domfluff

On my wishlist for CMSF is a much more flexible Uncon force selection. I do like that the loadouts vary, but I'd like much more control over choosing individual vehicles and the like.

You can use the snipping tool (Win+Shift+S), but it won't work perfectly - I'm not clear on the technical details, but a snipped screenshot will be of a lower quality render (it's clearly taking part of the output in some way, but not the fully processed part). It's the quickest and easiest though. Mostly I use Fraps.

Aside from re-skinning the crew, I don't think you can, presumably because the crew work as tank crews can, and prevent you from swapping them (so that you don't buy a cheap Panzer 3 with an elite crew, then stick them in a Tiger)

It's a cheap and cheerful compromise - it's probably the only sensible way to do a turn-based game in anything like real time (that is, have a real time game with enforced pauses every minute). I'd much rather have that then only have real time as the real time option. I agree it would be great to also have the ability to replay things, but PBEM does exist.

Agreed, it feels like they're in a better place now.

How do you fight in woods? Don't. Or possibly "be the defender, and have lots of SMGs". Failing that: (This is assuming a squad or platoon is fighting in a wood of infinite size, so you have no access to supporting arms, and you have to actually move and fight through the woods). Slow pepper-potting is the thing. One thing I do quite a bit is to use Target commands from the supporting elements to get an idea how far they can actually see - the hard limit of advance for each element is where LOS from the supporting elements stops, but should usually be a little closer than that. Hunt is the command for movement, exclusively. Having the lead element stop when coming under fire is really important, and if you've set up the supporting elements correctly, you should have the best chance of dealing with the contact, whenever it arrives - if they have LOS to the lead element then they have a chance to react. The general concept is that you need to make contact with as little of your force as possible, whilst maintaining access to fires from as much of it as possible. Woods ultimately are a randomiser - you're going to get this wrong, and you're going to lose more than you'd like.

https://boardgamegeek.com/collection/user/JasonC?rating=8&subtype=boardgame&ff=1

Without getting into any personal opinions, you can see his game collection and comments on his BGG page. It's worth bearing in mind that very few of the reviews are for the games as-is, but instead he appears to be mostly rating and commenting on games he has house-ruled significantly, which clearly affects how useful that can be.

Very broadly speaking, Combat Commander is Squad Leader, played with the cards from Up Front. A lot of the design decisions were not to simulate WW2, but instead on how things worked in Squad Leader (a lot of the unit values, for a start). That does mean that as a simulation it does lack some verisimilitude, but what you get in return is a superb game that you can knock out in 90 minutes or so. The Random Scenario Generator (which was originally supposed to be the only way to play it) means that there's no limit to the amount of game in the box. As to "there's no reason to play paper wargames when Combat Mission exists" - a scenario of Combat Mission is a project in and of itself, doubly do if playing with someone else. PBEM typically takes months, and no AI is going to compare with locking horns with another person. There's always a good reason to have a tabletop game. Of late, the majority of my sim time hasn't actually been with wargames, but with things like the BIOS series of games - games which are definitely simulationist in approach, but not wargames (or that war plays a minor part). High Frontier, in particular, is very much my thing.

I play a lot of boardgames. Combat Commander would be my preference from that list. Wargames in general struggle with keeping to a reasonable amount of time - finding a game that's playable in 1-3 hours is fantastic, but many will go far over that. The No Retreat! series, although certainly not tactical, is worth a look. The full campaigns are all-day affairs, but scenarios are playable in that timeframe.

We've discussed this before, but to a large extent the strength of CM as a simulation is that, to a large degree, the real-world stuff works very well in game. There are exceptions - hugging the map edge isn't something that a real-world commander has done, and even with the CM2 C2 system there's still gaminess there - but I think there's a ton of value in studying real world battle drills for CM games.

