domfluff

I'd suggest the campaigns that Field Marshall Blucher uploaded, to start with. They tend to be small, with elite troops and with large penalties for casualties, but generally worth checking out.

76mm AT gun vs Tiger, from a PBEM of mine a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NXfEVtMntw

This isn't a request so much as a "wouldn't it be cool if..." Wouldn't it look great (and add to functionality) if the alt-b night artifical brightness option was supplemented by "Night Vision Goggles" and "Thermal Imaging" modes? Purely an aesthetic touch of course, but an awesome one...

Thank you Bil!

From the manual: I'm not sure if this can be used to create CMSF/CMA-style trenches, but if it can, this would be how you'd do it.

I really miss these - I learnt a huge amount from the Battledrills blog, and it would be great to see platoon/company attacks have the same treatment. I still play through that example squad attack scenario, from time to time. I'm not sure if some of the other battle drills (clearing trenches, etc.) are relevant to CMBN?

Nope, no word on timings at all, or even the order of the planned releases at this point. There is snow in CMFI (technically in CM:Afghanistan as well) - the troops get winter overcoats and the like, and it looks great. Snow will be important on CMRT and the other Eastern front games, of course, so I would guess that you'd see a Bulge game before a CMRT module with snow, but that's complete guesswork.

The scenario editor will let you design scenarios and write AI plans - it's the same tool used to make them in the first place. It's pretty powerful (it's mostly *this* AI group goes *here*), but writing a good one is more difficult. Probably the easiest way to get started would be to open a quick battle map in the editor, and then save it as a new scenario. You can then delete all of the existing AI plans and write your own. Here's a decent guide, including triggers - it's for CMRT, but this should be identical to CMBS in it's current state. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f02X2cygzFY&safe=active

I think people (well, me) might be curious as to your process for developing the Quick Battles - it would seem to be much harder to write plans for generic units in that way.

Sort of. There are three AI levels. The "TacAI" is what tells your troops what to do on an individual level - taking cover in the 8m action spot, vaulting over walls, cowering from fire, using the right shells against tanks, running away. The top level "strategic" AI is a scripted plan per-scenario, but it's more like "go here, at X speed and Y amount of caution". In between these, there's a level of AI to control units that have been grouped together in the editor - deciding how to move from A to B (fire and movement, etc.), using cover and adhering to the overall plan (e.g., if the plan was for this group to sprint in this direction, without regard for the enemy, then they'll try to do that. There can be multiple AI plans, which can be weighted - this can cover everything from setup onwards, so you can set up a scenario that may change drastically on a second play through. You can also set reinforcements on a random timer, so you may be unsure as to what opposition you're facing, even if you've played the scenario before. The challenge with Quick Battles is that the map designer has no way of knowing what forces you're going to pick (or even which sides), so the plans have to be generic by design. With regular scenarios, they can be much more sophisticated. The way this used to work (back in CMx1) was pretty simple - there were objectives on the map. If those objectives were friendly controlled, the AI would defend, if they were enemy controlled they would attack. There is still some merit to this approach (it reacts dynamically to your actions), but it's very predictable and not terribly sophisticated - the AI might lead an attack with mortar units, for example, which is entirely avoidable now. Quick Battles are great, but they're probably best done with a human opponent, PBEM. They can be fun to knock around, but the AI is always going to be weaker than in a proper scenario or campaign.

In Shock Force at least, having a Forward Observer in the Stryker Fire Support vehicle would knock down the off-map mortar support's (Platoon level I think? Company possibly) call-in time down to just *two minutes*, which was blisteringly fast. The vehicle was providing a bonus to the FO, since the FO on foot was a little slower, and another unit in the Fire Support Vehicle was slower than the FO in the same - clearly both bonuses were stacking, to a certain degree.

Mostly I lurk. I've been playing CM since 2005 or so, but only seriously in the last couple of years, and I've only dipped my toe into PBEM since CMRT came out, so I created a forum account around the same time.

