Broadsword56

Yes. Just as you can't understand the Sixties without looking at the Fifties they were a reaction to, all you have to do is look the war years to realize why adults wanted the peace to be as bland and quiet and predictably stable as possible.

This is the kind of mapping I really love to see. Great work!

That obit also reminded me of a more mundane game issue: Note to self: When the Market-Garden module comes out, remember that the German troops of that era bore little resemblance to the armies that the Allies faced even a few short months earlier in Normandy. By fall, a GI might find himself facing elite SS formations with Ostfront experience one day, 14-year-old green-but-fanatical Volksgrenadiers the next, and various ad-hoc mixtures of NCO school classes, regimental bandsmen, invalid Luftwaffe members, or military police units. To have realistic battles of the time period, make sure to reflect that wider variety in the "soft factors" of battle setups.

I was struck by this passage in today's New York Times obit for actor Charles Durning, 89, who died Christmas Eve: ---- ...Then came World War II, and he enlisted in the Army [rifleman with the 398th Infantry Regiment, later with the 3rd Army Support troops and the 386th Anti-aircraft Artillery (AAA) Battalion]. His combat experiences were harrowing. He was in the first wave of troops to land on Omaha Beach on D-Day and his unit’s lone survivor of a machine-gun ambush. In Belgium he was stabbed in hand-to-hand combat with a German soldier, whom he bludgeoned to death with a rock. Fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, he and the rest of his company were captured and forced to march through a pine forest at Malmedy, the scene of an infamous massacre in which the Germans opened fire on almost 90 prisoners. Mr. Durning was among the few [only three, according to other sources] to escape. By the war’s end he had been awarded a Silver Star for valor and three Purple Hearts, having suffered gunshot and shrapnel wounds as well. He spent months in hospitals and was treated for psychological trauma... ...Mr. Durning was also remembered for his combat service, which he avoided discussing publicly until later in life. He spoke at memorial ceremonies in Washington, and in 2008 France awarded him the National Order of the Legion of Honor. In the Parade interview, he recalled the hand-to-hand combat. “I was crossing a field somewhere in Belgium,” he said. “A German soldier ran toward me carrying a bayonet. He couldn’t have been more than 14 or 15. I didn’t see a soldier. I saw a boy. Even though he was coming at me, I couldn’t shoot.” They grappled, he recounted later — he was stabbed seven or eight times — until finally he grasped a rock and made it a weapon. After killing the youth, he said, he held him in his arms and wept. Mr. Durning said the memories never left him, even when performing, even when he became, however briefly, someone else. “There are many secrets in us, in the depths of our souls, that we don’t want anyone to know about,” he told Parade. “There’s terror and repulsion in us, the terrible spot that we don’t talk about. That place that no one knows about — horrifying things we keep secret. A lot of that is released through acting.” ---- CM is just a game, but part of me always tries to be mindful of what the characters and actions I'm seeing on the screen represent. I think one reason for my enduring fascination with WWII is sheer amazement at what some of these men went through, and wanting to better understand it. Also, it amazes and fascinates me to that so many of these seemingly bland, conformist, everyday Dad types I saw and knew as a suburban American kid of the '60s were carrying incredible, unspeakable secrets around with them. Even if I had known, for example, about my high school principal's valor when he parachuted into predawn Sicily, I most likely wouldn't have properly appreciated it then (since he was angrily suspending students at the time for a Vietnam walkout protest).

Thanks loads, Mord! Now can someone explain how one uses the brifing graphics templates (things like the side panels files, etc) to make those slick-looking briefing graphics? All I know how to do is import the stratmap, opmap, tacmap bmp files into the editor, but that simply places them into the frames that already exist. What does one do with template files to make them work in-game, etc.?

Ove a year ago I posted a 4km x 4km master map to the Repository of the XIX Corps area around July 11, 1944, using Google earth terrain. It's got all elevations done and the basic bocage pattern and roads laid in, but you'd have to detail the rest of it yourself in the areas you're interested in.

Sportmanship Award of the Year 2012 for that one!

