BletchleyGeek

Congratulations, both for a neat victory and an excellent AAR! Looking forward to the next installment.

My thoughts precisely. Don't you think the "recipe" I gave a bit above goes along those same lines? I would like to hear opinions on that. Succesful maneuvering usually turns "surfaces" into "gaps" Nice link, thank you

Not sure about that. Even in Iron mode you can check unit equipment once it's sighted. Which does not imply that the spotted unit has shot at all.

My basic strategy follows a similar pattern to that of PaK40. My only objection to his suggested plan is that any human player worth its salt will prioritize the mortar section, and probably kill or suppress it. Here's mine: 1. Divide your attack force into three groups: center and flanks. 2. Set HQ to a circular Target Arc of 5m radius (you don't want these guys to attract much attention on them). 3. Split the center squad into Scout Team, and Split the remainder into two balanced fire teams. 4. Use scout team as Pak suggests 5. Deploy the central squad fire teams to support the Scouts - to their sides - so you get concentric fire on the defenders. Rush the HQ to the center, and deploy the Mortar team 8-16m (1 or 2 action spots) behind the HQ. 6. Setup a fire mission (I tend to select for this a Medium / Short one) behind the hedgerow (linear or area, I'm not sure what's better). 7. Now you have 6 minutes (4 setup + 1 or 2 of fire), approximately, to use the other two infantry groups to envelope (if possible) or flank (if possible). These groups are also split as I describe above. Clearing the target hedgerow takes with the above procedure - if everything goes according to plan - about 10-12 minutes. Having scouted the flanking avenues of approach beforehand is a plus (just in case there are ambushes setup on most likely approaches). The AI usually ignores flanking maneuvers or reacts slowly to them (based on the plans). Humans might be wiser (and probably will care more about the flanks). When in a QB, allocating extra BAR and Scout teams for the wings might be of critical importance (extra firepower, real recon forces). Turning the flanks in the bocage is very important I think: what might be at one point in time an excellent defensive position, can become five minutes later a death trap.

Yes, it would be nice. Just wondered if you had found out how to figure that out. Though, as you say, in game terms, there's not really any difference.

Hmmm, what do you mean by "sound contacts"? Can you tell apart what contacts shown on the UI are visual and which are sound? If so, how? Thank you, and excellent writing. I'm enjoying this a lot (and learning a couple things as well).

That was indeed a lucky shot by that 57mm :eek: As you say "Awwww, crap". By the way, I didn't get your explanation regarding LOS inside modular buildings. Did you mean that even if you don't see any wall there's an "invisible" wall - but not transparent - between each module?

On Windows I think you're out of options guys, other than having two builds and possibly doing a complete rework of CM:BN memory management. The AWE API offered by some versions of Windows - up to Vista I think - is regressive as in going back to ye olde times when one had to work with overlays to access EMS in the 1990s. Worse, it doesn't even work for 32-bit applications running on 64-bit environments. On Mac I see you might be able to do it, if Apple didn't geld the BSD basecode powering their MacOS X thing. 32-bit applications running on a 64-bit Linux Kernel can access beyond the 4GBs using mmap(). Ironically, this would involve programming work similar to that needed to have the CMx2 engine code to support 64-bit out of the box. For the non-programmers: we're in a much better situation regarding compatibility than in the 1980-1990s when there were in the market 8-bit (C64), 16-bit (IBM PC, Amstrad PC) and 32-bit platforms (AMIGA, 80386, etc.).

