Bozowans

Do you recommend any books about the ancient world? You seem to know a bit about it. I am reading Ghost on the Throne by James Romm and it has been pretty fascinating. Speaking of the impact that the ancient world has had on us, it makes me wonder what the world would have looked like if Alexander had survived. He planned to turn west after the Indian campaign. He was going to invade Arabia first, mainly to secure the coastal cities so his supply lines from the east would be secure, then he was going to turn west and march across North Africa all the way to Gibraltar. He wanted to take Sicily as well at the very least. Rome was just a weak city at that point being constantly invaded by Gauls and whatnot, and Alexander would have almost certainly crushed Rome in the crib if he had made it that far or considered the emerging Rome to be a threat. The army was already beginning the Arabian campaign when Alexander died. If he survived, he could have lived another 30-40 years easy. If he lived, Rome might have never been a thing. If Rome was never a thing, Christianity might have never been a thing either, and if no Christianity, perhaps no Islam either. Alexander also wanted to start a massive monumental works program on the scale of the Great Pyramids of Egypt. He wanted to build enormous temples to the Hellenic gods like Zeus and Athena, and he wanted a massive monumental tomb for his father, Philip II. He had insane utopian ideas about uniting all of humanity under himself. He probably wouldn't have been able to achieve half of what he wanted, but had he lived, the world would look indescribably different today. He could have had an empire that lasted centuries or millennia. Instead, one man's bout of sudden illness changed everything and his empire collapsed in a spectacular and apocalyptic fashion. I'm pretty sure they went with square tiles in FOG2 to make the armies line up more evenly. If they used hexes, things would look weird. Or if they used no clear grid system at all, things would get really messy. Like the TW games or games such as Scourge of War: Gettysburg or Waterloo, where the regiments tend to overlap each other and get mixed together and walk through each other in weird and unrealistic ways. At least in FOG2 units feel like they have a "weight" to them. They feel like big blocks of men that are hard to maneuver, which is good. I love FOG2, but if you want something different and more RTW-ish, maybe take a look at the Hegemony series. They are fairly low-budget indie games and they don't look nearly as good graphically as RTW, but I think they are really interesting. I've only played Hegemony: Wars of Ancient Greece but they have a Rome game and one that takes place centuries before Rome or Alexander. They kinda merge together the strategic and tactical maps of RTW, so it's like you are fighting small real-time RTW-style battles directly on top of the strategic map. They focus less on city building and more on the logistics of military campaigns and maintaining supply lines and such. You have to do things like send armies out into remote areas in Greece where there isn't much food, so you have to build up large food stockpiles beforehand and send them along with you on the backs of slaves. Then you have to defeat the enemy field armies and then lay siege to their cities before food runs out, all the while protecting your slaves and making sure that you don't weaken the other side of your empire too much, because the AI is very good at being annoying and harassing you all along your borders and burning your crops and stealing your sheep and whatnot. They are also very history focused, which I loved. Their Greece game has a campaign that closely follows the rise of Philip II of Macedon and gives you lots of little historical details and objectives as you go along. I thought it was really fun. I don't really know of many ancients games other than that. There is an obscure one that came out recently called Imperiums: Greek Wars, but it's a turn-based 4X game like Civ. I dunno if it's any good.

This is cool, thanks for the post. I got FoG Empires on the Steam sale a few days ago but I still haven't played it yet. I installed it and poked around the game menus, but I've mostly just been reading about it and looking at videos and tutorials and whatnot. It's hard to decide on where to start! Maybe Macedonia... I also played RTW including the EB mod for it and all that stuff way back in the day. I never played any of the AGEOD titles like Alea Jacta Est though. For grand strategy stuff I mostly stuck with Paradox stuff like CK2, EU4 and now Imperator: Rome. I was never really that into ancient history until recently. I had some vague familiarity with it over the years but I never really knew much about it. Lately though, I read a book about ancient Sparta and now I'm reading a book about the death of Alexander and the wars of the Diadochi, and I'm kinda hooked on it now. It's a fascinating and bizarre time period. Reading about it made me get into FoG2 again, which reminded me that FoG Empires is a thing that exists. In some ways it reminds me of Imperator: Rome. It's about expansion, but not too rapidly or else you collapse. As with most of the other Paradox games, if you expand too rapidly, you become more and more unstable. You even get little citizen and slave pops that you can move around like in I:R. There are some pretty key differences though of course. I like that the terrain and combat width mechanics means that you can't just flood the enemy with overwhelming numbers. Paradox games always seemed like they just came down to raw numbers and manpower. It was always too easy to just flood the enemy with armies without even worrying about terrain or attrition. The progression/regression/aging/decadence mechanic looks interesting too. It's also interesting that the building selection for each province is randomized. I've seen some people dislike this feature, but I think it works. It seems like it would prevent players from doing some kind of min/max optimal build order for every single province over and over again like RTW. I guess I can't say too much about the game though without even having played it.

