domfluff

Ah, no, I see what you mean - the CMSF 1 (2001) variant had Kontakt-5, not Kontakt-1. Presumably this was a TO&E research thing.

I think the T-72M1-V in CMSF was just (rightly or wrongly) renamed the T-72AV. That's the T-72M1 with additional ERA: (Left to right, T-72M, M1, AV

Ah well, all good

That thinking wouldn't match any other CM title, so I think that's unlikely. It'll be a bug. Nope. Make sure you're selecting the T-90 in the bottom pane here: It'll show the T-90 on the left, preview section, and will choose a random (or rather "Typical" in this case) one for the right, since that's how the above is set up. If you click on the Company, and then "T-90SA" in the bottom pane, all of the armour will be the T-90. Setting this to "Excellent" will give you T-90SA, and I imagine the lowest setting will give you T-72M1. Or you just choose the one you want.

The above, with grid lines approximating action spots:

The most reliable way I have to replicate this behaviour: Precisely this order: At precisely this spot - one action spot to the *left* of the bocage gap. This does not exhibit the same behaviour when the centre of the unit is on the bocage gap. When they take fire, they will reliably run forwards, towards this specific spot: Zooming in to their only contact: This spot has LOS with the Target tool to that MG team. It doesn't have LOS to the action spot the LMG is on, since the low wall is in the way. I still think that's the problem. It's trying to find the nearest solution out of LOS, and it chooses this one. Sending units one space to the left of the gaps of the Bocage Panic Test Map: These die in place (right here) or withdraw and die (here, left).

Just ran through that test scenario five times. Each time I Fast moved a squad up to the bocage loophole, and took the fire. Each time the US squads reacted in the same way - dying in place, or sometimes withdrawing from the hedgeline. Either way, acceptable behaviour, since they never run through the hedge. I still suspect that in Roadblock map that due to map curvature and obstacles like the low wall, there's a position out-of-LOS just in front of the hedge, which is close or closer than the alternatives.

Similar to CMSF, they picked a real, near-future date and stuck with it. Also similar to CMSF, there's been quite a bit of wiggle room around what that actually means. CMSF has Syrian air assets, for example, and CMBS has US APS systems. The advantage of choosing a fixed date is that you can build to something known, and that more can be known about that period as time continues. More factions are inevitable. US Marines, Russian airborne, British etc. are all extremely likely, if not certain. Updating the TO&E (and all future TO&E's) to 2020 or other future dates would be significantly more work than choosing one date and sticking to it, not least in that the Campaign would have to be rewritten, since it's now even more alt-history than it was when it was made.

I believe that: Is more to do with the Bren and BAR choosing to fire single shots in 4.0 more than they should, rather than the MG42 being made worse. Could be wrong though. In any case, the MG42 (and all machine guns) are far more effective than they were in the early releases of CMBN, CMFI (or CMSF 1 for that matter), since they'll generally fire longer bursts, more often. They're a much more appropriately scary tool than they were when The Road to Montebourg was designed.

The balance has certainly changed with the engine upgrades - The Road to Montebourg in CMBN in particular became an awful lot nastier with the MG changes, since that's a frontal assault over mostly open ground into MG positions. I don't think this is "broken" at all, but it's certainly more difficult. I haven't played Troina post-patch to comment (but have certainly played it post-MG update), but you can usually muscle through with some careful planning. Fighting up a hill pretty much defines CMFI, so use of smoke to cover movements is really important to define what the enemy can see. Even if you are setting pre-battle barrages, it's probably useful to set longer, lighter barrages to force the enemy to keep their heads down - your first and foremost problem is gaining the ability to manoeuvre in these circumstances.

In terms of what you could do about the mountain campaign: making the forest patchier might help. A "sweep and clear" might be better done on a more urban map, but in terms of making changes to the existing campaign, I think just making the forest less monolithic would help. It would also make the sweeping more tactically interesting.

I'd look into uploading it to the Scenario Depot 3 - that's become the offical place now anyway. I think I'd only lost one US soldier by that point. Total campaign deaths were something like 10, but most of those were allies. In the final mission I didn't have to enter the town at all, indirect fire did it all for me. Under an hour had passed as well - I didnt see the Abrams turn up.

Whereas I do think that corner peeking, the hull down command and the improved spacing are all vital additions. There are some minor things as well, but I really wouldnt want to lose those. The infantry behaviour is usually pretty great. The above is the exception, in my experience, and not the rule.

Righty, picked this up again and powered through to the end. Enjoyed this a lot, well worth playing, thank you. I do think the missions where you are attacking urban areas gave you too much artillery/air support - there didn't seem to be any reason not to just flatten the area. In the first of these, I refrained, and had a great little compound to compound fight. In the second, I ended up just flattening everything until they surrendered. I do think Preserve objectives would work well here. That's a bit of a shame, since the second was building up to something really interesting. The mountain clearing mission was a grind, and perhaps not a terribly interesting one. The basic tactical situation was good, but the ratio of size to thought was a little off I think. That's where I had to take a break.

Re-downloaded the patch. Huh. I wonder if I didn't overwrite the previous normandy v400.brz somehow?

