Heirloom_Tomato

My vote would be for CMFI+GL bundle as it will allow you to do Monte Cassino and winter battles. The only thing it is missing off your list is Russians.😀
The upcoming Rome to Victory module will add the Free French troops and many others, extend the timeline of the game from July 43 to May 45, the longest timeline of any CM game. There are so many unique vehicles and units in CMFI, it is my favourite game in the series.
I would wait to buy Red Thunder until the new module for it comes out. This bundle will give you the winter battles on the East Front you are after.

My vote would be for CMFI+GL bundle as it will allow you to do Monte Cassino and winter battles. The only thing it is missing off your list is Russians.😀
The upcoming Rome to Victory module will add the Free French troops and many others, extend the timeline of the game from July 43 to May 45, the longest timeline of any CM game. There are so many unique vehicles and units in CMFI, it is my favourite game in the series.
I would wait to buy Red Thunder until the new module for it comes out. This bundle will give you the winter battles on the East Front you are after.

My vote would be for CMFI+GL bundle as it will allow you to do Monte Cassino and winter battles. The only thing it is missing off your list is Russians.😀
The upcoming Rome to Victory module will add the Free French troops and many others, extend the timeline of the game from July 43 to May 45, the longest timeline of any CM game. There are so many unique vehicles and units in CMFI, it is my favourite game in the series.
I would wait to buy Red Thunder until the new module for it comes out. This bundle will give you the winter battles on the East Front you are after.

The main source of my farming activities is raising pigs to satisfy all your ham and bacon cravings. We also grow corn, soybeans and wheat to feed all those hungry pigs. 
My wife and I also grow a large garden every year to feed our brood of kids. All the extra produce we have gets sold at our local farmers market. If you have ever eaten an heirloom tomato you will know why we only grow them.

It sure did not take long for this thread to get way off track. Has anyone attempted to play the scenarios I posted? Any further feedback on the idea?

The main source of my farming activities is raising pigs to satisfy all your ham and bacon cravings. We also grow corn, soybeans and wheat to feed all those hungry pigs. 
My wife and I also grow a large garden every year to feed our brood of kids. All the extra produce we have gets sold at our local farmers market. If you have ever eaten an heirloom tomato you will know why we only grow them.

I have a shotgun and he has heard all about my shooting skills. So far the rumors have been enough to keep him in line. And my mustache scares him so no need to jump to straight to the guns.

Best picture I could find of me on Google Images

My daughter has been playing a few battles with me from time to time and I think is starting to get the hang of how things work. Her boyfriend tried to play the CMBN demo against me over Christmas and very quickly got frustrated by the number of units he needed to figure out how to manoeuvre. To make the process a little easier, I built a couple of very small quick battles for them to try to fight the AI, with a very small force. I wanted to teach them how to properly fight with a small force, so hopefully a bigger one would be more manageable, a lesson I need to relearn all the time if you ask anyone of my PBEM opponents! 
This got me wondering if anyone here is interested in these battles, and if introducing them as a daily challenge would hold any appeal? I would post a new small scenario every day and you would have until I post the next scenario to add a screen shot of your results. Highest score with the lowest losses wins the day.  My plan would be to create some battles for each of the 4 WW2 titles, one title for each week. 
Before getting too carried away with this idea, I have 3 battles for CMFI+GL ready to go. You can find them here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/rcse7lwjhh7evk3/AAAaaP3xFpX856IasIER4Dzia?dl=0
The rules are quite simple:
Play as the Allies, Trees turned on, and in Iron mode. Post a screenshot of your results.
Please give them a try and let me know what you think of the idea.

Oh alright. The first pic is over the Austrian Alps, second pic climbing out of an ice cave in an Icelandic glacier. Apologies to Steve, only on the one off topic post I promise.

Well I do enjoy combat mission.

No worries! These battles are an essentially a blind quick battle. I took the qb map, added reasonable forces, and assigned them to an AI orders group. I changed very little if anything with the maps. I left the name of the quick battle map alone to give credit to the proper person who did most of the work on the battle. Any future ones I do, I will change the name and include the information in a breifing note.

