A Canadian Cat

Thanks - now we just have to ask for them to be added as a feature

METT-T: Terrain The map is about a km squared. There are some flat plateaus but also a lot of hill and valleys as well. My forces start off in the South East corner near KT1. The path to the hill top KT7 will be over the river at KT1 and KT2 adn then over the ridge line between KT3 and KT4. There is a road from the bridge KT2 leading to town KT6 and a trail leading from KT1 to KT5 just East of KT3. Some views of the terrain follow as indicated by the green triangles. Map View #1 Map View #2 Map View #3 Map View #4 Map View #5 Map View #6 Map View #7

Planning METT-T: Mission The real mission is to show off the Rome to Victory Beta and give you guys something to drool over;-) The mission of the SA and Indian armies is the keep up the pressure on the German forces in the area and take away the high ground in the area to prevent any possible German counter attacks into the valley below. Objectives: The main objective is the high ground with its multi story building that has an excellent view of a wide area. To succeed in capturing that objective we need to cross a small river and capture a bridge as well as the town below the high point and another small village near by. Bridge – There is a single bridge and three fords over the river. Given the wet ground conditions using the fords will be risky. We will need to capture this bridge. Hamlet – This is probably the least important objective but it is on the route from the fords and attacking the down without nutralizing forces in this village will be foolish. Lower Town, Mid Town, Upper Town – With three separate equally important objectives in the down for the scenario this is the most important area of the map. Hill Top – The true objective of the scenario. All other objectives service taking the observation post on this hill top. Tasks: The Germans have been fortifying the area and are likely to have AT guns in the area along with some armour elements as well. The first task will be to get observation on the ridge line and village near our jumping off point. After which we will need to capture a river crossing and gain a view onto the plateau and the hill beyond. Cross the river – We will need to cross the river at KT1 (fords) and or KT2 (bridge) Gain the ridge line – In order to assault the town and the hill above we will next need to take the ridge line between KT3 and KT4. Neutralize forces in the Hamlet – assaulting the town will be difficult if my forces are taking fire across the plateau KT5. Assault the town KT6 – To make it to the hill top we will not be able to ignore the town Take the hill top KT7 – With the above tasks accomplished this will be the last step to Victory

Initial situation This AAR is being played using a custom scenario borrowing a map from one of the scenarios that will be in the final game. Bud and I replaced the forces with some specific choices to show off new formations and gear. It is now March 1945 the Germans have been pushed far to the North in Italy. The area is defended by some low experience Luftwaffe ground forces and very tough Gebirgsjaegers. The forces available to push the Germans back in this area are South African and Indian. A force of a squadron plus of tanks from 1 Battalion Pretoria Regiment of the 6th South African armour division and two companies of the 24th Battalion Sikh Regiment supported by the elements of 2nd Independent Field Squadron of Indian Engineers. The weather is clear but with the snow having recently melted the ground is wet. Comandant Litson climbed back into his tank reflecting on his first meeting with the CO of the infantry he was tasked with supporting. The whole thing went better than expected. Lt. Col Ram Singh spoke better English that he did. Turns out the Indian officer had spent years in England before the war. His concerns about communications problems were curtailed. While there might still be problems, he now felt that he and is 2IC could contact Lt. Col Ram Singh and his staff and they would be able to straightening things out. In fact, since they were not under a time crunch, they had spent a little time over tea. The Indians seemed genuinely pleased to be working with he and his men. He got the feeling that they had similar uncomfortable experiences in the past working with British officers. Comandant Litson, like everyone else, knew the war was in its final days but until hostilities actually ended his men were not out of danger. The best way to protect his men and those of his allies was to prevent the Germans from regrouping and causing havoc on their terms. This was the time for his men to take the fight into their control.

Nice. So to summarize you are arranging them to arrive in their new firing position as the turn ends. Then in the next turn you can decide to how long to give them in position before pulling back.

Loving the AAR - excellent stuff. Question about your technique for repositioning. Clearly from the first quite you are using pauses at way points for the Warriors. Are you dong the same with the Javelin teams? Can you describe some of the timings you are using and how you feel about their effectivness?

Let me start by saying I am well aware that the US pushes its own agenda and wishes on the rest of the world quite assertively. Are you saying that the US government has been forcing / convincing other countries to act according to US interests instead of their own more than previous governments? If so that's not true. The opposite is happening - more countries are moving away from some cooperation with the US because the US government has become more self centred than before. Just look at the example of Iran. There were two separate initiatives to protect shipping in the strait of Hormuz (seems like the US lead one will actually happen and the German lead one may not - but EU members are still saying they will not join the US lead mission - which would have been unheard of 5 or 10 years ago) and the P5+1 nuclear deal where all the other countries in that deal continue to try to keep it alive against the US government's wishes.

How about that. Yesterday it seems @37mm posted some screen shots comparing drawing distances:

I am unaware of may settings to control this or even what the algorithm looks like for determining this. I think reducing the quality will increase the draw distance but I personally have not experimented. Hopefully if I am wrong someone will come along an enlighten me as well.

