usgubgub

Put simply, this is a sadist scenario. The Kiwi troops don't have the quality, the leaders or the support to have an even chance to carry the mission out. After many attempts, I got a draw where I took the station but not the farm. The FJs in the station were all wiped out but one, in the farm they had no casualties. I lost two thirds of my platoon. To win, you need luck. Because of the positioning of the FJs in the station's middle building, and the lack of cover from which you can observe them and fire on them, taking the station is always going to cost dear. I got good at using the 2" smoke and time a move by groups with SMGs so they could fire on the middle building from close by while covered by a bren team in the shellholes just ou from Perano farm. The trick is to assign the move order with a fire order from the arrival point just seconds before the smoke covers the window. Your infantry gets into position under cover of the smoke and begins firing their Tommy guns into the window before the FJs can spot them. The smoke clears away litterally seconds after they begin to fire, but sometimes that is enough to give them the edge. This move got good results three times out of eight, depending on whether the FJs would manage to stay unsuppressed despite the incoming fire, in which case your assault teams were toast in very short order. Without Thompsons and with the Brens busy keeping the FJs in the farm suppressed there is no point in going on. More mortar ammo is needed, also better leaders/troops as very often the minute someone gets hit the Kiwis in this scenario tend to remember urgent appointments elsewhere and bolt. The answer to winning this scenario is in the editor. I made a couple of mods and got a total victory (just to be able to complete the mission I put a Vickers and a sniper in the building at the back and gave the 81mm mortar teams a full complement of ammo). Now, this is perhaps too big an adjustment. One could fiddle with the victory conditions to penalize the Kiwis/favor the FJs for suffering/inflicting casualties. The Vickers is probably surplus with plenty of 81mm ammo. Having tried to attack the farm first a few times I can confirm my preference for the station first approach. There aren't enough mortar bombs to suppress effectively the FJs in the station long enough to approach the farm and bring fire to bear on it. I used the 81mm smoke allocation (2 rounds!!!) to cover two sections approaching up along the map edge. I get them into position along the wall next to the map edge, still in full view of the FJs in the station, so they have to crawl and hide for the last 20m. I then put a stonk down on the farm which doesn't kill anybody and doesn't suppress anybody (again, not enough rounds). I can't move close while the farm is being bombarded. When I move, the FJ HQ with two Schmeissers mows down a few of the attackers, the rest promptly bolt and end up being shredded by the FJs in the station who now have a perfect view as the smoke has long faded.

There are 6 Bluecoat scenarios in the scenarios that shipped with the model: CW Evil be unto him CW Keep calm and carry on CW Nedforce CW Normons CW Seven Winds CW Ubique. There is another Bluecoat scenario in the Scottish Corridor campaign, La Mancelliere. My fictional maps aim at creating some fictional terrain similar to how the Bluecoat terrain is described that can then be used to have fun recreating small or large engagements or "campaigns" with the feel of the brutal short range, claustrophobic fighting that British units experienced during this phase of the campaign.

That sounds great,. thank you very much!

I tried unpacking the campaign scenarios that come with GL with the CMBN Scenario organiser. It had worked with CMFI. It does not seem to find the new GL campaigns. Any suggestions?:confused:

Kursk was ill conceived strategically. After two years of terrible reverses the Soviet Army was upping its game. It had much stronger reserves than the Germans ever suspected. It was getting Ultra intelligence from its spy in Bletchley Park. Hitler should have updated his respect for his foe, but he went on the basis of "one last kick and they'll fold for good". Thinking like a corporal. What you describe, though (the black knight in Monty Python and the holy grail) is not a good analogy forthe German Army at Kursk. It fits Bagration, a year later better. At Kursk the Germans had plenty of fight left in them. A quick look at the relative casualty figures bears that out. The Soviet Army could replenish their resources, the Germans could not, so in relative terms the result was catastrophic for the Germans and strategically beneficial for the Soviets. But the Germans still had 22 moths of fight left in them, and casualties for the Soviets in those months were not the sort suffered when facing a lame adversary who's had all its limbs cut off. Another very important element after Kursk is that Hitler took even greater charge of the conduct of operations, whereas Stalin came to trust his staff more and interfered much less. Thus, the relative quality of the leaderships reversed.

