Pelican Pal

There are definitely game solutions the the problem.
The "super hardcore mode", which I forget the name of, could provide some opportunity. Namely removing 3d models for enemy troops in most situations and replacing them with a confirmed contact marker that is placed in some 20 to 30 meter radius of their actual position. Perhaps actually using 3d models only when the contact is sent up to through the Comms chain to the highest level on the map.

Broadly I agree with Kaunitz but would take a slightly different tack. Tanks themselves are not overpowered, but Combat Mission does a poor job at simulating their weaknesses for a variety of reasons.
CM does a honestly very poor job with fortifications.
Infantry lack a good ability to safely move from point-to-point in a trenchline Firing steps or even basic keyholing isn't done Buildings cannot be fortified or made part of an overall plan No overhead cover etc.... This just means that defensive positions are much weaker to fire and destruction that they generally were. It becomes an increasingly large problem as your opponent gains more firepower (e.g. tanks),
 
 
The other primary reason is player related, players have too much control. Largely nullifying the negatives of armored vehicles.
Armor always has infantry support I can't really recall the last time I had my armor advance without an infantry screen or recon element. Yet when you read histories you find tons of situations where armor advances without infantry. Its almost a trope. Armor advances with infantry, infantry is pinned down, armor continues to advance into enemy lines, realize the infantry isn't with them, turn around and drive back.
Essentially though communication and combat friction armor should be alone far more often than a player will let it be. Which leads into the next point
Player can borg spot for their armor The player always has a full intel picture and can inform everyone's moves based off of that. Wherein reality your tanks might not know where the forward defenses are because they aren't being shot at by them. They might drive straight through a strong position that is solely engaging infantry, for example.
 
 
 
An example from a large scale 100 player shooter I play called Hell Let Loose. I was the gunner of a Sherman and we advanced forward towards the objective and found a large amount of German infantry to our front. We stopped and began to engage them (range of maybe 125 meters) and after sometime engaged and destroyed a Panther. This whole time we were wondering why our infantry wasn't also advancing up to us?
Finally we noticed that next to our tank (maybe 20 meters away in some fortifications) was a number of heavily armed German infantry. They had no weaponry to destroy our tank, and being focused on the enemy to our front we did not notice them. They were able to keep our infantry pinned far behind us for several minutes until we finally pivoted and engaged them.
 
Essentially a key weakness of armor is its ability to incorrectly interpret what is happening and where it is at.  In CM the player largely nullifies that weakness.

As an aside this is one of the reasons I believe its beneficial for players to also try out relatively "arcade" first person shooter titles. All games do a lot to remove friction, but there is still more of it in a multiplayer game than a single-player game like CM. In my above example, from Hell Let Loose, we actually had an infantry leader on the "radio" telling us that they couldn't come up because there were Germans to their front. We misinterpreted that to mean that the Germans to OUR front were somehow still engaging the infantry.

Regardless you managed to fill what was an interesting thread with chaff.

Personally I'm thankful we have this one currently active to draw in all that waste.

Yea, it would be. Like I said earlier I kinda wonder if the research that BF is doing for these games is actually worth it in the sense that it doesn't actually trickle down to the players. You have to have the knowledge beforehand, and by the description of the "research pain" it seems unlikely if any players actually do. Taking the old info from CM:BB or CM:AK would be sufficient. Like if you aren't making the player a stakeholder in your level of detail what is the point of it? I can't easily confirm anything BF is doing is correct, I can't easily figure out what the differences are between June '44 and December '44. That should be a huge selling point, but they don't take advantage of it.
Yea, I recall Warts 'n All jumping down some dudes throat in a discussion about captured equipment because he made a youtube video he didn't like? SOmething like that, I don't tend to follow Combat Mission's social media scene. And unlike this current thread it was a pretty interesting topic until it got derailed.

I wonder if Honda would sell many cars if it ignored users comments about what they liked and disliked about its cars, or if only positive comments appeared on its website?

Well, I hadn't named names...  I find it odd, though, that you would equate being "patient" with being a "fanboi".  For the record, I view them as being quite different.  

