Rinaldi

Find an opponent who's willing to grit his teeth and you should be in for a tough match - as either side. Its sadly very easy as BLUFOR if you make it singleplayer. The REDFOR vehicles will pop smoke and retreat but won't re enter alternate fighting positions until a trigger is met; by which point its often too late. I have a few more H2H scenarios cooked up in my mind; one is still being mapped and the other is on a pre-made master map. Watch this space. The scenario depot now has the most updated map file.

Cheers, thanks. It is indeed; very subtle and rolling terrain; lots of good cover for BLUFOR to minimize exposure to KORNETs and Bastions/Arkans. Good advice and very true; but you also have to consider potential counterattacks if you stall out on enemy minefields or withering artillery fire. I have to say I'm very impressed with it. Thank you again for play testing, I know you enjoyed it as much as I did

A new scenario for you all; Blue vs. AI, or H2H only. H2H very much reccomended, as it will be a trivial scenario otherwise. An outdated version is already on the scenario depot. While I wait on Bootie to update the file, the newest version can be found here. The premise of the scenario is a deliberate attack to penetrate and pass through a Russian MLR to establish, far-side security, and protect the brigade from counterattack as it completes its mission. Russians as a result put a low priority on force preservation, but a very high priority on attriting the enemy. The asymmetry in objectives provides a good measure of balance. The US player can demolish the bulk of the Russian force but if they take too many losses - of any nature, even mobility - the Russian player will likely win. To date, I haven't been able to score higher than a draw against my playtesters. In the above match, the US failed to exit with 9 Bradleys and a platoon of abrams, giving the Russians a victory for attrition. A big thanks to Herr Tom for giving us an example of good vehicle fighting positions, which I use heavily. I reccomend the more experienced player goes REDFOR and that they use the pause command heavily. About two companies equivalent per side. Some screens:

A permanent pause command is the only certain work-around at present. Which, of course, the Ai cannot be told to do by a scenario designer so it really doesn't solve the problem of 4.0 dumbing down the single player experience considerably. Its a fine stopgap solution for H2H but it adds another layer of tedium to a game that already demands hard attention to detail.

@Bulletpoint definitely brought this conversation back down to earth. Tanks rarely take and hold positions, and there's plenty of accounts that have German (or anyone's, really) armor aborting an otherwise successful attack because their infantry aren't up there to protect them; sometimes all it took was skilled indirect fire.

As others have already iterated, this happens regardless of overhead. Units entrenched in a field will bolt from an off-map spotting round (general, non airburst). I've sent @sburke saved files showing this problem and can corroborate - in fact, Miller was my playtesting buddy in those saved files. He hasn't pulled this out of nowhere, I assure you. We've been mulling over how to articulate the issue without getting cornered by ifs and whats. I'm confident enough now in saying that this isn't, as is often the case, players interpreting combat differently from the devs. This is a problem; one we hope the Dev team will tackle in due time with their usual skill. The 'pause' command has circumnavigated most of this problem and keeps the game interesting H2H, its quite unplayable now SP; and I'm not willing to accept any hand-wave explanations that this is somehow 'rational' and comparable action in reality.

I agree. I follow the principle of 1 up rule in scenario design: If a scenario has the Americans at Veteran with a sprinkling of Crack troops, I make the Russians Regular with a sprinkling of Veteran. As a rule in CMBS I generally make both the Russians and the Americans have slightly above average motivation, with natural deviancies - unless the scenario can explain why a unit would be demoralized (re: heavy losses). I make American leadership generally uniformly above average but sprinkle in bad eggs; jokes about Butterbars aside I think its safe to say that NCO and Officers are equally professional. My view on the Russian NCO and Officer corps may be antiquated and outdated in this regard but I generally make Russian Officers above average with a sprinkling of deviances but keep Russian NCOs as-are. The results are usually satisfying.

Did you enjoy yourself when you killed Vince Foster ((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((( ?

Oh, and which games are these?

Cheeky ...but there's a lot of time and love poured into this map. Looking forward to see more and frankly your reputation precedes you on this front. The firehouse is a great little touch; I could tell what it was well before reading the description below.

