Broadsword56

It's not the least bit gamey to use 60mm mortar crews as regular infantry when they've shot off their mortar ammo. It happened all the time IRL. In the US Army, for example, they were part of the 4th (Weapons) platoon and as trained as any other soldier in the front-line rifle company. When casualties depleted the ranks of the first three platoons, the mortar crews and ammo bearers would be the first place the company would grab warm bodies to throw into the line. They're going to suffer if they don't have M-1s, but send them somewhere to pick some up and they'll get the infantryman's job done. Plus they usually carry binoculars too.

No, wait! Never mind the Greco-Roman columns (while that would be cool, here's a different tower-like building that we've been needing desperately and will need increasingly as we move into Holland, Germany, and E Front): Factory smokestack -- (and since it's identical on all sides and doesn't need to have a facing, the arrow keys could control 4 levels of height for it. So you could get everything from the chimney of a modest brickworks to the mighty industrial smokestacks of the Ruhr). Since smokestacks/chimeys don't stand apart from buildings and normally protrude out of a building, the smokestack can have a mini-building/base portion at the ground level that, when joined next to a factory building, would look like a natural extension of that building.

I wish that were possible in this game. Back in Normandy, one of the reasons the outnumbered Brits managed to hold out on Hill 112 near Caen was that they used a lot of captured German MGs and, as a result, acquired way more direct firepower than a unit their size typically would have had.

I've always felt BFC could do a lot more with the square "church tower" modular building, and here are some ideas to raise it to its full potential in 2.0: How about using the "cycling" functions that change building details to make this one structure fill several important needs: 1. Church/cathedral tower (in CMFI this is a campanile type or a typical tile-roofed square church tower with windows at the top, and in CMBN/OMG it's an ornate Dutch brick steepled church/bell tower with trim). (which cycles to become...) 2. Chateau tower (with the appropriate style for an Italian villa in CMFI or a pointy-turreted NW Europe chateau that would work in France or Holland). I know LongLeftFlank, me, and others have been clamoring for this for a long time. (which cycles to become...) 3. Stone castle-keep tower with battlements. Mossy and nearly windowless, useful for medieval ruins, Colditz, flak towers, Metz, remnants of ancient city walls like the Porte de la Craffe in Nancy, and the Norman watchtower on the beach at Salerno. Set a high damage level on this one and you'd have some good standing WWII-era ruins of stone buildings to intersperse with other types on urban maps. (which cycles to become...) 4. Classical Greco-Roman column(s). These should be of light stone but VERY weathered and beaten-up looking. Using a number of these, at different damage levels and combined with rocky ground and stone debris, you could do Paestum or use as the occasional flavor object anywhere in Italy or the Med. Patton would love them and say, "I was THERE!" :-)

But the 2.0 upgrade for CMBN is still expected within the next 2 months, right Steve? (fingers crossed) Also, I see you called the Operation Market-Garden module "Arnhem." Will it include the forces and TO&E necessary for the US and XXX Corps sectors of the operation? Or is it initially going to be only Commonwealth vs. SS + FJ, etc., i.e, the forces that fought in the Oosterbeek/Arnhem?

I don't know the answer (how to download), but can't you just save the image as you have done, then open it in an image editor (like gimp or Photoshop) and resize/crop/edit/change image format however you need to? Granted, you'll lose resolution with a big blowup, but for overlay purposes I would think you'd still be good to go as far as outlines of roads, fields, buildings, etc, to get your map laid out properly. Have you tried that, or does the aerial photo get too blurry to use?

Neither. It was in Deliver Us from Darkness: The Untold Story of Third Battalion, 506th PIR.

+1 to that. I remember the old Close Combat games had it. Also reminds me of a Market-Garden anecdote I just read the other night: A US paratrooper was munching on an apple some Dutch civilians had given him, when the Germans suddenly attacked. The fire grew more intense as the Germans got closer and closer. His weapon jammed. In desperation, he threw the apple at them! The Germans reacted as if it was a grenade and hit the dirt -- leaving just enough time for the paratrooper to sprint for safety.

Ahhh, they never knew what hit 'em once those Thunderbolts came down on them. At least they didn't have to suffer additional days of hedgerow warfare only to die in the rubble of Saint-Lo...As for me, I'm still mourning the entire US company that surrendered when cut off and surrounded at Choisy Crossroads!

Bottom line: If it's interesting to you and makes you want to see it in CMBN, then it's an interesting battle. My point, though is that some battles I see develop in an operational level make my hair stand on end, and I feel like I just can't wait to play them out tactically. Other battles don't, even though they all have consequences of one sort or another on the operation. Yes, they all have consequences on the operation. But no, they don't all have to be played in CMBN. That's why the boardgame has a CRT. In a good operational game, just like IRL, a particular unit can get an impossibly sh**ty mission. If it were a stand-alone CMBN battle, I might say I got a raw deal as a player and not want to play it. But in an op campaign, when I put on my Corps commander's hat, I see the bigger picture: That unfortunate company has to occupy and fix the enemy with a feint frontal attack while the rest of the battalion hits them in the flank/rear. That still doesn't necessarily make me want to experience the mission of the sacrificial company in CMBN. So I can let the boardgame CRT handle that one, while my live opponent and I decide we'd have more fun using CMBN to play out the action of, say, the final phase of the attack 2 hours later, when the flanking attack goes in and the enemy has to make a desperate last stand to hold a vital crossroads, etc.

Wow -- that brings back memories. I recall standing in the back corner of a game store in Palo Alto, circa 1982, and just marveling over the scope and detail of the "Battle for the Factories" map -- well, from what I could see on the unopened box.

