domfluff

I would sign up to A Few Good Men and The Blitz - both are large communities of PBEM players.

Hold down V when you start the game. Hold down V again if you want it back.

Thank you for the AAR Bil, the risky moves over the last few turns could easily have paid off, or the Jagdtiger could have bogged itself somewhere useless, and we'd be looking at an entirely different battle.

Wow, well that was a thing. I think it's pretty clear where everything fell apart. I do think Bil's force choice wasn't bad (even if it was extreme), and it could have easily gone the other way - as mentioned, if the Jagdtiger had died to a lucky shot, we'd all be calling him a genius. Excellent analysis and setup for the AAR, really keen to get into CMFB

Ah, fair enough, but the point stands (and yeah, they're not just sound contacts) With CMBO, there could be a physical representation (generic grey tank shape) of the enemy tank on the battlefield, and sometimes this would produce bizarre (sometimes to the extent of being implausible) results like seeing a supposedly friendly Sherman in the middle of an enemy panzer formation. It was a great feature, but I can understand the logic of dropping it - quite a few things have been dropped that (apparently) didn't work quite as well as intended between the game lines.

It was pretty cool, but it came up with some nonsensical outcomes in CMBO sometimes. At the moment, a "tank" sound contact is definitely enemy. but no word on whether it could be a halftrack or a jagdtiger, so there's something of the same effect.

Oh, and nearly forgot - Slim is producing a series of Tactics, Techniques, and Procedure videos as well, which seem pretty promising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZaFn-1clic&list=PLmW_vcwM_qxukdDjpfUEerpICUzTrTKek&index=9 His channel also has a playlist of Combat Mission tutorial videos, which include the Armchair General videos from above. I've also learnt a fair amount from watching Ithikial's AAR's, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYfN9N2-DpA&index=1&list=PLR0_ESlvYtKJBR_hXXCurhEJEugpgpz7W

Generally speaking, I think you can learn a lot from keeping the battles as small as possible. CM makes you into the role of every commander down to a squad leader, so only having to think about a single platoon or company is really useful. Bil's Battle Drill blog is invaluable http://battledrill.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/combat-mission-tactical-problems-cmtp.html The Armchair General series of five videos is also fantastic - especially when you go back and find out that one of the scenarios he plays through and wins (School of Hard Knocks - it's the video on attacking) has a load of posts on this forum back from release complaining about how it was impossible, and that the player is supposed to lose. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ6dDlqye9Q In terms of "where to start" - the CMBN base has the scenario "Platoon Patrol", which is a single US platoon crossing a river. It's entirely possible to play that through in under an hour, and when you know what you're doing you can play through that with zero casualties, with proper fire and movement and control of your platoon. Initially, you're likely to suffer heavily of course.

There's an awful lot of it

If the hide breaks contact (say, behind a wall, against non-HE fire), then that should work fine - they can throw smoke whilst prone.

Having made a fairly stupid mistake of digging in on the forward slope of a hill in CMFI, I'm very happy with the effect of trenches at least: https://youtu.be/kPjkD3gCRJM This kind of incoming fire went on for fully 30 minutes at (seemingly) this rate (and continued thereafter, but not as intense) - the platoon in the trenches were badly suppressed (and one squad, Green with a poor leader, went as far as breaking and running behind the hill - I eventually sent them back in), but they took *zero* casualties throughout, and were there to deal with the eventual German assault (repulsed with grenades and mortar fire, mostly). The 17pdrs weren't so lucky of course. Definitive? Certainly not, but they clearly did the job here.

You mean Gurkha's *can't* jump twelve feet in the air, or bludgeon a Panther to death in close assault armed only with another Panther?

The AI will happily call in off-map assets by itself, give it the assets and a Forward Observer in a good position, and enough time to call it in. You can also set pre-planned missions. I'm not sure about triggering artillery missions, but you can certainly trigger the FO's movement into a spotting position. Triggers get activated regardless of LOS or other issues, they're magic like that. Orders like covered arcs can be assigned at setup, or can be pre-baked - you could assign the AI an entire plan just using the movement options (Move fast here, pause for 2 minutes, crawl to here, covered arc west, etc.) but this has to be a "pre-baked" scenario, so there are other limitations.

Hmmm... access to the British Indian army for CMFI... Gurkhas?

Sure, but throwing smoke whilst under fire isn't the best idea for maximum efficiency - it should be tossed before an advance, and given a little time to develop, before charging across the open ground. Obviously, sometimes you're desperate... The thing that's usually got me is when I've chucked smoke around a corner of a house, and the smoke grenades have bounced off the house and landed in useless positions.

