Dave85

It would definetly be awesome. My main problem with CMBN is that the campaigns are too short, too scripted and too few. Going strategic would eradicate this problem. Another issue that might arise though, campaigns, as they are, are generally better then quick battles vs AI because the AI side has been very well deployed by the designer. The game has no real AI as such. In a quick battle the enemy seem to just walk all their troops on one or two axis of advance (usually tanks down one road, inf down the other) and just let you line them up and slaughter them. It would be a real challenge for the campaign designers to get round this IMO

Hitler, you must remember, had an unhealthy obsession with super weapons and poured vast amounts of germanys resources into devastationg weapons that had no real effect on the war because they came too late and too few. Also the allies obviously had the capability for far greater quantity, regardless of quality because of the huge US, Soviet and British commonwealth industrial capability. It would, IMO be a rather silly attitude for the west to say "well, the germans had bigger tanks than us and they lost the war, so we best not build big tanks" You have to remember that after the advent of nuclear weapons there was a constant arms race on the go. When you are in a state of preparing for a war that may or may not happen, for 30+ years, it pays to invent very advanced weapons and be prepared to mass produce them, as opposed to mass producing basic weapons that you may never use. In modern times, war has been for the US, for want of a better word, a luxury, usually politically or financially motivated and not really linked to American national security. In wars like this the politicians need to keep casualties as low as poss to win the next election, whereas arms expenditure is a good thing, because all the corrupt sons of bitches have shares in the war profiteering companies.

If you make a mental note, early on, of the fact time is severly limited its not a major problem. If you dont, and start carrying out a proper recon and a well planned multi pronged assault like a good commander should, then notice you've only got 20 mins left, you're in trouble. The thing I find playing the krauts is, you can stick your panthers up front of every attacking column and just go hell for leather. Most incoming fire, including AT will simply bounce off them. It doesn't matter if you take casualties but if you run out of time the next mission is basically a horrible massacre.

Just because you cant see something on your map doesn't mean one of your units can't see it. When a unit spots something, it takes time for the sighting to be communicated to other units, as well as you.

I too would love to see this, and a campaign where you control an entire regiment or even division on the campaign map so you can have 50+ battles in a campaign with various battalions and actions of units on the battle map affect other units on the campaign map. The major drawback to going strategic is that players who are very good at the strategy will inevitably have to be rewarded with completely unchallenging battles

Good mission this and good campaign too. I love the way the breifings are so vague and misleading representing the germans lack of recon/intel assets. In this mission I took a few HT's on a wide right hook and spread them out in the field to hose anything that moved. I advanced up the road with my AC's and a few more HT's and stuck a platoon of inf in the woods to the right of the road before the bridge. When the attack came in I just pushed my halftracks and AC's up to the bocage to my right and blasted everything that went past, I think one of my AC's managed to damage 2 sherms with its 20mm by moving to the bocage, firing until the sherm aims its gun and then reversing. My halftracks in the feild to the right managed to kill most of the inf that got through and then reversed into the ditch when the sherms came. One of the shermans was almost on top of them and about to wipe out all 5 vehicles when the cavalry (panthers) showed up. After that its easy. Personally I wouldnt bother trying to clear woods that are occupied. Just load your men up into vehicles and bypass them.

Hi Guys Few questions about C2: How do bad leaders work? Am I better off leaving my -2 platoon leader in the rear or what? Does it matter what you do with Company HQ? Obviously Coy HQ communicates via radio to platoon leaders, but is there any benefit to putting them in the line with the troops, if not, there should be. Im thinking about Lt Winters standing upright in the middle of the road into carentam under MG fire and physically dragging the men up, there's a good chance if he'd of been in the rear, the company would have remained pinned and taken heavy casualties. Is verbal contact better than visual contact? again, it should be in terms of spotting. If a platoon HQ is knocked out, is there any benefit to bringing the coy HQ close to them? If the LT is killed but platoon sgt and radioman survive does this effect morale? And another question not really related.... Why are all Lt's first Lt and not second Lt, what was the role of a second Lt? Any advice would be much appreciated cheers guys

Nice account I had a similar experience playing this mission, a single rifleman held up the entire german advance for 10 minutes while the rest evac'd and he still survived. When I reviewed the battle he had about 40 germans almost within grenade range of his position and 12 kills under his belt (he was an assitant BAR man, the gunner was killed very early on) Awesome mission.

I have also read that the british took around 12 hours to create a 17 pdr position (about 3 hours for a 6 pounder I believe). This is why the british used their achilles tank destroyers soley as temporary fixed AT guns while digging in the towed guns, as opposed to the American method of using TD's to hunt tanks offensively.

