Broadsword56

Nice job, permanent. I just posted my XIX Corps master map. Will add the others soon.

Well, you have a point, Blackhorse -- if we had a system for seeing exactly where all the historical CMBN maps are supposed to be located, we might be disappointed to discover some of the liberties that were taken and how little they resemble the actual places. But I'm sure many other CMBN maps would astound us with how accurate they are, and we would marvel even more at the artistry, research, and effort that went into them. Either way -- my point is, once you can pinpoint the geo location of a BFC or a user-made map (if it has a true N orientation) you can use it with a grid system as a starting point for expanding the mapped area in a given direction, or re-editing the map in the editor however you like.

@George MC -- Yes, I have that GE file and -- correct me if I'm wrong -- but the points in it are just single pushpins showing where the maps are. But they don't help mappers except in a general way, because the pins could be anywhere within the mapped areas. What would be helpful instead are sets of 4 pins per map (NW,NE,SE,SW), or better yet an unfilled, outlined polygon, labeled with the map name, that covers each mapped area, so we could see where the boundaries actually fall.

When I researched a historical map/scenario I uploaded for TOW II: Africa (Battle of El Guettar, Tunisia, in March 1943), I learned about how the new M-10 TD saved the day for Patton's forces when they showed up en masse, used shoot-and-scoot tactics from the heights, and obliterated the German panzer spearhead (together with US arty that obliterated the supporting grenadiers). It was the first -- and only -- episode where the TDs were used in this large a concentration, instead of parceling them out in penny packets. It was a desperation move that turned out successfully. I imagine El Guettar may have prolonged the US confusion about TDs and the proper way to use them -- those who wanted to distribute them into infantry battalions simply as more mobile versions of AT guns, and those who might have argued, "No, the doctrine really works, if only commanders would truly follow it and deploy TDs as whole units."

Thanks for the plug, sburke. As intresesting as it is to have two maps covering roughly the same area (Heckenschutze's and mine) it's a shame to have this sort of duplication while so many areas remain unmapped. Solutions to this: 1. Communicate! Post WIP threads, tell the forum what you're working on or plan to work on or hope to work on. 2. Check first with a forum search on your map topic just to see if maybe someone already did it or is about to do it. 3. Consider a more organized map sharing system for the community, as I've suggested and outlined in the "map sharing" thread. If BFC actively supported it, so much the better, but it can work fine too as a purely community effort.

@Heckenschutze: Try downloading my Hamel Vallee map/scenario from the repository -- you can see the differences for yourself and enjoy looking around at my take on it. You're right about Hill 108 barely being a hill, etc. And even on my map, which I think has the elevation a bit higher for it, that didn't really give the US player (me) much advantage as I attacked toward the SW. Sburke can tell you he was able to keep a lot of his forces well concealed from Hill 108 behind reverse slopes, since the land really drops off to lower elevations in the W and especially SW parts of the map. On field types: Yes, that's my interpretation of those same photos: I take lightest color to be wheat and I take the darkest of the dark fields to be longer, lusher unmowed/ungrazed grass or even younger green wheat. I don't use plain plowed fields much at all, since in June-July the plowing season is past and crops would have been well started and growing. I'm also careful about not using too many haystacks, because haying season would have been a bit later in the year, I think. It's also helpful to place your aerial photo as a JPEG overlay in Google Earth, scale it to match the satellite imagery, and use the transparency slider to flip quickly back and forth between your b/w image and the modern terrain. You get a hypnotizing sort of "time machine" effect as you flip back and forth, and it becomes clearer what those b/w fields actually must have represented, what the building types were, etc. (I think I would have enjoyed being one of those aerial recon photo interpreters at Medmenham, England, during WWII, using stereoscopic viewers to try and locate enemy positions and V1 sites.) Just curious: Did you use the HTML Mapping Tool for your map, or eyeball it to get the scale and locations and placements right? Check out the tool if you haven't already. You might also find my latest post in the "Map Sharing" thread, further down in this forum, interesting too.

