domfluff

It's also the case that the old stuff all still works - it doesn't take advantage of the new toys, and it might well have balance issues, but it's all functional.

Yeah, this is great - reminds me of "Green 9" in structure, but as a campaign.

Oh, this looks great, have played through the first mission. Would definitely suggest uploading this to the Scenario Depot - having this hosted somewhere other than your Dropbox is a good idea, for visibility and redundancy.

A quick guide to Cold War doctrine, much of which is still applicable in CMBS: https://balagan.info/soviet-order-of-battle-and-doctrine-in-the-cold-war In particular:

Unfortunately for you, the Russians do. Russian (and Soviet, and Syrian) artillery is only available at the higher levels of command. That means any request for fire has to take the time to go up several levels and back down again, increasing the response times. Many low level units can't call for indirect fires at all. The intention is to centralise command and control, and to enforce actions on a larger scale. You're talking about a military who's doctrine has traditionally emphasised the *Regiment* as the smallest tactical unit. The correct way to use conventional red forces are to mass up as much as possible, be fluid in your plan, but blunt and brutal when it comes to executing it.

Yeah, flamethrowers are both incredibly awkward and devastatingly powerful - if you manage to get close enough, you'll usually clear out the fortified target in a single burst. Also, Crocodiles. As in reality, the Churchill Crocodile is by far the best use of a flamethrower, with ridiculous range, heavy armour and a 75mm gun to back it up. Man-portable flamethrowers might be the most difficult unit to use effectively in Combat Mission, but that doesn't mean they're modelled incorrectly. One thing that CM does extremely well is give you an appreciation of range and scale - the 30m range of a man-portable flamethrower is extremely close, and more than anything dictates how they can be used - an awful lot can go wrong over that kind of distance.

Well, sure, but you can certainly set up a competitive tournament scenario where both sides can have known compositions, with zero hidden information pre-battle. That's not every scenario, of course, but I think that's far from a miracle.

There are a couple of problems with Hidden Objectives - they can certainly be "unfair", especially if they're badly defined - e.g., a hidden Occupy objective, and you miss the action spot by one square. The other issue is - how hidden are they, really? They're always available in the editor, and certainly accessible on repeat plays, so they're often not the most elegant solution to the problem. If randomness was desired, I'd imagine that points for taking out specific units with randomised reinforcement times, might be more appropriate.

Sure, but that line of argument obliviates the need for vp at all. Since vp exist, they should serve a useful purpose as a means to measure the player's success. That's not straight forward - the WW2 games are broadly symmetric, so setting up roughly balanced victory conditions is a lot easier there, whereas the modern games (and especially cmsf) require a lot more thought.

Yup, that seems to be the case. Just Combatants, Spies and VBIED. Absolutely not - Fighters have much better equipment, usually carry more ammunition, and (on Typical) better soft factors. Combatants are rubbish, Fighters are tenacious and well equipped (or "well equipped"), up to and including ATGMs. I haven't compared the two, but I'd expect their soft factors to be better at least. Off-map rockets I can see, but the mortars they currently have are pretty great, and an upgrade from what they got in CMSF 1. I've never participated in an insurgency, but I imagine that 120mm mortars require a much longer supply chain than 82mm ones, since the ammunition will be harder to cart around, etc. Mines would be good, but you do get IED's. Not having access to "IED mines" is a problem, certainly. Actual fortifications are dodgier, perhaps. I imagine that you really don't want to be digging trenches for the most part. I'd not really be happy with this outside of scenarios - and you can already do this in a scenario. In general, combatants are a one-time thing. You can't reasonably expect them to do more than one task (ambush here, defend this building, etc.), and they'll probably expend themselves on that task. Would be nice, but I think the current compromise is okay. Haven't dug around the points yet, you might well be correct.

There are definitely quite a few of those for CM - CMBN Buying the Farm, for example, I was playing as a multiplayer game as the defending Germans, and was wiped out, with the US in command of the field. I'd caused enough damage for the end result to be a Draw. The victory conditions in CM are often awkward or counter intuitive, but you can do quite a lot with them.

Ooh, okay, but I imagine you can still monkey around with the numbers until you get something that makes sense.

Double post

Yup, so in the hypothetical "Hostage Rescue" scenario above you'd need to make it something like: Blue - 100 point touch objective Blue - 100 point preserve objective Red - 100 bonus points Red - 100 point hold objective Immediate Red surrender would give you: Blue - 200 Red - 100 Immediate Blue surrender would give you: Blue - 100 Red - 200 Blue completing the mission successfully would give you: Blue - 200 Red - 100 Blue completing the mission but damaging the building would give you: Blue - 100 Red - 100

Actually the correct answer.

If the scenario has been set to that, sure. You're at the behest of the designer in terms of creating interesting, fair or balanced objectives, but if the conditions were set to something extreme, you'll get extreme results. I've certainly played at least one user scenario where losing a single man (it was a platoon-level scenario) would result in a minor loss for the US. Balance is hard, but you could certainly imagine situations where a building destruction was heavily penalised - perhaps the aim of the mission was a hostage rescue, set up as a hidden objective in a particular building. You have to search through a small town for the correct building, and if the building was flattened, so are the hostages. That could be modelled as a hidden "touch" objective for the action spot the building is on, to represent the hostage rescue, but also a Preserve objective on the building itself, with heavy penalties. You'd need an arbitrary bonus to the other side as well to counter this Preserve VP, but it could be set up such that the end result would be that you'd lose the mission if you destroyed this building.

Whether it matters will depend entirely on what the victory conditions are set to - you could absolutely make a scenario that punished building destruction heavily. The extent to which it matters also may not be clear from the briefings, so you may need to err on the side of caution. Now, in practice, for a lot of scenario, you're not wrong - balancing objectives is hard, and especially in CMSF, where the sides are so asymmetric. A lot of user scenarios tend to be more restrictive than official ones - penalising blue losses or building destruction more significantly.

"Max Assault" is an AI command, of course, not something you use in-game. However, yes. This illustration is from Real and Simulated Wars: http://rswars.com/combat-missions-tactical-ai/ So "Max Assault" is a movement order which prioritises firing. Total priority would be doing nothing (or waiting), but this is still an order where you're expecting the AI to move, but they will keep as many of it's elements stationary as possible, and stop to fire whenever they see a target. This means that your default AI order should probably be "Advance", unless you're expecting contact (to the left) or not expecting contact (to the right). The player orders are similar, but these orders are the mid-level Tac AI, since they govern the behaviour of the group as a whole (e.g., Platoon, or whatever you've assigned to this AI group).

Given that intentional Flamethrower ignition is not a trivial engineering problem, unintentional ignition seems pretty unlikely.

The advice in "Assaulting a building, fierce and agile" is very suspect. It'll work if everything is in your favour, but it won't often be in practice, and I wouldn't want to roll an *Abrams* up that close to an occupied building, let alone paper-thin Strykers. As I pointed out in the "Breaking the Bank" thread, the actual assault is something which is easy to get hung up on, in the game or reality. It's actually the least important part of the whole business. https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/call/call_01-9_karagosian.htm The point is that controlling the area around the building, and especially your route to the building, is what's important, not the room clearing. The actual building assault (if you do one, and you probably want to avoid this as much as possible) should be the easy part - if you've controlled the building to the extent that the occupants are heavily suppressed, and all the necessary routes to and from the building are safely covered, then the actual order doesn't matter that much - just be advised that *any* close-quarters combat is massive risk - the squad may be suppressed, but a single chap with an AK can still mess up your squad if given the chance. So: "What move orders is most effective at clearing hostile buildings with minimal casualties?" If you can avoid clearing a building, do. Flatten it, ignore it, isolate it, anything but go in. If you must, make sure you have overwhelming firepower on both the building, the routes from the building (you need to stop reinforcement or the enemy leaving), and especially your intended route to the building. Being caught in the street is a death sentence. If you are forced to assault a building (usually for tempo reasons), and you have control of the environment to as much as you can, then the first thing you'll do is to split into fireteams to minimise risk. Assault isn't really intended for this task, since the Assault command will leave half of the squad in the street, and if the first half runs into an ambush, the second half will charge in after them, and also get killed. You can use it effectively, with control of the surroundings, if you also set a target order on the building - the stationary half of the squad will area-fire into the building, whilst the moving half moves in. Ideally though, you'd have more firepower than that, because one fireteam is probably not enough. Fast will cross the open space to the building faster - but then you should already be confident about that. They'll usually take longer to react to any surprises in the building or behind the building though. Quick will be the same, but less so - Quick is probably better than fast if you're not 100% certain of the road safety. Move will give them more situational awareness, but will leave them dead in the street if anything goes off. If you get shot in the crossing, they'll change this to Quick and bundle into the building. Hunt will stop them on contact. That can be deadly if they are stopped in the street unexpectedly by a hidden sniper or something. So - for the actual assault, if you're in an imperfect situation where you're forced into doing this, then the answers will depend on context, and what you're deficient in. If you do not have sufficient firepower to suppress the target building, I'd use an Assault/Target command. This is probably a terrible idea, but it'll give you something. I think I'd usually rather just do this manually (split the squads, have one area-fire whilst the other Quick or Fast moves) in this scenario, since you need to be really careful with your placement. If you are not 100% in control of the street, then I'd Quick move into the building, and accept that I've a high chance of losing people on contact. If you are in control of the street, can suppress the building and control the environment, I'd Move across to the target in fireteams, taking as much time as I can.

It's not really a question, he's just implying that you shouldn't be able to choose certain pieces of equipment before certain dates - e.g., Panzerfaust 100's presumably shouldn't be available before November 1944, or something like that.

Oh, I dont think it's a good idea, but that wasnt the question

I believe the traditional reaction to an artillery strike is to leap three hundred feet into the air, and scatter yourself unevenly around the surrounding environment. The short answer is that if you can, you need to get out of that area fast, ideally as spotting rounds are landing. Hiding in place, even in fortifications or vehicles, isn't really a good idea. The above is also suggesting that given the pattern of attacks in CM, you're better off running towards the enemy, than away.

I think the period reference is FM 5-15 Engineer Field Manual, Field Fortifications 1940, which has a chapter dedicated to swearing, and the correct and appropriate words to utter when placing wire, mines and trenchworks, in varying conditions. For the US anyway. Commonwealth forces delegated their swearing guides to one week during basic training, since they assumed a basic level of pre-existing competency.

That thread's still around in the CMSF Tactics forum. A few points that I've always found interesting about that one: People frequently over-value this kind of thing, if it's accompanied by lots of pretty pictures. Even if the information is garbage. I think it's a very good example of the kind of mental trap that is really easy to fall into, in CM or in reality. e.g.,: The focus is entirely on room clearing, and how you storm a building, when that's absolutely not the priority. The scenario posited assumes total information and control - the technique in that thread will work absolutely fine if you have overwhelming fire superiority, and total control over the battlespace. If you can suppress the target building, and ensure that all buildings with LOS to that building, or (more importantly) to the approach of that building are clear or similarly suppressed, then storming in a manner similar to that listed is fine. Of course, if you can achieve that, you probably don't need to storm the building at all. What I find fascinating is that you can find real-world textbook examples of this kind of wrong thinking. Not this technique specifically, but in terms of how urban warfare is approached and carried out.