slippy

Reverse Wall Drill when trying to sneak into a building or if OpFor might be across the street:
1. Give team a circular Target Arc about the size of the building.
2. Slow team into the building & then to the desired floor.
3. Give desired floor waypoint a Target Arc out the reverse wall.1
4. 2nd turn give the team a permanent Pause3 order.
5. Give team a 32m, or smaller, 360oTarget Arc2 and consider Hide.
6. If/when ready to engage cancel Target Arc Pause & Hide.
Notes: 1)The team will have LOS out the forward wall of the building from the reverse wall.  This will also keep team from entering a balcony on forward wall.  2)A 360oTarget Arc is used to prevent the OpFor from approaching outside a wedge arc. 3)Pause keeps team from moving to forward wall & entering balconies.

Testing – Scenarios and the Campaign

When it comes to testing a final campaign there are two layers to consider; 1) do the individual scenarios play as intended; and 2) does the campaign flow from start to finish as intended.

Testing individual scenarios can occur as they are being built, like what a designer may do when building an individual standalone scenario. However, there is one very large difference that is difficult to artificially ‘fix’. What the testers are playing will never match the end product that the players will realistically experience. Testers jumping into Mission 5, won’t be experiencing the battle with the results (including unit losses) the player has experienced leading up to that scenario in the campaign.

It’s because of this that a campaign needs to be tested with full playthroughs and ideally by ‘blind testers’, or people who are unaware of the individual scenario designs including the placement of enemies. Also encouraging a tester or two to purposefully lose key scenarios to go down ‘lose’ pathways is also of assistance to ensure each pathway gets a degree of review.

As a designer looking to help out testers, providing a visual campaign tree with small blurbs about what each scenario entails, including friendly forces the tester should have available, will provide them a big help. It’s this way they can identify if the campaign script and the core unit file is working as intended with the correct scenarios and forces showing up and the right time.

This is not to say that individual scenario testing is a waste of time and shouldn’t be undertaken for campaign scenarios. For this type of testing, I advise referring to Jon’s Scenario Design AAR handbook for tips and things to look out for. However, testers moving through a campaign as a player and moving into follow on scenarios in a condition that a player will reasonably be in is the most important additional piece of information a tester requires after each battle.

After Release

When you release your campaign, the player will only require the .cam file that is generated when compiling the campaign. The game will only draw information contained inside the .cam file.

There is an unwritten rule (until now!) in campaign design, and that is as a designer to hold on to all the component files that is within the generated .cam file. This is for security going forward as regular game patching and upgrading cycles may inadvertently break something or make the campaign unwinnable in the future as settings are tweaked. Perhaps the best example for of this was some early designed campaigns from the first release of CMBN when automatic weaponry effectiveness was a lot less than it is now. Playing these same campaigns today will likely lead to very different outcomes than the designers originally intended.

If the designer does not want the responsibility, it is advised to provide the files to the players downloading the campaign files in case someone wants to fix any problems that arise down the track.

Final tips for an enjoyable campaign from the player’s side

And there we are. After just under 70 pages of writing and around 18,000 words that’s about it. Good luck for everyone that decides to take the dive into making a campaign.

Some final thoughts and of course what I provide below is highly subjective.

-          Ensure it is winnable. It’s a game, not a slog!

-          Don’t expect your players to be a tactical genius. This may sound counter to the point of Combat Mission but even the most experienced players will get their ass handed to them from time to time. Ensure that under most circumstances a battle will always provide the player with a chance of ‘winning’.

o   This is not saying every scenario needs to be balanced, if anything most scenarios will need to be balanced in the players favour, especially where core units that need to appear in follow up scenarios are part of the mix.

o   For example. Let’s say the campaign is trying to be a historical recreation of every engagement that Easy Company, 506th PIR fought from Normandy through to Market Garden. There would easily be a dozen or more scenarios here with a real mix of forces the player must go up against. There is also no real replenishment historically available except for the replacements at the end of Normandy and before Market Garden. So, what happens if the player takes Carentan at around Mission 5 but suffers very heavy casualties in doing so? What happens next? The player is thrust into defending against the fresh 17 SS Panzergrenadier Division counterattack with no more than 20 soldiers to deploy? It simply won’t work and I can promise you the player will switch off in anger/despair before even attempting to defend Bloody Gulch.

