FlemFire

Necro'ing thread. I did a little bit of testing and artillery in general is largely ineffective vs. infantry inside buildings. However, I did make some unscientific observations: General/Armor rounds will debris-kill guys on the first floor if it lands close enough. So if you're getting bombarded it may be wise to move them to the 2nd floor. Syrians/Uncons seem way more vulnerable to taking such casualties, whereas NATO/US seem to take the 'minor' injuries hits. Armor seems better at destroying a building - so if you do a targeted strike to flatten something that seems the way to go. Could use more testing, though. Anti-personnel rounds have a better chance of exploding higher up and hitting guys on the upper floor. Armor/General rounds hitting the ceiling above guys didn't do much as far as I could tell. The one conceit is if they're in a smaller structure (see below). If you throw a tremendous amount of rounds at a specific building very quickly, it may cause the enemy to break and flee. I'm sure one can think of many ways to use this coordination with other assets, or even just brute force it with high density AP mortar groupings. There's a tremendous range for debris being flung by Armor/General: I've seen guys many action squares away getting clipped if they're in the open. I found AP rounds to be more centralized in their capacity for carnage. Might need more testing. Small buildings like shacks or 1-room houses are not so safe from artillery damage, making them prime targets for destruction. If these take direct hits the occupants inside are liable to pay for it. This is notably true for structures like barns which aren't common in SF2, but are HE-death traps in the WWII games. Fundamentally, it seems arty's role is still to fix the target in place. If it kills them, great, but if used as a fire-and-forget asset you're probably wasting its utility.

Speaking of rubble, and just out of curiosity, has there been any consideration for having buildings of 2+ stories having a chance to randomly slope somewhere when destroyed? For example, spilling debris into a street and blocking it from tank access?

I only open up the hatch if it's to arm an MG that I want to use or reload one of those awkward ATGs. That's literally it. Guys hanging out in the cupola are insane bullet magnets in CMx2. Sometimes you'll want to make more use of it in the WWII games and their tank duels, but SF2 is modern age, and in the modern age the optics on some of the vehicles is essentially better than the human eye (in a sense...).

For 30 points it should be a moderately armed air balloon.

It very rarely comes up, but here's an example of just that:

This is still in the game, by the way. Was glancing at the Syrian TOE and you can basically get a swarm of Hinds for free. Would have to house rule it so someone doesn't lamely spam you with nonstop air attacks. You can see the error by the way as the Hind F is listed as 742 points, whereas the Hind D is a whopping... 30.

More the case that I don't know the names off hand so go with colloquial terms. BRDM is not one I keep in the memory bank -- it's vaguely armored and it's carrying a few personnel. Good enough for me . As far as I'm concerned, if it's in the Syrian TOE then it's evaporating on contact regardless of designation.

You can't figure out which of those two might colloquially be referred to as an APC? I'm aware grognards like to nitpick, but goodness.

Looks like an interesting map. I like looking for low/mid-length maps for streaming on occasion so I'll add it to the list. I did open it up for the initial setup (which I always do off-stream as sometimes it takes a long while). My initial setup currently (pre-review) is to fill the APCs with MGs/mortarguns and run them to hotspots. Not sure yet where to place the tanks and infantry. The main road seems to be an obvious deathtrap for the Syrians so I'm steering clear and heading into the village as fast as I possibly can. The briefing is extremely short and vague so it seems pretty structured for PBEM though AI stuff can be interesting as well.

I don't see recon or scouting anywhere in your tactics there. Generally speaking, if you have the appropriate resources at your disposal, then patience, reconnaissance, and applying firepower will work in your favor. Personally speaking, impatience is my #1 error. In your example the enemy has too many points to cover your angle of attack. Don't try and establish a base of fire on an enemy that could return fire from superior positions the second you pop your head. Smoke screen. Or apply harassing artillery support to soften them and then follow through with suppression via on-map resources. Those are just examples off the top of my head. 99% of the time if something goes sideways in CM it is, on reflection, wholly my fault and there usually was a better way. And the best way to learn is to just make those mistakes and then think about them and figure out what could have been done different. Sometimes scenarios/campaigns are designed to be considerably more constrained, surprising, and/or difficult, but I suppose knowing the difference between "I'm messing up" and "the scenario is designed to mess me up" is a whole 'nother bag of hammers.