Well as you're coming out of the Roman Empire, I am going into it. I got Field of Glory Empires on sale a little while ago. It seems interesting, and it's cool that it integrates with FoG2. About CMBS though, yes it is good and you should get it. It's very challenging and plays a lot differently than the other ones. I haven't played all the campaigns yet but the Russian campaign was a lot of fun. As others have said, the fighting can be very fast and deadly and you usually have to be much more stealthy and careful than in the other games, to avoid getting instakilled in one shot from 2000 meters away or something. At the same time though, it can be strangely not deadly when you have stuff like the vehicles with active protection systems. Usually it's suicide to lead an attack with vehicles in CM. Usually you need an infantry screen out front in order to scout for and protect the tanks. In CMBS though, I was able to brazenly charge forward with my APS vehicles, with my infantry jogging along behind. Then I would laugh as enemy missiles and RPGs would harmlessly explode in front of the vehicle. And then the enemy would get blown up real good. The modern warfare toys can be pretty fun.

They seem to represent both sound contacts and tentative contacts. Contact icons will still pop up if an enemy tank is roaring around at high speed on the other side of a hill where no one has LOS to it. I've also seen sound contacts pop up for enemy infantry units that are very close by but with no LOS, like if they are right on the other side of a wall or something -- presumably to simulate footsteps and voices coming from the enemy. I agree that the game gives you way too much info about the enemy though. Like Erwin said, the CM1 games were much better about this. They would deliberately lie to the player about where enemies were, showing an enemy unit 50+ meters away from where they really were sometimes. If an enemy MG was firing from a cluster of buildings in the distance, you might not be able to tell from which building, or you might even be misled into thinking it was one building but it was really another. Then you would plaster that building with fire and blow it up, only to find the enemy was in the house next door all along. I loved the way the game did that, and it's a shame nothing like that ever made it into CM2. I guess it was too complicated for them to code that into the new engine where every single bullet and every single soldier is tracked in detail. Even aside from sound contacts though, the game still gives you too much info, even on maximum difficulty. If you click on a single enemy soldier you spotted from 2000 meters away, the game will still tell you whether he's from an HQ unit or not, or from an AT gun team, or whatever. Now that's just silly.

Oh these are really cool. Thanks!

Does anyone know of something like this but for Cold War Soviet doctrine?

I agree with this 100%. The way you could just sit back and shoot enemies off of hard cover before was silly. In real life it could take hours just to clear out a single apartment building. I'm reminded of the book The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer. He remembered spending much of his time in combat cowering in a terrified, delusional stupor at the bottom of his hole, unable to react or do anything except lie there while the bullets and explosions crashed around outside. He wrote that a lot of his memories of combat were just a blur because of it. Green or conscript troops should certainly not be running around all over the place whenever they get shot at. I never liked how so many of the battles in Shock Force 2 consisted of the western forces shooting the poor hapless Syrians in the back as they ran away from their positions over and over. Every battle would end in a slaughter. I've always wanted the AI in CM to be more likely to cower and surrender, and less likely to run away. Now it seems I've gotten my wish. If I put myself in the shoes of a Syrian conscript, handed a rifle, thrown into a hole in the ground and then told to fend off the invading army of a foreign superpower, I would probably not want to be running around outside. I imagine I would probably be like Sajer, cowering in the bottom of my hole soiling myself until enemy troops got close enough for me to throw my hands up and surrender. One of the first scenarios I played with the new patch was a CMSF2 scenario where you're British light infantry attacking a battalion of poor quality Syrian conscripts in a small town. Their poor quality made them easy to suppress with just small arms fire, and since they weren't running away, it made them easy to capture. Most of the scenario involved my slow, exhausted British troops lumbering from building to building in the extreme heat rounding up large groups of prisoners as they went along. I ended up taking more than 100 prisoners overall, more than any other CM scenario I've ever played. It felt very realistic honestly, kinda like what I imagine a lot of the early Iraq War to have been like, with US troops moving from position to position, and after some token resistance, rounding up groups of Iraqi prisoners as they went along.

