Broadsword56

Yes -- to this day, French newspapers in rural areas still occasionally have little "police blotter" news items mentioning this or that farmer or mushroom forager injured by a unexploded WWII (or even WWI) munitions.

Yikes, wouldn't TNT like that be unstable and highly dangerous? I guess it would take an electrical charge to detonate it, but I wouldn't want my cellphone to start ringing right then...

Thought you all might enjoy this -- I was trying to to figure out the best way to translate the step losses/cohesion hits of an operational Normandy game to the specific personnel strengths of units at the tactical level in CMBN. So I e-mailed Joe Balkoski, the official 29th ID historian who designed the St. Lo. game and wrote "Beyond the Beachhead" about that campaign. He answered in detail, and gave me permission to share it here: -- Thanks very much for your message and kind words about my work. I appreciate it. I'm afraid I'm not going to be of too much help, as my work on the St. Lo game was in 1984 -- 27 years ago -- and my memory of it is almost non-existent. Sadly, I don't think I even own a copy, although I do recall that I was very proud of that game in that I think it broke new ground in the hobby. Everything in the game was based on the realities of WWII combat that I had learned from interviewing the veterans in the process of writing my book "Beyond the Beachhead." The combat they described to me I tried to represent in the game. As far as step losses in the game vis a vis physical losses in battle, I would say that the representation of step losses had more to do with ruptured cohesion than physical loss. There is no question that one thing I learned from the veterans was that even a full-strength unit with poor cohesion could do almost nothing, whereas a highly depleted unit with good cohesion could accomplish a lot. My only guideline for your question is that a unit losing one step in the game certainly would not have lost 33% of its men. It could have lost only one -- say, its CO -- and it would probably have lost a third of its effectiveness. I have found as I continue to write about WWII that a loss of 30 men (wounded and killed) in a rifle company of 193 men typically was devastating and required the unit to sit tight the following day, absorbing replacements (if any) and generally not taking any offensive action. Even a loss of 5 men could be tough if the combat endured by the unit had been unremitting, day after day. I am not sure this information is of any help, but I hope it is. I am curious about the Combat Mission: Battle for Normandy game. If it's realistic enough to reflect some of the real situations portrayed in my book, I would be impressed. My sense is that in a game, players have incentive to move their people around, but in reality soldiers tended to freeze and stay put, especially under cover, if they came under heavy fire. As a gamer going way back, I'm curious how the game tries to reflect things like that. Is it a turn-based game or a continuous action game? The situations depicted in "Beyond the Beachhead" are told in some detail, but I wish I had had the page space to tell them in even greater detail. In my later books on the 29th Division (see my website: http://www.angelfire.com/md/29division/), I do tell of company-level actions in greater detail than in the original book. --- I sent him a link to the "Features" page here so he could discover more about CMBN. Back to my question: This is a gross abstraction on my part, but (based on Joe's rifle company example) it sounds fair to say that a unit would certainly be combat ineffective after 15% casualties. So, I'd say a 3-step unit in the operational game should take about 5% strength loss for each hit; a 2-step unit should take 8% per hit; and a 1-step unit is knocked out with one hit. That would at least allow units entering a CMBN battle to be quantified for scenario-building purposes -- starting with their known strengths on D-Day and applying any step losses/gains in the campaign to that point. Then, based on the CMBN battle result, any losses above a certain threshold would mean the unit resumed the campaign with one or two step losses. Your thoughts?

It's so great to connect these things back to the people and the events that put the artifacts where they are. Now some other human stories of the war have become known to history.

Some questions about the CMBN map editor: *Will it be possible to import grayscale heightmaps into the editor (saves enormous amount of time compared to shaping all elevations manually with tools)? *How does are texture files set up? For example, in TOW2 there's a 1024 px x 1024 px playable area, and its appearance is controlled by a JPEG file. You can make a really artistic texture map in Gimp or Photoshop, and then import it into the map editor. *When you place a linear object (say, a hedgerow or a long stone wall) do you have to place and position lots of little pieces and fiddle with aligning them, or can you place them as one long piece?

One way I hope to get around the "campaign fatigue" issue is to play my campaign solitaire (using a boardgame) and then just invite a human opponent to play whenever I have a specific map/OOB ready to resolve an interesting battle. Not sure how well this will work, but at least it's on my own timetable and doesn't require a dedicated club, etc. Noob, you might consider trying this, too, as a Plan B if your MP campaign doesn't materialize as you hope.

These 1947 photos really are a revelation once you overlay them on the present-day Google Earth imagery. What strikes me about the Bocage (at least in the Manche department arount St. Lo) is that since WWII, field sizes have been consolidated (many are 3 or 4 times their wartime size), and also many orchards have been cleared away. orchards than in the 1940s.

Just to help folks assess best operational games to use with CMBN, here's a detailed review of St. Lo from back when the game was first published -- it also has an illustrated example of play: http://wargamememories.com/Documents/St%20Lo%20Review%20and%20Example%20of%20Play.pdf And here's a more recent AAR: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/128039/aar-st-lo What I find particularly appealing about the St Lo system are its initiative/morale/recovery rules, which force you to manage units and pull them out of the line -- or risk having them be unable to attack when you need them to. This also makes it a good game for solitaire play. If the hexes in N44 are several km, then the battlefields would of necessity have to be pretty big. And then how would you split up the regimental stacks, etc? In St Lo, not only are the units already battalions, but the hexes are only 304 meters. So the map it a lot more detailed (good for making CMBN maps) and seems to lend itself more easily to seeing the boundaries of the the tactical battles and the units involved. The turn scale in St. Lo is one day per turn. But during each player's segment, the phasing player makes rolls for initiative checks and spends "action points" to make things happen. I imagine that it could just be up to the players to decide if a pending battalion battle ought to be played out in CMBN or not --the idea being that the tactical level ought to be saved for battles that are the most interesting or critical to the overall campaign. This would be a matter of consensus and level of interest.

