Broadsword56

Nice map! How has it played in the tag team battles?

Never had any problem with this mod and have been running it for months.

I guess I long for those "developer's diary" blogs that some of the deeper-pocketed game developers do for much-anticipated releases... Actually, not all the ones who do this are deep-pocketed. I recall the developer of Scourge of War Gettysburg posted pretty regular forum updates for a year or more before the game came out. Often it was something like: "OK, one more line of code to try and fix that $%#@ cavalry charge animation before I call it a night. Fun times playtesting the Peach Orchard scenario last weekend -- you can really feel the minie balls whizz by now, with those new sounds we're adding in version 2.3..." Not super-informative, but curiously satisfying to those hopelessly addicted fanpeople who crave any crumb of new information about their favorite game.

+1 for dead tree

Yes, although after a while the "soft" factors of CMBN do seem to have a cumulative effect on an attacking force -- to the point where accomplishing the original attack mission just isn't feasible any longer. In our La Nicollerie HTH, for example, I think I'd just about hit -- or was soon to hit -- that "breakpoint" when the game crashed. And, interestingly enough, my rifle company's casualty level was around 25% at that point. A 30% casualty rate would have finished them for the day, I think. So maybe 30% is a good figure?

I'm interested in the way you set these victory conditions, because I'm using something similar when I convert operational boardgame situations into CMBN scenarios. The US has territory objective(s), but the Germans have a casualty objective. One of the things I've wrestled with was deciding what that casualty percentage should be. You make it 30%. The DoD study I read says an attacking US battalion in WWII would typically reach a cohesion "breakpoint" of around 15% casualties -- that's the point where the unit would not be destroyed, but would no longer be able to continue attacking. But that's 15% of the total battalion strength, and when you consider that almost all the casualties would have been in the two rifle companies (assuming one was in reserve), that breakpoint would actualy be much higher. Example: 871 men in a full-strength US battalion. 193 men per company. If 2 companies fought, that's 386 men. 15% casualties in the battalion would be 130 men. But if all the casualties happened in those two up-front companies, that's about a 34% casualty rate for the actual units engaged. So I think you got it about right -- except that if CMBN tends to create "bloodier" battles than real life, for various reasons (the foxhole and building cover effects that have been documented on these forums, etc.), I wonder whether the percentage should be a bit higher to take that into account? 40%? 60%? Also, the study seemed to find a higher cohesion breakpoint for battalions on defense (which makes sense to me): somewhere closer to 60% if you average officers and enlisted. But that's 523 men, and that would wipe out almost all the rifle companies. So I'm not sure that's quite right. Any thoughts?

Yes, a campaign is a good idea. And don't be concerned about "balance" in the standard sense. A battle with great disparities of forces can still be "balanced" as a game depending on how you set the victory conditions. Even in a battle certain to be lost, CMBN can give a chance of game victory to the outnumbered and outgunned with points for acheiving an exit objective, or managing to holding a certain position when it was lost historically, or inflicting a certain damage level on the enemy.

This is not the fault of the game! It's the fault of poor map designs. We have "gap" sections of low and high bocage, which infantry (not vehicles) can pass through. Unfortunately, too few maps use them. The standard best practice, IMHO, should be to have frequent random gaps, as often as every 5th or 6th section. Having these thin spots and wormholes completely changes the tactics of the game and makes it play far more realistically.

Totally authentic now!

Excellent effect, especially the bits of low bocage that look like household hedges. I still use regular grass a lot for pastures (interspersed with mud here and there) because the cows would have still been munching it down. But lots of weeds and tall grass around the borders and fencelines. Orchards are tall grass with regular grass spots under each tree. XT grass is REALLY tall and I save it for unkempt waste areas next to lanes and roads, underneath and along bocage (alternating with weeds), and fallow fields.

Sgt Schultz, Nice workaround. If I were to nitpick, I'd prefer to see a few more gaps in the base vegetation and maybe some variation in color -- the way it looks now covers the base, but it's a bit overpowering and actually seems to draw attention to itself rather than just looking like natural stuff growing here and there. Don't know if this is possible or worth your time, but just my 2 cents.

The ivy actually looks fine to me, since little tendrils not visible from a distance can creep up a wall or out of a crack somewhere. The flowers on the left don't look good to me, either, due to the building base. The flower pot looks fine, since it could be sitting on little ledge or something.

