Combatintman
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Posts posted by Combatintman
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On 9/24/2023 at 2:39 AM, Rob2020 said:
Interestingly, board wargame designer Bruce Maxwell has also chosen the BAOR as the first sequel/expansion for his upcoming Air & Armor game, largely due to accidentally having stumbled upon an expert on the BAOR. I wonder whether it's the same person BFC is using.
Also, isn't it British Army of the Rhine, rather than on? I've bever heard it called the latter.
No, I'm not involved with that title
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It might have something to do with how the core units file for the campaign was structured and the designer had to leave elements of certain units off the map in order to include the ones he needed. Anyway - I'm sure P-T will be along at some point and explain.
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Final Blitzkrieg, when the module comes out, might be a better option rather than CMFI because it would be a reasonable assumption that it will include all the late Shermans and the Pershing for the US and Commonwealth forces. Germans could be used as the North Koreans - Panther = T-34. The Brits led a Commonwealth division in Korea so people on this side of the pond probably wouldn't mind seeing them in your project although I'm not sure how you'd cook up a Centurion because I very much doubt it will appear in the module as it just missed being fielded by the time the war ended.
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On 8/15/2023 at 10:56 AM, Sunbather said:
The Heaven and Earth mod would like to have a word:
That would be the same mod that I tried to make a scenario based on an actual battle set on real terrain that had so many trees and elevation changes on it that it would not load once I got to the point of starting to lay buildings down. So yes it is an issue. My actual scenario for that title (Ap Bac - again a real battle) worked because I halved the map size, it didn't have that many trees and was an almost entirely flat map.
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Apparently coincidence according to a thread of many many many years ago which I cannot find. However, what you do in your description above is exactly what I do when my vehicles bog. Sometimes I get lucky, sometimes I don't.
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Yes mate - very good indeed, you captured the essence of the place in your map brilliantly.
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4 minutes ago, kohlenklau said:
I looked but no longer have it
It's okay mate I have saved your a55 - so you can concentrate on a true British military icon of the early war period for your 1940 efforts ... Jones's van (Dad's Army) - Wikipedia
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2 minutes ago, Aragorn2002 said:
Thank you, @Combatintman, that would be very welcome.
PM sent.
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@Aragorn2002 I actually deleted the Schirwindt images from my hard drive a few days ago but pm me if you need any help and I can revisit this and either step you through the process or knock up some overlays.
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46 minutes ago, 37mm said:
I've still got 80+ heavy artillery shells (as well as the four precision rounds) & I've a feeling I'm going to need those for the next scenario, which I started last night...
As is abundantly clear from the screenshots
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Unless - as was discovered in another thread
- troop quality is set to fanatical, the AI will auto-surrender when about 65% of casualties are suffered which is possibly the set of circumstances that you discovered in the Road to Nijmegen Campaign. To achieve your desired effect you may need to add reinforcements that never arrive or orchestrate the AI plan to ensure that the Germans hit that 65% figure.
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Check your spam email box - the email from Battlefront might be lurking there.
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8 hours ago, Sgt Joch said:
I also do not think it is relevant to focus on squad size. A squad is not supposed to fight in isolation. If a point unit runs into a superior enemy force, SOP should be to retreat and bring up other forces to deal with the threat.
For example in Vietnam, you had several situations where a U.S. infantry platoon on point ran into a NVA company/battalion. Typically, the platoon would retreat/go defensive, call in artillery/air strikes and bring up the rest of the company/battalion/other battalions, as required to deal with the threat.
Correct a Rhodesian stick was four guys - stick leader, two riflemen, and a MAG gunner. Why - That's how many people fitted into an Alouette III G-Car. However, that stick would be at least one of three and or possibly four dumped onto the ground. Later in the conflict, para sticks were deployed from a Dakota adding another five or six sticks to the mix. The key factors were however:
- An Alouette-III K-Car with a commander on board who could see the battlefield and a 20mm cannon. That would orbit the contact zone and target the enemy accordingly with the 20mm while the commander could see for himself where his own troops and the enemy troops were located and issue orders appropriately.