I read that in Normandy 75% of allied casualties were inflicted by mortars. If its true, its pretty impressive considering that the krauts were using; bayonets, pistols, rifles, smg's, mg's (thousands of em), grenades, rifle grenades, shreks, fausts, inf guns, AT guns, 88's, assault guns, TD's, tanks, artillery, mines etc etc. I guess for them, anything bigger than a mortar didn't last too long what with allied air supremacy. I just did a defensive quick battle using a rifle company and a weapons company against a full bosch battalion + 16 odd armoured vehicles and I got 230 out of 410 kills with my 6tubes (70 kills with 4 ATG's). My 4 .30 cal MG's rattled of about 15 000 rounds and they killed virtually nothing. The .50 cal did ok though, with something like 15 kills for 300 rounds.

I have a totally different problem regarding force selection. As the US, other than by using a suggestion, I can not seem to get anything smaller than a full inf battalion, there seems to be no option to remove company's/ platoons etc. Why cant I just ask for a bloody inf company not a battalion. Using the suggestion option I can get a reduced battalion but I dont know what has been taken from it (usually most of the rifle platoons). Is there something wrong with my game or am i being an ubertard?

Not sure why this is but theres a simple solution. Keep the HQ with the tubes and use the HQ support as FO

I think the idea of this game is thats its supposed to be realistic. The Idea of every infantry company in the US army having 10 plane loads of fully equipped paratrooprers circling overhead, ready to drop at the whim of a company commander is not. Only one man in the AEF could approve parachute drops and that was Eisenhower. What could be fun is missions that start immedietly after a paradrop where paratroops are scattered over a large area bristling with unsuspecting second line german troops. Might be able to recreate some sgt Summers moments

Ha ha this is funny. When one person disagrees with him he goes ballistic at them, when everyone disagrees he suddenly goes all shy. Love it. Personally the issue of floating icons has never even crossed my mind. The reason I play a PC war game and not a game of chess is because it looks like a battle, not a game of chess. It seems he's suggesting we might as well do away with the soldiers altogether and replace them with icons. Why not get rid of the 3d view while we're at it and make it a top down game to save him having a nervous breakdown.

Those two guys were fresh back from the eastern front. Dont expect them to shy away from a few pesky HE rounds

I've downloaded this campaign but cant get it to work (im completely computer illiterate) I tried saving it in the CMBN campaigns folder but no joy. I thinked its zipped or something but its all french to me. Some help would be much appreciated, thanks

Sorry to interupt your conversation guys, didn't realise there was 29 pages of banter when i first wrote this reply to the original thread: US Tanks were good all round tanks just not particularly good in tank on tank action against german tanks. But the US had planes, artillery, AT guns, bazookas and tank destroyers in abundence to combat the german tanks. Also, conveniently, in normandy the majority of heavy german armour was directed at the british who, with their sherman firefly and 17pdr AT guns were better positioned to deal with heavy tanks. The US 101st and 82nd airborne divisions were, in my opinion two of the best divisions of any nation that served during the war, especially in june 1944. The american troops didn't get off to a good start in north africa but by D Day they had improved massively. I beleive it was Rommel who observed that the americans were better at adapting to the difficult bocage combat than their british counterparts. The US browning .30 cal was (bar MG34/42) possibly the best general purpose machinegun of the war and was effective in both the LMG and MMG role aswell as in tanks. The M2 .50 cal was a brilliant weapon, giving massive firepower to tank commanders halftrack crew aswell as infantry. The garand may have been a flawed weapon with inferior accuracy to the Lee enfield and the kar 98 but it was the a next generation weapon, it allowed the US to adopt close range infantry tactics denied to bolt action rifle armed troops. Long range accuracy for a combat rifle was by ww2 no longer the most important factor because long range work was generally done by heavy weapons. I believe it was the best standard issue infantry rifle of the war. As for the supply lines, the US had the best supply system in the history of warfare with everything transported by tens of thousands of motor vehicles while the germans relied largely on horsedrawn supply lines throughout the war. The US had 3 years to amass supplies in england. Just for the record, im not american.

In my experience (I mostly play as yanks) anything american that comes within 5 miles of a kraut NCO with an MP40 has a life expectancy of 0.067 seconds. If only it were hollywood and all my men carried tommy guns....

