BletchleyGeek

That's a remarkably accurate estimate. Indeed, as one internalizes how things actually look in 3D - and the muscle memory for CMx2 editor hotkeys is developed, times go down accordingly. Something that also worked for me to speed up map making was to spend some time "prepping" the overlays for different purposes. For instance, having one overlay for the contours and another one for the vegetation. I have used Command Ops Map Maker to great effect by 1) tracing the contours manually with it and 2) taking a screenshot of the map to use as an overlay for Combat Mission.

That can't be good for the health of your install, Peter. Make sure to remark to BFC that you tinkered with the official data files in that way, just to make sure they're not running in circles.

Chris explicitly addressed the topic of Tank Riders. And the answer to that is no, that feature isn't going to be included. The reason Chris gave for that was that reworking the AFV models to support that was considered by Battlefront to be too big a job for the price of the upgrade. Regarding flamethrowers. Chris didn't show any, they weren't featured in the scenarios he played (stock CMBN and CMFI scenarios). Maybe they're in, just that they're not used by any of the existing scenarios for those two games.

Funny that you put WITP AE as an example, a project that got off the ground because of fans rolling their sleeves up and fixing a game that never kind of worked right. I am sure that the reasons it hasn't been updated in a while will be as interesting to read as the Polygon piece on Mad Minute Games.

Totenkopf never fought in Ukraine in the 1941-1942 period. It was assigned to Army Group North and fought its way across Lithuania and Latvia, until getting bogged down in the fighting for the Demjansk region, to the south east of Lake Peipus. It was encircled during the Red Army winter counteroffensives fighting in what was to be known as the Demjansk Pocket. Totenkopf wasn't extricated from there until the late Spring of 1942, after losing about an 80% of its effectives. After that it was sent to France to refit and rebuild, and wasn't back into Russia until February 1943, where it took part in the famous Von Manstein's backhand blow at Kharkov. It then took part in the initial stages of the Kursk offensive, being then quickly re-deployed further south, to bolster the 8th German Army at the Mius, and suffering horrific casualties there and during the long retreat towards the Dnepr river. In the Winter of 1943-44 it took part in the also infamous relief effort of the German forces encircled at Korsun, and in the less famous but not less hard-fought fighting withdrawal of 1st Panzer Armee in the early Spring of 1944. After that it fought alongside GrossDeutschland in twarting the Soviet offensives on present day Moldavia, and by August 1944 it was deployed to central Poland playing a great role in defeating Soviet attempts to capture Warsaw. Then it was used as part of the crazy attempt to relieve the surrounded Budapest garrison attacking through the forests and marshes around Lake Balaton, and practically destroyed while later falling back to cover Vienna. The last I know about it is that several of its units found its way into the western parts of the Czech republic, where they surrendered to the forward elements of the US forces. Indeed, the quite distinguished feats of arms above are tainted by well-documented war crimes. I find it also a very peculiar unit, in the sense that their senior commanders have struck several historians - including George M. Nipe - as being extremely unimaginative tacticians, that used their division as a rather blunt 'shock' force, squandering the lives of their troops in useless frontal attacks.

Well, Jon, I don't think Michael is alone in thinking that ASL is the alpha and omega / gold standard of tactical wargaming, and any other tactical system where you aren't able to portray in a verbatim way an existing ASL scenario has a "problem" to some degree. That's an attitude that isn't going to die out easily - it can be debunked in several ways, the most effective being something other than engaging in a flame war. A couple months ago I approached him about one of his CMRT scenarios, he makes scenarios and I am very fond of some of his designs, which was a "direct" ASL conversion, and we had a very constructive discussion about a couple things that ASL models in a quite ahistorical way - and 90% of ASL players are totally oblivious to it - and CM models in painfully realistic fashion. He was indeed reluctant to consider ASL to be in a fault, but I think that my observations registered. I took the same discussion to a forum heavy with ASL people, and I got a far more negative reaction. I don't think there's usually a problem with the content of the message when one engages in discussions regarding accuracy/realism/historicity but in the way those messages are delivered. Everybody is wrong at some point in their lives, Jon, but how long it takes that individual to reconsider their position varies greatly

