AlexUK

Happy to help. One of the little quirks about Belgium is the linguistic divide between Flemish and French. And the area of the 1815 campaign sits right on it. So Big Nose's HQ was in Flemish Waterloo, but the Allied front line was to the south of the divide in Mont St. Jean. 
Whether the crewmen of a Daimler Dingo could speak either is open to question.

Thanks for the tips (about the beer too! The best beer I have ever tasted). 

Also, the interview seemed to miss the question:
Is CM3 under development? 

Single volume - Waterloo New Perspectives by David Hamilton-Williams
Two volume - 1815 The Waterloo Campaign by Peter Hofschroer (It gives a lot more detail on the Hanovarians, Brunswickers, Dutch and Prussians than most histories.)
Although the most essential reading is a Good Beer Guide to Belgium by Tim Webb.

Aside from throw grenades, I have been thinking about Target. 
It is annoying not to have a target light for a specified time. 
How about just target and target light, but if you click/press either button again, it starts to cycle through the target briefly times? 

Aside from throw grenades, I have been thinking about Target. 
It is annoying not to have a target light for a specified time. 
How about just target and target light, but if you click/press either button again, it starts to cycle through the target briefly times? 

Also, the interview seemed to miss the question:
Is CM3 under development? 

I was thinking about going for a visit! 

Military History Visualised just made a video about this vehicle. He says the range was not 33 metres but 40-60 metres, depending on wind and terrain.
So, it would be better to allow the player to plot a target line to 50 metres and then have a chance the flame will splash out to 60m, rather than to allow target line to 33 metres with a chance it will reach to 40, in my opinion.
 

Yes I know what you mean. Problem with BN is it only has five tree types, so it limits what we can do to make a more diverse woodland experience. It's actually a bit odd, since all the games are supposed to be on the same engine which supports at least eight tree types. Some of the trees in SF2 even have individual parts, branches, twigs etc whilst some of it's 3D models use a very different approach for leaves. Maybe with the next engine upgrade (presumably for BN's release on Steam) we could get more tree types in BN, it would be nice, pretty please 🙏 @Battlefront.com, heck, you can even have some of my tree textures if you want ... 😉

Oh how easily he's distracted - my school reports often mentioned this trait. Partly window gazing, partly day dreaming, nevertheless curious. I am supposed to be working on my next big mod project but I got looking at some of last year's attempts in Blender to rework trees and such. Thinking I'd crack two proverbial nuts I decided to see what I could do now that I have a little more (dangerous) knowledge of Blender and the dark arts of 3D. I was going to look again at those beanpoles propping up the bocage when I came across a tree that I had started but could never figure out how to get in the game. I just couldn't export the damn thing from Blender to make anything more than floating broccoli in the distance. Anyway equipped with a bit more patience and a damp Sunday afternoon (though it's now very late into the small hours) I have finally squeezed something out of the Blender tube ... I give you a naturalistic oak ...


... or at least the start of one. The shape is working and I think I can alter it whilst still getting a result out of Blender; what I'm struggling with at the moment is getting the texture-mapping figured out. I have some working whilst other parts are somewhat bedazzled, but I think it's solvable. My question is do you folks want it? A whole forest of these old, leaning trees is a bit much but I guess they could be combined with a straight version of the same tree type for variety. Also a similar model for them apples might be quite nice, ancient orchards and all that. Thoughts people?
In the meantime I'm back to the steppe to work on my latest, although I still need to look at the bocage beanpoles ...
 

