BletchleyGeek

No time for actual playing unfortunately though I investigated in the editor somewhat. I made some flat roof mod to the 8x8 modular building (taking roof1 from CMSF2 Demo) and adding some (concrete) textures fitting to the ones I made for a scenario of mine using modular buildings as pillbox substitute. Could possibly be of use for you. I also needed something like this for a planned Metz, or Brest fortress scenario. Another recent finding was you actually can make large gates through modular buildings by removing (CNTRL Click 3D Editor) the facades at the bottom at both sides and then putting a 16m bridge (rail or stone) on top/through it. With the bridge taking precedence you even can move tanks through it now, which the AI wouldn´t do before. More on that after the holidays. Good work on the Port Cros map btw.
8x8m Level 2 modular building with flat roof and new textures. Infantry and vehicles will use the bridge just like the building isn´t there. Yet the 2nd story above the passageway can be used normally like in any other building.

I got a bit creative on one the forts on your map to see how the mod probably works out. It replaces the Holland independant building and got some flat balcony added at level 3. This enables any attackers to hava a look and shoot to the interior of the forts.

My fault. Now I have found the cause. I had all 'unused mods' transferred to a folder I called NoZ, but I left that under the Data Folder. I thought these would not be used, but they were and there was one called Editor Tree Mod which was the cause for the marks. It was just an indicator for one, two, or three trees.
Sorry for this trouble - at least I've learned where you don't put unused mods.
@ASL Veteran I think I will restart with an intact bridge. Now after I've heard so much about the scenario I am eager to play it this weekend. Thank you for your inspiration and effort. Fortunately, I am in a situation to use CM at work and there I designed a scenario for CM:BS, it is smooth but a real effort. I don't find the time to do that privately after so much computer stuff professionally, but I will be at (on?) pension in some years. Sweet dreams of nice landscapes ready to be completely destroyed ;-)

But your analogy was add ons like a rear view camera.  An engine is a different story.  Don't read disagreement into what I am saying.  I specially call out the BFC's dilemma and also empathize with them.  But at the same time, new car buyers coming in and paying full price for a new car do have expectations around some basic  technoloy features they see in similarly priced cars.  Those tech features have zero impact on how the car will handle snow, is maintained, etc., but those tech features are becoming very large factors in car buying.  My son bought a car, with all other things being equal, based on how easy the bluetooth was to connect to.  The engine, suspension, etc. are commoditized for what he needs it for.
Car analogies are tired and don't work.  Most people don't buy cars the same way they did even five years ago.  To carry this to BFC, someone comes from ARMA or a flight sim like IL-2 where DirectX is the backbone and are shocked at the graphics and performance.  Is the tactical engine the best out there?  Probably.  Is it what people see when they first fire it?  No.  There is nothing BFC or it fans can do to change that except convince them the graphics are worth it because its a different kind of game.

I have a shotgun and he has heard all about my shooting skills. So far the rumors have been enough to keep him in line. And my mustache scares him so no need to jump to straight to the guns.

Sounds good but I would not give them a week to play them to score for points. I think 1 to 2 days seems better (limit the amount of replays people might do).
I was suggesting that you only posted one a week at a certain time each week. That would be for your own well being more than anything else.
 

Welcome to our forums, Sir!
Where we try to never allow a thread to remain on topic past the 2 page...

Obviously not for some folks
🙄
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_rates_by_country
We are in effect sh*tting on our own doorstep and the amount of plastic waste polluting our water is staggering.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/06/plastic-fibres-found-tap-water-around-world-study-reveals
But hey ho it is all down to a liberal conspiracy to stop big business making profits and declining living standards, the recent change in leadership in America has not helped...
🙄
As for less collections that is down to reduced tax return due to the world economic crisis that is still hitting the UK public spending purse as tax has not increased and so councils under pressure to make savings while still trying to keep recycling rates up.
Target is to hit 50% by 2020 at 43% we are close but still put a third of our waste in the ground, compared to America 54%...
Back on topic I checked my credit cards, not been compromised, but then I did not buy anything off Battlefront recently... (Not that it is relevant...)
😋