You can play CMx2 like that: raise the camera and make it point in almost straight towards the ground. Not that I recommend that: all the cool tricks that Phil has been programming over the years to make CMx2 look good will break down in quite spectacular ways. If you play like that, though, you'll probably get completely disoriented and have a Steel Panthers deja vu From what I can gather from past statements made the CC devs, the 3D is meant to be mostly to determine LOS and LOF in a more convincing fashion. I don't think there's going to be a detailed ballistic model that takes into account the 3D-shapes of vehicles or 3D terrain affecting HE fire effects, as we have in CMx2.

Some comments on the cons: It is different, takes time to adjust to that. Let's say that the choice of icons and use of English in the tooltips isn't very inspired. There's some variety there, but not much. CM only changes the faces of the guys and the equipment. To a similar degree than in CM, I think. Yes. You can't - as in CC you control squads and vehicles. Allegedly, you're supposed to issue commands at the platoon level. Some people claim that at that level the game shines. My experience is somewhat different. Sometimes it works surprisingly well, most of the time it is sad to see what the platoon level AI does. What I can say is that the AI tries hard, and seems to have some knowledge of actual tactics - it actually deploys heavy weapons in sensible ways to support assaults - but doesn't seem to me to grasp very well timing, cover, concealment or the value of fire superiority. The AI isn't scripted - so you'll get quite different behaviors over several replays - but the "plans" it develops sometimes remind me of McClellan at Antietam, at other times of Burnside at Fredericksburg. I tend to think that the AI is perceived by some to be stronger than actually is because of the match-ups in some operations: you don't need to be a genius to be challenging when you're attacking a scattered German infantry force, whose AT assets are limited to grenade bundles and German Anti-Tank Rifles, with Matildas supported by infantry.

There's always a bit of that. Welcome to the Internet, etc. Yet I don't think you acknowledged the posts RockinHarry made quite early, which I think were quite clear in what were HMG operators supposed to do with that crazy rate of fire http://www.battlefront.com/community/showpost.php?p=1530822&postcount=49 which, from what I read in that post is nothing. Seems that the standard operating procedure was "to refrain from going full auto". I wouldn't be surprised that the HMG gunner AI has been programmed to behave according to what BFC - after doing some research - established to be the norm, historically back in the 1940s, amongst operators of that particular piece of equipment. You might agree or disagree with BFC doing that rather than just coding into the AI the limit given by technically attainable rates of fire, in firing range conditions, where there are no concerns about ammo availability, no enemies advancing on your position, and wrecking your gun due to barrel overheating is not a problem that might mean those advancing enemies to overrun your position. EDIT: Actually, I wouldn't be suprised if Conscript/Green crews with poor leaders attain higher rates of fire than Elite crews with good leaders.

While I do agree with the second bit - regarding to the overload of assessing, planning and then, executing manually those plans as ScoutPL pointed out - I must say that big maps are a "big thing" for me when armor is present in a substantial quantity. It is at longer ranges (not less than 500 meters) where I personally find the tank-to-tank combat to be the most interesting (and exciting). The natural "scope" of tank units is much bigger than that of infantry, for reasons I think are quite apparent. My understanding is that it would be uncommon for a tank company on the attack over open terrain to be deployed on a frontage of less than 500 meters.

