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SimpleSimon

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SimpleSimon last won the day on February 5 2020

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  1. Ideal scenarios with Conscripts would feature a lot of maneuvers or a lot of fighting but not a mix of both. It was generally hard enough to get Conscript troops to show up as arranged at all let alone expect serious willingness to engage in a pitched fight with enemy outside of anything but the most favorable circumstances. Don't get me wrong you can make interesting scenarios and narratives with them-but expecting them to be very heroic is a lot to ask of guys who were drafted or even shanghaied into uniform.
  2. If you want "Japanese Troops" it's literally as simple as setting scenarios with unsupported light infantry with maybe 2-3 light machine guns between one hundred riflemen, the occasional light mortar, and in defense a pair of HMGs. Troops sent to the Pacific usually had nothing like their assigned equipment allotments-there appears to have been very little in the way of assigned equipment tables at all in the Japanese Army. Forces in China were generally better organized than the ones in the Pacific to be fair-but the near total lack of infrastructure in that country could make it just as hard often to justify the presence of heavy equipment that couldn't be brought up ever. Again-the one exception to this seems to have been airplanes. Much of this is due to the peculiar manner in which Japanese troop detachments "coalesced" around charismatic and individualistic commanders who seem to have generally just grabbed whatever troops and equipment were available and carried out attacks on their own initiative. Superiors were then usually obliged to support such actions in the name of avoiding humiliation for poor discipline. There are a ridiculous number of examples all over CBI and the Pacific of Japanese Troop detachments marching off to attack or bypass enemy positions without formal orders to do so and at least at the start of the war this sort of bravado usually paid off against enemy troops who were badly led. Allied Commanders in particular invited their own destruction all the time by simply assuming Japanese forces wouldn't be able to bypass strongpoints by using the jungles to just outflank them-since Allied Commanders would never do that. It's how the British lost Malaya so fast. The Americans had minimized their own vulnerabilities to such tactics at Bataan-but not because they knew how the Japanese were conducting their attacks, more because the objective was to thwart efforts to use the Port at Manila for as long as possible by protecting Corregidor.
  3. A lot of the time light recon units get sent into full setpiece battles in this game on ridiculously dense battlefields with predictable results. Three Pak 40s guarding the same T Junction are going to trash your Greyhounds yo. Not much else you can do about that. In reality recon sections avoided battle as much as possible unless they were certain all they were facing was lightly armed outpost positions. The game's maps and scenarios have a way of funneling you toward action and thus also high lethality play and this is anathema to many kinds of more subtle units like armored cars and sniper sections etc who generally avoided high densities of enemy troops. Scenarios with recon in all manner of circumstances can be done in CM. They can be done in circumstances which are both favorable and unfavorable to mounted reconnaissance. They just usually aren't due to the limited knowledge of what their day-to-day life looked like.
  4. I remain unconvinced that a theater of fighting predominantly set by naval objectives and starving island garrisons neutralized and bypassed without a fight will end up being very interesting for very long. Like the pace of fighting on Pacific Islands was generally one of two states-skirmishes between patrols, and sieges. The terrain and poor local infrastructure left virtually no avenues for the full combined arms kits to be of much use. Tanks were reduced to supporting roles in the few situations roads were the sight of actual fighting. Infantry maneuvers were frequently done with a preference for as little fighting as possible-since the jungles were far worse than the enemy was. It was seriously normal for infantry regiments to be reduced to battalions by malaria *alone*. One interesting exception to this is a campaign most guys seem oddly oblivious too. Japan's invasion and seizure of the Philippine Islands from the Americans in 1941-42. The fighting on Luzon involved close air support, tactical maneuver, and yes even panzer blitzing but so little is spoken of this campaign since the Americans lost. The fighting also did degenerate into a siege once Bataan came under attack-but there's just enough scope for a short CM style campaign in the early part of the campaign there and maybe also Malaya. If you want a CM game about the Pacific War you will-unsurprisingly- find few examples. If you want a game about *the way* fighting in the Pacific War happened there are plenty of examples actually. Radio Commander is a good one.
  5. The Blitzkrieg and North Africa remain the underline for me in future games.
  6. John, i'm also in favor of an overall revision of Soviet CAS as depicted in the game. It loiters too much-CAS does this in most of the games-but the Soviets emphasized ordinance dump on all their strikes. This caused some issues with Army leadership-who wanted actual loiter capability (later provided by the Hind and Su-25) not provided by the generation of Mach 1.0 capable attackers mostly available to the VVS in the 1970s. (The Su-17, 22, 27 etc). Incidentally the MiG-21 could actually mount and fire the beam-riding missile Grom (radar guided, not laser). CAS and multi-mission capability in Soviet aircraft was often more widespread than believed, they were more role-specific than western types but not inflexibly so.
  7. Ask far less of your rifle infantry than you think you should and far more of your support assets in return. Send bullets first and men afterwards. Always conduct proper screening too. You don't have to deploy to fight pitched battles against every threat-but try to determine when a fight is really necessary. Plenty of enemies in plenty of locations on maps literally aren't worth your time or blood and should just be left for follow on troops. Divide and conquer. Enemies who flee into a forest or the back of a house not in your path might as well be on Venus. They're out of play. Keep them that way.
  8. It's ok Artkin one wouldn't make the mistake of thinking you had anything to say. I have a sign-up date just one year after yours tho so like idk where you get that. I'd much prefer posts with actual content from now on than smug non-replies over something as incredibly sad and pathetic as who signed up on an internet forum first. Your next reply will probably more interesting than this one though. Go ahead. Let's see how much worse you can make this. Amuse me. That's like, your opinion man!