My daughter has been playing a few battles with me from time to time and I think is starting to get the hang of how things work. Her boyfriend tried to play the CMBN demo against me over Christmas and very quickly got frustrated by the number of units he needed to figure out how to manoeuvre. To make the process a little easier, I built a couple of very small quick battles for them to try to fight the AI, with a very small force. I wanted to teach them how to properly fight with a small force, so hopefully a bigger one would be more manageable, a lesson I need to relearn all the time if you ask anyone of my PBEM opponents! 
This got me wondering if anyone here is interested in these battles, and if introducing them as a daily challenge would hold any appeal? I would post a new small scenario every day and you would have until I post the next scenario to add a screen shot of your results. Highest score with the lowest losses wins the day.  My plan would be to create some battles for each of the 4 WW2 titles, one title for each week. 
Before getting too carried away with this idea, I have 3 battles for CMFI+GL ready to go. You can find them here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/rcse7lwjhh7evk3/AAAaaP3xFpX856IasIER4Dzia?dl=0
The rules are quite simple:
Play as the Allies, Trees turned on, and in Iron mode. Post a screenshot of your results.
Please give them a try and let me know what you think of the idea.

It's called recycling and saving the planet, something that America (and other countries) might want to adopt...
Nothing to do with declining living standards!!!

The noise of time, Julian Barnes
It's the summer holidays here, some I'm doing a bit of off-reservation reading before varsity starts again.

Just wanted to report the results of playing the first battle.
Played Ian, he wanted to check these out so we are.
He was the Germans, I selected the Americans.
My briefing did not give a clear objective as to what I needed to focus on. I had to determine for myself what the key areas were and then I was informed to react to what the enemy was doing. (That is what the challenge was that you gave us) The briefing did a good job of setting that up.
The bridge and crossroads were the obvious key areas in my mind but because I had them right next to me they were not objectives I had to go obtain. So I felt I needed to be aggressive and attack and get other objectives. So that meant I needed to push for other objectives.

But with the M8’s being my only assets with any real fire power, they were too brittle to risk. Losing 1 or 2 of them would for sure be costly to my side in any efforts in the battle.

So it meant any aggressive actions on my part would be a slow action trying to use my infantry. So after moving across the bridge and getting units at the cross roads and coming into contact with German units I began a slow process of moving infantry units forward on my flanks.
Ian was focused on the center of the map objectives, so my flanks were able to get to the next objectives without too much problem
I was surprised by what the German units were, but since I had the m8's in reserve, they were used to react to any areas I felt I was getting out gunned in.
As the battle progressed I could tell Ian was going to stay focused on the crossroads and that I needed to make sure that I had good fire on areas he would likely approach to taking that objective. Having taken the flanks, this became somewhat easy in that I had units holding those objectives but they could also support the center cross road area.
So that was really the cause for the win in that the Germans lost most of their units on that approach which I had prepared for. Holding the flanks also cause Ian to divert some forces to his flanks , so that prevented him from using them in his main attack.
So I hope this gives you some insight without me giving too much away about the scenario  for others who have not played it.
 

Except that, as @JonS already said, that is wholly and entirely incorrect. I know, because I went through the process myself.

