Broadsword56

I had the same problem recently (Rhino made a gap, but no other vehicles were able to follow through it), but the map was created in an older version of CMBN. So I don't know yet whether 2.0 still does this.

If this is the kind of political shouting match we descend to in a thread that's about a game that's about a war that ended almost 70 years ago, I can only imagine what it would be like in game forums about, say, Vietnam! (which is one reason I stick to games about WWII and earlier)

I think Fernando has the persuasive argument, with the facts on his side. Bottom line: For Soviet toops we'll just have to do our historical homework, depending on which specific situations we're trying to re-create with CM:EF.

My local library in the Bay Area is in an interlibrary loan system called Link+ So I searched for it online at the Library's website and it located a copy at San Jose State U. A few weeks later it arrived at my local library and I picked it up. The volume itself felt like a historical artifact -- actually I'm surprised that the university let it circulate -- it was tiny, slender, pulpy-smelling, and printed in the late 1940s by the Foreign Language Publishing House, Moscow. The flyleaf said "Stalin Prize, 1947" in bright red type. It had a number of moody, evocative illustrated plates in a few places, too. So, if your library has a loan system like this, do a search and you might be surprised.

As someone once said, "quantity has a quality all its own."

Yes, and it's a shame that we'll never see as many unvarnished, soldier-level accounts from the Red Army as we've gotten over the decades from the armies that fought WWII in the West (things like "A Bridge Too Far," "Band of Brothers," etc.) As a result, the story of the Red Army soldier has largely been told in the West by their former WWII or Cold War enemies. I've seen some more recent books that have tried to rectify this -- but so many years have passed and so many of the veterans have passed away. I just finished that 1940s novel "Star," which I really liked and which had a feel of authenticity to the patrol actions. But it was a Stalin-era novel (it even won the Stalin prize) and so it still had the whiff of propaganda about it.

So, if you wanted something that would enable human wave-style behavior, maybe something like: Experience = Conscript Motivation = Fanatic Leadership = -2 Fitness = Fit

We've all been watching too much "Downton Abbey" lately...

No offense intended, Baron. I'm sure the forum will benefit from the insights of real Russians once we in the West are playing CM on the Eastern Front. But the question I posed still remains. How would you set the soft factors to represent a Soviet soldier, and might there be any differences -- on average -- from the way the ratings might be set for Germans in that period?

Yet they also couldn't break and run, since they had as much to fear in punishment from their own side as from the enemy. Which raises a good CM question: What would be the best way to set the "soft factors" to represent the typical Red Army soldier of WW II (yes, I realize there's no such thing and it depends on the time/place/unit and whether it might have been a Guards formation or rifle troops, etc.)? I'm imagining troops that have low training, little experience, little initiative, not particularly well skilled, but also very stubbornly persistent in combat and much more likely to fight/die in place than rout. How would one represent that in game, since it would seem that very poor motivation doesn't usually equal high staying power?

The only thing we had that worked around this was the HTML Mapping Tool -- in essence, you built your maps in 400m x 400m sections, and then the tool would automatically draw and place those sections anywhere in the 4km x 4km grid you told it to. That was a brilliant concept -- But the tool is more or less obsolete now that we have overlays in CMBN 2.0

Yikes, I had never stopped and thought about there being a limit to how far you can extend a map in a particular direction. What's the limit? I thought you'd be able to extend indefinitely on just one edge long as the total distance on that axis remained 4,000m or less. Reading this last post with *great* interest, since I'm about to start an operational-tactical campaign in the Fontenay-les-Pesnel -- Tessel woods -- Rauray sector very soon, using CMBN and a company-scale boardgame that does Operation Martlet (then known as Dauntless) over a division-sized area. We'll certainly be able to use some of your mapped areas for the eventual CMBN battles.

I just corrected that number in my post. I figured you knew about this technique, Noob, but I wanted to share it "for the folks watching at home."

Noob, You can always expand maps like these if they're based on the actual terrain, provided you locate the relevant area on a source image (like Google Earth), use the overlay function, and carefully watch the scaling of your overlay and the direction you extend the map within the CMBN editor. The really tricky thing about extending existing maps is matching things up if the original mapper rotated the original game map from a N orientation (for example, to get a straight road). Then you'd have the extra challenge of hand-tweaking the rotation of your Google Earth screen, and trying to define your expanded map area to match the original orientation. [This is one of the reasons why I advocate that mappers of real places try and keep a N orientation and also try and base one or more map corners on a a real grid coordinate intersection. It would make community expansion projects and campaign maps much easier to do.] So the way I'd go about it is: 1. Make a jpeg of Rokko's map and overlay it on the actual terrain in GE, matching it as exactly as possible. 2. Rotate the GE screen to get it to the orientation you need (if N is top, then Shift+N always gets the screen to exactly that orientation). 3. Use the ruler tool in meters and measure out the extended boundaries of your desired area, setting GE placemarks at the corners. 4. Use the draw polygon tool to click on all 4 corners of your desired map area. (I like to use a white 2pt outlined but not filled box). 5. Zoom in and save the screen image -- it will be a jpeg. (If you want to be really detailed, take a number of images at 90m elevation and stitch them into one. But I usually just take one image as close as I can zoom in with a full screen). 6. In the CMBN editor, open the Rokko map. Now you have to do some tricky math to calculate how much the original needs to expand on any given side to match your overlay. Use the sizing arrows in the upper right corner and extend the map EXACTLY the number of meters necessary in EXACTLY the right direction(s) to get to your 4000m x 400m size. 7. Turn the jpeg from your reference image into a bmp overlay for CMBN and crop it exactly on your white boundaries. Place it into the z folder. 8. Open the game editor again. What you should see is a 4000m x 4000m map, with Rokko's original showing in it's exact place, and blank areas in the areas you extended. Your GE overlay, in those new areas, should show you what to draw in order to fill in the rest of the map. (You'll still have to do the elevations in the new areas and make sure they mesh well with the original ones.) So, it's very doable -- but no one said it was easy!