"This is mostly utter hokum". I beg to differ. That may be your opinion, to which you are entitled, but it is not fact. Zitadelle was failing, no doubt about it. The Germans had no surprise, frequent delays had allowed the Soviets who were well informed about German intentions to strengthen their defenses. German armor was committed piecemeal in places. The Soviets had got better at defense. I could go on. The events in Sicily weighed heavily on Hitler's mind when he decided to call the offensive off. Von Manstein did not agree, and got three more days before Hitler made his mind up and ordered the whole of the SS Panzekorps transferred to Italy. In the end, only the Leibstandarte went there, minus its equipment, the other divisions being needed to resist the Soviet counterattack at Belgorod. We cannot rerun history to see what the German High command would have done had the landings in Sicily not taken place. I said they were instrumental, not decisive: German timing, lack of surprise and Soviet operational improvements were. You are clearly well informed and competent but you do not have a monopoly on truth on this subject.

Of course the war in the West was important in bringing down Hitler's Germany. Nobody understood that better than Stalin, who bitched and moaned at his allies since 1941 about what they were doing to get the Second Front going. The landings in Sicily were instrumental in bringing about the end of the German effort at Kursk, where they finally lost the initiative on the Eastern Front. Having the elite of their armored forces busy in Normandy repulsing the landings and later trying to destroy the bridgehead deprived the Germans of resources crucial to counterattacking Soviet breakthroughs in Bielorussia. I was mainly referring to the share of the butcher's bill, particularly with reference to casualties inflicted in men and material on the German forces, but also the cost in casualties to the Soviets compared to the other allies.

I'm not sure what we are arguing about. Things may look and sound different 53 miles west of Venus than where I grew up. West Europeans (and within that, each nationality), Americans, Russians or Japanese, our perceptions of history will be heavily influenced by different factors and according to how much interest we have in the subject (in my case, one helluva-lot), how much reading we have done about the subject (again, large amounts), whether we keep up with new writings and how we process all that information to draw our own conclusions. When I grew up, in Europe, the French were generally given an easier ride than the Italians. The grown ups I knew who had lived during the war and observed it from Switzerland spoke in ways that reflected their sympathies and the spin that the British had initiated. Germans generally kept very quiet (except among themselves, as you well know), the French were schizophrenic and every Italian you met had done something in the Resistance (and probably worn black shirts at an earlier time). People from the Low Countries did not like the Germans or the French much. Everybody loved the Americans, except Communists (and there were lots of them). From most people's perspective in Western Europe, the British were the lions that stood up to Hitler alone (the French would argue with that), the Americans were their tall, strong, well nourished and even better armed cousins from over the ocean who came over and made the liberation of Europe possible; very little was said about the Russian contribution (only after years of interest and study was I able to understand that, compared to what went on on the eastern front, the rest of the war in the West was pretty much a side-show). An embarrassed silence reigned over the issue of how millions of people (including those in whose name the hot conflict had started) ended up trading occupation and plunder by one tyranny for occupation and plunder by another. The morphing of the shooting 2nd World War into the Cold War distorted narratives and available materials in Europe for decades. I expect something similar happened in America.

It would not be the first or only instance where a country's contribution to a war effort was not proportional to its political importance in the victor's alliance. British troops were a minority in most theaters where the Empire's armies were fighting, but Britain was the only politically important representative, which did cause tensions and had consequences beyond the end of the war. Torch succeeded because covert operations (diplomacy and espionage) incapacitated or neutralised a good proportion of Vichy French fighting power. Yes, many French units resisted from token effort to determined stands, but in the main the real fight only began when the Germans reacted, the Allies having got all the way to Tunisia with comparatively light casualties. As to the "we wuz robbed" school of military history, I agree about the American Civil War though that was a consequence of the far-sighted magnanimity of the victors who, for the sake of strategic imperatives, were happy to allow that narrative to develop. When you speak of WWII Eastern Front and WWI, I presume you are talking mainly of German revisionist narratives. These were important in Germany during the inter war years and in West Germany during the cold war, but were not intelligible by the majority of non interested observers. Certainly, the post WWII revisionist German narrative had no resonance is East Germany. In the West it was a function of the need to staff the nascent Bundeswehr with ex Wehrmacht officers which created the opportunity to indulge in such arguments (for example, Von Manstein's "Lost Victories"). On matters such as war crimes it is clear that the winning powers had the decisive impact on the narrative that prevailed. This does not detract from the horror of German and Japanese crimes. It does beg the question why powers on the winning side that perpetrated crimes of equivalent horror were not made to account for them, the answer being that such an intent was unenforceable. It is easy to forget that WWII in Europe did not start according to anyone's plans, but that it started as a result of a diplomatic dynamic that got out of control. Hitler had got used to getting his way and miscalculated the Allies reaction to his invasion of Poland. The allies declared war but did not attack, their resolve being weak at the time. France wanted to fight a defensive war on the frontier, but Hitler had other plans.

