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SimpleSimon

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Everything posted by SimpleSimon

  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.
  16. The most devastating consequence of which was the shutdown of the Luftwaffe's aerial reconnaissance. Photo recon was about the only reliable source of military intelligence the Wehrmacht possessed (The Abwehr was a useless organization) and it's loss left the Germans blind to the buildup of operations as large as Bagration. People on the other side of the world knew where the Russians were going by word of mouth alone-but a combination of blindness and Hitlerian denial naturally meant the German Army didn't.
  17. "When its the RAF we duck, when it's the Americans everyone ducks. When it's the Luftwaffe, nobody ducks" and "The war will be over when Goering fits in Goebbel's trousers" were a pair of my all time favorites.
  18. I really wanted to put up Red Thunder-if for no reason other than Blunting the Spear-but a number of the vanilla campaigns and scenarios are really badly designed. I still really like it, because with the Master Maps and unit toolkit Ive still made great campaigns and scenarios for myself but like-that's a lot of work I didn't always appreciate and i'm sure if one tallies up their CM list under "most played by hours" than Red Thunder usually ends up near the bottom of my list. It just shipped too lean. Battle for Normandy is great but also sort of obligatory-Normandy is totally overdone in gaming everywhere which is a shame because otherwise BN still has great campaigns and scenarios. What really revitalized it for me was the Market Garden module-but it needed that to stand out. Fortress Italy just had everything as far as the games went. It was great right off release and all its modules have done nothing but make it better.
  19. Close call between Shock Force 2 and Fortress Italy. Both of them have really broad kinds of situation and the scenarios are constructed that felt more intuitive than usual rather than relying on scripting of some kind.
  20. Are we even playing the same game? The Browning .50cal is utterly brutal toward the enormous number of paper-armored German recon cars and half tracks they've got tons of. Murphy didn't kill anything bigger than a man with that Browning. He fought extremely hard and by all accounts did something very heroic and selfless in the face of a terrifying situation. The overpowering imagery and depictions of his fight are universally illustrating events which Did Not Happen Like That and paint an embellished idea of the battle obviously to sell war bonds and support Hawk policies post war. Incidentally, it was not even the first time Murphy did something worth earning a Medal of Honor for. The man's entire career was an insane defiance of death and odds and it left him by the way - with no shortage of emotional and drug problems after the war. He clearly felt that his life and exploits had been violated to some degree by a system with an ulterior motive. That's a far more interesting discussion to me than "oh if only CM would model the special AP incendiary round I read about on wikipedia".
  21. In the Campaign brief Erwin theres a subnote for mission "x variants" which I think kick in after....some number of scenario failures in a row. I cant remember if it was 3?
  22. Almost all of the campaigns use core troops to some degree - unfortunately. For a number of them is does more harm than good since the scenarios are all designed to be challenging and this means that any one of them has the power to cripple your force before you get anywhere near the end of the campaign. Narratively, this was sometimes the case, especially for such infamous campaigns such as Market Garden or Bagration. For some of the Normandy campaigns I found it really unwelcome however. The other really great campaign in the game to me was Road to Nijmegan because the designers of the campaign have a bypass option that allows you sidestep the regular campaign difficulty if you get screwed over by one of the scenarios. That way you can still play the rest of the campaign but with more flexibility. Some other reasons I really liked Road to Nijmegan was the breadth of scenario types, situations, and units. It is a good "variety platter" of situations in the game. Unfortunately the reason I place it second to Spear is because when it was designed the rules governing air strikes in the game were very different and now they've been changed and the scenarios have not been rebalanced to reflect that. It's not crippling thanks to the bypass option - but I had to use the campaign decompiling tool and scenario editor to edit nearly the entire campaign (which was so heavily built around the old air support rules - which predate CM3.0 even) to basically abstract the airstrikes or just give the player more of other things to properly negotiate the scenarios. Note: They are and should still be difficult, Market Garden was doomed from the start.
  23. Blunting the Spear - The ultimate in Glorious Panzer Death Ride. This campaign is very big, so it requires some confidence and patience while you manage your force comprising full strength battalions + support assets. The plus is that - it captures the scale of operations on the Ostfront like few other games ever get near and "core troops" mechanic is well utilized in the context a pair of German Kampfgruppe being asked to conduct a challenging attack with zero prospect of reinforcement and little of resupply. CM's mechanics in both the clear and metaphorical sense very much favored this sort of campaign, even the briefings are well written, the entire campaign opening with... The last several months have been a series of painful setbacks as the inexorable Soviet drive inches closer to the heartland of the Third Reich... Which is putting it charitably - I sense the author was fully aware of the understatement within his prose. Another very wise element behind this campaign's design is that both sides are making use of core troops. The AI can find itself punished down the road for taking too many losses to the player's attacks. This is a big deal-because it means casualties are affecting the metaplay and thus matter far more than they usually seem to in a CM campaign...
  24. I think ultimately it was an operational mobility thing-not a tactical one. The Russians just got tired of all the times the Germans used rivers to construct defensive barriers and frustrate an advance. I would think it'd be reasonable enough to have it in game nonetheless, but it can be abstracted with deploy zone/map design construction well enough too.
  25. Comparing the M48 to the Abrams is putting the cart before the horse. The M48 was designed with the last generation of WW2 heavy and medium tanks in mind and is not a modern MBT. It is more like a Super World War 2 tank, and much of the thinking behind it is both literally and figuratively closer to 1945 than 1989.
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