It's interesting, and I can sort of imagine what were the arguments used by each side in the discussion. I think it all boils down to the amount of resources one can put into testing that the scenario "works". I've been working for five weeks on a Bn-level scenario, and I have come to the realization - to my chagrin - that I need to cut it down in order to be both playable and "testable". Inspired by the concept on the Market Garden German campaign "A Moment in Time", I think it is - generally speaking - possible to capture such big scenarios by breaking them down into scenarios smaller in scope, covering opening phases of the original scenario and then propagate the outcomes in the following manner to another scenario covering the "end/late game": Opening Phase Scenario #1: If Win, go to "Opening Phase Scenario #2 (Win Scenario #1)" If Lose, go to "Opening Phase Scenario #2 (Loss Scenario #2)" Opening Phase Scenario #2 (Win Scenario #1): If Win, go to "End Phase Scenario (Win Scen 1, Win Scen 2)" If Loss, go to "End Phase Scenario (Win Scen 1, Loss Scen 2)" Opening Phase Scenario #2 (Loss Scenario #1): If Win, go to "End Phase Scenario (Loss Scen 1, Win Scen2)" If Loss, go to "End Phase Scenario (Loss Scen 2, Loss Scen 2)" So basically the campaing ends up baking: * 2 versions (which are exactly the same, but with different filenames) of the "Opening Phase Scenario #2" scenario * 4 (or 3 ) versions with substantial changes in the deployment and victory locations of the "End Phase" scenario So you end up with 6 different files baked into the campaign, all using the same map resources and OOB. I'd be surprised to find out that nobody has come up with a similar solution before. So, if anyone out there has thought along these lines, I'd appreciate to hear about their experiences. Those sound very interesting.

You as in the second person plural: those who play those scenarios as the Germans (since as the Soviets, you don't get to command much German armor at all). But you should first go through the History Homework, before continuing into English Grammar. NOOOOOOOO, that's a filthy Nazi propaganda lie! The German Army was just meekly accepting their fate, holding fast in their many Alamovskys and either walking into Soviet lines with their arms raised or devolving into a brainless mob running for the Vistula. There's nothing else other than that, because The Big Man in the CM Community Back in The Early 2000's says so, and PITY THE FOOLS who dare to disagree with his word. Now seriously, those attempts are interesting in itself, and they're useful to illustrate quite well how had, by that time, the Red Army "learnt" how to handle the "German operational art of war".

Beutezug features a combination of Tank Destroyers, Panzer IV's and StuGs. The Passage features a Pz IV Coy. You really need good tactics to overcome the T-34/85's in that one. The German campaign features a Pz IV equipped German armored formation. In Tankovy Desant you have StuG's and you'll really like to have something else. In Woroblin Bridgehead you have StuG's. I'm not counting the scenarios where you have mix including any of the German heavies. But considering how many scenarios feature German armor, saying that Panthers/Tigers/King Tigers are overrepresented is a bit of a stretch.

Thank you very much for reading so carefully what I wrote. Maybe, if you did your homework, you would have understood what such "operations" entailed for the German forces involved. Or maybe you think you're above "doing any homework", but that's your problem, not mine. I have never read any Signal magazine, nor I've ever been interested in doing so. I'll keep my thoughts private about what you can do with those magazines yourself. Oh, and have a nice day.