A great book on battlefield psychology is Brains & Bullets.

https://www.bitebackpublishing.com/books/brains-bullets
 

The more I learned about the realities of combat in WWII the more I wondered how on earth men withstood it. I found, however, that sometimes they didn’t. 
Below is a link to an overview of battle fatigue in US forces in WWII. I found some rather astounding numbers, and also that the army studied the issue of men’s breaking points very meticulously. Given the numbers involved, they had to. 
The morale model in Combat Mission’s WWII titles are remarkable in their reflection of reality. There have been studies that found that the “soft factors” that determine when and why men will break are not as abstract as one would think. 
Battle fatigue in WWII is a fascinating - even if heartbreaking - topic that I thought deserved some study. Figured you guys might be interested as well 
 
https://battlelines.blog/2019/01/09/the-spirit-of-the-infantry-battle-fatigue-in-the-second-world-war/
 

Yeah, Burden of Command, I'm closely following it too @BletchleyGeek, I picked up that book reading Luke Hughes' blog actually. I think some CM's players may be interested in it and vice-versa.

I can answer this for you, most of the time, no, some times yes.
What happens is just what you thought, the rifle recoil will knock you view off and for a moment because of movement, you really cannot see anything.
now what is interesting is, depending on how well you have the weapon locked into your body and secure. You can have the weapon come right back into a resting position and be right on the original line of site basically.
In this case, it is possible to see impact. rare but possible.
What I remember more than anything was when shooting at very long ranges (800 to 1000 yards) in a hot open environment (desert) and this would happen where the weapon came back to the original sight picture. Not only at times could you see impact, but you actually could see the bullet cutting through the air, the heat waves coming up off the surface is visible in the sight and the bullet is moving the air as it flies and you can see that as it moves to target.
Now as for seeing the results of being a sniper. If you do not know, snipers now work always in teams of 2 or 3 in most armies.
One is designated as a spotter when shots are fired. they normally are viewing the target, many times with even stronger optics than the sniper. so that person has a view of the whole event. so yes they get images that will likely never leave their mind.
For a sniper , the mental challenge is war is a little different than for others in one sense.
Killing impacts most  people,  it can play on their minds. For a Sniper, they have the situation of normally being able to see the victim and know that as they pull the trigger they are taking that persons life away from them and that its within their control to do it. (its not like its a fair fight. Most of the time that person has no clue you are going to take their life or that they are presently at risk of death) So for many it can become a challenge to be a killer in such a manor.

Posted on CMMODSIII as per author's request : CMBN Highway Mod by Falaise
Thanks for sharing @Falaise 🍻

That is not, as far as I know, true, and hasn’t been for quite some time. In many (most?) militaries these days the issues created by dumping guys and girls straight out of combat back into their home environments is well know. Policy is now to extract them, do any post tour admin (hand in ammo, clean stuff for customs, etc) then have a deliberate period (at least several days, and often a week) in a closed environment to decompress. Ready access to alcohol, no programme or timetable except a scheduled session with the psych. Fight, get drunk, yell at each other, sing stupid songs loudly out of tune, talk, sleep, etc.
 
Now, you can argue that a couple of days - or even a week - isn't nearly long enough, but that's quite different to the military just ignoring the issue.

Mord,
Just finished the excellent Rising Sun Victorious, Peter Tsouras, Editor. A bunch of military historians independently examine alternate paths for various military actions Japan could've taken and what the probable result would've been. Some real surprises await. Great resource for PTO books. 

Resumed intermittent reading of Andrew Nagorski's superb and easily readable The Nazi Hunters, which not only covers the people involved but shows how vanishingly little actual prosecution occurred, despite the authorities having the goods on the perps. To give you some idea, they had enough evidence to bring 3000 former Einsatzgruppen murderers to trial, yet only 14 were tried and 3 were executed, if memory serves. With Communism looming over Europe, not to mention Germany and Austria not really interested in exposing their criminal pasts, most of the interest dried up, though here and there some Nazi war criminals were much later identified and prosecuted.

