SimpleSimon
-
Posts
572 -
Joined
-
Days Won
2
Posts posted by SimpleSimon
-
-
Highly dependent on unit composition and circumstances but it usually shouldn't be necessary unless you're scouting or defending. I do not generally split up infantry but then I typically work with rifle-heavy Armies like the Italians or British or Red Army who don't gain much from being split up anyway. As for the forced penalty Russian infantry squads take on being split-it makes zero sense but it's not the only oddity in RT.
In forests it's not a bad idea but one should ask why you sent men in there instead of high explosive.
-
I'm a bit more willing to engage with the individual scenarios on the grounds of them being really challenging since there's no overall-link to preserve. A lot of the time the campaigns are really painful about their core-troop usage though and the need to preserve a given force while also facing serious penalties for failure to achieve objectives are often incommensurate with the given challenge facing the player.
-
Usually I give any scenario in the game one go as a series of saves from various points I consider "junctions" in my plan and see how often I need to save-scum my way to victory. Two or three reloads is ok to me but if I have to go more than that I discontinue and hit up the editor.
-
The Microprose logo flashing by for me was like the weirdest flex ever lol.
-
In general i'm in favor of an all-around overhaul of the support options so there are more parameters for fire plans. The system we have is mostly unchanged from....Shock Force 1 and is pretty reflective of its 2007ish design and thinking. Not necessarily sure we need something as granular as "at my command" though. You can have that more or less with TRPs and the Emergency Fire option which when combined are-some would argue-a bit broken even. Id personally prefer more options for stuff like mixed bombardments in one battery (smoke and HE), creeping barrage, and Target-Reference Zones or poly-customizable fire plans rather than just points.
-
Haiduk said was I was about to. I'm not too miffed to see T-72s around in spite of their existence for export, because I could easily see them finding their way into an invasion anyway.
-
Here's a scenario Im in late testing for.
The American's right-most Battalion. I advanced them and their support teams up through the crevice as close as possible to the town. The Germans weren't deployed to stop this, so they were able to get close enough to screen the machine guns moving up behind them. I've abstracted American infantry squads to 6 men-this is the 1944 arrangement of 4 Garands, 1 Thompson or 50% Grease Gun and 1 BAR. Additionally there are BAR, marksman, bazooka, and rifle grenade "teams" of two men and an HQ squad of 4 men.
German Infantry are configured dependent upon when I set the scenario but the late 1944 arrangement is usually 5 men, one MG34 or 50% chance of an MG42, three K98s and randomly one G43 or StG 44 selected randomly. The last guy will have an StG44 or MP40 selected randomly. The high randomization of German infantry squads is meant to abstract the confused state of resupply and rearmament going on in the Wehrmacht at this time. Since this is a Panzer Aufklarung they're all Scout Teams of 3 men though with an MG42/34, MP40, and K98/G43.
Post battle. 2nd Battalion went up a road I had placed an Sdkfz 234/4-the variant with a Pak 40. They were delayed by this and Jeep that tried to scout up the road was destroyed. The center of the town was taken by Right-Battalion which maneuvered closely and was able to destroy the half track pictured with their bazooka team. There's a destroyed 232 barely visible that was taken out by a bazooka team after they maneuvered into the hamlet from behind. On the flipside of this, as the German commander I was trying to extricate my Aufklarung by using the Spahwagens to cover the movement of the Scout teams but in practice this was extremely difficult. The Americans can rapidly punish any movement you make openly and in the end I was only able to extract one team and the 234/4 car. This is how I can construct stories and narratives that play out really well and are exciting to watch even if there's not many surprises because im hotseating against myself.
-
Yeah it's real time, a turn-based option would be pretty handy but it's important to remember MoW is basically much closer to Company of Heroes than Combat Mission. It doesn't have much base content either I felt, but Valour Mod adds an incredible library of units and stuff into the editor's files that you can use. Some things however cannot be controlled from the editor, like firing range values which I would very much like to modify for some weapons. The ZiS-3 for instance has a shorter firing range than the M1938, when in fact it was the other way around.
-
So for about a year i've been experimenting with and teaching myself the GEM editor attached to Men of War 2 Assault Squad. I wasn't too crazy about MoW for years but with the attachment of Valour Mod so much material and equipment has been put in the game that you can make a literally unlimited number of potential scenarios involving a shocking number of configurations and setups. It's been very challenging since so little of the Editor has published reference material, I still don't know how to make waypoints and reinforcements for instance and YouTube tutorials i've watched look veeeery complicated. So i've been content to just build scenarios and then just hotseat them playing them out in the editor and i've gotta say i've been having a blast.
