BletchleyGeek

Hi @Vanir Ausf B, is that just affecting ATGs or perhaps any kind of deployable heavy weapon?

Not just that @Scipio, there are ways people can get more involved if wanted https://www.fig.co @Battlefront.com have you checked up this? I know you are very old school, I am just giving ideas about how to attract funding...

@Badger73 there's a way which doesn't require you to install 3rd party software: https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/4kpqx3/psa_windows_10_has_a_builtin_game_capture_software/ it does work quite well, even if the quality isn't awesome. With CMx2 you don't get the overlay but whenever you use the shortcuts for screenshots or video capture you'll see the screen brightness to change slightly to higher, normal, higher, normal. You can tweak settings etc. via the xbox app that comes with Win10.

I had never thought about that - one could use this as well for AAR's or records keeping. Especially for those who struggle to find the time to sit down with their CM undisturbed for anything longer than 30 minutes One could use as well OneNote instead of Adobe Acrobat, for extra flexibility. Thanks @Macisle as well for describing how you build your plan diagrams, sounds tedious but sounds pretty effective as well.

Thanks for sharing the process of refining the scenario victory conditions - that was a very interesting discussion. Regarding AI plans, something that has worked quite well for me is: 1) Take a screenshot of the 2D view of the map as you do 2) Convert it into PDF 3) Load it up on Adobe Acrobat on my Samsung Galaxy Tab A 4) Plot on the tablet using the stylus AI groups positions, plans and timings 5) Go to the editor and input the plan reading from the tablet One problem that has me stumped is that it is very hard to get a "global" view that combines the plans of all the AI groups... realising that you forgot to plot the flanking move of a "fix and flank" plan involves usually some facepalming. In this scenario it looks to me the AI is organised in quite a few maneuvering elements, so I am curious to hear about how you're dealing with that.

Hi Harry, In the many - 10? 12? - years since I first met you on the Internet - some Matrix Games' Steel Panthers edition forum perhaps? - I have never ever remotely entertained the notion you were some kind of insincere revisionist. In these times where so many, in the Internet and out of it, seem bent on re-enacting the rethoric of the late 20s and 30s you do stand out in a good way. Cheers, BG.

Hi @RockinHarry good catch with the ref and thanks for sharing those pointers, you're right that Aachen was a big deal for the propaganda machines of both sides, and who knows whether some stories were made up and passed along as facts. It's not like similar things haven't ever happened in WW2 historiography.

You've got a good point @RockinHarry there. Let me see what my copy of Doubler says see attached files: first is picture of page 100, Chapter 4, and second is the reference itself. it gives reference 28 as a pointer, which is one of the Green Series books on the ETO? I went to check it here http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/Siegfried/Siegfried Line/siegfried-ch13.htm and I cannot find anything about the specific incident that Doubler mentions. Yet there is this bit describing the very end of the battle for Aachen On 21 October, Colonel Corley’s battalion approached a big air-raid bunker at the northern end of Lousberg Strasse. Colonel Corley called for his attached 155-mm. rifle. To the attackers, this was just another building that had to be reduced. They had no way of knowing that here was the cerebellum of the Aachen defense, the headquarters of Colonel Wilck. From this bunker, Colonel Wilck and his staff had been exercising their penchant for the melodramatic. "All forces are committed in the final struggle!" "Confined to the smallest area, the last defenders of Aachen are embroiled in their final battle!" "The last defenders of Aachen, mindful of their beloved German homeland, with firm confidence in our final victory, donate Reichsmark 10,468.00 to the Winterhilfswerk [Winter Relief] Project. We shall fight on. Long live the Fuehrer!" Such was the tenor of Colonel Wilck’s last messages to his superiors on the outside. As Colonel Corley called for his 155-mm. rifle, Colonel Wilck, despite his exhortations, was ready to end the fight. But how to surrender? Two Germans who had tried to leave the bunker under a white flag had been shot down in the confusion of the battle. The solution appeared to lie among some thirty American prisoners the Germans were holding. From the prisoners they solicited volunteers to arrange the surrender. Two men from the 1106th Engineers who had been captured early in the Aachen fighting responded. They were S. Sgt. Ewart M. Padgett and Pfc. James B. Haswell. While Colonel Wilck by radio renewed his "unshakable faith in our right and our victory" and again paid obeisance to the Fuehrer, Haswell and Padgett stepped from the bunker. Small arms fire cracked about them. Bearing a white flag, the two men dashed into the middle of Lousberg Strasse. As they waved the flag frantically, the firing died down. An American rifleman leaned from a nearby window to motion the two men forward. Sergeant Padgett beckoned to two German officers behind him to follow. A company commander returned with Haswell, Padgett, and the Germans. Their luggage already packed, Colonel Wilck and his coterie were ready to depart. Before they left, Sergeant Padgett nabbed the prize souvenir of the occasion, the colonel’s pistol.16 So Wilck is seen by the "official" history as a bit of a thespian, but given the nature of those post July 20th 1944 days in the German Army, I think that he was doing a smart move protecting his family from possible reprisal.

