Melchior

Gustav Line had a lot of content for its price. It was at least as much game as FI was. Don't write it off entirely. RT was really short on content when it was released but the community has really fixed that now. Lots of post-release scenarios and campaigns have been made. The best thing about RT though is that yes it's a different game from BN and FI substantially. The Russians and Eastern Front bring another whole dynamic into play and the scale for RT is much larger than the other games. Lots of huge maps with hordes of units and maneuvering options.

I just got into community made scenarios only about a month ago when I ran out of things to do in CMRT. Which shipped with very few scenarios and campaigns built in. Overall i'm really impressed with effort that goes into scenario creation and even the worst scenarios i've played are always commendable efforts. The future of user made scenarios is probably further refinement of the scenario designer to decrease the (large) workload that goes into making the scenarios I would think. I tried my hand at scenario design years ago but stopped because it's just way too time consuming with the tools at hand. The effort that must go into scenario designing is on the level of graphic designing, and they typically get paid. I would not mind if scenario designers charged a little for their work.

I was crushed in the first mission. Clauss died when a T-34 plugged his Tiger from the side. Lost all but one Company commander in the rocket artillery barrage plus the Regiment commander and his XO. Left line broke, Tigers got overwhelmed. Have to see if my luck changes next time.

Their is a caveat for this approach though. A high concentration of force on a single axis of approach will be an inviting target for Russian mortar fire. What I'll do is just pummel the south end of the town with pre planned artillery fire and basically bumrush the Germans into the town in the low light of early morning. Hot on the heels of the bombardment. I'll never clear the town before the Russians drop fire on the Germans, but the townhouses are a better place to be during bombardment than out in the open.

Played yesterday. Carius died in the first two minutes of battle and never even got a shot off. Kerscher was much more successful, rampaging into the town and covering the fleeing StuGs until his Tiger was degunned. I tried to have him flee out of town too and just as he made it back to the start area an IS-2 got a shot into the rear of his Tiger's turret from 1200m and killed him. The StuGs all made it though. All in all the impression I get from the circumstances is that Carius and Kerscher took on a suicide mission and were extremely lucky. Like only survivors of a nose-dive plane crash lucky.

An issue I wasn't prepared for is that the off-map mortars do not cover the whole map. They run out of range about half way down the field. The Wespe is a big deal to me, but at only 64 rounds i'm conserving it for the final assault. The goings have been rough. Casualties have been agreeable but the men's morale is low. Their are quite a few "Rattled" statuses. Ironically the Company I have taking the eastern town objective is having a much better time than the men I marched right at Biali Blota. I used to have real problems clearing towns because of the PPsh squads. I figured out that the Germans have a real advantage at range because of the MG42 which is liberally distributed to their infantry. German squads can really "reach out" at distant targets with that gun. So it's best to risk only small teams of point men with each move while the base-of-fire be kept large. The infantry in the fields keep having issues because the Russians are nigh impossible to spot until you're right on top of them. The grass is high and the terrain modestly uneven. Normally i'd lead with the tanks but because the StuGs are bugged I have to lead with the infantry which is not what I want to do. Next time I play I think i'll avoid marching straight through the center. I'll commit all of my forces to Manckowcie and then use the low terrain north of the town to flank into Biali Blota from the east without ever exposing myself to the defenses of the western hill.

Yeah the problem is acute of the 1944 era. The Russian defenses aren't just one line or even two. But several, with interlocking fields of fire. I won't have enough ammo to go around so i'm planning on using the terrain to keep my forces masked from the western hill. I only bring the StuGs in for priority targets like machine guns and cannons. Everything else has to be handled by my overloaded MG42 teams.

I just started playing the scenario and am avoiding most of the comments so it's not spoiled. So far I really dig that the German's heavy artillery is deployed on the map. Would've been cool to see the infantry's trucks on the maps too. I would've liked to use the trucks to tow the AT guns to positions where I could use them as ad-hoc assault guns against the Russian positions on the west hill instead of using the StuGs to suppress that area.

