Ithikial_AU

Steve's will is my command.

@BFCElvis - For pinning please. Steve has let me off the proverbial leash to release some bones for CMBN in 2023. Relive the opening days of the Normandy Campaign from the perspective of American and German forces fighting for control of the Cotentin Peninsula of France. From D-Day through to the 13th of June, take command of forces from the 4th Infantry, 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions, as they fight for a foothold on the western edge of Operation Overlord. Alternatively, take command of German formations in the area, including the 6th Fallschirmjäger Regiment as it tries to hold back the Allied Invasion. A Taster of Included Content - Three Campaigns o We Start Here – Follow the exploits of the 101st Airborne and 4th Infantry on D-Day. Follow the first paratroopers to hit the ground just after midnight, through to the evening of June 6th. Get off the beach. o Purple Heart Lane – Command the 101st Airborne from the Battle of Ste Come du Mont through to the Battle of Carentan. § A slight experiment in campaign design, allowing the player to fight a rolling battle at their own pace over several in game days. Can you keep pace with history or will the 17SS Panzer Grenadier Division arrive in time to make your task more difficult? Current count, 110 scenario variants so that is quite a long campaign script. § A recreation of the Carentan Operation from Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord. o Fist of Iron – Take control of the 17SS Panzer Grenadier Division on the 13th of June as they launch their counterattack to retake Carentan. Can you defy history? - Scenarios (purposefully incomplete to leave some surprises) o La Madeleine / Tare Green – The 4th Infantry Division head north along the beach to clear the German Strongpoints. o Clash of Eagles – 101st Airborne and 6 Fallschirmjäger Regiment elements clash around Vierville. o Hill 30 – 101st Airborne try to hold the line southwest of Carentan against a determined 17SS Counter Attack. - Master Maps o Seven maps covering just over 70 square kilometres of now famous battlefields, recreated from Allied aerial photographs and D-Day planning maps from 1944. - (Possibly) Master Unit Files. In combination with the Master Maps will allow players to easily put together fight their own linked multiplayer campaign battles. [Let me know views on this one]. Requirements Players will be required to own: - Combat Mission Battle for Normandy Base Game; - Commonwealth Forces Module; - Market Garden Module; and - Vehicle Pack. Likely Questions Why are we going back to D-Day? When the CMBN base game was designed there was a conscious decision to focus on the US Army and German Heer forces only. This meant that key German formations that were fighting around the 101st Airborne area were not available. With Waffen SS and Fallschirmjäger formations now part of the game family we are able to recreate these famous engagements inside the CM2 engine. It's also a chance to present a number of different tactical scenario situations rarely used in previously in stock scenarios such as the use of naval gunfire, extensive fortifications, spotting victory point allocations etc. Why the focus on the 101st Airborne? No love for the 82nd Airborne? There are already a number of community made scenarios and maps available for players focusing on the exploits of the 82nd Airborne to the north of the location depicted in this Battle Pack. We didn’t want to crossover too heavily with the work the community had already undertaken. Will any new formations or units be added to the CMBN family with this release? No. Like other Battle Packs the focus is on campaigns and scenarios. Unlike Modules which focus on the new units and formations introduced, Battle Packs provide us the opportunity to mix and match all the content available in a game family. What’s the release date? When it is ready. This will be sometime after the CMBN Steam release. This pack has also been a bit different when compared to others to date. When this was announced at the start of the year the actual work had only just commenced rather than being in development for some time already. Saying that, the mapping is virtually complete and scenarios are being built. How will I be able to get my hands on it? From all the existing places you can currently buy Combat Mission products. In the promotional photos that bush is 0.764 meters away from where it was historically! Everything is a work in progress. Also, I suggest you may want another glass of a fermented vegetable drink. Wait a minute who the hell are you? One of the volunteer beta team. Like GeorgeMC and JonS before me, one of us generally leads a Battle Pack development though this time I've been lucky enough for a number of other betas to help out and get all that mapping done. Also dabbled in some modding and YouTube in previous years. Can we see some pictures? Oh alright.

If they are turning away it may actually be that the bridge it too light to carry the heavy tanks rather than the bridge bug. Designers can use this on purpose sometimes if it's historically appropriate and/or they want to provide tactical challenges to players. If you have a screenshot of the bridge it may help understand the issue.

I would like to disagree about it being piece of cake after the map is complete. Particularly historical scenarios/campaigns where you are trying to replicate something from varying source material.

Double check your graphics settings. CM doesn't like FXAA version of anti-aliasing. If it is on by default this will cause blocky text. Saying that, CM has never worked very well with integrated graphics so unsure if the Surface Pro hardware itself could be the issue.

Sorry no idea.

I had something similar late last year on the Nvidia side. What solved it for me was going into the Control Panel and telling it to play the CM Games at a "Fixed Refresh Rate". So effectively turning off G-Sync/FreeSync etc. If you also have a modern monitor then this may be the culprit. Unsure how/where you would do this with an AMD GPU though for specific programs.

Nvidia? Yeah been that way for while after updating drivers a few months ago. No idea...

From yonks ago. https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/thefgmforum/threads/combat-mission-memes.21185/ Still one of my favourites.

https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/cm-mod-warehouse/uncategorized/ithikials-combat-mission-victory-calculator-version-2/

Replace "Russia" with "China", replace "energy" with "manufacturing" and the paragraph sadly still makes a lot of sense. and .