This one turned out sour rather quickly. I find a bit surprising that when scenario designers come forward with quite cogent arguments, they're "maneuvered" around and their explanations ignored. Given the scope of this initial Eastern Front installment and the number of scenarios - 18, which is not small, and let's not forget that CMRT release got delayed because of testing those scenarios - I think the sample of situations depicted is well balanced. I haven't gone through all of them - there literally hundreds of hours of play here - but I have already played two battles in the Baltics, one battle in Eastern Prussia, one battle in Galitzia and two or three happening in Belarus. I see there are at least three scenarios covering the fighting in Eastern Poland and even one set in the Hungarian plain. This is not just a "Bagration" game, very much as CMBN wasn't just a "Normandy" game. And even during the "Deluge" that was Bagration for Army Group Center, there were a few major German counterattacks involving several divisions operating in concert. Obviously, they didn't achieve much (or, arguably, anything) of lasting operational or strategic significance, but they're there, mostly forgotten and very poorly documented. I've got one scenario in the works (and a few other planned) covering one of such operations (PM me if interested in playtesting it). On the other hand, I've also found quite a few examples of successful local counterattacks performed by elements of the divisions destroyed during Bagration (involving mostly infantry and assault guns, of course). But the historical record of those is fragmentary and obscure. Not many of the participants ever came back to have the opportunity to tell the tale, and the Soviet histories don't devote a lot of detail to very local actions where the Red Army wasn't successful and didn't affect operational outcomes. Playing also a bit of John Tiller's Minsk'44 "breakthrough scenarios" it becomes obvious that there are plenty of opportunities for Soviet forward elements to find themselves confronting a locally superior or equal force. In any pursuit battle, where the pursuer is limited to not many roads, the defender has the opportunity to use interior lines and concentrate its strength against, relatively speaking, unsupported and isolated forward elements. The thing is, naturally enough, even if the Germans were very good fighting that kind of mobile defensive battles, you can achieve so much with so few resources. In that sense, the 'Bagration' setting is not that different of the late Summer and Autumn 1943 fighting, where major German mobile units had to be broken up - and therefore, losing their operational offensive capabilities - to keep in check - never for long - the advancing Red Army. This is a motif you can also find in the fighting on the Chir river during the winter of 1942 and 1943. The expression 'Fire Brigade' appears in quite a few war games, and for a good reason. Also while designing my first 'for real' scenario, I came to realize that 'balance' isn't a criterion I like to use or adhere to while designing scenarios. It is not even well defined. I think that the notion of 'variability' is much more interesting: it invites replaying the scenario, and breaks with the convention of the "the bigger battalions winning the day". If the bigger battalions commander make poor decisions, that bigger size will just mean a bigger friendly body count. In the scenario I mention above I found that the key to variability is enabled by having a rather big (2 by 2 kilometers) area covered: there are plenty of opportunities to render enemy *numerical* superiority irrelevant by dislocation. Indeed, "dislocation" isn't a given like "attrition". It does require the commander - the player - to read well the terrain, apply firepower not to destroy the enemy, but to create opportunities to render most (or a substantial part) of the enemy force irrelevant.

It might indeed look like we might derail the thread, but not quite. In my first post I discussed the data that Dupuy published on the statistics of battle casualties. That data seems to suggest that the CM KIA vs. CM WIA seemingly almost perfectly random distribution is quite in line with historical data. Nonetheless, it is obvious that if casualty rates are much, much higher than historical casualty rates, the proportions given by Dupuy might not hold or be distorted (for instance, there are so many casualties that there isn't just enough personnel in good condition to apply first-aid and send those casualties to the rear). Hence, taking a look at historical casualty rates, and how variable they could historically be, kind of debunks this "casualties in CM are crazy high" statement. My point is that these casualties can be indeed crazy high, but comparatively speaking, similar to the casualty rates recorded for crazy historical episodes. Given the scope of World War 2, it is quite clear that there was plenty of opportunities for the "crazy" to happen.

Yes, the "theater-level model" was his objective and what he cared about: that was what he actually wanted to sell the Department of Defense as a tool - I suppose - to inform defense policy making (in the context of the 1960s and 1970s quite a hot topic, given the controversy surrounding US policy in Vietnam and its political outcomes). In that context, his models are strikingly accurate and flexible. Besides that, you can also see him stopping from time to time and reflecting on "what might be wrong with what I am writing". Yet he doesn't do that very often: I perceive a certain degree of "advocacy" in his works, probably because the HERO efforts had been derided by the Operations Research community entrenched in the Defense Department (who didn't appreciate amateurs coming out of the woodwork to piss on their turf). On the other hand, in his books you can find all the pieces necessary to "instance" that model to a level that matches well that of Combat Mission.

