Broadsword56

From what I've read, after Cobra the German front collapsed and their forces retreated so fast, that American "leg" infantry just grabbed or hopped on anything with wheels just to try and keep up. So yeah, tank-riding would seem to be more important in the fast-moving, wide-open-spaces type of war that happened in Aug-September than in the CMBN period.

The US Army Air Corps killed enormous numbers of friendly troops in Normandy with airstrikes gone awry. The bocage made it hard to see and ID troops on the ground, and there were problems with the "recognition panels" being too small, as well as the limits on radio communications mentioned above. So I hope there is at least the chance of aerial friendly fire in this game. It would also even the odds a bit for the German player, given the overwhelming US air superiority in this campaign. Any US player calling in airstrikes would have to weigh the benefits against the very real possibility of friendly fire.

Couldn't agree more. But I guess it's just that some wargamers are from Venus and some from Mars (or whatever analogy works best here). Both equally valid in their own way, but totally different in motivation and taste (Battlefront marketing department take note)... The type you describe is more competitive, and the "game" part matters more to them. It's like a sports contest, and a large part of the emotional payoff comes from being proven the better general/tactician, in a "pure" test of skill, like chess, where nothing extraneous can be blamed for the result. This is today's extension of the tournament player community at boardgaming conventions, who (still, I think), play ancient simple and pure games like AH's Stalingrad with great gusto. The other type is more experience-motivated. They may be drawn in primarily by an interest in history. So realism and authentic play and tactics matter more to them. They want a time machine that puts them as closely as possible into the boots of Gen. Cota or Sepp Dietrich, to face the same dilemmas they did and better understand what happened and why. Eye-candy matters more to them, because the overall spectacle and drama of the game are a bigger part of the payoff than who wins. They can even enjoy a lopsided battle against desperate odds, they like quirky maps. They care about things like knowing the soldier's names. And, come to think of it, I think there's one more type of gamer: The technician. I have a harder time understanding this, but from what I see I think their payoff comes from appreciating the technology of the game itself, the state of the programming art, the ability to tinker with details and get under the hood. This gamer is the one who loves the minute discussions of penetration capabilities and rates of fire -- tedious to some others, but crucial to making the games better for all the rest of us. And these are the people whose endless labors of love create the mods we all enjoy. Game makers: Find a way to appeal to all these groups in some key way at the same time, and you've got a winner! I think the CM series fits that bill very nicely.

I love to curl up with a nice thick manual -- especially the one shipping with the boxed preorder game. Those little pamphlets that come in CD jewel cases nowadays are so unsatisfying. CMx1's manual, with the period cartoons and such, gshowed deph and gave me a warm feeling that said "ahh, this game was created by some people who really cared."

Yeah, you could almost see that Panzer trooper shaking his little pixel-kopf in amazement and a grudging admiration for his plucky enemy.

Great fun indeed! And make sure some random factor is thrown in, so that no one can be sure precisely when the designated weather will change. That way, it's like a "weather forecast" for the time period that both players might have access to, but won't know precisely enough to be able to synchonize their battle plans with it in advance.

I disagree with this disagreement! Battlefront, please be very careful before ruining CM by turning it into an arcade game of suicidal armies and adolescent one-upmanship. Make this sort of gameplay an option, if you need to do it for commercial reasons. But please make sure all the work you've put into realism isn't ruined by forcing us into some gamey way of playing.

Also, there was always the good possibility that an enemy weapon (or any other tempting souvenir for a GI) might be booby-trapped. So the smart soldier would avoid picking it up unless he knew for sure.

We'll pretend the wires used to be there, but they got shot down, and then the local civilians scavenged the rest for scrap.

Am I the first to notice these, or are we getting jaded around here? Great job Battlefront -- the Norman countryside and "flavor" objects really come through well here, as well as the weather effects.

I just bought Battles from the Bulge and installed a St. Lo bocage custom scenario to mess around with, while waiting for CMBN to come out. Can anyone here explain to me the actual mechanics one would use to pick a battalion-level battle to play tactically, extract data from the BFTB operational game, then get data back into BFTB so it would be able to incorporate that and resume the operational game? I realize that for CMBN one would still have to create the map and OOBs, etc. But I'm just asking about the data in and out of BFTB, to see whether anyone has explored and/or figure this out yet, how feasible it will be, etc.

There already is a working and very popular St Lo mod scenario with hedgerow terrain/map if you look in the "Mods" folder on the Matrix Games forum area for BFTB. That seems like it could work with CMBN right out of the box, no?

I'm surprised the commanders in these two German tanks remain unbuttoned with all these fireworks flying around (compared to the US tanks, which have always seemed to be buttoned). Any reason for this? Did you order them to stay unbuttoned, Bil? Or is this behavior the tank commanders' own AI decisions?

