Broadsword56

Yes, SOPs are terrific and TacOps had them back in the mid 1990s, so it can't be that hard to incorporate them into a computer game almost 20 years later. Wish we saw that more often in games today.

For the Allies, I think TRPs are more a function of: 1. How long the unit has been in the area -- any unit that's been someplace overnight, for example, would always have dug foxholes for a night perimeter and set up at least some TRPs around their position. 2. What kind of assets and HQ level support is involved in the unit's current action. In a meeting engagement or a hasty attack, an American unit wouldn't have any TRPs, IMHO. A more deliberate attack with some attached assets would get some TRPs. And if it's part of some larger operation that involved planning by Division HQ staff, aerial recon, and is more of a setpiece attack that represents the division's main effort, I'd say there should be a lot of TRPs with that -- expecially in the case of the British, where they used those massive preplanned rolling barrages of 25-pounders with the infantry following 300 yards behind. (To do that, you'd want to set up a whole parallel string of TRPs so the FOOs could call in a new medium mission/medium duration every 3 minutes to "lift" the barrage 300 yards to the next line)

Certainly for the German side I think there should always be a hefty set of TRPs, just about everywhere they might be fighting. That's because they had months to prepare their Normandy defenses and the fallback line of strongpoints and resistance nests, and had been living and patrolling and training in the area long before it became a battlefield. So IMHO the German side should get TRPs for just about every crossroads, farm complex, town, hilltop and any other tactically meaningful spot of ground, regardless of the battle type or length of time the FOO had been there.

As we keep saying in other threads, there's absolutely no reason to moan and whine about what CMBN isn't -- you can enjoy what it is (tactical) and use a different game to have a concurrent operational or even strategic campaign with all the bells and whistles you could possibly want. That is, if you really want to have that and are willing to help create the maps and scenarios that make it possible. The tools to do it are literally on your desktop right now.

Or, for those who lack an op layer but want more realistic outcomes, agree to maximum casualty thresholds beforehand -- for example, attacker maximum 40 percent or it's a loss; defender maximum 80% or it's a loss. Or whatever seems better to the players involved. As long as players are willing to agree to some asymmetry in the setup, it can affect the way they play and make them balance achieving the mission with conserving lives.

Aha! HUNT + HIDE with no cover arc is the effect I wanted. That is much better. I had always thought (don't know why) a HIDE at the end of the HUNT waypoint only applied once they reached that waypoint.

Another good scout tactic when approaching a terrain feature with your lead team (like an opening in bocage, crest of a hill, etc.) when enemy location is unknown but contact expected: 1. HUNT order to the safe side of the feature + HIDE + cover arc 15m. 2. "Unhide" the unit on the safe side of the feature + 15 sec PAUSE in place (to peer across and spot potential threats). 3. SLOW order 1 action spot to the enemy side of the terrain feature + PAUSE 15 sec + SLOW back to the safe side of the feature + HIDE at the safe spot. [if you haven't seen any threats by now, then...] 4. HUNT across to the enemy side of the feature and patrol as normal (HUNT commands with 15 sec pauses every 30 meters or so). 5. Every 100m or so or before every new terrain feature: Take a listening halt and rest the team with HIDE + PAUSE for 1 minute and a 360 degree cover arc. Another tip: On US side, that HQ Support unit you get with the jeep and a senior NCO is useful in a recon role. Have him "acquire" lots of ammo and/or a bazooka, dismount the NCO, and have him lead a foot patrol with an infantry team or two. He's got a radio, so if your patrol runs into trouble or sees a good indirect artillery target, he can call it in.

Just discovered this amazing resource site for 1:25,000 military topo maps of Holland from the Library of Congress. It really gets my OMG mapping fingers itching... The map site: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?ammem/gmd:@field(NUMBER+@band(g6000m+gct00040)) And, since the images are in that huge jpeg2000 format, you'll also want to have an image converter (like irfanview, with the jpeg2000 plugin installed) to view and convert them to regular jpegs for your mapping purposes.