Yes, but the problem is that many newish posters on the forum were not been around as those issues that were hashed and rehashed many times (often many years ago); sometimes "supporters" respond respectfully but as often as not they respond with an unwarranted degree of exasperation and condescension for bringing such and such topic up again.  
I suspect that if you're seeing less back-and-forth than you expected, it is because people with critical questions or comments just don't post as often.  As you point out, on other forums this board's reputation is that it is not welcoming of critical comments, and I don't think that that reputation was is completely unearned.
While I agree that not very many juvenile morons post on this forum, that is mainly because the games do not appeal much to juvenile morons.

Fair enough,. although as mentioned the fact is that there are plenty of fanbois on this forum, and the poster in question simply noted their existence without labeling anyone as such, so I'm not sure who would have objected, especially to the extent of, for instance, drawing-and-quartering or other medieval tortures.  

Not really, CMRT and CMFB have tank riders, a very different and cool tactical treat.I purchase all titles to have the "full Combat Mission experience", each title has a unique feel to it, Do i love game engine changes and new features? yes(love them🙌) and I wait patiently for them, maybe major changes/additions to the CMX2 engine will never come and its run its course, I dont know?someone does though 

yes i would love a CM encylopedia within the game, click on a vehicle , weapon or unit and "goto history" would be awsome

You have an issue like the Engine 4 upgrade (paid) essentially breaking infantry interaction with fortifications for months on end. Not that fortifications are that fleshed out in CM, but the community response was very measured. "Haters" as a group seem largely fictitious outside of like 1-2 actual people. Especially so if you ignore the time period directly around the original CM:SF release. Which I can sympathize with to an extant because man... that release.

What CM is, is a game system that is pretty close to being fantastic but is often just pretty good. Which is in many ways is more frustrating than if it were just crap.

- There is a powerful scenario editor that lets you do a lot

However, it is just weak enough to prevent designers from easily doing really interesting things.

-  CM has pretty solid 1:1 design

Except that commitment to 1:1 can often result in unrealistic situations. Like personnel in a half-track sitting bolt upright when hunkering down slightly would save them from being hit, or weird LOS issues.

- CM has some fun campaigns

Yet, with rare exceptions, they don't feel particularly connected.

- CM has pretty good content

If you are interested in a very specific setting/time period you are likely going to have to wait years to see it.
 
CM does a lot right, which makes what it does poorly all the more annoying.
 

Its clear that the animations (well base sitting stance) is getting men who would otherwise not be hit killed. Half-track passengers will get repeatedly head shot by rounds that are bouncing off the vehicles armor solely because they sit in the vehicle as if they were on parade.

In historic photos you do not see men sitting in half-tracks they way they sit in them in CM and there is good reason for that.
Animations can have a pretty dramatic effect on the actual combat outcome of any given fight. Which is why I mentioned them in the first place.
 
 
That is essentially what I'm talking about. A lot of the basic animations in CM are not making men small targets so you have lackluster fortifications, well decent "hasty" fortifications and then you have men who aren't firing over the lip of the trench/foxhole and often expose a significant portion of their upper chest.
I ran some quick tests this afternoon in an old version of Red Thunder and HMGs were picking up kills at 800 meters and downright deadly at 200 meters. LMGs on the otherhand were not getting kills against running infantry at both 800 meters and 200 meters.

They seemed to consistently shoot high or low and there wasn't a lot of fire inline with the target. Whereas HMGs were often off on the horizontal but vertically had good aim.
I wonder if LMGs get a negative for being fried from the standing or kneeling position as that might be a factor? Its often hard to test accuracy as we don't have good information on what positively and negatively effects it. As far as I can tell CM doesn't do any modelling of weapon stabilization on miscellaneous items (trees, window, furniture, fence line, etc..) But I'm not entirely sure.

