Broadsword56

Ahhh -- Sept 30 is later on the calendar than I thought the base game would allow. Perfect! Can you tell us whether there's any discernible seasonal change to the foliage and terrain for a Sept. 30 scenario than for one set in June or July? For example, bare trees and foliage and bare or autumn brush? I ask because I'll be staging a campaign in the last week of Sept-first week of Oct., (albeit in 1942) and I want to determine whether it's going to look right for that time of year or whether a mod will be needed to get things right.

And it would have been cool and realistic for some of the Soviets to have bedrolls instead of those potato-sack packs on their backs. Maybe for a future module or pack?

My first urgent need for a RT mod will be bare trees and foliage and brush to simulate late Sept-early Oct. season. Planning work on Orlovka Pocket map(s) for Stalingrad (the less urbanised sector on the N flank).

I didn't see this on the RT TO&E overview, but I'd be interested to know how these units were structured, and how/whether one could approximate them with any unit types that are in RT. For example, the NKVD units that were used in the early going at Stalingrad before all the regular units had arrived.

That horse looks too crisp and clean, like he's just been groomed. Needs mud and crud for the true peasant workhorse look -- where's Aris?

Excellent news! I *don't* care how you fixed it, I'm just glad you did and grateful to those who persisted with the tests and posts to get it looked at.

Wha?? I don't like that at all and I hope that BFC will make flames equally dangerous to all whenever they're implemented again. I can just imagine the ridiculous gamey tactic of setting everything ablaze and then charging through the "friendly" flames to the cowering and burning enemy.

I think the camo scarves look excellent -- I don't notice the collar and tie shapes because they just appear to be folds in the silk. If you can make the silk a bit less shiny and mute the color a bit more it would be even better, IMHO. With these, a muted flag patch and weathered/worn unis, we'd have a terrific Airborne mod.

Re: Airborne uniform mods -- could the inner shirt area around the open collar be modded to look like the tucked-in camo scarves the paratroops often wore? I think these were made from parachute silk.

That netting looks amazing.

Excellent job on the ruins and battle damaged town. You might also want to consider making some totally destoyed and rubbled lots too. Various mappers have really advanced the state of the art in making ruined cities and towns. For example: The CM totally destoyed buildings are useful but only up to a point. Instead of just using the editor's detruction key to rubble a building 100%, Try making some more diverse types of ruins on your own. For example, rubbled buildings don't just lie flat. They can collapse into their basements and leave a big mound, and collapse into the streets too. To get that effect, experiment with ditchlocked elevated mounds, cover them with rocky terrain tiles, and then strew junk and other scattered objects on and around them. Make a few walls left standing by placing a few tall and short wall segments in or on the perimeter. Then you can have a lot of craters around, too.

Yes, the Saferight helmet mods are almost too good for the rest of the game!

Outstanding. If it would fit in a frame I'd hang it permanently over my monitor!

This is a good capability and would be somewhat similar to the "automatic" air option that I outlined above. But... Preplanned only applies before the battle begins. What I'm advocating is some way for air assets to play this type of hunting role later in a battle when they show up as reinforcements. Actually, the simplest way to do it would be to allow a longer "delay" to the preplanned area attack by the air units -- up to almost the 2-hour limit of a battle. If you make the area too small, you risk that the enemy units will have moved out of the zone. But if you make the area target the entire map or put it too close to your own lines, you also run greater risks of friendly fire. Those delayed preplanned strikes should not be controllable by the player, though, once they have been set. That would simulate air units in general support, loitering over an area and hunting without necessarily being vectored onto a ground-spotted target in real time.

