Broadsword56

...Silly Billies? ...Swash Bucklers? ...Suffering B**tards?

After looking through my sources, it seems to me that in Crete the FJ rifle companies had a 4th (heavy) platoon that had a 5cm mortar team, and at battalion level there was a weapons company that had the 80mm mortars and MMGs.

Thanks mj, I'd love to see the Brit 2" mortar teams modded into FJ 5cm teams, but can you actually mod an allied unit and then place it into German OOBs?

Good question. Answer: I often do and I have. Look back in the Repository and you'll find a huge 4km x 4km master map of the area N of Saint-Lo for I did in CMBN. It was for an operational-tactical campaign that sburke and I played and greatly enjoyed. Right now I'm also very happily playing CMBN-CW in its original time period in an op-tac campaign simulating Operation Dauntless, June '44. Op-Tac campaigns vs. a real person in HTH Wego are the only way I play CMx2. So the maps and scenarios I make get driven by what operational campaign I'm playing or want to play. And that's a function of which boardgames I feel work well with CMx2. There are only so many boardgames that fit the bill, IMHO. So sometimes it's necessary to look for mods and tweaks to get the game experience I want. Here, for example, I'm interested in 1941 mods because I'm now playtesting the upcoming Crete game in the MMP Grand Tactical Series. It can make a fun campaign while waiting for CMBN-MG to come out. On the Eastern Front, the game I plan to use with CM is Panzer Command. That game is set in Fall '42-Spring '43, so vanilla Bagration just won't work with it without some tweaking. But I also have a Salerno game that will make a good op layer for GL (Death Ride Salerno: 16th Panzer) and I plan to play that eventually too, using vanilla GL.

How could you forget John Ratzenberger (later to be Cliiff Klavan on "Cheers" and now Tea Party buffoon) in his screen debut performance as an 82nd Abn soldier crossing the river at Nijmegen, and his unforgettable line as the MG bullets frothed the water all around him: "Arrrrgggggghhhhh!"

In the battle we just finished, sburke, I saw this a number of times when my Sherman IIIs were threatened from several directions at once. The turret would turn, seem to prepare to fire, then turn again. And it almost looked as if the tank was thinking and trying to make up its mind which was the most serious threat. This happened most often on HUNT orders. One way to prevent indecision is to focus the tank's targeting with an arc or a target order, but Murphy's Law dictates that will be exactly when a new threat appears and kills your tank from the direction it wasn't looking/targeting. I've come to have a lot of respect for the TacAI, and when I see troops or vehicles fail to blindly obey an order, it often turns out they were seeing a threat that I failed to notice!

In Holland, the ditchlock capability could allow mappers to better re-create the Fort Hof Van Holland, an old rampart that featured in the battles for Nijmegen. JonS, what happens when you use a stone terrain texture - like cobblestones - instead of grass on your castle? Does it look reasonably like a building?

In fortifications, for example, you could place berms raised 1m on either side of a trench object and it would become invisible to the enemy due to the blocked LOS. The friendly side side of the berm would be ditchlocked, and the enemy side normal slope to help disguise it. Defenders could use the berm as a firing step to engage, and drop back down into the trench for cover. Would that work? Or would the ditchlock create a shadow from the stark deformation that would be visible from the enemy player's aerial view?

Seeing Castle Ditchlock makes me realize how useful the ditch lock capability will be not only for ditches, canals and RR cuts, but for terraced hillsides, raised dikes and berms, fortifications, and for cutting the foundation holes for partially sunken bunkers and buildings.

Arghh. I'm sooo disapppointed. I was looking forward to a USMC mod and I thought this was just the French spelling for Gomer.

Another unit type that would be cool to see in GL.

Stunning photos. +1 for better ruins (or worse ones, depending on your point of view). But credit is due to some of our more creative mappers, who have done amazing things already with the editor tools we have. One thing I think we've discovered is that partially or fully damaging buildings is of limited use. They're still vital, but the overall effect is better if they're intermingled with other features. For example, notice how undulating the streets of these cities became once there were lots of collapsed buildings around. You can get great rubble effects by using the elevation editor to make mounds in the elevation, then covering the mounds with rock terrain tiles and various debris objects. It's also good to rubble a building to complete destruction, then place a few high and low wall segments on parts of the building perimeter to simulate ruins. You can even create foundation pits and collapse buildings into them. Add liberal doses of craters, some wrecked and flaming vehicles (you can even place dead vehicles inside a building and the smoke will make it look like it's on fire) and you'll have a hellscape to please the most battle-scarred veteran of the Rattenkrieg. We'll certainly need to think more along these lines once CMBN is in Holland and we've got more urbanized combat situations.

I dare you to say that to their pixelfaces...

Yes, the pistols were the FJ troops' preferred weapon in drops because they couldn't carry their larger weapons on the descent. They were standard issue to all ranks. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt they would have given their pistols up just because they stopped jumping out of airplanes once they were in Italy and NW Europe -- CMFI really ought to have given them pistols in Italy (and in CMBN once that game has them too).