Also I commend Heckenschutze for making lots of sensible entrances/exits to fields, and for having lots of variation and occasional gaps in the bocage on the Hill 108 map. Hope it gets a lot of play.

Amazing work on Hill 108, Heckenschutze!!! sburke, you're going to have a sense of deja vu when you 3D into this map -- it incorporates all of the area I mapped for Hamel Vallee plus the Choisy area to the north. The various crossroads, bloody orchard, the hilltop horse farm at Hotel (or Hamel) au Heup, the wheatfields, are all there in the same authentic locations. Sunken roads very well done. What's interesting to me, as someone who mapped the same area from probably the same source information, are the subtle differences in design choice -- building types and layouts being subject to interpretation, particular fields that have a different crop type, or the Hotel au Heup hill not appearing to be as elevated in this map (not sure why?). Also, I put an "allee" of poplars along the highway in front of Hotel au Heup in my map, but those really interfered with my tanks' supporting fire from the hilltop farm. No such problem on this map. So now I think it's safe to say the Hill 108 sector is extremely well covered now.

IIRC, what sburke discovered in that after-battle test on the Hamel Vallee scenario was that a preplanned, rolling barrage of 4 x 105mm guns needed at least 4 minutes at each "step" to do the job before lifting to the next hedgerow/phase line. I found that my original plan of medium intensity/medium duration gave only about 3 minutes of FFE, so one might need to go to medium intensity/long duration, or some other combo to get it right.

Sorry to hear about your circumstances, John -- good luck and we hope you'll acquire the full game someday soon.

Also, there are so many variables in how players deploy their AT guns. How many players are following WWII doctrine for these weapons -- setting them behind their front line, in "keyhole" positions, on rear slopes, etc., so they stay concealed until they take primarily flank and rear shots against the enemy and are largely unspottable/immune to direct fire from the front? If you don't want to do that, OK, but don't be surprised if they die early and certainly don't blame the game itself. Is the map you're playing on large and varied and detailed enough to permit this, or are you playing on the equivalent of a green tabletop? And if you don't like the maps you've got, make some!

Depends on whether you want a pure game, or something more closely approaching (but certainly never matching) the confusion, uncertainty, and the sheer dirty bloody unfairness of war. I like anything that prevents micromanaging "A action" + "B situation" = "C result" types of thinking. No one in real life or on a real battlefield necessarily knows precisely what they'll be able to see from a place they haven't moved to yet. And once they get there, they might have to slide over or duck down or go a bit further to see what they wanted to see from that spot. A minor frustration for the player, IMHO, at a larger gain in friction and FOW by the sheer virtue of preventing me from making my units do exactly what I want, when I want, where I want.

In an ideal world (at least to me), here's how BFC could use the grid-database concept for authentic maps to make its own maps more useful, add value to them, and even better support the user community, mappers, and meta-gaming: To take Bulge as the example... What if BFC set up the master areas (4km x 4km) and section grids (400m x 400m) for the Ardennes area, and then shared them as a Google Earth placemarks (.kmz file)? Now, let's say that when the game ships, BFC includes an appendix to the rules that index all the maps provided in the game. For example: Map: "Last Stand at Noville" Master Area: Bastogne-North Sections covered: (NW corner) 101-1 (SE corner 201-101) (This assumes it's a reasonably authentic and properly scaled battle map of the place, with a true N orientation, without designer abstractions or rotations to make roads run straight - otherwise the grid system doesn't work) Now it would be possible for a player who wants to make a custom map for a new area just south of Noville to load the shipped map into the editor, and add new 400m x 400m sections to it to extend it to the south. The player/mapmaker could even post the grid ID info with the map so that others would see its location, and be able to incorporate it into their own maps. Everyone would know, over time, which areas of the Ardnennes have been mapped. And the maps that came with the game could be used and re-used all over the place, making them far more versatile than in the canned campaigns or standalone battles that BFC created (as wonderful as those would certainly be). I'm just sayin...

