Broadsword56

That is a really interesting opinion. I wonder how widely shared it is? Maybe I'll try it myself and see if it seems more realistic to me. I suppose I was taking the CMBN original manual at face value -- and how it described the various experience levels used in the game. Are you saying subsequent playing experience has led to to revise the way you look at the ratings, and that "Green" is the new "Regular?"

Why do you say that? OK, good troops. But not extraordinary. This battle is happening on July 17, 1944. The 352nd Infantry Division has been continuously in action since D-Day. German replacement policies don't flood units with green replacements the way the US Army does. So, those Landsers who haven't died by now would defintely be veterans. What other rating makes sense? As for leadership -- that can vary but in this case, the unit still has a skilled cadre of small unit NCOs with Ostfront battle experience (by Market Garden those NCOs would be gone, but Normandy is where they still lived and could make a difference, at least until Cobra, Falaise, etc.). So I'd rate that a +1 in leadership, although maybe others might make that "average" (0) and have it be the baseline. In my system, 0 is the default for US leadership and +1 the default for German, unless specific circumstances of the battle dictate otherwise (for example, a deliberate attack gives the attacking side's leader ratings a +1 to reflect greater advance planning and higher-level support).

+1 for SOPs TacOps had them over a decade ago and they worked great -- in fact it's the only distinctive thing I remember about that game, other than it was tactical and set in the 1990s modern era. They were the best and most original feature I've ever seen in any tactical PC game, before or since.

No, these are battle scenarios on maps of my own design, not QBs. So I know for certain that these troops have normal motovation, +1 leadership, and are veteran experience. But my OP question has not to do with CMBN, but the real Wehrmacht in WWII, and how they selected Landsers for dismounted AT teams. Anyone?

German army experts: I'm curious to know what the historical Wehrmacht policy was on manning their dismounted Heer AT teams -- were they handpicked veterans and considered more elite than the average Grenadier, or just average Johans who were slected more or less at random, handed a tube and given a bit of specialized training? The dismounted German AT teams have been quite deadly to US infantry in various random patrol encounters in some of my recent HTH Wego battles, and sometimes even outnumbered individual AT guys seem prone to go berserk and let loose with a hail of 'schreck rounds, grenades and even pistol fire before showing any willingness to get suppressed/run/retreat. By and large, these have been ordinary veteran level troops, with +1 leadership. I'm not claiming anything is broken -- just curious and surprised to see them stand and fight so ferociously this way.

Never had this problem, but here's how I handle contours. 1. Pick a sensible contour interval, like 5m. Don't try to get too finer than that. 2. Find your highest and lowest point on the map. Lock those two elevations. 3. Make your contour lines as dotted lines ( not solid lines!) using as few dots as possible -- I generally add a dot only when a line changes direction. That's it. Usually problems happen if I try to specify too much -- the height editor is very smart and it works best when you let it create the terrain as much as possible.

According to the September 20, 1945 introduction, "Utah beach to Cherbourg" was to be the next volume in this American Forces in Action series.

Spoken like a true artist. :-)

Just a correction (but thanks for the compliment StoneAge): I don't actually or always let casualty thresholds end battles automatically. In my operational rules, companies and battalions have various casualty level "breakpoints" in a CMBN battle that trigger a step loss when the units to back into the operational game. So the player can decide whether to press an attack past that breakpoint and sacrifice the step, or break it off and preserve his forces (as I did as the US player in Hamel Vallee). But, since companies only have one step, they'd be eliminated. So hitting a breakpoint effectively ends the battle for an attacking or defending company. A battalion, if it has two operational steps, can take more punishment and keep fighting. But a reduced battalion, like a company, has only one step and will be eliminated if it exceeds a breakpoint.

Just curous why you say it would be "wrong" to put a light forest tile under orchard trees (it doesn't even have to be all of them). It's a useful tile and its use isn't strictly limited to forests. Different designers have their different styles, but I don't understand what you've got against this. It looks good and I see no negative effect on play. If you don't want to do it, then don't. But why the sweeping judgment on this?

