stand-alone mission is a real headache and it is even more so when it is part of a lengthy campaign and I have to use my own best judgement at first and then listen very carefully to the feedback I get from my play-testers to get it 'right'. Difficulty itself does not make a mission fun to play. One very fine example of this arose when I was designing the 'Scottish Corridor' campaign. I had intended to have two bonus Bluecoat missions at the end of the campaign featuring the real German heavies, the King Tiger and the JagPanther. The King Tiger mission was a lot of fun to play but the JgPanther mission, 'Brew Up', was absolutely no fun whatsoever and so it never even got in front of a Beta tester. I won't go into the details but basically, a squadron of Churchills, with their crews dismounted at the start of the mission, (enjoying a brew up with the infantry in their foxholes as it happens) were ambushed by no less than three Jagpanthers from behind. The result was a massacre in history and it resulted in a massacre in the game as well. In almost every case, I do a lot of my mission work ahead of BFC working on the module and so I had already done a lot of testing on this mission using US Shermans in place of the Churchills and the Shermans could pull it off from time to time. But when I finally got Churchills to play around with, they just weren't up to the task. Very simply, there was no fun to be had in this mission and so it's being reworked substantially for inclusion in the revised 'Scottish Corridor' campaign. Although we're all playing CMBN, we're a very varied bunch. We are divided into the Real Timers and the WEGO players, the H2H and the AI opponent players etc. There are also smaller sub-groups that find their fun destroyed by what they feel to be artificial time restrictions. I've already covered this at length in another thread and won't go into it again here. However, I have had one person who has been very critical of my recent work and after discussing the time limits that were originally the cause for his dissatisfaction with the game, he then switched focus to the way my missions are playtested, that real tactics don't work in the game and that I employed tricks and puzzles to make my missions artificially difficult. At each stage of these discussions, I patiently dealt with his complaints but they clearly were ignored. We've done the mission clock so now let's now talk about real tactics in the game. Although I'm better known for my campaigns, I have actually designed around ten stand-alones for the CMx2 series of games. Seven for the British Forces module and three for the Repository. In the course of designing one of those BF stand-alones, 'British Mettle', I had the good fortune to get some wonderful feedback from Mark Gibson, a Major in the Australian Army, who was playtesting it for me. He basically explained to me how to do 'combined arms' properly in the game. I learned a whole new way to play the game after that and it was an important influence on my development. before he talked me through it, I thought I was a pretty good player. How wrong I was. And I went on from there to develop my own play-style making further discoveries along the way as I explored the game more deeply. My tactics and play styles continue to evolve as I play the game. I don't think I will ever be able to say that I have perfected my tactics. Two things I will say about my tactics though. Firstly, I use SMOKE a lot. If I have it, I WILL use it, every time. And second, I aim to achieve fire superiority over my opponent at every opportunity. And that's as much as I'm going to say about tactics. Now let's talk about tricks and puzzles. A very, VERY important part of the designing process is allowing the battle to develop and tell its own story and this comes about from hours and hours of repeated play. Quite naturally, as a result of all that time spent playtesting, I become very familiar with the map and so get a feel for where would be a good place to site an AT-Gun or a MG bunker etc. Breaking into one of these defensive positions may feel like it's a puzzle to be solved and of course it is. This is a tactical challenge that a real-life commander would have to face. He'd have to work out the best way to overcome the tactical problems confronting him using only the assets available to him at that time. But what about the somewhat more insulting 'tricks'? After playtesting through certain missions for hours and hours on end, sometimes it just leads to a complete dead end while other times, I get an epiphany about what the mission needs to give it that extra 'cool' factor. What that actually is can vary tremendously. It's part of the evolution of the mission. And that's pretty much all there is to my designing. It's important to note that at no point to I resort to formulas or tricks in the process. I try to craft an AI plan that will give a good player a challenge without resorting to trickery. To be honest, I don't know any tricks. These are utterly alien to me and I'm not interested in learning any either. Now, what about the way content is tested? Absolutely everything I design is playtested very thoroughly by me before it gets in front of another Beta-tester. Since I play everything in Real Time you can be sure that it has been playtested in RT . This is my hobby and I don't have all the time in the world to do it. I prefer to play a mission through to its conclusion in one sitting and so RT suits me best. Therefore, if I put something up on the Repository, it's likely that I did all the testing myself and so it's been tested in Real Time only. However, everything that is crafted for the title/module which you PAY for has been tested in both Real Time and WEGO. It shouldn't come as any big surprise after reading the endless number of 'Which do you prefer: Real Time or WEGO?' threads that continually pop up, that the majority of player play WEGO and so it's unnecessary for anybody to ask which way it was tested. It was tested both ways. Finally, there's no doubt that the game got significantly more difficult since v2.01 introduced the improved machine gun behaviour in the game. A lot of the content that was designed earlier got more difficult. When I play campaigns, I like to let off steam and relax from time to time. In 'Montebourg' there are a number of relaxed missions, like 'Beau Guillot', 'La Grand Hameau', 'Le Ham' and 'The Farmhouse' that were quite easy to win. The same missions are now a bit more difficult even without the revisions. When going back to these pre-v2.01 works, it's important to bear in mind that they were not intended to be that hard to win. In time, I hope to revise the two big campaigns that I've already made to ease up the difficulty a bit. but that's not going to happen any time soon. As a footnote, I'd like to add that if I want to sit back and relax and enjoy a game of CMBN against the computer player after a hard day at the office, I play a Quick Battle. I actually do do this from time to time and I would strongly recommend that others do this from time to time as well. The stand-alones are designed to provide the player with a more challenging, and less frivolous experience. The campaigns, bar the traing campaigns, are intended for the more serious of the serious players. Lame scenarios and campaigns wouldn't help the game at all. If you have taken the time to read all this I would like to thank you for your indulgence.