If you have Final Blitzkrieg, try "Day of Attrition." I don't know if it's the biggest, but it might be good for testing out hardware because of the huge map and the huge numbers of infantry. There aren't many vehicles but the Germans get two full battalions of Volksgrenadiers plus a few more platoons on top of that. It's so big that I couldn't finish the scenario because the whole game crashed and bugged out halfway through.

It always did seem like the guy who sits in the little chair on the 88mm gun can be remarkably impervious to shrapnel or blast or anything else. The rest of the crew will usually get killed very quickly, but there is always that last guy controlling the gun who can be really hard to kill. This is sometimes the case with other types of guns and it's been like that for years as far as I can remember. 88mm guns have always stood out to me as being especially hard to kill though. Maybe I'm wrong or it's confirmation bias or something. It's not always a sure thing and I've seen some guns get taken out quickly, but sometimes they just seem invincible, soaking up 100+ artillery shells and thousands upon thousands of machine gun bullets.

Yeah FOG2 is good. Comparing it to CMx1 with the huge unit variety is pretty interesting. Battles can play out so differently depending on the era or army makeup. It goes from ancient Egyptians and Babylonians all the way up to Vikings. I love the big infantry shieldwalls and phalanxes but the big open cavalry battles can really be something else. They get so chaotic and confusing, where you have some units charging, some stuck in melee, others breaking off contact and falling back, others flanking, then others evading only to turn around and charge again. You get these big running cavalry battles with units chasing each other back and forth all over the map or sometimes off the map completely only to return again later. Those are always fun. I thought the AI was pretty decent too. It knows to avoid exposing flanks, and it actively tries to exploit your own flanks. I mostly play single player stuff so it's nice to have a challenging AI opponent. I've been trounced by the AI quite a few times in that game, usually due to bad tactics on my own part. I've done better at the game when I go back and read about the real world battles and tactics from the era. One of my favorite things is to do what the Thebans did against the Spartans at Leuctra. You mass all of your best/elite troops on one flank, and all of your weakest troops on the opposite flank. Then you have your elites advance first, with the rest of the army advancing behind them in echelon, so your weakest troops are the farthest back, and elites farthest forward. The idea is to delay contact with your weakest units for as long as possible while your elites do their thing and smash through the enemy line. I've had a lot of success in FOG2 using that formation. Sometimes the battle will be pretty much over before my weakest units even make it into the fight. Sengoku Jidai and Pike and Shot are both good games too IMO. Those games use the same combat system and rules and were made by the same people.

Very good posts in this thread. I love those "OpFor rooms". I'm trying to design my first scenario right now so this is interesting. I was having trouble figuring out how to get the AI to work. I made a very small scenario for CMSF2 about an insurgent raid on an AI controlled checkpoint. All you get at the start is a small handful of guys in position to start shooting at the checkpoint to distract the enemy while another group of guys in a pickup truck and a taxi roll up from behind to try to kill as many as possible before driving away again. I wanted to make it so you had to be fast when raiding the checkpoint, because AI reinforcements would come running to check things out once the shooting started. I put one AI squad in the nearby town, as if they were on patrol, then I put in an AI trigger for them to start running toward the checkpoint once the player reached it. They would never come though and it took me a long time to figure out why. They would just sit there at their start point and never move. At first I was just doing the AI orders and triggers wrong, but once I figured that out, they still wouldn't come. Turns out that the AI squad was simply getting freaked out about their buddies and their HQ getting blown away back at the checkpoint. They would get to a "rattled" state and then cancel the orders before they even began - as if they were saying "Screw that! We're not going over there!" It's kinda neat that the AI does that. I had to bump up the squad's quality and motivation just to get them to move. I think I got the scenario working pretty well. I added in more AI reinforcements such as a mechanized platoon that drives to the checkpoint, dismounts, and then starts searching the area on foot. I'm not very good with the AI orders so it looks kinda clunky sometimes but it works. It's been fun designing it though. I'll probably end up making a lot more.