To pass the time until the new Combat Mission comes out, I started tinkering around with my El Guettar map and mission for TOW 2 Africa 1943. This time I have a detailed readme that spells out all the installation steps, and it should work. Please visit the repository and give this one a try. A few screenies to whet your appetites: Scratch one Stuka -- You've got one Bofors to keep those swarms of Stukas off your troops, so make good use of it! The Wadi Keddab was the stop-line for Patton's army. Here a GI made the ultimate sacrifice as he machinegunned the crew of a German halftrack that overran his platoon. While the armor battle is raging, veteran German panzergrenadiers emerge from the smoke and assault the green American infantry in their foxholes (this one was too frightened to throw the grenades he had, cowered in suppression, then jumped up to put up a pretty good hand-to-hand fight. But the German got free, leveled his MP-40, and finished him off with one brutal burst. Crippled German tanks in the wadi are easy prey for surviving US bazooka teams -- if they can shoot straight! A long view of the 10th Panzer Division thundering down the valley toward the American last line of defense at El Guettar.

To pass the time until the new Combat Mission comes out, I started tinkering around with my El Guettar map and mission for TOW 2 Africa 1943. This time I have a detailed readme that spells out all the installation steps, and it should work. Please visit the repository and give this one a try. A few screenies to whet your appetites: Scratch one Stuka -- You've got one Bofors to keep those swarms of Stukas off your troops, so make good use of it! The Wadi Keddab was the stop-line for Patton's army. Here a GI made the ultimate sacrifice as he machinegunned the crew of a German halftrack that overran his platoon. While the armor battle is raging, veteran German panzergrenadiers emerge from the smoke and assault the green American infantry in their foxholes (this one was too frightened to throw the grenades he had, cowered in suppression, then jumped up to put up a pretty good hand-to-hand fight. But the German got free, leveled his MP-40, and finished him off with one brutal burst. Crippled German tanks in the wadi are easy prey for surviving US bazooka teams -- if they can shoot straight! A long view of the 10th Panzer Division thundering down the valley toward the American last line of defense at El Guettar.

Come on, now admit it: Don't you wish you knew "brave tanker's" name? (Sorry, I know this issue has been settled -- just couldn't resist)

Which makes me worried about the maps we're going to see in this game. Is it just a limitation of this particular QB map, which was intended just as a testing ground for a Mark IV vs. Sherman match? Or are these shortcomings due to something about the game itself and the limitations of the way it does buildings and objects? Some of the other screenshots I've seen looked like they had plenty of Norman flavor, walls, etc. So I guess we'll have to wait and see.

I recall being startled at the bloodcurdling screams of wounded or panicked troops when the first Close Combat game appeared -- first time I'd ever experienced this in a wargame, and it made everything seem that more vital and immediate. It also made me that much more careful with pixeltrupppen's lives.

(Probably should continue this on a new thread, but...) This exists already: ARMA 2:Operation Arrowhead is so graphically detailed and realistic a FPS that its most advanced realism mods include complex wounding modules, blood trails, etc., and it's an important part of gameplay to drag/carry buddies to safety, use first aid/buddy care, and use team medics effectively. Wounded troops roll around in agony, etc. It's an immersive and violent world if you have the PC hardware to run it. I've enjoyed it but the experience of it vs. Combat Mission is like F1 racing to chess (and both have their merits). I'm amazed at all the real-life ex-grunts who've been in Afghanistan or Iraq (or who say they were) who seem active in the MP community -- you'd think that after seeing the real thing, the last thing they'd want is to re-live it as a hobby. But maybe it's cathartic -- who knows?

The ultimate, to me, would be a function key that let you toggle contours on and off -- they'd show as bands of elevation or depression superimposed over the 3D map. Another good method is the "area LOS" toggle from games like Conquest of the Aegean and Battles from the Bulge -- you select a spot on the map, toggle the function, and every bit of terrain that can be "seen" from that point is highlighted wherever it is on the map.

I wonder why his air support was "denied" in the battle? Can anyone explain when/why this happens in the game? It would be frustrating to buy the support and not ever be able to call it in (although I like having some randomness to when it becomes available and how much of it actually shows up).

As long as this stuff is moddable (at least somewhat), I'm sure you graphics gurus will find a way to make CM:BN even more awesome. I just hope that the ability to mod it for dirt, atmosphere, etc., will exist (has Battlefront assured us that it will be?), and that we don't have to resort to immersion-killing abstractions like terrain gridlines.

Sounds great and wish the game could do this. But it sounds like this is as good as it's going to get. And it's still sounding like the wargame of all time, even with those limitations.

Hey, it was pretty rainy in Normandy in June 1944. So we can pretend the rain just washed the dust off and enjoy those amazingly detailed 3D models, clean as they may be. Muddy ground troops would be pretty cool, though, and while you're at it, how about some "Willie & Joe" style beard stubble on those dogfaces?

You can always area fire into the smoky zone without LOS to anything, right? But it's less accurate then, as it should be.