Chris Ferrous

I've still got my original copy of Victory games' 'Omaha Beachhead - Battle for the Bocage' (copyright 1987) which is at a reasonable scale:- Infantry as Battalions Support assets e.g. ATG and Armour as Companies 1 Hex = 1 Kilometre The scenario represents the first ten days of advance from the initially tenuously held Omaha beachhead. Link-up with Sword and Utah is abstracted by mapedge objectives and the map goes about 70km inland, certainly as far as Caumont. Look it up if anyone's interested or PM me.

Yes, but not too slow through water or they go rusty and die . . . .

Thanks Umlaut Perhaps you are right, although I thought 'turn off all play aids' did the trick. There was an option to make roofs opaque, definitely.

BTW: is there any way of turning off the transparency of occupied buildings - there was in CM1.

Monty was quite prepared to call off a set-piece plan if he thought it was going askew, then dig-in, and make a new plan, sometimes undertaken only the very next day. Just like Patton, Monty didn't like paying in blood for the same ground twice, and he knew a good defensive stance was likely to disrupt the enemy further if they attempted a counterattack. One could even argue that a sit-and-wait-for-the-counterattack doctrine could be part of the overall set-piece battle! Overall, I don't think one can argue about the effectiveness of the El Alemein set-piece battle; it resulted in something like a 1000 mile advance to Tripoli with no set-piece battles interrupting that advance at all. BTW, even Patton didn't achieve that sort of advance, and by comparison his logistical problem was trivial.

Incredible, I didn't know Stuarts couldn't knock over low walls! Thanks for letting me know.

Other than the usual 'not quite enough room' or a 'bit of a corner action spot' scenario you may need to check the ground tile. IF that is impassable to vehicles then you cannot go through. Otherwise, I'd suggest that perhaps you have plotted too far beyond the gap and the vehicle plots a quicker way through to the final location.

Yes, sure; casualties equals men / combatants, not vehicles.

Hi The scenario designer can designate any enemy units as 'targets' and award the player as many points for this as he sees fit. Likewise, it works in reverse; the AI, or your opponent can get any amount of points as designated for eliminating certain of your units. A well written briefing should also guide you as to what are exactly your objectives. Good luck!

I don't think it is a one-off. We had a discussion in a thread 'Giving the AI a helping hand' a while ago, and incorrect AFV facing was something that came up. The natural reaction is to think it's a 'friendly mapedge' error, but I don't think it is. In an AI plan, especially on a QB map, units are allocated randomly to an AI group (orders/movement group) and there is no separation between vehicle and foot orders for groups, so orders which may be logical to infantry but not for vehicles can end up being given to vehicles. What I believe may have happened here is that the group to which the AFVs were assigned had a withdrawal order, i.e next movement towards the rear. For some reason upon arrival at a waypoint, all units, including infantry, orientate themselves for the next movement however far ahead in time that may be. It is a real pain and a problem I'm still trying to work on with the AI system. The main snag is the very low number of groups available (8, one of which is default and can barely be used unless you want battalion HQs and mortar teams to lead charges!).

Yes, I had a single Sherman cook off and blow up on a short bridge, and that brought the thing toppling down. Another Sherman which had just taken the risk of passing the burning tank using a smoke screen then fell backwards off the very end of the bridge and became immobile halfway down the rubble. I thought that was quite neat. As regards the guy reported earlier to be just paddling and not moving I think this is another rare and minor bug not necessarily related to bridges. Rarely, I have noted that one team member can go AWOL and apparently act entirely independently of the rest of the group. Sometimes it's just that individual that remains under command (maybe if the individual is the leader) and sometimes only the rest of the squad can be moved. But it really does seem to be extremely rare and only under extremes of battle stress. The worst example I had of the above was when a MG squad behind bocage took flanking fire and I asked them to pop smoke and flee. They didn't. Then I realised the number of troops at the location didn't match the number of weapon icons, and initially assumed two pixeltruppen were superimposed. However when I spotted a random smoke cloud about 150m away, I looked back through previous turns and realised one team member, I think the leader, had gone beserk and charged towards the enemy. The smoke erupted from the 'mean position' of the unit (e.g when you unit lock during an assault order and the squad splits up) and the unit was immobile until the 'beserker' was gunned down. All squadies then being together in one action spot, the unit became under my control once more. Weird.

Not a bad idea. I usually double-click on the leading HQ (e.g. Cpy HQ) so every subordinate unit is highlighted. I find the red shows up quite well amongst the green.

Phil Yes, that's just silly. If it happens at all it should be a rare event, e.g. tank destroyed on or very near its objective and the crew stays on the spot to defend it (if possible) till infantry arrive. I wouldn't mind heroics while they're still IN the tank, and in my opinion these events are under-modelled, i.e. where a crew or even just some of the crew refuse to bail and keep moving and or firing even though the tank is on fire or shot to pieces. There were certainly instances when tanks with all weapons systems destroyed kept going and simply ran over anti-tank guns and trenches. Lets face it, if a burning tank arrives in your gun pit, you leave your gun behind since in all liklihood the thing will go sky high in a couple of minutes.