In CM it always needs an FO to call it in. I would greatly prefer if the game could create an option for air cover to be present or not, but not to always make air assets have to be controlled by an FO or require in-battle requests for fire like artillery. Because in many cases in real life in WWII, air units that were present on the tactical battlefield were usually *not* in direct real-time communication with the actual platoon/company friendlies on the ground. More often, the air units would have been in a more general tactical support role, hunting on their own for enemy ground targets. The friendly ground units could, at most, deploy recognition panels on the ground or set off colored smoke or flares to show the aircraft where *not* to attack -- but even then this was a haphazard affair and history is replete with instances of friendly fire from above. Here's how I think CM should do air assets -- Make them available for purchase as they are now. Have a toggle option in the editor for an air asset to be "controlled" or "automatic" Allow the controlled or automatic air assets to be set up in the editor as reinforcements, as we do currently, so there can be windows of possible arrival times, etc. But: If the air asset was set up as "automatic" then once it arrives the artillery tab would show the air asset's status only -- no ability of the friendly player to designate targets or affect it in any way. The status would just say "in area" or "target spotting" or "firing" or "departing" or "unavailable," etc. The advantage of the "automatic" option would be that the air asset would hunt over the map on its own for enemy targets. It would have a TAC AI logic that would assign priorities based on the enemy unit's point value -- say, tanks first, then artillery units, heavy weapons, and then infantry. The air unit would also have a realistic ability to spot AFVs more readily than infantry on foot, and concentrations of enemy more readily than a single dispersed vehicle or team, hiding enemy harder to spot than not hiding, etc. The upside of the "automatic" air option is you don't need an FO or a radio, and you don't have to see an enemy target for the jabos to have a chance of spotting and attacking it. The downside of it is that you have a greater chance of taking friendly fire than you would with "controlled" air assets. To make it even cooler (although I doubt we'd ever see this), give the friendly player a chance to lower the friendly fire risk by giving certain battalion or company HQ teams an "air panel" instead of a smoke grenade or demo charge. The team could throw it, and the brightly colored little symbol would sit on the map as a decal. Friendly air units would fly away from any friendly air recognition panels on the ground. You'd get highly realistic situations, where your HQ has to weigh the risk of breaking cover to deploy an air panel and getting shot by a sniper vs. staying hidden and risking friendly fire from the air. Better yet: Let the enemy pick up air panels from your dead HQ units -- now the enemy can deploy your air panels in front of their own lines, and fool your own planes into attacking you! (This actually happened a lot - I was just reading about how the Australians did this to the Germans in Crete). PS: I just discovered this excellent Defense Department white paper about the air-ground control doctrines and practices of Germans and Allies in WWII: http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/cgsc/carl/download/csipubs/comparat.pdf I haven't read it in detail yet, but it seems that controllers were at division (or in the case of Germans) regimental level, way above the level of the typical CMx2 battle. In the US forces, the "Rover Joes" with the radios would travel around to battalions and give them access to the radio net needed to comminucate to the aircraft. But battalion was about as low as the control got, and even then it was not an all-the-time thing.

This post has the link and instructions for the French map/aerial photos site. The site has changed a bit since then, but if you understand a bit of French you should be able to work it out. You can download the 1947 1:25,000 images for free. You just need to convert them into regular jpegs and then place them as overlays on your Google Earth area. Then take your screenshots and use them as another source image. Good luck!

Spectacular job on this map, Bram! Great to have a map that looks properly war-torn -- even though it's sad to see such a picturesque Dutch town in ruins.

How exciting! Is it possible to make your tool record losses per squad (or at least per company)? Or is it that you don't want to, or that you think it would not be a useful feature? Because believe me, it would be one of the most useful things a tool could do. Because there's no other way to know what a battle's specific KIA, WIA, POW totals to specific units were without doing a manual headcount after the ending screen. In any kind of operational-tactical campaign, one of the biggest headaches is tracking strengths and losses from battle to battle. Yes, of course armies replaced losses between battles. But that can be done in the operational level or with the boardgame, or whatever other campaign mechanism one is using. The main thing is to get a good report on what the losses and strengths are. Any way to automate this would be the Holy Grail, for me and for those I play with. Re: Exit zones -- Yes, you can use them as simply a way to allow units to exit off the map and escape the battle. When they reach the zone they simply disappear. But it only works if you disregard the in-game VPs and use your own system for deciding victory levels. That's because if you use exit zones then I think your enemy gains VPs for any unit of that formation that fail to exit.

Outstanding work! Did you also use the 1940s French aerial photos or just modern Google Earth? It's really worth using the photos as overlay sources too, if you can, because the fields and landscape of Normandy have changed enormously since the war -- much wartime bocage has been removed, and the Caen area has seen lots of suburban development over the decades. I'm sure Los will take great interest, since he's got a campaign going just nearby as we speak and using a version of my Juvigny-to-Fontenay map.

