BletchleyGeek

The engine handles them more like vehicles than buildings. And you can't enter them, very much like you can't commandeer an abandoned enemy vehicle. They work like grenades, pixeltruppen will toss the demo charges at the bunkers, when distance is less than 30 meters (3 action spots).

That's interesting. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that some corners have been cut to get the best performance on typical desktop resolutions, leaving less common resolutions hanging out to dry.

I've occasionally got shadows like that regularly on all my NVIDIA cards, in CMSF, CMBN and CMFI, without doing this nifty trick. Seems to depend on the camera angle w.r.t. the source of lighting, and I suspect is an issue with the NVIDIA OpenGL drivers. EDIT: This is not a problem specific with CMx2, or OpenGL, I must also say. I get this kind of weird artifacts on other games, like Shogun 2: Total War and even Rome 2: Total War. But not on Unreal engine games like XCOM Enemy Unknown. Digging a bit in one of my favorite sites, I see that this is quite a common - and tricky - problem: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9854416/how-to-improve-the-quality-of-my-shadows

Some thoughts: * If I were you, I'd e-mail or PM in a polite and friendly manner the scenario authors, first thanking them for their effort and then asking what's the rationale behind the ratings. * I wouldn't ever rate any German force bigger than a squad as 'Crack' nor 'Elite', with the exception of GrossDeutschland Div infantry. And that in 1942. 'Salting' units with a diverse set of ratings can be busy work on the editor, and I wouldn't be surprised that the scenario authors would correct that themselves (or invite you to do that yourself) if they got feedback. The comments system in the Scenario depot is quite unhelpful I reckon, unless e-mail or PM notifications are being sent to authors when somebody makes a comment.

Just replayed Barkmann's Corner under 2.10. Barkmann's Panther got taken out after taking out 8 Shermans. Then the US armor proceeded to break through... to be stopped in their tracks by German grenadiers firing their Panzerfausts from their flanks and inside houses. Not to mention that now it's possible to sneak a PanzerSchrek team around to get a good shot at short range. A German rifle team managed to take out 3 Shermans (1 shot, 1 kill). This just made me so happy I wanted to come over here and tell about it to the OP.

You can also find them on the scenario "Boldness be my brother" or something like that. Very good ROF indeed, quite a match for those US Airborne squads bristling with automatic weapons.

What Ken says. I try always very hard to make sure my HT's are offering their front to the enemy and I try to keep them at a distance. Both of which quite often are at odds with what I need to do, by the way. They're certainly not some kind of cheap MG-equipped tankettes.

The Germans thought the same: Konigin (sorry for the missing umlaut) = Queen

CMBN and CMFI are totally independent. So installing the MG module on top of your previously existing CMBN install, can't have an effect on your CMFI install.

Nice one

Bil, what's the victory level to pass? The texts (in the blog and the scenario itself) are very clear and informative. They are also concise, which is good as well Maybe it would be good to devote some space (in the blog) to how important is to keep pouring fire continuous manner on an enemy position while on the attack. And how that requirement constraints the decision making (i.e. you have to position the fire support elements so that they have both good lines of fire and are in cover). On my first run on the Infantry Squad Attack exercise I lost too many men because I failed to make sure that the fire support elements could actually fire on the enemy position...

Thank you very much for the answer PT. Looking forward to dive head first on The Road to Nijmegen very soon

Does anybody know if there's a limit in the number of units one can have in a Campaign Core Units File? If so, how many units can you have there at most? Cheers!

Indeed. If there's enough time to do that, that's the true and tried way to make any headway in a built-up area against a determined enemy.

Regarding the multi-battalion battles problem: according to the PzC operational level rules, the number of stacking points for the assaulters cannot exceed the stacking limits of the target hex. This kind of takes into account limitations in reasonable force-to-space ratios when in the attack (1 hexside is 500m, a 2-hexsides cut is about 850m, 3-hexsides cut corresponds to 1000m, etc.). Why don't just forbid CM battles which aren't valid PzC assaults? Strictly enforcing stacking limits, and a slightly more lethal artillery, might work well enough to avoid those huge battles.

Activating the Alternative Indirect Fire resolution optional rule might not be a bad idea at all. That rule basically changes artillery usage so one is targeting hexes rather than single units, doubling the hard and soft attack values of the firing artillery and then resolving fires for each unit in the hex separately, with a modifier applied depending on the size of the unit. What I have never really understood about that rule, though, is whether the assessment of 'size" is something absolute (tied to the stacking values in the scenario parameters) or relative (between units in the same hex). Nonetheless, experience (and very old guides on the subject) seem to point that the smaller the unit, the harder for artillery to have an effect at all.

