Bulletpoint

Actually I just ran the numbers before you posted that, see my table above. As far as I can calculate, going from Green to Veteran would mean you have roughly 19% fewer troops available.

Just for the record, my cost estimate was slightly off - a company of US infantry veterans are not 7.5 % more expensive, they cost about 8.3 % more. Some interesting things though. Points cost of infantry company (late) Regular, normal, Fit, 0 leadership. Conscript: 571 Green: 651 (+80) Regular: 744 (+93) Veteran: 806 (+62) Crack: 885 (+79) Elite: 957 (+72) Seems like getting to "regular" is the costliest single step. Also, as the points required to reach each additional step don't increase, it becomes become relatively cheaper to upgrade the further up the exp levels you go. Conversely, you save 173 points going from Regular down to Conscript, that's about 23 % of the unit's cost. Going up two steps to Crack level costs you 144 points, that's a 19 % price increase over Regulars.

Yes, this is a major problem in the way the game works currently. I get around it when I design scenarios by making the HQ unit his own AI group. That allows me to place the HQ in a specific placs (or small area), and then paint a much bigger area around it for the rest of the platoon. Another related issue is that AT guns often have a separate team of ammo carriers. So if I want to make it random what spot the gun deploys to, I end up with the gun choosing one of the available spots and the ammo carriers choose another place far away from there. The only way to solve it is to make a whole separate AI plan for each spot I want the gun to be able to deploy to. Which limits how flexible I can be with the rest of the AI.

The whole point was that it would not need massive calculations, because the underlying logic would be simple: If movement line intersects a place of cover, stop moving (until next movement leg). It wouldn't give perfect results in all cases, but in the majority of cases it would be much better than just stopping at random points.

Well it's interesting to hear other points of view about this. Does anyone ever go down to green or conscript levels? Why/why not?

Fair enough, but the counterargument could then be the "cowboy scenario" - two gunslingers face each other in a quick draw contest. How valuable is it to be even 5% faster and more accurate than the other guy?

I like your point of view, and I would like to do the same. Trouble is, when I'm playing against a human opponent, I also want a chance of winning, and if he goes with all veterans, I think I need to do the same. An "arms race" kind of situation. Maybe a house rule would fix the problem, but still it's a bit odd to see much better troops only cost a bit more points. I thought the points value had to reflect the combat effectiveness of the unit.

It just seems to me veterans are much better than regulars. I'm thinking a 20 pct price premium might make the choice of what to buy more interesting. Or maybe make more experienced troops increasingly expensive in rarity points. After all, most wars were mostly fought by green or regular troops. It's only in very recent conflicts that we see small all-crack forces against irregulars (as the main event, not just as isolated incidences in a much larger conflict).

Ok, open question time. I usually only play scenarios, but recently started doing Quick Battles against an opponent, so we get to buy our own troops. I'm noticing that upgrading your troops from Regular to Veteran experience level only costs around 7.5 % extra points. That seems cheap to me. I mean, it basically costs you less than 1/10 of your troops to upgrade them all to veterans. You can have a 15 man squad of regulars or a 14 man squad of veterans - surely that is a no-brainer? Why would you ever not do that? (apart from house rules to make the game more realistic of course..)

I think a key point here is to remember this game is really hard. I've been playing for years, and I still make mistakes. So don't be too disappointed when things go wrong - it happens to everyone. With time, you'll begin to recognise two things that will help you do much better: Typical tactical situations & Game quirks. You need to learn plenty of both to really start getting success.

I have been experimenting with this too, and it seems these settings only determine the pattern of when sub-units will move, not how each unit actually moves. For example, setting move type to "assault" for a platoon will make individual squads conduct something a bit like bounding overwatch, but each team when it moves will still just plot a long "quick" movement to the next spot. Each leap will still be way too long and teams won't stop at natural points of cover. They'll happily run 10 metres past a low wall for example, to stop in open ground. It would be cool if each team had basic AI to think "Are we getting close to the end of our movement path now? Are we currently in a spot that offers cover or concealment? If so, let's just stop a bit early instead of running the last few metres". This would not need a big complicated overall battle plan AI, just some simple rules to represent common sense for the individual team.

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Burning vehicles now cast shadows?

Double post - the forum software gave an error message when I posted it and I found two copies had been posted.

