BletchleyGeek

Hi @Bil Hardenberger, I quite like this revision of the rules. The two waypoint limit seemed to me a bit arbitrary, given how micromanagement usually helps the TacAI to achieve better/happier outcomes. I don't think it is invalid to use a dismounted mortar crew as regular infantry. Most countries train (and trained) their mortar crews as regular infantry, they have additional training that makes them special, but still should be capable of fighting if needs be. Drivers can be assumed to have basic training at least, but certainly sending them out by themselves, like some kind of 1980s action hero, is gamey and should be ruled out. The rules are at a state that seems fit for trying - will try to covince my next PBEM opponent to give them a try.

Thanks very much for sharing that @Haiduk, very interesting reading.

The pictures by @Haiduk do not seem to be staged. What is interesting is that in the first the howitzer is firing in almost a flat trajectory, maybe from an elevated position? In the second one, given the elevation of the gun, it looks definitely like indirect fire. I am with @DMS, I think that using such guns on the field was more of a spur of the moment tactical expedient (like the use of the self-propelled 155mm's in Aachen), than a standard operating procedure. Given the more static nature of the fighting in Berlin, I think it is reasonable to assume that Soviet battalions in the city had access to wired comms, enabling to call in support fire from the howitzers (and assuming as well that by "attached" it was meant "on call" for a battalion).

The Red Army organization did reflect that in CMRT. So at least in what concerns the Red Army it should be good to go. I don't know if a similar review is taking place for quite diverse set of German services that we will see in F&R (Heer, Waffen SS, Volkssturm, FJ/HG Division). In that case, glitches like the one you saw in Carbide Carbide would be prone to happen.

I noticed recently that CMBN US Army Armored Infantry platoons have that structure too. Did that came with the 3.0 update?

Thanks for the clarification Steve, it is a subtle difference, as I wasn't sure that individual components (soldier, vehicle?) were invariably loaded dynamically. It makes sense that the OOB gets baked into the scenario because you guys allows a fair degree of customization of the template that the engine knows about in the editor (removing nodes of the "tree" and adding new "leaves").

From past experience with similar changes, the TOE's of the units in the order of battle are "baked" into the scenario files, rather than being loaded dynamically, so it may be necessary to load them up and save again perhaps?

Thanks for the compliment too - but that doesn't make me to be right about things all the time. Or even half of the time. There's a natural cycle with games: you love them like crazy, right until you hate them. With other kinds of games, there's a "winning state" - you know you're done with the game. With CMx2 there's no such a thing, but there's a "breaking point" that comes for people at different times. For me it starts when I fly right into one of the "invisible walls" that define the envelope of what is possible with CMx2. Games and simulators are by definition finite in their scope, not something infinite like Star Trek's holodeck. So I must admit it is totally unreasonable to be annoyed by those boundaries. Sometimes I bounce back just all right, sometimes it's like a funny smell pervades everything that happens in the game. When I feel like that, diminishing returns set in very quickly, and I have learnt to cut down my CMx2 time to the minimum (not even playing it for weeks, which is weird, as this is indeed the one and only game that I have played continuously since 2011, only War in the East has stood the test of time like CMx2 has). My daughters weren't even born when I was playing this game, I hadn't even met my partner, and they're a big part of my life. It helps that my gaming time budget, on a good week, is about 5 hours! You get really appreciative of time, and it is easy to bail out when you feel you don't get bang for your buck. I think that pretty much everyone posting on this thread with a long history with CMx2 at some point or other have decided to "take it easy" and step away from H2H, posting or picking up new stuff put together by BFC & co. Some people come back, some don't. It's natural, and just the way things are. Happy to read you @Sublime , with your heart on the sleeve approach, just take care mate.

I think that may be a bridge too far, @Aragorn2002. Saying that is very much like the British in September 1944, jumping straight into the unknown...

Great post @Macisle - these passages resonated powerfully with me If memory serves well, Market Garden, with its intense urban fighting, did force a number of major improvements. From the top of my head, the ability of using infantry AT weapons from inside buildings was introduced at that time, as well as other subtle changes in the AI behaviour. I would expect that whatever is the heuristic that governs the selection of the behaviour of units breaking contact with the enemy is reviewed. Even if the TacAI just randomly selected between the current "wandering" behaviour and the more conservative "closest AS between us and direction of incoming fire" would be a better strategy (in statistical terms at least). I think it is fair to say that there lots of little features in CMx2 that were introduced, but never were revisited to respond to feedback. Definitely, due to lack of programming manpower. For the better I think, the strategy to develop this games was to go all Eisenhower, broad and shallow. AI orders for Area Fire is one example, the Iron mode for FOW is another one that has been in the series since 2011 and nobody can't still to this day say what are exactly the gameplay effects other than introducing a vague sense of awareness of the limited perception your units have of the battlefield. The other feature that comes to mind are the underlays for map making: still only accepting BMP format with finicky settings, that needs to have a very specific name and in an obscure folder. We're lucky that CMx2 exists... there's no doubt of that. I will just share the following, and I am not stirring the pot, just sharing some perspective. On another game that I am part of the beta testing, the scenario developers (all volunteers) decided that they had had enough coping with the spartan facilities offered by the scenario editor when it came to data export and import, map edition, consistency checking. What they started doing was basically the equivalent of a strike: no QOL improvements, no content. Guess what happened - the editor has been massively improved and in a consistent and constant pace since. On yet another game whose development I was part of, for many many years no improvements were done on basic QoL elements. As a result, apart from one very particularly staunch scenario designer, countless projects had been started and they died off as the requests for improvements on the front-end and back-end of the game went mostly unheeded for years. Some elementary work was done, and that was enough to reactivate the interest of those volunteers that would have provided most of the content for those games. I think too that CMx2 is very lucky to have around it a community of volunteers that are so dedicated as to cope with primitive scenario design tools and engine limitations that make painful or difficult to realize their vision. Without those volunteers, these games would be as dead and done as Norman Bates' mum (what an image @Sublime, now I can't get it off my head!).