FOG2 is a cool game. Pike and Shot is another great game, made by the same people. Fighting against one of those enormous tercio formations can be really intimidating. I suppose you could say tercios were like the Tiger tanks of their day. A giant square of thousands of men that just runs right over anything in its way and absorbs any kind of punishment you can throw at it. It's like a moving castle that lumbers its way across the battlefield. It's usually just a waste to try shooting at them, because it won't do anything. It takes a huge amount of concentrated fire just to have a chance at disrupting them, so usually your best bet is to ignore them or avoid them entirely and try to concentrate on the weak parts of the enemy lines, where you know your shots will have an impact, and hope you can rout them before the tercios can do much damage. Or you can win against tercios by winning the cavalry battles going on around the flanks. WW2 doesn't seem that much different to me. A Tiger tank isn't going to do much good without infantry support, or without supply lines, or any of the other things it depends on. You don't win by throwing waves of troops and tanks into the Tiger's teeth for a chance at knocking it out. You win by avoiding it and calling in air support, or by concentrating on another area entirely and then winning on operational level maneuver. The Germans were so successful in the first few years of the war because they had mastered operational level maneuver. They had bewegungskrieg down to a science. They would concentrate their most powerful forces onto a single weak point, the schwerpunkt, and then punch through and encircle the enemy in a giant kessel. That's how they managed to capture four million Soviet prisoners in 1941. What they were doing wasn't anything new either. They were just following in the same Prussian tradition of the past 300 years going all the way back to Frederick the Great. The way to beat that is not by fighting against the enemy's strongest forces, but by avoiding them. The Soviets finally won by doing just that in 1942 during Case Blue. The Soviet armies didn't leave themselves to be kesseled this time and just ran away, leaving the German panzer divisions to wander aimlessly over hundreds of miles of featureless steppe, searching for prey that wasn't even there. Once the Germans got tied down at Stalingrad, the Soviets turned the tables on them and hit the Germans' own weak points - the Romanian armies on the flanks, and then pretty much won the war right there because of it. So I don't think things have changed much throughout history. The tactics are the same. I don't think ancient battles were much different either. A shield wall is a really strong formation and I don't you could beat it by just bashing up against it and beating them man for man. You would beat it by hitting weak points, like exploiting a flank or some rift that opens up somewhere, accidentally or otherwise. A weak point in a shield wall will eventually turn into a hole, and then a small hole will turn into a big hole, and then the entire formation will come crashing down and the battle will be over.

I've always had trouble close assaulting enemy vehicles. Infantry doesn't seem at all overpowered to me. They often miss their grenade throws entirely or the grenades explode in the air too early. They usually at least immobilize the target though. I just had a game of Shock Force 2 where my insurgents threw at least 7 grenades at a Stryker and still failed to knock it out. The Stryker then blew everyone to bits with its grenade launcher. Sometimes my infantry will do nothing but sit there next to the enemy vehicle for long periods even though they have plenty of grenades, and sometimes they will seem to pin themselves down with their own grenade explosions before getting machine gunned by the enemy vehicle. I have certainly seen infantry knock out vehicles with one or two grenade throws, but it's not very reliable. I find that I often have to swarm the vehicle with a lot of guys from multiple directions to reliably knock it out, and they will usually fail if they have any kind of suppression at all.

