Pelican Pal

And again another obvious issue is that while infantry on the ground gain cover saves to abstract their ability to find micro terrain tank crewmen do not and are reliant on their animation positioning them. If you find any video of men sticking their heads out of a vehicle in combat its simple to see that they make attempts to reduce their exposure whenever possible which is something that CM crewmen do not do.

Yes this is why I believe the issue is more pertinent as you move into the modern titles. The modern titles have more bits and bobs attached to the tank and therefore more bits and bobs that could be smashed by fragments. Laser warning receivers in Black Sea rely heavily on the smoke launchers having ammo to defend against an incoming ATGM but if the smoke launcher was rendered inoperable by artillery shelling earlier in the battle the window for the ATGM to guide into the tank is now bigger than before. These sort of small cascading effects are missing in CM currently but get regularly ignored during the discussion and instead tests are made against "car parks" of armor to claim that there isn't an issue.

Yea, sorry I wasn't clear. If a round lands very close to a tank some amount of track damage will be done but that is the only subsystem that will take any damage and even then it has to be nearly on top of the vehicle. You won't get a shell landing 30 meters away to do any damage. In a more abstract game that would be fine but CM is 1:1 so that sort of 1:1 damage modeling is important. Having a FLIR sight closed up for 30 seconds during the peak of the artillery fire or to have the top mounted machine gun become inoperable can have a butterfly effect on the outcome of a scenario.

Yea Lethaface showed that in my thread but people are still failing to grasp the basic problem with fragmentation damage so I left that out.

There is good documentation that artillery damage against subsystems isn't just too low but outright broken. I'm not entirely sure why people continue to re-argue this again and again and again. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Artillery within CM has a few key problems that make it less effective than it ought to be and the linked article is useful for proving that point. #1: Fragmentation does not cause subsystem damage outside of tracks/wheels. The "dumb artillery article" proves that this is incorrect here: Where near hits cause extensive damage via fragments. What is interesting is that even "blast kills" in CM do not cause subsystem damage. Now this leads into a discussion of the correct amount but currently all that we need to show is that in the real world its possible and that its not possible in CM. #2: Artillery does not cause vehicle crew to button up sensitive sights. Obviously tank crew will turn in but they won't close armor covers over sensitive sights during an artillery strike. This represents a reduced capability for artillery to actively suppress a target even if the long-term damage is nil. #3: While the above two are known the third is my theorizing that the lack of projectile modeling from artillery fragments has some impact on tank crew morale. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The discussion always ends up circling the drain around kills when kills are likely fairly accurate. The real problem with artillery is that you are losing out on degradation of vehicles and short term suppression.

Yea I figured most old timers had these but I noticed that they aren't easily accessible so my goal is to drop these on the @Bootiewebsite so they are more easily available to the public. This is very interesting and possibly explains why my game kept crashing when trying to load these maps!

@hm_stanley These are just plain maps but sort of in the ballpark.

Follow the link to an in-progress map pack for Black Sea. All of these maps are blank and exist for use of scenario designers to make scenarios with without the onerous map creation portion of the experience. https://github.com/combat-mission/Black-Sea/tree/main/maps Please let me know if any of these maps do not work in Black Sea. My testing has shown that they do but I haven't tried to load them all in the 3d mode. Additionally if anyone here would like to help and has CMFI/CMRT please PM me. Notes: Most of these are maps were packed with the games but a few are from map designers. Be sure to click the "..." to show attributions. I plan on doing this for other games in the series. As this is list is refined they'll be added to the scenario depot for better accessibility. This current location is a soft launch location.

The newest Graviteam games do have soft factors but the thing about the Graviteam games is that they do not give the player a ton of feedback. CM is sort of like a board wargame in that department where you will know that 1st squad is pinned down because the game deliberately tells you. While in Graviteam you sort of get a feel that an attack is going well. @chuckdyke Your tank crew in graviteam will attempt to do repairs when they are out of combat. Maps in Graviteam are much larger and battles last far longer so its far more likely that they will be out of combat. Also just because you see the crew attempting to repair doesn't mean that they will actually complete the repair within the combat time frame. Recently I had a vehicle throw a track at the beginning of a battle and it was back in action literally hours later. But most of the time you are going to end the battle with the crew still repairing the vehicle rather than the vehicle being combat ready.

Yea, there is some sort of modeling issue with vehicle crew. I suspect its a combination both of what @domfluff mentioned, and a lack of cover saves. Troops on terrain get a cover save based on the terrain they are in. Representing micro-terrain, soldiers making themselves smaller targets than the animation system can do, etc... Anyone poking their head out of a vehicle does not seem to gain the benefit of these cover saves so any hit is going to be more lethal, unless they have an armor save. Its reasonable to argue that vehicle crew should receive some cover save to represent them placing themselves in less exposed positions (and acting more dynamically) than the animation system allows them to.

Does the M10 happen to have a rear mounted .50 cal?

If pre-battle intel operates they way old resupply did it would be a % chance for each unit rather than a % minimum. So if the scenario designer set 10% early intel it there would be a 10% chance for each unit to be detected rather than 10% of enemy units being detected. IMO the mission would be better with a QB style "off-map" spawn area. Especially for the rest of the battalion.