Awesome idea! Good luck and please keep us posted.

Also, I find the face command used multiple times can tweak the way the team situates itself in a foxhole group.

Well, this will be an interesting test of asymmetrical soft factors, make of it what you will: The battle now set up in my op-tac campaign, about to be played out: Germans: Fitness unfit/weakened, Experience: Veteran, Motivation: Low, Leadership -2. Americans: Fitness weakened/fit, Experience: Green, Motivation: Normal, Leadership: +2. Given that the American battalion outnumbers the German around 3:1 in this battle and have light and heavy tank companies in support plus a full 105mm battalion offmap, I'd bet on the Americans winning. Oh, and they have the better terrain, attacking downhill from Hill 108 into a hard-to-defend valley. But... The German battalion gets some assets too (some 88s, a Stug company, sniper teams) to make it interesting. And while the Americans have to secure and hold a 280m x 280m victory location, the Germans need only inflict enemy casualties over 40 percent. I'm never quite sure how these sorts of battles will turn out. The battle odds on a boardgame map look so much cleaner and more predictable than the chaotic, 3D apocalypse they become once the red "start" button sets them off in CMBN...

Thanks for the honest update, Steve! That approach sounds like the right way to go, and I wouldn't want it any other way.

OK, now you got me started...here are some doodads for the next module to aspire to:

Ahh, that's right -- make it 45 years for me because that reminds me that I played American Heritage's "Broadside" (naval war of 1812, great fun) and Civil War at elementary school age, even before I discovered AH D-Day, etc., years later. BTW, so much of this shared cultural nostalgia is American or Canadian -- makes me wonder how our older overseas friends here found their way into the hobby. With WWII still so much in local and recent memory, overwhelming desire to forget the war in Germany (compared to the constant romanticizing of it in US media and kids toys in the 1950s and 1960s), and these boardgames we grew up with probably not published or sold as much overseas back then. Maybe miniatures were more often the "entry drug" for Europeans in those days? Or something else?

55+ years (well, OK, wargaming for maybe 42 years) for me, too, and this is the stuff I couldn't even begin to dream I'd have on my desktop all those years ago, when I squinted into those Panzerblitz counters and tried to imagine what a Tiger tank firing from hull-down must have looked like, outside of book photos, grainy newsreel footage, or fakey looking war movies.

See this thread for the info on the overlayer: http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=101988 If you can get it to work in a satisfactory way, please consider writing a "for dummies" how-to guide in English for the forum. Sorry about the link to the photo site. I've tried it a bunch of ways today but the whole site seems to be down (?) This is the one that used to work for me: http://aerial.rcahms.gov.uk/

Not so sure. I'd suspect the more open terrain with no bocage, less foliage, fewer trees, should probably be less difficult for the game to handle, even with larger-area maps.

Here's a source where you can find the WW2 aerial recon photos of the D-Day beaches: http://aerial.rcahms.gov.uk/isadg/collectiondescriptions.php Breaking the game maps into the sectors is a great idea. But you'll need to get creative with how to reprint the German defenses, since we don't have all the beach obstacles, gun emplacements, Tobruks, etc.

Excellent, c3k, thanks. Do you think that by July 11-18, these strengths were less, more, or the same? Normally I would assume D-Day and the June fighting whittled those numbers way down. But since the AT bn was divisional reserve, and because the 352nd received some infusions of troops from other divisions (like a regiment from the 353rd) for the Saint-Lo battles, maybe these strengths might be pretty much the same by July 11-18. Dunno.

And I hate to see what the SS are going to do...

Sorry, but no. It all has to be done manually. Japanzer made a utility that is supposed to let you use a third-party program trace your CMBN map using an image overlay, if you can get it to work properly. Kudos to you for wanting to do an accurate map from real terrain in the first place, though!

