Broadsword56

The ultimate selfie.

Now that's what I call "a party school."

+1 to what Kip says about messier lower-level vegetation. The single most common issue I see in maps is that they're too clean. It can take time, but things like brush along fencelines, hedges near houses, weeds on most any ungrazed or untrafficked area, etc., make a huge immersion difference and give infantry more realistic concealment too.

If you mean the town on the upper left corner of the master map, on the Orsha highway, it's marked on the 1:100,000 maps as Klyukovka.

Outstanding sound mod. Thank you!

I've always found it's preferable not to literally trace contour lines, but to just place dots every so often along a contour whenever the direction of the line changes. That way you let the engine do the rest and get a nice, natural look. It's also less strain on the game to have fewer dense concentrations of set elevation points.

I thought there was a snow mod for CMBN, no?

But in those days you didn't have cloud storage like we have now. We've been using Dropbox and other cloud services to share/exchange PBEM files for years now. There's no point in trying to e-mail them.

This is the definitive tutorial, and its stickied over in the CM: Battle for Normandy maps & mods forum: http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=110294

That raises some questions for me about what RT is using as the starting point. Can someone please clarify this? If I take a Soviet Guards rifle company "out of the box" in the scenario editor, is it going to have 100% of an "on paper" 1944 TO&E, or already be pre-shrunk to a typical real-world 75 men per company? If I wanted to get that company to 75 men and 25 per platoon, would selecting "typical" affect the manning level compared to other settings? The smallest the editor allows a unit to be is 50% of personnel, right? So to get any thinner than that, one would need to go within the company and start cutting structure, eliminating squads or sections. To get the 30-50% conscripts, would selecting "typical" accomplish that? Or would one need to go squad by squad in the editor to reduce experience settings? Please tell me the best adjustments to make to get from what's in the editor now, as a starting point, to the typical historical Soviet units that fought in Bagration.

I've updated the Orsha scenario rules to v 1.03 PM me if you want a copy. (Mostly just adds little things here and there that were discovered as errors & omissions during play, some clarifications, updated errata, etc.)

Does this really huge master map include the parts of the Radzymin operation where the SS units were involved? If so, it will be very useful for operational-tactical play once we have the SS in CM on the Eastern Front.

Yes, please!! I could base another hexmap on it someday for another Cyberboard scenario to use in tandem with RT.

Get that face on a Soviet officer and put him on the balcony in that Soviet Parade mod, and you've got yourself a Comrade Stalin to review the procession from atop the Kremlin Wall. (He's a bit young-looking for Stalin, but close enough)

IRL the Soviets here had 7:6 superiority in infantry, 3:1 superiority in AFVs, and 7.5:1 superiority in artillery tubes. The space on the Soviet side of the Sukhodrovka River at the start of the campaign (a.k.a. Soviet Campaign Master Map 1) would have been packed solid with a division + assets, then another division + assets behind it, and eventually the entire 2nd Guards Tank Corps once the Soviets realized this was the place to send them through for deep penetration. Re: Partisans -- Primarily the effect of partisans in Bagration was more in the German rear, where ops against rail lines, etc., severely limited German ability to reinforce/resupply etc. But that's all beyond the scope of anything within RT. But the German front collapsed so fast that those logistical effects never even had time to matter. I did include Partisans as one of the Random Events in my operational layer game (see the RT mods forum). It's something that can strike a German HQ or small platoon-sized unit, outpost, rearguard, etc., that's in forest and a given distance from any friendly troops.

I read somewhere about the manpack field telephone switchboard that followed US battalion commanders around -- it was enormous, too.

Be cool if they came on a little parade map with a Kremlin lookalike (using the new onion dome church model, high brick walls and large building with high balcony). Some Soviet officers perched on the balcony to review the parade, and have the tanks, SUs and Katyushas set with AI to roll down the boulevard in grand style....

Check your e-mail, mj

Lol -- you didn't see them because yours came first and I made sure my hexmap used the same basic area.