  9. It's abstracted since it's beneath the layer the game depicts. You kicked a door in that happened to be at the end of a straight well-lit hallway totally exposed to a shooter across the other end of the street etc etc. The houses are literally devoid of walls, furniture, etc. It's clearly being RNG-ed. If you don't like that this is just not the game for you. Door kickers is. Insurgency is. Call of Duty is. Your perspective is a battlefield one, not a "check those corners" one. Sorry man.
  10. CQB or MOUT as it otherwise known is a legitimately nightmarish experience for all forces involved. It just barely covered by the scope of the game but I remain unconvinced the results replicated by the outcome of close encounters are unrealistic or routinely incorrect. If you want depictions of close assault with higher fidelity than I suggest a game like Door Kickers or Insurgency because ASL/CM were never about that. This is really nebulous. It sounds to me like you're expecting an awful lot of otherwise unspecialized rifle infantry who are literally just conscripts who had a rifle pushed in their hands. Westerners seem to be so captured by the powerful imagery of SWAT and Spec Ops tactics that they think these things are universal in military forces. They are not. I sort of agree with this. I think the games are definitely suffering from a kind of design blandness. I think it has more to do with the scenario and campaign designers all being a relatively small crowd of guys who are willing to put the time and energy in than the games being stale per se. So there's a sort of idea-drought in the games unfortunately and this comes across as stale-game-syndrome. Yeah, I can see that. CM is the virtual version of the Advanced-Squad-Leader series of board games from decades ago. It is not a "video game" in the sense that many consumers might see it. If you are unwilling to adjust your perspective on this, you will probably just not enjoy CM. I don't see how that's CM's fault though or why the development team should waste time and resources on better graphical fidelity. The alternative to these games are tabletop, and in that regard CM is and will remain for the foreseeable future-utterly superior. Actually a pretty good point. The games could totally go for a coop option of some kind. If they can then why haven't they? I think the whole industry has artificially low prices for everything honestly and this coming out the backend by causing burnt-out development teams to put in minimum effort and jump between various better paying gigs all the time. This affects product quality and if you think that's something that doesn't affect you (a consumer) then look at the utter catastrophe that was AAA gaming for the year 2021. (Big name titles all roundly blasted, widespread failure to reach target sales, etc) They are part of the game actually, I suspect you're asking why the launch platform for aerial weapons are not depicted visually but depictions of them on map are necessary...why??? Given the enormous work that goes on behind the scenes in software development from texturing to modeling, etc it this is just untrue. I have no sympathy whatsoever for reasoning like this either. The whole games industry is suffering from an extremely toxic wage suppression crisis and consumers are partly to blame for it. Attempts to raise the cost of mainstream titles met with enormous hostility, workarounds such as loot boxes, pay-to-win etc failed thankfully but all of this left a legacy of mutual recrimination between consumers and developers, nonetheless. Battlefront is a small independent studio thankfully mostly outside the mechanics of the mainstream gaming market. (They are much closer to the board-gaming and tabletop market) So Battlefront gets more say about setting the prices that it thinks are fair. Given how deeply invested the entire west is in wage suppression it is probably still far too low for the labour invested since it's hard to break consumers out of the mentality they hold about pricing. That's an entirely separate topic however...
  11. Issue I see is improper use of the TRP mechanic. Scenario designers tend to reserve them for defense and rarely distribute any to offense. In reality it should be the other way around. The attacker has initiative so fires have been planned and missions readied ahead of time. It's the defender who needs to prepare for impromptu or "emergency" fire missions on unregistered/unobserved sectors of front. Artillery in defense has a much harder job than artillery in the offense-where planning and initiative yield the greatest benefit of that arm's reach.
  12. The largest single problem with the CM games is one entirely typical to wargaming in general-broken scoring and context mechanics creating ridiculous situations and then penalizing the player for making reasonable decisions. Chief of which is low or basically zero penalty for own-force casualties and excessive value placed on terrain or flavor text captures. Phase lines are about the only reasonable system in the game for doing this. Requiring the player to put his force on a 100x100m capture demonstrates a shockingly limited knowledge and experience of war and what things actually matter at the given level of play. I basically have zero interest in playing against AI or computer opponents anymore because the need for work arounds toward the AI's limitations and passive conduct requires the scenario to be designed for those problems. So I just extract the campaign files, hotseat, and use cards from a game like Memoir 44 to contextualize or abstract the opponent's overall actions which I then execute or interpret as if I was the commander of the opposing side. Preferring that much to "you didn't capture Houfallize in time -50 points to Gryffindor"
  13. Outwardly just about all of them are entirely plausible. What is often asked of the player however is usually pretty silly.
  14. I'm honestly hoping that the weakness of a Barbarossa module for Red Thunder will lead to the release of a full 1939-41 Blitzkrieg title instead.
  15. The lack of proper C2 certainly presents a new kind situation for CM players more accustomed to heavy subdivisions and unit tailoring. (ie: Half a platoon + engineer team + M10 for lulz) The Red Army was definitely the best "peasant army" in the world though as far as that all went. They just applied everything really heavily, or sent no one at all. Most Armies in the world were not like Central Europeans much less the Anglo-Americans with luxurious walkie talkies and ice cream trucks. Unlike lots of nations though Russia could actually provide the mass of arms to justify the sort of attacks that looked like 1918 all over again with high applied force density on a tiny slice of frontage. Of course it also helped that the Ostfront was like outer space with its infamous low troop densities and permeable frontlines. You could get a shocking number of men behind a frontline in one night and then just collapse a defense arrangement reliant on outposts and tripwire positions like the kind the Germans had to use everywhere. Sometimes you'll have disasters, but then the whole war is a bloody disaster isn't it? Pass the vodka comrade. Post war the appearance of radios does not seem to have changed much about this hard-headed but reliable method of launching attacks-I think that was mainly done to make HQs safer and decrease turnaround times with reconnaissance.
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