Good memory, @JonS - Doubler devotes a page or so to comment on the episode. The complaint wasn't so much about using a M8 155mm - which is btw in game if you have the CMBN Vehicle Pack - horrible as it may sound, but rather about the damage done to the historical building, the Aachen Opera theater, that was being targeted since the German infantry had turned it into a little urban fortress. Assuming that the liberal use of napalm wouldn't have been precisely very good for the health of the building, the only way that such a building would have been cleared out with minimal damage would have entailed either probably massive US infantrymen casualties or the liberal usage of mustard or phosphene gas. World War 2 entailed a notable degree of savagery, but at least the world was spared the horrors of chemical warfare (thermite incendiary bombs effects on civilians and buildings are pretty horrifying as well but for the sake of argument, let's consider them a conventional weapon) on urban areas. Obviously the German commander at Aachen had a preference for the former as well, but probably for more self-centered reasons. We can count ourselves collectively lucky that cities like Rome or Paris were treated as open cities - more or less willingly - and were spared of the treatment of so many other notable cities and places across the globe.

Nope, I haven't played but you just made me curious about it.

Hi @Badger73, If you are into hard mil SF, you need to check this out https://childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com

Excellent write ups @Hapless - seeing a H2H match where one of the sides gets hemmed in like this is very interesting: it is quite unusual and by seeing how it plays out I will be learning a thing or two. Let me echo @benpark's idea about sharing saved games for spectators to take a look by themselves, it's a good one.

If you look close enough you'll see that there's a difference between AI and Al. Crikey, I got a whiff of smelly feet when I looked at the pic....

I don't think CMx2 will move away from OpenGL like ever. So "legacy" (irony) systems aren't going to be left out on the cold anytime soon. It would be good to dump support on 32-bit platforms at some point, though. @Battlefront.com thanks for the updates Steve. Good to see the player-usable Follow command and the AI-only withdraw plan, and the changes in the scenario editor interface. Anything that helps saving time while making scenarios is quite a "force multiplier". Being able to switch underlays without restarting the game or loading GeoTiff tiles directly to populate the heights in our maps (now that the USGS is being so generous as to allow download the SRTM 1-arc second dataset to anybody, anywhere but North Korea probably) would be great too.

No problem guys, I have been enjoying your work for years and the least I can do is to show appreciation in public.