This thread (and the one where we're discussing old boardgames that could serve as operational layers/campaign management tools for CMBN) is inspiring me... As a pastime and amusement before CMBN releases, I'm going to try using the Google Earth topo contour method described above, and make an overlay of the hexmap from the St. Lo boardgame map (West End Games, 1986) on the satellite imagery, see how it matches up, and then draw the contour lines on it (is it every 10 meters?) to correspond with what we have to work with in CMBN. That could at least become a good source image for battle maps in the future. Since the boardgame is battalion-scale and its map is 3.5 hexes per km, it's got individual farms, 14 elevation levels, and is pretty well detailed for this purpose.

The other nice thing about the St. Lo boardgame map is it's not only battalion scale, but 3.5 hexes per kilometer, 14 elevation levels -- enough even to show individual farms. So at least more terrain detail to use as a starting point for CMBN maps than the ones using bigger map scales.

Reading about the AH Longest Day game, though, IMHO it seems big but rather simplistic -- it doesn't seem to have activation/initiative rules, for example, or a lot of modeling of morale and fatigue the way St. Lo does it. To each his own... By the way, how might one best translate board wargames that use "step reduction" combat results back and forth with CMBN battles?

The mapmaking for CM-resolved battalion battles would be the biggest challenge. I'm thinking I'd enjoy just role-playing as the commander of one battalion, in, say, the 29th ID, and play it out in an operational game, but also follow that one battalion's progress by playing out its battles in CMBN. I'd let the operational game take care of the rest of the war. It would make a helluva game, and a great AAR to read as well.

Cyberboard is similar to Vassal and some players prefer one or the other. Some games have been converted into modules for one and not the other, so your choice also depends on what boardgame game you're looking to play electronically. Some players say Cyberboard's features better support PBEM, but I don't know either way. One key consideration is your system: Cyberboard is Windows-only, while Vassal works on PC, Mac, and others. A good brief summary of what Cyberboard is and how it works can be found here: http://wargamecenter.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/cyberboard/

If anyone wants a Cyberboard module for St Lo., just PM me -- I've got it now from someone who made a good one.

On the boardgame side, St. Lo (West End Games, designer: Joseph Balkoski)is battalion-scale and a highly regarded classic from the 1980s. Not a monster like Atlantic Wall, much cheaper to buy used these days ($40-$60) and preferred by some grognards who have played both. Balkoski, as many of you might know, is the historian who wrote the "Beyond the Beachead" book being touted over on the books thread. Although I'd prefer a computer game for the op layer, it seems that a board game would actually be the easiest to use right out of the box -- since all you have to do is stop the op game at the right moment, resolve a battle, and apply results on the board before continuing. There's a good page about the St. Lo game on boardgamegeek.com.

Shhh! Don't mention the war, Basil.

Great to read all the support here for historically accurate realism-based maps! The discussion made me flash back to the Ubisoft "Brothers in Arms" series (an old favorite of mine) -- where, in spite of the stunningly re-created appearance of Normandy and actual places, it always seemed there was always a handy crate of Panzerfausts just there...a stack of crates or an oil drum placed just there...etc. It made the gameplay feel awfully canned and scripted. I think team efforts are a splendid way to go with mapping. Some of us are really skilled at setting up the basic contour map over a section of satellite terrain, while others (like me) love the artistic part of placing objects and making textures, etc.

Yes, this was a really big dissatisfier for me in CMx1 and really made certain types of scenarios all but unplayable.

An interesting and educational US WWII training film for infantry soldiers about all their weapons includes the rifle grenade and shows it in use:

One of the things that bedeviled CMx1 players was moving groups of units along a road. Look at the old forums and you'll see years of posts where players traded tips about various "work-arounds" to make units follow each other while traveling, without running into each other -- all because the game just didn't have a workable and automatic "follow" system. Has CMBN solved this problem? (Maybe it was already solved with CMSF, I dunno). But curious to know.

I'm all for the 4 x 4 size -- more room = more possibilities for flanking and maneuver. Also means more ability to do scenarios where some units are already in contact and other are in the rear, moving up.

Does "bino" zoom view have that vignetted cutout shadow shape around the edges to simulate looking through the lenses of binoculars? Just curious.

The image of the gruff and profane Gen. George S. Patton on a honeymoon in romantic prewar France brings all sorts of comic images to mind... "Oh George, isn't the view just divine?" "Damn good terrain for an M4 position over there...and where's that $%#@*& sonofabitch with our Champagne? How amusing if he turned out to have been a charming Fred Astaire type in his private life.

Thank you for making St Lo, Crushingleek! It's just what I always wanted, and the thing that finally pushed me to buy that game. (So as not to annoy Battlefront or the other folks on this thread, I'll PM you or post something on the Matrix BFTB Mod thread.) As someone who's made custom maps for other games I've played (TOW2, Empire Total War), I know exactly what you mean about actually getting feedback from other players who have discovered and appreciated your creation. It takes many hours to make these things, and too often it feels like once you post it on a repository, you've dropped it into a void. I wish more people would post reviews or respond to user-created content more actively -- it's the only payoff we ever get! (other than getting to play them ourselves, of course).

Playing the St. Lo custom scenario for Battles from the Bulge, as US 1st Army. A real, and absorbing challenge. Plus, understanding the bigger picture of the bocage battle can't hurt when CMBN arrives.