Re: Tank MGs are too accurate
I suspect part of the "problem" is that the game does a "hit calculation" by the shooter and change the point of aim for the gun depending on whether the shooter hits/misses. On a miss the point of aim is going to be off of the target by a certain distance. Vehicle mounted MGs, when they miss, don't miss by nearly as much as tripod mounted MGs. So the chance for collateral damage is much higher. Whereas tripod mounted MGs will "miss" and just go totally wide of the entire element its firing at.
This isn't necessarily a bad interaction, but it is visually very weird because it feels like the gunner is intentionally throwing his aim to meet the calculation the game is doing. Whether its correct or not you'd have to do a fair amount of testing for. But visually it feels off which, imo, isn't something that can't be totally discarded since the game has gone 1:1. The results need to be right, but it also needs to visually look correct too.

As an aside I would really love to see MGs traverse their fire more often. They don't really seem to do it at all.


Re: Fortifications
One of the key problems I run into, and this shows up elsewhere, is that the exposure of the man really determines how survivable he is. Essentially not being hit is better than being hit with a good saving throw. Fortifications tend to increase the amount of visual exposure in most cases. Meaning that even though the men are getting good saving throws they are also taking more hits than they would be if they were just prone.
 
The most obvious example of animation/exposure causing deaths is with half-tracks. Where the men are sitting bolt upright and take far more hits than if they were hunched over in the track. Similarly men don't fire over the lip of a fortification, but do so at a full kneeling position. Often leaving much of their upper torso exposed. Its been a problem in CMx2 as far back as CM:SF where there was a store window option for buildings. Resulting into entire squads essentially lining up to be killed at the window. If there is one improvement I would like to see in CM is an increased number of positions/animations since they track so closely with lethality.

Re: Tank MGs are too accurate
I suspect part of the "problem" is that the game does a "hit calculation" by the shooter and change the point of aim for the gun depending on whether the shooter hits/misses. On a miss the point of aim is going to be off of the target by a certain distance. Vehicle mounted MGs, when they miss, don't miss by nearly as much as tripod mounted MGs. So the chance for collateral damage is much higher. Whereas tripod mounted MGs will "miss" and just go totally wide of the entire element its firing at.
This isn't necessarily a bad interaction, but it is visually very weird because it feels like the gunner is intentionally throwing his aim to meet the calculation the game is doing. Whether its correct or not you'd have to do a fair amount of testing for. But visually it feels off which, imo, isn't something that can't be totally discarded since the game has gone 1:1. The results need to be right, but it also needs to visually look correct too.

As an aside I would really love to see MGs traverse their fire more often. They don't really seem to do it at all.


Re: Fortifications
One of the key problems I run into, and this shows up elsewhere, is that the exposure of the man really determines how survivable he is. Essentially not being hit is better than being hit with a good saving throw. Fortifications tend to increase the amount of visual exposure in most cases. Meaning that even though the men are getting good saving throws they are also taking more hits than they would be if they were just prone.
 
The most obvious example of animation/exposure causing deaths is with half-tracks. Where the men are sitting bolt upright and take far more hits than if they were hunched over in the track. Similarly men don't fire over the lip of a fortification, but do so at a full kneeling position. Often leaving much of their upper torso exposed. Its been a problem in CMx2 as far back as CM:SF where there was a store window option for buildings. Resulting into entire squads essentially lining up to be killed at the window. If there is one improvement I would like to see in CM is an increased number of positions/animations since they track so closely with lethality.

RE: Scenario design overall
What building your own scenarios does, at least for me, is point out the limitation more than just sticking with QBs and premade scenarios. Once you start opening the system up and you realize that there is  a lot you can';t do with the limited amount provided. Sure you can do jeeps and artillery if you want, but that isn't particularly interesting. Take 37mm's Heaven and Earth... That is a dramatic change that is only possible because CM:SF has a relatively broad stable of units. CM:SF, in fact, can do a decent job of representing various conflicts outside of its actual ~3 month time period thanks to the existence of so much Cold War Soviet kit. Some of my favorite CM scenarios were African and Middle-East civil war scenarios. These are scenarios which are well outside of the scope of the game as made, but there is sufficent breadth to make possible.