??? not sure what "MAGA uber allies" means or how any US action relates to an accident during a Russian test. Actually I would be afraid that such an action would cause the US to act before they think.

So in other words a module I know I'm exaggerating but I think the reaction to my post supports my point that not everyone would be happy no mater what change was made.

They do something similar with water now. It is just not permanent. I think in the current engine it would not be able to keep track of permanent one side only effects. But I'm just guessing. Is something like that supported in any of the commercial engines? Just curious if it is a feature that is considered important generically.

And the video game dev does not have to deal with spoofing the AI by an adversary because they control the environment. I guess that means that applying these techniques to creating a war game AI would actually be easier than an AI that had to deal with the real world.

I am not totally convinced about this. I get that people see it as a way to get cool stuff faster. I get that Steve knows it would be appreciated. None of that is wrong - that's not what I am concerned about. I worry about there not being enough scenarios for it. I can practically see the posts in my minds eye already "packs are nice but what good are they with no scenarios or enough scenarios". Queue the usual discussion about making your own and the understandable frustration with that. In a nut shell I worry that we will replace the common complaint "why is BFC's suff always so late" with "why is there not enough value in the new stuff that BFC puts out". Different people will be happy and sad but we'll still have both kinds of people.

I honestly have no idea what Stave and Charles are up to in the area of AI so perhaps they will take your thoughts to heart or are already. They have certainly done a great job with what they create so far. OK well if you only want to discuss AI and or Deep Learning with people who already know a lot about it or look at it the same way as you then the rest of the humans in this world will be the poorer for it.

Or someone is trying to cover their asses and hide how much danger there is to the public.

OK exploring new AI techniques and how they apply to war gaming is likely a good idea. The level of exploring that BFC can do is probably a bit limited. My impression is they will need to jump in a little later than the research stage. Your earlier posts left me with the impression you thought that, now, today, a small shop like BFC could just feed stuff to a deep learning engine and create a good AI for the game. If I am wrong about that then I trust you will enlighten us. I do not believe this is even remotely possible - at this time. My impression is that there are no tools in open source or at an affordable price that a small shop like BFC can use *now* to accomplish that. Again if I am wrong I will be interested to hear. Can we let that go, please? @BletchleyGeek made a comment (over the top) that triggered a very dramatic response from you and you have not really addressed any of his other his valid areas of concern and instead created an appeal to authority argument to defend it and now you are gaining in ad homenm attacks - cut it out - and let us keep to the topic. @BletchleyGeek please consider not taking the bait on this and we can see if @Rattenkrieg can fill in some of the gaps and answer our questions. Please.

It very much is. But the flip side is that we should not just let propaganda or false claims or even questionable claims just sit out there without pointing out their flaws. Please not I am speaking generally here. I am not calling anything in this thread propaganda or false but we all know we have seen that occasionally on this forum on other topics. So, while it is a bad idea to single handedly try to right the wrongs of the internet we also should not just turn our backs on everything either. We have to choose our battles and hope that all involved choose to be civil.

"He hit me back first!"

LOL what ever it is I hear Al Gore invented it

LOL

All very true. I was more talking about when a terrain feature - usually elevation - inadvertently renders a door useless. Those issues can often be spotted by inspection. Valid points about internal doors though. If you walk through my neighbourhood there are a lot of town homes. I am pretty sure none of them have doors between the units so you have to chose where you place the doors. Also, downtown there are very few buildings that don't have more than one way out - even the small ones that have been build around. There are more than a few maps where I have said to my self - how does this business take deliveries? Or let the dish-washing staff take their smoke breaks cause it sure ain't out on that pretty cobble stone street across form the shops.

Wait, are you saying we have been having one giant conversation about the next Combat Mission product this whole time? Mind blown.

LOL well that was pretty bold of him - true But dude, that was one point in his analysis of how you were overstepping how the technology could be applied. So, even if us readers grant you that he was wrong about that line, it is hardly vindication of your point and the end of his.

That is for sure. The expert systems I worked with were basically us humans coding a decision tree as close to how we formally analyzed a problem ourselves. Clearly they were helpful and frequently useful but limited to the conditions and categories we considered. For safety reasons (engineering applictions after all) we really were limiting ourselves to the starting point for analysis. Kind of like a qualifying questionnaire that lead to the right people further examining the problem with a good starting point. Now we are training something way more sophisticated with reference material and letting it loose on totally unknown documents to get a result (not the same problem space and no safety concerns and engineering involved). Even then we have learned that *we* are not able to train the system and ship the resulting algorithm to customers because there is enough of a difference between various companies material that we aren't getting the results they want. Instead we have created a tool set that lets our customer train the system on their data and incorporate the resulting model into our product. We are hoping that with some more experience and some partnerships we can create a number of models that work in various similar businesses. Amazing advances and such a large amount of effort being applied - both in creating the advances and in the application to the real world.