@JasonChas written at length, in this forum and on BGG, on the Panzer Brigades, and what he views as the German cult of the panzer attack.  As oldsters here know well, Jason is a genius macro-thinker, but he also tends to contemptuously wave away counterexamples (micro) that don't fit his Macro thesis. Nonetheless, there is a great deal worth pondering. For those interested, here are some snips:
1.  The Germans placed great emphasis on using armor offensively and on concentrating it, and they were the first to understand the need to support it with all arms - motorized to keep up and organic to the PD to ensure effective command and cooperation etc. However, very few men on the German side fully understood the technical details of how and why they had been so successful in the early war period, from 1939 to 1941....
Early in the war achieving an initial break-in was a more important thing to achieve, because the defenders against it mostly didn't know what to do about it.
But the Germans did not ascribe those earlier successes to the Allies being dumb at the time. They ascribed them to their own doctrines and what they thought of as the power of the offensive.
2.  As a result, they had an extremely offensive minded doctrine about the use of armor. Armor attacked, that was its essence. Letting the enemy attack first and then counterpunching was needlessly forfeiting initiative to enemies whose armies were still viewed (in some respects, rightly) as unadaptive and rigid, and therefore brittle. They believed mass employment in multiple-corps level attacks was the only possible way to employ serious armor. So whenever they accumulated any to speak of, they attempted another such attack.  Later in the war the offensive emphasis became a terrible liability.
The German armor doctrine had worked in 1940 and in 1942, and they didn't adapt well to it no longer working. They were forever throwing away their magnificent armor on useless counterattacks because they did not have a defensive armor doctrine. By the time a PD was allowed to defend tactically speaking, it often had half or less of its tanks remaining. 
The higher ups snapped up any armor at all fresh and not immediately in the line, for counterattack schemes.  The right place for them would have been just off the line in local reserve, ready for action in any direction, linebacker style. But putting a PD in reserve off the line was an engraved invitation to have it transfered out of your command to somebody else. It was a big ad saying "not needed to hold the front, immediately".
It was a general disease - have armor -> attack -> lose armor -> defend. 
The Germans should have husbanded their uber armor and used it as linebackers, smashing the most forward Allied probes. But defending with armor was simply a heresy. Armor attacked. That was its reason to exist.
3. The 1944 Panzer brigades were the latest and worst example of the armor offensive disease.  Worst, because at least a rebuilt PD retained experienced cadres and had all arms in the right proportions. Panzer commanders recommended using new tanks to refit existing Panzer divisions, to get their cadres, experienced staffs, and all make use of their remaining all arms support. But OKW overruled that,and made new KG sized formations instead, out of green men. Hitler wanted more armor formations on the map, psychologically, perhaps. But more likely, they wanted to control the commitment of the new armor, and in particular to ensure it got offensive missions.
The Panzer brigades had cadres, certainly, but they performed absymally, and a large part of that has to be put down to green formations. The men hadn't worked together, and a lot of the rank and file were raw. They also tended to get committed piecemeal, and as I have stressed here, on overly offensive missions.  Until wrecked - remnants were allowed to defend but not the full strength formations.
In the September 1944 Arracourt battles in Lorraine, Hitler thought he was pulling a repetition of Manstein's famous "backhand blow" in the Kharkov counterattack, early 1943. OKW thought the Americans were as logistically overextended after grabbing France. Which was largely true, in the gasoline area at any rate. But the US army wasn't a horsedrawn affair.
Panthers charged every morning in fog, to avoid Allied air power. The result was a series of knife fights at 200m, which the US won hands down. They were more often in their own defensive zone, better visibility, TDs heard the Panthers coming, Shermans flanked them, etc. 
They still managed to get initial break-ins easily enough, even against later Allied defenses. The problems they encountered typically had to do with breakdown of combined arms when infantry got stripped off the tanks by artillery, or getting lost in a deep defended zone and hunted by reserves while buttoned, or having roads cut, mined, bridges blown, etc.
Thrust forward with a whole battalion of Panthers at once, down 2-3 roads a company on each, and what happens? Do you get through the front line battalion? Sure. So what?
Now you are in bazooka land. You can't drive through an enemy army without showing side plate. Every hedge and wood needs to be scoured by Panzergrenadiers, but they are being blasted by American 105s and 155s. 
The Allies could "countermass" with artillery fire on the narrow breakthrough areas. Allied fire support and fire responsiveness increased drastically from early war to late. The German infantry could not 'shoulder' through the holes to widen them. Once the tanks were stripped, they were hunted rather than hunters.
4.  Did the German command learn from this fiasco? No. The commander of a storied PD who fought his whole army out of the trap of the south of France took control of the remnants of a shattered Panzer brigade, a fresher one that hadn't done well the last few days, cadre from another PD, and his own PD with a reduced number of runners. For days he battered away at a US combat command, trading Panthers for Shermans and not getting even 1 to 1. He was clever about arty and night infantry attacks helping out, to keep it up as long as he had. But he was down to 30 runners, having used up essentially all the armor in the whole theater. So he called off his attacks - and was promptly reprimanded for showing insufficient offensive spirit! Not by some political brown nose at OKW, but by a picked old Prussian Rundstedt protege. 
With the armor the Germans sent to Lorraine, fully re-equipping the crack 11th Panzer division, the 21st PD, giving 17th SS one panzer battalion, likewise for 3rd and 15th Panzer grenadier, plus TDs or StuGs for all of the above as well, and all of them employed defensively, the PDs as monster backs and the Pz Gdrs as sinew behind river lines and between the woods and cities held by the infantry - you could have fought 3rd army to a standstill, while keeping that massive force intact.
Instead they attacked and attacked throughout September until there was nothing left. 
****
More from Jason on 'Panzerleute disease', for those interested:
The question they should have been asking was: where and when am I going to destroy his armor? Because then, it is obvious enough a kill sack or Pakfront in your own zone is a more promising location for it, than off in his.
If instead you are trying to win the whole campaign 1940 style without having to face his armor, you try to hit where it isn't. Expecting to paralyze, pocket and kill whole armies again, as in the glory days.
Well, that didn't happen and it wasn't going to happen. Offensive spirit did not produce those successes. Enemy weaknesses and mistakes did. The Allies weren't that dumb anymore.
You couldn't beat them without fighting them, you had to kill them by fighting them. In particular their armor. And that requires a different way of thinking about what armor can do for you, to consider it the "heavy wood" in a frankly attritionist battle of material, rather than thinking of it as exploiting cavalry that was going to make the enemy 'evaporate' by driving around him and shooting up his supply lines.
German defensive armor 'doctrine', such as it was, was the net outcome of a lot of (often superb) tactical skills applied, improvising with whatever remained on hand after the counterattacks bled out. That was all twice as hard and half as effective as it might have been, since the German armor was already decimated at lower exchange ratios than it could have achieved.