Maybe one possible simple solution would be to make all bailed crews at the very least lightly wounded. At least that would slow them down to zombie speed. Overall though, I really think there needs to be a change of status flag of some sort; instead of tanker crew they become very inexperienced infantry and take a morale drop too. They should also be dropped from any AI group orders. To be honest in the battles I've played I've hardly experienced these uber tank crews. Maybe that's because I hit 'em hard and keep hitting them till they give up or run away.

Hi Not updated to CW or latest patch as I was concerned there may be glitches introduced. This wire problem: does the crash only occur with saves during set-up or is it generally any time during the game. Any other problems with latest patch and CW/BN? Thanks in advance.

@76mm I may still have a CMBB map we used for one of our 'never-ending' QBs. I can't remember why we stopped after 3 battles as neither of us had got to the far end of the map. Think RL issues intervened. BTW, be careful if you put any set-up zones on the map as they will stay in place for subsequent battles; hence a starting meeting engagement with zones at respective edges only is best. Surviving units can stay put beyond the zones but new units will be placed in them. There's some other cautions I could offer; PM me if you need more info.

Hi 76mm Yes, it can be done in CM1, it was a great feature and I played some 'never-ending' QB campaigns with some of my PBEM pals. We gradually trickled in units at maybe 800pts per battle (I can't remember exactly) and obviously if you'd taken a hammering in the previous game it didn't help your chances in the next. To import a used map (in CM1) you MUST have a FINISHED battle file which has been saved during the map review option after the AAR screen. This has the same file suffix as any battle map or scenario file and can be imported either as a QB or as a starting position in a new scenario (IIRC, QB is absolutely definite, I'm not absolutely sure about creating a scenario that way).

You could entirely ignore the CMBN in-game scoring system and dictate yourself what is meant by, or at least what constitutes, victory, defeat or an inconclusive result (and various other possibilities). In other words you could use objective zones almost like flags, and casualty figures as sustainable unit integrity values without having the game compute what that means. I do miss the overall morale = x% summary from CM1. I did quite a bit of this sort of thing with CM1 using both an external operational map which dictated engagements' OOBs and the terrain, and also using a 'choose your next move' text-style options table using a spreadsheet with a complete tree of branching possibilities. Each battle result (closely defined) leading to maybe 1-3 possibilities for the player who held the initiative (not necessarily the 'winner' as you've already countenanced should one side 'escape' an engagement for instance). Another thing I miss from CM1 is the ability to re-import a damaged battle map as often as you like (including its units living and dead). Before I knew of this option it really grated if a battle was fought over the same ground and a farmhouse smashed to bits earlier was suddenly intact again. One or two buildings you could deliberately damage but to replicate shell damage for a whole village would be tiresome.

Well good luck, womble. Does limbering up take extra time beyond pack-up or is it instantaneous?

I've tried IGs just once, in a random QB early on, and IIRC their set-up/pack-up time is about 3 minutes isn't it? How you can set one up with LOS of an enemy that's not already virtually buried in dirt without being detected and taken out first, I really don't know. It seemed to me, the best use was simply to use them like an old fashioned cannon on defence, say pointing down a lane or into the corner of a hedgerow, then loose off 2-3 shells at the first target before you have to abandon the gun.

Not quite JonS. I have an example of a full Battalion (US), with all Cpy HQs present true, plus all their infantry, and yet the upper Battalion units have been deleted. Yes, this does to some extent contradict what I wrote earlier, since in this case I didn't delete anything except the Battalion HQ and its 'helpers'.

Yes, ghosting / deleting got me for a while too. As far as I can tell, you CAN delete upper HQs providing you delete, shall we say, upwards? So, if you delete a lower echelon then you can usually delete a higher one, including the Battn HQ etc, but something beneath must go - I believe that to be the case anyway!

All good stuff. Now to the 'don't let the AI surrender on me just when it gets interesting' problem:- Back with CM1 the solution was to have some reinforcements in the AI's OOB which never arrived as they were scheduled after the battle was over. Thanks for reminding me of this JonS! I suppose the same thing works for CMBN? Only problem is we have such limited slots I'll have to free one up to do this. Anyone got any idea what sort of proportion of 'additional invisible reserve' is necessary? Nick thanks for bumping my earlier queries back on topic. I think we've answered the set-up zones thing though. I'm particularly interested in how the AI reacts to the different behaviours during a move if anyone has any observations on this issue. My experience was that I didn't seem to see any difference between a cautious assault and a normal assault.

Yes, I had hoped, and initially believed, the AI set-up would be free of such restrictions unless set to default, but sadly it has to compete on a level playing field. How many wargames do that! I've just run a check on vehicle facing and it does seem that once they reach an objective (step) they do orientate to anticipate the next step however far ahead in time that may be. It's not 100% of the time but at a rough guess 80% of the time, otherwise they face a perceived (known by them) threat, or about 20% of the time stay in the attitude they arrived at their objective. That's got me a bit scuppered because I wanted to be able to cause the AI to withdraw some armour after a 'shock' advance, so it could do it all over again later. Unfortunately, if they don't see anything they'll turn their tails ready to withdraw, and when the enemy (human) sees them they'll get a wicked first shot. Anyone know what happens if I set a further objective way ahead but say just 30secs before the withdrawal order. Will that mean after 30secs they'll give up on the distant forward objective and withdraw? Or will they doggedly try to go forward, even though 'out of time', and only then execute their withdrawl order?

Thanks, Womble, good point, but with only three zones to play with it doesn't leave much wiggle room.