Excellent initiative! Subscribed and looking forward for more DAR's coming up on these forums.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. CM:BN covers in its time-frame the Third Army breakout from Normandy, well past bocage country. I don't see any inherent limitation in the engine, besides technical ones regarding RAM availability. And quite a few others in this thread point to the Lorraine campaign. All the elements - with the exception of some minor quibbles regarding equipment such as the M18 Hellcat - are in the game to replicate engagements like the one in Arracourt in September 1944. There's some people who have even come out with a Singling scenario: Singling (Abram's goes postal) by Adelscott & Iosef Briefing et al are in Spanish, though. Another example that comes to my mind is the "No Exit" scenario by Sgt Schulz: that's hardly bocage fighting, more like the kind of combined arms actions people miss from scenarios made for previous CM installments. The elements are there, eventually people will find the time to make more scenarios like that

Another kind of mixing-and-matching I think nobody has commented on is that regarding units parameters: Leadership, Experience and Motivation. Tweaking those can significantly amplify - or reduce - the effectiveness of the equipment. For instance, having well motivated guys on the HMG's or similar has a noticeable effect on ROF.

Thank you and very good advice in this thread, learnt a couple things as well. I think I can only add something: infantry recon is not only useful in the attack, also in the defense. The following mostly applies to QBs where you buy your troops. One of its purposes is the same as in attack to gain information. But rather than locating enemy strongpoints, heavy weapon locations, etc. to get a hold on the overall attack plan of your enemy. This allows to setup area fires to interdict his advance, or if you get really good intel, identify where he's forming up and direct area fires on that location. Second purpose is to harass advancing forces. In really close terrain country - hedgerow country - marauding the no man's land with PzSchrek/Bazooka and Tank Hunter teams can really make very expensive your opponent approach. This can work surprisingly well sometimes. On a recent H2H game I faced a full US Cavalry Squadron with a Reinforced Grenadier Company. These roamers stalked approaching Scout AFVs and Jeeps and thinned down considerably my opponent ranks. In open terrain, small teams of Scout + LMG (or FO + Scout + LMG) roaming around can still disrupt and held up a significantly larger force. As other posters said, go to eye level and look for crests in the terrain, and move from reverse slope to reverse slope. Scout - either German or US - have weapons with high ROF, and the LMG has both ROF and range. FO's is a bit risky, they're really expensive. My usual technique is to do a "shoot-n-scoot" like maneuver but for an extended period of time. Setting up pauses also helps to negotiate the slack inherent to WEGO turns. EDIT: Keeping in mind that they're not meant to hold any ground is of the essence. Never stay in the same place for a very long time. Keep moving! Having good leadership, experience and motivation on these recon elements is a must, I think. You really want them to be difficult to get suppressed, and if so, to get unsupressed quickly.

Yes, re-doing Patton Strikes Back for the iOS could certainly become a minor hit on the Apple Store. Regarding the appeal: wait for 2014, that will make 70th Anniversary of Bulge Well, that, or borrowing the premise of this bizarre Norwegian horror flick: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1278340/ A ski vacation turns horrific for a group of medical students, as they find themselves confronted by an unimaginable menace: Nazi zombies Precisely. I've seen so many games failing at capturing the quite unique ebb and flow of the German offensive and Allied counteroffensive... until Command Ops, that is. I realized the same after doing a few searches. Apart from Niessuh and Clark's proposals, I have failed anything close to that level of concretion.

That Bulge game was REALLY good, and the weird part is that its "weirdness" got a lot of things just about right. I loved the splash screen where the devs themselves appeared dressed with in German uniforms. For those who don't know the game, it's highly recommended: Patton Strikes Back! YARRR! Well, in the last part I'm really out of your league, since I'm not privy to the actual details. Would you guys find useful that an effort was made to compile all suggestions regarding the UI? I'm sure that it would be feasible to round up the threads and setup a "directory" of sorts.

I for one, have never felt like speaking for the "community". I don't think I've ever written "we feel that...", or "we think that...". Very much like you, I'm giving my opinion. Which is informed by having played a lot of wargames, which might or not be meaningful to everyone. UI mods are really minor tweaks, compared to the suggestions made in those threads I linked. You took a really bad example out of the repository to base your argument. That's highly debatable, but well, they could also do some mass mailing asking for feedback and take people to a webpage. Airlines do it, and BFC has more reason for doing it I think. The only ones who can really make the decision to go one way or another are Steve, Charles and Phil (and the rest of the BFC crew whose names I don't know about). And it's not about being "vocal", but about making a case in a constructive and articulated way. I invite you to make your case as well (you just did).