------------------------------------
The Map : New Aleppo District
-----------------------------------
Located just to the west of Aleppo proper in Syria, it is a dense residential area built in the 80's.
Map size : 1200 X 900 m
This is just a raw map, no setup zones, objectives or anything. Probably requires some cropping to make it suitable for a scenario or a PBEM.


Install :
Extract in my documents/Battlefront/Shock Force 2/Game Files/Scenario
Download :
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1xg16nl6esiays5/SYR - New Aleppo District.rar?dl=0

I'm not only making complete buildings but smashed up ones also which is much harder than the former?
 

This topic should not die. Here is post I had on the playtesting forum on June 6th. I have been too busy with work to resume tests and make a Mantis report, yet. In my estimation the T-64A/B is better protected and more capable in CMCW than in any board wargame, computer game or simulation I have played, developed or play tested in 30+ years of wargaming. This includes modern armored warfare board games like Assault, MBT (original), MBT 2 (GMT), Lock n' Load, Mech War (SPI) and others. PC games ranging from Tanks, Steel Panthers, Flashpoint Germany & Campaigns, HPS Simulations and Armored Brigade. The only Sim I have used is Steelbeasts.
POST from June 6th------- 
I set up a test range that is approximately 2000m long and flat. It is June 1st, 1982, at 0000 hours and the conditions are hazy, cool and dry. I placed 1x M60A3TTS behind a berm hull down with armored arcs set to 1500m. At the opposite end of the map approached 4x T-64A’s (4x tank platoon). The scenario is set for two player hot seat and the Soviet tanks are given a move order to move toward the M60A3TTS’s. All crews are regular, normal and fit. I played the scenario enough times to get 100 shots of M774 APFSDS rounds at an engagement range of 1500m and less and 30 shots of the M256A2 HEAT round an engagement range of 1500m and less. At only no time during the engagements was a T-64A able to engage a M60A3TTS, this is due to the conditions and the thermal sight of the M60A3TTS. BUT I suspect the T-64A may be underperforming in IR optics.
Here is a summary of my findings:
The distribution of M774 hits which were all from the frontal arc on the T-64A and are as follows:
1.       The turret (top turret, front turret, weapon mount and weapon) was hit a combined 5.0% of the time. I believe this is too low
2.       The lower front hull (Lower, right, left) was hit a combined 17.2% of the time
3.       The upper front hull (front, right, left) was hit 77.8% of the time. I believe this is too high
4.       There were no track hits
The M774 hit 99 out of a 100 shots for 99% accuracy. Perhaps too high.
Overall,  the M774  penetrated the whole of the T-64A, 18.2% of the time. The only areas to be penetrated on the T-64A was the upper right hull and lower front hull.
1.       The upper front hull  was struck 1 time and was penetrated for 100% of the time
2.       The lower front hull was struck 17 times and penetrated 17 times for 100% penetration
 

The distribution of M256A2 HEAT hits which were all from the frontal arc on the T-64A and are as follows:
1.       The turret (top turret, front turret, right turret, weapon mount and weapon) was hit a combined 6.6% of the time. I believe this is too low
2.       The lower front hull (lower, right, left) was hit a combined 23.3% of the time
3.       The upper front hull (front, right, left) was hit 70.0% of the time. I believe this is too high
4.       There were no track hits
The M256A2 HEAT hit 30 out of a 30 shots for 100% accuracy. Certainly, too high. Most of the rounds were fired at 400m or less but some were fired at >1000m.
Overall,  the M256A2 HEAT  penetrated the whole of the T-64A, 30.0% of the time. The only areas to be penetrated on the T-64A was the upper front hull and lower front hull.
1.       The upper front hull  was struck 2 times and was penetrated for 100% of the time
2.       The lower front hull was struck 7 times and penetrated 7 times for 100% penetration