Most of those jokes were circulated by americans after France refused to dance to their tune at the time of the second Gulf war. I agreed with American policy at the time on the basis that it had lost credibility as a military power because of too many half baked adventures where it pulled back after losing comparatively few men because of politicians' fear of media repercussions. America needed to show it meant business and could see things through to victory. In hindsight, they were hasty in declaring victory and had not thought out what to do with Iraq after Saddam's regime had been toppled. France was one of the main Allies in the North-West Europe campaign. Their support was needed to guarantee the success of Torch, much earlier on. The murky goings on at that time are well documented and have nothing to envy to what happened with Italy within a year. France, though, was not a fascist country, whereas Italy was. France had also been on the winning side from the beginning, and was occupied in part by the Germans, with the other part governed by a German puppet regime. History always being written by victors, this guaranteed a very bad press for Italy and a more lenient treatment for France. I was born in 1955 and as I was growing up there were plenty of jokes such as Italian tanks having only one forward gear but ten reverse gears etc. Italian troops were considered cowardly and prone to surrendering without firing a shot, which certainly happened but was not an exclusively Italian prerogative. I never came across such lore regarding France back then. Only when they wouldn't dance to Dubya's tune was all of that dragged up. They were being punished for pursuing their own interests, which differed from those of the then Republican, Neoconservative American Administration. Who had the last laugh in that context, though? Propaganda is just noise. It distorts the truth to facilitate the imposition of narratives that suit the purpose of whoever ends up holding the biggest megaphone when the fight is over. Russian war crimes were glossed over because they had large armies crawling all over Eastern Europe and had undoubtedly paid most of the butcher's bill. Stalin probably would not have seen what the fuss was all about, but he was canny enough to exploit the opportunity to deal its most dangerous ploitical enemy, Fascism, a mortal blow by using its undeniable crimes and atrocities to bury it politically. In this he succeeded. Such is power politics. Morality does not come into it, but it can be exploited when convenient. My own assesment of the situation immediately after the war is that the Soviet Union could not have carried out an aggressive campaign against the Western Allies after the fall of Berlin. The effort to get to Berlin had been enormous, and the Armies must have been exhausted. Taking the might of American industry on would also have been a huge gamble, and the Americans were only months away from obtaining nuclear capability, something Stslin would have known about. The main motivation for Soviet Troops fighting spirit, revenge on the Germans, had also become redundant. It was not an option for the Allies, equally, despite Patton's solitary enthusiasm for the venture. Neither side had a powerful enough incentive to attack (no surprise, no superiority, no obvious gain, plenty of obvious risks), so things settled pretty much where they had got to at Potsdam. What we got was the cold war instead. Who won that one is still, in my opinion, a matter to be settled.

Talking about changing sides, the names Hitler and Stalin come to mind. They started on the same side against poland, remember?

Everyone seems to agree the Italian Armies were poorly equipped and very poorly led. Did they put up a good fight occasionally? There are many accounts of heroism by individual Italian soldiers and small formations. Politically, Italy was led by an opportunist who thought as long as his country could be seen at the right place at the right time its armies did not need to be well eqwuipped or led. In the early stages of WWII in Europe, when the Germans blew aside any opposition and seemed invincible, it was easy to take that view. But WWII turned into a great endurance/material contest, and every nation participating was tested to its limits. Victory went to those who made the right strategic choices after 1941. Little that went on before really counted, save perhaps the Battle of Britain, which kept the British in the war when they were alone. France performed very poorly, but it does not get anwhere near the bad press Italy gets because it was not led by a fascist regime when the war broke out (by the way, Tarquelne, Italy invented Fascism, the name comes from the logo of the Italian Fascist party, depicting a Roman military symbol; Hitler copied italian Fascist ideas). Like France, Italy was eventually split in two, the South with the Allies and the North still nominally with the Axis, but only the italians were stuck with the stigma of changing sides. Many of these issues were political and highly complex, they don't lend themselves to simplistic and prejudiced analysis. Yes, Rommel defeated the Matildas at Arras by improvising a defence with Flak guns. The Italians did not have a Rommel. Poorly led, not necessarily poor soldiers or a herd of cowards. There are plenty of examples of German formations performing poorly when poorly armed or led.

Commando units were organised in 5 troops of 65 men, each troop had 2 sections of 30 men subdivided into 3 sub-sections of 10 men. There was an additional heavy weapons troop. Sub-sections were armed with more Brens and SMGs than a regular infantry section. Heavy troops had HMGs (Vickers) and 3in Mortars. 2in Mortars were also used, I don't know whether they were with the 30 man sections, in the troop HQ or with the heavy troop. Just adding berets and making the sections "crack" or "elite" and eliminating a platoon from a standard infantry company would approximate the simulation, but the firepower would not be adequately modelled. A standard infantry battalion also had 4 companies including heavy weapons, a Commando had six. I suppose this means Commandos can be sort of approximated below platoon level, with far less firepower than would have been the case.