o   The campaign by design should of pushed the player down the ‘lose’ route in this situation and either kicked the player out of the campaign as a whole or skipped to Market Garden noting Easy Company was not part of the defensive action. Don’t expect your players to be a Lieutenant Winters when the time comes.

o   This is extremely hard to get right and honestly won’t ever be perfect given the wide range of player skills out there and countless combinations of outcomes from each scenario from a game like Combat Mission.

o   As rules of thumb:

§  don’t rely solely on your designated Core Units for every single mission/task the player needs to achieve;

§  follow history as a guide throughout your design as a guide about what your troops could theoretically be expected to achieve;

§  ensure unique units are the backbone of completing objectives later in a campaign. (ie. The player’s core units are expected to fend off an armoured counter attack at some point, but the only has three possible 57mm AT guns at their disposal… and they were potentially lost two scenarios ago).

Don’t ignore the narrative and make the player care for spending dozens of hours with your creation.

Thanks Slippy.
Yes the bocage was also the thing that I disliked the most as well (and grapevines). I understood why it was designed that way from the point of view of the original game release. But it's a shame that BF have not updated what is an essential part of the game, at least for Normandy.
Bocage is an oddity in some respects. The textures it's made of use a 1 bit mask, which is why it appears so jaggy compared to all the other foliage which uses an 8 bit mask. It also doesn't sway in the wind, again unlike all other foliage. Yet it can easily be outnumbered by other foliage textures on a map, grass, crops, trees etc, so it's low quality masking is not likely connected with how numerous it, or it's constituent parts are. There must have been a good reason to not make it as smooth looking as the other foliage, but we can only guess. Thus far I haven't been able to discover how to alter the masking or movement, so I suspect these things are hard-coded into the game somewhere unreachable to us mortals.
What these bushes help to do, as you rightly noticed, is to cover some of the bocage when placed on the same tiles, hence less jaggies.

Great work Lucky Strike. The large and small bocage are two of my least liked forms of vegetation in the game.
Most of the vegetation is pretty passable but thier models are really poor, so anything you can do to help cover them up gets the thumbs up from me mate.
 
 
 

Take a look here mate, may answer your question
http://ww2talk.com/index.php?threads/british-army-radio-voice-procedure.24931/
 
Regards 

Your doing some amazing work Lucky Strike. Your Hedgerow Hell is one of my favourite mods, looking forward to what you have for the future, hopefully Battlefront can free up some more slots in CMBN 😉.
 
Well done mate, really good work.
 
Regards
Slippy

Your doing some amazing work Lucky Strike. Your Hedgerow Hell is one of my favourite mods, looking forward to what you have for the future, hopefully Battlefront can free up some more slots in CMBN 😉.
 
Well done mate, really good work.
 
Regards
Slippy

I'm not sure, but you can add non steam games into your steam account. You will not get all the things that normally go with a steam game like store page, community, etc. But they are shown in your game library and can be loaded from there.
For me it helps to keep all my games under one list.
 
Regards
 
Slippy
 
 

Excellent work again Lucky Strike, you have a real talent for this mate. Looking forward to it, i couldn't play CMBN without your hedgerow mod i must admit.
Its interesting the different effects you get with reshade also, almost gives the feel of different times of year by adjusting settings.

Thanks Aquilla 😉

Yes I too would order Barbarossa, France 1940 straight away

Yes I too would order Barbarossa, France 1940 straight away

100th year anniversary of the Battle of Berlin, so April 2045 🤔

I see Tim Saunders has a new book out about the 12th SS Hitlerjugend in normandy, not read it yet though.
 

Whilst I am very happy to see the announcement of Cold War and possible follow on modules, and with past reference to further modules and battle packs for CMFB and CMBS also to be released, I was wondering when BFC may see another major upgrade to the game engine to CM3?
 
Bearing in mind the sometimes painfully slow release schedule, does the announcement of Cold War tie in production to the present engine for another 5 or 6 years when it is already 11 years old?
 
