Paper Tiger

<rubs hands while cackling evilly> Actually, the minefields move around from plan to plan. Sometimes, they are in front of the German MLR. I hope you enjoy what's still to come.

I completely forgot about two maps that I had made that were intended for inclusion in the German and Canadian NATO campaigns. They never got used and they are both really good NATO quality maps. I am giving some serious thought to remodelling the building interiors of my Brit maps and recasting them into a Brit Light Infantry campaign including these two new maps. I am not sure that I have the time to create a host of new maps so this might be an interesting project to take on. I am also considering making a somewhat easier version of 'It Ain't Half Hot Mum'. I had originally planned to have some 105mm Light Howitzers in there but somewhere, they got omitted. It's a bitchin' tough mission as it stands.

Well, after making my earlier post, I fired up CMSF and played one of old favourites, 'UK Sabres at Dawn' and had a real blast. I really want to get back to work on something new for the Brits. Also saw a lot that I didn't like about my old scenario designs. Adjacent buildings with windows on the connecting walls... hmm. I am tempted to rework some of my Brit scenarios to make them a bit 'friendlier'.

I am really beginning to miss playing CMSF. After playing around with the WW2 vehicle models for a while, seeing those utterly wicked modern era IFVs and Tanks in action with their awesome array of weaponry, I think they're really cool. It's massively more violent than WW2 and that's a big draw for me. I am thinking about designing some serious Brit Light Infantry v UNCON missions, maybe for a campaign. I think things will perk up around here when the new patch comes and people are finally able to go through the campaigns.

Peach operations Thanks for the extended feedback on your progress through the campaign so far. It sounds like you'e enjoying it and so are not bothered at having to restart the campaign. You are my sort of player. By sucking up the losses and continuing, you are experiencing some of the variants as you progress through the campaign. Regarding time limits, I added at least 10 minutes to the length of most missions after playtesting to ensure that most folks would be able to do it without too much time pressure. I have to draw a line somewhere and the time limits you've got seemed fair. I want the missions to have some challenge Enemy troops are not deployed in foxholes or trenches behind bocage because they would be unable to draw LoS through the hedge. Try it. They can only fire on units on the other side of the hedgerow. very unsatisfactory and so the hedgerows are all the cover they have. Regarding AI artillery hitting your set-up zones, the AI does not have any pre-planned artillery and so what you are likely experiencing is some enemy commander spotting units at the hedgerows on the front edge of your deployment zone and calling in a strike. So your set up areas are safe from pre-planned strikes but not from strikes called in by enemy FOS after the mission starts. I'm thinking of uploading a more realistic version of the campaign to the Repository later as there are a couple of missions that should be real stinkers but I felt that making them accurate would just piss off most players. Example being that there was a lot more artillery available to the Germans in Hell in the Hedgrows and it was a real dog advancing against it. The Allies lost that battle but I decided to try and keep it winnable as long as the Allied player was willing to push hard and not worry too much about casualties. The two Ste Mere Eglise missions, Licornets and Labrynth, were supposed to be quite easy missions but I decided to link Turnbull's Stand and Labrynth together to make all the Day 2 missions more meaningful. As a result, a loss in Turnbull's Stand will have a very strong influence on the course of the battles for the rest of that phase. It affects the amount of replacements you get as well as the forces you will face in Labrynth. The idea was that if the Allies were able to hold the Germans up long enough at Neuville au Plain as Turnbull did and clear the Germans from the north of Ste Mere Eglise that more Paratroopers that got scattered on the drop would be able to rejoin their formations more rapidly. To win Turnbull's Stand, you must hit Cease Fire. You don't have to exit all your guys off the board when you do but you will lose points for them. But nowhere near as many as you will if the enemy touch one of the objectives before you do. It sounds like you had a very similar experience to the Allies in Orchard Hill by the way. They ran short on ammo too. I look forward to hearing how you get on with the rest of the campaign, especially as you are following an alternate branch to le Ham. Good luck and that's again for the feedback.

Oops. I kind of missed this as I've been busy and when I do pop in, it's been off the first page. afreau Yes, there are no engineers in the final mission by design. There are already a lot of breaks in the bocage to allow the player to approach the objective from a number of different directions. This has the added effect of making the town a mini fortress. I hope this wasn't too much of an inconvenience to you. Plus, it helped to keep the number of units manageable when played in Real Time. GerryCMBB I hope you enjoy the rest of it. It was designed to be a reasonably easy but enjoyable campaign. After playing this one, you can graduate to the more difficult campaigns that came with the disk. I did have to do a lot of reading to get the general idea for the campaign. But the maps took the most time to do. Aqua That's my sweet spot too. I primarily design for my own pleasure and I like company sized actions. There are a few bigger ones later in the campaign though but nothing unmanageable.