OK you MG grogs, next question: Ranges: Some data on the web show a Vickers-armed British MG platoon with a range of 1250 yards. The MG34's range is shown as identical They give the MG42 a range of about 1,750. Are these accurate? Also: I believe those max ranges refer to indirect firing. Do we have evidence that either the Vickers or either German HMG were fired indirect much (or ever) in the Normandy battles? Or were they limited to close support of the infantry battalions? Clearly the terrain would have limited the practical ranges of these weapons much of the time. But in the more open country around Caen, for example, might there have been any use of indirect HMG fire?

Thanks so much, everyone.

I imagined the dead soldier wasn't a Gebirgsjaeger but perhaps had worn the edelweiss for more sentimental reasons -- perhaps he was Austrian, or perhaps his girlfriend had given it to him when he was on leave or something (or maybe I'm just confusing it with that scene in "The Sound of Music??" Damn, now I won't be able to get that song out of my head...Ehhhh-del-WEISS, Ehhh-del-WEISS...)

This seems like the kind of research question our resident grogs would know: What percentage of the 12th SS Pz and Panzer Lehr units featured in the CMBN time frame were likely to be fitted with the MG42, as opposed to the MG34? I'm guessing a mix of the two gun types was normal in June 44, but realistically how many units had the MG42 by this time? And if they had it, how many of the 6 HMGs in the a battalion heavy weapons company would have been likely to have been MG42s? Would there likely be more of them in a Lehr unit compared to a Hitlerjugend unit, or the other way around?

I can't imagine that BFC would release a MG module without a windmill in it. But I'm sure that if/when they do, Tanks a Lot would be able to do another great job of modding it.

Clearly, the poster has an anger management problem, brought about by excessive time spent playing violent video games...:-) CC: ASPCA

"I ain't been shot, Mum."

Also, mj, consider the great classic Panzer Command (Victory Games 1984) for the Eastern Front. It's the chit-pull, company-level system that was eventually adapted for MMP's two Market-Garden games. I just picked up a used copy for $30, so it's a steal compared to new games today.

Thanks for the wrap-up summary, sburke. A great time was had by all. In a nutshell, what happened is the American XIX Corps lost about 24 hours in the second or third day of the 8-day campaign. A combination of factors contributed to this: 1. Truly shameful performance of the green 35th (Santa Fe) Infantry Division -- many of whose units arrived late, failed to activate, and performed poorly in combat (one company on reserve/flank guard even got itself captured when the Germans launched a surprise armored counterattack on the American LOC). 2. The historically accurate, stubborn German bocage defenses that bogged down and chewed up all the US attacks, except for the last one at La Luzerne -- but that came too late to save the campaign. 3. Some seriously lousy die-rolling for the Americans that caused the 29th (Blue and Gray) Infantry Division to underperform and exhaust itself, despite having some open corridors to Saint-Lo, with lead units halting 2km from the city. We both had a positive experience with the one built-up town map we fought on (La Luzerne), and felt it showed us a lot of what works and doesn't work in CM in that type of terrain. Basically, the more destroyed and ruined and rubbled the town, the better it plays. It's the intact buildings that tend to cause problems (either by limitations of the game engine or by collapsing too easily on occupants). Some standing buildings are necessary, and they do a lot to channel attacks/defenses, affect LOS,a dn other important things. But we can do a lot of other creative things with spot elevations, rubble piles, perimeter walls, ruined buildings, etc., to make good urban maps that play pretty well. Although the La Luzene chateau collapse frustrated sburke (he lost a Pioneer platoon that had planned to make it a defensive fortress), it was interesting because it had a sunken basement and a parked ammo truck down there for resupply. Also, because the chateau was made of three adjoining structures, the collapse still left a multilevel ruin in one wing that the Americans were able to use as a refuge/rally point/OP. And some of those German pioneers even survived the building collapse to continue waging grenade and close combat within the basement, many turns later. I kept seeing GIs get hit and wondered what was killing them, because I couldn't see the Germans who were doing it. (We imagined that they were holed up in a wine cellar, picking off every American who went down there to investigate!) They eventually had to be rooted out with grenades and tommy guns. I think the results of La Luzerne showed a realistic result: The US attacked a fortified village with about a 6:1 force ratio and eventually won, but took about 35% casualties in the process. The Germans took about the same level of casualties, but because they were a company defending against a battalion-plus, attrition eventually won the day and the last 65 panzergrenadiers surrendered. What got sburke to throw in the towel at last was a great little sequence where my scout car surprised his last remaining StuG from behind. The scout car crept around a bocage corner and took out the StuG with one shot -- up the tailpipe from about 150-200m.

Wow, it even has a gargoyle and -- from the looks of it -- a bell in the belfry! Thanks again, Tanks.

Come to think of it, one could probably do a Spanish Civil War battle with some modding and CMFI, similar to the way LongLeftFlank did with Dien Bien Phu and the Pacific.