Really? Why? Have you not read those threads I posted links to? Nothing much that I haven't said to you already while addressing your concerns. LOL. This is more honest of you. Thank you. And I'mnot aghast/stunned that you have failed to address any of the remarks I have made about the manner in which you convey your feedback to the designer. There is no contrition at all. Instead, I am expected to be mollified by your false praise. Now that would make me a rather shallow fellow indeed. The thing is, I did listen to your feedback and designed the Scottish Corridor campaign to have variable difficulty but you didn't appreciate it, did you? You just found new ways to be negative with a snide twist to it in doing so. And this is not my job. I'm not getting paid to do it like you were being paid in your job. Your bosses doled out harsh criticism and you're a better [X] for it. Good for you. I've had that in my career as well but the thing is, you're not my boss. I have no professional experience of scenario design at all. This has never been anything other than a hobby for me. I am an enthusiast who was invited to join the team, that's all. FWIW, I don't come here to fight with posters and I'm not going to engage with you any more, Erwin. I've obviously lost my patience with you and so it's best for all of us , you, me and the community, if I put you on my Ignore list and we can both happily continue to enjoy CMBN, me designing and you ... whatever.

Erwin Well, as glad as I am that you appreciate the Road to Dinas, I really don't believe that you are a fan of my work at all. Look at your intrusive 'Gawd, not another 'find the trick to win' comment you made when somebody was giving me feedback on the Scottish Corridor. The Grainville map is a very detailed and accurate map and so siting an important AT asset is a real challenge that a real commander would face fighting at Grainville. I didn't contrive the map to make it a puzzle. The battleground and the OBs are what they were or as close to it as I could manage and nothing more. The unfounded implication that I made it 'tricksy' is insulting to the designer and shows no respect for the immense amount of hard work put in to make something like that. Also, when I informed you that the Scottish Corridor campaign was scripted to send the player to easier version if he was losing missions, you made that rather snide remark about 'failing upwards'. You seem so determined to be pissed off with my work that I really wonder why you bother playing my stuff at all. . Nice, but really, your compliment doesn't really hold up when you read the posts you've made in those threads I posted links to earlier. You will see all those comments about my designs requiring solving puzzles to win, designed for wrist twitchers (nasty! and no apology either), and that missions should be winnable first time through using sensible tactics etc. These seem to be your real sentiments seeing as how you're still voicing them just as harshly fifteen months on. Fair enough, you don't actually insult the designers personally, call us idiots or morons or anything like that. And it's good for us to get constructive negative feedback on our work as well. A good designer will appreciate honest criticism when he gets it. (That's why the revised Scottish Corridor veteran mission #13 will not have Panthers in it.) But your particular form of criticism is not what I'd call constructive criticism at all. Maybe it's a problem of my perception but I'm not alone if it is