Pete has been the 'map maestro' for a long, long time. He produced two of the most beautiful QB maps for CMSF that I'd ever seen. I have always been inspired by Pete's maps. They are always of exquisite quality. And his talent doesn't stop with maps either. Part of his contribution to the WW2 title is present on most of our maps Hopefully, we'll see a lot more work from him in the future.

I've got a small selection of new maps in the pipeline which I intend to turn into a small-ish campaign at some point. At the moment, I'm just creating the maps so I have no idea if it will end up being a German v US AI or US v German AI campaign. This will be a fantasy campaign as the maps I'm working on are very detailed representations of the villages and farms along the A1120/B1120 between Peasenhall and Framlingham in Suffolk. I used to cycle through these little villages almost daily when I lived in Suffolk and sometimes, seeing them brings a lump to my throat.

Sounds like a mod I'll be grabbing later today . Very sentimental but beautiful music. I guess it will make me want to watch the entire series, yet again... edit to add: got it. Sounds great. thanks for sharing

I am currently working on converting some of the Montebourg Campaign maps for use as QB maps: Because they are being extensively tested before release, creating these QBs will take quite a bit of time so I intend to release them in small packs consisting of 3-4 maps. The first map pack will consist of the maps for campaign missions 2, 3 and 4 - Ecoqueneauville, la Grand Hameau and le Hamelet. There will be three versions of each map, an ASSAULT, ATTACK and PROBE map, each with a slightly different focus with respect to scoring to reflect the different nature of the three actions. For the time being, there will be no MEETING variants but they may come later. These QB maps will be highly customised for SMALL infantry battles only, not TINY or NORMAL+. The official QB maps that shipped with the game had to be playable with every force composition possible in mind. I only play infantry-centric QBs anyway and so I'm designing them to suit my play preferences. Of course, the Human player is free to chose whatever force he wishes to play with, but he must bear in mind that an AI attacker with lots of vehicles will likely produce a very unsatisfactory experience because the AI plans were not tested with vehicles in mind.

I have never seen this happen, as you describe, with a group executing the Advance order Really? What I described is generally what happens when you keep the distance between the two map zones quite short, i.e. about 100m or less for Infantry groups. If you are issuing them with substantially longer orders then the behaviour I described will become exaggerated. Distance does matter. Also, I would never use the Advance order for any purpose, if that is what it does. Then don't use it That will save you quite a bit of head-banging, won't it? I would like to have on order that causes the AI units to use Move or Hunt. None of them do. Yup, so would I and perhaps we'll have this functionality after BFC redesign the game interface. But at present, we can't. I think this is a handicap for the AI. I disagree with you here but you are entitled to your opinion. There are design limitations and we have to work within them and push them to the limit. You have to accept these limitations. You can't issue MOVE and HUNT orders to AI groups even though a Human player can (although I rarely use either). If you issue an AI group that has a mortar team an order to move into a zone with buildings, then the AI might move the mortar into that building. However, if you create a special AI group that contains units that you don't want to go into a building, you can work around this limitation. It costs you an AI group but it prevents that behaviour from spoiling your game experience. And we have ALL been petitioning BFC for more AI groups for years.

SteveP AI Groups are frequently composed of a mixed bunch of units. Let's break them into three categories as they will all do something different with the same movement order. There are FAST unit which are incapable of splitting and thus can't use the Assault order. These include Scouts, Snipers, Ammo bearers, and Light weapons teams. Vehicles that are part of this group will fall into this category. There are ASSAULT units. Units that can split. No need to categorise these. Finally there are HQs and mortar teams When we issue this mixed group an ADVANCE movement order to move to its first map zone, this is what we see happen generally: 1st - The FAST units get QUICK movement orders and fly off ahead of everybody else. 2nd - The ASSAULT units get Assault orders at the same time. Obviously it's going to take them a bit longer to get there. 3rd - The HQ and mortar units will hang back until at least one unit in its group reaches the first map zone. Then they get QUICK movement orders. Obviously, a FAST unit is going to get there first and so trigger the HQ's movement. Depending on the length beweeen the two map zones, the HQ wll most likely fly ahead of the ASSAULT units resulting in its death. Now, remove all the FAST units from your group and you'll see the HQs hanging back until the first ASSAULT unit reaches the map zone. Then they start moving. In other words, the lag behind quite badly. So AI group composition will make a big difference to how the group behaves. BTW, if you change the movement command to QUICK, you'll see the ASSAULT units mostly use QUICK movement orders instead of ASSAULT orders. Hope that helped.

Khane Advice on use of artillery as requested... SPOILERS * * * * * * It looks like you are making very good progress there. When I have no intel on enemy positions, I use my artillery to plot a strike in front of my advance. I wait until the barrage starts to fall and then I advance rapidly towards the strike zone. If there happen to be enemy troops there, then they'll be suppressed or killed by my artillery strike. Then I consolidate, form up and call in another strike. The 'little' 60mm mortars also come in very handy for pounding a hedgerow in front of my advance. They set up very quickly and as long as they have LoS, can start firing in as little as a minute. You don't need to put down a lot of fire to shake up the defenders either. They are Green with Low morale and so will hunker down quite quickly when a shell goes off near their positions.