Sure it is, it's just a bad way. Look, what i'm prescribing here are precautions not solutions to pre-battle bombardment. If you lose enough of your force to a bombardment then just call the attack off. Inform the defender he got lucky and reload the map. It's a game after all turns out you can do that sort of thing. I do not see how. Artillery is such a roll of the dice I do not see how the defender is substantially crippled by either holding out on bombardments or starting his morning off with a fine breakfast to the tune of M2 Howie's Greatest Hits. The force adjustment does not need to be ridiculously slatted in the attacker's favor or it can be mixed with the other solutions i've prescribed. House rules are forced, in game solutions are organic. House rules are a complication. Evocative of nothing except fragile egos. Well that's ok because I almost never play video games competitively against other players anymore. Most video gamers simply take the games they play way, way, way, way, way, too seriously. I'm not directly accusing you of that though. I'm just saying that things like house rules are the punch line of a bigger joke to me.

Yes the QB's have poorly designed setup areas, so compensate for this by either choosing a larger map with a proportionately larger deployment area of stupid or simply allow attacking players to have pre battle entrenchments too or a correspondingly larger force. Their are literally so many ways around this problem that aren't game breaking. Maybe if war gamers understood that "full strength" was an exception rather than the rule we wouldn't be discussing ways to make a broken situation more broken. It's not, by virtue of its existence because it could only exist to fix a problem that has been poorly handled. Bad deployment zones are not universal either, plenty of the game's maps have very well thought out deploy zones with lots of options for mixing up the original plan. Few things in CM make me cringe more than those rainbow deployment zones of "ONLY 3RD PLATOON CAN DEPLOY AROUND HERE/NO ENTRENCHMENTS THERE". Issues of troop spotting can be handled by disclaimers "deploy beyond the 400m area at your own risk." Troop setup has literally been the most contentious issue with the game since CMSF and veterans will probably tell me long before then too.

Hell I think attackers should be ready for prep bombardments. Setup zones in the most the games just need to be bigger, or feature entrenchments since it was standard practice in just about every Army ever for troops to dig in if they were going to sit still in any spot for more than an hour. If setup zones were bigger the defender would really have to guess where his fire should go, and could be taking a real risk blowing it off early. I just don't buy this idea of gentlemen's rules in a game so chaotic and unpredictable as CM. These games aren't like Company of Heroes or Starcraft that are so broken no house rules basically just mean t-minus 8min to the Kangaroo Carrier doom rush. If my troops get shattered the first min of a battle because they had all congregated around a 400x400m area to pull straws for latrine duty then I damn well deserve that for being so callous about their safety.

If you insist. All I can say is don't play the game believing you're entitled to some kind of result or it'll never be very satisfying. Remember the enemy will probably have their own wtf moments too. You're just not inclined to perceive them because our minds tend to focus on our own problems. I have no idea why a greenhouse like the Bulat would have poor situational awareness. The T-64 sort of doesn't surprise me though. That tank is a relic of the Cold War and crew optics are probably somewhere between a cardboard tube and a pair of butter smeared swimming goggles. But hey, the gunner can see the blobs at night now too!

It sounds to me like the game you were looking for was Steel Beasts.

Human wave attacks succeeded in Malaya and the Philippines. Once or twice in the Spanish Civil War. Largely because in these cases the defenders either did not manage their available firepower effectively or the defenders were barely armed at all. Whatever you want to cosign this sort of thing to is up to the reader but I think it's been show their is something to be said for the tactics of the bold. Foolish and risky sure, but boldness is the sort that has sometimes had really big payouts in war.

I'm being sarcastic here Jason. Read some of the Green Books. Fall of the Philippines and Northwest Africa specifically. Very detailed books but at times exhausting due to highly sterile writing. I haven't commit to any of the Normandy books yet though.

"Worked" is a relative term here. Grand majority of the time delays only successful because Allies literally blundered into German defenses head on, in bad weather, with a traffic jam at St. Croissant due to an errant Jeep driver checking his watch at the same time a French farmer's ass decided now was a good time to go on strike in the middle of the T junction. But but 2nd SS Panzer is on the way to plug the gap! Well they were until they lost half the infantry's trucks to P-47 runs. Attempts to cross local bridges unsuccessful because none of them exist, and the engineers got buried by an avalanche of 105mm and 25pdr fire on their way to the river.

It worked in Normandy thanks to the terrain and the Allies' tendency to commit piecemeal attacks against obvious targets down narrow avenues of approach. S'ok though. Tomorrow morning 200 Hawker Typhoons will just remove the whole grid square anyway.

You could make pre-planned barrages ok in scenarios by affording the attacking player compensation or some such. Like affording him a somewhat larger force. This could pretty exciting actually. Since it abstracts the real-life casualties units would've sustained over pre-battle bombardments. It also presents defending players with the conundrum of choosing to blow their proverbial load early and all at once or retaining it for the battle.