The game already gives you an opportunity for command delays. Play in Iron mode, set the trees to on and turn off all the icons. If you want it even tougher, play this way in realtime, without pauses, instead of WEGO. 
Your troops will still have all the spotting and sound contacts info, and relay this information up the C2 chain, the only missing link is you. Since the big complaint seems to be that the player can see or knows too much information all the time, this takes away all of the advantage. Unless you can see the enemy on the map with your own eyeballs, there will be a delay between when you first notice your men firing their weapons or dying and you giving them orders to react.
If you think the CO should be able to have regular status updates, turn the icons back on every 5 or 10 turns. 

I just don't understand how someone can pay 60$ to fly an F86 over Georgia circa 2008, the Persian Gulf in the 2020s, or Normandy in 1944. But sure the joy of doing so is real to them. I usually tolerate and respect, until I observe those same individuals getting all worked up when one just mentions to them, or in front of them, that alternative sims exist, with better value for money to the average fan.
There already credible alternatives, who actually have expressed respect for your work in public several times, yet approach the subject matter differently. I have no reason to assume more developers will turn out to do similar games, with emphasis on different aspects or looking at different periods. The past is a different country, they do things differenly there... the catch being that we are all the past of some future. 
Tolkien was an Edwardian man who came to see:
- crashing the Empire to abject lows of oppression and eventual dissolution,
- along with the downfall of the ethical, moral  and political system of the 19th century,
- two vicious world wars,
- a great depression,
- with the cherry on top that was the cold war and the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction.
So he was perhaps a bit dramatic, and that ending sounds like being sad. But my reading is that Tolkien was just observing that the Old plants the seeds of the New, and it is a good thing for the former to leave space to the later, to make its own mistakes or reach heights never seen before. Such is the way of the world, until somebody makes the mistake to invent a potion of eternal youth 

special dedication

Cheers.

Here´s one more:

Maybe he was into Homererotic literature...
 
Mord.
 
P.S. That's right I am using it again. Seeing that all you guys ignored it last time it's what you deserve!

With a good deal of Homererotic undertones.
 
Mord.

I built this little map tonight after supper as well. It is the field beside my house shown worked on the left and then they way it looked this spring as a lush field of hay on the right. The farm has a sand ridge, several wet holes and about 4 different soil types in the 25 acres, in game 150 meters by 600 meters. The view here is from the west looking east. The first time I worked this field, I assumed it was all dry and good to go because the east portion of the field was fit. The field was covered with corn stubble after a near record harvest so there were no areas of the field that had drowned out and were without plant material, a typical giveaway of a wet hole. At the Northwest edge of the field, the sand ridge was dry but not the little hollow between the sand and the pond. The disc I was pulling got bogged down in the wet ground and I almost got the tractor stuck. Fortunately, I was able to get out without assistance but made a big mess. With the ground worked, it is fairly visible, with a full growth of hay... good luck finding it if you didn't know it was there. Can you even see the wet hole in the field on the right? I was travelling at 4.5-5 mph when I noticed the problem and still was lucky to stop in time. If you were in tank, cruising at 15 mph+ and hit that wet hole, for sure bogging is an issue.
For my two cents, I think the game give you all the details an actual trooper would have. Look at the ground conditions in the game, and then recognise any ground other paved surfaces has a chance of bogging if conditions are damp or worse. Make an effort to stick to the higher ground and ground with some sort of vegetative cover. The hay field on the right will have a reduced chance of bogging due to the root structure of the plants. But if the conditions are wet or muddy, that won't make a big difference. Remember, crew experience goes a long way to preventing bogging. Just like at work, all the new inexperienced guys seem to find the wet holes....

