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Broadsword56

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Posts posted by Broadsword56

  1. There’s a master map of nearly the entire XIX Corps area for the June 1944 push to Saint-Lo that I made years ago. It’s still widely available on the download site that replaced the BFC Repository. It’s fully accurate from satellite terrain and period photos. But it’s not detailed with objects, trees and vegetation or buildings. The idea is that you first cut out the area you want to use, then detail just the actual area of your battle. Still way faster than a map from scratch.

     

  2. Also, the best grand-Tactical board Wargames have command-control mechanisms (e.g., chit-pull, op sheets, objective control markers that restrict route of march and unit boundaries, activation points) that limit and vary how much a player’s units can do (if they activate at all).  So in those games, an attacking player is often having to push on in less-than optimal circumstances — without all the assets one should have, for example, or giving too big a mission to too small a unit because of time pressure, or having to depend on a fatigued, spent unit to win an attack. It’s those games that generate the variable soft factors and surprisingly interesting setups for CM, not the I go-you go ones that let a player methodically build up 3:1 odds and let you move troops at will all over the map.

  3. On 1/30/2019 at 9:23 AM, General Liederkranz said:

    I agree that using a larger-scale wargame to generate scenarios could be more interesting than just translating from a tactical-level game. I know some people were doing something like this with "St. Lo" in CMBN a few years ago. I was recently playing "Last Blitzkrieg" from MMP's Battalion Combat Series and keeping notes of interesting engagements to game out in CMFB. To my mind the problem with doing this with most board wargames is that success is normally dependent on stacking up enough attacking units to make 3-1 odds, so the only information available to build a CM scenario would be "three battalions attack one." By contrast, BCS (maybe like Berlin '85, which I haven't played) models attacks as essentially one battalion on another, and the variables you need to manipulate to win all translate nicely into CM: unit type, troop quality, amount of artillery for each side, posture (deployed vs. hasty attack/defense), availability (and type) of armor or AT support, terrain, strength levels, and fatigue. Of course, if the attacker is doing his job, most BCS attacks would be lopsided in CM terms, but this is usually achieved through combinations of these advantages, rather than just by vastly superior numbers. 

    Back in 2016, sburke and I were using BCS Last Blitzkrieg to run a KG Peiper campaign with CM2 4.0. 

    We’ve found the battles at 3:1 odds are not the ones you necessarily want to set up in CM. But we’ve often found that in the course of a campaign, lots of other, less-certain, oddball engagements happen that make thrilling CM setups. In the Bulge, a single US engineer company holding a bridge vs. A panzer battalion for longer than expected is a huge deal and can cause huge problems for the Germans. Often, we find engagements that look one-sided on paper turn out to be much more interesting and closely fought due to terrain factors, weather (reducing visibility, for example), and localised fog of war. In one battle, I had a US cavalry unit trying to fight a screening/delaying action against Peiper’s spearhead. My nimble little armored cars were able to perform surprisingly well as they shot and scooted from good cover in a village. So my advice is, play the board game and just watch for the interesting and unexpected things to happen. If it’s one of the better-designed games (BCS series certainly qualifies), the game will tell you when a CM-worthy situation appears.

  4. 7 hours ago, sburke said:

    you youngsters always harping on your ambushes.  I step outside to get the paper and something is burning on my porch, of course I am gonna step on it.  Oh wait you meant something else....

    Yeah back in the early days of CMBN, when wire was a bug and we didn't have overlays in the editor.  Between Broadsword and LLF we were looking at having all of the front mapped around St Lo.

    Yes, really between My XIX Corps master map and LLF's Le Carillon master map, we really did have most of the St-Lo campaign area mapped. The glaring exception was the 2nd ID sector on the E side along Martinville Ridge -- a very important sector -- but one that we skipped at the time because back then the German FJ troops weren't yet in the game.

  5. On 8/14/2018 at 1:23 PM, sburke said:

    @Broadsword56 would be better able to answer owning the game ;)  the units are generally companies.  Hexes are as I recall a couple hundred meters and time scale is kind of variable in that a single unit could be activated more than once in a turn, but there was a cost to doing so.  It was a very good basis for a campaign layer in that the battles fit well for CM scale and we'd pick and choose which battles to fight out in CM so we only had the more interesting critical ones.  It was still after all this time one of my best Combat Mission experiences.  If you hit the link in my sig for Hamel Vallee there is a lengthy AAR that goes into the campaign layer, map creation etc- and this was before CM had overlays.  Broadsword did an amazing job running the campaign, creating maps etc.