Now, on a serious note. I followed with keen interest Jon's scenario design AAR - which I see is included in MG as a PDF document - and I find it to be a very interesting document about how to design defensive battles that are interesting to play both against the AI and against a human player. The AI isn't going to surprise you thinking "out of the box" and it's hard - i.e. requires quite a bit of experimentation - to get out of it behaviours that look "intelligent", but I think it's adequate if one takes care as well of designing the objectives - that is, splitting them to avoid the "winner takes it all" or the "mother hen" effect and distributing them in a clever way so the defender can deny them to the attacker without getting badly exposed, or allowing the defender (or the attacker) to withdraw from the battlefield (see George MC's "First Clash" scenario for an example of a well thought way of allowing this option). designing the map - especially offering enough depth for the defender to fall back and regroup, and for the attacker as well realistic force mix and battlefield dynamics - so at the start we are confronted with a quite realistic 3-1 ratio between attacker and defender, which becomes more even due to casualties and arrival of reinforcements for the defender, and realistic time frames for attacks and counterattacks to develop one can get quite tense, realistic and really enjoyable scenarios, equally interesting to play on the attack and the defense. So let's not oversimplify. On the other hand, with the exception of a few notable individuals I'd say that we CMx2 players aren't very good at "real world tactics as enabled by the game engine". In CMx2 there are quite a few aspects of tactical combat which aren't streamlined or abstracted as they were in CMx1 or are in other tactical wargaming systems. The way one did "fire & movement" in CMx1 is quite different from the way one needs to do that effectively in CMx2. Bil's Battle Drill is going to be an invaluable resource to change that. Well, "not very detailed" is a quite unfair assessment for an operational level wargame modeling terrain at a scale of 100 meters, covering tens or hundreds of square kilometers in some maps. When you're commanding divisions across a frontage of 10 or 20 kilometers, the focus of the game can't be that of walking into the shoes of a squad leader - at best a Company or Platoon commander. CMx2 and CmdOps face the player with problems with have the same structure - effectively planning and executing a brigade attack involves the "find, fix & flank" tasks that are the bread and butter of what one needs to do to organize a company attack. Formations are as important at the tactical level as they're at the operational level. I'd argue that that the difference isn't qualitative - is rather quantitative (time, space, number of men, guns and AFV's involved). Indeed, you can't look at the eyes of your soldiers in CmdOps as you can do in CMx2 and see them ripped apart by those nasty AA guns. But I'd say that's - objectively speaking - an irrelevant difference when it comes to discussing whether or not CMx2 scenarios are "impossibly hard" because of the constraints imposed on scenario designers by limitations in the AI.

That's some good advice in there :-) Not to mention that one can have fun and get whipped by the AI (or a human opponent). I can understand that there are people who aren't in this so to get ever whipped on the virtual battlefield, but please, leave the masochists have their fun as well. No real harm is done and it's stuff happening between two consenting adults (or an adult and a machine)

Saturday morning here in Australia, plenty of time to see how a certain man is having a terrible morning trying to cross a certain bridge https://www.dropbox.com/s/p77icp9s77xodu4/Screenshot%202013-10-12%2012.53.05.png (sorry for the quality of the screenshot, built-in Windows 8 screenshot feature doesn't like much OpenGL). Perhaps one of the most intense firefights I've ever seen in CMx2. And perhaps not one of the most interesting scenarios ever. But boy, what a delight to behold. It took about 15 seconds to compute the replay on my two months old i7. EDIT: I shouldn't forget to express my congratulations to the MG development team. Even after a limited experience with MG (got to go to a wedding this afternoon) I think it's safe to say that this is the pinnacle of CMx2. Well done!

Bil, let me remind you of this line you wrote a few turns back: Ken now occupies terrain where his troops capabilities can shine. I think he's been mis-managing badly his forces, even if the Spaniard in me appreciates his taste for charging at windmills (hosting machine gun nests). He's naturally and logically, doing better. John is right that Ken's troops are the very best, but even the best infantry in the world can't overpower a mechanized force by charging it across a couple hundred meters of open ground. In the more recent screenshots I've come to appreciate that it's indeed a quite strong defensive position. But let's not forget that you've basically routed him away from the other three quarters of the map. It's not that Ken wanted to be there, you pushed him there - so I think it's a natural thing that you might suffering losses as you press your attack. Losses that can significantly impair your force, which I find to be reasonably well-balanced for a being a "show pony" - the point of this game is to showcase MG equipment after all. I think you're already winning. You don't need to slaughter those paras yourself. I think Ken it's in a better position - and willing - to do that for you. Just stand back, sit down your troops on good ground overlooking the ways out of that forested area and start pummelling from a distance the town (I might be wrong but you have some nice high ground right behind your main force). Then wait for Ken's offensive spirit to kick in as he mistakes your "hasty retreat" as his chance "to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat" and launches some sort of Pickett's Charge-like antic. Good luck and good game!

Not if the projectile starts rotating or wobbling, as such a slow velocity projectile would after travelling some distance in a arcing trajectory. That disperses the blast, doesn't it?

I'm no ordnance grog, but seems that the Wirbelwind was at no less than 200 meters from Ken's PIAT positions. At that range, the penetrating effect of the PIAT would be not much at all, actually having a HE effect instead which seems to be quite accurately modelled as roughly the same as that of a 2in mortar shell direct hit on a lightly armored open top AFV. Bil's Panther can and should laugh off those PIAT things at that range.

I think the shield is more a device to enhance the morale of the gunner than anything else. Because be it a Sdkfz or a M3 or a Bren Carrier chances are that the gunner will have to be replaced when he gets his head shot off. I find very effective to direct HE area fire to the sides or the rear of the ATG emplacement. US 57mm ATG especially are death traps for their crew once spotted. If the ATG is in a trench or behind a good reverse slope position, this doesn't work very well or at all, and I need to try to blind it with smoke and flank it or get infantry within effective range to pick off the crew or just admit heavy losses as my tanks have to rush the position as in an image from an old picture book depicting a cavalry charge... A well-thought out defense in depth with ATG's of lethal calibres is quite a nightmare to break through.

These two changes will be a game-changer (for me, at least). Unsupported AFV's should be substantially more vulnerable now. Thank you very much, BFC

I sincerely hope that the kind of magical all aspect spotting ability reported here http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=111325 is gone for good in Market Garden (and a patch for CMFI). There's a problem with tank crews spotting things around them, and it does have quite an impact in the tactical relationships between units in the battlefield. Just as machine gun crews behavior used to have, just like the über ranging and targeting of on-map mortar crews had, etc. etc. etc. etc.