Broadsword56

Bimmer, did you figure out how to set it to "vecchia versione" (old version, I guess, to get historical maps?

I'd sure love to see canister-shooting Stuarts in CMBN 2.0 But it could take a bit of getting used to for players used to seeing the Germans-in-bocage as invincible. Would it throw the balance of the game way off in the Allied direction? Well, how about returning the favor and giving the Germans 20mm flak (as DF only, no AA capability)? It's a must by the time we get to Market-Garden, anyway (scattered light flak units were just about all the Germans had, in some places, to slow the Allies down in some of the earliest battles along the S. half of the corridor)

Found this old post on a CMAK forum -- could help CMFI mappers: Best map site for Italy. You can scale the map down to 1:5000 or smaller. Topos of Italy: http://www.pcn.minambiente.it/viewer/ Note that it only works (for me at least) in IE. Example -- For the Operation Avalanche (Salerno) area: -Click on Cartografia. -Click Vecchia Versione. -Click OK -Click Accetto -Click on the region (Campania for the Salerno region) -Scroll down and click on IGM 1:25000 -Wait a few minutes to allow it to load up completely, then use the Zoom and Pan buttons to get to the area you are interested in.

I like this plan. Certainly giving the enemy more than one thing to worry about, too.

OMG -- can't wait to see the ground-level shots of how the pack-vs-troop truck action turns out. Sometimes a rapid truck/jeep dash like that can catch an opponent napping and pay dividends -- like a QB sneak in football. In my Hamel Vallee battle with sburke, I had a HMG crew in their jeep do a quick-and-crazy dash around the end of a hedgerow into a wheatfield, and they came in with guns blazing from the jeep like Al Capone's mob. Totally surprised and gunned down a German or two, and greatly speeded up the advance.

Enjoying this. Just a thought -- those look like some long "Quick" segments for your infantry. Do you put in some pauses between segments? I'd worry about them getting tired at that pace. When I use "Quick" for leg infantry I try to keep segments no longer than 30m before adding at least a 5 sec pause, with periodic longer pauses to stop-look-listen-and-rest. (No wonder my pixeltruppen like me so much -- they may die, but at least they die refreshed...)

For those who've really delved into CMFI, or the developers/testers: Any suggestions on which scenarios make the best HTH battles?

Love this. How do you get the screenies to look to authentically grainy and old (specific filters or effects, etc.?)

Well Erwin, FWIW, I took that percentage figure from a Defense Department study called "Casualties as a Measure of the Loss of Combat Effectiveness of an Infantry Battalion." It was done during the Cold War but analyzed data from all the US battalions engaged in WWII. You can find it online, if you really want to geek out on this topic: http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=AD0059384&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf IIRC, the study pretty much concluded that there could be no universal measure of the relationship between casualties and cohesion level, but they did identify various factors affecting the relationship between the two, and how "breakpoints" could vary depending on the type of mission, how long the unit had been fighting, etc.

No. There just wouldn't be any overall way to say what was considered acceptable. It's just so relative. I suppose it would have depended on what the commander's objective was, the how intensively he was expected to pursue it, how much time he had to achieve it, and the resources available to achieve it. For example, I'm in a battle now where a US battalion + assets has force-marched to try and make a lightning grab of a village strongpoint that -- if captured -- would open the highway to Saint-Lo and might be the last chance for the US to win this campaign. The command's "acceptable" casualty levels for a battle like that would be much higher than if the situation were a probe to find and fix the enemy, a rearguard action, etc. But no matter how many casualties the commander would "accept," there's a limit to what flesh-and-blood soldiers can endure. And that's where the cohesion breakpoint -- 15% (or whatever the percentage really would be in a CM unit) -- comes in. In our operational campaigns using CM, we've set the cohesion breakpoint of attacking battalions at 35-40% of personnel, and defending battalions at 70-80%. Is that realistic? I don't know. But incorporating these sorts of factors does seem to push battles in more realistic directions than ones where players can fight to the last man. If you don't have an operational level to set up these situations, one way to do it is to just think a bit more before setting up a HTH battle about what the wider context and storyline could be - just make one up -- and then adjust the supply, forces, etc., to simulate that. In battles vs. the AI, well, the situation and victory conditions are already set up for you. Some of what was "acceptable" was culturally influenced... In Normandy, I've read, American infantry units tended to break off attacks sooner than German units would -- if the going got too tough, they'd rely on ample armor and artillery, and had air superiority. The British are sometimes said to have been especially casualty-averse, because with a more limited manpower pool they didn't have the resources to keep replacing troops this late in the war at the rate the Americans could. Monty and British commanders of the WWI generation were especially keen not to repeat the wholesale slaughter of that war. Others might say they just fought "smarter," using their artillery and combined arms better and more often than the less experienced Americans. With Germans or Soviets, you've got troops fighting under a dictatorship, which could and did press their troops harder and more often. Even after patriotism wore off as a reason to keep fighting, their fear of military discipline kept them fighting and obeying orders as long as they feared that discipline more than the enemy.

Wow, Erwin, those really are some tough subjective victory conditions you're setting for yourself. To each his own, but I tend to look at things in light of what I've been able to learn about WWII and casualties/unit cohesion: For a U.S. battalion in NW Europe with an attack mission, the "breakpoint" (when a battalion typically couldn't continue attacking and would have to switch over to defense, or get relieved, etc.) was somewhere around 15% casualties*. That's 15% of the total battalion TO&E (which includes all the cooks, medics, HQ personnel, etc., that aren't represented in CM). But because the vast majority of those casualties were concentrated the rifle companies, it means the actual casualty percentage breakpoint in the units we're playing with in CM would be quite a bit higher than 15%. Battalions on defense, of course, could take more punishment before breaking. Which also makes sense to me. (* A gross generalization, of course -- cohesion can depend on who gets hit, since the loss of one good officer at a key moment might devastate a unit, and the time frame of the losses -- since losing a lot of men in an hour would hurt a unit's combat effectiveness more than the same number of losses stretched over days or weeks.)

