Broadsword56

True, but if you can knock down just one action spot of the wall (with a demo charge, or even just with a vehicle running over it) you can make a great "keyhole" firing position from the MG that will protect the prone team from nearly all small arms fire -- it then takes HE or a good grenade toss to get them out.

There's no "unit tray." But you can set the locations the units appear in when the scenario launches, with pinpoint precision. If you want the player to be able to alter the deployment of a unit, paint a deployment zone and deploy the unit inside that zone. If you want a unit to start in a specific spot and not let the player change where it starts the battle, then deploy the unit on the map with no deployment zone under it. But you have to do this manually in the editor with every unit and leader -- if you just have the units in the scenario, and paint a deployment zone, but don't actualyl place the units in the zone, CMBN will often launch the scenario with all the units crammed up in the corner of the map and not let the player move them.

Yes, explosions are "meh" in CMBN. And they were my favorite eye-candy in BFC's Theatre of War II, so it's a disappointment -- although an acceptable tradeoff for such an outstanding game in so many other aspects.

Well, it's the same exact process except you just specify a different x,y location for your next 400m grid square in settings.js. You can build your squares out adjacent to the one you just did, or plop one down thousands of meters away. It's just a matter of numbering the x,y coordinates according to the system shown in the help file, so the tool knows where you want the square to go. Here's what's cool about this: Say you've mapped this 1,1 square. Now say there's an area with a church tower 1.5 km away that you want to map, and a forest 800m away in between that will affect LOS, but you don't necessarily care about mapping the intervening terrain. Just make a larger "master map" area in CMBN (just plain default grass) and then tell the tool where to place your mapped, detailed squares. The trick is just to work out how you identify the squares and make sure they're situated in the proper places on your CMBN map.

Yes, I had trouble with this at first, too. Here's my way: Right-click on the CMBN launch icon on your desktop. On the menu, select "pin to start menu." That will make a CMBN launch icon appear in exactly the same spot on your start menu every time. Next, download and install Irfanview (freeware, great for viewing and converting images, has a zillion uses). Click your "start" button and then just take a screenshot of your whole desktop. Launch Irfanview and open the screenshot. Read the status line in Irfanview as you muse over the image, and find the exact x,y coordinates of your CMBN start icon. That's the setting you want to remember and write down because you'll use it every time in the HTML mapping tool.

Pete, When you input the settings into settings.js, you simply save that file. You don't change its format to csv.

Interesting to consider what (if any) role towed AT guns might be able to play on offense. They never really attacked, but the British doctrine intended them to move up quickly after an attack to consolidate gains: Ian Daglish, in his FANTASTIC book "Over The Battlefield: Operation Epsom," has a 9-page appendix on British antitank forces and their tactics in Normandy. He writes on p 235: "The General idea in Normandy came to be that tanks would support infantry onto the objective, remaining to defend against armoured counterattack only as long as it took specialist antitank forces to come forward and get into position... "In the advance, the intention was to get antitank platoon guns established on a captured position within 15 minutes, in the expectation of an armoured counterattack within 30. In Normandy, this was a tall order..."

And a good "keyhole" is also one that's behind a hill or reverse slope, facing in such a way as to ambush enemy armor in the side as it passes -- or better yet from the rear after it has passed. AT guns deployed this way are nearly impossible to spot and suppress/kill by the advancing attacker unless your opponent gets lucky with area bombardment. It's really important to think of defense in depth (little islands of mutually supportive strongpoints and resistance nests), and not in terms of a "line." For Germans, especially, their doctrine was to let the enemy penetrate, hit them from flank/rear with these deep AT and HMG assets, and then use mobile reserves to counterattack the worn down and isolated, overextended enemy attackers.

No, those excel and csv files in the Campaign folder are just leftover examples from a project that StoneAge was apparently working on. You don't use them at all, you can delete them, and you don't need Excel.

I use an accessory program, like Notepad or Wordpad. Just make a new blank file, paste in your data, then save the file with the .csv extension and make sure the format is selected to text.

Tried the tool and it worked exactly as advertised, including for the Scottish Corridor. thanks!

+1 to the suggestions of JonS, as someone who has (and is) doing the exactly the same thing with two boardgames and CMBN at the moment. Find some workable compromises, and make yourself a set of "conversion" rules that translate things like counter strengths, supply states, and other factors into CMBN terms, and vice-versa. We've found that "soft" factors matter a great deal in how your tabletop battles will play out in CMBN. So you need to decide how you will handle a unit that's "disrupted" or "pinned" in the boardgame, for example. What would that mean in a CMBN unit's motivation or leadership or fitness? Does your tabletop game's combat results use men/vehicles or step-losses to track casualties? If it's step-losses, you'll have to think about and make a judgment about what a "step" represents in concrete terms in CMBN troop numbers, etc. Be prepared to see your tabletop campaign generate some VERY unbalanced, asymmetrical and "unfair" battle setups for CMBN. But that's the realistic nature of war, and part of the fun of playing this way. After all, the "operational art" consists of arranging to fight the enemy on your terms at a time and place of your choosing. So I find one gets a lot of maneuvering, a lot of dull and highly imbalanced setups that are better off resolved on the tabletop. But every so often you'll get a truly interesting situation -- a meeting engagement, a probe, or a desperate fight to hold a positionat all costs -- that make for some truly memorable CMBN battles that no one is ever likely to design as a standalone scenario.