@PaperTiger: No one respects and admires your work more than I do, so please take no offense and I didn't mean to mischaracterize your post. I think I understand your question about shared maps and meta-campaigns better now. Here's how I would answer it: You're absolutely right. Even if one were committed to the greatest authenticity possible for maps in a meta-campaign, there just aren't enough mapping hours and mappers in existence to fully map real campaign areas at CMBN scale. That's the bad news. The good news: There's no need to do that anymore. Now we have the ability to map only the areas where battles take place -- or an even smaller subset: the areas where only the most interesting or important battles take place that we actually want to play out in CMBN. What makes this possible is StoneAge's revolutionary HTML Mapping Tool. If I sound like a shill for it, it's only because I've experienced how powerful and effective it is, and because I don't think the forum has fully realized yet what we have here. Even some dedicated mappers seem only vaguely aware of it, or may have looked at it and then been put off by the long help.htm file. But the file is only long because StoneAge really took the trouble to document every step and explain it, include illustrated examples, etc. The tool itself is extremely simple and easy to use once you try it a time or two. Back to my point about meta-campaigns and the challenge of using authentic maps for them: Before the HTML tool, you could make a rudimentary 4km x 4km "master map" (the way I did last summer) and then, depending on where the op layer gave you a battle, you'd cut off that part of the master map (say, 1000 x 1000m) to play on and detail it with all the trees and bocage and doodads. Very time-consuming, because even just placing all the roads and rivers and field patterns accurately on a 4km x 4km area is a ton of work. That's not necessary anymore! Now what I'd do is: 1. Use Google Earth to select the full operational area. Draw a grid of 4km x 4km grid boxes on it (there's a tool for this that will draw precise grids on GE for you automatically from only two specific lat-long coordinates.) 2. Make a corresponding set of blank 4km x 4km maps in CMBN -- They're all just default grass tiles, takes no time at all. Then I might apply the basic elevation contours to them, which doesn't really take that long at 5m elevation difference per contour (especially in a flat place like Holland!) if you just lock the highest and lowest points, and then use the locked elevation tiles as dotted lines, setting a point only where the contour changes direction. Give each of these giant maps a name, like "Veghel West." 3. Go back to Google Earth and use that automatic tool again to draw another, finer grid of 400m x 400m sections. At this stage I'd also place my operational game map into GE a jpeg overlay and position it over the terrain, so I'll be able to see where in real life my campaign battles will be taking place. I'd also do the same thing for any aerial photos, WWII maps, or other reference images I plan to use. 4. Now I'd just forget about mapping and go play my operational game. Wait until it's battle time. Hey-- there's a great battle shaping up around Veghel-West, in the SE corner, about a 1200m x 1200m area. Let's play it out in CMBN... 5. Go back to GE and locate the area (3 x 3 of your 400m grid squares) where your battle is. Use the HTML Mapping tool (I won't explain all the details here) to make those 9 map sections. 6. Open the CMBN editor and the appropriate 4x4 km blank master map (e.g, your "Veghel-West" map). Now I just tell the HTML tool where on that 4 x 4km area to place those 9 fully mapped sections, and there it is. I can either cut the playing area off and save it separately, or leave the whole 4 x 4km map as-is and use it. 7. As a campaign goes on, I'd only map the fighting areas as I need them, in 400m x 400m sections. As long as I label them properly and know where they fit into the GE grid system, I have a growing database that can be used and re-used. It can even be treated like a database -- Other mappers can even contribute sections to it if they follow the same common labeling/location system. Better yet, we can take that 1200m x 1200m area from Battle #1 later on and tell the HTML tool to re-draw it in a different spot in the Veghel-West sector's 4km x 4km area. That means we can effectively copy and re-use existing work in a campaign that moves over a large area -- something we couldn't do within the CMBN editor itself. In short, meta-gaming with authentic maps and terrain is entirely feasible now -- as long as we don't map every part of the area and don't try to play every battle in CMBN. The only major drawback/PITA to this method is that within the HTML tool as it is now, there's no getting around having to click your mouse on every tile cell in each of the 400m x 400m map sections. There's no way to "enlarge the paintbrush" as you can in the CMBN editor and paint an entire wheatfield with one click. So you end up having to make 2,500 clicks for every section (carpal tunnel syndrome, here we come!). Oddly enough, the benefits of the tool still outweigh this IMHO, because once you have a section mapped, it's mapped for good and it can be used and re-used and moved anywhere. (If you map it within CMBN, all you can do is expand or contract the map boundaries -- and when you do, you get blank new terrain. The existing mapped area can never be copied and moved somewhere else within the 4 x 4km area you already have). (@PaperTiger -- I know you already know all this stuff -- I just spelled it out for the benefit of everyone here to encourage more people to entertain the idea of meta-gaming and authentic maps, and to understand what's involved.)