Thanks. And BTW, the German fitness level was set super-low in that battle not just for the heck of it (or to handicap sburke because his Landsers continue to kick GI butt every time) but to simulate the effects (disruption, lack of sleep, messed-up C3) of an operational-level overnight bombardment by the entire 29th ID artillery that hit them just prior to the battle's start. Not everyone will want to play an op layer or model events like that, but it's worth noting that these are they types of things that went on IRL, outside the scope of CM, that would have had a bearing on the forces, soft factors, and conditions at the tactical level. So if you omit those types of factors as "inputs", be prepared to accept a different set of "outputs" in the behavior and outcomes you see in your CM battle.

Except that you had CM on the brain the whole time, so you strung the entire fence with barbed wire without realizing it...d'oh!

Since Vassal, Cyberboard Zun Tzu and the like came out, we've gotten the best of both worlds: The ability to play traditional wargames on the computer with no need for tables, cardboard counters, and space; and the ability to find human opponents worldwide for PBEM or online play. On community sites like Consimworld and Boardgamegeek, wargamers have a 24/7 community to discuss games in ways they could never do before. Ebay and online used-game stores keep older wargames alive and played many years after they went out of print. It's led to a second golden age for traditional wargames and the hobby of playing them -- not only the old AH and SPI classics, but all sorts of new games in the block, card, print-and-play formats, as well as great game magazines (like Battles or Against All Odds) with games in them. It's never looked better. As a money-making industry, selling a physical product, the wargame business is lucky to break even today compared to the golden days of the cardboard boxed games sold in stores. But just because the original business model eventually failed doesn't mean the hobby itself died with it. Back in the 1990s I thought it would, but things have turned out very differently. Finally, with BFC, the CMx1 and the CMx2 engine, we're seeing great "artisan" computer wargames made by designers who are gamers themselves, with a completely different approach than the big-money blockbuster side of the game industry. And it's now possible to use CM and traditional wargames together to create multi-level metagames. It just doesn't get any better than that.

I give a +100 to the reviewer's plea that we one day see the 28th Maori Bn added to the CMFI "family."

Try this: https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=213046468374458899658.0004c2f2cbb3b4c5d62f4&msa=0

@JonS: If you're interested at all in looking ahead to Market-Garden, the issue of rating unit motivation, experience, and leadership for operational formations will be extremely important (and even more complicated) there. The mix of German units, in particular, is so wonderfully hodgepodge, from crack SS to garrison troops to FJ to convalescents, etc. It would be great if we could list -- actually I think I will do this -- on a separate thread all the KG and other formations and open it up to our resident scholars to suggest how these should be rated in CM terms. I'm perusing "It Never Snows in September" again to glean tidbits on what specific formations were like.

This is one you can spend hours reading "case files" on: http://www.battledetective.com

No, but in that case I'd tell the AFV to fire on the move on that leg of the order -- just leave an area fire target in effect during a move segment -- since you're looking for suppressive effect and not necessarily trying to target and kill specific known enemy positions.

No, I was speaking off the cuff and from memory re: CMBN. It seemed that sometimes I could do multiple splits like that and sometimes I couldn't, but I never really delved into the geekly details of it.

Check out the German WWII POW graves at Ft. Meade, too. It's a small plot with Wehrmacht headstones, the final resting place of a few who happened to die while in custody. I think (or am I imagining) there's a little stone bridge nearby with a 1944 cornerstone, that these POWs built while confined there. The German Embassy in DC (at least back in the 1980s) always sent a wreath-laying delegation out to the post every year to honor their memory.

Which is why it's better not to split only a scout team, even if that's all you need split at the moment. When I play I immediately split almost all squads (leaving whole only those in reserve or well out of contact) in this order: 1. Split off the AT team. Makes it much more flexible, small, and useful. 2. Either "Split Teams" (which gives you two roughly equal sized large teams), or "Split Scout team" (which gives your scout team). 3. If #2 was to get a Scout Team, then "Split Teams" to get 2 small fire teams. This leaves you 3 or 4 useful elements instead of one big blob of a squad. This type of splitting is an all-purpose organization, but if you have specific missions in mind for a squad then of course the Assault Team, etc., make sense to get the right weapons/equipment in the right hands.

Gorgeous town map. Makes me wish for another flavor object -- one that really would make Italy come alive and the towns feel lived-in... Clotheslines across the alleys -- some even with a bit of tattered laundry on them.

I think CM-Market Garden will offer more variety in battle types that will hit the "sweet spot" for many players. Instead of "take that hill/defend that hill" (Italy) or "grind through the bocage on a continuous front" (Normandy pre-Cobra), we'll be seeing a theatre with more meeting engagements, crazy flanks and fluid fronts, and smaller, more widely separated elements trying to cut or defend portions of the narrow Allied corridor. Urban combat enthusiasts will get Arnhem, and if you like big dense set-pieces, there's the XXX Corps breakout effort on Sept. 17. Can't wait....!

Also, I think we've found there's a "consolation prize" when you have an operational layer -- a lopsided tactical battle doesn't hurt as much if you lose, because there's always tomorrow, or an opportunity to counterattack with that company over there, etc.