Well, the idea was to characterize the extremes, which by definition, do not happen too often. Or in other words, the "mean" is the most typical outcome, the "variance" gives you an idea of how "rare" are outcomes different from the mean, depending on their difference w.r.t. the typical result. Note that in the Rapido figures, there is one unit on the "mean" as well. There's something here going on which isn't explained alone by weapons lethality and rates of attrition. Those figures give us some leverage on the level of variation in outcomes, depending on a number of factors which I will discuss later, when I show to you guys Dupuy's predictive model (that is, a simple equation that anybody can use to see how what you get deviates from what it should be provided that Dupuy's model is a perfect model). Another thing to keep in mind is that many CMx2 scenarios cover such "ill-conceived" battles because they're perceived as "balanced" - in other words, the defender has a more than reasonable chance to hold his position, and the scenario scope is set to cover just the attacker assault - and, very importantly, because of the inherent drama value. As I've said, these "extremes" do not happen too often, but they weren't either rare as in a snowflake standing its own in a pizza oven. See for instance the figures Dupuy gives for two battalions of the 393rd Infantry Regiment, for the period encompassing 16th to 18th December 1944: 1st Bn/393rd Regt, start str: 857, loss: 648, cas rate: 25% 2nd Bn/393rd Regt, start str: 837, loss: 383, cas rate: 15% Both battalions suffered almost double the casualties than "average". Indeed, both battalions - if my memory serves me well - were deployed covering a frontage of over 15 kilometers and got hit by 2 Volksgrenadier divisions and elements of a SS Panzer Division. They were, nonetheless, deployed on an awesome defensive terrain and the attacking Germans were most of the time tightly constrained to few roads cris-crossing that bit of the Ardennes. If we start looking, I'm pretty sure that we can find a substantial number of examples where forces suffered massive casualty rates (coming to my mind are the Hurtgen Forest and other attempts to breach the West Wall in Autumn 1944, or the hapless 99th US Division in Normandy, or the fighting in Normandy in general) where we cannot clearly put the blame on unimaginative, almost criminal, commanding officers.

Thanks Fiz @slysniper and @Ken: I hadn't finished what I wanted to say with the previous post. Indeed, battles will be somewhat bloodier than the average historical engagement, but the thing is that the actual variance regarding casualties can be very, very wide. And also, it doesn't need to be that way.