Not that we're obsessed over this tank-squishing stuff -- we're just biding our time here, rocking back and forth in front of the CM hot stove, cracking walnuts and speculating and waiting for the first seasonal sounds of tank treads from the East.

But it's not moot because enemy dismounts could include far more than AT guns and crew. Enemy infantry who have gone to ground could still be hiding in their holes with AT rifles and Molotov cocktails, waiting to emerge after the tanks roll past. If the game automatically killed (or had a high chance of killing) any infantry in the same AS as a moving tank, then the tanks would have an effective counter **if** they survive to get this close and overrun the infantry.

Dogs indeed. IIRC the Soviet tankers called the team tactic "hunting with borzoi," after the Russian dog breed. Distract the German tank from one vector while stalking it from the other.

Not to be bloodthirsty, but for tactical reasons I wish enemy personnel could be crushed by AFVs in the game. I say "enemy" because with pathfinding challenges, we'd want to make sure our own troops aren't the ones getting accidentally crushed :-) Maybe the arguments against it would be technical (much harder to do in the CM engine that it would seem) or just that it's too low a priority to be worth the time to do it. But are there any game reasons not to? I don't see any potential for gamey abuse. If a player dares to put AFVs close enough to crush infantry, the infantry may also have the means to kill the vehicle. But it would be good for overrun situations.

Your points about doctrine, and not reinforcing failure, are valid. But the end results would be in the hands of the scenario designer and/or anyone who wants to edit reinforcements in the editor. The answer to your concern is to use the tool wisely and make sure to consider what's appropriate for the battle in question. Some people make ahistorical scenarios now, and some make scrupulously authentic ones. But making the scenario editor deliberately less functional isn't going to change any of that. It's like saying, "don't allow QBs, because some players might choose to buy too many Tiger tanks." The editor is simply a tool -- it's up to the user to employ it intelligently. Besides, under the concept we've been discussing you would be able to assign VP costs to specific reinforcements. So if you, the scenario designer, think the Allied player ought to be able to accomplish the mission with the a company-sized force, you would have two options: 1. Give the Allied player no reinforcements -- the only option you have now; or 2. Give the Allied player some optional reinforcements available, but with a VP cost for using them in the battle. Make the VP cost prohibitively high if you really want to ensure that he doesn't reward failure. But now you've added another element of risk/reward that enhances the entire game -- and that ratio of risk/reward would change throughout the battle as the tide swings one way or the other. Think, too, of the added FOW and uncertainty for the enemy player. He might know there's a possibility of facing a foe suddenly larger than he bargained for, in an unexpected time or place. Even if he knows a certain enemy unit was potentially nearby and able to influence the battle, he can't be sure whether or when it might show up. Now you've put him in exactly the position of Napoleon at Waterloo -- thinking he's got the situation in hand...only to see that movement on the flank -- Blucher is coming!

Great proposal -- what I'd most like to see, as a creator of HTH scenarios for PBEM games, is the ability to have a reinforcement become "available" at a set or variable time during play (the game gives me an availability alert). The reinforcement does not come on the map, however, until/unless I select it to "deploy" -- at that point it appears in its reinforcement zone as normal. This should be set up flexibly enough that scenario designers could set VP conditions for deploying available reinforcements. Better yet, allow the designer to set the VP cost for deploying a reinforcement at specific elapsed times in the battle (the sooner you use them, the more VPs you might sacrifice, and you could have no cost at all if you leave them on the shelf). This sort of system would better simulate a commander's management of tactical reserves. Or, in longer battles, the tactical commander requesting and receiving reinforcements from battalion/brigade reserve that would have been able to reach this area within the time window of the scenario. Right now, there's no way to separate a reinforcement's availability in a battle from its physical appearance on the map. So we've had to work around this by creating little "safe" reinforcement holding areas on map edges -- using elevation pits to hide them from LOS/LOF, giving them tiny cover arcs, and all sorts of workarounds and house rules. Once the reinforcements arrive, we have to pretend that "they're not really there" unless/until the owning player moves them, they're fired upon, an enemy moves into proximity, or the owning player fires with them. Having a more flexible reinforcement system would enhance the decision-making challenge of the game at all levels. It would also better support operational-tactical play using CM with other games. BFC won't implement operational play into CM, but it can nevertheless try to do things that make CM more op-friendly -- as long as those changes enrich the tactical game and don't hurt it.