A Canadian Cat

Oh yes, regularly. I suspect that the information is really being tracked per soldier - hence their different reactions to suppression etc.

The issue should not be who's entitled to an opinion - we all are. And on this forum we are even entitled to express a huge range of them. @SLIM opened this thread with a plea to not fill it full of wishful thinking and focus on long standing bugs and missing bits of gear in CMSF that would be nice to get fixed. @SLIM and @Sgt.Squarehead added some useful points and then you side tracked the whole thread and now we have had a bunch of posts about that side tracking. Including this one - sorry. Cut it out man . Keep your eye on the prize and help @SLIM get the testers and devs focused on CMSF2.

My bold: Probably. LOL try just sending the choppers in then. That will spice things up.

Ah sure, but not what you might be alluding too Let's face it authoritarian regimes typically rule by fear and to do that they need a boogie man. If <insert the name of annoying regime here> would stop being a bad actor on the world stage the US (and many other countries) would have no need to station troops in their neighbours, or have self defence treaties with their neighbours or deploy missile defence shields on their neighbours territory or work to create sanctions to contain them etc. All the stuff that NK says is why they fear the US is totally of their own doing. And they are happy for things to be that way. Kim needs it to be that way. All the rhetoric that these guys behave this way is because of the US's actions is tosh. IMO

When I wrote: Clearly I did not read this properly. Sorry. What I said above relates to a large map with a lot of forces but many coming as reinforcements of the course of hours and hours of battle time. In other words one large battle over a large long map to see who comes out ahead. I got that idea stuck in my head after reading your first paragraph and nothing else sunk in - sorry. Yeah, a set of scenarios with flow charts could work. To get the force preservation between battles would require some work and trust or would you create variations of the follow on scenarios with different adjusted forces and not try to actually reflect what was left from the previous battle but just reflect force levels generally.

Meaning they are a nuclear power therefore it is settled? I agree it looks like it is too late but I'm not sure I would call things settled. This is the thing. We have the example people keep trotting out that Lybia is an example of why it is bad to give up nukes (which is totally wrong BTW) and Iran where there is a deal in place that looks like it could work. What message does that send to NK? Not a clear one based on the miss information around Lybia and the rhetoric around the deal with Iran. Ah, yeah the deal that was struck between the US, EU, Russia and Iran. . Indications are that even though there are factions in the Iranian government that are not happy with the deal and the US says they are not happy anymore, Iran is living up to the deal regarding no longer perusing nuclear weapons. Clearly that deal does not cover everything we might like to see Iran stop doing because they are a very bad actor in many ways not just nuclear. The thing is I think it would be good for NK to see the nuclear deal with Iran work. If the deal with Iran is scuppered even though they are complying with it then why would NK ever come to the table to strike a similar deal? Clearly even with a perfect and working deal Iran there is no guarantee that NK would come to the table but I also think it is clear that if the deal with Iran falls apart because the new US administration never liked it then there is no way NK will come to the table.

The concept is worthy of investigation. If you keep things to a battalion per side ish it could work. I have been involved in one really big experiment (I think it was two battalions per side) and eventually there were too many forces on the board for the game to process and strange things started to happen - orders were ignored, units stop moving etc. So, there are limits that are not as explicit as the dimensions of the map that you have to be aware of. In this case we were unsure if the issue was specific to the number of units or the amount of orders (which also naturally goes up with more units) so we do not know where the lines are. Oh man - a year or more perhaps.

I don't know about that. I think he is more interested in maintaining his current regime than taking over the south. For what you are saying to work first he would have to have all US forces withdraw from SK. Invading SK and threatening the US to stay out of it only works if you have not killed service personnel already.

No the spotting takes into account the eyeball level of the troops. Haven't we been through this before? Guys lying down is the reason they loose sight of things they saw as they were moving into position. As soon as they lay down in the tall grass they loose their LOS to the target they were just looking at.

Sorry I saw this yesterday but got distracted before answering and then forgot. Forget item 'i' just do the above. After you purchase the v4 update you will have access to the all in one installer for CMBS if you download that installer it will do everything needed to install CMBS 2.00. You will have a few choices available to you: you want to pick the "CM Black Sea 2.00 full Windows" or "CM Black Sea 2.00 full MacOS" as appropriate. Run that installer and enter your upgrade key (I think you need your 1.0 key too). After that you an purchase the battle pack (link is for windows): http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=shop.flypage_bfc&product_id=625&category_id=39&manufacturer_id=0&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=26 or download the patch from here: http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=335&Itemid=579 (on the left look for a link called "Combat Mission: Black Sea (PC) 2.10 All-inclusive") Either one of those will update the game to v2.10.

