MOSwas71331

The demo training mission, "Road to Berlin" is one I consider hard, though everybody and his brother seem to complain that it's too easy, even on its most difficult setting, with the attacking US outnumbered roughly three to two.

If you look around, you'll find many threads complaining about how difficult CM:BN is. Just search for threads on which I've posted; there must be twenty or so. When I played CMBO-CMBB-CMAK, I was always eager to see what had happened in the previous minute of activity. (I play WeGo, as I fear a nervous breakdown should I attempt to command in real-time more than four or five units.) With CM:BN, I dread finding out what happened, because I expect that, no matter how carefully I directed my units for the previous minute, a catastrophe other players would have avoided will occur. In at least one thread, there was a complaint about whiners such as myself wanting easy wins for gratification. Anyone after easy wins, can get them every time on the German side in "Busting the Bocage" demo. Start the game and select Cease Fire. You get an automatic German tactical victory. Of course there's not much gratification, because you didn't have to do anything to earn that victory. What I want is to feel that I have a chance. I had that feeling the very first time I played CMBO. I took the German side in "Last Defense" and lost against the AI. I wasn't discouraged; I just wanted to try again with a different set up and approach to the battle. Perhaps the absence of CMBO discussion postings from people who won "Last Defense" on the first attempt with the German side while taking only four casualties prevented me from feeling as stupid with CMBO as I now feel with CM:BN.

I'd like to try the CM:SF demo on my iMac, but I can't find one. If there is a demo available, could you provide a URL for it?

I want to use realistic actions. IF CM:BN considers a man militarily effective after he has run a 100 yard dash carrying a mortar baseplate, then enjoy using that tactic. I KNOW that even Arnold Schwartenegger and Jesse Ventura would need to rest after such an exertion, so I won't direct my GI mortar teams (probably with less imposing men than Arnold or Jesse) to try. Other posters on this thread agree that it's not necessary to rush the mortars forward and can beat the AI defense while setting up the mortars near their starting positions. I seem to be the only person who can't.

For those unfamiliar with common English puns, a door is not a door when its ajar (slightly open) and pronounced "a jar". I think I first heard that pun around 1950.

On another thread, I asked some questions about foxholes and trenches, and I believe we need some serious answers. In real life, we can see exactly where a foxhole is, how deep it is, and so on. We can get in it and see what a soldier can and can't see when he's using it. (And we'd have a fair idea of the foxhole's value to a basketball player or a circus midget, the tallest and shortest guys likely to occupy it.) In the game, all we can do is try to place a group of foxholes in a useful position. If we know that the foxholes and trenches depicted on the map visually represent a small area in which soldiers have somewhat better protection and a somewhat degraded view, we won't spend a lot of time trying to place them in exact spots. [Which CM:BN doesn't let me do anyway. No matter how carefully I try to position foxholes, their map pictures appear yards away from where the positioning cursor was pointing.] As a related thought, in real life you can spend hours digging a foxhole or just a few minutes. Could the point cost of a foxhole or other fortification be a range rather than a single number, with the value in the game of the fortification increasing with the points "invested" in it?

One of the first things I tried was putting the weapons platoon leader on an upper floor to spot for his mortars in the courtyard below. When I checked his targeting lines, he couldn't see anything useful. Perhaps if a tall German looked over a hedgerow, the platoon leader might get a fleeting glimpse of the peeper. That didn't seem a worthwhile target for a mortar barrage; the guy would probably flee when a ranging shot landed anywhere near him.

When I've used pauses to separate my infantry squads as they advance from their starting positions in the "Road to Berlin" demo, nobody starts moving until a few seconds after scenario start, and a squad with a 40 second delay sometimes doesn't move at all in the first minute. [i play only WeGo, as I'm hopeless / helpless in real-time.] I suspect there's a "realistic" randomness built into the game to make it impossible to micromanage your troops. I only have the demo, so I can't test whether conscripts tell time better than veterans.

When I try to place German foxholes and trenches on the map in Busting the Bocage, I can't precisely place them. For example, I want some foxholes very near the intersection of two hedgerows and in the field of my choice. As the placement cursor nears the hedgerow, it changes to its disallowed state. When I move the cursor away, it changes to its allowed state. Fine. I click and the foxholes appear yards away from where I wanted them. (Frequently the foxholes don't move at all when I try to adjust their positions unless I make a big adjustment of 20 yards or so.) Are map foxholes and trenches just an abstraction showing that the protective value of the terrain has been increased by some amount in that general area? Does the game automatically place the foxholes and trenches in locations it considers optimal? And how does it determine what's optimal? I seem to have to place my troops deliberately in foxholes and trenches. Are their fighting capabilities diminished by being in them because of reduced vision or enhanced because of the added protection? Will troops near foxholes and trenches and receiving fire normally jump into them, unless discombobulated by realistic die rolls? Will conscripts freeze in the open under fire while veterans quickly jump into foxholes and trenches, or will conscripts flee into the fs and ts while veterans hold their ground and return fire? Or are the reactions to fire of both conscripts and veterans just a matter of chance?

