Broadsword56

Michael, have you tried Vassal or Cyberboard, or Zun Tzu? I have zero space to set up board wargames, and I haven't done that in 40 years. But with those computer modules, you can play almost any of them now, from the Avalon Hill and SPI classics to the latest releases (and find opponents easily online, too). Avalanche will surely have a computer module one day.

You might be interested to know that Avalanche is being reworked and reprinted by Consim Press as a battalion level game: http://talk.consimworld.com/WebX/.1dd59cd4/243 I'm keeping my eye on this one as a good candidate for a meta-game to use with the CMFI family once it moves to the mainland boot. But since the game was still in play testing this month, I'll bet it could be a year or more before the game ever sees release.

Would be nice to have: The ability to turn off the white text on paused screens during replay that says, "DONE" or "review" etc., so that I don't have to do a lot of doctoring and cloning on images to remove it when making screenshots. Being able to turn off the GUI for a full screen would be nice too (or is there already an option for that)?

mjkerner and I have been playing a HTH on this map and are up to Turn 124. We both agree the map is awesome. Authentic, loaded with atmosphere, and chock full of fascinating and frustrating tactical challenges. The OOB is a different story. While it looks well-researched, as far as the numbers and TO&E, there are two issues: 1. Reinforcements are just dumped on the map in no real order. Big headache for the players, and it leads to unrealistic additional delays while the players have to march units halfway across the map to get them into the formations that historically they would have already been in. 2. Naming of the units is ahistorical -- not any effect on gameplay, but annoying and an immersion-killer on such a great map. Example, US companies are numbered ("10 Company," "12 Company," etc. and the OOB doesn't follow the way American units were named. These things would be easy to fix in the editor, but it's not time I feel like spending since I'm already in mid-battle. I still highly recommend this scenario, but this is just a word of warning to those considering downloading it. Thanks Undercovergeek for the great map and scenario -- here's hoping you (or someone) can issue a revised version some day that will address these issues. If anyone is interested in an AAR and some screenshots, let us know on this thread and we can consider posting something later on.

Well, at Carentan you may soon get your chance to even the score in that regard... And if it's not the commander, it always seems to be the radio operator! But IRL, the enemy always aimed for those two guys first if they could. In CMBN, I think it has to do with the fact that commanders more often are trying to spot, trying to be visible to their men, and are less likely to simply cower/go to ground at any given moment. So any lead or frags in the air are just that much more likely to catch 'em, plus they're being specifically targeted more. Put those together and you get a lot of telegrams going home to officers' families :-(

Good policy, but it's a policy I break selectively now and then -- and it can pay big dividends. There are times when a good leader, leading from the front, can make all the difference in a critical moment. Their superior spotting abilities can ID a developing threat or counterattack faster, the men keep their fighting spirit a bit longer, and sometimes you just need their extra firepower and tommy guns to give an assault that extra oomph. But it's not a "percentage play" as they say in baseball. To torture the analogy a bit more, it's like a squeeze play -- not for the novice, and not for their feint of heart!

I think the degree of rally from Shaken/Panic also seems to be affected by other factors than proximity of their leader -- like the leader quality, quality of the troops, and even maybe fitness level. Two units with the same morale state might even behave differently, depending on other factors -- I've seen Broken troops capable of putting up a limited defense or even a limited attack, and Broken troops that went fetal at the mere sound of their own artillery rounds hitting the enemy several hundred meters away. The great thing is, you don't need to know all that under-the-hood stuff to know what a real-life commander would know to be effective: Take care of the soldiers, stay close to them, watch them for signs of faltering, give them a mission within their capabilities, and make sure they can rest and recover when necessary so they can stay in the fight.

Better explosion graphics/animation -- hope it wouldn't be too much of a framerate hit, but I really miss the look of artillery explosions in series like Theatre of War. CM versions may never be as good as that, but couldn't they get a bit better than the "dirty puffs" we have now? Something taller, darker, with jagged points rocketing out. Speaking of smoke, it's a minor but annoying thing to me that the smoke from flaming vehicles always rises straight up. Looks weird. Since the game already models wind, couldn't vehicle smoke drift windward the same way WP and grenade smoke already do?

This ought to be like shooting fish in a barrel :-( But fun to watch!

