A Canadian Cat

A few months ago discovered this game and found a great thread that had links to useful tactics discussion threads. I sure looked like a wonderful collection of useful stuff but none of the links worked. It seems some forum maintenance meant the links no longer worked. I searched and found what I feel are probably most of the articles. A few I could not find and some seemed to have more then one relevant thread. After I posted the new anthology in the CM1x game forum, Michael Emrys suggested that once the new game arrives people might find those old articles useful. I present you with a list of links from the discussion forums for the old games on tactics. I think if you focus on the tactical part of the discussions there are good lessons to be learned from all this. I certainly learned to play better by reading them. The parts that include "game UI instructions" often will have differences in the new game, but if you focus on what the orders mean to the soldiers and how to respond to certain situations there is value in these old discussions. A Radical New Approach to the Meeting Engagement Advance to Contact - Techniques Advance to contact Advancing troops Ammo Conservation Tips Armor vs Armor tactics Armor vs Armor tactics 2 Assaulting a town (night) AT Gun Usage AT Guns in an Offensive Role AT Guns in an Offensive Role 2 AT Guns in defense AT Guns vs Tanks duel Avoiding traffic jams Avoiding traffic jams 2 Best tank Bogging Building assault tactics Defending against artillery in a town Defending Defending 2 Defending 3 Defense tactics Defensive tactics for artillery bombardment Entering buildings Exiting units Finding MP games Flame Throwers Foxholes German Infantry in the Closed Defense Going Hull Down Going Hull Down 2 Going Hull Down 3 Halftrack and Armored Car uses Company / Battalion HQ's Hiding Tanks How to break contact How to use smoke effectively Killing Pillboxes Meeting Engagement Tactics MGs on the Attack Morale affects Mortar Targeting Mortar Targeting 2 Moving tanks Night game tactics Offensive Consolidation Leaving the Armor Free Panzerschrek unit usage Priest usage Purchasing Arty Rifle squads and buildings Rushing Tactics Sharp Shooters Sharpshooters Sneak or crawl Sneak or crawl 2 Some tips for newbie defenders Sound Map Splitting squads Splitting squads 2 Spotting enemy AT Guns Squad spacing Stone Walls Taking Bridges Tank Techniques Tank vs Tank engagements Advice please Tips on Hiding TRPs Tutorial - Tank vs. Tank Company HQ Leadership Bonuses (was Using CC bonuses) Using hunt with tanks Using Mortars Which unit to shoot at first Withdrawal on The Attack (staying Flexible) Withdrawal Withdrawal 2 Enjoy, Ian

I've only played the Road to Berlin scenario a couple of times now (getting a feel for the diff between Vetran, Warrior and Elite) and I have noticed that the Germans keep trying to do my Shermans in from 200m plus. So far I'm not worried at all. My tankers have not suffered any ill effects from such fire. So, the Germans can just keep right on shooting away. Now if I were commanding the Germans I'd be telling my guys to wait until those tanks get closer. It seems to me that the weapons are being modeled OK. Perhaps its my disciplined advance that keeps the tanks just out of reach while supporting my infantry. That AT gun is a whole different matter - where is it this time?

I will defiantly try this out. I have been using the mouse at the far edges of the screen to navigate - just like I did in CMBB and AK. I always hated how jumpy that ended up being (can't control the speed and always over shooting and then backing up). I had been excited about the keyboard keys for camera control but they have been spiking my blood pressure too. LOL my blood pressure goes up when using the key board because the speed the camera moves keeps changing. I'll be humming along using the W key to move the camera forward (along with the Q and E keys to tweak the direction) happy as a clam and then it will come to some trees and ssssslllllooooowwww to a crawl. When I use the mouse that does not happen.

What is he shooting at? It looks like he is just firing it off high into the air.

Excellent thanks to all those that posted how to cease firing. All I can say is I need a better imagination:). Now that you spell it out its obvious that I already knew how to do it for the advancing guys - and it is just the same for the stationary guys. I was just not able to make the leap to give the stationary guys a move order. Sounds like a face order can be used too. I'll experiment - thanks for what will be a very useful technique. Ian

Yep I did the same thing with an HMG crew - oops.