I wouldn't be too keen to make a guess on the exact proportions, to be honest. It all depends on what was the method used to record those "numbers", how systematic were those surveys, etc. Probably we could get good data on that from Afghanistan or Iraq, and then try to extrapolate it back, making "educated" guesses along the way. On the other hand, Dupuy also considers such conflicts to be in an entirely different league, statistically speaking. I wasn't really advocating to make "sweeping" adjustments moving things into the league of the "trivial". I reckon that even a battle where the attacker has realistic firepower and numbers ratios, for instance, can end up as being a truly interesting game. Indeed, there's very little context to the battles we play - with the exception of campaigns which are there to provide to some extent that. It's interesting though, by recalling your scenarios I've played, that you state the above and at the same time, you also make quite an effort to provide that context (within the limitations of the game and reasonable assumptions on the level of masochism of players) The interesting thing Jon, is that I do think that casualty returns for WW2 were far more varied than what published statistical studies seem to suggest that very bloody engagements were far from uncommon: but they didn't either happen every other day. Case in point are Dupuy's own numbers on average casualty rates for units depending on their size. I think that JasonC quoted them directly or indirectly at some point at the threadnaught on the CMFI forums. So let's look at the "baseline" more closely, which kind of "proves" that something is inherently wrong with CMx2 2. Averages alone aren't good generative/predictive/forecasting models Dupuy's tabulated average casualty rates per day depending on the unit size as follows: Here we can see an "apparent anomaly", and these are Dupuy's words not mine. The dataset considered included 400 WW2 engagements according to Dupuy of "moderate to high intensity when one or both sides was aggressively seeking to accomplish its (or their) mission(s) during a period of a few hours of days". The anomaly is that a given unit is reported to be suffering double or more casualties than its organic unit. According to Dupuy there's a small influence in this due to presence of staffs and support units in the larger forces. Dupuy justifies this anomaly with the following observations Small units will be engaged more intensively, but for briefer periods of time, than will the larger forces they belong to (note casualty rates are measured per day) As forces become larger, there are increasing delays in the performance of missions and compliance with orders on both sides of interactions between opposing forces. I'll add a third to this: for the same time period, the smaller the force, the larger is the proportion of personnel directly exposed to enemy firepower. Note that the decrease in the casualty rates goes down with strength, but that also means that the larger the force, the larger will be the space that it occupies and where it maneuvers. For a company one could define to occupy an area of about 400 meters wide and 200 meters deep, and a reasonable area of operations for a company would probably be about 2 square kilometers. What does "reasonable" mean? Well, that depends on the time frame of the scenario: the larger the space, the longer it will take, generally speaking, to march, to bring heavy weapons to bear, to find the enemy, etc. You can't really expect a foot infantry company to accomplish a great deal when time is limited to 2 hours and the area of operations is 16 square kilometers (and it is operating as a unit, maintaining its cohesion). These are I think, the source of most of the numbers being quoted on these boards to put a lid on CMx2 as "the game where anything goes" with respect to casualties. I reckon that these figures are also very rough: they're hiding from us a quite broad "diversity" in outcomes. That's my main gripe with Dupuy. He (and the rest of the HERO members) were amazing data collectors and analysts, but very poor statisticians. They just took their data, measured it in many clever and interesting ways, computed an average, and quickly got a predictive model running which was made to fit their data by the mathematical equivalent of "hammering an sphere into a cube-shaped hole". He takes these averages and runs with the ball all the way to the touch down line, forgetting about the inseparable companion of averages: the notion of variance. In neither of the two books I mentioned there is a straight statement that gives one some leverage on what kind of deviations we can expect from the averages above. In "Attrition" there's something to that effect (that book was written almost 20 years after the more famous "Numbers, Predictions & War"), where a quite interesting list of engagements is given, featuring casualty rates which do not quite look like the averages: Santa Maria Infante, 12-13 May 1944 E Coy/351st Inf, starting strength: 170, loss: 80, daily casualty rate: 24% F Coy/351st Inf, start. str.: 170, loss: 170, daily casualty rate: 50% G Coy/351st Inf, start. str: 170, loss: 84, daily casualty rate: 28% K Coy/351st Inf, start. str: 170, loss: 102, daily casualty rate: 30% Rapido, 20th Jan 1944 1st Bn/141st Inf, start: 684, loss: 248, cas rate: 36% 3rd Bn/141st Inf, start: 663, loss: 107, cas rate: 16% 1st Bn/143rd Inf, start: 760, loss: 71, cas rate: 9% Rapido, 21st Jan 1944 2nd Bn/141st Inf, start: 696, loss: 370, cas rate: 53% 3rd Bn/141st Inf, start: 553, loss: 254, cas rate: 46% 1st Bn/143rd Inf, start: 689, loss: 138, cas rate: 20% 2nd Bn/143rd Inf, start: 673, loss: 249, cas rate: 37% 3rd Bn/143rd Inf, start: 561, loss: 108, cas rate: 19% I've picked up where we get to see how well fared units of sizes covered by Combat Mission, which were being used in the same "engagement" or "battle" with common or related missions. You'll see that the casualty rates can go anything from double to half of these quite widely quoted statistics collected by Dupuy and his team.