Benpark's excellent master maps for RT's Soviet Campaign look like this when laid out on Google Earth in their real locations: Now, for those who like operational-tactical play, there's a hex-and-counter computer game designed to fit exactly with these master maps: Panzer Command Bagration: Panzer Command Bagration is a Cyberboard gamebox + custom scenario for the classic boardgame, Panzer Command (Victory Games, 1984). Designed by Eric Lee Smith, Panzer Command is still one of the few solid Eastern Front games at grand tactical scale (company/battery counters, 500m per hex). It was the basis for Multi Man Publishing's current Grand Tactical Series, too. One of the drags about op-tac campaigns in the past was having to make CM maps every time we wanted to fight a tactical setup from the boardgame. Either that, or play with fictional maps borrowed from somewhere else. But here, you've already got RT maps for virtually all the 25-km or so of the Orsha northern attack corridor. So all it takes is cutting out whatever segment you want from a master map to set up a HTH scenario. A few caveats: You'd have to own a copy of Panzer Command for its rules and charts. Copies are widely available on the used market for $20-$30 these days. Well worth having. You'd also need to DL a copy of the GTS series rules from the Multi Man Publishing support page. I brought a few of the GTS rules into PCB, like column formation, barrage markers, rearguards, roadblocks and my favorite -- random events. These really improve the game -- but they might prove to be too much of a learning curve if you don't have some familiarity with the GTS system already. The scenario and gamebox come zipped with my own PDF scenario rulebook, which might seem long at 20 pp, but was carefully written to be as clear and thorough as possible (with illustrated examples). It's free to anyone who PMs me and asks nicely. One plus of having PCB in Cyberboard is that it's totally moddable. So if anyone wants to try improving any aspect of it, open the Gamebox and have at it, then save a new scenario and share it with the rest of us. [Just be advised that any changes to my Gamebox will break any scenarios or games that were based on it, like my existing scenario.] Post here to ask me any questions about it. I'm going to post about PCB on other wargaming forums in hopes that it will attract more conventional grog wargamers to come over here to BFC and give RT a try. (When CM gets mentioned in those places, the replies usually suggest gamers still think we're talking about CMx1 and they don't know about CMBN or CMFI or RT. Or they mention a general distaste for computer games and don't realize that CM is nothing like the rest of the genre.) For those who want to do op-tac campaigns with RT but want something more automated, I'd also recommend Minsk '44 in the John Tiller series. It covers a very wide scope of Bagration and you could use Noob's well-developed rulesets with it.

+1 to that. Found the same book at the same place a few years ago. Would love to get somemof those other volumes in the series. Didn't know about them.

Great detail Jason, thanks. I hope others were enlightened by it, too. Given what you said, for my purposes I'm going to apply that restrictive boardgame mechanism I described earlier to both German and Soviet sides as a bit of "design for effect" to prevent units all over the map spotting for indirect fire willy-nilly. The Soviets will get to do some big preplanned shoots with the larger assets maybe a couple of times a day, and I'll let the player secretly pick which turns.

No, you'd have to do that yourself. The way you could do it is: 1. Open any map you want on 3D Preview in the Scenario Editor; 2. Hit "9" and take a series of screenshots at that view level until you have the entire map covered; 3. Open the images in a program like Gimp or Photoshop and stitch them together into a single image; 4. Print that image as a PDF file. 5. Post the PDF file on your Dropbox or other cloud storage area; 6. On your Ipad, open the file and select "Read in..." and select your PDF-reading reader app of choice (iBooks, Kindle, etc.)

Since this thread has gone off in an artillery direction now and Jason has returned, thought I'd ask: It seems to me, after reading several books and reports about ops on/around the Bagration timeframe, that the Red Army did a great job shooting preplanned bombardments and put a lot of artillery tubes (75mm, 120mm mortars) up front with the regiments and divisions. But, when there were breakthroughs and rapid advances, as in Bagration, the Soviets had greater trouble than the Germans in keeping indirect artillery fire available as needed to the units at the tip of the spear. Is this accurate? Was it due to communication inferiority (fewer radios? reliance on wire field telephones?) Or did the front simply move too fast for the guns and ammo dumps to keep pace? How far down the organization table did Soviet FOs operate, and how many teams would have typically moved with a division, regiment, battalion? Or were they totally independent and operated out of a larger (Corps? Army?) HQ? In the companion op layer boardgame I've made to accompany RT, the standard rules let any unit with LOS to an enemy call for indirect fire on it, provided they make a successful radio contact dieroll with the battery. That's fine for the Germans, but I'm wondering if it might be more realistic on the Soviet side to restrict on-the-fly artillery missions by saying, for example, that only recon units or units stacked with a leader counter can make indirect fire calls. That's not literally how it worked, but a way to represent limited flexibility in the game mechanics and force the Soviet player to rely more on organic direct fire and preplanned indirect fire for artillery support. Thoughts?

What would a rifle squad have done in RL in World War II, then?