And really what you are doing is using basic building blocks (infantry with Warsaw Pact weaponry, T-55s, BMP-1s, etc...) to create interesting engagements that only broadly resemble the TO&E of any actual Nation that would be fighting with these weapons. In fact you can do a modern battle with "Kurdish" forces using American equipment fighting "Isis" troops with stolen American equipment and various Soviet era vehicles even though there isn't anything close to a well researched layout of these forces in the game.
 

You are ignoring the obvious solution here and imagining that you'd have to release some absurd "uber game". DCS, for example, has a Core Launcher and numerous modules which in the end create a single mega game. The layout of CM, as it stands, would be adaptable to that selfsame system.

Rather than having ~6 families each with separate launchers and separate modules. You would have:

CORE LAUNCHER
Which hosted each family

Family Module
Which would be the base game for each time period.

Child Module
Which would be individual modules that are financially attached to a family module.

This layout is far from ironic and would actual be a pretty rational system if BFC wasn't as far into the separation system that they currently have. Since with a single "parent" you wouldn't have ~6 different engine upgrades and patches but instead just a single. While you could still have CM:BN, CM:FB, CM:FI as they exist.
 

I get the feeling that 76mm is talking more about some of the complete formations. Within the editor there are quite a few formations that you can pick which essentially aren't ever used as a whole within CM, but are instead already being broken up by the scenario designer/QB player.
 
 

Broadly I agree with Kaunitz but would take a slightly different tack. Tanks themselves are not overpowered, but Combat Mission does a poor job at simulating their weaknesses for a variety of reasons.
CM does a honestly very poor job with fortifications.
Infantry lack a good ability to safely move from point-to-point in a trenchline Firing steps or even basic keyholing isn't done Buildings cannot be fortified or made part of an overall plan No overhead cover etc.... This just means that defensive positions are much weaker to fire and destruction that they generally were. It becomes an increasingly large problem as your opponent gains more firepower (e.g. tanks),
 
 
The other primary reason is player related, players have too much control. Largely nullifying the negatives of armored vehicles.
Armor always has infantry support I can't really recall the last time I had my armor advance without an infantry screen or recon element. Yet when you read histories you find tons of situations where armor advances without infantry. Its almost a trope. Armor advances with infantry, infantry is pinned down, armor continues to advance into enemy lines, realize the infantry isn't with them, turn around and drive back.
Essentially though communication and combat friction armor should be alone far more often than a player will let it be. Which leads into the next point
Player can borg spot for their armor The player always has a full intel picture and can inform everyone's moves based off of that. Wherein reality your tanks might not know where the forward defenses are because they aren't being shot at by them. They might drive straight through a strong position that is solely engaging infantry, for example.
 
 
 
An example from a large scale 100 player shooter I play called Hell Let Loose. I was the gunner of a Sherman and we advanced forward towards the objective and found a large amount of German infantry to our front. We stopped and began to engage them (range of maybe 125 meters) and after sometime engaged and destroyed a Panther. This whole time we were wondering why our infantry wasn't also advancing up to us?
Finally we noticed that next to our tank (maybe 20 meters away in some fortifications) was a number of heavily armed German infantry. They had no weaponry to destroy our tank, and being focused on the enemy to our front we did not notice them. They were able to keep our infantry pinned far behind us for several minutes until we finally pivoted and engaged them.
 
Essentially a key weakness of armor is its ability to incorrectly interpret what is happening and where it is at.  In CM the player largely nullifies that weakness.

As an aside this is one of the reasons I believe its beneficial for players to also try out relatively "arcade" first person shooter titles. All games do a lot to remove friction, but there is still more of it in a multiplayer game than a single-player game like CM. In my above example, from Hell Let Loose, we actually had an infantry leader on the "radio" telling us that they couldn't come up because there were Germans to their front. We misinterpreted that to mean that the Germans to OUR front were somehow still engaging the infantry.

Just a warning when using the assault command. The AI will allow the teams within the squad to move independently of each other. However, because they are still part of a single squad they share state. This means that the moving element, if pinned, can then cause the static element (who should be engaging the enemy) to become pinned.