You'll find this in the help.htm file, but you need to make sure you take your Google Earth screenshots at 95 meters above ground level. If you want to use French aerial photos, or 1:25 scale maps, or whatever else, just overlay them as jpegs onto your Google Earth and then go to 95m above ground and shoot that image.

As someone who has tested this tool and seen its results, I can say it's truly revolutionary. We now have the capability to make photo-accurate, historically authentic maps AND topography -- with an automated process that saves time and removes much of the drudgery. The tool has many uses -- some of which are yet to be discovered and fully explored. For example, you can take existing BFC maps, expand the boundaries, and then use this tool to place new terrain all around them in perfect alignment. You can make a 4km x 4km "master map" and use the tool to map out a battle area, then place battle damage on it and "move" it to another spot while you add more detailed terrain along with the progress of the campaign. You still have to click all those tiles, one by one, to make your terrain. But now you'll know that every tile is an exact representation of the Google Earth or aerial photo or source map you're using -- and that the tool will place all of it to the proper scale and orientation without the guesswork or number-crunching that was necessary in the past. The tool's help file is lavishly documented with graphics and examples, and the interface is decently intuitive. The tool seemed quite stable and reliable, and forgiving of rookie mistakes. So, combat cartographers, give it a try! I hope we can look forward to a new wave of historically accurate and visually stunning CMBN maps, now that this tool is in the hands of so many creative minds out there.

The maps for the CW Scottish Corridor Campaign -- can anyone tell me step by step how you can open them in the CMBN editor and use/extract them for stand-alone maps and/or scenarios? When I open the "Campaigns" folder in the editor the file shows as empty. I seem to recall that originally, maps contained in BFC-supplied campaigns were not accessible at all on their own. But someone made a tool that lets you get at them (?) What is it and how does it work?

Just curious -- what's the size of that map?

I, too, tend to keep the XO "in a secure location" like the VP in case anything happens to the CO. But what I find useful is the HQ Support Team, since it has jeep, radio, binos, a jeep packed with ammo, and usually a kick-a** first sergeant in command. Great for leading a patrol, scouting and recon, and artillery spotting.

Because the MG platoon wasn't organic to the battalion. Here's a good reference site for the Canadian battalion TO&E's: http://www.canadiansoldiers.com/tactical/infantrybattalion.htm To quote: "[by 1944] each Infantry Section of 10 men had its own Bren light machine gun, but heavier machineguns (the Vickers) and 4.2-inch Mortars were held by support battalions at the divisional level and did not form part of the infantry battalion.

+1 to varying the types and colors of the helmet foliage a bit to rough it up -- there's a risk of it looking too pretty and decorative, like a lady's fancy hat! But I love the direction all this is going so far. You're getting really really close.

Great work, Ben! If I were nitpicking, I'd only say that your source photo seems tok show the cammo more as irregular strips than squarish patches. Also - just wondering -- would it be possible at all within the constraints of modding to make a version that has some foliage leaves/branches stuck in the netting? I suppose nothing can stick out of the helmet model itself, but even just some bitmapped foliage that looks as if it's under the netting might give a great effect.

Also, if you're in bocage country and your scouts need to look past the next row of bocage, your covering teams will only be able to cover the scouts up *until* they reach that far row of bocage -- once the scouts reach the far row of bocage, they will have only their own stealth (slow moves, pauses, hide commands) to protect them against any ambushes from the far side of that bocage row.

Sorry, and thanks so much for the clarification and excellent pics. It's the cammo and scrim version tht we really need. When I said Hessian I meant the strip of colored Hessian cammo. You're right -- the tan Hessian cover would look totally out of place in Normandy.

Beg to differ. In the pics of the battles around Caen we see a lot of very fuzzy British helmets, with everything from leaves and branches on them to a mixture of cammo strips flopping around. Some plain netted covers are OK, but to say that's all we should have is nonsense.

If you can place the burning wreck under a building in the map editor, that would also give you a cheat to have an "on fire" building, and throw a little light out there if you're making a nighttime map. Has this been done or tried?

This is a fantastic tool, and thanks to Japanzer for making it. Could someone please post a step by step guide in clear English that really spells out how the process works? Screenshots would be helpful too. I tried it but got stuck a few times and couldn't understand the answers to my questions. Because this tool requires downloading another program that takes control of your cursor, etc., I think it's daunting to many users. More people would use it if we could all understand it better.