 

https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/cm-mod-warehouse/combat-mission-battle-for-normandy/cmbn-infantry/cmbn-veins-cw-uniforms/
Who else than Vein? That giant of a man.

Thanks HerrTom
 
Any idea where i may find the smoke for the tanks please? One of my least dislike graphical elements of the game are the long black 'fingers' of smoke from damaged vehicles and tanks, like below
 

 
 
would like to try and get something more natural looking such as this 
 

 
do you think in theory it is possible within the limitations of the game?
 
regards
 
slippy

Is this master map still available anywhere please? Looked over at scenario depot and couldn't see it there.
 
Thanks

Hi all, really looking forward to this module. I served in BAOR from 1983 - 1988, so a little after this initial release. From my time at least i would say one of the main concerns was NBC warfare, not so much Nuclear at this stage but definitely Biological and Gas. I would estimate we spent about 80% of the time whilst on Exercise in our NBC suits.
Nobody really knew what was going to happen, but initially there would of been a big fear of Chemical warfare, it would be good if this could be simulated somehow. i know at the time that any smoke, cloud, mist etc i saw and i would of had my mask on pronto.
Training in NBC gear was extremely tiring and cumbersome, especially in the Summer months so even if reduced visibility, higher exhaustion etc could be modelled.
I'm on the right in the picture below, taken about 85, with a typical bit of squaddie humour 😉. I see if i can find anything more relevant, i think i still have the old 'Survive To Fight' pamphlet in the loft.
cheers all 
 
 

Thanks Combatintman
 
Did some searching of SSVC videos and there are quite a few, also found this for Soviet ATGM's from the American side
 

Hi all, really looking forward to this module. I served in BAOR from 1983 - 1988, so a little after this initial release. From my time at least i would say one of the main concerns was NBC warfare, not so much Nuclear at this stage but definitely Biological and Gas. I would estimate we spent about 80% of the time whilst on Exercise in our NBC suits.
Nobody really knew what was going to happen, but initially there would of been a big fear of Chemical warfare, it would be good if this could be simulated somehow. i know at the time that any smoke, cloud, mist etc i saw and i would of had my mask on pronto.
Training in NBC gear was extremely tiring and cumbersome, especially in the Summer months so even if reduced visibility, higher exhaustion etc could be modelled.
I'm on the right in the picture below, taken about 85, with a typical bit of squaddie humour 😉. I see if i can find anything more relevant, i think i still have the old 'Survive To Fight' pamphlet in the loft.
cheers all 
 
 

Hi all, really looking forward to this module. I served in BAOR from 1983 - 1988, so a little after this initial release. From my time at least i would say one of the main concerns was NBC warfare, not so much Nuclear at this stage but definitely Biological and Gas. I would estimate we spent about 80% of the time whilst on Exercise in our NBC suits.
Nobody really knew what was going to happen, but initially there would of been a big fear of Chemical warfare, it would be good if this could be simulated somehow. i know at the time that any smoke, cloud, mist etc i saw and i would of had my mask on pronto.
Training in NBC gear was extremely tiring and cumbersome, especially in the Summer months so even if reduced visibility, higher exhaustion etc could be modelled.
I'm on the right in the picture below, taken about 85, with a typical bit of squaddie humour 😉. I see if i can find anything more relevant, i think i still have the old 'Survive To Fight' pamphlet in the loft.
cheers all 
 
 

Check is in the mail. 

Bil

I read (and write) a lot of AARs, but Bil's are probably my favorites. The presentation (screens, maps, etc) and analysis is top-notch, The commentary of your reasoning, analysis and actions is always entertaining and enlightening.  Add to it the ability read the AAR of the opponent, while it is all going down, and it all adds up to the best AARs on the 'net. Turn-based WEGO Combat Mission is especially well suited to this. I know these AARs are a lot of work, and I would believe it if you told us you spend more time on these than the battle itself.  Just a post to say how much it is appreciated, and for those of us excited about Cold War, a must-read. Good luck, commander!

Great AAR Bill, thanks for posting 😉, really whetting my appetite for this modules release.