Quote: "2. I expect my mortar units would be high priority targets for the German defenders. I don't want them exposed to direct German fire -- which is already deadly enough. Right again. That's why you want your riflemen along with whatever else you can scrape up to be laying down as much suppressive fire on enemy positions as possible when you have to move in view of those positions." Unfortunately, it's my US riflemen who get suppressed (and killed) by German fire. I haven't yet discovered how to prevent that as I advance them. You have to see the German positions to suppress them, and the stationary Germans see my moving riflemen first. My Shermans sometimes fire off a few MG rounds at German targets, but only until incoming AT rounds or panzershreks knock them out. I'm obviously not coordinating my units properly, but I can't figure out how to do that.

I'd be happy to have someone living near Colorado Springs and able to win the demo come over and show me what I'm doing wrong. I've posted my email address and my phone number in other threads, and nobody has contacted me so far. Here's the info again: harry.pool@hotmail.com and 719 494-0854 Despite the listed advantages of advancing my mortars to accompany my infantry and tanks, here are the reasons I don't: 1. I remember my struggle to carry the baseplate to an 81mm mortar about 20 yards in ROTC summer camp in 1964. I'm not going to ask an electronic soldier to run (which is how they appear to move with a Quick command) a few hundred yards in the game carrying a 60mm mortar baseplate, even though the 60mm mortar baseplate may weigh about half as much. 2. I expect my mortar units would be high priority targets for the German defenders. I don't want them exposed to direct German fire -- which is already deadly enough. 3. By keeping my mortars near the weapons platoon leader, they can fire quickly at any German target on the map. [i don't like separating my MG teams from their platoon leader, but they should work fairly well with the infantry platoon leaders near them. If they don't, I think that's a flaw in the Battlefront model.] 4. There are already a lot of US targets moving toward the German positions. It seems unwise to add more targets, when I can keep the US mortars safe and able to engage German units anywhere on the map.

I just tried giving a US unit a three waypoint movement command, and clicking the stop sign (middle brown button on the left containing a black hexagon) eliminated the movement path. That'll speed things up a lot! Thanks again.

As I said in another thread, I've never played RT. I'm so clumsy with viewing the map and commanding my units, I expect I'd have a nervous breakdown trying to control more than four or five units in an RT game. I also rarely give a unit more that two or three movement waypoints, and, when I do, it's only to keep a unit on a road which isn't straight. [i complained repeatedly about CMBO-CMBB-CMAK making it so hard to direct a vehicle to follow a road.]

I've used the veteran setting since I was told that there were no floating ?-mark icons for unidentified German units in the basic training mode and that the German unit performance wasn't better. In CMBO-CMBB-CMAK, I believe the only play balancing adjustment was to get more or fewer or better or worse units for the sides. The AI always controlled its units the same way. As I recall his play of the demo, dakuth used those floating ?-mark icons to lay down prep fire on the German positions. I had some fun doing that to see how effective that prep fire might be. [i think my best result was to eliminate one German HMG and inflict about 15 casualties.] I decided I mostly wanted to knock out the German AT guns (priority 1) and HMGs (priority 2), and I didn't feel lucky enough to expect my prep fire to be productive. I also thought that if lucky prep fire was so essential to US easy victory, those posts about "how I won total victory with only three US casualties" would have mentioned how they handled their prep fire..

There's no point I can see in playing the German side. At least in my experience, the US units never move from their starting positions and the Krauts have no indirect fire weapons with which to shell the sitting GIs. If German units advanced into the view of US units, I suppose there might be an exchange of fire. Is that the case?

I still can't beat the AI at the Allied veteran setting, and all the posts I've read of people beating the AI on their first try and taking only a few US casualties in the process just make me feel stupid. I've never even taken the farm yard objective, as I take so many casualties trying to get there, I see no point in continuing the game. I am controlling my map views better, but I still can't duplicate dakuth's accomplishments in his video tutorial. One thing it would be nice to know is how he can clear out all a unit's commands in one or two keystrokes. (There are times when dakuth claims to change his mind about what to do with a unit, quickly clears its commands, and starts over with new commands.) It usually takes me a while to delete all a unit's waypoints and cancel all its combat commands. Hell, it even takes me a while to see whether a unit has any commands pending at all, except when the unit has a visible path with waypoints and / or a visible firing arc.

When I tried playing as the German to see how the AI would run its attack, I quit after seeing a screen telling me that this training mission is not designed for play as the Axis forces. I saw no point in going further.