I do enjoy Battalion level scraps more than smaller scenarios... my best and fondest H2H gaming memories in CMx2 are for scenarios like "Hot Mustard", "The Forest of the Wild Beasts", "Studienka", "Les Grandes Bonfaits", "The Sheriff of Oosterbek", "Men with Curious Hats", "Counterattack at Son". As @Bil Hardenberger they were hard work, involved sending back and forth literally thousands of files, and I would have loved to have some degree of automation.. but it was rewarding enough that I can recite the scenario titles from memory

With a buddy acting as the umpire, you could do something like that now. I think it was @MOS:96B2P or @Badger73 (?) who came up with a relatively simple system where two players sent to a third person (the umpire) their QB purchases, and this person then constructed an scenario, rolling some factors from a table to pick up a map time and environmental conditions. This umpire could also set some of the players forces as reinforcements, to represent staggered arrivals etc. I don't know how feasible this is though, as you need some critical mass of players to get enough people to do the umpiring (and do a good job generally so the games are enjoyable). There seems to be a decent number of people hanging out at the Few Good Men Discord server, so that could be a relatively close knit group of CM players where such a system could prove popular. It would be great too that it was actual gameplay offered by the game itself, rather than meta-gameplay the players concoct around the game.

I tend to agree with that @Erwin: strategic wargaming does require some sort of economic simulation (even Axis and Allies does), and usually is where things get wild. On the AGEOD Civil War II game I remember literally steamrolling the Confederacy in mid 1863 after mobilizing the Union economy in a way that would have made green with envy Roosevelt's advisors. Yet this is mainly the reason I come back to these kind of games. I certainly prefer Paradox organic approach to generate historical chaos, in contrast with half baked economic minigames that you can minmax easily. It is a bit like knowing that I am just punching through a flimsy fame mechanic steals the fun from coming up with a weird, bemusing alt history situation. EU IV is indeed great for that.

I am generally sceptical of this kind of attempts at doing a vertical slice of a conflict as complex as the American Civil War, but I found the most recent video interesting They do have quite few covering battle scenarios as well. One of the developers has a noble attempt at dealing with the Seven Years War on Steam, this looks like some lessons were learnt (at least when it comes to presentation).

I wonder how did the US Army source the launchers and ordnance to estimate those probabilities. It must be quite a story.

I am sorry, and thanks for sharing your story.

Sounds to me like your "friend" fleeced you all, guys. I have bought several copies of some BFC games to give as gifts and I had one key per purchase.

Of course they were, it came with a 100% guarantee seal, dude

Cheers for the clarification Steve

I presume that will be December 2020, otherwise he would have said a few weeks rather than months. Southern hemisphere winter starts in June, but definitely Steve didn't had that in mind Good to see you around the boards again Phil!

Maybe one day all these "bug reports" will become "suggestions to tweak algorithms and mechanics" or "requests to revise algorithms and mechanics". The ease of communication via the Internet from behind a pseudonym seems to have been detrimental to the ability to communicate.

My experience is even better @Erwin, my bank here in Australia recently cancelled one of my debit cards preemptively and sent to me a replacement via urgent post, as they had got evidence that the number (not the CVC) of the card had got compromised. That's pretty much the best we can expect from a bank. I do reuse passwords for sites likes forums (e.g. Matrix, Battlefront, etc.). Surely more than one prospective "hacker" will have been disappointed following up that password seeking for gold and finding just commentary on nerdy stuff.

An old thread I had bookmarked Maybe @akd can reflect on what has changed if anything over the past seven years. There was also a very good discussion on the topic of cover and "micro cover" (which is the concept analogue to terrain fire effect modifiers used by Command Ops @markshot) but I can't find that (or those?) threads. It may sound obvious but the most solid cover in the game are obstacles like walls or hedgerows and terrain. More recent maps tend to often represent terrain elevation in a more nuanced way, and the value of reverse slopes etc is better accounted for in scenarios.

Remembering and celebrating the contributions and sacrifice of the grandparents' generation probably helped.