Once we have the map editor overlay function in CMBN 2.0, books like this will really come into their own -- with the maps scanned, scaled and positioned on Google Earth, we'll be able to put all the beach defenses and fighting positions in their exact locations, and in very short time!

I've evolved my style for Normandy orchards so that I place the trees on single light forest tiles. Looks more realistic around the base of the tree, where the shade would keep grass from growing and/or the farmer may have cultivated around it. And there's a bit of light weeds that comes with the light forest tile that looks good under a tree, too.

Discovered this little gem this morning at my favorite used bookstore in Monterey, CA. Published in September 1945 by the War Department, it's a 167-page large format paperback covering Omaha in unbelievable detail, from photos of the terrain to diagrams of all the positions, topographical maps, and many many fold-out maps in the back. It covers D-Day and the inland battles to about June 12. Fragile condition, feels like something that should be in a museum -- probably came out of a library collection cleanout from the nearby Naval Postgraduate School. The only place I've ever seen books from this old series before was the Pentagon library in DC.

That's part of the reason I've never gotten into the Eastern Front as much as NW Europe in wargaming -- for me the games and the history and books are closely linked, because a great book makes me want to game it, and a great game makes me want to learn more about a battle/campaign. But the problem with the Eastern Front IMHO is that we don't get the volume and quality of good grunt-level, small-unit accounts or histories a la Cornelius Ryan that weave the big and small picture together as well in the East -- because both warring parties were dictatorships, neither one had a free press, and their propaganda machines favored heroic mythmaking over the "tell it like it really was" school of history. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, of course, many more records have become available to historians. But the old veterans have largely died off, and the ones that are left -- at least in the books i've read -- still seem conditioned by their old habits under Stalinism not to talk too much about it and generally stress the heroic side of things. (Now I expect to touch off a flood of counter-arguments, followed by lists of books that are accurate and great reading as well -- so bring it on! I'd love to see such a list, because I have no stomach for some of the dry-as-dust histories that are nothing but groggy armor stats or records of troop movements. Even some well-done novels would be worth knowing about.)

My wish for the CMFI family: Mules! Read about the campaign and you'll learn how vital they were to logistics. Vehicles had no hope of getting up those mountains. Another cool thing, but for early war, would be bicycles. I could imagine a single vehicle unit that actually appears as 12 bikes. When dismounted the appear lying on their sidees. When mounted by a squad, the troops appear on them and are pedaling when they move...LOL, I can just imagine the endless animation and coding work something like this would take...

You should change the time of day in the editor to daytime, just so you (and we) can see the map properly in your screenshots. That also makes it easier for you in 3D preview mode. Then you can change it back to the actual scenario time before finishing it.

OK next up in CMBN karaoke... "Sicil-ia You're breakin' my heart You're shakin' my confidence ba-byyyyyyyyy..."

Thank you for your courage, Vark. IMHO, our civilization and democracy would be better off (to prevent all the distasters cited higher in this thread) if our schools actually *taught* moral courage to kids when they're young. It could be a completely nonpartisan type of civics class, with lessons about how to recognize when "your moment of decision" is at hand, how to speak out, recognize what a "conflict of interest" is and why it's a bad thing, handle retaliation, etc. Obviously you can't "teach" an emotion like courage, but you can give them practical and philosophical tools to help them recognize such situations for what they are and deal with them. It even connects to the anti-bullying efforts going on now, since bullying only thrives because of all the passive bystanders who keep their heads down and lay low.

And the problem is not so much glory seekers at the top, but ordinarily good, decent and moral people -- the worker bees -- who find themselves in a situation they've never expected or prepared to handle, a situation that suddenly demands great moral courage. Imagine being trained and loyal to a specific corporate/military/political/institutional culture, then suddenly discovering wrongdoing or a grave error. Reporting or stopping it goes against everything you've ever been taught. Every pressure and incentive presses you to just keep quiet, follow the herd, and go along. Or you do report it through proper channels, and the organization reasssures you that -- don't worry -- it's all being taken care of, now go back to work and stop worrying about it. History and the present day are full of these situations, and I can't really blame the people who were faced with these decisions and failed to do the right thing. I hope I would, but who knows what we would really do until we face that situation ourselves.