Sure (and this is the weakness of the omniscient perspective), but targeted fire is still a better idea than area fire, and since a contact marker seems to improve the chances of gaining a full spot (this part is really difficult to test accurately, but it certainly seems to have this effect), this should still improve your tank's chances of shaving a few vital seconds off the time to get a full spot, and start targeting the AT gun effectively, rather than the approximate area it is in... against an AT gun this could mean one fewer round fired back at you, which could mean one fewer tank destroyed. It's small, incremental advantages, but they do add up. Naturally, if C2 was strongly enforced, then the non-contact marker area fire would presumably be modelled as much less accurate (since you're modelling "that hedge", rather than "two thirds of the way along that hedge", in simple terms), so it would be even more important... but I think it's still important with the system that we have, since I think that any advantage you can give to the TacAI is worth working for.

Okay, this is fairly complicated, and has a fair few unknowns, but: Having a contact marker for a target *seems* to improve the chances of spotting the target. It certainly seems that way in testing. I've had quite a few slow moving, buttoned tanks with contact markers get the first shot on unbuttoned stationary tanks since knowing and applying the following. Information can be transferred vertically and horizontally. Vertical information is transferred through active C2 links (you can visualise these with Ctrl-Z), and therefore can be voice comms, radio, whatever. Squad 3 of Platoon 2 will talk to Platoon 2's HQ, which can talk to the other squads in the platoon, and give them the same contact markers (usually within 10 seconds). Platoon 2's HQ can then (with an active C2 link) talk up the chain to the Company's HQ, which in turn can transfer this down to the other platoon HQ's, and them to their squads. So, to transfer contacts between company HQ's, you must have a Battalion HQ above company HQ's to communicate between them. This means that a Tank Battalion (or elements thereof) operating with an Infantry Battalion has no easy way of sharing information. This is where horizontal sharing comes in. *Any* units that are inside voice comms range (4 squares) can share contact information, regardless of their TOE structure. So.... since valid and current contact markers seem to improve your guys' spotting performance across the board, maintaining C2 links for them is important. If a tank platoon needs to go up against a known AT gun, they really want to have a contact marker first. This can mean having a recon section's HQ with a radio by the tanks, to transfer information to them when their radio-equipped scouts find the AT gun, but it can also mean that forces that lack radios, like German recon forces in Kubelwagens, and especially the Italians in CMFI, need to rely on runners (HQ units and XO units) to go between squads and keep their information up. Realising this made the Italian force structure make infinitely more sense to me, although it's still hilariously bad. Now, one of the fundamental weaknesses (and strengths) of Combat Mission is that you, the player, play every role. You are every squad leader and every Battalion commander. This means that you have more information than any of your troops do. That means that the remnants of a tank crew can spot something, and despite having no radio, and no chance of getting back to your lines, you (as the omniscient player) can still put area fire down on the forces they can see. It's a compromise, and I can understand why it's done that way.

Checking CMFI, the carrier platoons there do not have attached scout squads (rather, the crew *are* the scout squad, and they dismount. Those carrier platoons can acquire the 2 inch mortars just fine. I did see if the CMBN logic was the same - dismounting the scout squad and letting the driver acquire the mortar, or dismounting the driver, loading the scouts and having them acquire the mortar, but to no avail.

The universal carrier platoons (CW motor battalions) have a variety of weapons that can be acquired, including PIATS and 2inch mortars (with 51mm HE and WP ammo). No matter what I do, I can't seem to acquire the actual mortar. On acquiring, it just seems to vanish. Ammunition can be acquired fine, but the silhouette doesn't appear in the unit, and the weapon isn't visually represented. Naturally, the unit cannot fire it either on testing. I imagine this is a bug?

CMBS seem to have less bogging (I've mostly only bogged around rivers), or bogging seems to be more survivable at least. Of course, being immobilised in the wrong place is a mission kill.

I'm fully expecting the life and death of that Jagdtiger to be one of the decisive moments. Bil knows it's there, of course, so he'll be ready for it, and I don't think he'd have taken a force that couldn't deal with it. What I'm *actually* expecting is for it to bog within the first couple of turns, out of LOS of anything worth shooting, but that's just me being cynical

I feel like this is going to be decided fairly quickly - the American TD's are reasonably bad at dealing with infantry, and the mismatch in armour numbers mean that the Panthers have their work cut out, so there are some clear decisive moments that will swing this either way. I am expecting to see quite a lot of burning halftracks though. My money's on Bil I think, but that's always a fairly safe bet.

This is great. I started playing around with the values to try to make a "night vision" mode for CMBS, but haven't gotten terribly far at the moment. Did manage to turn everything pink, which is something.

I've long thought that CMFI might actually be the strongest of all of them - Shermans are comparatively heavier tanks, armoured cars are actually reasonably well protected, etc. - there's an awful lot to like about it. Still, CMBN is the WW2 of the movies, and the Eastern front is traditional wargame fare (as well as the Bulge). The modern games are the less trodden path, so they have novelty on their side... so CMFI is really the odd one out.

The "First Person" camera that the upgrade talks about are the "FPS Controls" option - this is using WASD and the mouse to move the camera around as in a first person shooter, rather than the default controls, which are more like CAD software in implementation. Personally, I've always been fine with the default, but each to their own.