Skinfaxi

Warts, thanks a lot! There are quite some great educational videos out there. I think I have a good understanding now, what the CM2 campaign system is and what it can do and what it can't. My expectations from the written descriptions were very close. I can only support those who want a system that can portray consecutive engagements on a map where unit location and status, map destruction are preserved.

Womble, if you prefer this tone I can talk with you adequately, too. You seem to live in the illusion that people need to have played CM to know what tactics is. But the one who is not knowing what he is talking about is you:The planning of a batallion is not operational. Not even the internal planning of a division. The advance of a division along a street that is blocked and then a Flak battery is moved forward to deal with the problem, is not operational. What nonsense are you talking? And you are not even consistent: If the argument comes from me, then you claim it would be operational and operational was beyond the scope of CM. But when in the current campaign system US airborne division is moving through France and this move is used as story background, then the portrayed operational moves in Market Garden between the engagements are not beyond CM's scope... In the meanwhile I have watched video reports from two campaigns and I can only laugh, how you claim that a tactical framework was operational, while the CMx2 campaign system often is based on operational storytelling. Yes I can. But I can also imagine that the one or other would prefer higher realism over storytelling. Me for example. It is often argued that CM is about realism. But is it realistic, if the player always seems to know where the enemy is, how strong he is, and that his forces are adequate to fullfill the order? Is that realistic? Now you are confusing me. You are talking about the current campaign system, yes? Didn't you follow our discussion from the beginning, where people explained the old CM1 campaign system? Was that an operational framework, too?

And why should he do that? If what he says is according to the rules, then it must be according to the rules if I say the same, too. Otherwise it would be double standards.

Womble, now you did not answer one argument I presented, why the current system never be capable to model a whole battle. I don't argue for an operational game, I talk about the lowest tactical level. Attack that village. Take that bridge. Take that hill. All that does not happen in one engagement, as soon as there is a stronger defense. To find out, if there even is an enemy, already needs a recon phase. Teh result of the recon phase is that the attack is planned. That's NOT operational level. That's tactical level. Bulletpoint, that's a good argument, that the AI cannot be good enough to solve such tasks. But my suggestion is that of a synthesis anyway. The current system expanded, not that of an exclusion. Current campaigns would not change a bit, but also campaigns against humans and the simulation of whole battles would become possible. I am also not sure, if an expanded campaign system would not be suited for AI play under all circumstances. I am thinking of a mini-campaign that now is cramped into one engagement, where the player attacks the AI. The first battle is the recon phase. The player gathers the intel. The second phase is the attack. The third is the mopping up. The time between the phases could be minimal. So there is no need for the AI to make intelligent decisions or analyze the terrain or something like that. I have seen there are even huge "master maps" available. I think it would be terrific if two players would have a certain pool of units and the map would be a portion of the master map and it would shift around, according how the battle develops.

Hi womble, I am pleased you took the time for that lenghty reply because I want to make sure, before I buy the game, I have understood it's capabilities and shortcomings. Please bear in mind that I am new to CM (didn't even know that such a game exists, if in a discussion on a blog someone wouldn't have mentioned it in a discussion about the conflict in Ukraine). If I overlook some features the campaign system allows, please correct me. If I understood your post correctly sadly my fear is strenghtened, that the campaign system cannot model whole battles: I don't understand this assumption. I guess you have good tactical knowledge about WW2? Then you must know, how incredibly important little things on the tactical lavel can be. A spotted or unspotted HMG (bunker) can decide if the attack of a whole company succeeds or fails (for the day). A single sMG42 running out of ammo can mean that suddenly a gap of 150 meters can't be defended. It is not possible to simulate this, by a designer chopping a battle into different independent phases, re-deploys units according to his imagination of the previous outcome, transfers the units to a different map while all changes to the battelfield vanish. The destruction of houses, or the availability of craters - under certain situations incredibly important tactical factors for all the action that follows there. No designer in the world can overcome this. This is not game dependent, it is a fact of the reality of tactics. If a game only models the operational level, then ok, it's not decisive if at the end of the street behind that house a MG is placed. But a low tactical level game claiming to simulate the tactical level down to single bullets that cannot simulate little battles as a whole but instead only offers a campaign system, that puts unrelated individual engagements together with a story? Cannot convince me. How could a designer define victory points for a recon scenario, if the recon phase is based on a bigger operation? That's not possible because the designer does not know, how the player decides to solve the problem. The designer doesn't even know what units the player wants to use. There can be different ways to win a battle. Maybe careful recon is one way. But maybe an immediate attack with tanks from a crazy direction overwhelms the enemy? If I understand it correctly, reinforcements or not in the current system are a binary option and they are fully dependent on the designer.But in reality it depends on the development on the battlefield. Additionally reinforcements should not be dependent how a designer imagines the player will play the game. In my understanding reinforcements either are part of the tactical reality or not. If they are potentially available, then there should be the possibility for the player to recognize if, decide when, how much and what kind of units/weapons he needs. If he needs pioneers for mines, and/or a platoon of StuGs to deal with tanks, or PAK to secure a flank because of an expected attack, one or two batteries, light or heavy artillery. How could the designer know, what the player knows after the recon phase? How good the player is and how much reinforcements he needs? What does losing mean, in that sense? It can only mean a designer had decided previously during design, that a certain amount of points or units lost or destroyed mean a certain judgement for the specific phase of the battle. But the designer can't know, if one player prefers to keep his reserves hidden until the second attack while another player prefers to immediately uses everything available for a counterattack. What if one player wants to give the attacker the illusion of success? Even over several "battles"? Either the game system allows to model all phases of a whole battle, then it must allow the battle to evolve naturally from one phase to the next while as much information from the battlefield is preserved, or it cannot model that. But to split up a battle into artificial phases to overcome this missing game mechanism cannot work. Don't understand me wrong: I do not mean to say that campaigns with the current system cannot be fun. How could I. I don't know. But I can judge from the available game mechanisms if the campaign system could be suitable to simulate whole battles. No designer in the world can predict how the engagement phase, or the encirclement phase will look like, depending on imagined and then calculated point results of a game mechanism. But probably I will buy the game despite its incapability to model whole battles anyway, because the tactical depth seems to be unique and without comparison.