Wow! Nice work there mjkerner! I did get some OOB resource references from a game designer who really researched this deeply. So, if anyone wants to delve into the details of 1941 FJ TO&E, here you are: Each Parachute Battalion had 3 Infantry Companies and 1 Heavy Weapons Company (with 2 MG Plts and an 80mm mortar Plt) Each Regiment had 3 Parachute Battalions and a Recoilless Rifle Company and an AT Company. The Division had 3 Regiments plus an Artillery Battalion (3 Batteries), MG Battalion (3 Companies), an Light AA Battalion with (4 Companies), a Pioneer (Engineer) Battalion with 4 Companies, and an AT Battalion (3 Companies). Most of the Companies from the separate battalions were doled out amongst the regiments with the exception of the Pioneer Battalion. Here are a couple of secondary sources available on the internet if you are interested: http://www.scribd.com/doc/40481156/Osprey-Battle-Orders-004-German-Airborne-Division-Blitzkrieg-1940-41 http://www.scribd.com/doc/45228565/7Th-Flieger-Division-Student-s-Fallschirmjager-Elite-PDF-by-Snack Official NZ history of the Crete campaign: http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-WH2Cret.html

If I want to represent a 1941 era FJ battalion, it seems fairly feasible to do that by tweaking the OB editor here and there. But an issue arises with the 4th (heavy) company, which would have had the little 50cm mortars. I know the 50 cm mortars were considered next to useless, but they do give some HE capability to the formation that I'm not sure I can totally leave out. Which of these options do you think would be best in terms of game effect without throwing the firepower off too much one way or the other: 1. Just give the company more HMG sections and no mortars. 2. Use a tweaked Italian weapons company to replace the German 4th company and let their Brixia mortars stand in for the 50 cm. 3. Leave the proper number of HMG sections in the company, and replace what would have been 50mm sections with standard FJ infantry -- pretending the mortars got lost in the para drop or that the mortarmen tossed them away at the first opportunity.

Cheers, akd! Just what I needed. After reading it, I'd say the standard British units would work just fine. Any differences seem to be superficial and not really tactically significant for the game. One could explain away the higher personnel count in an Australian battalion by pretending the battalion in play is not at full strength (and we know units seldom operated at their full paper strength anyway). And after reading about the NZ infantry on the same site, I'd say it's better not to use them to represent 1941 Aussies (because in 1944 in the GL time period, according to the site, NZ started using its own TO&Es for the Italian Campaign that differed somewhat from the Brits).

If I wanted to represent Australian units using CMFI-GL, which type of unit comes closer to the proper look and TO&E: British or NZ? I know we don't have the classic slouch hats in the game, but the Australians wore Mark II helmets a lot of the time. The pictures I see online look pretty much like the typical British wool battledress or khaki drill uniforms and kit. Are there any significant differences in the way the Aussies were armed or organized compared with Brits and Kiwis? Were there many changes between, say, Australian TO&E circa 1941 in Crete and their (non Pacific) campaigns later on? (Please excuse my Yank ingnorance on this topic)

@chris ferrous: No flak from me, I think you got it exactly right. Problem is, the Ardennes is probably the most-wargamed subject in history (right up there with Stalingrad), and many players want a highly realistic game. Some also feel they should be able to win as the German side. Nothing wrong with playing alternate history and, say, giving these Germans a super weapon to see what would have happened, or having the weather stay overcast longer than IRL to see what happens when Allied airpower remains grounded. But if the Bulge is gamed with the historical setup and basic parameters, then a German victory in the terms Hitler conceived it should be virtually impossible.

Who did the map for this GL scenario? It looks excellent. i like the way it renders the dranage ditches -- with dirt tiles and about a 2m elevation drop. Curious to know if there's a source map or aerial photos you used for this one. None of the reference I've seen show where the ditches actually were. Or did you just fictionalize that aspect and place the ditches where they seemed to make sense? So much of the landscape has changed in the valley since 1943 that Google Earth isn't much help on field patterns, ditch and wall locations, etc.

Do any groggy geeky gustav-loving gamers happen to know... What would a 1941 Crete invasion FJ squad-platoon-company-battalion have looked like in weapons, personnel and organization compared with what we have in GL? I'm just trying to get a sense of what could be done within the scenario editor OOB tools to simulate a 1941 FJ force, or whether certain settings we have in the game now would make that impossible. At least it's theoretically possible to delete/substitute weapons and men in the editor to simulate a different era, compared to the impossibility of adding things to an OOB that aren't in the game.

Why not try a similar post on Boardgamegeek or Consimworld?

They're up now -- another masterpiece! Thanks, Vein.

Napoleon's wars filled so many cemeteries that they probably needed the space once the churchyards filled up.

Agreed -- just tried this sound mod and it really adds a better level to the audio. I particularly like the clankier tank sounds. I noticed the only voice files are various types of casualty screams -- so it would appear to me that Mord's Realistic American Voices, and some of the German voice mods would be compatible with it.