Trying to decide between Jason Marks's Death of the Leaping Horseman and Valeriy Zamulin's Demolishing the Myth. Spot reading of the former blew me away, but I've been dying to read Zamulin's book, which is going to be enormously more demanding. Here's hoping it's not super turgid like The Battle of Kursk, by David M. Glantz and Donald M. House!
Your halftrack gunner books are mad genius level clever and twisted!
Regards,
John Kettler






 
 

CM  Repairman
 

I have been deliberately picky in my selection, Steve. I think there's a lot of generic churning on the Slitherine line up these days. They have significantly increased their depth in purely strategy genres - like 4X - which were already carried by Matrix in the early 2000s (like Reach for the Stars! or Armada 2525). I'd say that they're diversifying and broadening their audience base. That means that the kind of games become more accessible - i.e. Panzer General clones and introductory stuff like Battle Academy.
My criterion for selecting those are the ones I personally find to offer something genuinely unique (as in never seen before) or exceptionally well done/researched. Your games fall in that category, too.
With 2D games some production costs are indeed lower, but other are higher but typically borne out by volunteer, unpaid work. Those enthusiast volunteers spend hundreds or thousands of hours and substantial money to furnish that research. I am not saying that your research isn't good, Steve, just that tactical war games feed on a kind of information that usually isn't available (except for the US Army thanks to the excellent Historical service and their Green Books series). Or require extensive manuals that need to be proofread and actually contain useful information.
On a different level, I think that coming out with credible (not perfect) external ballistics that gets right about 80% of the time match ups ranging from Panzer III vs 45mm guns to Panther versus IS-2 engaging each other at >1kms, is less time consuming than coming out with a credible system that emulates friction at the operational level due to the interaction of traffic congestion, communications and weather, or MACV intelligence collection in say, the Tay Ninh province in late 1966.
Of course, if you have particularly ehm, passionate inputs, you may spend years working out an impressive external ballistics model.
I just reminded another one: Panzer Command Kharkov and their follow ups. Kind of following the groove set by CMx1. But its unique feature was the interface with Google Earth to capture geographic data to setup maps. That was kind of rickety but a very cool feature (hint, hint).
 
That's interesting and I appreciate you share that insight, Steve. I wonder if you have done any attempt to identify the causes of either issue.
Reaching out seems to be a very common preoccupation these days in the video game development world (see the Epic vs Valve upcoming store wars). This guy - another hard ass indie developer survivor 
http://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/
shares some insightful stuff from time to time (he also posts some bull and potentially broken C++ code :P).
I think you have been very tactical - doh! - picking up the periods and theaters to cover, which are fresher in the memory (and imagination) of the bulk of your potential market. You may only have missed on not having a Combat Mission: Indochina in your line up. And that's a big may, imo. 
 

In the 3D space, other than Graviteam I can think of:
- That failed attempt by Eric Young that Matrix released circa 2004
- Mad Minute Games Civil War games, and their continuation as NorbSoftDev Scourge of War Series (latest expansion to their take on Waterloo released in 2016)
- We can consider Histwar to have been released twice (at least!)
In the 2.5D space we have the new Close Combats and that beautiful curio, Firefight. 
In the 2D space since 2001 we have quite a few of them:
- Red Devils over Arnhem / Highway to the Reich / Conquest of the Aegean / Command Ops 1 & 2
- 2by3 Uncommon Valour, War in the Pacific, the Admiral's Edition follow up, War in the East, War in the West
- Frank Hunter's Campaigns in the Danube (the best operational level Napoleonic game out there) and Piercing Fortress Europa
- Desert War 1940-42
- TOAW improvements and versions 3 and 4
- Flashpoint Campaigns (both the 2006 edition and the newer games)
- Armored Brigade (not entirely sure just yet how serious it actually is, though)
- Command (nuHarpoon)
and I am sure fellow forum members can add more titles that try to capture in a meaningful way some of the physical, economic, psychological and political constraints that make war different from other human competitive activities such as chess, soccer or cricket. Trading off level of detail for broadness of scope and scale as appropiate, of course.
Ballpark figure is about 20... compare that with the number of "isometric RPGs inspired by D&D edition 3 where choices matter and the main character is guaranteed to bang at least two party NPCs over the course of the game" released between 2001 and 2019, and we'll be more or less even. I think that is about the size of what is called a "niche genre". Indeed, a tiny figure when compared with FPS, RTS, third person shooters, platformers, or casual puzzle games. 
In any case, the volume of titles released hardly matters to determine if a genre is "dying", what it matters is to see the historical figures for average number of units sold. Are you guys selling noticeably less over the years? Is that something hitting every one on the list above in the same way?
Where I do agree with you is that 3D tactical wargames are hard yakka - there's lots of roadkill on that particular route.
I am pretty sure those young ones - if they are of the clever sort - who have the skills and the talent will be happier to use said skills and talent getting a nice fat paycheck every fortnight, padding their 401k (or equivalent) accounts, providing for a safe and comfortable environment to raise children. Why should they give that up to work more hours than a wall clock and, on top of that, have to deal with an audience whose more vocal members can be quite abrasive?
They would be nuts, wouldn't they? 

