Warts 'n' all

A combination of cancer treatment, and then needing to buy a new PC, means that I have built up a backlog of stuff to play. But, I will certainly buy this at sometime. Having been to Kleve for a meal once, and seeing how lovely it is, I might feel a pang of guilt if I have to pound it to bits. Ho hum. 

Many thanks. Recovery is slow, but the girlfriend takes great care of me, and even listens to me waffling on about CM.

Here's screenshots #2 and 3. Maybe they'll eventually show up on an official screenshots site, maybe not. Late war M4A1 Sherman 76 and Pershing during some QB city fighting. Battling Jagdtigers
 

I had pulled a bunch of screenshots for the guys but I don't know which they're going to use. So I'll post a couple of my favorites here to whet your appetite.
First, a tank I lobbied hard to get into the game - uparmored Sherman! One of a number of late war M4A3E8s that went through a field modification program that literally doubled the bow armor (which is now thicker than the Jumbo's). They acted as substitute/additional Jumbos in field units.
 
 

Hope you're okay now my friend.
Hope you're okay now my friend 😉.

A combination of cancer treatment, and then needing to buy a new PC, means that I have built up a backlog of stuff to play. But, I will certainly buy this at sometime. Having been to Kleve for a meal once, and seeing how lovely it is, I might feel a pang of guilt if I have to pound it to bits. Ho hum. 

A combination of cancer treatment, and then needing to buy a new PC, means that I have built up a backlog of stuff to play. But, I will certainly buy this at sometime. Having been to Kleve for a meal once, and seeing how lovely it is, I might feel a pang of guilt if I have to pound it to bits. Ho hum. 

A combination of cancer treatment, and then needing to buy a new PC, means that I have built up a backlog of stuff to play. But, I will certainly buy this at sometime. Having been to Kleve for a meal once, and seeing how lovely it is, I might feel a pang of guilt if I have to pound it to bits. Ho hum. 

A combination of cancer treatment, and then needing to buy a new PC, means that I have built up a backlog of stuff to play. But, I will certainly buy this at sometime. Having been to Kleve for a meal once, and seeing how lovely it is, I might feel a pang of guilt if I have to pound it to bits. Ho hum. 

A combination of cancer treatment, and then needing to buy a new PC, means that I have built up a backlog of stuff to play. But, I will certainly buy this at sometime. Having been to Kleve for a meal once, and seeing how lovely it is, I might feel a pang of guilt if I have to pound it to bits. Ho hum. 

A combination of cancer treatment, and then needing to buy a new PC, means that I have built up a backlog of stuff to play. But, I will certainly buy this at sometime. Having been to Kleve for a meal once, and seeing how lovely it is, I might feel a pang of guilt if I have to pound it to bits. Ho hum. 

A combination of cancer treatment, and then needing to buy a new PC, means that I have built up a backlog of stuff to play. But, I will certainly buy this at sometime. Having been to Kleve for a meal once, and seeing how lovely it is, I might feel a pang of guilt if I have to pound it to bits. Ho hum. 

A combination of cancer treatment, and then needing to buy a new PC, means that I have built up a backlog of stuff to play. But, I will certainly buy this at sometime. Having been to Kleve for a meal once, and seeing how lovely it is, I might feel a pang of guilt if I have to pound it to bits. Ho hum. 

Ah ok! Thanks, PT, I should have known you would consider this also 😉. Thanks again mate

I actually do slip in some small terrain undulations to break up LoS because the real world is not generally billiard table flat (except perhaps for beaches). I've been doing that as long as I've been making maps for this game  Check out Beau Guillot for a good example - Google Earth shows flat terrain but as you can see, there are plenty of small dips.

@Kohlbie Thanks for letting us all know so quickly. And @Paper Tiger for the prompt action.

Aaaw crap! There's always something that slips through the last check. I have no idea how that got past - I must have re-imported these units after all the testing as I played the vanilla version several times without any issues. It's funny because they're not in the variant which is almost exactly the same. That's game breaker for sure but I guess you'll have a fairly easy run at this particular mission.
I have deleted these units and will get a fresh compilation up later today after I've run through everything else again. Thanks for letting me know.
 
And thanks for the feedback on the first three missions.
 
A new version with the tanks removed is now up. I've had a look through most of the other missions and there are no irregularities that I can see.

Hey Paper Tiger. Just started the deployment phase on La Grand Hameau and for some reason I have a wild platoon of Shermans on the map, behind the objective (see image). They are the 746th Tank Battalion HQ tank, the A Company HQ tank, and my surviving tanks of 1st platoon A company from the previous mission.
Stray Shermans aside, the first three missions played really well. Silence The Guns was a fun, snappy romp, and the changes in experience/motivation on Beu Guillot didn't make the mission particularly harder but certainly more satisfying than the original experience I had were the Germans just crumbled and ran almost immediately. Ecoqueneauville was also a noticeably improved experience. The AI moving and reacting to me coming up the main road felt a lot more natural than them just sitting around like lemmings. Good stuff! 

This is a difference without a distinction. There's functionally no difference between having two reasonable-size games and one mega-game, except the people with no interest in summer 44 France would be compelled to purchase it at an inflated price. How much is the full CMBN bundle? $140? CMFB is $60. You're asking them to charge you $220 whether you want both games or not.
 