Thus far i've done scenarios from the Battle of France to Kursk and Bagration and yes even North Africa and the Philippines! Japanese forces are not only in the game but are crucially depicted with their full toolkit of heavy artillery and tanks. The Chinese are in the game too, and in theory with Valour Mod you could actually do stuff crazy and obscure in the West like the Mukden Incident. For now though i've decided to show off some pictures of a modest infantry scenario i'm working on at the moment involving a US Infantry Battalion + Recon Troop advancing on a German Aufklarung deployed in a French hamlet.
Valour Mod's caveat is that its a multiplayer mod that sets MoW's lethality and accuracy values way high, so to compensate i've buffed all soft units to 600% of their normal health values and 600% health regen rates. This leads to infantry firefights that tend to be indecisive at range and go on for a while, by lowering ambient visibility or changing the spotting values of units (units can be set to be better at detecting objects or have their field of view changed) they can be easy to break off too. With the modifications i've made infantry usually have the ability to get within range of eachother and get into short-sharp firefights that don't usually tend to do much except waste lots of ammo now. Exactly what I want. HE is also somewhat less deadly than in the multiplayer mod, otherwise it was just way too overpowered.
I'm having a lot of fun using the tools available through MoW and Valour to sort of make my own "game" here since the GEM Editor grants some pretty major control over abstractions such as health, visibility, geography, and yes the AI too although I haven't quite figured that one out yet. I'm prepared to answer some questions here about how to use the editor and some of its tools if anyone would like help crafting their own stuff.
-
The ideas behind this sound pretty interesting though. I like the notion of an explicit tactics-game approach to what has been the territory of action and simulator games for a long time.
-
Chalk me up for France and the rest of NATO. France had some totally insane stuff in their toolkit like the AMX-50.
-
It made quite a bit of sense when the thinking behind it was that it could plink targets too far out for an autocannon while maintaining stand-off distance from infantry anti-tank weapons. It helped that it outranges some first generation ATGMs and even the SACLOS ones can have their command link severed by blasting the launcher while the missile is still in flight. FAF missiles are making that all a bit of a problem now.
From the start though the MGS life has been pretty ugly. Most of the complaints arrayed against the Stryker family in general were sort of dubious-comparing it to the M113 or even the Bradley etc when it wasn't meant to be peer to either of those vehicles-both of which are tracked. The gun system however had a lot of serious issues that were never fully resolved-like the internal cooling system that didn't work necessitating the addition of a big vulnerable air conditioning unit on the side of the vehicle. The gun carousel is also separate from the crew compartment-so a malfunction requires the crew to dismount in order to fix it. Some complaints are also being made about the vehicles vulnerability to IEDs but those i'm not sure are very fair. Everything except specially designed V-hull movers are vulnerable to IEDs. The MGS might've been a particular brew-up risk though.
I actually found them extremely useful in the games, but the games don't cover a lot of the headaches that came with the vehicle in real life.
-
Its been coming for years, red flag was when they slashed vehicle counts in the SBCTs from 3 to 2.
-
It'd be cool to see CM:A brought up to 4.0 honestly.
-
As long as it involves a major expansion of the depictions of Italian Armed Forces i'd absolutely be in on North Africa.
-
One of my big wishes (Cold War) has been granted. Here's to hoping history will predict the future and we'll all get Combat Mission Blitzkrieg
*whistles*
-
Which is an interesting observation John, sounds like the precise opposite of what the word means in the West. The way western Armies are configured Officers are usually given more latitude in determination of how exactly they should proceed-and I do not always think that this degree of individual initiative is always warranted or desirable either...
One interesting product of the Red Army's rearmament initiative of the 1930s was the SVT-38 which later went on to become the SVT-40. Originally the weapon had been slated to replace the Mosin but the invasion caused production to halt before resuming again as the SVT-40. It does not sound like Soviet infantry really liked either rifle much. Sub-machine guns were preferred for assaulting and as far as rifles went yeah the Mosin was a relic but it was also very rugged and valued by marksmen for its accuracy. The SVT-40 was more or less revised production variant of the SVT-38 which was better designed. (The SVT-38's construction involved things like an awkward 2 piece stock and other bits meant it came out heavier than period battle rifles.) Both guns needed to be heavily built in order to contain the infamously high operating pressure of the 7.62x54R round. This is a big reason why the SKS and AK couldn't have appeared pre-war. They were built around a much lighter round and didn't need so many heavy parts.