The bar for what folks consider toxic is practically nonexistent. I wouldn't even call his comment "harmful to the title's reputation". Find me someone who is perusing the forum and deciding their opinion of CM on Erwin's comment in a 5 page thread? There are things that damage the game's reputation and I can guarantee you that none of them involve Erwin.

The interactions shown here not only show the bug in question but also make me question exactly how fragments are being modeled. If you notice the BMPs that are knocked out have no system damage and are just destroyed. That makes me think that the game isn't model any sort of fragments as projectiles but instead use some sort of blast radius calculation. Since a fragment hitting the vehicle would cause some sort of system damage or possible crew casualties. My guess is that modeling fragments explicitly in 2008 was seen as prohibitive so they are abstracted out. @The_Capt Yes, tracking down info on this is generally difficult and I don't really think vehicle destruction is that far off from what I've been able to find. This is from the Dupuy Institute which puts armor losses during WW2 around 12% although I'm not sure how trustworthy they are as a source. One of the obvious questions (in relation to CM) is how concentrated are these losses are. 12% across a multi-day battle isn't huge but its possible that they could be concentrated in several CM scale engagements in which case they might be significant for our purposes. Anyway... I generally think that too much focus gets put on kills in this discussion when I'm more interested in the effect of artillery during and immediately after a barrage. What sort of non-fatal damage might be caused^1, what sort of suppression might be caused^2, how does artillery impact target engagement^2. ^1 I think this is question is far more important in Shock Force and Black Sea but not without merit in Cold War. 40 artillery shells might not be concentrated enough to kill a tank within the barrage area, however, it might knock out the thermal sight which is not unimportant. Obviously in BS and SF you have modern tanks within even more equipment on them that could be knocked out. And CM is the sort of game where the destruction of a smoke launcher could be critical later. ^2 Suppression not only in the sense of the crew themselves being knocked around by blast effect and being worried by the shells falling/fragments clattering off the vehicle reducing their capabilities, but the crew making the decision to lower armored shutters over thermal sights and so on. CM is often a game of minute details mattering which is why I don't think this is unimportant.

Artillery in CM has two key weaknesses that make it suspect within the context of a mech heavy environment. The first being (as I've been told) that CM does not model vehicles closing up vision ports when under artillery fire. The second that the game does not model fragmentation damage to vehicles.^1 Combined this is causing artillery to under perform against armor. I'm not sure by how much it is under performing but my suspicion is that its not a meaningless loss. Part of my reasoning is that, as you have said, the Soviet forces are often at a 2:1 to 3:1 advantage. Within this context you might have a M60 TTS platoon against a 2-3 platoons of Soviet armor and the reduction of even a single TTS's capability to effectively engage results in a significant drop in combat power for NATO. Now this can be worked around but it requires that you use artillery in a way that I suspect most players don't readily take to. For example, you have located a TTS platoon astride the advance of your FSE. A player might drop a large number of shells over 8-10 minutes only to find that no damage has been done at all to the opposing armor. Not only that but during the barrage their spotting ability is not being reduced. The player has therefore expended a large amount of firepower and a significant amount of time for no impact on the enemy. I think this fairly leads to frustration on the players part. ^1 Documented bug but I also have a suspicion that how CM would model fragmentation might be doing a bit of a disservice to them. ~~~ Overall though I actually disagree that the Soviets don't work. But I do think that the peculiarities of both the Soviets and CM work against players having initial success with them.

Yea you can find it with enough searching. I personally just find the "let me google that for you" attitude to be annoying.

From a scenario design perspective what would be fantastic is a brush that would copy all the ground clutter from one section and then allow you to paint that elsewhere. Doing woodlands with mixed trees, bushes, etc... is a huge pain if its of any significant size.

You can get very gamey with that where you move the camera around to locate the source of the sound. Against the AI it can make things a lot easier but this is really a discussion about your personal difficulty settings. You can do certain things to make scenarios easier for yourself and thats fine. However, if you start to notice that many games against the AI feel too easy and thus less fun it might make sense to increase your personal difficulty.

I wouldn't say they are OP by any means. Although I haven't done extensive testing with them. I do wish there were a cheaper version that didn't give ground units the combat bonus when engaging targets.

ABHE is a weird one and I couldn't find a good combo that would reliably bring you to the military term. Its possibly due to search engine?

A big part of this is scenario design which trends towards troops that are willing to take losses rather than go to ground after taking fire. Conscript or green troops seem to be better for reflecting troops attempts to avoid taking fire. Although the tac ai reactions still leave something to be desired.

I've got two scenarios for CMCW and another for CMBS I'm trying to get out before Christmas but they might end up being late and/or just testing versions for anyone who wants more content.

Wow this is a beast! How long did it take to put this together?

Engaging unspotted enemies (essentially skipping the C2 system) is probably the most gamey element listed here. If you are playing PBEM you essentially have to do this unless you have agreed to separate rules with your opponent and trust them. Within player vs AI gameplay its something you can avoid if you wish to make the scenario harder for yourself but odds are the scenario was tested/balanced with this gamey sort of play in mind.

RIP i've been got.