That's more like it although perhaps you're just a tad further towards the other end of the difficulty spectrum than most here too;) I appreciate complexity in my games as well. But where this game truly shines is that I can get my 'fix' in quite a short period of playing time. I can set up and play through an average sized mission in one afternoon's session, less than two hours most of the time. Whereas some of the other complex monsters that I play can take weeks or months to play just one campaign. With CMx2 campaigns, we can make them linear or we can make them dynamic to varying degrees. A strictly linear campaign would simply demand that the player wins the mission or a - gets ejected from the campaign, or b - skips a mission and continues at a later point Now, if this were the case, I really could understand why people were complaining about how difficult it is to get wins in missions in a campaign. But I'm not really aware of any campaign that shipped with the disks that played out like that. I think every single campaign I have ever crafted, from Hasrabit for CMSF through to The Scottish Corridor for CMBN has been fully dynamic. That means that the campaign follows different branches depending on the player's success and doesn't simply eject him from the campaign for losing a single mission. This means that a player can suck up the loss and continue to play the campaign to its natural conclusion. Yup, that may mean the campaign ending earlier than the full 14+ missions but that's why it's dynamic. You can argue that if you don't win, you won't get to see all the missions in the campaign but if you win every mission, you won't see the alternates. So winning all the time doesn't let you see the whole campaign, just one possible outcome. Winning first time, every time makes dynamic campaigns a complete waste of everyone's time. And another one... http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=103484

Rambler Sometimes, it just gets tiring listening to the same old complaints coming from the same folks time after time. It gets doubly frustrating when one of the chief complainers sounds off when a mission is too easy as well. http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=106397 Apparently, it's frustrating for him when the AI throws in the towel too early as well. So it's getting harder and harder to make anything that will keep him happy. Sometimes, it really is just time to find another game to play when you're no longer getting any pleasure from the old one. Unless you want the titles and modules to ship with content that is easy to win on the first playthrough. That would be really easy for us to do and it really would save us all a lot of work creating and testing content in the future.

I remember Billy Connolly singing an amusing little ditty about the Goldfish all about how all it does is swim round and round, and round and round, and round, and ROUND and ROUND!! This song seemes to be appropriate for one swimmer in this forum. http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=102955 http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=103215 Just two threads but I'm sure there are plenty more where the same complaint comes up, gets dealt with and then gets forgotten. Because here we are... again. (Love the attitude being displayed in the last paragraph btw A nice twist of the knife. You're getting good at this) And round and round, and round and round, and round and round, and round and round. And round and round, and round and round, and round and round, and round and round.

I really wish WEGoers and RTers would stop taking pops at each other over which playstyle is more realistic. Neither is more realistic. While RT is more open to abuse, experienced RT players don't hit the pause button very often. So please stop suggesting that we do this.

I've got nothing but respect for GeorgeMc's work. Not only are his maps in a class all of their own but he really does seem to have nailed the armour/combined arms aspect of the game down in a way that I fear I never will have. I can't wait to play his East Front missions.

I know. Every Montebourg map was crafted from looking at Google Earth especially when Street View was available, and eliminating any modern looking structures. No scenario editor overlay back in those days so it all had to be done through carefully measuring distances, etc. There is a Street View of the Hameau Road at the back of Beau Guillot and the road looks like it's lined by bocage, or at least tall hedges so I went with tall bocage when making the map. I know most of you are utterly wowwed by MacIsle's map but really, the only thing he did differently from the maps made by most of the Beta team, and many of the community-made maps as well, was to post photos of the real-world locations side by side with his screenshots. That's not to make light of the effort he put in to making that map. We all know how difficult it is to make them as accurately as that and so kudos to the guy for putting in the hours to get it as right as possible. The guys on the Beta team really do put in a lot of effort to get their maps as accurate as possible when modelling a real-life place. They're no slackers when it comes to making their maps.

Yes, George Mc is the amateur scenario designer that other amateur scenario designers aspire to be tudhodge Yup, that's the general area alright. The two roads in the photos are the A1120 and the B1120, close to Framlingham where I used to live. Such a beautiful, quiet place to live, except when the farmers were spraying their fields with chicken poop. That's a pre-Montebourg era map as well. I learned how to use the CMBN editor by recreating the village I lived in in as close detail as the editor would allow.

Suffolk, eh? Let's see if you recognise this location... Fat chance, I know, but you never know. That would be the White Horse pub but there are no pub commercial buildings in CMBN. And I used to love the view across the river Alde.

Of course.