I just don't understand how someone can pay 60$ to fly an F86 over Georgia circa 2008, the Persian Gulf in the 2020s, or Normandy in 1944. But sure the joy of doing so is real to them. I usually tolerate and respect, until I observe those same individuals getting all worked up when one just mentions to them, or in front of them, that alternative sims exist, with better value for money to the average fan.
There already credible alternatives, who actually have expressed respect for your work in public several times, yet approach the subject matter differently. I have no reason to assume more developers will turn out to do similar games, with emphasis on different aspects or looking at different periods. The past is a different country, they do things differenly there... the catch being that we are all the past of some future. 
Tolkien was an Edwardian man who came to see:
- crashing the Empire to abject lows of oppression and eventual dissolution,
- along with the downfall of the ethical, moral  and political system of the 19th century,
- two vicious world wars,
- a great depression,
- with the cherry on top that was the cold war and the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction.
So he was perhaps a bit dramatic, and that ending sounds like being sad. But my reading is that Tolkien was just observing that the Old plants the seeds of the New, and it is a good thing for the former to leave space to the later, to make its own mistakes or reach heights never seen before. Such is the way of the world, until somebody makes the mistake to invent a potion of eternal youth 

I just don't understand how someone can pay 60$ to fly an F86 over Georgia circa 2008, the Persian Gulf in the 2020s, or Normandy in 1944. But sure the joy of doing so is real to them. I usually tolerate and respect, until I observe those same individuals getting all worked up when one just mentions to them, or in front of them, that alternative sims exist, with better value for money to the average fan.
There already credible alternatives, who actually have expressed respect for your work in public several times, yet approach the subject matter differently. I have no reason to assume more developers will turn out to do similar games, with emphasis on different aspects or looking at different periods. The past is a different country, they do things differenly there... the catch being that we are all the past of some future. 
Tolkien was an Edwardian man who came to see:
- crashing the Empire to abject lows of oppression and eventual dissolution,
- along with the downfall of the ethical, moral  and political system of the 19th century,
- two vicious world wars,
- a great depression,
- with the cherry on top that was the cold war and the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction.
So he was perhaps a bit dramatic, and that ending sounds like being sad. But my reading is that Tolkien was just observing that the Old plants the seeds of the New, and it is a good thing for the former to leave space to the later, to make its own mistakes or reach heights never seen before. Such is the way of the world, until somebody makes the mistake to invent a potion of eternal youth 

Oh, please. Yes, I am closely associated with some of the devs at 1CGS, but that doesn't mean I can't have an opinion about the pricing model of both DCS and IL2. It's hardly bashing DCS when - at the moment and for quite some time now - all of the WWII aircraft have very limited single-player replay value. There are planes that have been in development for literally years now, and the only 2 flyable German planes don't even fit the map. And yes, it's pretty darn crazy that one has to buy ground units separately in order to populate the map properly. 
Now, if that situation changes (and it looks like it may) I will reevaluate my opinion of them, but until then, that's my judgement of where the content I care about with regards to DCS is at right now.