Broadsword I believe you'll find this map among the QB maps. It is called: Assault Large Rough (bocage - water) QB - 025 Attack Large Rough (bocage - water) QB - 25 Probe Large Rough (bocage - water) QB - 25

There are no Terrain Objectives or any other VP parameters for the Allied side. You only get points for destroying the Axis force. Perhaps the lack of these objectives is why you got the Red Crosses. Otherwise, you got a Tactical Victory and that is all that matters. Congrats . Given more time, I have no doubt that a good player could stop the Germans cold. The AI really isn't that great at attacking.

PondScum This was intended to be one of the most challenging missions for the player in the campaign. Nevertheless, I wanted it to be winnable by the majority of players. Those casualty levels are just fine. What's paramount in this mission is that you win it as a win here eases your path through the remaining missions in the le Ham series. Losing it with high casualties is not good though

I wouldn't read anything into the GREEN experience of the US side in this mission. The Germans are GREEN too in this mission so it's a level playing field. It just happens that I think I see better, and more realistic behaviour in the game when the experience levels are a bit lower. That's all. So if you increase the US experience in the editor, be sure to increase the German's too

URC and Renaud are pretty close to the mark with the length of the hops. I usually split up my squads when attacking but if I am playing a large-ish mission and don't want all the hassle of micro-manging huge numbers of split squads, I issue Assault orders in short hops and that works just fine. Three Assault commands of 50m is better than one command of 150m. It takes longer to carry out but most of the time, you're doing this in the face of the enemy.

gautrek It's been a long time since I first fired up CMBO but I can still remember how difficult it was to manage the camera and issue commands, etc for the first few playthroughs. Because I was a real ASL fan, I was willing to put in the hard work to learn how to master the thing and eventually, I got it. It wasn't that different when I first fired up CMSF either. It look a long time to get a feel for the interface and the camera controls. I guess BFC are masters at creating great wargames with less-than-optimal user interfaces. You get used to them eventually and once you have mastered them, they become second nature. But it's work doing so and it was work in CMBO too. Give it another week or so.

COI isn't ASL for clarification - True that. It was the first SL expansion module. (I bought SL when it first came out and all the modules except 'Yanks' which for some reason, didn't appeal to me at the time, probably because it was expensive and I was a struggling Student at that time) But it was converted for playing as an ASL mission which is how I played it. Funnily enough, that scenario was the basis for my very first CMSF scenario, 'In Harm's Way'. It turned out to be very different from what I'd intended due to the US having javelins. I tried this map out with an OB as close as possible to the ASL conversion a while back but the gradual firming up of the TO&Es over time resulted in me having to undo all that work and I've never gotten around to finishing it. The plan was to create a short and utterly fictional US Airborne Infantry campaign called 'Rue d'Remarque' or some such nonsense, and this was be the second mission. Seeing as how FMB's 'Devil's Descent' is the best show in town at the moment, it might not be a bad idea to finish this project.

LOL! Bloody brilliant Sergei.

Do you mean this gap? If it is that one, then the problem is caused by the bunker and that would mean you can blame me for it . I'm developing this map as a QB map and it works fine.

The very first map I made after I got to work on WW2 was an adaption of the ASL map for one of my favourite ASL scenarios. Using half of board 5 and half of board 3 (I think) this is what it looks like just now. It's a long time since I had a look at this one. Yes, ASL maps conversions are flat and the terrain looks uttery unnatural. So I took a few liberties with the map to make it look a bit more realistic. The original ASL mission saw a small force of US paras defending a farm against an entire company of German Infantry with a PSW 222 in support. The US had a couple of captured AT guns to keep the AC away. It was a really fun mission to play, in ASL. I could play through it once from both sides in the span of a single evening when I had an opponent to play with. When we FINALLY get round to the Eastern Front, I would like to sink my teeth into a conversion on THAT most famous of all SL battles. It will fit the title's time span nicely as well

'Give the Nazis their Nebelwerfers back' Be careful what you ask for. You might just get it. I hope to review this at some point and expand it up to the fighting for Cherbourg*. If this actually gets done, I might just revive the German Neberwerfer strike in the 'Hell in the Hedgerows' mission. While playtesting the earliest versions of that mission, if it caughts you in its kill zone then it was 'campaign over'. It's just too unfair. But so is war.... At the moment, I'm putting together a small series of maps for a fictional German campaign and there will be Nebelwerfers in there. * It's likely that such an expansion will take place later once BFC have released the 'funnies' module for CMBN as I'd like to do it properly. At the moment, there are no captured French tanks and I'd like to have some in the fighting around Ste Mere Eglise.