 
Here is a link to the file if you wish to check out the terrain types used.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4ftkpyl7j8sgbbb/Terrian Example.btt?dl=0
I would also like to add, I hope Battlefront seriously considers adding another ground condition to the game for all the upcoming modules, and that is thawing. At work today we were trying to plough some of our last soybean stubble. It has been a wet fall/early winter and we have a couple fields left to go. This morning there was a good frost in the ground and the first few hours went real well. Around 10 am the sun came out strong and started to melt the frost. We broke a chisel plough tooth and it took half an hour to fix it up. In the time we were fixing the chisel plough, the ground became to soft to continue. The reading I have been doing the last few years about the Canadians fighting in Holland, this same thing happened to them. The tanks could support them for the start of the day but as the sun warmed things up, the tanks bogged and had to be left behind. Attacks would falter and need to be tried again the next morning when the ground was frozen enough again. I would love to see the same kind of thing happen in game. Start the battle and vehicles can drive just about anywhere, but as the fight drags on more and more will be lost to bogging. It would be a great way to add a time element to the battle as a reward for those who move quickly and it would hinder those who take too long. I know the game already models this with regards to rain, so I would hope it would be easy to implement with frost.
 

That right there is beautiful!

Ok I'll meet you half way, what is out there is less than optimal and I think the manual could probably do with a little more expansive explanation of the various terrain types.
As others have said, terrain pretty much behaves as you would expect it to in real life so if you wouldn't want to walk or drive over it in real life, it will probably present the same risks in CM. For instance I've never thought to question what 'Grass Y' is because to me it is grass that is yellow in colour.
If you imagine walking down the pavement/sidewalk and you see something brown - take a closer look at it. If its dogsh1t don't stand in it, if its anything else it is probably safe to stand on. Same as CM, if the tile is brown, decide whether it is mud or not and if it is, try and avoid it. Fords and streams are also areas which should be avoided unless absolutely necessary for the same reasons that you would avoid driving over them in real life. If you don't need to drive through hedges and fences then don't because you pick up minor damage to your vehicle, as you would in real life. Off the top of my head, pretty much everything else is good to go or, if not, poses negligible chance of bogging unless of course the underlying conditions in the scenario are wet and it is raining. 
I really wouldn't stress that much about it, if you do then the only logical outcome of this is that you will find yourself plotting unit moves from action spot to adjacent action spot so as to remove any possibility of the Tac AI making a unit cross terrain that you're not sure about and that will soon end up being very tedious indeed. Herein lies a top tip though, it is worth making the effort to plot precise moves in areas where terrain is difficult or you think that the AI will do something crazy in its pathfinding.
I hope this helps and I'm sure you'll get the hang of it with a couple more games under your belt, remember that most of us are still trying to master the challenge that CM presents after years of play because it is like chess, easy to learn the mechanics but hard to master.
What is guaranteed every time you play is that one of your best/heaviest armoured/best gunned vehicles will bog and immobilise within the first ten minutes of the game, with a full ammunition load at a point on the map where it can have absolutely no effect on the battle. This of course is Murphy's Law of Combat (Mission).

I do wonder how often players these days go into the editor to play. You only see a few people (a.k.a. tpr) doing 'test scenarios' to test theories anymore. You certainly don't see many players excitedly uploading a new scenario they just built for everyone to try. Which is a shame. The editor is your playground.  Here's a screenshot of a scenario map I threw together just last night after supper (no, really). If you're worried that opponents will take unfair advantage of you because of their better knowledge of terrain, I'd bet most players wouldn't have a clue which terrain type was under feet on this particular map

The vehicle pack adds flamethrowers to the game and that alone is worth the purchase in my opinion. If you play Commonwealth forces, the Churchill Crocodile is a great tank to choose as it is effective against enemy armour and devastating against infantry. 

The vehicle pack adds flamethrowers to the game and that alone is worth the purchase in my opinion. If you play Commonwealth forces, the Churchill Crocodile is a great tank to choose as it is effective against enemy armour and devastating against infantry. 

Moderators, this is a general WWII interest piece. If it is not allowed, by all means let me know. 
With CM being as much of a simulation it is, many players and scenario designers probably have an interest in the nuts and bolts of the tactics, technology, and equipment in use during WWII. 
It took a long time for me to grasp the different ways in which combat units, especially infantry, communicated. Although there is a wealth of info the basics are lost in the pile of highly technical. 
I wrote up a bit of a primer for the US Army infantry commo tech and methods here:
https://battlelines.blog/2018/12/20/roger-that-army-communications-in-wwii/