This is how the manual describes it, but I doubt it's correct.. at least the behaviour I saw when I played around with various settings was that "Exit between 00:00 and 10:00" simply means "move out at random time between 00:00 and 10:00". Maybe there's a hidden logic behind it. But giving a unit more time to complete an order doesn't seem to make it move differently. It simply seems to chose a random time to start running at full speed towards the target zone. Would be nice if giving a unit 30 minutes to cover a small distance would mean that it made more breaks along the way, stopping where there is cover. But I don't see it working that way currently.

Yes I forgot to mention that I am playing an "attack" mission. I rarely ever play meeting engagements.

But these SPGs are off-map, so basically what it's left with is a forward observer and two modules of artillery.. and a sniper and a mortar I think. Not exactly a balanced force. I noticed before the AI purchasing is out of whack, but only playing US against Germans. In that case, the AI nearly always buys a unit of ATGs.

Whn I set up a 'tiny' sized quick battle and make the AI choose its own troops, it always buys a Cannon Company. I can keep clicking on the "suggestions" button but it will keep sugesting the same thing. Sometimes it will add a mortar section, but apart from that it just keeps on with the cannon company, never choosing infantry, armoured infantry, or anything else. Even in a tiny battle there are plenty of points for a proper infantry company, so I don't get why it's stuck with this cannon idea?

I agree. The withdrawal feature will be a great addition, but area fire will be difficult to use well with the current order options. Never understood why the AI is based on "exit between" orders anyway. It gives of course a way to build in some unpredictability in the orders, so you don't know if the right flank attack will begin at T+5, T+10, or T+15 minutes, but it's extremely cumbersome to program the AI this way, compared to a simple "Wait here for x minutes" order. The whole AI programming interface could do with a reworking to make it more flexible and powerful, while still keeping things simple. Aside from big reworkings, this game has so many "low hanging design fruits" that could be picked to improve the game with hardly any effort. Just a little thing like being able to activate a reinforcement by a trigger would open up so many possibilities for scenario design, and it would be fast and easy to implement.

@Johnlondon125 It's actually very simple, forget the advanced explanations for a moment. You can call in artillery only by HQ units (they have a little flag as their icon) and Forward Observers (they have binoculars as their unit icon). Radios or not doesn't matter at all.

Yeah the barns are made of cardboard, never take cover in one. They look like they are made of some kind of stone, but they act in the game as classical American wooden barns.

I think you just summed up the entire world history in one sentence.

I prefer not to use Google Earth too much, for exactly this reason. For me, it's more fun to find a high-resolution aerial recon photo from the war and then try to recreate that in as much detail as the editor will alllow. But I guess if you want to do a specific battle, you'll need to take and use what you can get. In that case, my suggestion would be to do these steps when working with Google Earth: 1: A virtual walk-through of the area and remove all houses from your map that are not clearly old. 2: Do a "scale down" of the road network. With that I mean to drop down all roads one level of quality. A modern, well travelled road becomes the CM regular road. Smaller paved roads become dirt roads. Dirt roads become foot paths or disappear. Long straight modern highways are generally just erased, unless you know for sure they were there at the time. 3: Cut all fields in half by hedges, low walls, or bocage (in Normandy of course). It's my impression that fields were generally smaller in 1944, and many small farms have later been bought up, fusing fields together. 4: Add more trees, bushes, and shrubbery. Weeds, too. I think the 1944 rural landscape would have had much more foliage, also weeds and shrubs at the edges and corners of fields. 1944 was a time before large-scale herbicide use and intensive mechanical clearing had really taken off. Tractors were in use in some places, but a lot of work was still done by manpower and horses. (here's a nice graph of tractors vs horses). 5: Consider making streams of flowing water less straight. There was a time in modern agriculture where a lot of the little brooks were straightened and dug out to make them more like canals. With bad results for wildlife. For this reason, they are now being re-curved in some places. Do your bit for CM wildlife Also remember that the land close to the small streams would often have been more swampy and marshy than today, due to less draining pumps being installed back then. So having a "golf lawn" straight down to the water would have been rare.

Some really cool work you're doing on this. Never read the book, but it sure looks grim.

In CMBN it seems to be weak against everything. My pet peeve is the nearly indestructible hedgerows, which you won't have to worry about in CMFB The effectiveness of artillery against troops in the open has also been dialled down, some say it's to balance things since the game has troops bunching up more than in real life. I even have a savegame showing 150mm artillery airburst directly above two scouts. Result: One of them was lightly wounded. They were my own scouts, but still I thought it was a bit odd...