Agreed. Indeed, I designed this to be played in RT... http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=314&func=fileinfo&id=2084 (Utterly shameless, if not shameful, plug)

With the exception of Normal Dude, who is on BFC's payroll, all the campaigns, missions and QB maps, that ship with the disks are made by so-called amateurs Try out The Road to Montebourg first. It was designed primarily to be fun to play with a couple of toughies to keep it interesting. If you want it to be a more challenging experience, try the revised version that is on the Repository. http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=314&func=fileinfo&id=2082 I'd recommend playing the revised version although it is most definitely designed by an amateur

They're all contained in one campaign. Basically, the campaign script checks how you are doing in the campaign from time to time and if you're winning big (i.e. better than Minor Victories), it will direct you to more difficult versions of the following missions (Veteran). If you are losing, you'll go to easier versions (Green, or Regular if you're playing Veteran). Regular and Veteran players get to play a special bonus mission after the regular campaign finishes BTW, I've refined this testing system for the MG campaign.

Yes, I was thinking along the lines of adding 10 minutes to each Regular version when the AI is defending and adding a LOT more time to the Green versions. (Veterans will keep the tight limits though) There's no doubt that this has become more difficult since v2.01. I have also decided to make a substantial revision of the 'Going to Church' mission to make it much tougher for the Brits. It sounds like too many people were able to get wins here so I'm going to make it more historical . To offset this, the difficulty of the Regular "Crescendo of Doom' mission will be toned down a wee bit, and a LOT for the Veteran version.

This has been asked for We'll just have to wait and see if it happens. I would like to see reinforcements arrive anytime after the mission starts so that the player doesn't have to wait 5+ minutes to use artillery that the designer doesn't want the player to have for a pre-planned barrage. I have quite a few missions on hold that would greatly benefit from this feature.

Well, since you asked . The Germans used King Tigers to support their counterattacks that day and wherever they attacked, the Brits were unable to hold them. However, that wouldn't make for a fun scenario* so I added a couple of tank destroyers to the Brit OB that weren't there on the day so that you do have the tools to do the job. They can take the KTs down if you can get the tank destroyers into good positions. * This is the reason why the other bonus mission, 'Brew Up', never made it into the campaign. The Churchills couldn't take out the three JgPanthers. It was historical but it most definitely was NOT fun. I will include a <cough> less-historical version of 'Brew Up' in the revised campaign though

I would think that people starting out playing RT (ab)use the Pause button far too frequently. However, with a bit of experience, you stop using it almost altogether. That's how I play the game. A 45 minute scenario takes under an hour to play after set-up. I guess RT v WEGO will always be an issue. It's like the 'cats make better pets than dogs' debate. There are cat people and dog people and they both find ways to justify their preference and in a small number of cases, belittling the other for their preference as well.

Nope, but it's not beyond the realm of all possibility that I might craft a short 'Germans at Gavrus' campaign using the full-sized Gavrus map. Maybe even a Grainville campaign too but there were more diverse units fighting in the latter so it would be less historical. I love playing as the Germans so it's an interesting project. For the rest, the defenders usually got steamrollered (after giving very good account of themselves) and so there's not much scope for a number of batttles using the same core units there. And, by the way, thanks for your appreciation guys. When your work gets appreciated, it inspires you to keep working. It takes a lot of time and effort to put together something as big, and sophisticated, as this. As you've remarked, it's not just 15 linear-linked missions

ONLY because they have all the time in the world to make it just right whereas the designers have to craft the skins for all the new models within a limited time frame, say two or three months. Models can't ship without skins. Just how good do you think some of these amateur mods would look if they had to work to the same schedule? I use most of Aris' mods, I love them, but he probably spends 2-3 weeks+ working on just one vehicle skin. The designers don't have the luxury of time like that so this should be borne in mind when making any comparisons. And that's how some of the current testers made it onto the team. FMB and Normal Dude were both once 'some talented individuals' who were invited to join the team because of their efforts. Good work gets noticed

Not quite as absurd as that. The German Friendly Force Preservation bonus is set at 80% for 100vps meaning that you have to kill 20% or more to rob them of it. Further, the Allies have an Enemy Unit Objective worth 500 vps for the entire German force, so kill 20+% and you get 100+vps. On the other hand, the Germans have an enemy unit objective total of 100vps. However, and this is a big however, you must exit your forces before the German player touches either of the main farmhouses on either side of the highway. They get 500vps for doing this. Allowing them to do so will prevent the remnants of Turnbull's platoon from escaping back to join the battalion for the next 2/505 battle. Of course, you can stay and fight and inflict 300+vps of casualties on the German and prevent him from touching the objectives and win that way as well.