I would love to get fancy:). I know how to get the moving squads to pause and wait for 20s. But how do I set the guys doing the covering fire to only fire for the first 20s of a turn? Ian

Not sure if it was a failure but it sure was strange. I have two squads an assault order to enter a house while being covered by a thrid squad and a tank. The first squad was a bit a head and moved in no problem and started shooting at the Germans in the next building over. They all huddled around the windows at one end and fired away. The second squad entered the building and once most of the squad was inside started doing this dance from one side of the building to the other. I was like they were restless and unable to just sit down. Once the whole squad was inside they kept on doing for the rest of the turn. One or two of them would go back and forth back and forth. It was like they were saying "give us a turn guys, let us have some room at the windows". At the end of the turn I noticed that the first squad was nervous and the second one was rattled. They sure looked rattled. So, perhaps that was it. Next turn the stopped and joined their mates to provide covering fire for the third squad. Once the Platoon HQ got in their a few turns later they were no longer rattled. Ian

Come to think of it my infantry coming under fire was how I found the AT gun in the Road to Berlin scenario. Up to that point it had KO'ed a Sherman and bounced a couple of rounds off another but the tanks were clueless as to where it was or even what direction. I had to hold them back. As soon as one of my squads came under HE fire (well after the settled down any way) my guys spotted them. After that it took some work but eventually they took care of it. If I had been the German commander I would *not* have wanted my guys to bother firing at that squad - it was over 300m away and there was German infantry between the gun and the Americans that had not even been engaged yet. +1 for cover armor Ian

I am sorry to hear that WeGo over the internet is not supported by please don't encourage them to take away PBEM. Quite literally I could not play this head to head with my friends without it. If there was no PBEM I would not bother to buy the game. My prime computer time is at a totally different time of day to my favorite human competitors. Live play over the internet would just not be possible except on special occasions. Lets encourage BattleFront to support more options rather than less for play between humans. I'll add my desire to have WeGo be playable over the internet. In fact I don't understand why its not available? PBEM can handle WeGo which means turns can be sent and read in a "batch" of information. RT can be played over the internet which means the game can handle inter-computer communications. Sounds like all the puzzle pieces are in place to allow WeGo over the internet. Is the issue about testing resources? I'll hazard a guess that LemoN would volunteer to test it out. And if my computer time / timezone is compatible with his I'll gladly participate too. Just say the word. Ian

I finally got some time on the weekend to play. First impression is WOW awesome. I was stuck working on our underpowered notebook so I had to run with the 3D modeling turned down. Only the soldiers close by were drawn in any detail most of the time they looked like abstract animated groups of triangles. But I did not care!!! The game play was so good I ignored the poor rendering and just enjoyed the play. (Note later I got a chance to play a couple of turns on our main computer and the graphics looked fantastic - BTW). The new spotting is excellent (I played on Warrior - I'm going to try again on Elite to see which I like better). It took me a long time to get that AT gun. In the end I had to go after it with two tanks, mortars, an HGM and two squads of infantry. Even though my platoon commander passed on its reported position (under the tall tree at the end of the bridge) only the HQ and the infantry could actually see the gun. So the others had to use area fire. I have no idea what finally did it in but after loosing two tanks to the first attempt I was not taking any chances. I had a bit of trouble managing the artillery missions. First my heavy weapons HQ was out of position then I botched the order up and had to wait a minute before trying again. Then in one case I set a rate of fire that was too high and ran out of amo before my guys could take advantage of the suppression. So I actually cracked the manual and I think I'll do better next time:-) I really like the behavior of the soldiers and the ability to give target and pause orders at way points. Of course one of the best behaviour improvements negates the way point orders. I'm speaking here of when a tank gets hit or soldiers come under fire they sometimes forget about future orders and just stop to find cover or engage. This means all those fancy orders get thrown out the window. Brilliant! It is great that you can give those kinds of orders. The tank can go down the road and alternate shooting between various obvious choices of enemy positions. But if it takes fire from one of them or some other place it will not keep going to its doom but stop instead. Ian

Is that by design? Is there some kind of feedback - other than disappearing bridges :confused:

If that does not work you can get a free DropBox account and create a public folder which can then be used to create a url to your file. You should create a .zip file for your deliverable for something like this. If that will not work for you I would be willing to host a moderately sized file on my domain lesliesoftware.com. Ian

I'm curious by 'blackspot' are you referring to the dark colour the map editor uses to show a tile you have set the height for? If so why every other square? Cool, can you share how you made a culvert? Please, Ian

Excellent tip. My test map was looking a bit ragged with all my mismatched polygons...