TLDR I do think that an excellent community resource would be a geolocated database with maps, so people interested in specific battlefields could either find an already ready made map or could ask for help in working one out. --- If there's a bottleneck, it is with the map making and the silly notion that scenario design can only be done by one person, and what I suspect it is a reluctance to modify other's people work (not that the tools we have allow us to collaborate much, either). With CMx1 the mapping work wasn't much more involved than in, say, Steel Panthers. Get a rough idea of the elevations, plop down some generic geomorphic terrain features and you would be done, as the engine would be "fudging" for you little details like cover, concealment, LOS and LOF, etc. Now, with the higher fidelity simulation in CMx2 the "classic" approach to map making just doesn't cut it anymore. There's a fair bit of scenarios (official and not) out there where you can "feel" that the map making was approached in the lo-fi way characteristic of CMx1. They just don't play well, in many cases there's just no way to approach the enemy through a truly covered route, because the scenery "props" that look equivalent to those of CMx1 do not have the same effect in CMx2. So we end up with a garbage in, garbage out kind of situation. You can see other early maps, such as those by @Paper Tiger or @Pete Wenman that do look starkly different from the majority. Compare for instance CMBN scenario "Vierville" with "Carbide Carbide" or any of the maps featured in the US campaign to just put one example. There has obviously been a learning process in map making: I can see a definite evolution on @George MC work in CMBN like "Huzzah!" to "Les Grandes Bonfaits" maps (the former was great, the latter is a master piece), or even in @JonS work, compare his work on "The Sheriff of Oosterbek" with that of "Bois of Bauguin". The most probable reason for that is that many of the people I mention did a lot of mapping work for CMSF, and they had under their belt a lot of experience. The issue is not so much with placing "decorative" items that you'll only really get to appreciate if you spend most of your time with the camera hovering at about 2 meters from the ground. But rather in getting vegetation, towns, villages and relief - especially micro-relief, there's very rarely any really "flat" ground in the countryside - just about right or at least making it up in a way that is useful for what you want to achieve (provide some hull-down positions for tanks, or reverse slopes for a infantry force to leapfrog during an attack, etc.). Of course you can find more scenarios for CMSF @Erwin: given the subject matter (terrain, organisation of combatants and weapons technology) it is way easier to get the feel right for that combo than it is in Normandy or the Eastern Front. With the exception of most of the Afghanistan-themed CMSF scenarios, a lot of the generic Syria/Iraq one fall into two categories: desert with rocks, one or two ridges and if you're lucky, a wadi with some palm trees and a gully, or a Fallujah-like death-trap that feels like a screenshot from a Middle Eastern-themed Sim City. We have seen those places very often on our TV sets and screen for the last 15 years of this War Is Peace times we're living. In my opinion, it is not so much a matter of sources, or limitations with the Scenario Editor (which do exist and sometimes can be rather crippling) but one of experience at two levels: one with understanding what features give a specific character to a region, and two, knowledge about which of those features are relevant or critical for military operations. Inferring the lay of the land from a topographic map is like inferring what does someone's face look like from just watching his shadow projected on a wall. Aerial photos help but rarely you'll get close enough shots or easily available high-res images to appreciate detail you'd also get from Google Earth (unless you can go to Washington DC and spend years scouring the NARA archives, but then probably you'd better off by tucking that research into some notes with your sights put on writing a book instead of making a CM scenario for free). I have personally found very enlightening other games (made, guess why, by Ukranian or Russian dev teams) to get a sense of what do the plains of Russia and Ukraine actually feel like. I could make excellent maps out of my homeland - "too bad" it was spared by WW2, though - because I do have an intuitive appraisal of what is the land like. Now I could probably do a quite good impression of the Australian south eastern farmlands with little effort. Yet probably I would still probably get wrong the location more often than not: battles and firefights seldom happen because of, you know, bumping on enemy forces while you're admiring the beauty of the scenery, but rather because they become important at the operational level. All the stuff I have bothered publishing online have been maps: my fun probably isn't going to be the fun of 90% of the guys here, but hey, I do think the playground I built was well worth sharing. Pretty much all the scenarios I have made over the past five years have never left my hard disk. They are little generically named 30-minute long numbers where the map is a QB map or a cut out of one my big ones, or the excellent Master Maps we've been getting since Market Garden, and the forces & objectives follow from some "higher level" wargame I have been playing (like Tiller's Panzer Campaigns, or the more recent platoon level games) that give "context" to the action, scoping and motivating the laborious process of map making.

Thanks for the recommendation @Fizou I have devoured half the book over the weekend! It is truly magnificient.

It is very context dependent: what is the mission of either force? For instance, say a Soviet Army commander wants to pin down that German infantry regiment in prepared positions while it is enveloped by a tank brigade maneuvering on its flank. Then, using one or two battalions in a frontal attack on a narrow frontage - like 500 meters !! - right up the boundaries of two German battalion positions would be the "obvious" solution, no matter whether chances would be that those two battalions would be wiped out while charging through the German defenses, as that would probably force the Germans to react and commit reserves. Note here the context: those guys are being sacrificed so as to restrict the enemy ability to maneuver and create the conditions for the mobile force to cut the enemy lines of communication. Not because Red Army senior officers liked to have baths in the blood of their subordinates under the moonlight. On the other hand, say the same Army commander sees one of his forward regiments has its flanks turned by a German local counterattack, and that position is right in the middle of his front, so there's nothing to be gained. Then in all likelihood, that Regiment would try to exfiltrate itself during the night and rejoin the rest of the Army. In the case of the Germans, I don't think there was a concept of "acceptable losses" for the forces tasked with taking the lead on a Schwerpunkt (especially Pioniere units). The mission - breaking through - was well above other considerations. On the other hand, the better training, organisation and education of German command echelons meant that they were way quicker to recognise that the mission - as initially formulated - had no chances of succeeding and would abort the attack in a timely fashion. The professionalism of the staffs and commanding officers was the difference between a German battalion being wiped out like one of their more unfortunate Soviet counterparts or just suffering 30% or 40% losses after getting caught on a wire line with pre-registered Soviet mortar fire. In terms of scenario design, I'd advise to use casualty thresholds to give the players credit for achieving their objectives while trying to minimise the loss in combat power of their commands, and enemy losses as a "bonus", taking always in mind that CMx2 models friction quite well, and a lucky blind mortar fire mission on a forest can cripple the best laid plans.

Hmmm Hmmmm Hmmmm I think it is an issue with his English editor - I had a very nice exchange with a very nice (also Swedish) guy on the CMFB forums about his Bulge book. His books covering the air war on the Eastern Front are classics - @LukeFF mentioned them on this very same thread.

I saw the reviews on Amazon and I got the feeling that it would be as much of a mixed bag as his book on the Ardennes was. Also, that typographical errors are reported for a hardcover edition isn't precisely awesome (given that I got a fair bit of those on the Kindle version of the Ardennes book). Regarding Leaping Horseman Books, I am looking with merry eyes this one http://www.leapinghorseman.com/proddetail.php?prod=9780992274917 does anybody have it? Is it as good as it seems? Looking forward to the pair of books by C. J. Dick "From Victory to Stalemate" & "From Defeat to Victory", as well. Glantz's Battle for Byelorrusia also looks quite good.

Thanks for sharing @George MC it is the most comprehensive collection I have seen online.

Wow, thanks for making that post. Amazing.

"Gamey" is a very tricky term, @spawncaptain. But good on you for being a good sport when it comes to C2. It's not so much that one can create these outcomes with certainty, but rather than they just tend to happen. Another example where dubious spacing by the TacAI and light mortars interacted in a weird way was in a H2H game on @Pete Wenman "Drive on the Dreijseweg" (the spelling of the Dreij-thing is probably wrong, feel free those who like to pick at nits to correct me). I was playing British, and on my right flank a quite curious situation ensued. In a little enclosure surrounded by a quite dense forest, my opponent had one of these colourful Schule/Naval/Ersatz formations with the little German 50mm mortars equipped. I discovered this as the company I was attacking with on that flank was literally repulsed by some Heavy AA stuff my opponent had craftily placed to strengthen his main line of resistance. What happened was basically that my 3in platoon mortars and his 50mm mortars duelled it out in the forest... a few Bren or Enfield or Mauser fired in anger, most of the fires being just those little mortars. I counted over 30 casualties amongst my paras, all of them found in clumped together in a mash of limb and gore. When the scenario was over, I saw that a similar carnage had taken place on the German side (I salute @db_zero for playing a quite good game). Last night I got see The Battle of The Bastards... that part of the map was blanketed in a similar way as that battlefield just out of Winterfell. This wasn't a thread about mortars effectiveness, we know them to be very effective and fearsome weapons. Maybe @Battlefront.com, instead of duking it out with Putin's Motorised Troll Brigade, will want a change of company and explain to us how HE effects are dampened in order to compensate for the tendency the TacAI has to clump people around the center of the action spot or some piece of cover. My original point was to highlight that the effectiveness of these weapons is amplified in a significant way by the limitations in the TacAI (and you can do good tactics as long as the TacAI, the resolution of the terrain modelling and fog-of-war allows you). This is not so much a problem about how people play the game (even if it is true that depending on how you play it you can make it worse) but rather at how the pieces of the game interact sometimes in ways which catch the eye. Because if CMx2 was a complete, utter mess, we would probably be barking mad about tanks going through buildings, infantry sprinting for 500 meters in full battle gear without breaking a sweat, single bullets killing three troopers, missiles going through hills and destroying T-72 (all of these stuff is things I remember from other games which I won't name). Since it is not, we look at the "little things". Because they're little, but not because of that, they're nothing.

Several: 1) I don't think light mortars are magical, nor I have ever written that. It is simply the interaction of a limitation in the TacAI and a very well modelled weapon system. 2) You tell me how it is possible that a weapon that takes more time to deploy and pack, and slows downs the carriers slightly more is "more nimble". 3) Mortars (in general) can fire from behind from behind full high cover such as bocage and also LOF is "tricked" to account for parabolic projectile trajectories. This is reasonable, but given that a) you can direct pretty much wherever you have LOF regardless of the mortar unit "knowing" enemies to be at the location and b ) the agility of the thing, well, let's say they are hard to counter. 4) 2 rounds before FFE is pretty good, with a 60mm it is fairly likely - say 30% of the time - to get the rounds right on target at the first try. Which is even more awesome. 5) It is hard to suppress the enemy you cannot see. In the case of mortars, you tell me how you can tell the direction the fire is coming from if you only get to see the dirt being flung around by the explosion, Mr. Little Passive Aggressive Remark At The End Of My Post Which I Make To See If I Can Further Derail The Discussion Away From The TacAI.

Mimicking TheForwardObserver, I respectfully disagree with this bit as well.