I've always done a lot better with the modern titles, so I got up to speed with CMBS pretty quickly I think. It helps that I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about how best to use Motor Rifle Troops - the difference here is that the Russians (unlike the Syrians) actually have the tools to make use of them, relatively speaking. In terms of the small battles, August Morning took a fair few attempts to get the hang of, but the last time I ran through it I only took one casualty, and that was probably unnecessary. Part of the issue I'm finding (against the AI and in PBEM) is that being stationary for more than a few minutes can be a death sentence - precision artillery, AGL's and missiles can all cause havoc out of nowhere.

I imagine that Tunisia would be the starting point though - if only for the fact that the Americans were involved. But yes, quite right, early war is early war. I do wonder what the path of least resistance is there? Working backwards towards Barbarossa? I'm really interested in seeing France 1940, but I don't think that's coming any time soon (despite the Char B1 being in CMBN now, sort of).

Whilst that's true - CMRT is more symmetric than, say, CMSF - I would have thought the primary reason for setting it in 1944 is that they already had a ton of German vehicles and uniforms from 1944. I'm not sure the infantry focus is really the point, CM does infantry combat really rather well, after all.

Since the goal seems to be to re-use assets as much as possible, it's likely that the 1944-45 WW2 West Front game will share quite a bit with late war Eastern Front. Both need snow, of course. A lot of the assets needed for North Africa already exist in CMFI, which is great news (since I'd really like a North Africa game). By this logic, we couldn't expect to see France 1940 before the Eastern Front 1941, and possibly before North Africa as well. The Pacific is harder to predict. The developers have mentioned either no interest or the lack of engine capability to handle the Pacific, and there are also fewer overlapping assets to use elsewhere. More Combat Mission is better than fewer, but I can see why it wouldn't be a top priority.

Thank you Mark, these are awesome.

Next major WW2 title is the Bulge game. CMRT is clearly getting a module at some point, and they've talked about more Eastern front modules, working backwards. Logically this could be one per year, which would mean Kursk and Stalingrad in the next Eastern Front game (!) CMFI might have a final module, but CMBN is presumably "finished", at least for the most part. This all might change of course - Steve's been even more hesitant/cautious than normal when talking about the future.

I'm fairly certain he was assassinated. Unless he's living on the Moon or got really hairy and started roaming the woods, prompting stories about a Bigfoot with a Boston accent.

I play it both ways - with some scenarios it's worth going back over and over and trying to "solve" them - I'll rarely reload mid-battle (unless I've made some kind of fat-fingered error, like double clicking to select all of a recon troop, and sending their (offscreen) vehicles fast moving into open ground - but I think you can learn a lot from replaying missions repeatedly. Off the top of my head, I know I've played "Sabres at Dawn" from CMSF quite bit, so I have my sequencing/co-ordinating of fire down fairly strongly, as well as my avenues of approach, etc.

About this close: (From Valley of Death) Kidding aside, I'd certainly want to engage at under 1,000m, and much closer if I can manage it. Russian armour is pretty quick, so you can often use the speed to outflank pretty effectively - trading shots at long range is only ever going to benefit the Abrams. The T-90 gets through their side armour easily enough, but I'd usually want to go in with a 2:1 or 3:1 superiority to ensure that the unit is combat effective (i.e., there's no point in wiping out a platoon of M1A1's, if they wipe out 75% of your armour in response - by Lanchester laws you'll have fewer casualties the more you outnumber them).

Gagarina Ave. Checkpoint - a weirdly flat map, but I'm getting to like it.

Messing about around Kharkiv. How many Russian soldiers does it take to work an ATM?

Assuming you're on Windows, and everything's in the default position, when you add CMBS you need to set the game directory path to the Black Sea folder in My Documents, and the executable path to the actual exe, in program files.

Overcoming the US armour advantage (from "Valley of Death").