One of the inconvenient truths about TOAW is that the engine doesn't work equally well at all the possible combination of unit/time/space scales. Opinions on the "optimal" scale for TOAW are as varied as colors in a 32-bit palette. Mine is that it works best at the company/bn level, on day or half day turns, 2 to 5 km per hex. A whole Kursk engagement - northern and southern pincers - played at that scale would be a "monster". Actually John Tiller's Panzer Campaigns Kursk'43 has something like that. It took me something like two months to play over half of the 12th July Prokhorovka battle. I had to keep notes and an operational situation map to keep track of who was supposed to get where and why. EDIT: That playing hotseat. The AI there is a joke, and in places like the blitz there's very little people interested in playing such scenarios anyways.

I think I'm not alone in considering that it would be greatly appreciated that you kept peeps on the loop (GaJ just suggested a Dev Diary, I understand the reluctance to commit to that on a regular basis, but well, you could take turns guys ). I see you're old school Phil Younger people not used to Koger's classic games (or Grigsby's classic games) mileage might vary wildly. My bad. Just checked my wishlist there and they have SWAT 3, not SWAT 4

Well, that mod is Veins' tracers mod. A mod released 3 days after release, and which has gone through 3 revisions already (so say that actual people downloading it were about 550). And sincerely, I don't think most of the playerbase cares much or at all about the looks of tracers at night scenarios. That as an statistic indicator of disatisfaction with the user-interface is a non-starter. A much better indicator would be a forum poll, where people were asked to express their opinion on a certain number of concrete questions. And that would be excluding those not caring about forums or the non-English speaking CM community (which is not small).

Awesome. Will look forward to both the H2H battlepacks and the AI campaign

Nope. It's been on my GOG wishlist for months, so "soon".

Most campaigns played in CMx2 (or CMx1) are based on similar principles, though in these the umpire work requires also to keep track of the operational context of the battles being fought. EDIT: That could be a quite nice scheme for a quick and dirty NABLA tournament.

"Right-click on units = invoking the orders menu you get with the Spacebar" is indeed an step in that direction. I've seen lot of fancy mouse-centric control schemes. Some of them are neat, other are - literally - a pain. Do you mean the kind of "wheel menu" that seems to be favored in some RPGs? Something like pressing mouse right button, a circular menu appears, you need to keep the right button pressed while you hover through selections?

Good question. I'm so used to it that I had to look it up on urbandictionary: It's most commonly used on academic circles.

You just saw two. They're pretty modular, as Alchenar just said. They don't leave out anything that can already be done with the UI (as far as I can see). Since the precise definition of "newb" doesn't seem to be relevant or important, then we can just forget about "newbs", can't we? Perhaps I'm a bit dense, but it appeared to me you were just handwaving them. If you weren't interested in derailing the discussion, then here you have my apologies.

Well, you can see a mockup of what the screen layout would be as well as quite detailed textual description of what each new element is meant to do. If you mean making a synthesis of all of them... well, I think there are limits to what you can expect from people who devote their spare time to think out these. And you should also define what means "newb". If you're asking for a professional, complete and coherent analysis of UI shortcomings and possible solutions, well, then you need to find a friend who's got experience as an UI analyst, and get him to dig the game, so he does it with its own spare time. Or you could make a full-time job offer - what you ask could take easily a couple hundred hours of work - so make it 1,200$, a couple hundred up or down. There are quite a few good sites to link up with freelancers. I don't get you, really. Are you trying to suppress the discussion on the grounds that people complaining don't have what they should? Would you be more specific about this? Do you mean that all of current UI features should be retained?