I was thinking the same thing about XO's and ammo bearers, too much micro. When we have the option to split a rifle squad into teams anyway, would it not make sense to have the option to merge machine gun/HQ teams into a squad? Other thing I was wondering, will the MG ammo bearer top up my GI's m1's if they run low?

Yes, the left flank is definetly the way to go on this one. Smash the end of the enemy trench line with a pre-deployment barrage and put another one in the field in the furthest objective. Send at least a full company up your extreme left flank. Watch out for mines as you level with the enemys trenches. Once past the trenches its not really worth attacking them just keep going up the flank shooting anyone in the fields to your right. You can also send a force down the extreme right but once you've cleared the enemy trenches in front of you its not really worth pushing any further this side as you'll take huge casualties in the hedgerows. Probably only worth sending 2 platoons max down the right flank, everything else can go down the left. Once the stuarts turn up it gets easy but you won't have much time left. This is the final mission for the 2/325 Glider Inf so its not the end of the world if they get a bit chewed up

I just got absolutely pasted by a couple of krauts with an mg42 and an STG44 in a forest. I was attacking from all sides with 2 full platoons but getting slaughtered. I thought "I wonder if theres anything about forest fighting on the forums, probably not" And voila 3rd thread from the top 'infantry in woods' Some very helpfull advice, thanks guys.

I've just finished this campaign in RT. Believe it or not 10 days ago I had never heard of the combat force series, having been a die hard total war fan for the last 5 years. This game is everything I've ever wanted and much much more from a world war 2 strategy game. The montebourg campaign has been great fun. i've been learning more and more evry battle. My favourite so far was probably holding action. I managed to almost completely encircle and destroy the initial german force with <10 casualties. On my right flank my second platoon had faced no opposition after blasting through the hedges and the whole platoon was running along the road leading into the rear of the german position, just as they rounded the corner they come face to face with an armoured car and an entire kraut platoon running the other way. What ensued was carnage, after about 60 seconds of shooting 30 germans and 15 GI's lay in the road bleeding and the armoured car had been abandoned, luckily i managed to get the MG team and the platoon HQ into a hedgerow to mow the germans down. My heart was pounding. Turnbulls stand was also huge fun although my AT guns bugged so I had to settle for 2 close range ambushes on the right of the road and the far right, gunning down about 70 infantry and then running for my life with about 12 casualties. Because I hadn't hit any of the armour in this level I found the labyrnth mission to be one of the hardest. They still had two mark IV's and a marder. The marder was easy enough to take out with a grenade and bazooka attack. But the two mark 4's were covering each other and i'd mistakenly sent all my engineers down my right flank and all my armoured cars down the left so i couldnt open a flanking rout for them. Eventually after several reloads I manged to hit the first panzer with two bazooka teams and then just charged a jeep followed by 3 armoured cars at the second eventually taking it out and storming the objective with 2 minutes to go. I've just finished playing the final Eroudesville mission and I purposefully didn't save once so I couldn't take the cowards way out. What a nightmare this level was. I managed to secure the objective and virtually wipe out the two kraut infantry companies and two STUG's but it cost me half my men and 4 shermans. And I still ran out of time so never had the opportunity to leave the map. On review I realised that the huns still had a completely intact 88 battery in the woods even though I had hit it with a heavy SP gun barrage at the start. This mission started out well enough for me. I completely levelled the german trench position in the copse with several barrages. And managed to storm the first buildings with minor casualties (did lose a sherman to a panzerfaust though) I then put a smoke screen infront of the copse and charged it with two platoons and two tanks. Didn't meet any opposition on my approach, problem was I'd take to long and the German counter attack rolled in to the position before I'd fully taken it. For the next 30 mins easy company were locked a terrifying close range battle and most of the men were starting to lose their nerve and kept pulling back. Because easy had become pretty much combat ineffective I decided to leave them in the copse and launch Fox in head on assault into the buildings to the right. These they managed to take with limited losses but by now I was low on time and after hitting eroudesville with every mortar and gun I had, I charged straight in with fox coy which turned into a bloodbath. During the fighting my last 2 shermans quickly became immobilised so the infantry had to buy the town at a very high cost in bodies. The enemy coy CO team alone got 27 kills. Excellent campaign. Final result was about 1000 casualties for me and 1200 for the huns, with 8 tanks lost each. Obviously I have a lot of learning to do. Just like to congratulate paper tiger on the campaign and the level of historical accuracy which is supreme. This game has really made me appreciate what an absolute nightmare it must have been trying to wrestle western europe from the grip of nazi germany.

I believe a couple of the divisions that landed in early june suffered over 200% casualty rates by wars end if my memory serves.