If you've been playing the WWII stuff for 20 years I don't think the learning curve will be very steep. IMO Shock Force 2 is easier than the WWII games because of the huge force imbalance, as long as you don't play as the Syrians of course. Some of the missions are like a turkey shoot for the U.S. military and it's possible to beat some of them while taking zero casualties. The Syrians can still give you a bloody nose if you're not careful though. ATGMs can be especially tricky to deal with. Some missions are harder than others of course, but in general I think it's easier than WWII, where the armies are more evenly matched. As MikeyD already suggested, Usually Hapless has some very well-made videos on the modern games. The one he did on Stryker Battalions is good, and even though it uses Black Sea, it's just as applicable to SF2 because you will be using Strykers quite a lot.

What about APS? At least when playing Black Sea, it's like a magic invisible wall around the tank. In all the other CM titles I would have to be extremely careful with my vehicles, keeping infantry screens in front etc. In Black Sea, sometimes I would do the opposite and lead an attack with the APS vehicles in front, with the infantry jogging along behind. Then I would laugh as all the enemy ATGMs and RPGs slammed uselessly against my magic shields and then I would laugh again when the enemy got blown up real good.

Yeah, infantry that are very close to enemy vehicles will throw grenades (or satchel charges if they have them) in order to simulate a close assault (like infantry throwing grenades down open hatches or whatever). It can be risky to do close assaults with grenades though, and sometimes it doesn't always work. You might need a lot of guys surrounding the tank. If I was the tank though, I certainly wouldn't want to stick around even if it was just one guy! Tanks can shoot at infantry that are right next to them, but there is a very long delay. One of the limitations of the game engine is that it does not take gun barrel elevation into account when acquiring targets, so tanks can shoot at things even when they would realistically not be able to elevate/depress the gun barrel enough to reach them, like if infantry were swarming around the base of the tank, or if there were infantry in the upper floors of a building right next to the tank. The game compensates for that by making it take very long to acquire the target at very close range. The tank will sit there and stare at the infantry (could be 30 seconds or a minute or even longer) before it's allowed to fire, giving the infantry time to throw grenades. Unfortunately tanks can't run over infantry and you can't ram enemy vehicles either. Sometimes that mechanic leads to some silly things, like if a friendly and enemy tank somehow manage to drive up right next to each other without getting destroyed in the process, they will just sit there and stare at each other with their gun barrels pressed against each other like some kinda standoff until one backs away. That almost never happens in the game though so it doesn't really matter.

Storming the presidential palace Anyone play Grand Theft Auto? Where it says WASTED on the screen when you die? Well... This guy is DONE

The Khaki Hordes!

These games have always had weird and sometimes funny spotting issues. There's been a couple of times now when I've had units fail to spot an enemy tank in the middle of the street at close range, but they spot enemy infantry BEHIND the tank. Then my units start shooting at the infantry, only to have their bullets bounce off the enemy tank right in front of them that they still can't see. I remember another situation where I tried to close assault a buttoned-up T-34 during a night-time scenario. I had an infantry squad run up to the tank in the middle of the street so they are surrounding it. I told the infantry to literally go into the same action square that the enemy tank was in, so they could literally reach out and touch the tank if they could. Some of the infantry would have had to walk around the enemy tank to find a spot to lay down. The infantry proceeded to sit there next to the enemy tank for multiple turns without spotting it. I can't remember how many turns went by. Four, maybe five? In fact, the buttoned-up enemy tank spotted my infantry first! The tank went through that long delay cycle for acquiring targets at extremely close range and then machine-gunned some of my guys laying down right next to the tank. That was a real head-scratcher, that one. Every time I've seen weird spotting issues come up though is when units are at extremely close range. I've never noticed weird stuff happen at really long ranges, so that's interesting.

I usually consider the poor bloody infantry to be more expendable than the vehicles. Losing a few guys with rifles isn't going to cost me much, but losing a tank or IFV is going to cost me a huge amount of firepower that might be sorely missed in later missions of a campaign. 20-30% casualties aren't that big of a deal as long as those aren't my vehicle crews. Especially in the modern titles, my infantry are just a bunch of glorified scouts and bodyguards for the high-tech vehicles. I try to keep the infantry dismounted as much as possible and I keep the vehicles hidden somewhere behind hard cover like a hill or building. If the vehicles MUST go forward, they should stick to trees as much as possible, since trees have an uncanny ability to block incoming AT fire. The infantry's job is to disperse and fan out across the map as much as they can. They should always be sniffing and probing around everywhere like rats, constantly trying to find safe ways forward. The infantry should go all over the map if possible, because you never know from where they might spot something. Once they get shot at or spot something, I might have a vehicle stick its nose out very briefly to blast an enemy position and then retreat. The infantry's job is to soak up casualties and enemy fire while the vehicles do the killing.

