Bulletpoint

I've played this game for many years and tried out many battalion sized attacks in game. I posted this question to learn more about the historical side of things. Being a civilian, and being blessed with living in the current century, I only know what I can google up on wikipedia

I played your Aachen campaign, and enjoyed it. When I bought CMFB, I thought it would be only for the Peiper campaign, and the H2H games. But I actually found your US campaign ("Knock 'em all down") very good. I don't think there's anything wrong with splitting a battalion up into companies and then letting each company have their own mission. I just wondered if it would be interesting to give the player the whole battalion at the start, stake out some basic objectives and time-table and then let the player decide how many forces to commit, and how quickly. Also, having a large map but focusing on one company at a time could give the player a better situational awareness of the bigger environs the campaign takes place on, rather than to cut it up. Just some ideas/thoughts. I dont know if there's anything new.

Yep, of course I could do that. Just wanted to ask the experts first. I know there's a lot of WW2 knowledge on this forum.

Sounds like a propaganda story to be honest.

Ok, so what I get from this is that a typical mission for a battalion would be taking a small town. Not a village - that would be a task fit for a company. Not a big town; that would be a regiment/division job. The reason I asked the question is because I was thinking about doing a one-map campaign where you get a full battalion on the map and then a long time to achieve several objectives. Typically, designers split such missions up into three submissions, where you control one company in each mission. I was thinking about doing one big map, and then use phase lines. Company 1 is expected to reach phase line 1 within the first hour, company 2 will reach phase line 2 within the second hour, etc. Or alternatively: Each of the three companies has a simultaneous task to begin with, and will then later focus their attack on a final objective. But I find such scenarios get very tiresome to play, as you have to juggle three different companies and their disparate tactical situations each turn. Currently, this stuff is just at the thinking stage, and I don't know if I'll ever find time to do the scenario. But to start with, at least I would need to know what it would be reasonable to expect a battalion to do - say within a day.

Lots of people get crashes. The solution is usually to toggle off the shaders (press alt+R). The game engine is ancient and is starting to break up against newer hardware/driver combinations.

Wouldn't that kill the crew?

So what would typical orders / objectives for a company and battalion be? Battalion: Take the village on crossroads Company: Take a bridge/farm/hill to prepare for taking the village on crossroads? Is this approximately the scope?

The good thing about English humour is that you're always only halfway joking. https://warisboring.com/the-british-perfected-the-art-of-brewing-tea-inside-an-armored-vehicle/

I'm looking for info about what a typical WW2 infantry battalion would be expected to achieve in typical combat, and how long it would be expected to take. If attacking, how large area would it be expected to seize, and how far would it be expected to advance? How heavy opposition would it realistically be expected to overcome? If on the defence, how wide a frontage would it be expected to hold, and against what level of attack? I understand the answer will often be "it depends", and that in the real war, the theory manual often went out the window very fast. But can anyone give some ballpark estimates? Thanks a lot.

The problem with this is that the player can see these all over the map, thus giving away the position of any enemy units that he shouldn't know the whereabouts of. It is bad enough that vehicle unit crossing fences give away their positions already, and men fording streams leave splash marks while in the water. Let's say they made it so that you can only see the tracks from your own guys?

It must be hard to deal with so many unreasonable people who pester you with their 'suggestions' that were probably already discussed half a decade ago or more

Indeed and if it happened close to the turret and was particular nasty (left a very thin portion of the barrel behind) then it absolutely is possible that the weight of the extended barrel would cause the gun to droop. Oh and in a nice bit of irony my degree is in fact BSc Eng in Mechanical Engineering. Would have been ironic if I had been nasty towards you and tried to tell you that I knew better. But in this case, it's just a good thing that you were qualified to answer my question.

But that's exactly what you have to do in this campaign; in the missions that are "command decisions" you have to choose not to take certain objectives even though you could, in order to signal your intents to choose one path or another. Would be better if the game had a simple player choice interface between missions, but this is what we have to work with...

Part of the fun is to try other branches in the campaign, so I wanted to know what decisions would lead me to the open version of the final battle, in case I go back and play through the campaign a third time. But maybe you mean I could just unpack the campaign and pick the battles I want to try out? That's an option too, I guess.

Revamp the way direct fire mortars work. Currently, they either fire very fast for a full minute, wasting many shells. Or they fire very slowly (target light), which takes forever to knock out the target. Instead, they could work like in real life: The mortar is given a target order; it then then fires a couple of rounds to get the range; then it rapidly fires three shells on target. The officer evaluates the effect and can then order another salvo. This time without the spotting rounds, as the mortar already has the range. Alternatively, it could work like this: Giving a Target Brief order, the timer would only start to count down once the mortar was done aiming and finding range, and had begun the fire for effect phase.

Thanks, +1. Fascinating.

Oh yeah absolutely. The majority of the material in the gun barrel is to hold in the explosive propellant and the round and do that in such away as to continue to function correctly after hundreds of rounds and the odd knock and bash that normal use dishes out. The amount of steel needed to support itself is lots less that what is in the typical gun barrel. Having said that someone hanging off the very end might find their feet touching the ground - leverage is powerful. Then again, the thicker the steel in the barrel, the more heavy the hanging part would also be... But I'm no mechanical engineer.

Every time I see this photo, I wonder if it's photoshopped. Could the gun barrel really keep itself straight against gravity with so much of the material missing?

Actually each node on that graph is a different scenario regardless of the name similarities or not. So "[CB #15] To the Meuse", is different from "[CB #16] To the Meuse", which is different than "[CB #17] To the Meuse" and different to "[CB #18] To the Meuse!". All four of those similarly named scenarios are different. Given their similar names I suspect the author has just tweaked things slightly but the fact remains those are four different scenarios no four instances of the same scenario. I know, but just from looking at that flow chart, I don't get any info about which version does what. That's all I meant.

Thanks Ian, I've seen his flowchart before. However it doesn't show what the different versions of the battles are. It's two different scenarios, but called the same... Edit: Hmmm now that I look at it again, I notice that two of the scenarios are called "To the Meuse" and two of them are called "To the Meuse!" with an exclamation mark.

Thank you. Do you know which decisions or outcomes lead to the various versions? Just in case I re-play the campaign a third time.

When you hit a tank and it blows up, sometimes the explosion will dig a crater under the tank. Looks a bit silly, I think. Did it ever actually happen in reality? I think the energy would escape through the turret, blowing it off, rather than to dig out a crater. So my suggestion is to toggle off cratering for explosions caused by vehicle ammo storage blowing up.

It seems there are very different versions of it. The scenario in this thread is very open terrain. The one I just played yesterday had the Germans attack through three defensive lines down a very narrow road, very tightly hemmed in by heavy forest and a river.

Here you go: