domfluff

This thread has some great, fundamental questions that don't have easy answers. The ones I will chime in on are reconnaissance and scouting. The approach march and how you start an engagement. First rule is to put circular or short covered arcs on your scouting units, this is to stop them shooting and revealing their position. Second is to move them forward, in cover, slowly - normal Move, Slow or Hunt are good for this. On the approach, what I'll usually do is to march the platoon in column (using the appropriate movement techniques - Bil's Battle Drill Blog outlines these well), then try to reform at a safe location, near to the expected contact, but out of sight. The HQ unit (who has radio and binos) will typically be tasked with doing the actual scouting. This unit sneaks forward into LOS to the expected enemy position, and waits. And waits. The main reason to use the HQ for this is that the spotting information will be handed down faster from HQ to their squads than it will from scout team to squad to HQ to other squads. Being on the radio will help as well. The HQ unit also has the option of starting to call down indirect fires, if appropriate. The HQ unit will either leave the line and head back to the platoon, or the platoon will move up to the HQ. Either way the spotting info will be transferred before the squads hit the line of contact, to give them the best possible chance of seeing the enemy before they're seen in turn. Whether to attack with Fire + Manoeuvre (i.e., a base of fire, and a flanking group offset by 45 or 90 degrees), or Fire and Movement (attacking frontally, with bounding rushes) is a situational call. In either case, the base of fire is established in as much concealment as possible. If you're reasonably confident that there is enemy present, but you can't spot them, you can advance the platoon onto the line, holding fire, then open up with one of the units briefly, hoping to spark an exchange - if the enemy reveal themselves by firing, you're likely to have more firepower than they do, and will start at an advantage. Now - this is assuming you have a good idea where the enemy is already, If you do not, that's when you have to think about scouting in terms of "go down that road until you blow up". Ideally, you should be able to consider several likely approach marches, and send your scouts into the less likely ones, therefore working out their position by process of elimination. In practice though, making contact is still a dangerous job. Buildings offer some good cover and concealment. They're not bad spots for scouts, but they can be pretty exposed fighting positions. It might be better to scout from buildings, but fight from surrounding cover, depending. Forward observers are valuable units, that are hard to replace. They make good scouts, in that they have radios and binoculars, but bad ones in that they are definitely not expendable. There's an unsolved question here about the appropriate use of FO's - the default option would be to station them at a safe distance, with a commanding view of the battlefield. This is great for calling fires down on a large area, but doesn't leave them as flexible as the alternative - which is embedding them with a unit. The latter brings with them a lot more risk, but allows them to bring fires down onto immediate targets much more effectively.

Is an easy one to mod, at least.

Larger maps (or Operational scenarios) would also require infrastructure that the game just doesn't support - I don't believe that any vehicle in CM can run out of fuel, for example.

CMSF and CMBN are probably the best starting points for Combat Mission, in different ways. Both tend towards small numbers of units (at least the Blue side in CMSF), and have some clear maps and objectives. A lot of CMBN is in bocage, so short-ranged fights with clearly defined terrain. A lot of CMSF involves fighting in cities, which are conceptually similar. The main difference is that CMSF is asymmetric - you'll usually have a small Blue force against a much larger Red one, and the Blue force is probably going to be the attacker. In some ways that's easier - you'll have better kit and less to think about as the attacker - but it does mean that missions often have a similar narrative.

Let's start the forensic dissection game: Lots of things you'd expect, hit decals, hit text, shaders, on-map mortars, less moustaches, visible pouches, fortifications, rivers and bridges etc. I'm assuming the static armour positions are still just built with map geometry, rather than being a fortification type Some other points: Irregulars in tracksuits! M1 Abrams no longer have "Shock Force" written on the barrel Tons more detail on those T-72s. Not sure if these are one of the now-not-hypothetical "future" models they were talking about. Not sure if the BMPs are hit by a Precision artillery mission? Excaliber was used in Iraq in 2007, so it's early, but not too early, I suspect. High rarity, probably. Are those *six* men Bradley squads?

I use Assault quite a bit, but in the wrong situation it's risky - the problem is that it only represents bounding overwatch, so you're losing a degree of control. Often it's better to take things a lot slower and do the same thing manually. The situations where it's most useful is when you absolutely need the security to fire+movement onto a target, *and* speed is paramount - manually adjusting orders and wait times can quickly get yourself into difficulties, since errors can accumulate. From previous testing, I believe you can throw smoke grenades whilst mounted in halftracks as well, which is well worth doing (i.e., Smoke, let the smoke develop, then Assault)

Field guns fire on flat(ish) trajectories. I don't think the US use any field guns right now? Arguably they don't have a reason to, since long range direct fire can be accomplished with ATGMs or aircraft.

Inspired by this, I set up a near best-case scenario against the AI to play around with panzergrenadiers in detail. Using CMRT, a platoon of halftracks against a Soviet rifle platoon, with a couple of HMG's, on an Open map. The halftracks, perhaps unsurprisingly, dominated. I did find that they were best used buttoned up, minimising gunner exposure time (I did lose two gunners, but one was due to wandering into SMG range, and the other from some sneaky enfilade fire, so I'd be happy claiming both as my fault). Keeping the halftrack's nose pointing towards the enemy made them pretty much invulnerable. The tighter cone of incoming fire was evident, alongside the immediate reaction times of the enemy, but it didn't make a huge amount of difference. Mostly the engagement was from 300-500m away, and the three HMG and one sdkfz/17 - the 2cm variant. This has all-around armour protection for the gunner, and was extremely effective. "Assault" orders from the back of the halftrack are interesting - they'll all jump out, and half of them will take up positions next to the vehicle, whilst the other half sprint forward. That's probably the best way to dismount in general. Knowing that there were not AT weapons on the other side made bolder moves possible. Charging directly in spraying fire would still have been daft, but this is probably the best I've ever seen halftracks operate.

Distance will definitely help - that gun shield is pretty great from the right angle (another consequence of the different spread in weapons fire) I do also wonder if the correct SOP with halftracks is to not "open up" at all, and primarily use them in situations where the infantry need to cross open areas under potential small arms fire. Actually firing the MG can be useful, but perhaps only as a contingency or as a way to protect the dismounts whilst they're dismounting, by area-firing for suppression. The stereotypical panzergrenadier approach (rolling up to 200m-400m away, spraying fire everywhere, dumping infantry, assaulting forward) is clearly a roll of the dice - that kind of up-front violence is only going to work if the unit significantly out-firepowers the opposition, and given the nature of the attack, it's plausible that the scouting information might not be as complete as you'd like.

The gunner (and tank commander) vulnerability seems to be a bug, or at least an unintended consequence of the way firing solutions are calculated. Targeting in CM is always centre of mass, and presumably there's an accuracy offset based on this - this may well be based on a percentage. Targeting the halftrack and the halftrack gunner has been shown to result in quite different spreads of fire - tracers fired at the gunner are far more concentrated. I'd posit that the reason for this is that it might be calculating percentage offset from a smaller target, so the end result is a tighter cone of fire, resulting in more gunner death. In reality, I'm not sure that changes things tactically all that much - ideally you want to be the only one shooting, with the MG's suppression keeping the other chap's head down. If that's not the case then you won't last long anyway.

Thank you John. From your link above: This makes a lot of sense to me in CM terms - if the halftrack is going to be up against zero AT assets, and possibly if the enemies that were there could be reliably suppressed (even by the halftrack's own MG), then it should be possible to be very aggressive with them. On the eastern front, if you were in a situation (locally or otherwise) with no Soviet armour, then I suspect this is a lot more plausible - AT rifles are not Bazookas, and whilst the soviets had plenty of AT guns, if their positions could be reliably scouted and suppressed with artillery then I'd expect the halftracks to operate more freely.

Oh, quite right, but it might still be worthwhile.

My list looks something like: Manual points are a good one, even if you can technically do it now, on an honour system. "Un-Acquire", or even manual acquire would be another. "Typical Only" setting for Quick Battles would be nice too. Road - or formation following is another. If-then AI triggers? A visual display/overlay of the LOS map in-game, so that you can tell which spots can be seen from this spot, unambiguously. Flares, Flares, Flares. That's a huge part of night-fighting which just doesn't exist in CM. I'm not sure about the real tactical value of spreading fires, but maybe that? I suspect it's the kind of thing that's over-,modelled in a lot of games, like ASL. There's probably more, but that's a decent list I think.

I don't know if that's actually true. I've certainly seen a Stuarts fire canister rounds at enemy tanks before, which led me to believe there was at least some level of "chamber" logic going on. Those wouldn't have been the first round fired though, so perhaps that's not the same thing.

I don't remember Battlefront ever hitting an announced date either. I also can't see any justifiable reason to clutch at pearls in horror when the statement was: Which is still accurate - one of the possible outcomes of aiming at something is that you'll miss. Disappointing, no question - I too would like be playing with tiny soldiers right now. Offering preorders does muddy things, since there's been some kind of monetary transaction. Pre-ordering in general is rarely something that benefits the consumer though. Do Battlefront do the best PR work? Certainly not, but that's a very different question. There's clearly an effort/benefit calculation to be done there, and since I haven't done that, I can't say whether it would be worth their time (whether better PR would equate to more sales). Same applies to issues around Steam, or any other questions about how their business is run. It wouldn't surprise me if there was a lot of worthwhile improvement that could be made here, but I don't remotely have the context to have a founded opinion about it. The Engine 4 patch/issues are a more serious matter, I think. Battlefront has clearly been through a blip in terms of staffing, and the engine is not where they'd like it to be right now, with the variously known issues. It's definitely a fully playable product, but I think it is the only area where you could make a defensible argument that one had be "let down" or similar. I still don't think that's an argument that I'm keen to make, but I suspect it's a viable one.

Yeah, but how sure was Montgomery that there weren't two Panzer divisions in the Netherlands? And that was also in September. Co-incidence? Yes.

Combat Mission is a hardcore simulation, not a "strategy game". There's definitely overlap, but the priorities are extremely different - CM is complex enough that using historical manuals as a guide is not only practical, but probably a good idea. Part of the simulation value is that "overwhelming odds" doesn't really mean what you think it does. A Machine Gun doesn't care if you run five guys or twenty guys at it from a few hundred metres away, they're all equally dead. Healing people is firmly not possible in CM, as it wouldn't be in reality. Again, it's attempting to approximate reality as it's first priority.  So, absolute basics of WW2 to Modern infantry combat: Squads have around 10 men, usually based around a Light Machine Gun or two. Squads will usually subdivide into two fireteams of 4-5 men. There are both larger and smaller formations, but we'll stick with that. Platoons are three squads, and usually have some attached assets (Medium Machine Guns, Anti-tank assets, Light Mortars, etc.) Companies are three platoons, with some more attached assets (Perhaps HMG's, Medium Mortars, etc.) The absolute fundamental idea is that of Fire and Manouevre. If you're stationary, you have far better situational awareness, and can bring more firepower to bear (creating a larger "volume of fire". That means a squad will typically want to divide into two fireteams, only one of which is moving at any one time. The second core idea is suppression - shooting at people isn't primarily about killing them, it's about making them keep their heads down. If you are supressing them (they're cowering and not shooting back), then your guys are free to move. That means that if one fireteam can suppress the enemy, then the second can manouevre freely, either closing to close range to finish them off, or completing their movement elsewhere. If the fireteam *can't* suppress the enemy by themselves (i.e., win fire superiority in the firefight), then the whole squad joins the firefight. That means that another squad from the platoon needs to be the one to manouevre. This is why reserves are important - to have that option, the second squad can't be engaged at the same time that the first squad is, otherwise there's no-one to move. If the whole platoon is engaged, the same thing applies at the company level. Core ideas: - Pay attention to your weapons and what they're for - Don't tire your guys out - Keep your options as open as possible - keep guys out of the fighting until you need them - Learn to read the terrain - find areas where it's possible to advance in cover (physical protection) or concealment (hidden from Line of Sight) - Patience! CM is unforgiving and brutal, and small mistakes can be devastating. Bil's Battle Drill blog is superb: http://battledrill.blogspot.com/2013/09/battle-drill-002-squad-attack-drill.html There are also many Youtube videos which illustrate battle drills, many of which are fully applicable to Combat Mission. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MURJTflM_JI Period Manuals are usually available online for free as well.

The Grenade launcher? In formal terms I doubt it (it won't come under "artillery"), although conceptually it's pretty similar to WW2 infantry guns like the Ig18. The main difference is that the Infantry guns can fire indirectly, and has a much great range. Obviously, as with anything like this, the lines are blurred.

Just brought up the Scenario editor in CMBS, to look at the US artillery for comparison: Comparing batteries of three guns apiece, the ammo counts are: 155mm Self Propelled (Paladin) 117 HE 12 Excaliber (Precision guided) 12 WP (Smoke) Call-in time for Typical FO on foot: 4 minutes 155mm 180 HE 12 Excaliber 18 WP Call-in time: 5 minutes 105mm 105 HE 30 WP Call-in time: 5 minutes 60 and 81mm mortars come in pairs, and each pair has: 100 HE 8 WP Call-in time: 3 minutes 120mm mortars have: 50 HE XM395 (Guided) 8 6 WP Call-in time: 4 minutes The increase in smoke rounds for the 105mm is interesting, although obviously the 155mm WP rounds will have a larger footprint. Doing the same test with a FO mounted in an M1200 Armored Knight shaved off one minute on each call-in time (so Paladins were 3 minutes, etc.), with the exception of the 81mm mortars, which remained at 3 minutes. I forget what the equivalent vehicles are in CMSF, but they're in there, and have a similar effect. Oh, also worth mentioning Danger Close - smaller calibre rounds are easier to use closer to your own dudes, without taking hits.

Blackmoria's answer, unsurprisingly, is the one to pay attention to. Some more points and an illustration: Mortar vs. Howitzer vs. Field Gun - the interesting thing is where they overlap. The main practical difference, in all CM games, is how organic each asset is. In WW2 titles, US infantry have 60mm mortars at the Platoon level - this means they are available for the platoon leader to call down, and that they are going to be quick to respond to changing circumstances. 81mm mortars exist at the Company level, and most formations attach their artillery at higher levels than that, and often these larger assets are only available to Forward Observers. In CMBS (and to a less extent CMSF, but we'll have to see exactly how this is modelled in CMSF 2) , the modern US infantry rifle platoon can have embedded Forward Observers, and may also have access to small drones. The rifle company also typically has 120mm mortars, which are gettng to the point where they're no longer really "miniature artillery", since they can do some real damage. It's also notable that the US 155mm and 120mm mortars both have a limited amount of precision-guided rounds, which allow you to call in "precision" missions. In the modern titles, Forward Observers often have dedicated vehicles, which cut down their response time even further.

True, but it's not clear precisely what the changes are (from this end) - this scenario in particular was mentioned by name, so it's plausible it has some major updates. I'm not sure that all of them need the same level of attention.

I think that I remember reading that the artillery has two effects - an explosion, and a number of generated "shrapnel" projectiles that issues from that point - the number, velocity and so forth will differ depending on the weapon. If that's correct, I don't know whether this is ray-traced or actually affected by gravity, etc. This won't be a realistic number of pieces (since there would be thousands in reality, most of which won't matter), but would be enough to get the point across. In any case, that seems to follow my observations (and it sounds like a plausible way to do it anyway) - a small rise can offer significant protection from artillery, and sometimes a surprisingly far-off squad will get hit by friendly fire, if they have LOS/LOF to the impact point. Terrain fudging seems to be a "saving throw", of sorts - with the above assumptions this means that trenches will not protect the poor chap from being hit by the explosion, or the simulated invisible shrapnel, but would get an additional chance at life. Presumably not when the shell lands in the trench. In addition, we do know that the terrain tiles act conceptually similar to Advanced Squad Leader or Combat Commander - there's the cover from the actual tile (i.e., a wall or hill physically getting in the way), and also a hinderence factor based on the tiles that the LOF passes through. It's not clear right now precisely how that's modelled - whether that just spoils the spotting, disrupts the aim, or works as a saving throw.

Since CMSF was the first version-2 game, you can really see the progression in sophistication in scenario design - both in terms of map making, and in things like AI plans. Some of the scenarios in the CMSF1 base game are very basic. As a simple example - CMSF 1 Al Huqf Engagement. This is something which has been hinted has been ported over and updated in CMSF 2, and I hope this is correct. This scenario is a symmetric platoon-vs-platoon-with-attached-IFV scenario, over a small city block. The AI plan in this is as simple as it comes - there's literally a central square painted with "assault" (or whatever the command is), which the AI moves to occupy. It's enough to get some movement out of them and make the scenario work, but the end result is a scenario which is trivial and predictable, and nothing like the sophistication of later scenarios. Other than the different kit, that scenario quality is probably the main thing the modules offer. There's a noticeable jump even with the first module (Marines).

Speculating, but I wonder if it depends: 1) Which side of the building it's on 2) Which orientation the building is in 3) What type of building the texture is on That seems like it would be fairly testable, and might be down to offset errors (flipping a bit somewhere, which might not even be noticable if the vanilla textures were symmetric)