I may Mantis this concerning the high concentration of upper front hull hits and low concentration of turret front hits.
Pete
 

Thanks to @mjkerner for his excellent job adding 2 front pockets to the Soviet M35 uniform work in progress.
Any uniform modders want to volunteer to take on some small tasks? Please PM me if you want to help pull the Barbarossa wagon across the finish line.

Apart from pretty much every set of orders in a 34 year military career I've received or read having them ... you're probably right.

I'll be away from the forum for the rest of the summer. Here's one last pic for the road:
Some of the new WIP textures on map, with a shot of the same view from the real world.


Have a good summer, everybody! 🙂
 

ok, adding some markings and such. Always a learning and often relearning experience. :-)

Historical rarity is handled by the rarity points system. The Luchs costs more than ten times more rarity points than the Stuart.
If BFC then also makes the Luchs cost more basic points in order to represent historical availability, to my mind that suggests that they are confused about how their own unit price system was intended to work. They mix up apples and oranges.
Here's another argument: Look at the price of a Puma. Also a historically very rare vehicle, but it costs less than the Luchs, and it's a much better AFV.

I don't see why QB can not be ahistorical. It also can be unbalanced - there is a choice to give one side extra points. Basically CM gives us an engine that allows us to play a tactical game the way we see fit.
There is a lot of different equipment in the game and it would be great if all of it would get used. For that different units, vehicles should be priced in a way to let people chose different force compositions.

Request for assistance. I need an experienced dropbox dude to PM me that he can give me some info on how this goes with the file structure for a new dropbox link.

Probably a five minute job. You get a free CMFI scenario for your trouble. 
Basically, I want to have in my forum signature an active dropbox link that opens a folder for many subfolders to click on and then only download "new stuff"...I guess I name folders as batches of "new stuff"...? with a date. Downloaders would just look at the folder name of what they have now to know if new downloads are needed...
 

Part II - following on from the above.
Once the enemy security outpost was eliminated the platoons swapped out and a fresh platoon carried forward the attack, whilst the lead platoon, tended to their wounded, re-orged and rearmed and took up position as the reserve.
By this stage some armour support in the shape of three Panthers had joined the attacking force. They all rolled forward.

The enemy supporting positions that had revealed their location attempting to support their security outpost were taken under fire from the supporting 105mm 'Wespe' battery.
Whilst the defenders were pinned down the assaulting SPW platoon drove onto the enemy position.
Under covering MG fire from their SPW the grenadiers assaulted forward to clear the foxholes.



it was not all straightforward. Some defenders rather than cowering in the bottom of their foxhole actively and effectively engaged the attacking grenadiers.

Aren't you being a little dogmatic about this? 🤪 And by a little I mean a lot.
Personally, when picking tanks in a QB all I care about is their tank killing ability. Once the enemy armor is gone his infantry can be dealt with in any number of ways. Killing infantry is easy. Killing tanks is hard. In my humble opinion ☺️
This is why BFC uses a formula to determine unit prices instead of someone's opinion on what a Stug is worth. That method brings it's own set of baggage and frankly I would prefer a system that didn't even use purchase points but you go to war with the QB system you have, not the QB system you wish you had.

For the same price? You really don't interest me enough to fire it up and dig out Jagdpanzer prices... It's not that I want to use them that way, it's how they end up getting used, both in-game and historically, because of the strategic stances of the forces involved at that time of the war. And they're not "mediocre"; they can kill most Allied tanks (even most Allied tank marks; there were a lot fewer Churchills than Shermans and Cromwells in Normandy) and can stand up to the most common opponent at mid-or-greater ranges. As Assault guns, they're mediocre by that time in the war, having a low ammo count.

Sherman 76s aren't as good as 75s in the HE-chucker role. But having some to engage the enemy armour, like a proper tank should be able to is a good idea.
Unit pricing is a really tricky art. There a bunch of assumptions that have to be made, and if they're different to yours, you'll disagree with the pricing. Thus it will ever be. And BFC aren't going to enter into any discussion about it. And we're not going to be able to do anything about it. It is what it is. Buy those "Better options", and stop worrying about the missing "common weapon" in the artificial arena of a QB.