It makes assault pretty useless when you really want it to work as suddenly the ~five guys you expect to cover the maneuver element decide that they too are taking fire. Splitting teams splits the state of each team. Meaning that your overwatch element will not become pinned by the maneuver element being fired on.

Just a warning when using the assault command. The AI will allow the teams within the squad to move independently of each other. However, because they are still part of a single squad they share state. This means that the moving element, if pinned, can then cause the static element (who should be engaging the enemy) to become pinned.

It makes assault pretty useless when you really want it to work as suddenly the ~five guys you expect to cover the maneuver element decide that they too are taking fire. Splitting teams splits the state of each team. Meaning that your overwatch element will not become pinned by the maneuver element being fired on.

Just a warning when using the assault command. The AI will allow the teams within the squad to move independently of each other. However, because they are still part of a single squad they share state. This means that the moving element, if pinned, can then cause the static element (who should be engaging the enemy) to become pinned.

It makes assault pretty useless when you really want it to work as suddenly the ~five guys you expect to cover the maneuver element decide that they too are taking fire. Splitting teams splits the state of each team. Meaning that your overwatch element will not become pinned by the maneuver element being fired on.

Just a warning when using the assault command. The AI will allow the teams within the squad to move independently of each other. However, because they are still part of a single squad they share state. This means that the moving element, if pinned, can then cause the static element (who should be engaging the enemy) to become pinned.

It makes assault pretty useless when you really want it to work as suddenly the ~five guys you expect to cover the maneuver element decide that they too are taking fire. Splitting teams splits the state of each team. Meaning that your overwatch element will not become pinned by the maneuver element being fired on.

Why is this astonishing to you? 

Basic operating procedure commands exist in a variety of games and they are great for turning a relatively static command into a dynamic one that can work in many situations. If you are confused by the usefulness of SOPs well....

- Hunt (triggers on spotting an enemy)
- SOP upon trigger *Fallback*
- Movement type *slow*

And suddenly a movement type that will see men lay in an open field for ~45 seconds waiting to be killed turns into a command that sees them returning to cover. All without cluttering up the action selection menu. I'm actually flabbergasted that you can't see the benefits of SOPs in a 1:1 tactical game.
 
Yea for sure. I think the best solution is to just buy a second weaker gun that has an extended firing arc to nail trash vehicles and then a real AT gun with a closer in arc for armor. But that can be expensive and difficult in many situations. Part of the overall issue is that we have a set group of commands and then rely on the tacai throughout the action minute to handle things. Yet the tacai is completely incapable of understanding context and acts passively.

Which given the dynamic nature of the battlefield isn't great.

Yes totally. In the v2 engine upgrade the made MGs more effective and now you cannot just run at the and expect to win the day.

Part of the issue is that BF does a fair amount of research, but for most players it doesn't actually matter. CM:FI is almost certainly better researched content than CM:AK. However, for 90% of players directly using the pre-existing CMAK TO&Es would be more than enough. Because BFC is apparently going through hoops to track down the correct information - so most players definitely aren't going to care. They lack the means and the time to do so and that creates a saminess to the proceedings.

(Clarifying the above) If BFC has to go through pains to track down the correct information for a time period then the player base isn't really going to care because they:

1. Can't verify or gain new information from the work that BFC has done.
2. Actually be able to tell when something is wrong or right

Once info is tracked down that information needs to be shared in some sort of consumable fashion with the audience for them to also become a stakeholder in that level of detail. Right now if the audience wants to be a shared stakeholder they have to go through the selfsame hoops that BFC did to find the info.

I was recently playing Graviteam's North Africa game and they have a section of the game that details some basic stats for each unit and also a few paragraphs of relevant info. So when I started a battle and found the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M6_Gun_Motor_Carriage I was able to say "what the hell is that" and then quickly become acquainted some history. All without leaving the match I was in.