Well don't hold your breath there because I am not so sure the work level is small. The bigger issue is the segment of players who want this is pretty small. Just those who play head to head is small to start with and those willing to spend months playing a large scenario is a small sub set of that. Playing campaigns is quickly going to be measured in many months if not years and will be an even smaller number of people. That is for sure.

Oh good idea. I have not been recording as long as you (I started recording in February of 2014) Of 98 non testing battles 25 were Quick Battles (~24%) none of them were against the AI. +1 to that.

Really, why is that surprising? I got board playing against the AI. Like I always do. Perhaps if I stopped all my PBEM games I would be more board doing nothing than playing vs the AI. Naw that's not going to happen. I have had at least two (usually more like six) PBEM games going since CMBN was released. OK, sure. I know. Which is why I am involved in several multi player campaigns using CM but managed by an outside umpire. My personal preference is that they make campaigns playable H2H. If that happened I would likely switch to campaign play for the vast majority of my games. I still hold onto hope.

Yes, theBlitz is by definition H2H battles. As for Cage fight - yeah after a few meeting engagements you start to get a bit board. I have been playing probes more lately against human opponents - it is much more satisfying.

We have limited facts about how this game is played. Here are a few things we know: From Steve we know that a majority of people play exclusively all on their own against the AI only. He knows how many games he has sold and he can see how much activity is happening here and at places like theBlitz so I see zero reason to doubt him. At one multi player site, theBlitz, I did a quick game count and came up with of the games played 44% are Quick battles, 56% are scenarios and 0% are campaigns. Someone could have a look at data from another multi player site but I would be surprised if it was more then 10% different. Again zero campaigns. I think that's about it. Feel free to add anything I missed - but back it up please - your opinion, as important as it is to you, matters little compared to the whole community. Yeah I know that is hard to hear. Steve keeps tell me me the same thing about my opinion . We don't have any information on how those solo vs the AI payers play QBs, scenarios or campaigns. We also do not have information on how scenario and campaigns games might be constrained by the number of scenarios and campaigns are available. In other words if there were twice as many scenarios and campaigns would there by less quick battles played? Would there just be more games played? We really do not know.

LOL. I love it. I fixed that for ya - my bold. I totally get that campaigns are the most important thing for you. I personally have *never* finished a campaign, not one. Head to head play is where CM2 shines - in my opinion. Given that campaigns don't really support that type of play then campaigns might as well not exist - from my point of view. This whole conversation seems to be viewed in radically different ways based on the way several people think the game is played.

Is there any evidence of this? I'd think the opposite is true, and that longtime players avoid QBs. I just did a quick, rough, analysis of games played at theBlitz. I looked at data for the CM2x games from Normandy onward. Since this is a war game club, this is only H2H play and therefore excludes single player play. The total games played is 3208 of which 1406 are Quick battles so that is 44% I noticed a pattern that since we have been running our scenario of the month it has pushed the percentage of games that are QB in a downward direction. That makes sense because we have between 6 and 12 games per month that are guaranteed to be based on scenarios

Cool

Puppet of whom? Part of the problem is that no other nation really has a deciding influence on Kim.

I think it is a pretty cool idea, clearly, and hope others will to. Have fun everyone and thanks to @Ithikial_AU for the great idea and putting it all together.

A lot of good reading there. For BMP3s I have been doing this for a while now, since reading those threads. I usually use split off scout teams, sniper teams and the platoon HQ. I have not purchased teams to fill those seats but I can confirm that having someone in the command chair does help a lot with spotting. Mind you I do a lot of area fire from the BMPs based on spotting from the rest of the platoon so it only matters some of the time.

@Rinaldi once you have an author account there you should be able to add / update your own scenarios without his assistance.

Very nice. Thanks for writing all this up!

Yeah agreed. About the only thing I can think of doing is having a scenario with a lot of split squads and then run then through a gauntlet of opfor and then sort out single man teams with scoped and non scoped rifles. Then you could do some tests. Wether it is worth doing or not is up to you.

Yes, aggreed. Very good to read, thanks.