This is exactly what makes meta-gaming operational campaigns so great: The odd situations and variety of matchups that make for some really dynamic, exciting battles. And it's not so bad being the outnumbered side in one of these, either -- because it's just one battle in a larger theatre, and the more tanks/men you save or exit here, the more will live on to fight another day somehere else.

Well, if you're concerned about the investment of time to code AI behavior, then be careful what you wish for! Triggers are wonderful but they're like a language -- when you're fluent, you can express ideas and describe all kinds of complex actions. But if you're just learning the language or haven't used it much, it can be a painful experience of coding, testing, coding again, etc., until you learn the tricks to make it work. I'm only speaking from my limited experience coding triggers for a TOW2 Africa scenario -- which turned out great, but convinced me I never want to repeat the experience.

BFC, is this true? Did that get changed/improved between versions? I thought a consensus had developed on the forum recently that for best and most realistic in-game results, regular troops should really be classified in the game as GREEN and veteran troops should be classified REGULAR, etc.

Since paratroops carry demo charges, that's at least a consolation and a way they could blast their way through a built-up environment. And of course some engineers came in with the 101st and 82nd in Holland, too. I've never tried blasting through the adjoining walls of a block of row houses to make a covered passageway -- a fun experiment if someone wants to test it and show the results -- it certainly would take a lot of demo charges, though. Which is one reason I wish we could make ammo dumps or place extra demo charges (and smoke and HE grenades, for that matter) on jeeps and trucks for resupply. Realistic? I dunno.

+1 to Poesel71. Exactly the way I play, too, and for the same reasons. AI is no slouch, but once I'd played real oppos on realistic maps there was no turning back.

I can't tell you the technique, because I've never tried it myself -- but I'm sure I've seen screenies on the maps and mods forum of some experimental urban maps someone did months ago that looked like Paris, with the river and bridges and sharp, cobbled embankments. Can anyone help necramonium on this?

That really is impressive -- on the balcony shot I can almost see Antony Hopkins in "A Bridge Too Far!" I wonder how your map, created in the current version of CMBN, would be affected once CMBN moves to 2.0 and Operation MG. Would you need to go in and manually substitute more Dutch-styled buildings, objects, etc., for the ones you have, or would the new ones appear automatically in their places? I just hope your time investment so far will not be wasted, and that you can build upon what you've done rather than have to do it all over again. Any thoughts on this, BFC?

Just finished Gavin's "On to Berlin" the other day, as it happens. In part he blames Browning.. "[On Sept. 14 during the planning] General Browning particularly directed me not to attempt the seizure of the Nijmegen Bridge until all other missions had been successfully accomplished and the Groesbeek/Berg-en-Dal high ground was firmly in our hands." (p. 174) But then he adds.. "I couldn't have agreed more. but I was deeply troubled by the possibility of failing to accomplish some of our objectives." He goes on to summarize how his units would be spread over 25 miles, fighting simultaneous major battles in various places, while having to secure and keep open the drop zones. "On the other hand, if I could possibly spare a battalion, I knew I had to commit it to the Nijmegen Bridge as quickly as I could send it in that direction." Also, Gavin says the planning was flawed in that it assigned the bridge to the 508th, when in hindsight it actually it was the 504th that was in a better position to send a battalion to the bridge on the night of the 17th, though no one realized it at the time. Gavin recounts the late and halting night advance of the 1/508, and the various mishaps that delayed them en route (a dark night, a late start, and they were supposed to go overland but instead got misled by a Dutch civilian into taking a route through a built-up area where they got delayed by skirmishes) and blames orders from the regiment that told the battalion to halt when they reached the traffic circle, which gave the Germans too much time to reinforce the south end of the bridge.

I agree that you get a more adrenaline-filled time-pressured experience of the game in RT that more closely resembles that physical/mental/time stress aspect of trying not to let the enemy get inside your decision cycle. But...The challenge of getting inside the enemy's OODA loop and preventing him from getting inside yours exists in the game every bit as much in WeGo. The only difference is that you, the player, get to relax and think about your decisions and don't have to experience the physical dimension of sweat, info overload, nerves, reflexes, etc. But we've all seen that initiative is very real in CMBN WeGo, and losing it can have devastating consequences. If I calmly throw more problems at my opponent in a given number of turns than he can deal with, and he starts reacting to my moves instead of making me react to his, then I'm inside his OODA loop, the same as in RT play -- it's just experienced differently in the mind/body of the player. People who say RT is more realistic often overlook that while they're busy twitching and zooming and mimicking a more realistic subjective experience of the commander, they're making their individual squads and teams behave less intelligently -- hence less realistically -- because the player in his haste is missing information that IRL the squad or team leader on the ground would know and be reacting to.