Yes, they did poke the barrel through the bocage wall. It wasn't a solid surface, just a dense hedge above the solid earth/stone/root packed berm -- and a gun barrel could pretty easily find a spot to go through that foliage. It wouldn't take much to snip out/push aside a bit of foliage for a sighting peephole either -- since that wouldn't require digging through the earthen berm. Making this impossible in the game would be ahistorical and a step backwards.

I think there's room for all kinds of design philosphies with maps/scenarios, as long as consumers get the chance to know what they're really downloading from the Repository and/or buying with the game. For me, since no AI is never going to give me as much fun and challenge as a human opponent, map quality and immersive historical settings are the main attraction. Others have found fun in making totally fanciful maps depicting freeway interchanges, wide-open tank on tank sandboxes, you name it. And then there are maps that capture the spirit of a place and are generally based on it, but where the designer has altered things for looks and play purposes. Those are fine too, especially in standalone battles. It's one thing to say: I don't care about authentic maps beause they're more time and trouble to make, so I go for the feel of the place because it's faster and easier and more fun for me. But it would be another thing to suggest that authentic maps don't matter, or that striving to make them as authentic as one could isn't worth the trouble because authenticity is an illusion and the CMx2 editor is too limited anyway. No game map can be 100% authentic -- that would be impossible. It's always a matter of degree. So the question is, how far does one go and how far is worth it for the game result it delivers? You can make an analogy here with the CMx2 engine itself, and its lofty goal to model the bullets and physics of combat in 1:1 instead of designing "for effect." We could say: Why bother, when it's so much more complicated and time-consuming to try and simulate combat this way, and when no engine can completely model all the physical world of combat? But BFC bothered, and, despite those inherent limitations, look at what a great game it's given us. So, I like to know that a map is as authentic as the existing tools and resources could make it. Others might not care as much, or at all.

Wow, that hadn't occurred to me but StoneAge is right. Once you've created those CSV files from your source maps/photos/etc, it won't matter what version of CMBN we're currently playing. The HTML tool simply would create the new map in the new editor and would put the tiles in the positions that the CSV files tell it to. Another great benefit of this tool -- thanks for making it!

No!! Not trees -- just the heavy forest terrain tiles with no foliage on them. Or, for variety use the swamp tiles with no foliage on them for the same effect and a greener, grassier look. When you use them that way, they look very close to normal terrain (only slightly gnarlier and browner) but block vehicle movement and slow troops down just as if they had trees on them. Yes, they confer a defensive benefit, but that's actually good since the real ground would have had little undulations and dead spots to shelter defenders -- plus you aren't able to give defenders the Tobruks and other fortifications that they actually had on those beaches. They wouldn't block LOS though, as we've seen in battles where toops can pretty easily shoot into and out of forests (unless the mapper adds some LOS-blocking elements to the edges of the forest like hedge, low bocage, lots of bushes and brush, etc.)

