H1nd

Thanks for the well constructed and thorough feedback!

My latest thread on twitter. Its in Finnish, but the twitter translation function seems to work rather decently. I will probably translate it in english at some point if I have the time. Cheers! -H1nd/Pasi Paroinen

Its interesting time over here for certain. So much has changed in the past 7 months in terms of diplomacy, internal politics and the general atmosphere in regards to military matters and national defence. I have to admit that it feels strange to be going to refresher training knowing, that there are almost certainly going to be future NATO partner forces training with us (if we get past the end boss Turkey).

I have been active on my part in the Finnish twitter sphere throughout the war, but decided for once to write down a thread in english as well. Take it with ton of salt but the pictures are hopefully pretty. Cheers! -H1nd/Pasi Paroinen

By unsing the the awesome powers of necroposting, I am resurrecting this thread from beyond the veil! Just to link an nice video from international exercises conducted in Finland this summer, where a FDF combat engineers demonstrated minefield breaching using a long "bangalore torpedo" or putkiraivain (pipe deminer) as it is called in finnish. Whole affair is intensively trained and among the principal basic tasks of FDF combat engineer squads. I remember trying to explain this device on this forum several times in the past but alas we had no good examples of the device in use on youtube back in the day. But here it is at 5:01-6:20, This is why I would love to see CM engineer squads beign able to use the generic blast command to remove minefield tiles (in ww2 and modern CM). Similar devices are probably in use elsewhere, and these are only one of several explosive solutions for quick demining: well within the timeframe of Combat mission scenarios. Cheers! -H1nd

humm... nothing but crickets ehh..?

I would like to experiment a bit so bear with me. First of all I would like to play a really huge QB with a large map cropped from mastermap. For the starters I am proposing a map cropped from the excellent stoumont mastermap with the terrain around La Gleize as the battlefield. It is a large and heavy map so only people with good hardware are wanted here (sorry!). Next experimental bit: I have always found the QB point limits very restrictive, especially for the defender. There is just so little points to go around that you can't really sacrifice any for field fortifications which I think is one of the reasons why defender is usually heavily overmatched (at least in my experience) in QBs. So I am proposing following settings for the game: HUGE Meeting Engagement - But the map and deployment zones are actually made with one side defending and already holding the objectives. This gives the defender nice 7140 points of which I propose that the defender must use at least 1400 points on field fortifications: bunkers, barbed wire, foxholes, trenches, hedgehogs but I would be inclined to ban mines altogether since it can be too easy to 100% block all avenues of approach in most maps. This way the defender is left with 7140-1400= 5740 for units/trps/arty etc just like he would have in HUGE probe (5732). Accordingly we will give the attacker +25% points to boost their points to 8900 points which is roughly equal to the points that the attacker would get in Huge Attack (8898). This way we will attain the basic point balance of a huge probe/attack but give the defender some boost with extra points for them trenches and such. Loose rarity: just so we can have fancy stuff as well. 2 Hour play time. We can either play as GER attacking vs US from the east with muddy ground and foggy weather in december or as US attacking vs GER from the west in snow conditions in January. Some houserules: TRP's are ok for both sides (attacker has made some preliminary calculations/scouting for the arty) No defender prepanned artillery on turn 1 and no artillery on attackers deployment zone at any point unless it is in direct line of sight from the get go. I will make very clear "reserve" area for attackers deployment zone for this purpose that should be out of LOS. No Mines Both sides must use at least 25% of the points for infantry formations - organic mortars, light vehicles and infantry guns etc count towards this for simplicity (we can bump this up if you want a more infantry heavy battle) Attacker must use at least 5% of the points for heavier artillery (100mm +) If you are buying bunkers you should only buy HMG and MMG bunkers for your HMG and MMG teams and place those teams inside them, otherwise we may have situations where we will have a infantry platoon with extra 10 HMG's and that's not what I am after here. We should stick to this anti cheese rule since there is no point difference between regular shelter bunkers and mg bunkers. (a bit of a oversight from BFC I think) I am open for suggestions and wishes but this is the basic outline of what I am looking for here: Larger scale combined arms battle with some extra "dig in factor" for the defender. I am using dropbox and CMhelper. PM me if interested. Cheers! -H1nd

I am actually quite at loss on which version to play at this point for least broken gameplay. Previous version made singleplayer pretty much easymode, all you had to do was send a few rounds at the enemy and they would run away to some hidey-hole and the MP was such a huge forced pause-panic control micromanagement hell that I am not looking forward going back to the 4.00 version. To remember how things were before that, one needs to start remembering stuff from over three years past.. and then there is the fact that If my memory serves, we had to pay for engine 4 upgrades for CMBN. At this point it's probably not unreasonable to wish for BFC to at least acknowledge that there is a problem.