You've got to know what the rules are before you can usefully break them. That's fundamentally it - you may never get a textbook, all-advantages situation in practice, with a laid out covered route and a platoon attacking an unsupported enemy, but the building blocks of your more complex plan are all there. Those represent your fundamentals, and what goes into the larger scheme - they represent the things to look for, or the situations you have to create. It's not for nothing that the Squad attack drill has a few sections in the decision flowchart which branch into "and if you can't do this, form a base of fire and move into the platoon attack drill", and the same thing applies to the platoon attack drill defaulting to a company attack. Any real-life application of drill is going to be less than perfect, but since the fundamentals are sound, getting those right should leave you in a better spot than not. The perennial CM problem is that of scale. Those platoon battle drills *do* represent the kinds of problems that platoon leaders need to solve. The whole point of *having* platoon leaders is that the company leaders don't need to be concerned with that, and can instead point a platoon at something and tell them to get on with it. In CM, naturally, you're playing platoon leader, company leader and potentially battalion leader, all at the same time.

Whilst on the subject - this is a battalion MG section in the 1943 US TOE for CMFI, as depicted in the above video. Of particular note is that the above section has no radios - neither the section leader, nor the jeeps have them. The only radios in the platoon are with the platoon HQ unit. That means that this section will have to fight within close range of themselves by necessity, and share information manually - the section HQ (which is one chap) is going to be running around a lot. The jeeps contain additional .30 cal ammunition (1500 rounds), which might be fairly obvious.

Quite a bit of that video is about indirect MG fire, which we can't do in CM. The point still holds though. 13:15 is where the "how to get into position" starts, which mostly involves "just rush into position if you don't have cover". The part where the squad leader is picking targets for them is simulated in CM by sharing spotting contacts though, so paying attention to those is important.

Yeah, it's tricky. The scheme that Heirloom_tomato outlines is good, but it's worth breaking this down a little. Defining the problem: Setting up an MG takes time, so in an even fight (an MG and an opposing squad rushing up to facing covered positions), the squad will probably win, simply because the MG needs time to set up, and the squad has much greater situational awareness, owing to a greater number of eyes. Once set up, the MMG/HMG should win the eventual firefight, but if it doesn't get the chance to do so because the MG is suppressed, then you're not getting anywhere. That means that you need something to shift things in your favour. Compounding this, tree cover is ambiguous. Particularly in CMFI, terrain can be sparse and inconsistent, and it can be hard to mask an entire unit. It only takes on chap being spotted to rumble the whole thing. In the above screenshot it also looks as though the wall is down the slope. That means that the appropriate position for observation is not the facing wall, but instead the hillcrest covered by forest. The alternative is that you'll likely be spotted through tree gaps as you make your way to the downsloped wall. In terms of concealing this movement, it's important to play the odds. Slow movement helps, and definitely setting short cover arcs to hold fire. What also helps is using the minimum possible number of troops. So, in this scenario I think what I would do is scout with the platoon leader, which would hold fire. The mortars deploy behind the ridgeline, within shouting distance of the HQ's intended position on the ridgeline (four action spots is reasonable). I'm going to assume that you have zero smoke available - there's not much smoke for US forces anyway, and there are too many factors that can come into play - wind direction, weather, etc. The HQ (and only the HQ) Slow-moves to the ridgeline, to a spot with LOS to the house. Since you'll be moving a small number of troops, slowly and through woods, holding fire, you'll have the maximum chance of doing this undetected. If you can't, then a mass-assault may be the only way - rushing up and overwhelming them with fire. That's not the first plan though. After gaining LOS on the target (which we're assuming you know is occupied already - if not then this HQ is going to be observing for a number of turns, since you won't have many eyes to spot with. This is where good C2 links and multiple scouts with radios become useful), then you do two things - start planning your mortar fire mission, and start planning your MG placement. When the HQ has spotting contacts, you can move up the MGs (still behind the ridgeline) to collect these using horizontal C2. That'll be important in a minute. The same applies for any rifle squads that are joining this base of fire, but the deployment of the MGs need the most thought. When the fire mission has been plotted and starts landing, now is the time to rush forward the MGs. Mortar rounds suppressing the enemy give your MGs the time to set up in your pre-planned positions, and the shared spotting contacts allow them to find the targets most effectively. You're stacking the deck in your favour. Once the MGs are deployed then you should have sufficient firepower to allow the supporting rifle squads to move up, and eventually to give the manoeuvre elements freedom to move. MGs are important in the attack as well as the defence, but they do require some more thought. Training film, with some useful things, including a depiction of this kind of leader recon at the six-ish minute mark.