Green berets all 'round, then. Battlefront have not included Commandos for probably the same reason FJs are not included: they are different and require more work. In the case of the Commandos I know they fought on after D-Day (they had, among other things, a running street fight with HJ PzGren in Rots), but there were many fewer of them than FJs. They were probably considered nice to have, but left out in the interest of getting the module out earlier than would have been the case. It's not just about the uniform, they were organised and armed differently from the Infantry. Maybe they will be included in some odds and sods module to come.

Royal Marine Commandos wore green, not red berets. Paras wore red berets, with the para camo smock, not battledress. I can't recall what the beret colour for Army Commandos was, or for that matter whether Army Commandos units fought in Normandy. I seem to recall that Commando units had a very different unit organisation to standard infantry formations, and that small unit weapons were also different, with more automatic weapons. I am not sure, though, whether this was true in June 1944 for the units that landed and fought in Normandy.

Thank you very much, mjkerner, that was very useful. I agree with you, more AI gruops would make it easier to come up with some really good AI plans. Triggers make sense, too, though conceptually they must be quite a challenge to implement.

I have read the scenario design manual a number of times, but I find it treats many elements in a very superficial way, and it is in any case specific to CMSF. What I would find more useful is something that explains more clearly how to use the available groups, order types and stances to achieve different effects and model different situations. I am really looking for ideas from people who have successfully tried and tested techniques that bring out the best in the available functions, and to understand what problems exceed their limitations. For example: how do you get a fire support group to set up correctly along a hedgerow or wall line without losing its cover and with LOS to the next hedgerow/wall line? When is assault the right order type, and when maximum assault? Does it make a difference if one uses cautious/normal/active stances in an advance, assault or maximum assault context or is cautious only to be used in a static defense context? In a dynamic situation, does assault preceed maximum assault or do things work best the other way 'round? After setup, there are only order types available that imply movement. What if all one wanted was for the units to remain in place but change stance? For instance, you may want a group of units to start the game hiding and then switch to "ambush 75m". What is the best way to achieve that? Moving groups of units away from the enemy or sideways seems to result in them stopping with the wrong facing. I get around this by getting them to retreat (or move sideways) further than intended and then give them another move order to the intended location that will result in them facing the right way. Is there a better way 'round this? How do you give orders to reinforcements if you want their arrival time to be variable? The exit before/exit after system does not seem to allow flexibility here. If reinforcements arrive near the edge of the map or in any event some distance from their side's objectives, will they move against the enemy without specific AI orders or will they just sit there? If the computer side has arty support, is there anyway to script how and when this will be used other than at the very beginning of a battle? Is it a question of getting an HQ or FOO with contact with arty assets somewhere where they can see the enemy and they will do the rest? What are the best orders to give them to make sure they do that? How is it best to organise an assault by armored infantry using their armored half tracks to move within striking distance and then in support? Do you put the infantry in one group and the vehicles in another? How do you co-ordinate them while the infantry is mounted? Is it possible/practical to organise concentric attacks on a surrounded position? These are just a sample of practical design problems I have encountered in trying to design scenarios. As I am inexperienced I end up abandoning the projects and just playing as both sides, which can be as entertaining as it is problematic. With more practice/confidence I may just get to the point where I can feel good enough about my work to post it on the repository for other people to enjoy. Right now, I think I don't know enough. Any advice, suggestions or tips would be greatly appreciated.

I ran into this problem in another scenario. I edited the trees out in the map. Putting the right kind of trees in the hedge tiles adjacent and parallel to a road produces a very good effect, without the need to put trees in the road tile. One could imagine that putting trees in the road tile represents a lane where foliage is so thick as to limit LOS along the road axis. This makes sense. If the scenario designer or the end users prefer to simulate a road with clear LOS along its axis, take the trees out of the road tiles.

How likely is it that an out of ammo American HQ or FOO group would move up to and parade around a German patrol in completely open terrain? Have the people who are pushing this point read anything about modern combat psychology or do they seriuosly believe fighting men are all John Wayne, Rambo or Chuck Norris types who are just itching to get down to some lethal hand to hand with the opposition? During both World Wars soldiers from all sides actively tried to avoid direct confrontation at close range with the enemy. It was not uncommon for chance encounters at that range to resolve themselves by both sides walking away. CMBN is a tactical small unit combat simulation, not a first person shooter. The video is not pathetic, posting it to try to make that point is.