There is a difference between the USA and Amerikans. I think most Amerikans are like everybody else... no problem with people minding their own business. But this is not the same thing as the USA, which is the state government. I do not want to sidetrack this conversation, but there is evidence to suggest that the USA (as a state) would like to once again have possession of Russia and it's resources as it once did under Yeltsin. I think USA is stupid enough to try.

Interesting. Why is that?

I have multiple domiciles and broadband is by far the cheapest solution.

Things are becoming much clearer, thanks! So the current campaigns are a consecutive sequence of individual, around 1-2 hour long engagements. The player has no control over the forces he wants to apply or hold back, there is no pool of forces. What he player has available, he should use. The recon tasks before an engagement are mostly done and the player has at least a rough guess what he can expect. The strenght of the player's forces versus the enemy forces are predetermined by the designers. The player does not have to find out on his own, if maybe a waaay to strong enemy is waiting, or that a given order is so easy, that much more could be achieved. So if the player is given the order to attack, it's an attack battle. If he is given the task to defend, it's a defend battle and he knows the enemy will come. Is that correct? If that's correct then I am a bit disappointed now, because I had hopes that CM was much more realistic than all the rest out there. But this campaign system very much sounds like typical action-shooter storytelling. I had hoped that the Market Garden module would allow me to experience what happens when the player can expect one thing but suddenly he is facing something completely different. But if all the action happens within two hours, there can't be much time or place for surprises. That's where all games suck: the map size, the briefings all that gives so much additonal information, that with some experience the player knows, what he can expect in the remaining time. What I still don't get: the frontlines that didn't work in CM1 and therefore that old campaign system was completely eliminated. If I understand it correctly there are deployment locations for arriving new units, yes? And units can share weapons and ammo. Trucks can carry ammo, too. Why the need to draw frontlines? Shouldn't it be up to the player to take care for open supply routes to his units? Or the decision to withdraw the units from the MLR, if the supply is not possible? If a player can't get the ammo to the front, then this should result in tactical consequences. Wouldn't the old system PLUS the current system be much superior? Example: Campaign: US division moves to X and destroys Y After advancing and one or two small skrimishes, a river is blocking the advance with a bridge. Order: take this bridge. Player advances on map torwards the bridge. He recons and notices, the bridge is heavily defended. Player decides that an attack was suicide and decides on his own to cancel the attack, call for reinforcements and wait. After a few hours or the next day he starts the attack. But the attack stalls and the player, instead of slaugherting his units, decides another attack on the next day is necessary. But this time with air support he calls for the next day. The next day: rain! Attack with or without air support? Player decides on his own to wait until the rain stops. At the evening the rain stops the next battle is offered. Now the player must decide for or against a night attack. The night game is loaded, but the player decides to wait for the next day. But he uses the night battle to sneek some of his units forward to better locations. The battle next day offers the promised air support. With the reinforcements and the air support the attack is successful and the bridge is taken with minimum losses. Then the bridge-episode is finished, the game calculates the result of this "campaign" within the master campaign as if it was one battle and the campaign system advances to the next battle. This could be even another CM1-campaign or a single battle. Why eliminate a good system, when the synthesis would offer the best from both?