@Broadsword56 a bit belated, forgive me; key co-ordinates from my scenario: American line of departure : 48.740516, 6.664310 The Town of Ley: 48.735883, 6.657058 Mannecourt Hill, roughly center: 48.728817, 6.666330 The "twin hills" that overlooked Mannecourt (I'm sorry the names slip my mind and I don't have CMBN to hand): Northern terminus: 48.726386, 6.672336 Middle: 48.721602, 6.666065 Southern terminus: 48.718844, 6.658968 Church of Moncourt: 48.718055, 6.637110 American Limit of Advance (using the Ley-Moncourt road): 48.716245, 6.631669

Oh dear Squarehead, slips like that make my day. I pray you never find yourself being cross-examined !

Oh goodness I can get you a bunch of reference co-ordinate points for "Once and For All" very soon using Google Maps. Watch this space, will have a moment to do so tomorrow morning. I can also send you the co-ordinates for my WIP map. I'll stick to key terrain features to give you a gist of things.

Hi, thanks for checking in. I see Badger beat me to it. Work is plodding along, though it will take a while longer yet. I am personally in the process of winding down my practice and preparing for a move to the UK and thus decided to finish off a CMBS project I never quite got around to. That map is released so I should be returning to this shortly. I'd love to release my finished scenario for this package if only to whet appetites (AAR here) but I haven't spoken to the other team members about it and feel it would be in bad taste. Patience, real progress has been made. Were at the 'AI and unit plotting' stage for quite a few maps!

Very true. Well said Sid, I forgot to do my MVD math. 100 hostages, 30 terrorists. 130 body bags :^)

You quite mistake me @IMHO. I said governments, the only government that handled the Chechen affair with as much irresponsibility and stupidity as Grozny was of course Moscow. Warm regards

Yes completely comparable. When a province or territory wants to break away in Canada we hold several referendums, when an autonomous region wants to break away in the former Soviet Union bodies begin to hold many bullets :^) a fine allegory. Thank you for explaining to me how two responsible & accountable governments splinter.

Okay, much needed backstory for this one: Am playing Power Hour with ||Cpt.Miller|| who is giving me a proper bloody nose as REDFOR. We're down to the last few minutes now and I'm attempting to get far side security so I can pass my units through the exit zone and end the map. He's hanging on by fingernails to prevent this and has a T90 that has lead a charmed life, enfilading me despite my best efforts to end him. Am moving Bradleys up to the exit zone even as the Abrams duel with it, and the T90 lazes a fully loaded Bradley...aims, and fires....just in time for the Abrams to fly in front and take the HEAT on the nose and save the day!

Exactly. It's telling that the packaged scenario we get from BFC ends regardless of the win branch with both sides horrified at their own losses, ready for detente and fairly non-radical map changes (or status quo ante bellum for the NATO win). No one is going to impale themselves when you're staring down a peer opponent. NATO or Russia somehow finding the manpower or political will to continue fighting an attritonal conflict well into Winter is as farfetched a request as the people who asked why NATO wasn't invading Russia in the scenario

I agree. Asides from being in good taste it may help put a hard upper limit on forum bickering. The fictional time-line also gives us more artistic licence; creating force-on-force scenarios alongside recreations of real world actions and COIN.

They have a much more robust and well-thought out scenario than they ever did for Shock Force; I (hope) believe they will stick to it rather strictly. The summer-campaign limited scenario is compelling because it's plausible. We've already had a battlepack, so we'll not see much in the immediate future I speculate. The 'not much future in it then' is you projecting, Squarehead ;). DLC will certainly expand the armed forces a bit to reflect hitherto unseen units such as Russian VDV. As for the when; its probably further down the list of to-dos.CMSFII which has been confirmed, Red Thunder which have been hinted at, etc. Other titles need the attention right now.

I'm hoping someone will take a crack at updating GeorgeMC's scenarios when they do update. They're all absolute gems. Very much looking forward to this.

Well you know what they say, truth has a reality bias and reality has a liberal bias )))) Sorry the observed truth doesn't bolster your feelings. The Russians have been consistently optimistic about their arms development, even more so than most. Skepticism is both healthy and justified. Find new forums if you don't like it, lmao.

Sorry for being right? You can bring a grog to water, but you can't make it drink.