I did not know the command rating affected the firepower of a squad. What does that mean exactly? Does it make their fire more accurate? I thought the command rating just affected how easily a unit gets pinned or how fast the suppression meter gets filled up or goes back down or whatever.

I thought he said "Just drive down that road until you get blown up." That's usually what happens in CM anyway. Soldiers will certainly shoot at exposed enemies when using the Move command, as long as they are not being shot at themselves. They will stop walking and then stand there and shoot. They won't do it at really long ranges though. And at least according to the manual, soldiers are more likely to spot enemies when using Move as well. When soldiers are moving faster, they are concentrating more on where they are going and trying not to trip over things, and so are less likely to spot and engage enemies. When using Move though, they keep their heads on a swivel. I've had situations like you described where an enemy pops up suddenly out of the rubble at close range and then my own guys walking along with the Move command suddenly quick-draw their weapons and mow him down, and then continue to calmly walk forward like nothing happened. It looks hilarious but I've seen it work. The game really does need a "move to contact" command though.

That is a bit of a shame how limited the AI is when reacting to an ambush. I suppose a workaround for that would be to have the scenario start right after first contact or right after the ambush has been sprung. I know some scenarios have done that already, where they start with a couple of burning vehicles on the road and some forces already in position. Then the reaction to the ambush can be better planned. Perhaps one way to start a scenario would be to have the vanguard of the enemy force already out in the road in front of you with a burning vehicle or two and some troops strung out along the road, with your forces already in contact starting on turn 1. Then you have to disengage and retreat and regroup before enemy reinforcements arrive and you can try ambushing them again later or fight delaying actions or something.

I had this issue in Black Sea earlier. It was the scenario where you attack a Russian AA battery in the middle of the night. I had three javelin teams and I fired every single one of the missiles. All of them missed except one. I had to knock out the remaining Russian vehicles using grenades instead.

I just thought of another idea relating to Afghanistan in particular. Try taking a look at the paper "Taking Back the Infantry Half Kilometer" by Army Maj. Thomas Ehrhart. There is a summary and link in the article here: https://www.military.com/defensetech/2010/03/01/taking-back-the-infantry-half-kilometer Basically it talks about how useless US infantry could be a lot of the time in Afghanistan due to the long engagement ranges that the Taliban preferred. American training, doctrine, and weapons were optimized for 300 meter engagement ranges on flat, level ground, but the Taliban liked to stay much farther away than that. They liked to sit at stand-off ranges on distant mountaintops and ridgelines and hammer the Americans with mortars and MMGs while the Americans could not do much more than sit helplessly down in the valleys until air support showed up. From the paper: “In the table of organization for a light infantry company only the six –M240B 7.62-mm machineguns, two- 60-mm mortars and nine designated marksman armed with either 7.62-mm M14 rifles or accurized 5.56-mm M16A4’s rifles are able to effectively engage the enemy. These weapons systems represent 19 percent of the company’s firepower. This means that 81 percent of the company has little effect on the fight. This is unacceptable.” US infantry were also overburdened with heavy equipment and ammo and were not well suited for the altitude, while the Taliban were lightly-equipped and could get around the rugged terrain easily. So if you were to make a CM scenario as Taliban vs US Army AI, you would probably want to take that into account. You could design a scenario where your Taliban guerrillas start shooting up American Humvees or trucks or a FOB down in a valley from like 1000+ meters away or something. The US AI would then send a bunch of infantry up into the hills to clear you out. Your objective would be to harass them and cause casualties while continuously falling back and staying outside of their engagement range. Perhaps you could even give the US a penalty to their fatigue levels in order to represent the altitude. You would want to cause as many casualties as possible while evading the US air support and then exit the map at the end or something. That sounds like it would be really fun honestly. I should learn how to use the editor...