So, the logic here (which may be wrong) is that if they're withdrawing, they'll try to withdraw to a nearby (possibly "the nearest" space) that's outside of LOS from the direction of known incoming fire. We know how LOS calculations work in CM - there's a precalculated grid overlay at five height intervals, which makes calculation between two of those points fast. This is why the "Target" tool is as fast as it is - the LOS between any two action spots can be calculated by it's a lookup table. This is distinct from the actual firing calculations of the individual guys. That's drawn from the actual figure, but there's far fewer of those calculations to derive per turn, so you can afford for that to be more expensive. What I'm suggesting, and may not be correct, is that in this kind of scenario the map overlay treats the hole in the bocage as larger than it's visually represented. It's perhaps even a hole that covers the entire action spot. In that scenario, the squad is saying "I'm receiving excessive fire, and I'm in the open, I need to run somewhere that I can't be seen". The suggestion here is that there's a spot just in front of this hedge where there's no LOS at the crawling height to the action spot that the HMG is firing from, since that's behind a low wall. The combination of considering themselves as more exposed than you think they are, and having a nearby "safe" spot, that makes them run through a really dangerous one, is making them make a bad decision. With this theory, the reason why it doesn't happen to the left is that they're already in a covered position - indeed, crawling takes them out of sight, since the hedges have that low level rise to them. Basically, stay away from hedge gaps, but that's always been good advice in CMBN.

Running a few tests with them slightly to the left results in them dying in place under HMG and HE fire. Move order: Incoming HE Aftermath/recovery: So, I'm still sure this is a LOS thing. We know the bocage holes aren't treated quite 1:1 anyway.

Oh, incidentally, the friendly directions are set correctly for that map.

They're using the Roadblock training scenario, since that was what was mentioned. I do wonder if it's related to the gap in the hedge screwing with the LOS calculations. Will redo this a few spots to the left

Have run this a few times, re-created the situation, and I have a theory as to why it happens. No promises that this is correct, mind you: The move order for testing: Starting to come under fire from HMG, rifles and AT guns. The squad, after running through the bocage, going to ground, getting shot and retreating back through. I've run this a few times. What I think is happening is that the squad starts coming under too much fire, including HE, and wants to move out of sight. Whenever I've seen this, the unit that the US squad can see is the HMG unit at the far end. What I think is happening is that the action spot that they're running to, at the 0 (crawling) level, is out of line of sight of the HMG, which is behind a low wall - that the terrain lines up here such that there's a deadzone to the pixeltruppen, if they were crawling. Obviously they're not crawling to get there, so they're getting shot on the way in. They're withdrawing when they are subsequently being fired on (and picking up contact markers from) the squad in the building to the left, at which point they retreat back through the hedge. I think this is a combination of awkward geometry and the normal randomness of panic combined with incomplete information. It's hard to debug without proper tools, obviously, but that's what I suspect.

True, and combining that with Josey Wale's work on how the soft factors and leadership works is pretty crucial I think. I've been running quite a few tests on symmetric squads in and out of C2, and the effect on recovering suppression is really reliable - they'll happily suppress each other at a similar rate to begin with, but the squad in C2 will recover first, and therefore end up winning the firefight over the course of a few turns.

I do think it's better - I'm in a CMFI Lancing the Abcess PBEM game, which is huge, and the saving times there are massive. After the patch this is a little better. It's still pretty long, mind you, but does seem improved.

One thing that is important to check is what information the squad has on what is firing on them - if they don't have contact markers from the firing squad, they won't know where they're being fired from, so the decision process seems to be "this place isn't safe, get to alternative cover", as opposed to "get out of LOS from what is shooting at us", which they will otherwise do. That doesn't mean that what you're seeing isn't a problem, but it may not be the full story either, and it can produce counter-intuitive results. Combine that with some occasional wonky pathfinding (that you'll find in any game with pathfinding), and it can create some frustrating situations.

Interesting. I'm in two CMFI PBEM games at the moment, one of which has just started. We've been passing turns back and forth, and haven't seen an issue.

Puje, your "Valleys of Death" campaign (which I need to get back to) is open ended, of course, and there's a lot of setup in deciding what forces to take, and how you're going to get there. That's very suitable for that kind of campaign, but in the scope of an individual battle it's harder to build for (since there's no reason not to empty out the FOB - in most of the early missions there I took a total of one squad with the two MGs on patrol in humvees). That increased later with the town assault, since that was clearly (from the briefing) a more major operation. For comparison - Combatintman's excellent "Green 9" for CMSF 1 is similar in basic design to your campaign, but it's the second type of scenario - it's a recreation of a real encounter, being a platoon patrol from a UK CP (CP Haji Alem). The mission objectives and direction of advance are pretty much pre-scripted, since you have to hit each of the touch objectives, and there's really only one good route to take, which matches the historical one. That's also fine - you have some real choices as to what equipment to take and load up on at the game start, and obviously how you proceed into the unknown is up to you, but the basic flow is pretty scripted, matching the historical account (decent pictures here: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/11/mark-evison-death-113211_full.html) In general, and especially in the modern titles, I think I slightly prefer the more open, generic scenarios. "You have a rifle platoon, go take that hill", but I do think there's a place for both, and they use briefings for very different reasons. You can certainly use CM to weave a narrative, and it's possible to do things which you can't do with that more generic approach if you approached it from the narrativist end.