chuckdyke

If we're throwing around acronyms, this discussion is less about LOS and more about FOW. You the scenario commander cannot tell if scampering a unit to a location is guaranteed to provide them with LOS because you the real world commander wouldn't know either. A LOS tool would be giving you more information that you'd have in a real world situation.

Interesting. Well, history is quite unlike most fiction I guess. Apart from the paintings, the stern piece of the captured 'HMS Royal Charles' is also preserved there if I'm correct. It was a long time ago I visited the place. 

Chuck you don't need to tell me about the "Haarlemmermeer". Nor about shipwrecks in the Netherlands, whether they be Spanish, or even Roman for that matter.

A 76 mm Sherman like the 'Easy Eight' in 'Fury' Can penetrate the side armor of a 'King Tiger' up to 1 KM. You learn that movies like Fury is a lot of bulldust. The game teaches you coordination. Dueling doesn't work my first advice. You have artillery, (The USA had the best in the world), Armor the Sherman has four lifting eyes its purpose to transfer it from the quay to a 'Liberty Ship'. The Sherman could be shipped anywhere in the world. Europe has lots of Bridges. A King Tiger has problems crossing a bridge which capacity is forty tons. If you have air support coordinate it with all your other tools. Good, Infantry advancing, Artillery strikes have been called in, you outnumber German Armor by 3 -5 to 1. You have better radio's your trucks are now ammunition dumps. Surprise surprise you see the King Tiger is not that effective. It is popping smoke and it seems to reverse in panic. After the game you discover your sniper which was hidden away, and you forgot about killed the HQ commander. This happened to me in a game. The sniper attached to its Company HQ in the British Commonwealth module turned a battle. Don't plot too many biased plans based on movies or TV. Take advice from Heinz Guderian 'Klotzen nicht kleckern'. To explain it. "Don't point one finger but punch with your fist. In CM it is coordination of: Airpower, Artillery, Armor, Infantry operating as one. Carefully read the scenario before a battle, which is your operation orders, plan which units you use for what, your fragmentation orders and Troop Leading Procedures. Recon Programs, Listening Recon, Scouting, Ambushing, Raids, without them the battle will fail. Sometimes all you need to do is to read the scenario. See what was done in the scenario before you start a battle. Shermans vs a King Tiger you started with. All five go at full speed at an angle. Three 75 mm Shermans obscure with smoke if you have a 76 mm Sherman, he will get the opportunity at the side. (The Tiger either rotates its turret or rotates its hull.) You have the HQ Sherman and a 76 MM Sherman tackling the Tiger. Often you lose a Sherman often you lose none. It is a tactic I used successfully. My rant for the day happy gaming. 

Not that I'm a polder grog, but I'd been surprised if there weren't any polders around the area with the Maas, Waal & Rijn.
A quick google learned me that they've been poldering around Gelderland and Brabant for quite a while. Some polders in Brabant:
http://www.jvdn.nl/images/BD/Ham.jpg
A polder just means a piece of land with it's own watermanagement, or something like that (the watermanagement makes the polder useful for humans). But Wikipedia does a better job:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder

Just watched Mosul, quite good.  What a mess to have to live through in real life -- assuming one lives through it.

I'm sure the award winning historian will be delighted by your assessment. 😉

I don't wish to be too pedantic but with street names like "Polderweg" and "Rosandepolder" on the north bank of the river near the Driel Ferry crossing, I think it would be fair to say that Gelderland has polders.

@chuckdyke I'm familiar with the sport of dyke leaping or fierljeppen to give it it's Dutch name. But, could you explain the finer points of dyke chucking to an ignorant Limey.

If you like WW 2 I would go for Final Blitzkrieg. My reason infantry can ride on tanks which was widespread practice in WW2. I work my way through SF 2 as the modern stuff is fascinating for me. I am 70 years old soon I will be 71, I found CM realistic as you can apply real world tactics. I find it money well spent. If you buy the SF2 bundle for example it will keep you going for a couple of years. Yes, there is a learning curve and as your first games stick to the tutorial games. There are five different levels it will keep you busy. 

Agreed. I think proper reinforced buildings (and some applicable house models to depict it) have been requested by some members of the community for a good few many years since now. It's especially relevant given the Berlin module, but the Soviets implemented strongholds when they were on the defensive in the war also. 

Putting foxholes half-in buildings as a work around (or as game compensation), really doesn't cut it in terms of immersion for me.

Proper house to house fighting with different rooms on each floor and basements where the troops can fight is probably something for CM3 if that engine ever will arrive.

Give this man a medal and a promotion! 