At this point I am quite baffled how this could get through the testing. This issue with troops charging towards enemies when evading is very obvious from simply just playing the game as you normally do. I have been trying out the revised road to montebourg campaign and aside from first mission I have seen this issue come up in all scenarios regularly during normal gameplay. It is just plain and simply broken. Not as badly as it may have been before but broken nevertheless. For H2H games it seems that the remedy is once again using the pause command (exploit?) to stop troops from fleeing. But the poor AI will get its infantry massacred in simple firefights.

From quite a lot of experience on messing around with fortifications (I think i may have some sort of dug in troops fixation) I am pretty sure that the troops do need to be actually inside the foxholes to get the cover bonus. Most casualties seem to occur on men left outside the foxholes or moving out of the foxholes on their own so I am pretty sure it is important to try to get the men actually in to the foxholes to give them any extra cover. What is happening in the picture: I would say that the road bank is overriding the foxholes as preferred position for the men. Much like the already mentioned elevation slopes and other terrain features. I have argued in the past that the problem seems to be the prioritization by which the pixel troops select their positions inside action squares. Number one priority is to place troops next to buildings or walls/hedges and this is why you need to be really careful when using foxholes or trenches close to buildings or walls. Second comes the priority to have troops lay down along any ridge or bank or such elevation feature inside the action square and this is why foxholes don't work well in steep terrain but rather need relatively flat action squares. Third comes the trees: foxholes and trees don't mix very well since the troops seem to prefer to seek shelter behind trees rather than in the foxholes, although this usually affects only some of the pixel troops in a group. And then there are the shell holes which might actually be on the top of this priority but i am not sure. So all in all any terrain feature that has a overriding effect on default troop placement inside any given action square usually has a higher priority than the foxholes which them selves seem to also have some overriding effect vs the default placement of troops. The problem is that the foxholes should have higher priority than the other overrides. So to sum up troops place them selves by: 1) walls/buildings 2) ridges/banks 3)trees (and maybe flavour objects) 4) shell holes (might actually be the no.1) 5) any fortifications 6) default placement. Using the facing command, as has been pointed out, does help in some cases but often the troops might still crawl back to the wrong positions on their own.

preregistered target points are also very good tool to mitigate artillery call times and from my understanding are part of eastern military doctrine in both attack and defence. If possible you should plan your attack with preplanned turn one artillery fires and also use additional pre registered targets in key terrain features along the planned axis of attack so that you can call in artillery where needed in matter of minutes. The emphasis is methodically planning your offensive action and trying to anticipate enemy counter moves and defensive strategy.

Hmmh you might be right. Usually I just crop down some maps or pre existing scenarios for custom multiplayer QBs, but I think I have also used master maps and some of my own maps without AI plans in same way. I remember that I have ran into some problems before with this, but I think that was due to QB map being set as ME when I was selecting attack in QB menu and thus it did not show up as selectable map. Which is in fact one thing to remember: you need to make QB version for each battle type that you intend to use the map with: One map for assault, one for attk, one for probe etc...

All tho you can naturally use your map in h2h multiplayer QB without AI plans but terrain objectives are recommended there as well :>

Well somebody is a real pleasant fellow. Yes is is true that I might have missed the point a bit since yes english is indeed not my native language and also because every time there is a talk on the forum about infantry engineers breaching minefields, wich you definitely can not do in CM games, since marking is not breaching in sense of clearing a mineless lane through the damn thing, there is immediately somebody popping up with the "Its not in scope of CM something something.." like literally every freaking time. Whole discussion on whether it might be reasonable to add the ability for engineers to breach minefields is just brushed aside without any consideration if the popular perception about the issue might actually be wrong. So yeah, I might be tad bit frustrated about the whole thing. But there is still no excuse to accept such immature and completely insulting behaviour as your reply. Is this the sort of thing we want to see here on this forum? Last word on the mine issue: I am actually quite optimistic that we will eventually get at least mine clearing vehicles to both modern CM titles. And that is enough for me. -H1nd

Funny how this was major part of all the training we did in FDF Combat engineers, to get through minefields, in combat, in matter of couple of minutes. But yeah.. totally not in scope of Combat Mission. And we did not even have any fancy vehicles to do that...