This rearmament programs timing was poor-but since it also led to weapons such as the T-34 and KV-1 the only real mistake may have been that it started too late. If Stalin had foreknowledge of the invasion down to the date of attack it still wouldn't have been wise to cancel the program but what if he had? What if all the Soviets had were the T-26 or I-16?
-
double post
-
A low velocity 75mm HE-slinger used to be pretty common on tanks in general, and there was a lot of use for it against all kinds of things. The one on the BMP has the added benefit of being more useful against armor than something like the KwK L/24, F-34, or even the M3 on the Sherman which was like the King of those tank guns. The PG-9's armor penetration is something like 300mm-400mm against RHA as opposed to the L/24's 112mm with the best HEAT charge they ever made for it. That's enough to get through the M60A1's front plate in theory.
Big picture though is that anything that slings an HE-Frag charge out to more than a kilometer away shouldn't be difficult to find a job for. The HEAT round is just a bonus. It's an IFV that can be used like the StuG and might even be far better thanks to its coaxial machine gun and full protection from battlefield HE and NBC for its infantry mounts. Yeah the Soviets switched an autocannon with the BMP-2, but at the time the BMP-1 was designed nobody was using subcaliber munitions for autocannons yet and it wasn't exactly easy to engineer any autocannon with a selectable HE/AP feed that didn't use complicated box magazines. (The Americans had rejected several submissions prior to accepting the Bushmaster M242 into service.)
-
Totally understand now why BFC was so silent for a while. You were all very busy!
-
37 minutes ago, WimO said:
In respect of both points of view. Experienced scenario designers have thoughtful reasons for making certain items immovable during setup. This is more likely to occur in historical scenarios and thus presents players with an historical challenge.
It's really contradictory to a historic challenge in my experience. That's script-play and i've got no interest in it at least. To me, the underline is in the word, scenario. The designer sets up the circumstances but should provide the player with an adequate "tool kit" for interacting with the challenge. The definition of the word scenario is "a written outline of a movie, novel, work giving details of a scene" I can see things like set-piece battles and even "influenced by" or "inspired by" but you can't emulate the history of a specific battle 1:1 in a video game. There's no such thing as timers and map edges and the omniscient God-Player in real life.
That said i'm willing to engage with the premise of a challenging or even outwardly "unfair" fight as long as the designer scores that reasonably.
-
It helps quite a bit when contextual detail is provided for deploy areas like attacker deploy areas emerging from nearby roadheads or being shared with other road-access-points on the map. In the case of infantry there's often no reason I can see for failing to allow their deployment in forest or other visibility-obscured areas on the attackers side of the map. Point is i'm often a bit frustrated by the narrow and obvious avenues available to an attacker because "balance" or some other silliness. Whereas i'm also not-very-offended by having sections of a deploy area that enemies have line-of-fire on. To me that smells of opportunity way more than some kind of trick or mistake on the designer's part. My own assessment of tactics is pretty Soviet though. Don't stall, and don't run from a fight. Find your enemy and put your fist through his face.
-
100%. Stuff like this is usually the result of script-style thinking in scenario design. Some fixed stuff is reasonable but most of the time tiny deploy zones and what's outside of them are really frustrating to see. The deployment phase is literally the most important thing going for both players and if there's a reason we have so little control at times it had damn well better be a good one.
-
On 4/11/2021 at 12:42 PM, MikeyD said:
There are weather and terrain extremes that rarely get used in CM scenarios because they're liable to bring the battle to a halt. Blizzard, high wind and deep snow condition for example. Another is heavy rain and muddy conditions. CM is a tactical sim, sometimes the proper tactical thing to do is just not bring your armor forward. Or at least stick to paved roads only.
Some of the scenarios involving attacks in bad weather seem pretty dicey to me regardless of the conditions. It's bad enough if you stand to lose any vehicle to bogging, but when the scenario also involves an attack right into the teeth of the enemy defense with no prospect of maneuver and scores you viciously for failing in spite of these conditions I rapidly lose patience with the scenario designer and whatever his intent was and head to the editor. Weather is great contextual stuff, but the scenario designers need be aware that it can radically and unpredictably alter the circumstances of the scenario. That's fine as long as the expectations on the player are reasonable...
Interest in WW2 Afrika Korps
in General Discussion Forum
Posted
I actually finished Mussolini's War Erwin but haven't felt like commenting on it much since discussion didn't seem to continue in the thread. I was just getting to descriptions of North Africa too.