That one mission in the FI campaign where you have to squeeze the Livorno Division by a heavily armed Company of American riflemen on a map only 800m wide grits my teeth every time. The briefing is completely wrong about it in my mind. Their simply is not enough room to maneuver the trucks around the Americans on the map and the only real choice i've found everytime is to give battle.

I recall hearing this as well, that Stryker was never supposed to be an APC but was designed as a replacement for the HMMVW in the IBCTs. With that in mind the vehicle makes quite a bit of sense. It's better protected, better armed, and carries more troops than the M1114. Yes the argument can be made that it's more expensive, has a bigger profile, etc etc since it's a very heavy battlefield truck that's all true. That was all planned for in the nature of the design though. I've heard lots of mixed arguments about Stryker overall but the gist i'm picking up on is that it's a recently introduced weapon system and is naturally prone to being misunderstood. This is pretty typical for every new weapon. I really don't buy that MGS was intended as some kind of anti-tank. How many AP rounds do they even carry on average? Two or three? That's not dedicated anti-tank. That's emergency/last-ditch anti tank. It's an assault gun in the tradition of vehicles like the Sturmgeshutz. It's designed for pummeling holed up infantry from the safe distance that a caliber like 105mm can provide. Less so for an auto-cannon. Everybody stopped using light tanks a long time ago because as it turns out IFVs do that job better anyway, and if infantry support firepower is really all that necessary than dedicated gun carriers like Centauro or Stryker MGS are more practical.

It's a niche of a niche. The market for strategy games is already minimal these days and what's there is pretty much 40K or Starcraft depending on whether we're talking about P&P or virtual. I don't think a day for these games will never come, but I don't see it in the immediate future. It's simply not the sort of thing most consumers are into. The learning curve is steep, the results are unpredictable, and their is little sense of empowerment. In the west video games are usually seen as a form of release, not challenge. Their is also a public misconception that the setting of a game has a bearing on whether or not it's a good game. The World War 2 stuff in particular is still really burned out in the mainstream due to "overfarming" of the market in the 1998-2006 years. Most of those games were shooters though, and that whole genre is very, very static. Personally i've been putting down controllers for dice these days. Table top games are often way more interesting, but have a large logistics trail and elusive player base. (Though this is being solved more and more with tablet support-apps.) I've always considered CM as more of a virtual table top game than a straight out tactical sim, and believe it should be marketed to that audience.

Fixed that for you. At least Kickstarter and Indiegogo have good intentions. I believe Steam downright swindles small developers.

FO REALZ. This is the biggest problem wargaming has had since it has existed. (Seriously, read about the US Navy Fleet Problems sometime, you'd be amazed how old these problems are.) This is why I cringe everytime I see another "how do i micro the inf for the win guys" topic. Wargamers are so used to the micro-management sims of the last 20 years of poor game design that it's become the norm for them. It's why the term "realism" on an internet forum does not mean "how it would actually happen" and really means "what I expect to see." You can't even tell some really nutty guys about "realistic" things like how Companies would blunder into machine gun positions or make a wrong turn at the t-junction. Because few wargames of the past decades have actually been about making decisions and suffering consequences. They've been about fantasy fulfillment. The problem of micro-management comes from entitlement. Gamers believe they deserve to win if they tick the right buttons and that's that. If you don't do that than you deserve to lose! That war has really often been about things like luck, misinformation, and mistakes has no bearing on popular perceptions.

It sounds to me that people are really just mad that CMx2 releases don't contain as much as content as CMx1 releases. Seems to me that this is more a result of how BF develops and schedules releases these days as opposed to how they used too. The current releases are really more like big expansion packs for the engine. More episodic in nature than a big release. I don't mind this really considering BF is a small development team and crank out these releases at least 1 per year. Sure I have my wishlist of things I want to see but overall I've been sinking countless hours into the CM games since I started playing SF in 2009. My point is you don't see Beyond Overlord than 3 years later for Barbarossa to Berlin these days.

One of the best missions in any of the games was the first mission of the CMSF Marine Campaign if you ask me. That was pretty SOF and a good example of how flexible the engine is. Sneak these recon teams through the city, spot dug in armor and enemy strongpoints. Knock out choice targets with precise naval artillery fire. Avoid becoming pinned or heavily engaged. Was great.