For those wanting more content, feel free to jump into the editor and build some new scenarios for the community. Trust me there is nothing special that the CM Betas get that you don't when it comes to the editor. The unit editor is already incredibly powerful if you know how to use it. Oh and it's part of the package if you've already bought the game. For those wanting fantasy weapons and a vehicles like tanks with automatic 120mm cannons, I reckon you'd love it for about 15 minutes before the novelty wore off and you never used the content again. There's a reason WW2 remains a popular time period for wargamers after all this time, and it isn't because of questions like: "What if the Panzer VIII Maus was deployed in 1945?" Can vouch for each of those guys listed and the effort they put into creating official content, I'm desperately trying to scramble to keep up with that standard. I still bow in awe at benpark and his effort to recreate 1945 central Berlin. The research undertaken to try make the most accurate recreation of historical engagements and help out in designing accurate TOE/OOB is in my mind second to none among the BFC official staff and the wider volunteer circle. Want an example? A small tidbit from my own work last Friday night. I've been recreating an engagement that includes the US 2nd Armored Division and been drawing from various historical and printed sources. Well I stumbled across digital scans of the divisional day by day reports and hand drawn maps of unit movements from June 1944. What was there was information that went against what was printed in some major history books by some big name historians. Though it was clear where the confusion over the years has come from given certain 2nd Armored battalions were detached from the Division in early June. Well this discovery slowed down putting the scenario together as it required me to go and edit my unit files and swap formations to ensure the scenario you play is the most historically accurate as possible. Finally, keep in mind that many of us have day jobs so working on CM content is on the side of "paying the bills"* and because we have a passion for wargaming, CM and most importantly history. * Feel free to send next weeks winning lottery numbers my way.

Can you take and share some screenshots or video? Anything graphically looking amiss? Computer hardware specs also good to know for any assistance. For example, there has been some issues with AMD Graphics drivers recently.

That video with the interview, no idea why I'm still listening to it. This guy is a crackpot. Yes Kherson was founded by the Russian Empire but today the ethnicity profile of the city if 70%+ Ukrainian.

Hehehe. All I did was stretch them out so I could see them a bit better. It may not be realistic accurate but it is a game. I've actually got two versions for each of my installs. One for night battles and another for day time. I think the night ones 'glow' a bit more.

https://battlefront.sharefile.com/share/view/s7d76501e23a4e608 Should be able to grab them from here. There was a bug in the campaign script that slipped through. Sadly, you will need to start again using the updated version. Good time to double check your game to ensure it is patched as well. https://www.battlefront.com/patches

I had recent issues with 526.47 which is why I asked. May want to consider rolling back the nVidia driver if the last one installed was more stable for CM. Worked for me.

Is your GPU Driver up to date? Version 526.47?

I think @IICptMillerII has nailed it on the head. Operations will inherently require the in game functionality of carrying across battlefield damage (potentially including remembering vehicle wreck locations), and existing units to be a worthwhile proposition. Multiplayer For multiplayer you'd need to be able to export the map via a button on the AAR screen which then can be loaded into the editor for a game master to tinker with and set up the next engagement. I've personally never run into situations where players in a campaign want to cheat and would require a scenario file to be locked. As a game master you can just send the first PBEM saved game file to the players as that's all they need to get going. Don't need the scenario file. Single Player The ability to integrate this functionality into existing campaign structure would I think make it a worthwhile feature for single player gamers. How I think this would work is that the game detects the map is identical to the last scenario played so automatically imports it's state from the point of mission end and then loads the units for the engagement on that map in the same action tiles. Sounds easy, but I'm guessing it's a coding nightmare. It's a major limitation right now as there is the assumption that that each engagement in an engagement will mean fighting somewhere new, which is never guaranteed even in stock campaigns. I remember one specific example fighting over Gavrus in the "Scottish Corridor" campaign. I completely destroyed the cathedral tower only for it to be miraculously repaired before the next engagement set a few hours later. It is a bit jarring to a player but also gave me an unfair advantage when you think about it, as I was able to perch a spotter nice and high to watch the German counter attack role in. Ideally I shouldn't have that option as a choice I made previously should of cut off that possibility.

This was a fun one during Fire and Rubble's development. Panzer III's weren't widespread across the front line and didn't find themselves in the standard Panzer units after the Battle of Kursk, but the crisis for the Germans at the end of summer '44 meant anything with tracks and a gun was being hastily thrown into the line where possible. This included a number of PzIII's from training depots that were sent north to help try to break through to the trapped Army Group North in Operation Doppelkopf. In game, the Panzer III models were available before this from CMFI and I was asking for the PzIII's to be included in some capacity into the module for my Battle of Tukums campaign to be more historically accurate. My campaign needed to to recreate SS Panzer Brigade Gross, which was changing it's tank makeup daily at times as it tried break the Soviet lines in the Baltics. BF created the Panzer Company (adhoc) formation, a '44 and a '45 variant. These were to help scenario designers create 'alarm units' or similar. Somewhat similar to the shattered infantry formations that were included in CMFB - the "Straggler Group". Believe the date is the determining factor for which PzIII variants are available so play around with the dates to find the "M". You can purchase it and then reset the date back to what you are trying to design for. Hope this helps.

Now it's $164 AUD or $102 USD. <Shrug> Can't see how it's possible to align all the varied currencies at all times between multiple online platforms. Always going to be a degree of difference.

Just checked Steam vs the BF website with a few conversions between Australian dollars and US Dollars, currently the BF store is far cheaper for the CMSF2 big bundle, $81 USD vs $145 USD on Steam. Rule of thumb for any consumer, shop around.

Well at least they were showing off some of the maps from the CMBN Battle Pack 2 while talking.

Belarus considering joining the war now? Seriously? https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-12/what-does-belarus-deploying-soldiers-with-russia-mean-for-ukrain/101525768