    The Scale of St-Lo is 306 yards per hex, and time scale is 1 day per turn. Each turn lasts a good while, as the sides alternate attempts to activate their troops. What's particularly good about St-Lo for use with Combat Mission is the nature of bocage fighting -- the engagements were highly compartmentalized due to the terrain, so it really was a company commander's war.  Copies of the game are very easy to find used for cheap, and there's a fine VASSAL module for it -- which is what I used. 

  6. On 8/12/2018 at 2:51 PM, sburke said:

    you can try, but movement pathing gets weird.  Broadsword and I did a battle once with a Multi story building simulating  basement.  It got really weird when the arty collapsed the building.

    I thought that ditchlocked basement under the multistory building was great as long as the building stood.

    But yes, when artillery collapsed the building into its basement, I recall sending GIs into that huge rubble pit to hunt out any surviving Germans. The yanks would hesitate at the edge, as if to look at me and say, "Are you nuts?" and then would leap off the edge into the abyss like hatchlings taking their first tentative flight from the nest... They ended up getting mugged down there by various Germans who they (and I) had no way of seeing. It was very weird and didn't look particularly realistic at all, but I found it kind of cool in another way -- or at least different!

    I think in that same battle there was a German command post in another building in a ditchlocked basement, and sburke's men got stuck down there. It was quite a few years ago now, so my recollection has grown hazy...(CM has entered the category of pleasant nostalgia for me, I'm afraid, since it's been so long since I was actually playing it and I reluctantly set it aside in the wait for the patch.)

  7. I just applied my CM "Big Bundle" upgrade to my CMBN that was up to v 3.11.

    When I launch CMBN, it shows the title screen and 4.0 on the lower right (so far, so good)

    But there's an error message on the screen that says it's missing 2 files and to contact support:

    normandyv220.brz

    normandyv312.brz

    Where do I find these or how to I get them to make my CMBN launch?

  8. Been away from CMFI a long time.

    I bought the Upgrade 4.0 Big Bundle for all the CM titles back in late 2016 when it first came out. 

    I just now got around to trying to play CMFI and use my current version. In my folder where the upgrade should be was this message:

    Hello CM Fortress Italy fan!  We experienced some last minute problems which couldn’t be sorted out ahead of the Holiday break.  We expect to have the kinks worked out of it by mid January.  We’ll announce the release on the front page of our website and the discussion Forums.

    Today I launched CMFI and I see my current version is 1.12.

    After looking on the BFC site for the game, I see a reference saying the current version is an all-inclusive v. 2.0

    Where do I get that v 2.0, and how do I eventually get the v 4.0 upgrade I already paid for? Is that waiting for the upcoming 4.0 patch?

    I'm totally lost as to the sequence of upgrades I need to do in order to make my CMFI as current as possible.

  9. 7 hours ago, IICptMillerII said:

    Any news about tweaks to the current 4.0 upgrade, regarding AI behavior?

    This. None of the new content means a thing to me until I know I can enjoy playing the CM titles I already have. Reluctantly, I've shelved them and gone back to board wargaming until I know the documented problems with 4.0 have been fixed. But I still have hope and keep an eye to these boards to check back from time to time.

    Any bones for us in this area?

  10. So happy to see this thread, the seriousness with which BFC is taking the issue, and the chance of a fix eventually!

    As someone who's devoted many hours to CMx2 and has played it devotedly since it first came out, I don't criticize it lightly. But this displacement-out-of-good-cover bug broke the game for me since 4.0 came out, even when using HIDE and permanent pause and every other workaround that's been mentioned. And I play exclusively 2-player PBEM, so this is not a bug that only bothers those who play SP against the AI. 

    This has been THE most realistic WWII tactical wargame in existence for the better part of a decade now. So it broke my heart to see what it's become now, and it was only with great reluctance that I finally put CMx2 on the shelf while waiting for this fix. 

    And when it is fixed, I'll be celebrating and ready to jump right back in.

    I just hope that day isn't too far away. 

     

     

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