Area fire absolutely does work. Targeting the ground right in front of a building instead of the building wall itself can be just as effective, or even more effective than direct fire -- at least for suppression (wider splash of bullets, I think).  Just recently, I posted a few screenies from a CMBN battle as the British. The whole battle was a series of identifying enemy building locations and wearing them down to the point that my infantry could get into the building to confirm clear, clear, and/or take willing survivors prisoner. To do that, I drained most of the MG ammo from two platoons of Churchills. I was up against a gaggle of low-grade LW troopers (AI random blind pick).
None of them ever retreated from the buildings (newest patch in action), but I was quite surprised to see how many were left when I entered some of them. I've never bagged so many prisoners. Like...50? Sometimes nearly whole squads threw up their hands when my dudes got close. I had no idea they were there until my men were taking the cigarettes out of their pockets.
Allowing them to get close was all about area fire. Also, lots of the buildings (Holland map, just the luck of foliage and building angles) didn't allow for direct targeting of walls, so I got as close as I could with ground targeting as per above. Worked a treat.

I did some experiments with hatches opened and closed on vehicles from different battalions (So no vertical information sharing) to observe how horizontal information sharing was affected.  The experiment was done in CMFI v2.0 Engine 4.  The following is a summary of the results followed by screenshots:
Maximum horizontal information sharing range is 32 meters (4 Action Spots)
A vehicle must be unbuttoned to horizontally share (report) information from about 9 to 32 meters.
A vehicle can be buttoned & horizontally share (report) information if it is within 8 meters of the other vehicle.
This one surprised me: If two vehicles are 9 to 32 meters apart with one buttoned & the other open the open vehicle will share (report) information to the buttoned vehicle.  However the buttoned vehicle will not share (report) information to the open vehicle.
Infantry may horizontally share (report) information to a buttoned vehicle when within 32 meters.
The Screenshots are from CMFI v2.0 Engine 4.
The M4 Sherman from 3rd Battalion has a tentative armor contact. 

The M4 Sherman from 1st Battalion has a tentative infantry contact

The M4 from 1st Battalion was ordered to move within 32 meters (but not closer than 9 meters) of the M4 from 3rd Battalion so they will be within the maximum horizontal information sharing range.

Both M4 Shermans are within the maximum horizontal information sharing range of 32 meters however both tanks are buttoned so the information about their different tentative contacts are not shared.


The M4 from 3rd Battalion opens its hatches.  It does not receive the tentative infantry contact information since the 1st Bn. M4 is still buttoned.

The M4 from the 1st Bn. is still buttoned but received the tentative armor contact from the open hatch 3rd Bn. M4. 

 

Thanks everyone for the input, it helped a ton! So to sum it up:
- all games have some training tutorial missions which i can follow while reading the manual
- all games have the ability to create custom Quick Battles with custom maps and forces
- scenarios can be sorted by their size in all games
- CMBN Big Bundle has the best price/content value
Looking at the Big Bundle ... 110 EUR .. wow .. never paid for a "game" that much .. ever .. are the DLC's worth it? Do they add a campaign or is it about single scenarios? What about the units? Are they added to the original campaigns somehow or just to the DLC scenarios? Should i go for the units if i plan to use mods? Do most of the mods require the DLC's?

If you like WW 2 I would go for Final Blitzkrieg. My reason infantry can ride on tanks which was widespread practice in WW2. I work my way through SF 2 as the modern stuff is fascinating for me. I am 70 years old soon I will be 71, I found CM realistic as you can apply real world tactics. I find it money well spent. If you buy the SF2 bundle for example it will keep you going for a couple of years. Yes, there is a learning curve and as your first games stick to the tutorial games. There are five different levels it will keep you busy. 

For what you spend compared to the amount of time you'll be playing it comes out to less than a few pennies (or Euro cents) per hour.

PS - My main advice.....Do not be afraid of the editor.  Your $110 will go many, many times futher once you are designing stuff for yourself (& us too, hopefully).
PPS - Welcome to the war! 

In any of the games, you can sort the scenario list by size, and then just start with the smaller scenarios. However, keep in mind that small scenarios can be fiendishly difficult too. And all the CM games are in general really hard.

If you like WW 2 I would go for Final Blitzkrieg. My reason infantry can ride on tanks which was widespread practice in WW2. I work my way through SF 2 as the modern stuff is fascinating for me. I am 70 years old soon I will be 71, I found CM realistic as you can apply real world tactics. I find it money well spent. If you buy the SF2 bundle for example it will keep you going for a couple of years. Yes, there is a learning curve and as your first games stick to the tutorial games. There are five different levels it will keep you busy. 

+1  Would be a good option.  Also wish we had more options for splitting squads.  In 7 member (or less) squads, once on splits off a 2-man scout team, one is left with an unwieldy 5-man team.  Wold be nice to split 7(or less) man squads more than once.

2 hits and 0 shells left... time to RTB 

yes bunkers are knocked out to easily, I feel all defensive works don't give enough protection and need to be tweaked in favor of the defender, that goes for trenches, foxholes, and sandbags

I don't know about WW2 but one of the armor field manuals specifically mentions the TC dismounting to check corners at city intersections. There's a couple of scenarios in CMSF2 where this would be very welcome if you don't happen to have any infantry nearby (for whatever reason).