In CM you can blast from one adjoining building wall and through another, and then move from one building to the next using demo charges. But there are never enough demo charges available in-game to advance through an entire city block that way. One help would be to make demo charges acquirable from engineer trucks, or to have pre-positionable ammo and demo charge dumps placeable on maps. This seems like something BFC will have to figure out by the time they get to the Ostfront, Berlin, etc.

Since you brought up 20mm cannon -- what are the chances we'll see this in CMBN for Market-Garden? It just seemed such an important direct fire weapon for the Germans, and particularly at this time/place.

I thought the Germans removed all the bells to melt them down for munitions?

You can make your troops move a bit smarter if you use QUICK moves with 10sec pauses every 30m or so. They'll fire every time they drop, and if you stagger the pauses among adjacent teams some will be firing while the others are moving. I think maybe some newcomers to the game might give their troops order paths that are much too long and continuous. It's a lot more work to plot all the shorter rushes, but troops will behave and survive better that way.

Also, instead of continuing to wait and beg for op-layer pie-in-the-sky, those who really long for an operational layer can always use their favorite board/VASSAL/whatever wargames in conjunction with CM to play out all or some of the tactical setups. Some of us do this now, and it's a blast. Not a perfect solution, and not as easy as an integrated op layer to CM might be -- but it's real and can be done right now. OTOH, in some ways the two-game option is superior because you get to set it up exactly the way you want it, and decide how to translate the situations/setups back and forth. I guarantee that even if BFC attempted to make and integrate an op layer into CM, these boards would be filled with players' gripes about how disppointed they are and flawed/broken it is, etc.

Thanks to your good reference links, I just was able to reserve a copy of "Star" via interlibrary loan. It seems to be in a lot of university libraries (my copy is coming from San Jose State -- sorry sburke!)

Lovely Christmas present. Thanks, Tanks!

I'm not a modder, but it's been my understanding that this is impossible because only the skins of vehicles can be modded, not the 3D aspects (wireframes). I'm sure if it were doable, one of our talented modders would have done it by now. We'd all love to see this. But a tank with flat foliage painted onto the skin probably wouldn't get the effect you're after.

What happened next?? Curse you for leaving us in suspense like that.

If you want more guidance, you can find WWII German manuals online that show diagrams for strongpoints. There's also an Osprey book, "World War II Infantry Assault Tactics" that diagrams prepared defenses very well.

Yes, I agree with using exit zones this way. In historical scenarios, I also use exit zones to represent an area that a force was known to have retreated to and was authorized to use, when there's really no point to including that area on the battle map. Example: The Wadi El Keddab in my El Guettar scenario -- I included only a sliver of the wadi along the W map edge, but gave the US an exit zone there to represent the possibility of retreating deeper into the wadi. It would have been unrealistic to let the Germans trap forces there against the map edge. And there was no point to putting the rest of the wadi on the (already enormous) map.

Exit zones can be a good feature, and can make the game more fun, to be sure. But it isn't necessarily more realistic. Commanders at this tactical level of CM games didn't have the authority to just withdraw from their assigned sector without permission from higher HQ. Realistically your unit is part of a larger formation -- if you decide on your own to retreat, you might be leaving your adjacent unit's flank open or leaving a hole in the line, or exposing your side's line of communications to the enemy. An operational game layer is a realistic way to manage things like that -- better IMHO than trying to stretch CM into an operational aspect it's really not designed for.

Special request if you ever want to do this some day, Aris: A terrain mod to turn the various rocks tiles to a chalkier, whiter color. If we had that then we could make realistic-looking maps for Crete once we have CW troops and FJ in the game. The rocks now are way too gray for that.

I'm confused about whether vehicle mods work in 2.0 or will all have to be redone. It looks, from some threads and posts, as if just certain specific vehicles (Lynx? Tiger? Marder?) maybe don't work with the old mods because they got redone in some way for 2.0. I removed all vehicle mods for 2.0, but I'd really like to keep the ones that work. It would be great to see a list if anyone knows and would share it.

Yes: 4/King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry (KOYLI) Hallamshire Battalion Linconshire Battalion Kensingtons 7/Duke of Wellington's

My vote would be for the 49th West Riding "Polar Bears" Division.

And of course flames and flamethrowers.

They look fantastic in game. Thanks for making them! Looking forward to the faces.