+1 to Chris' comments. In my experience with CMBN, when my troops are getting beaten I can see, hear, and feel it quite clearly. When I'm winning I can feel it in the diminished enemy return fire, enemy gun positions suddenly gone silent, and my troops able to advance in good order without crippling losses. If you get down to ground level and look at what's happening, you'll know! Surprises will happen, and sometimes you won't know the ultimate result until the battle is over, but that's entirely realistic. Enjoy the journey.

This is a HUGE breakthrough. Thanks for working on this. One thought: If this utility is going into the unit database and pulling out this information, would it be able to find the names of all the soldiers in each unit? We know that all the soldiers are named, because when a leader dies The name and rank of the soldier newly promoted to lead the unit appears in the UI. If this is possible without a lot of extra work, please consider making this or another tool that would make a roster of the indivifual soldiers. This would also make it possible to get to know them better.

Some smashed-out glass and broken frames on some windows would look good, too.

But the ones behind windows won't look bad -- flat is fine for those, I think.

Absolutely positively outstanding work. My marksmen will want to use that wine bottle on the windowsill for target practice, of course :-) Keep up the good work!

Let us all know if that size you mentioned actually works once you detail it, Schultzie. I work your example out to be 188 x 375 action squares, for a total of 70,500 action squares. My own master-map and submap adventures seem to suggest 25,000 action squares is close to the limit of what the game can handle for a really detailed bocage map -- probably could be more if you've got fewer hedgerows and are fighting in better tank country (like Caen to Falaise). Using my hypothetical threshold, your 3.5 km tank map would need to skinny down to about 533 meters to work well. But I'd love to hear that someone is making it wider than that and having full battalions fight with no problem. Nothing wrong with a long and very skinny map, mind you -- reminds me of those old Panzerblitz scenarios where you'd line up all the boards end to end for an armored spearhead to thunder through (what was the name of that poor, endlessly fought-over little village again?) Belogrod?

It might be a matter of the angle between the plane of the wall and the plane of the blast command line. IIRC, a wall (or hedgerow or whatever) that runs N-S is best penetrated by drawing the blast line perpendicular/straight through the wall. If the wall runs diagonally NW-SE, etc., some say you get better results by blasting along the wall spot. I haven't done my own tests or anything, so take it with a grain of Normandy gray sea salt :-)

IMHO the D-Day beach landings are interesting in an operational game (not CMBN level) because then you could see what would have happened if the Germans kept their armored reserves closer to the coast, or if the inland Allied airborne drops had scattered differently and/or they failed to secure one of the vital causeways, etc.

So it looks like the only mortars at all in a German infantry battalion would have been in the 8th (Heavy Weapons) Company: 6 x 81mm and 4 x 120mm. (Source: Joseph Balkoski's Beyond The Beachhead, p. 310, appendix, TO&E for the 8th Company, 916th GR, 352nd ID)

Looking great!! For gripping reading and scenario/map source material, I highly recommend: Saving the Breakout: The 30th Division's Heroic Stand at Mortain, August 7-12, 1944 [Hardcover] By Alwyn Feathersto

Unlike the garrison troops, though, the German 352nd ID was a front-line unit and listed in the highest readiness catgory at the time of D-Day. They had been training in Normandy for the Ostfront, and were expecting to be shipped there eventually, when the invasion intervened and they were kept in Normandy. So I wonder what they actually had in the typical grenadier company's HE toy chest?

Beach landings are spectacular to watch but spectacularly boring as a game experience, for the reasons Womble cites above. Maybe BFC should have just made an introductory cut scene for the game, to satisfy the folks who were disappointed not to see the troops splashing ashore.

To me, CMBN (with all the mods running) easily surpasses the "suspension of disbelief" threshold -- even though that's far short of the "uncanny valley," it's enough to make me see the action and trick my imagination into filling in the rest of the details, to the point that I feel I'm seeing a (slightly cartoony) representation of real WWII soldiers on the battlefield. It's enough to make me care and absorb my interest without the "straining to imagine what's really happening" that I always experienced when looking down at cardboard unit counters or trying to visualize 1 soldier representing 10 others, etc.