OK I am a happy camper now. I watched this video: http://earth.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=guide.cs&guide=22365&topic=23729 The take away was that I was not making my polygons correctly. I was not drawing them while the dialog was open so I was getting a infinitely small polygon - which was not very helpful. If I draw my polygon while the dialog is up things look good and I can add multiple layers and I get the expected behaviour. My fundamental miss use of the tool caused me all these problems. Now I just need to learn how to edit the points of an existing polygon. Off to watch more Google Earth tutorials... Thank for your help. Ian

Sounds good. That was what I thought I did. So, I tried it again here at work (shhh don't tell anyone) but I did not get a satisfactory result. The altitude value does not stick. I set the drop down to Absolute (I had to do that first because the edit box was not editable until I did that) then I tried 110 and 110m in the edit box and both times it ignored me. When I press the OK button I do not get a red polygon any where I can see but it does show up in my Places list. When I select it I see a bubble pointing to off map (which no matter what zoom level I set I can never actually find). When I edit the polygon, everything looks OK except the altitude value I set has been replaced with the default "various altitudes (min=-2147483648m, max=-2147483648m)". I must be missing something obvious. The screen shot you added looks just like I am hopping to get. Not sure what I am doing wrong. Here is what the polygon properties dialog looks like when I open it up again. I entered 110m for the Altitude: Ian

I took a shot at doing that yesterday and came up short - and confused:confused:. How do you create polygons at specific elevations the create this contour map? I had to move on to accomplish the task I had at the time so I could not experiment longer than a half our or so. Did you learn how from a tutorial? From the GE help system? Divine inspiration? Ian

Sounds very interesting. I look forward to hearing more. I have a question about the making of the maps in CM. I was helping my son with a geography project over the weekend, that involved topo maps, so it kind of got me thinking of getting into map making once CMBN arrives. One of the things we were doing was overlaying an ecozone map with the topo index map so we could find out which 1:50000 topo maps we wanted to get. My question is once you have your CM map grid created can you overlay an air photo or topo map over it in the editor? It strikes me that it would be handy to have a semi transparent overlay of the thing you are working on (buildings, or roads or contours) on top of the CM map editor so you can place things on the map that match the overlay. Ian

Well in the CM1x engine you would be correct. The more tired your troops are the easier it is for the opposition to pin them, cause panic etc. They will also move slower in a sense; tired or exhausted troops will only walk even though you gave them a run order. I am not sure about shooting accuracy though - hard to tell that in the game. I strongly suspect the CM2x engine will behave similarly. I usually try to let my guys at least get to OK or Ready before getting into contact. If they get tired getting into position or sneaking around under fire it is a good idea to give them some down time before pressing a final assault. Otherwise bad things will happen. Down time does not have to be away from the front. Covering an area from a position of cover for a turn or two is enough to let them rest. Ian

Interesting can you tell us what page in the manual? The teaser format is kind of hard to browse and find things easily. A while back I was talking to my father about infantry using smoke grenades for a smoke screen. He said even in the 60s and 70s when he was a front line infantry officer they did not have the capability to create their own smoke screens from the soldiers themselves. They had to call it in from mortars or artillery to do it. They carried a small number of coloured smoke grenades for signaling but that was about it. Ian

CMBB and CMAK. I have four PBEM scenarios on the go with two others plus one hot seat game going with my 14 year old son.

Count me in that statistic too. I discovered CMBB and CMAK only a month or so ago. When a couple of my friends were excited to find out about CMBN. I said what is Combat Mission? We have been playing CMBB and CMAK for the past month. I am loving it. I would buy CMBN even if it looked as good as those earlier versions as long as it played as well. The additional soldier level detail and the even better graphics are a real plus. I am looking forward to the new game for sure. But unlike many people here I still have that "its new and cool" feeling about the old games. About the only thing I'll be missing when the new games comes out are the Canadians and soldiers riding on tanks. I'm sure I'll be just as happy with CM BN and its expansion modules as they appear. Ian (a happy Canuck customer)

First of all excellent video - I really enjoyed watching it. I have a question - what software did you use to capture the video? I am trying to capture CMBB and CMAK videos right now and so far have had no luck. It could be that because these are older games there are issues. But I would like to try out the sw that you are using just be be sure. Thanks, Ian

There has been discussion here about grenades killing tanks. I was just watching the video and noticed the narrator saying that the tank is killed by grenades thrown by the squad hiding behind the trees. But if you look at the video 27:56 you can see a back flash and a projectile in the air then its strikes the tank and explodes. So we are *not* talking about potato mashers here. Those guys must have had a Panzerfaust. Is that the tank kill you guys have been debating?