That connection between the game and research can be content, but CM doesn't really do that. You select the year and month and a rifle squad appears from on high with an STG-44 why? We don't know. To an extant it makes me pine for the in-game information tabs of stuff like the original Rome Total War. Even stuff as simple as terrain differences aren't really known to anyone. If you made a CM:FI style map in CM:BS are there any differences?
I get the impression that a lot of people here exclusively, are almost exclusively, play CM. For folks who play other games those other games will offer different experiences and obviously we have limited time. The other day I was the Sherman crewmen who suppressed a German trenchline in Hell Let Loose. Its not CM, but many of the thrills that happen in CM happen in other games.

Other than that the tendency for PBEM games to become abandoned by people for various reasons, occasional annoyances setting them up, and the balkanization of the series all can make it a bit of a pain with various engine and module combinations now existing. PBEMs being abandoned or slowing to a painful crawl is my single biggest issue followed by engine and module upgrades. I don't want to come back to a match and wonder "what was I doing".

Part of the issue is that BF does a fair amount of research, but for most players it doesn't actually matter. CM:FI is almost certainly better researched content than CM:AK. However, for 90% of players directly using the pre-existing CMAK TO&Es would be more than enough. Because BFC is apparently going through hoops to track down the correct information - so most players definitely aren't going to care. They lack the means and the time to do so and that creates a saminess to the proceedings.

(Clarifying the above) If BFC has to go through pains to track down the correct information for a time period then the player base isn't really going to care because they:

1. Can't verify or gain new information from the work that BFC has done.
2. Actually be able to tell when something is wrong or right

Once info is tracked down that information needs to be shared in some sort of consumable fashion with the audience for them to also become a stakeholder in that level of detail. Right now if the audience wants to be a shared stakeholder they have to go through the selfsame hoops that BFC did to find the info.

I was recently playing Graviteam's North Africa game and they have a section of the game that details some basic stats for each unit and also a few paragraphs of relevant info. So when I started a battle and found the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M6_Gun_Motor_Carriage I was able to say "what the hell is that" and then quickly become acquainted some history. All without leaving the match I was in.

That connection between the game and research can be content, but CM doesn't really do that. You select the year and month and a rifle squad appears from on high with an STG-44 why? We don't know. To an extant it makes me pine for the in-game information tabs of stuff like the original Rome Total War. Even stuff as simple as terrain differences aren't really known to anyone. If you made a CM:FI style map in CM:BS are there any differences?
I get the impression that a lot of people here exclusively, are almost exclusively, play CM. For folks who play other games those other games will offer different experiences and obviously we have limited time. The other day I was the Sherman crewmen who suppressed a German trenchline in Hell Let Loose. Its not CM, but many of the thrills that happen in CM happen in other games.

Other than that the tendency for PBEM games to become abandoned by people for various reasons, occasional annoyances setting them up, and the balkanization of the series all can make it a bit of a pain with various engine and module combinations now existing. PBEMs being abandoned or slowing to a painful crawl is my single biggest issue followed by engine and module upgrades. I don't want to come back to a match and wonder "what was I doing".

Here a period pic showing German soldiers carrying their rifles one handed. Though it may appear otherwise , this includes the man in the foreground. Thought at first he had both hand on it, but that's an artifact of the image shadows, for I you look near the back of his left thigh, you can clearly see his left hand. As you can see from the smaller B/W pic below, Pinterest sepia tones the larger format one.

i



Here we have an LMG team charging into battle in what I consider a great combat pic.


The caption says these are men of the 709th Infantry Division in Montebourg , Normandy coming out their shelter and rushing to their fighting positions. The MG-42 gunner is obviously in a hurry, since neither of his boots is on the ground.


Have tried everything I could to get the pic at link to post, but it is an excellent quality B/W pic clearly showing one handed rifle carry. 

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fs-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com%2F736x%2F34%2Fdb%2F37%2F34db37d126f1ce52172063bd92bcd3ae.jpg&f=1&nofb=1
Famous Barbarossa pic showing the Panzer Grenadiers rushing in and holding their rifles in one hand.

https://static.abc.es/Media/201211/30/nazis-2--644x362.jpg

Regards,

John Kettler