Sorry for my stupid question, but what does that mean for me, if I would buy the Italy+Gustav bundle? Is the newest version of the engine available for this or not? And btw, how big is the bundle download? It's only displayed as bigger than 2 GB (> 2 GB) in the shop.

Does that mean there is no mobile version of the 88 Flak available for the German player? In no series (Normandy, Italy, RT)?

The conflict did start in Ukraine? In 1989 Russia accepted the German reuinification. For that to happen they had to withdraw their troops and NATO promised not to expand torwards Russia. Interestingly the Russians withdrew their troops but US and UK occupation troops stayed in Germany. Also no peace treaty with Germany has been signed. Fact is, the Russians also disbanded the Warshaw Pact. NATO was not disbanded. Afterwards NATO broke all promises it had given to Russia and has been expanding since. Isn't it strange, that NATO was not disbanded, too, since the reason for it's foundation, the Communist empire, had disappeared? NATO expansion (in western media it is even called enlargement, not expansion) since 1989 torwards Russia: Poland Hungary Czech Republic Estonia Latvia Lithuania Slovakia Bulgaria Slovenia Rumania Albania Croatia Further expansion planned torwards Cyprus Makedonia Bosnia Herzegowina Montenegro Victoria Nuland is the wife of radical Zionist Robert Kagan, who founded the zionist lobby organization PNAC (Project for the New American Century), a leading force behind the Iraq war. For a few years now, Kagan's Zionist warmonger friends have been lobbying for another US wars: their new "Foreign Policy Initiative" has been lobbying for attacking Syria and Iran. His wife Victoria Nuland admitted that the USA had spent 5 BILLION dollars for the coup in Ukraine! That's also clearly a hostile act against a souvereign country (Ukraine) and a breach of international law! A leaked telephone call between Catherine Ashton and a Baltic minister showed, that the EU knew, that in Ukraine on Maidan very strange things happened, and that certain forces were shooting at both sides to make them clash. Israeli soldiers even openly bragged for leading militant groups on Maidan. This video is extremely elightening to understand how blatantly Western mainstream media and politicians turned things upside down when they reported about the protests in Ukraine: www.youtube.com/watch?v=E18jWXbZY8U Recently the US foreign minister John Kerry admitted, that the USA had to force and blackmail the EU to support the economic warfare against Russia. American politicians are openly admitting they want a regime change in Russia. Is that friendly? That's also against international law. Even after Putin's first term, the Russians under Medvedev were still naive enough to fall victim to this trick: And they allowed the aggression against and destruction of Lybia to happen. Who is the betrayer and aggressor? And last but not least the shooting down of MH17 which was blamed on Russia by Western media and politicians without offering the slightest evidences. By looking closer to the downing of MH17 many strange facts are coming to light. I find it strange, that you, as interested and well informed about modern weaponry, did not notice, that a BUG system consists of three vehicles and needs months of training of specialists. This story was not only spread in Ukraine but hugely in the EU, too: https://magazin.spiegel.de/EpubDelivery/image/title/SP/2014/31/300 I can not understand, how anyone who takes a closer look at the developments in Ukraine can believe in the mainstream media narrative. That things in the area could become dangerous was not that hard to recognize with some basic knowledge about NATO aggression and the status of Sevastopol in the Black Sea. ps: I am sorry, somehow I cannot make certain links to appear as the others

Thanks a lot ASL! The CURRENT - not the old system - cannot portray the attack on heavyly defended locations, fortified defenses or battles of attrition? What is the CMx2 campaign-system simulating, if not time consuming or attritional engagements or difficult tactical tasks?

That's great to hear. Tx. Purchase has again become more probable.

Frontlines are needed for what?

"Separate engagements" - does that mean separate engagements are connected with a core force which is transferred from one to the next, but the engagements do not share the same battlefield? Does that mean that the campaigns in the Normandy big bundle do not model whole battles? With whole battle I mean for example attacking a village with first: recon, after a few hours an attack, based on the intel from the previous engagement, then potential counterattacks, repeated attacks, pocketing,... - no?!

And what does the CM2 system differently? IIRC it also carries over the units between the battles. Why? Isn't it the same?

What's the difference between the campaigns of CM1 and CM2?

Why aren't the files offered as torrent? As someone with a limited bandwidth of 20 GB/month I am very scared of that problem. I am considering to buy the Normandy big bundle but with a download size of 9 GB I can't afford a corrupted or broken download.

Cannot find any info, which game version the FI+GL bundle has. The Normandy big bundle is stated as version 3. Is FI+GL also v3?

Hi all. Sorry for a newbie question, but I couldn't find the info in the shop: which version of OpenGL does the game use?