[bumping this thread into 2012 since the OMG module is a year closer now, and because I want to learn all about how to map Holland as authentically as possible within the limits of what CMBN gives us.] It's taken time, but in the 8 months or so that CMBN has been out, I think we've all learned a lot more about Norman bocage and terrain and building patterns, and many user-made maps have grown better and more realistic as a result. After the Commonwealth module, CMBN will be taking us to Holland. And it's probably going to take time for us to explore the best ways to create that terrain in ways that not only look good and historically accurate, but contribute to realistic tactics and battle outcomes. I hope some of our Dutch forum members will post first-hand knowledge, photos, etc., and that some of our history buffs will post links and anecdotes that give us all a clearer idea of what the terrain really looked like. One thing we could certainly use is a resource for 1940s aerial photos of the OMG area, like the one we've been relying on for France. We still don't know what new Holland-specific building types, terrain tiles, etc., Battlefront might give us with the OMG module. So, rather than just indulge in wild speculation, maybe we can think about best ways to create Dutch terrain (forget buildings for now) with what we now have, circa early 2012: 1. Polder -- The OP and early posts to this thread give some valuable insights -- polders vary in firmness and aren't necessarily all soft and impassable to vehicles, they have lots of watery ditches running through them, etc. I'd still like to see some diagrams or examples so I can better understand what polderland really looks like. How frequent are those ditches, typically how deep, and how far apart? I guess they're all supposed to feed into some larger drainage system, so how does that work? The whole dike-and-polder system of reclaimed land is still a bit of a mystery to me. 2. Borders -- What separated Dutch fields most often in the OMG area, and what objects create that look and effect? Was wire fence in greater use in Holland than it was in Normandy? Trees seem more scarce, so fewer wooden fences perhaps? When there are walls, would brick have been the most typical material instead of stone? 3. Raised roads -- i.e., Hell's Highway. Not all roads would be raised, but many were. How high above the flatland would the typical raised roadway be? The most significant tactical effects were that the embankments blocked LOS, and that once vehicles were on a raised roadway they couldn't get off (because the banks were too steep). Keeping vehicles confined to a raised road would be easily accomplished with road placed over heavy forest tiles. But these would look brownish and weird, I think. So maybe BFC has something up their sleeve to make Dutch raised roads work better. That leads me to... 4. Dikes. We won't be needing bocage anymore in Holland. So what if those objects became dikes? They'd be maybe wider (3 or 4 tiles?) and the berm would be higher than the bocage berm, so maybe then you could even place roads atop them. Not sure if we'd really have to have this, but imagine having to place loads of hard-coded elevation points all around fields just to make dikes or road/RR embankments. We've seen how the game suffers when maps have too many fixed elevation points. So the placeable object seems a more elegant way to go.

[My ears are burning...] After following this discussion, I'm thinking I may have to start using "Green" more often. I had been using "Regular" for green and un-blooodied units of the 35th "Santa Fe" Division, because I thought "Green" in CMBN meant troops with little to no training, more on a par with Hiwis, Ostbattalions.

We can start talking about Market Garden now, and that in itself can be fun. I, for one, am expecting a whole new learning curve for being able to map Holland authentically. There's an old thread from last spring about that -- maybe I'll bump it and see if we can learn anything together...

Since we've been trying to translate AT counters from the 35nd Infantry Division here... These are the 4 counters that Joe Balkoski's "Saint Lo" operational boardgame has for divisional AT assets in the 352nd, from June 11-18, 1944: Looks like Companies 1 and 2 are Stug III companies and 3 and 4 are 75mm towed AT companies. But what would you say these 4 counters really would represent, specifically, by way of unit names, guns and personnel, etc., to translate into CMBN units? Ae these counters an oversimplification, and should the Stug companies have Marders in them too? Should the towed units have other types of guns in them too, and how many? What numbers and proportions, do you think? (Typically, in the boardgame, one or two of these at a time can be assigned to an eligible German battalion of the 352nd to help it out in a battle.)