What level of difficulty are you playing at? I've never seen where the German units are located at the start of the game. I've also never noticed different map coloring for set up areas or objectives. I'm using an iMac with MacOS 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard). I haven't yet switched to 10.7 (Lion).

On another thread, I posted: I have so much trouble controlling my map views in WeGo, I couldn't possibly play real-time. With more than four or five active units, I'd have a nervous breakdown trying to conduct a battle. Steve replied (slightly edited): "Our experience with players like you, going back to CM:SF, is that there's something you're doing that's nuking your ability to play with the ease the rest of us enjoy. I'm not saying you're doing something "wrong", in an absolute sense, just something "counter productive" to the goals of easy camera control. I mean, just ask yourself... how is it that some people can play, and win, the same scenario in RT that you're struggling with in WeGo? Either something is tripping you up, or those of us who can do better in RT are Godlike... Seriously, there's no physical way someone can play in RT and win if the UI itself is so bad. I'm not saying it's perfect (it isn't), but if it is functional enough for successful RT play then WeGoers shouldn't be struggling. My advice is to start up a new thread and ask for some help with figuring out what you're doing or not doing that's getting in the way. For some it's key related, some it's mouse related. Often it has something to do with a CMx1 habit that doesn't work the same way in CMx2. If we can figure out what that is, I'm sure you'll have a completely different game experience." So, this is Steve's suggested thread. I've posted about my problems with the CM:BN user interface many times on many threads. A search on MOSwas71331 will let those interested read the gory details. For this new thread, I'll just refer mostly to things marnoldster does easily in his tutorial video (http://youtu.be/SbE8795rt2s) that I can't do at all. marnoldster seems to have a standard view above and behind the US forces' primary direction of advance giving a kind of over the shoulder look at what's going on. He frequently moves his view elsewhere, but he seems able to snap back to that view instantly. HOW DOES HE DO THAT? [i have two views I like, the primary one directly above the entire map with the long axis (E-W) horizontal to fill my iMac's screen and the other essentially equivalent to that I just described. To get to either of my preferred views takes me four or five minutes of keystrokes as I try to rotate the map and center it, and, should I accidentally select a unit, the view jumps somewhere else and I have to start over.] I've no idea why marnoldster's Shermans engage German targets, as I haven't seen him give them targeting orders. When I move my Shermans to give covering MG fire or smoke for my advancing US infantry, my tanks usually can't see any German units to engage, and, when they can see Germans, they're quickly knocked out by German AT fire.

I have so much trouble controlling my map views in WeGo, I couldn't possibly play real-time. With more than four or five active units, I'd have a nervous breakdown trying to conduct a battle.

There are mods for the floating icons which make it a lot easier to distinguish between types of units. My biggest present complaint about the floating icons is that they frequently overlap two and three deep, making it difficult to select an icon below the top icon. As the key strokes for advancing from unit to unit don't always work reliably for me, the set up phase takes a lot longer than it should. It would also be nice if the floating icons for foxholes, trenches, and TRPs were different. I have to spend extra time in the set up for "Busting the Bocage", trying to rearrange the starting placements of these items.

DuckEFuzz suggested, "surely after playing the game you haven't been able to resist the inevitable purchase of the full game." Duck, if you look around for my posts on other threads, you'll see I'm not enjoying CM:BN at all. Despite having spent well over 100 hours on my iMac trying to learn the game and follow instructions / suggestions I've read in posts on other threads, I still can't even control my views of the map, much less get my units to perform successfully. I really want to like this game, largely because I greatly enjoyed CMBO-CMBB-CMAK, right from the first download of the CMBO demo. I'll probably buy the full game when my retired cash flow gives me $50 in excess of my unpaid bills, but that's only because I enjoyed the original series of WWII games so much. I only asked about the patch to see whether I should download the demo again. Everything I've read about the patch says it won't affect problems I've been having.

In my case, one significant problem is just controlling my view of the map. When I've watched U-tube videos of others playing CM:BN, they seem to be able to move around the map with ease. I've read and reread the manual's information (now that updates to Adobe reader have removed those ?-marks on every page) about how to view the map, but, after many hours of "practice", I still can't do it. As one example of my frustration, X and Z let you zoom in and out. In my experience, the first press lets you zoom in or out one level, but the second press zooms me in or out to the maximum setting and then locks my screen entirely, taking me about five minutes of fumbling around to get it unlocked.

I enjoyed CMBO the very first time I played it, even when an arriving US tank destroyer surprised me by knocking out MY Tiger. I always felt I had a chance against the AI or any PBEM opponent. Now I expect I'm going to lose no matter how carefully I play. As I've said in other threads, I want to enjoy this game, and, so far, I don't.

On a Mac, you just delete the files from the "Saved Games" folder. I expect the same approach will work in Windows.