- A Lynx light strike aircraft would also be orbiting the contact zone and would either initiate the contact or strike as directed by the commander in the K-Car.
- Superior training.
- High motivation.
- Close cooperation generated by familiarity with working with each other.
Numbers are not the be-all and end-all by any stretch of the imagination - well-trained troops, used to working together, commanded by someone who knows what they're doing with good situational awareness having support assets on call will always deliver out of proportion to their physical numbers.
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1 hour ago, Paper Tiger said:
I had a quick look at the 'Tiger' mission and the attacking Pioneers' morale is Extreme which is probably why they don't give up. There are some very weak units mixed into the German OB but the majority are good quality and so they won't surrender. It's definitely not due to reinforcements that never arrive.
Thanks mate - every day's a school day and all that ...
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A month or two for a decent scenario, let alone a campaign, is ambitious mate ... I wish you luck though.
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42 CDO RM's assault on Mount Harriet in the same conflict was about as flanking as flanking gets so it's not like that generation of commanders either didn't know of or didn't buy into the concept of flanking. I can't speak for Wireless Ridge but I've been to Goose Green and finding a flank there is somewhat challenging - 2 PARA managed it after a while but probably had to start with the assumption that the Darwin Hill position more or less required battering through frontally. I don't recall what information was available for planning at the time but a quick swatch at the map would immediately lead to the assumption that Darwin Hill would be held and that there wasn't a whole lot of room for fancy flanking stuff let alone very few covered/concealed approaches ...
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6 minutes ago, womble said:
I suspect they weren't taken to the Falklands at least partly because of the appreciation that the PBI was going to have to walk "a fair distance" over "unhelpful" terrain in them, and at that point, they'd just become litter in a Falklands bog... NI operations didn't involve 30 mile a day yomps very often, AIUI.
The weather was similarly sh1t though ...
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14 minutes ago, PEB14 said:
I thought about it twice and, in the case I depicted, it is not the case. Indeed, the AAR shows 100% casualties for the German size. Not 99 or so, 100%. So there is no reinforcement hiding somewhere, as they would appear in the final casualties calculations.
The last defenders to fall were the StuG crew. These 5 guys amount to 18,5% of the German head count, so more than 65% of the Germans had already been killed before I dealt with the StuG. So why didn't the Germans surrender in that particular case?
- AFV may be treated differently in the head count? Like a separate AFV vehicle count?
- is auto-surrender automatic ? It may be that it is random, checked each turn once the critical head count is reached?
In which case you'll have to ask @Paper Tiger who made the scenario and the campaign as to how he managed to create this situation. All I can say is that never arriving reinforcements is a well-known trick employed by scenario designers to prevent an early auto surrender. When I started making scenarios - early auto surrenders were a frequent problem that needed a workaround to solve. The 65% ish figure I quoted is what testing showed me to be the there or thereabouts threshold. Building extra non-arriving reinforcements around that threshold has always worked as a solution. Probably the easiest way to test it is to just play a few QBs to get a sense of the whole thing and then knock up some tailored tests from that. It all depends on how much detail you really want to know. Personally, for my scenario design purposes, I'm happy with my understanding of how it all works.
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13 hours ago, waffelmann said:
Thanks for the informations
I still don't understand exactly why the vests weren't used anymore, but you don't have to understand everything, do you?!?
Didn't the British use the vests either?Flak vests were widely worn in Northern Ireland but didn't get taken to the Falklands in 1982. I never saw one the whole time I was in Germany in the 1980s. They just weren't a thing. Why? I have no idea. The first time I got issued one outside of Northern Ireland was during Gulf War 1 in 1991.
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Cohesion, cohesion, cohesion is the general rule - one of those soft factors that is generally overlooked. As a result, best practice is for each battalion to be kept together and those at lower levels of combat effectiveness pulled out of the line or kept as a reserve rather than breaking it up to bring other battalions to 100%. Of course, desperate times sometimes require that rule to be broken but most swept-up armies try to avoid getting into that situation. If you want a good example of what happens when you dump a whole bunch of odds and sods from various units onto a battlefield and hope that you'll win through superior numbers - the Argentine forces in the Falklands War in 1982 demonstrated that it wasn't the greatest of ideas.