Ok, mjkerner, sorry to be the bearer of bad news and causing you extra work, thanks for the interest, I look forward to downloading the new files when they are ready, glad to hear about the twist of using EZ's uniforms. I adopted them as an alternative in case the prob was only mine. They are simply outstanding, and I immediately thought that if his efforts could be combined with yours and give the ability to have divisional insignia that would be really excellent.

I am having a problem with this mod. I had it on my laptop and now it has occurred on my PC as well. Both systems use Windows 7. Whwen I place the file "no patch_dark infantry uniforms.brz" or any other file from this download obtained after using RezExplode I subsequently cannot load CMBN. When I try to explode the file with RezExplode I eventually run out of memory and nothing is placed in the expoded folder, which gets stuck with the label "in progress". Is anyone else experiencing this? Is there a way around this problem? I like the mod, but as it stands I cannot use it.

Also, the biggest back route for these guys to creep back into power is in Brussels. Big, unelected power structure, riddled with crypto reds. They got game, set and match.

I should also say that, as long as the European right can only put up clowns such as Berlusconi, they don't stand much of a chance.

The ruling European elite consists of people born largely in the 50's who went through university through the late sixties - seventies at the height of the cold war. Their heroes were Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro and Che Guevara. This was the result of a very well orchestrated and effective campaign of cultural infiltration financed and promoted by very powerful Soviet organisations, such as the KGB. As I was born in 1955 in the heart of Europe, I saw this happening with my own eyes. Even in the small and inconsequential part of Europe where I grew up (Southern Switzerland), the guys running things today were going 'round back in the Seventies waving little red Mao books, reading Karl Marx and kept large posters of Che Guevara at the head of their beds. A few of these arseholes secretly envy Stalin and Mao's absolute powers. It is now an accepted axiom that the European left is better organised than other political forces in the area, that they are firmly entrenched in all the key institutions and that each time they get kicked out a front door, they eventually creep back through a window. Often, a leader of a right leaning political force suddenly veers hard left once he/she manages to win power (Chirac, Sarkozy). That is often because he is either an infiltrator (Mao was a card carrying and active member of the Chinese Nationalist Party. He was going to get there no matter what route would take him) or he realises that he has to deal with the powerful infiltrators running the major state institutions, who routinely wear these guys down and block reforms they don't like. I can't see this state of affairs changing. At least at present I can still write stuff like this without fear of being arrested, but I wonder how much longer this will be true.:eek:

Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, Hoo Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Mussolini, Franco, Saddam Hussein and a whole host of other more or less minor dictators with their ideologies, terror apparata, war fighting machines and disastrous policies were and are still manifestations of the fractured way in which the human race evolves politically while riding a wave of technological progress that is moving much faster than our ability to adapt to it. While there are certainly plenty of reasons to justify hoping that these trends are by and large likely to lead to positive outcomes for the majority of humans over the long run, there are equally reasons to fear them leading, here and there, to disastrous situations, or even one allmighty conflagration that will consume us all. WW2 was the last time we got close to such an outcome. It was really the logical outcome of the unresolved issues left behind by WW1, the beginning of the destructive tectonic historical process caused by the explosive convergence of a number of powerful global economic, political and social trends and forces that swept away centuries old power structures. Its effect on those of us who survived it created a long period of relative peace characterised by breakneck growth in prosperity in a relatively small part of the world. As that generation is dying out, the lessons that they learned are being lost. This and the pace and sheer impetus of a multitude of new trends in world economic, political and social development increase the odds of a new series of conflagrations at some point in our not too distant future. We have only the quality of our leaders and assorted political systems to protect us from that. Oh, dear! However, I am sceptical about trying to moralise about the relative qualities of the participants in that conflict. By and large, we in the West (and in Western Europe in particular), were lucky that our geographical area settled within the US sphere of influence. Ironically, a zombified socialist power ideology seems to have survived beyond the waning of the benevolent effect of that outcome. As the US shifts its attention towards the Pacific area, the EU fiddles around with a highly suspect political project dominated by a leftist power elite of politicians and civil servants which were the result of a highly successful campaign of infiltration by the Soviet Union, leaving Europe with a power elite of crypto socialists whose lack of direct experience of the practical results of that ideology is the paradox that allows it to endure. This may eventually accelerate the strong trend that is already well developed of marginalising in world affairs the area that for millenia was at its very centre. I hope I don't live to see the consequences of that. The only thing I am certain of is that, when Francis Fukuyama talked of the fall of the Soviet Empire as signalling "the end of history", he was talking a lot of tosh. There is sure to be plenty of history to come, and some of it won't make for pretty viewing. It may feed further interesting developments for the wargaming enthusiast.