And the really brilliant -- maybe decisive -- thing was how the German command reacted and improvised so well as the battles developed, grabbing troops from all over and funneling them into action. None of the Allied planners could have anticipated this by just looking at the maps and OOBs and intelligence that all suggested the Germans were a spent force. I'm sure military academies will study that for many years to come.

Yes, this is a pattern of institutional failure that often repeats itself in large bureaucracies when... 1. There's a big plan that acquires a momentum of its own, 2. Some underlings discover flaws and try to blow the whistle/alert superiors, 3. The organization ignores/squelches dissent. 4. The operation takes place anyway, ends in disaster, and no one is willing to take responsibility, even though later investigations show someone had to know about the flaws and someone with the power to stop the operation elected no to do so. Sometimes because the underlings don't protest loudly enough, not wanting to risk their own careers. Or sometimes their bosses bury the warnings in a desk drawer because they're afraid exposing the failure will reflect badly on their department. Or sometimes the operation is just so big, involves so much prestige and money, has powerful political backing, and is so deep-rooted that it has acquired an unstoppable momentum of its own. In addition to Market Garden, consider some other examples... *Double agents in WWII -- One of the spies in occupied Europe who did the British the most damage was a British agent who actually had been "turned" into a double agent by the Abwehr. What's worse is that the British officer who "ran" this agent from London actually knew for years that the agent was a turncoat, but covered it up because exposing it would have embarrassed and disgraced so many high-level people in the Allied spy bureaucracy. So the agent continued to work, London pretended he was genuine, and he continued to betray many good British agents to the Gestapo. *Wall Street 2008 (those who warned of a housing bubble and tried to point out the dangers of a shadow banking system were ignored or shouted down). *Iraq 2003 ("weapons of mass destruction" need I say more?) *Space Shuttle Challenger 1986 (the engineer who tried and failed to stop the launch and went to sleep that night knowing it would blow up) *Enron (the accountant who blew the whistle on massive fraud and even today still has difficulty finding a job). *Bay of Pigs, 1961 (operation planning started with Eisenhower; Kennedy feared failure but felt it was too far along to stop, so all he did was yank the air support in a futile effort to keep US fingerprints off the mission.) *Fast and Furious, 2012 (Begun under Bush with a different name, continued with a life of its own under Obama until the Justice Department finally managed to stop it.)

You can also place vehicles underneath buildings if the building is large enough and you place the vehicle first in the editor, then the building on top of it. In the new La Luzerne map that I'm playing on now ( and will post when battle is finished ) I have a Geman truck parked in the sunken sub-basement of a chateau as an ammo cache. It takes a bit of trial and error -- sometimes a vehicle will seem to be underneath a building only to pop out as soon as a battle is launched. Foxholes can also be placed beneath bocage tiles for some interesting effects. They're easily spotted but do seem to offer more protection to a soldier at a bocage line.

Also, IMHO scenario designers who provide and allow for free use of setup turn artillery should make sure to provide foxholes for all troops, unless those troops are considered to be just arrived or on the move when the scenario begins. Foxholes provide pretty good cover now against anything but a direct or very close artillery hit, so that simulates the hasty slit trenches that soldiers always dug if they were sitting anywhere for any length of time.

Just came across an amazing website with lots of material that CMBN players would probably find fascinating. Many of the battlefield investigations on the site deal with Operation Market-Garden, but there are others too... http://www.battledetective.com/index.html

So BFC won't get scared and halt further developments on other families/modules/packs if we CMBN fans don't all purchase CMFI and it isn't a smash seller? Good news, because I need to save my $$$ for the CMBN upgrade to 2.0 and the next module for that family. Thanks for having confidence in your fanbase, and for taking a long-term view toward maintaining/imporving the value of your products.