That is giving us some leverage to assess to what degree player or AI "aggressiveness" or "casualty tolerance" are not in line with historical records. As Apocal says, scenario designers don't have the tools to influence how the AI reacts to mounting casualties or situations perceived as hopeless (well, with triggers this is not so much true anymore). In the real world, I can't see a Soviet Rifle Coy standing up to the last man while defending from a German attack on a small village on a secondary road somewhere south of Minsk. Most likely, the Coy commander would have pulled back with the expectation of coming back, along the rest of the Regiment and some armoured support. Not every corner of the Soviet Union was as hardly fought for as Stalingrad was. In the case of human players, I think we're somewhat under the assumption that, whatever the odds, we're expected to be "successful". Actually, I would say that most scenarios featuring "balanced" attacking and defending forces with equivalent firepower are an invitation to reproduce situations where casualty rates are far from what we can find on the usual action or engagement of World War 2, and would have probably raised strong objections (in Western armies) amongst the officers of the attacking force. Other forms of balancing would include more "sophisticated" victory conditions - following the guidelines given by JonS on his Scenario DAR, or on his little scenario for CMRT - that disallow binary outcomes, or making the maps so that they offered the defender with more "depth" so that falling back and organizing a counterattack with reinforcing units becomes more feasible (and I can see quite a few scenarios in CMRT where care has been taken to offer the defender more "depth"). It's also important in this latter case, that the reinforcements received are substantial enough so as to become a credible threat to a weakened attacking force (one doesn't counterattack a Battalion with a platoon and two Tigers, while such a force may be sufficient to stall any further exploitation by the attacking force). The "theories" behind attrition that I am most familiar with are the studies by Trevor N. Dupuy in the early 1990s' "Attrition: Forecasting Battle Casualties and Equipment Losses in Modern War", a follow-up to his 1970s "Numbers, Prediction & War". Both works conclusions are to a great extent derived from hard data on the US Army performance in Italy and Northwestern Europe, so one needs to extrapolate that to the Eastern Front with a grain of salt - or two. He gives some quite interesting statistics in "Attrition", that I think are worthwhile sharing with those interested and are relevant to some of the issues being discussed in this thread. I'll keep posting these, as I have more time. 1. KIA vs. Serious WIA looking random Dupuy collected and analyzed a statistical dataset covering all wars fought by the US from the Mexican War to the Vietnam War. For World War 2, he makes the following observations: Battle casualties are divided into three broad categories: killed in action, seriously wounded and lightly wounded. Killed in action casualties hover - for all the conflicts covered, interestingly - to be about a 20% of the overall casualties. Seriously wounded casualties for WW2 tend to be a 15% of the overall battle casualties. For WW2, he gives the figure of 57% as the chances of seriously wounded personnel surviving his wounds In terms of how this relates to Combat Mission, we can see that the proportion of KIA (downed personnel marked with the skull and crossbones) and serious WIA (downed personnel marked with a pulsating red cross) are very similar. Indeed, one could say that the chances of personnel being hit and becoming incapacitated - either by death or severe trauma - are 50-50. Or in other words, it is almost as if the God of War in the was tossing a coin each time a pixeltruppen gets critically hit. So this perception of KIA vs. WIA being almost perfectly random is actually reflecting a "verity" in Dupuy's data. Regarding the general proportion of wounded personnel to fatal battle casualties: the proportion is more like 4 or 5 to 1 in general. The thing is that, besides lightly wounded personnel not being accounted in the final tally (but probably they're accounted for in the "Force Condition" victory conditions), what the engine lefts out - and is reasonable that it is the case - minor wounds which wouldn't impair soldiers performance (much) but would require further treatment after the action (and hence registered as "wounded in action"), such as grazing bullet wounds. I wouldn't be surprised that a vast majority of the WIA figures we can find published actually consist of such wounds.

I don't know what are the arrangements Battlefront has with beta-testers and scenario designers, and probably those arrangements are confidential and covered by a non-disclosure agreement. It all depends on the supply and demand of such labor, Skwabie. The more supply of qualified individuals for the job, the less the pay. If your skills are especially rare, you can pretty much ask for the salary you want (within reason, of course). Or it should work that way I honestly recommend you to migrate to a country where there is a decent minimum salary in place (not that many left, last time I checked). I did that - going over 12,000 kms away from home - a couple of years back, as my "old country" banks decided it was the taxpayers responsibility to bail them out. Actually, "content-only" expansions is something Battlefront doesn't seem keen on doing for whatever the reason, and probably could generate some substantial revenue. New official content is tied at the moment with new engine features, and those features development probably takes a lot more time than developing the content (which already takes a substantial amount of time).