True about the limitations of the road tools. But don't let them deter you or make you feel there's no point trying to make accurate battle maps. It's a trade-off decision you make: have the roads a bit curvier but following close to their real life paths, or skewing the map orientation to make more roads run straight and make then easier to place. If you choose straight roads, you get a prettier map. But the scale of the map will gradually get put of whack too. if you choose wavy roads, you lose some aesthetics but will find it easier to make a map that follows the real terrain at the accurate scale. Just select certain key junctions or intersections or points where the road actually ran, as checkpoints to keep it on track. Then use whatever curves you have to use to get it from checkpoint to checkpoint. I always go the curvy-road route, personally. But I wish we didn't have to make this choice.

That might be good advice for a stand-alone map, or if you just want it to look prettier, but think carefully before doing that if you have any wider ambitions of doing a series for a campaign, etc. Once you start skewing the orientation of reality-based maps from a true N orientation, it becomes more difficult to match them up to adjacent areas, extend them, etc., especially for other people who might want to locate the exact boundaries of your map and build on your work. (Having learned this the hard way from my 4km x 4km hand-drawn corps level map in Normandy)

Life's just too short to play the NON-interesting battles...and op layers give you a lot more interesting battles to choose from. We've seen some setups and situations and tactical/terrain challenges I'd never have been able to think up on my own.

Any Dutch speakers on the forum: If you can look at the "watwaswaar" site and explain a bit more to us in English about how to use the interface, that would be fantastic. I'm learning how to nativate it slowly, by trial-and-error, but I know I'm missing a lot of its capabilities.

Sand grogs will also appreciate the story in today's New York Times, reporting an electrifying discovery about beach fortifications...

That would be excellent JasonC -- the only caveat would be that the scale is above what some might consider best for operational-tactical CMFI campaigns. If you try it you'll see what I mean. The higher the scale, the more "fudge factor" and fill-in-the-blanks guesswork you have to do to interpret boardgame situations into CMBN maps and OOBs, and vice-versa. I find this true even with battalion-scale boardgames, but at least there the actual units can go into battalion scale CMBN battles. Still, thanks for listing it and contributing to a constructive thread. Good Sicily boardgames are harder to find than, of course, Normandy, Bulge, Stalingrad, etc.

My buddy Tom in The Netherlands at battledetective.com makes these suggestions for finding WWII aerial photos of the Market-Garden battle areas: ------ Aerial photos are sold in Holland by the government and can be ordered here: http://www.dotkadata.com/en/node/946 They cost € 46 per photo. Now, that's the official story. But a simple Google search gave me this website with photos of Nijmegen in 1944: http://mwn-luchtfoto.blogspot.nl/ And for Eindhoven: http://www.eindhoven-in-beeld.nl/years.asp?id=1944 And this one is the best: http://watwaswaar.nl/ It shows a reference map of Holland and when you zoom in on locations you can see the flight paths of photo recon sorties. Click on the images and you can enlarge the aerial photos. It helps when you understand Dutch but you must be able to find suitable photos. And on the homepage is an explanation in English. In short: The Nijmegen area: http://watwaswaar.nl/#cC-Om-5-1-1v-1 The Eindhoven area: http://watwaswaar.nl/#X2-ES-4-1-1v-1 ------- And here's a .&linkText=Back+to+bibliographic+information]US site you'll definitely want to use for 1:25,000 scale official maps -- showing every dike, fenceline, building, etc. (You should find and download/install an image viewer/converter, like irfanview, that can handle jpeg2000 image format and convert to regular jpg format. Then you'll be able to edit and use them as Google Earth overlays, or turn them into bmp format for your CMBN editor overlays.)

I think if the repair function were implemented for phone lines, it should be abstracted with a randomized chance and a variable time before the link is restored and the icon returns, once a line has been cut (by HE fire, an AFV rolling over it, or occupation of any commo line AS by an enemy unit).

Yes, but the repair activity would be outside the time scale of a CMBN battle. They wouldn't have been able to go looking for a break and run around with spools under fire and in the heat of battle, would they?

All three powers used landline field telephones extensively in WWII. I could imagine an abstracted system where, for phone instead of radio-equipped troops, the CM engine traces an imaginary LOC from the unit to the higher unit in the C2 chain. You wouldn't see the wire on map, but it could have some invisible dieroll chance of getting cut by any artillery that hits an AS along its length, or an AFV that drives over it. When it's working you'd see a telephone handset icon in the GUI instead of the radio icon, and the usual green dots.

General principle that I read in the real-life AAR seems to be: Take the high ground first; advance along ridges (in defilade, so as not to skyline your troops) and take the harder, less-expected and more difficult routes as long as they get you to where you can attack from above. Maneuver is SO important and vegetation so sparse in this arid island that I hope map builders will make sure to make them big enough to allow many alternative avenues of approach.

Yes, having those 20mm flak units would doing direct fire would add significantly to German tactical firepower in the game, and probably take some getting used to for Allied players. But if we're eventually going to get canister capability in the rest of the CM 2.0 families for Allied M5 Stuarts and M8 AGs, then maybe the German flak units would be a good counterbalance.

Exactly what's needed.

+1 to ruins/castles Consider... There were Roman ruins around Paestum (Salerno, American sector). The Salerno landing beach had an ancient Norman watchtower the Germans used for a MG nest. In Market-Garden, castles/castle ruins featured in various places -- notably Castle Heeswijk near the Willemsvaart Canal, which made a good OP. And we've had a need for some sort of "standing" ruins that go beyond the flat rubble of a completely rubbled building -- something with a few partial walls and apertures, etc., which would be important for urban/town combat maps in Arnhem, etc.