domfluff

Co-ordinating that kind of shoot and scoot (or indeed, pick up the squad, drop them off and do something else) is difficult to get right, and planning to do that over the course of one set of orders is liable to end up leaving you vulnerable - if you mess up a timing then you can end up in trouble. So, specifically: If you give passengers a movement order in a moving vehicle, they'll wait until the vehicle stops before executing the order. This won't work for vehicles which the passengers are also crewing (some humvees, for example). One nice trick here is that if your movement is the Assault command, the squad will pile out of the vehicle, and then half of it will run off towards the waypoint, with the other half taking up positions around the transport, and then following on. There are some situations where that's pretty useful. If you give troops a movement order that embarks a moving vehicle, they'll wait until it stops to get onboard, in a similar way as the above. Actually co-ordinating a short stop can be tough, and is liable to end up with the passengers running out into the open if you get it wrong, so I'd suggest doing the pick up and continuation over different turns, if possible. In general terms, you don't really want to be in a position where you need fancy embark or disembarking sequences. Your situational awareness around a transport is always pretty bad (even in a modern vehicle), and obviously the troops are vulnerable as they transition. That means that doing this safely and slowly is the better plan, even for IFVs. That often means using terrain or smoke to mask these manoeuvres.

Have reported this before, but this wasn't patched in the recent patch: The Syrian BRDM-2 (AT-3) has six missiles racked, and can therefore correctly fire six missiles before reloading. The BRDM-2 (AT-5) has five missiles racked, and can fire... six missiles before reloading. No idea where the other one comes from. That's clearly not intended behaviour. The equivalent vehicles in CMBS do not display this discrepancy - the five-shot BRDM can only fire five shots before reloads.

Inherently, not a lot. Steam would keep the game version up to date with patches, and (I'm guessing) will replace Battlefront's DRM with one that's a little more forgiving for changing hardware, etc. It also allows you to launch the game with Steam, which may well be where you have other games. Short answer is "why not?" at this point, since it doesn't cost you, but in a lot of ways this step isn't really meant for you - it's something which (hopefully) increases visibility and the player base. I'm registering all my keys when this becomes available. I'm less clear if I'm going to install them through Steam. Quite possibly.

I would appreciate you not putting words in my mouth, that's really not cool. In particular, I don't think I mentioned anything that would "impact the game's reputation" or anything similar.

The problem with CM has always been that the game allows you to make interesting decisions on the scale of squads and fire teams. It's tactically relevant where the Bren gun team goes in over a 24m frontage, and it's important to know where your rifle grenades are, or who's carrying the SMG. Then, at the same time, you can have throw 1,000 troops on the map, with attached armour and air assets. It's certainly possible to micro-manage a battalion-sized force, but it takes a lot of time and mental effort to do so. That means that it can become overwhelming and intimidating due to the effort involved, or it can result in taking shortcuts, and not playing the small scale stuff optimally. Reinforced company is certainly a sweet spot. I've been engaged with some larger battles (and it's easier to be engaged with a PBEM, but that's a whole different kind of commitment), but it's easy to feel that it's not worth the effort. I do like tiny-scale scenarios, platoon or squad level can be really interesting. You're correct that the game can be over with one mistake, but the trade-off there is that it doesn't take long to get there. I think one of the more relevant problems with platoon-level scenarios is that they are inherently limited in tactical depth - there are a limited number of options with most platoons, and a limited scope for what they can be expected to achieve. Phillip Sabin is a history professor, who teaches a wargaming course. The games he uses to teach, and has his students design, meet some fairly strict criteria to be useful in the classroom, most notably that they are simple and short enough to pick up quickly and play repeatedly. One of the major problems with wargame design in general (in any format) is the tendency towards "monster" games with thousands of counters which take hundreds of hours, which are difficult to play logistically - finding the time to commit, and finding an opponent who can also commit is difficult enough, but if you have something which is that large and difficult to arrange, it's very unlikely that you'll be able to play it repeatedly. If you can't repeat the game, there's no way to approach any kind of mastery. So... yeah, small scenarios, played often are the best way to learn something like this, and the game/outside reading learning feedback-loop is the primary reason why I (personally) play simulationist games.