If anyone wants to kick this beach landing excitment up another notch, there's a good cardboard game called Bradley's D-Day that would let you plan the US Omaha and Utah landings and then determine how each beach sector battle sets up (depending on tides, obstacle effects, etc.) It's a good scale for use with CMBN (battalion and company, two-hour turns) and it's a John Prados design, updating the popular system he used on "Monty's D-Day" (covering Gold Juno and Sword) in the old SPI days: https://atomagazine.readyhosting.com....cfm?ProdID=89 You get a campaign covering the first 48 hours of D-Day, so there's a lot of inland action too from the beach exits into the coastal towns, etc. Also: On the issue of tanks being able to climb inclines -- I'm not sure how CMBN handles this, or whether climbing ability is realistically limited in the game. If not, mapmakers might want to try some tricks (like heavy forest tor swamp tiles) to block vehicles on some slops they wouldn't have been able to climb in real life. Some analyses say a major reason for the failure of the Dieppe raid in 1942 was the steeply inclined pebbly beach, which caused great difficulty for the Canadian tanks (although some managed to climb over the seawall onto the promenade). From a quick look online, I'm seeing that Churchills could actually climb slopes up to 30 degrees. But in some tests the Germans ran on the Dieppe beach, their tanks could climb 15-20 degree slopes OK but failed when the slope got to 30-40 degrees. Math isn't my strong suit, but what meter height difference vs. action square distance (8meters) makes a 30 degree slope?

Crushingleek, Since your Omaha map seems so popular and is working so well for players, can you post some insights and tips about how to make a good historical beach map? I mean the technical aspects like getting the beach, water, and terrain to look and play right, etc., types of tiles for specific types of ground, how you made the defensive positions, etc.

I can't say for certain or cite the post that said it -- but I'm pretty sure I recall BFC saying long ago that Bulge will be a new milestone in the series and not just an expansion module like CW and OMG. So I think we've already been warned not to expect any compatibility between Bulge and the earlier games. Makes sense, since with Bulge we'd get all the winter stuff. And that sets the stage for the Ostfront stuff later on. On the plus side, if this is true, then maybe Bulge might give players some of the deeper engine improvements that they've been clamoring for -- but which weren't within the scope of modules (which have mostly been new units and patch-type improvements). Pure speculation here, with no evidence or inside knowledge whatsoever...

How do you get the briefing maps to display over an image background like this? Also, is your 29th ID patch serving as the "stratmap" here?

If I'd had to guess who'd answer my question first (and in record time, too)! Thanks Jon. The offending game is: "War in the Hedgerows:Operation Epsom, 1944" (Avalanche Press Ltd.) Contained in "The King's Officers" (A Campaigns & Commanders series supplement book) (Which I'm using to add an operational element and leader characters to the platoon-level boardgame Panzer Grenadier: Beyond Normandy). I'll post an alert about that to the relevant rules and errata forums for that game. Must have been a typo, because their OOBs are usually pretty detailed and researched.

A question for all you OOB greeks and grogs out there: One of my op-level campaign games for Operation Epsom has a German OOB that includes units that either were deployed in that area on June 26, 1944 (or could have been deployed there because they were nearby). Available as a German support unit is the famous SS Heavy Panzer Battalion 101 (aka Schwere SS-Panzer-Abteilung 101). But the OOB in the game has them equipped with Mark V Panthers. I thought (and everything I've read) that this unit was equipped entirely with Tiger I tanks. They started with 45 of them, and then by the time of July 5 (after Villiers-Bocage) they had only 15 left. OTOH, I've read that when Epsom began on June 26, the main body of s.SS-Pz. Abt. 101 wasn't available immediately because the British attack on Rauray the previous day had led German commanders to believe the main attack would strike over there. Was it possible that some companies of s.SS-Pz. Abt. 101 had replaced some of their lost Tigers with Panthers, and that's what this OOB is representing? Or is that totally preposterous? It's no trivial matter, because a counter in this boardgame represents about 5 vehicles. The effect on the game of 15 Tigers would be considerable compared to 15 Panthers.

Yes, it's always a mapper's dilemma: Do I warp the scale to get in the features I want, or to have the straight roads run straight in the game, etc. Or do I commit to an accurate scale but deliberately sacrifice some of the map's appearance, leave some features out, etc.?