Bulletpoint

In that case, why are they shouting "incoming, take cover!" 2 seconds before the shells drop?

Because they hear the incoming shells?

But do they start to drop down before the first shell hits, or is it just a reaction to nearby explosions?

^^^ This. Also better lead more experienced troops will stay down and not get up an try to run away - which is deadly when under a barrage. Ok, I take that back. Units won't actually go to ground when artillery is incoming. They will just shout "get down!" but stay up. I could have sworn I once saw units dive for cover when they heard artillery - before the rounds actually landed.

Haha, well actually it wasn't meant to be some kind of IQ test (what symbol comes next?). I just wrote something and thought maybe it's just me seeing things, so didn't want to call upon the awesome might of the community...

It's not restricted terrain. It's a wide open road.

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You're probably right for gameplay purposes, I'm just vain when it comes to the way my maps look

A related topic is how infantry will go out of their way to run on roads. This is a problem because there is no cover on a road. This is especially apparent when designing AI plans. It's very difficult to make the AI troops not get attracted to the road like a magnet, even from a considerable distance.

There's actually no water under the bridge, the scenario is taking place in late summer in Normandy, and the bridge is a place where water runs off farmland during the winter. The actual terrain tile under the bridge is "dirt red". Even if the game mistakenly thinks that it has to cross one tile of dirt, this should not mean that it decides to take a huge detour to avoid it.

Well the bridge is not critical, but it plays an interesting role both for gameplay and for the beauty of the map, so I want to keep it. I actually managed to solve the problem by blocking off all other paths that the halftrack could possibly take, so that there's only one way forward. Which is a pity because I wanted the player to have some more freedom about where to go.

I'm doing a scenario where there's a straight road with a bridge in the middle. Problem: When I order a halftrack to move down the road, it will do everything it can to avoid crossing the bridge. This includes turning around, driving back, crushing through hedges and going offroad, then moving forward on the side of the road, passing the spot it's supposed to go to, then crush through other obstacles, return to the road, then turn around and drive back to the destination spot. If I order the halftrack to move right up to the bridge and then cross it, and then continue, it sort of works. But any longer movement order, and this behaviour starts to happen.

Well Tiger Poaching was one that seemed silly to me, but in that one, at least the enemy tanks rolled towards you, so they had a chance to shoot back. Not that it mattered much, I ended up destroying around 25 tanks if I remember correctly. Then there's one later (Hunters in The Mist?) where you have loads of enemy tanks rolling in from west to east, and you come up from the south and just have them rolling past, shooting them. I mean, after the first wave probably the US forces would notice they were going into an ambush... But the same could be said about most defensive missions I've played in this game. Also most of the ones in Scottish Corridor. Designers know that the AI can't do anything resembling a real attack, so they just turn up the enemy numbers and experience to compensate. I don't think this produces realistic or enjoyable scenarios at all. Oh, and the pitch black night mission towards the end that just didn't technically work. Having "ghost tanks" driving around straight through your units, smashing through low walls, but with nobody spotting anything, even when my panzerfaust infantry were sitting in the same square as the enemy tank... It stopped being a wargame and started being a Benny Hill show. However, many of the missions where you are on the attack were excellent. Difficult as hell, some of them, but definitely good challenges.

As far as I know, some broken features of CMBN were never fixed. Such as the auto force selection for quick battles giving bizarre and useless results, and even crashing if you select "mixed" forces. I only have CMBN, but people tell me this stuff has been fixed in the newer games. It seems despite many patches these fixes never made it back to the Normandy game

This is getting into political territory, so I won't continue the argument, apart from to say that we disagree here - because I would say that tactics today are often very influenced by political sensibilities.

Well I can only speculate, but I've noticed that troops will call out artillery and duck down before the first shell lands. Prone units are much better at surviving artillery generally, so just being faster to go to ground would protect veterans, even if no special veteran saving rolls were applied. I don't know if veterans get special bullet-dodging powers in the game, but if they do, the effect must be quite subtle. I can't say I have noticed it.

Isn't it rather because modern western armies are more casualty averse in general? In a democracy, money is cheaper than blood. So spending on lots of HE and info tech is preferable to buying lots of body bags. One might say the modern Western army is similar to the Russian Afghanistan example above, with infantry mostly moving in after the enemy is blown to bits.

I often wondered if better quality troops are better at ducking down before getting hit by an artillery barrage though?

If the performance increase is linear, might the actual benefit the player receives still be exponential? Not a trick question, I'm just wondering about this. There's a lot of difference between a near miss and hitting the target, even if one might say the guy hitting what he shoots at is "only" slightly more accuracte than the guy who misses..

Thanks - I was very happy to see my guys get out of there, especially when the 81mm mortars started to come down on where they had been just 60 seconds before I think my opponent hadn't spotted my teams running away, or he would likely have stopped his mortars firing. Suppression not only prevents enemy fire, but also observation ...

I'd like to add that I try to play not just like a game of chess, but also in a relatively realistic way. For example, in a recent game I started out deploying a screen of troops in an exposed location, and if I had played the game only as a game, I would just write off those guys as expendable and let them defend as long as they could. But when things got too hot out there, I started doing suppressive fire to cover the screening troops while they ran back across a field to safety. I actually managed to get them all back to friendly lines alive and well, and this stuff is so much more fun to me than just winning the game

Yep, and that's the reason why I posted this thing in the first place. To hear other players' take on this, maybe find out if there's something I hadn't thought about.

I like both things actually, but even when I play competitively, I like to keep things reasonably historically correct and believable. So I really think it's a good thing that we have the rarity system and the formation overhead cost etc. to keep people from cherrypicking. I would just personally like to see a points system that encouraged players more strongly to play with a variety of unit qualities, with most of the soldiers being pretty low (or at least basic) quality, then some groups of veterans, and maybe a couple of rare crack troops here and there. Hardly ever any elites. One way this could be done would be to increase the points for going up levels exponentially. Instead of charging a nearly fixed amount of points (80 points, say, per level), you could say each level cost 10 percent more than the previous level. So going from Conscript to Green might cost you, say, 80 points, but going the final step from Crack to Elite might cost you 400 points (just arbitrary numbers to give an example of the general idea).

Well I think they know very well there's a big difference, at least I sure see the difference in the results when fighting veteran VS green. The vets mop the floor with the greens. But whether or not this quality difference is appropriately reflected in the points cost, well, I don't know.