Some wargaming developers pay royalties to scenario designers. This is basically a share of future revenues - that is, first, the scenario designer isn't paid up front for every hour he or she dedicates, and he'll get paid in proportion to how well the game performs. I don't know if this is Battlefront's policy as well. That also means that the time already sunk in the game isn't included in the price tag (which obviously, wouldn't be going downward but upwards). Getting that as promptly paid work would entail a non-negligible overhead on the cost. Consider the time JonS put into the Sheriff of Oosterbek (not counting writing the Scenario Design DAR). That probably was about 20 hours. The work he did wouldn't really qualify as 'unqualified work': it does require skills which aren't common. Let's say a fair price per hour would be 50 USD (before tax) per hour. That adds up to 1,000 USD, or in other words, the equivalent of about 40 copies sold of Market Garden. Sales number are unknown, but my guess is that Market Garden sold in the thousands. Just count up how many scenarios are included inside and outside of campaigns and run the numbers. Another view on this is to consider that scenario designers (and beta-testers in general) are 'crowdfunding' the development of the games. Rather than investing currency, they invest in species (usually devoting a significant chunk of their spare time, which I reckon anybody here will recognize as a valuable asset). In exchange, they get early access to the new shiny toys and privileged access to the developers (and therefore, some degree of influence in shaping how the game results) and the reward of knowing that they have made a contribution into a project they believe in. Drawing a parallelism: we've all probably read about that "heartbleed" bug in OpenSSL (potentially compromising a substantial proportion of all secure connections over the Internet). Probably you'll also learnt that it was developed by a bunch of volunteers over a period of two (?) decades. You'll probably have read that the bug was the responsibility of the developers, and in some quarters, used as an argument to pan out open source development. Here one needs to take a step back and realize how many millions of dollars in software licenses have been saved by the companies taking the software for free and deploying OpenSSL off-the-shelf, without ever bothering to review it. Indeed, due to its licensing, they were having free software as in free beer. Note as well that probably 99% of those companies have, over the years, provided exactly zero feedback and support to the OpenSSL project. I can't other than be bemused by the sense of entitlement of lazy free-booters. If there's an actual or perceived problem the mature thing to do is to attempt to provide feedback and assistance, if requested, to those who provide us with entertainment, rather than to stamp a sticker reading bullsh*t in capital letters on top of it. Note as well that the degree of involvement of scenario designers and beta-testers is voluntary, which implies that scenario designers and beta testers are usually a bunch of quite selfless individuals. Some might say that the perks match or outweigh the contribution, but I'd contest that, depending on the contributions individuals made and a fair cost-analysis of the time involved in delivering that contribution. That doesn't make their creations to be above criticism: provided such criticism is constructive and useful to further improve those creations. The Internet provides for a platform to get feedback quickly, but perhaps is too easy to put together ten or twelve sentences, with some snark thrown in for a good measure disguised as a humorous remark, and probably making self-contradicting statements. Being myself an ESL I've learnt the hard way to check, and double-check, that my writing has the intended meaning and the appropiate tone. So let's not forget that the context isn't just the same as that of American Airways tweeting at a disgruntled female customer a meaningless polite nothing along with a picture of a naked fellow female playing with a model plane

Regarding operations: with the bigger maps, as Ithikal says, the whole concept looks to me more workable. The big problem is how to handle the exponential growth in the number of possible situations as the operation progresses. It would boil down to enumerate all of them, changing setup zones and victory locations. Doable by one person, if one is to model an attack operation, with time divided into two hour segments, up to a duration of four hours, and envisioning at most three simultaneous attacks preceding a big one recapitulating the outcomes of previous actions. Such an operation would entail making 11 scenarios, 8 of them accounting for the possible combinations of outcomes of the previous ones. Bigger stuff would require the work of more than one person.

Highly recommended scenario, for those not afraid of getting some tough love