My sometimes extreme zeal for CM on the forums comes not from a narrow, limited view of only this game -- but because I've played many of those other PC games and know just how depressingly commercial and ridiculous they truly are. If we no longer had CM or a company like BFC that really loved real wargaming the way they do, I'd most likely not play computer military games anymore at all, and go back to the traditional hex-and-counter stuff -- but even that would be hard to do, now that I've had the CM experience and seen what it can be.

You nailed it: "Control" seems to come up time and again as the aspect that leads some players to have issues with the game, or not. I started out as a board wargamer since 1970 and the AH "classics," and then PanzerBlitz blew everything away and made me like the tactical level best of all. Yet I never got into SL or ASL, ever, and I think it's because I perceived a paradox in boardgaming: The more realistic and detailed a tactical boardgame tried to be, the slower and duller and more removed and LESS realistic it seemed to get in regard to the visceral phenomenon of combat. But CM changed all that. Now a wargame can be massively complex, far more than any boardgame, yet because it's on a computer that can all happen "under the hood" and I can enjoy a simpler, yet more visceral 3D experience of combat simulation -- the "personal war movie" that mjkerner referred to. To me, this is great because I can have my cake and eat it too. But I think maybe some wargaming hobbyists who started with and really enjoyed the micromanagement of ASL type games may find it harder to "let go" and just enjoy the ride -- also, people with a more mathematical/technical/scientific bent and training may feel compelled to "look under the hood" and can't really enjoy a game as much unless/until they know how those armor hits are calculated, whether they got the ROF right on a particular weapon, etc. I'm not dissing these folks, and frankly I value their presence because they push CM to become a better and better game. For me, the real draw is the history and the chance to feel as if I'm in a time machine. The more the game feels real in that way, the better I like it. And one of the things I see over and over again in historical accounts is how much chaos and lack of control have affected warfare. I'm so extreme in this regard that I find myself accepting even some known bugs or limitations of CMBN and say to myself, "well, the runner must have gotten shot or the phone wires got cut..." etc., as a way of explaining the failure and just chalking it up to the "friction" of combat. I don't like flaws or bugs in any game, but it's my way of trying to keep things in perspective. In the battle sburke and I have been playing now (which has crashed due to a bug that BFC is tracking down), we've seen at least two instances where a single US soldier has left his unit, disobeying the unit's movement orders, and sprinted at full speed down a road toward the GERMAN map edge. Once guy got gunned down just as he nearly reached German lines, and the other one actually made it, I think. Anyway -- as annoying as this has been, it also hasn't bothered me that much because I recall reading so many times about how every GI had a personal breaking point -- and that it was common at various times for some soldiers to simply break down and reach their limit. Do I want to know the technical reasons for this phenomenon and see it fixed? Hell yes. But does it break the game for me or bug me to the point that I enjoy CM any less? Hell no.

I thought about that limitation too (the designer would still always know WHERE the reinforcements might arrive because of where they were placed in the scenario editor). But I guess one could scatter lots of individual 2- 3- or 4- man teams around, all with big variations in arrival time and probability windows -- and that would be very hard to anticipate in-game, even if you're the same person who set them up. (Now, if we just had something smaller than a Kubelwagen for the Pathfinders to set on fire to mark the drop zone...)

I like it because it would also let us create paratroop drops that have a more randomized way to determine when and where they appear on the map -- if they arrive at all.

Good ground-level GI's view fiction, set in the Salerno campaign among the Texans of the 36th Infantry Division. Only $4.95 for Kindle edition, so it's going to be my in-flight entertainment next weekend: The Texas Gun Club http://http://www.amazon.com/Texas-Gun-Club-Mark-Bowlin/dp/1933651555

Reminds me of my tee shots...

Not me, because it would be more realistic and make the tanks less uber.