The perennial Combat Mission problem is one of scale. You're playing with a system that allows you to make interesting, meaningful decisions on a per-squad basis, splitting up the fire teams of a 10-12 man squad in different ways, and using that squad to mutually support itself, as well as surrounding elements, taking advantages of micro-terrain over a a matter of metres. Then, with the exact same system, you're handed 300 men, a bunch of armour, supporting artillery and a battlefield spanning kilometres. It would be great to have more precise micro-control over units. It would also be great to have macro-commands to automate larger-scale movements and reduce the load when commanding battalions. Compromise is important. I don't think the compromise chosen is perfect - I'm not sure any could be, - but it's pretty damn good where it is.

Well. Evading HE fire was a new feature introduced into Engine 4. I don't think it's a problem if they don't proactively try to evade HE fire whilst in cover. (I honestly don't think it would be a massive problem if they didn't try to evade HE fire *at all*, but that's secondary). I can't speak for all the facets of the current implementation, and don't know how it applies in all situations, but I can say with some confidence that the specific instance of the "charge into enemy fire" bug that I've been using to test (on the Roadblock map) has now been patched, and the troops don't kill themselves stupidly.

Thought it was worth mentioning that I tried to replicate the "hedgerow bug" with CMBN yesterday, using the same maps, scenarios and methods as before. All of the tests ended without the squad running forwards into enemy fire. They also didn't try to evade in the incoming HE fire, instead just dying in place along the hedgerow, but the end result is significantly less frustrating than charging forward into the enemy machine guns.

IIRC, from previous discussions: - Grenades *are* toned down a little. This is due to the inability of action spots to represent effective spacing. - Grenades will randomly fail to hurt people. This is going to be due to how explosions are modelled in CM. From memory - explosions are in two parts, the explosion itself, and some number of randomised "fragments", which are invisible projectiles or raycasts drawn from the explosion site. Those will be in randomised directions and elevations, so it's more than possible, although unlikely, for a grenade to land in the middle of a group of men and hit none of them.

That sounds like the second scenario from Road to Montebourg, but could be a lot of them really.

There are two main quality settings - one you can change in-game, "3D model quality", and the other you can change out of game "texture quality". The latter uses larger textures, so loads more into RAM (and will increase load times for a scenario). 3D model quality mostly controls the distance that the engine starts to hide detail for scaling. The easiest way to see this is to load a map with a lot of trees - with 3D model quality on the lowest setting, only nearby trees will be drawn, and there will be a noticeable drop in tree quality a little further out. Beyond that, the trees will not be drawn at all. You'll see the same thing with textures - there will be a noticeable radius around the camera where textures are drawn with their highest quality settings, then at further distances this will drop off. This kind of Level of Detail (LOD) scaling is commonplace - if a model takes up two pixels on the screen, there's no reason to spend a large amount of resources rendering it, since the user won't notice the difference. The CM engine being what it is (in terms of age, priorities and development resources), this isn't as powerful or efficient as it could be, and it's a lot more noticeable than some examples - this kind of LOD scaling will happen in most computer games (for an extreme example, the Total War series), but the effects are usually harder to spot.

I think that's generally a wise approach - any plan that requires that your opponent is inferior to you (at least in terms of tactical ability) is doomed to fail at some point - in anything competitive, it's a good idea to assume that they're at least equal to you, if not better, until proved otherwise.

To be fair, I've seen the same deal with Syrian/older BMPs and Bradleys - they fire their ATGMs and whilst the thing is in the air, the Bradley kills them with the 25mm. In general though, even a bad AT asset is still an AT asset, and you have to go with what you've got. Splitting them up is clearly sensible, since it lessens the ability for a single target to deal with them.

The manual lists it, case by case. All of the western smoke blocks thermals, but most of the Redfor stuff doesn't, with the exception of some of the more elite stuff. BMP-2M has the IR blocking smoke (white), for example.

Personally? "Badly" is what I usually go for. Yeah, hull down, scoot, and hope you don't have too much return fire. One obviously advantaged position would be to make use of the optics, and dump some IR-blocking smoke before cresting a hill with them, but that's a lot of resources expended on something you can usually do better with a Javelin, particularly in CMBS.