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1 hour ago, kohlenklau said:
I will bet you a nice pint of Harp lager it is this file
red thunder v210c.brz
COPY (NOT CUT!) that file to your input folder
Does such a thing exist?
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2 hours ago, Flibby said:
Thanks Combat.
I have read that topic with great interest before and will do so again to refresh my memory.
In the meantime what I fail to glean from posts from people such as yourself or Bil, which I am entirely sure is my own fault, is the finer details rather than the bigger picture.
For example, let's say one has an elevated enemy position. Any spot which one could consider a SBF position is going to be fairly obvious to the enemy. Is the idea that regardless of that fact, if you have to fight onto the key terrain in order to establish fire superiority you just have to get on with it, or do you try to obscure your approach there, if anything making it slightly more obvious?
The theory behind tactics sits well with me I just have a hard time applying it to CM. None of the tutorials I have seen actually lead you through a scenario aside from the Jeff Paulding Armchair General Ones. Whilst very useful a lot of the attacks were 'brute force' - absolutely great and well put together, but with nothing like the detail that you have set out in your linked post...
Perhaps I just need to lose more often to some decent players
I'm a rubbish player to be honest - mainly because I spend more time in the editor than actually playing scenarios. I am very much like you - I totally get the theory, planning and tactics piece but never seem to be able to convert that into anything other than scraping victories with huge losses if I'm lucky. What I will say though is that many players from what I see on the forum chats just struggle with the concept that people get killed in combat and get fixed by trying to avoid them altogether. This leads to a paralysis in both planning and execution. I think there's an element of that on show here and personally I wouldn't worry too much about it - as you say, sometimes "you just have to get on with it." There are ways in which you can reduce the risk of course - suppression via direct and indirect fires, covered approaches, feints/deception (which only work when playing a human), obscuration, attacking from an unexpected direction, attacking a weak point or all of them combined. Which ones you use all depend on the detailed ground and the resources you have available or the resources you are prepared to commit to that particular part of the operation/plan/scheme of manoeuvre.
In the tutorial, I used suppressive fire on Objective FRITZ to allow my force to cross the gap that I assessed would be covered by fire from that position and the whole scheme of manoeuvre from there on in was to use manoeuvre along a mostly concealed approach in order to attack the position from an unexpected direction. The close assault piece in the woods was assisted by the concealment provided by the woods and me employing fire and manoeuvre using direct fire from the dismounts leapfrogging forward and their parent half-tracks. It was one of my few CM triumphs.
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Like this ...
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On 7/17/2023 at 12:44 PM, PEB14 said:
I had this experience in the third mission of The Scottish Corridor campaign: I had to wipe out ALL ennemy units. I think there was no surrender in this case because the last unit I destroyed was a StuG; I think he weighted a lot in the total points, which probably explains the Germans didn't surrender.
Nope - it is as @IanL has explained. If I don't want one side to surrender in a scenario I am making then I bung in reinforcements that do not arrive. It has nothing to do with point values it is about the number of troops and auto surrender is triggered when the side in question loses about 65% of its starting head count.
Combat Mission Cold War - British Army On the Rhine
in Combat Mission Cold War
Posted · Edited by Combatintman
There was all sorts of jiggery-pokery going on with UK force structures at the time involving the usual suspects - cap badge rivalry and saving cash on the defence budget. In essence this played out along the lines of all recce assets being owned by the RAC and anything that the RA could claim being owned by the RA. Recce regiments are a good example - all armoured and infantry regiments lost their recce CVR(T) platoons/troops to RAC recce regiments and all infantry/MBT-equipped tank regiments lost their antitank assets to the RA. In the case of anti-tank stuff, the RA formed independent antitank batteries (all RHA) followed by the inevitable discussion about how they would be employed - as batteries in their own right, parcelled out etc etc until ... surprise, surprise, everyone changed their minds again and all of the stuff returned from whence it came. Have a look here ...
(69) Swingfire 1977-1984 | Army Rumour Service (arrse.co.uk)v