The thought did cross my mind briefly a while ago though. If they did want it as an extra, I'd be very happy for that to happen but I'm not pushing for it. It needs both the Market Garden and Vehicle Pack content to play so I can understand why that might not be appealing for them. 
The same will go for the revision of the Scottish Corridor that will come along some time in the future - it's going to need Market Garden and the Vehicle pack to work. I REALLY want a flamethrower tank or two in one or two of these missions as they were present in the real operation and there's no way that I'm redoing it without one. (Or at least trying it to see if it's as cool as I think it will be. I suspect it will completely destroy any existing balance in these missions but I want to try.)
 
Watching Hapless's Montebourg and Scottish Corridor series is what got me back into this. He did a really good job with his AARs - very professional. My wife was astonished when I pointed out to her that I made the series he was playing.

I've just downloaded it and look forward to finding new ways to lose! Happy New Year and thank you!

https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/tsd3/combat-mission-battle-for-normandy/cm-battle-for-normandy-campaigns/the-road-to-montebourg-revised-for-v4-0/
Don't worry, this won't overwrite or otherwise delete the original campaign that came on the disk. IIt's a completely different file. This is substantially different from the vanilla campaign and the number of changes made is huge but the most important one to note is that you will need both the Market Garden module and the Vehicle Pack to play this.
 
Other important highlights are that the 2/8 INF core units are now mostly Green with High morale which means you'll need to manage them more carefully in a firefight.
All-new AI plans using triggers and most of the tricks that came with later versions of the game.
Flamethrowers are included in some missions.
Some maps have been revised, most notably the map for Turnbull's Stand which veterans of the original campaign will probably notice quite quickly.
A 'new' mission has been added although those of you who found and played the earlier revised version that was uploaded to BFC's old Scenario Depot will recognise it. The campaign has a prelude phase consisting of the new mission and then the old campaign opener Beau Guillot. You should notice quite a few changes made to that mission as well - some extra help to make up for the drop in experience.
There is air support in quite a few missions now and less artillery, at least the bigger guns anyway.
 
Anyway, let's post this and then I'll see what needs to be 'fixed' or not in good time. This is an old campaign so i'm not expecting a ton of feedback for it for quite a while but let me know and I'll fix things. Now I'm taking a break from CMBN. I haven't quite decided what comes next - finishing Hasrabit or a new version of Gung Ho! for the German forces. Later, I'll get to work on the two Scottish campaigns I'd mentioned elswhere.
 
Have a Happy New year.

Well, that was a full day's work. Fortunately, the wife has been busy and hasn't minded me spending 6+ hours doing the artwork and the briefings for all the missions while listening to some early-70s Prog Rock albums and Thin Lizzy (Johnny the Fox is a seriously underappreciated album). All of the new work has just been imported into all the missions and their variants and all that's left to do is rewrite the campaign script and compile it.
Now I COULD upload this later this evening and be able to say that I revised it in 2023 (just) but I'd like to spend a bit more time making sure that everything is as it says on the tin (I did a lot of that today but a second pass is always a good idea.) I like to make sure that all the AI plans are active (I switch them off while testing a new plan) and make sure that the variants have the proper changes implemented.
I expect to have this done tomorrow morning which means it will still be up before the New Year if you live in Hawaii. Or failing that, early on Tuesday (for me)
Edit to add:
I just tested compiling the new version and it all works fine. Yay! There were a few errors but I found them all and corrected them. Now I just have to set those parameters in the script correctly and it's a day!

And there we are. I finished devising and testing the AI plans for Eroudeville today and it's all working as I'd like it too. I've played through the first 30 minutes of it too and it was tough so I made a few further adjustments that are non-spoiler in nature. The mission is now 1 hour and 50 minutes long with the possibility of 10 minutes of overtime. This extra time has been added at the start so that you have more daylight time.
I've also added some new toys for the US player to play with. Since the new AI plans alone will make things a bit more challenging for the player, I think some extra help is needed. You get a couple of M8 SPA vehicles at the start to help with the bunkers and at around the 30 minute mark, you'll get an M10 Tank Destroyer, a breach team and a flamethrower unit as well as some more air support. You have a few FOO available to keep your artillery and air support on the go as well.
Now, is it balanced? I doubt it. I suspect it will be a very difficult mission for the player especially if he has had a bad result in Ecausseville. Or it could be a cakewalk. Luck always plays some part in such a game, a single lucky hit or miss can decide the entire game and there's not much I can do about. I lost two Shermans to lucky hits in my first play through and that was basically game over for me. True, I wasn't playing smart but rather ensuring that a rash player who just throws his forces ant the enemy and hopes to win by brute force gets this posterior handed back to him but the second hit was entirely unexpected and so we have the M10. 
So, I will spend the rest of the year polishing things up, writing new briefings and making new artwork where necessary and then compile the thing to upload as soon as possible.

When I was at uni, I was a D&D dungeon master and devised a brutal world with several large, complex dungeons as well as some small, brutal ones. I was a total bastidge but people seemed to love the adventures I created. Tough but (not very) fair was how I rolled. I blame D&D for my sadistic impulses.
Getting difficulty right is pretty tough - make it too easy and people will ignore your work. Make it too hard and some folks will think it's the best mission ever while most will just give up and avoid your stuff in the future.