(Purely from a user perspective, rather than speculating about business reasons, which gets complex and non-intuitive fast) On some level it wouldn't - it would obviously allow people to use CM to model more things, and a wider selection of scenarios would become possible. On the other hand, imagine trying to discuss anything without a firm frame of reference. "How do I do x?" (and by the way, I've changed Y to be more like Z and I "fixed" A and B to be more like C). There's a chap who reviews a lot of wargames on BGG, but most of his reviews are for his own variants and "fixes". They might well be superior to the published material, but what use is that rating to anyone else? It would be great to have more control over CM, and for some of the mechanisms to be less obtuse than they are. I don't really understand why I can't add a single Technical to an uncon force in CMSF, or have those technicals selectable with a drop down for the different weapon types available. I think that kind of thing would be a strong net positive. Giving Uncons javelins might even be pretty interesting, for a weird scenario. Altering the stats of a recoilless rifle because I think I know better than Battlefront? That I'm less clear on being a positive force. I might, but there's some value in playing within the model as presented.

In terms of what title is the most *interesting* with small battles - in general, the later you go, the more stuff gets pushed down to platoon level. The russian platoons in cmbs are ostensibly similar to a syrian platoon, but have many more tactical options available to them. The same thing applies to the WW2 titles - later war formations have more depth to them in general. In terms of the best small unit *content*, CMSF trends towards the smaller scale for the US side (Task Force Thunder has a lot of "take this scout platoon and do x"), and CMBN tends to be a little smaller than the later titles, but certainly not in every case. CMBN also has the excellent campaigns "The Outlaws" and "The Devil's Descent", which are both airborne campaigns based around a single company, mostly using a platoon or two at a time.

Excellent, that's useful stuff to start with, thank you. Currently in a Red vs Red PBEM, at midnight. The difference between no night vision, night vision and thermals is going to decide the game, I think.

Which is a good definition, because it's testable and measurable. Like everything in game design though, definitions are firmly not agreed on, and that's the root of the frustration. As another example, another peeve is a game's "weight". My preferred definition of "Weight" is "complexity of the decision tree". Lighter games can be (as one example) more random, because randomness limits how far you can search from a given position, and therefore prunes the decision tree to some extent. Again, that's something you can model and measure. That means that Go is a "heavy" game, despite having about three rules. Something like Fluxx can produce fantastically complex boardstates, with a ton of stuff going on but since the whole is chaotic and pretty meaningless, the decision tree is extremely limited, and the game is "light", by that definition. In practice though, "weight" has a ton of different definitions. I've seen people refer to some games as "heavy" because the iconography is hard to parse, because there are lots of pieces, or because the rulebook is above an arbitrary x pages in length, which are useless. It might well be that heavy games tend to have long rulebooks, but just labelling a tendency doesn't provide any insight to answer any future questions. In terms of defining "fun" - I offer the game "dude". This is a party game, based on a deck of cards, which all have the word "dude" written on them, in different ways, fonts and styles. You draw one, and have to say the word "dude", in the manner presented on the card, or close to it. The rest of the table then need to guess which of the visible "dudes" you are trying to emulate. Is that "fun"? It's firmly not a series of meaningful decisions. It's about as gloriously stupid as anything like that can be. I can certainly imagine people having fun playing that though (one imagines that being drunk or stoned probably helps more than a little), which I think mostly illustrates the problem with the term in use. If someone says "Is Combat Mission fun?" - it's not fun in the same way that saying "duuuuuude?!" could be fun.

On a related question - are there known figures for how far night vision can see? Equally, do we know the range that troops will pick up sound contacts? I'm not expecting firm answers to those, but some idea of ranges would be useful.

"Fun" is one of the things that irritates me the most, when applied to games. Computer games or boardgames really. I'm painfully aware that my tastes in games swings far heavier than the mean, so I obviously have a skewed view on things, but I still haven't heard a good definition of what "fun" actually is, when used as an objective measure. More importantly, I can't imagine any other medium being held to that standard. "Sure, the Godfather is a well shot film, but it's not fun, is it?". Doing that for games seems incredibly limiting.

The T-90 and the TURMS-T are the top Syrian tanks available in CMSF. On paper, which vehicle should have better spotting and FCS?

Something that I've noticed even more since lockdown is that there are a lot of people online who are aggressively negative about everything, no matter what the situation. It can be well worth acknowledging where something has flaws, but treating every flaw as if it's the worst thing imaginable is exhausting and doesn't achieve anything.

Yup, just opened the scenario as Scenario Author Test, and ended the turn a bunch. After about 30 minutes they started withdrawing by themselves.

Yup, that's the one. I've never seen them not withdraw over the course of the scenario. I've only played it three or four times, mind you.

Huh. I mean, that's the one. They've withdrawn every time I've played it. Might just be a randomised AI plan thing, of course, but in any case I think it's the right way to approach it - you need to send a platoon to the rear to prevent them withdrawing, because they might.

I think the first mission of the German campaign in CMFB is a pretty good example of the tactical use of Halftracks, and why dismounting early is a problem. You're clearing out a crossroads, and you have a tight timescale. The AI is doing a fighting withdrawal, and if you don't get on with it, they'll just run away. I think the best use of at least one of your halftrack platoons is to use their mobility to bypass the defensive position, and set themselves up as a blocking force, preventing their retreat, before the main attack goes in - if the blocking force had dismounted too early, they would lose the chance to perform their primary role. That's the kind of thing I think point 25 is actually talking about (or at the very least, the useful application of that), more than chaps standing up in the back and using the halftrack as a fighting platform to shoot small arms from. I imagine that this can work, but it's incredibly risky. I don't have a good feeling for how plausible that would be in reality, but I definitely don't think it's a good idea in CM, and I especially don't think it's a good idea with bazookas flying around. The modern comparison was more to indicate where things are, relatively speaking. Clearly a BMP-1 has a lot more armour and armament than a Sd.Kfz 251, but the point I was trying to make was that each vehicle has faced an evolution of AT weapons over their lifespan - the context in which the vehicle was created and doctrine designed is significantly different to the current situation, and that means that usage has to adjust. Using an asset differently in the field is easier than changing doctrine, which itself is typically easier than changing hardware.

That's still uncommon though. You still occasionally get people asking on this forum if tanks have hitpoints or whatever. Does ARMA 3 still have hitpoints for tanks? I can't remember.

From a technical point of view, one assumes this would basically boil down to saving each PBEM turn, and stringing these together. Given how large PBEM turns get, that quickly builds up to a ton of disk space. It's certainly within reasonable bounds given how cheap storage is now, but I'm not surprised that this hasn't been an option before.

This comes up all the time, and I think questions like "should you fight mounted" require a bit more context or nuance than it's often granted. Firstly, correct procedure: With halftracks, and facing nothing other than small arms, it is possible to use the German halftrack as an effective fire support tool. The two important tips are: maintain distance (at least 200-300m, I'd say, but ideally more) and frontal facing to the target (which narrows the incoming angle of fire, and allows the gun shield to do much more work), and do not issue an "Open Up" command, since that dangles the gunner out for unnecessary risk. If you do not Open Up, the gunner will still stand up to man the gun, but will sit down when he's done firing, minimising return fire. Secondly, grand tactical considerations: If you look at that panzergrenadier training film, the most important part of that "fight mounted" advice is "do not disembark too early". If you disembark as soon as possible, you're losing any advantages in mobility that your vehicle gives you. From a grand-tactical point of view - units move at the speed of the slowest element, so dismounted panzergrenadiers become infantry, and can't flank, take advantage of distant terrain, react to unexpected events, etc. From a company or battalion commander point of view, you lose a lot of tactical flexibility with too-early dismounts. Thirdly, context: As has become the case with IFVs in the modern era, the quantity and type of anti-tank weapons will dictate the use of light armoured vehicles. In CM we don't have any early war games, and are instead pushed into periods where anti-tank weapons are embedded into a large percentage of squads. These were written in 1943, and earlier than anything in the CMx2 lineup. In 1943 CMFI, infantry AT weapons are rare, and semi-fixed AT guns are king. Point 25 should be seen in this context, I believe - you don't want to run your halftracks in front of an AT gun, but you're more or less safe doing when faced with small arms. It's quite correct that CM doesn't let you do everything that you'd do in reality, but this doesn't mean that the halftrack is useless - just that it lowers in value as the war goes on. Indeed, the experiences from both sides in the Ukraine have caused a similar trend with IFVs. To quote: I think this is broadly as true in CMBS as it is in CMBN or CMFB - a shift towards effective AT fire means that lightly armoured vehicles become much harder to use effectively, especially when they're intended to be a fighting platform of some kind.

Ha! Quite right, that's just me being a mong

One thing I think is really useful here is that it points to the correct use of foxholes - namely how foxholes positioned over 150m can make small arms pretty much useless, but are much less effective at closer ranges.

Clearly there are other effects of small arms besides killing people - the MP44's will be putting out a lot more fire, so the amount of suppression will be different (not necessarily more though, since then we run into the debate of whether volume or accuracy of fire is more effective for suppression).

Some answers: a) We don't know, because it's not available yet b) I would expect it to be identical. Steam will create a folder structure as you would for any game, and mods would be put into the relevant folder. c) A lot of games use the Steam workshop to load mods. If that was implemented for CM, that would be identical to the current way of doing things, but the process would be automated. You'd click "subscribe", but the exact same thing would happen - the mod files would be downloaded into the relevant folder.

This is amazing stuff, thank you.