I've FOG2 but yet to really break my teeth on it. They're running tournaments and there's a ladder-scene for it so the gameplay definitely has a lot of depth -- and it's very sneaky about it, too. As someone unfamiliar with ancient battles, to me it looks like a basic clash, but in reality there's so much going on under the hood. The TW/Paradox stuff tends to be more binary in nature as they appeal to the mass market. I think on one hand Paradox stuff is stronger than ever, but also they have been leaning way too heavily on 'mana' spending and instant yes/no results. The end result means they can greatly diversify the macro-aspects of their games at the cost of micro decision making. The Empires way of juggling degradation is quite good -- if you like that you should see the Decadence aspect of the Muslim nations in Crusader Kings 2 (as far as I can tell they removed it from CK3?). All that said, the export-import nonsense with FOG2/Empires is some real high-octane Slitherine tomfoolery. There's gotta be a better way to do that sorta thing nowadays.

Was dinking around in the scenario editor and ran across this "Civilian Density" metric -- is it even used anymore? I checked around in the manuals, physical & the ones that come with SF2 and the modules, but none make a mention of it.

Smoke is very powerful for such occasions, though make sure to track the wind direction and deploy it accordingly.

When running tests, you should also test things like running guys by IEDs with the spotters untouched; running by with the spotters at least suppressed/pinned 1x; running by with say another group in the spotter's vicinity killed off by attackers. See if anything causes the AI to drop the 'ball' in regards to activating IEDs; setup an AI plan adjacent to IED use. Kinda curious if car bombs are also used by AI. Edit: two scenarios that have heavy IED use if you wanted to test, Abu Susah SF2 The Shores of Tripoli

As an adaptation, I've been using more "area" fire even if I can target directly. It's by no means a new tactic, but I just find myself utilizing it way more often. The objective now is to pin the person down indefinitely while other forces move to destroy them (if tanks/arty are unable). If you target the enemy directly then you often get this series of events: 1) Enemy receives fire, after about 15-30s they get pinned and duck down. 2) You lose contact of the enemy and stop shooting. 3) After 15-30s, enemy stands back up and starts shooting back. Rinse, repeat. Because housed enemies are now so sturdy and hard to kill, this situation is way more common. As others have pointed out I think when it comes to scenarios/campaigns the issue is that the resource usage for these sorts of things is different than in the past. What you probably end up with is a lot of scenarios/campaigns where the expectations of player capabilities no longer match the new reality -- so a lot of these maps are suddenly much harder. I like the change a lot, even if I find myself wondering aloud "why won't you die!" as Abu Hajaar casually chills in a hail of gunfire from every direction.

I wouldn't necessarily call keeping casualties low a "technicality" because it may have sound reasons for existing, but you're right that it makes maps considerably more difficult. In the modern games it's easy to get bushwhacked over one small mistake and have an entire squad wiped out in mere moments. I've not played Black Sea but 20% seems sorta low if both armies are modern ones. I'm assuming you're playing as Americans there, so it's probably trying to emulate that the modern U.S. army almost aggressively avoids casualties for military and political reasons alike. Collateral damage VPs I actually like the most. It's super easy to just flatten everything in your way and the "preserve X" victory conditions sorta force the player to think outside the box a bit. I'm quite glad it exists. I think the WWII games are more relaxing on this issue in the sense that there's more "cushion" in the action. But that's why I own both the WWII games and the modern ones, as it's nice to go between one style or the other.

Having a heavy machine-gun or some variant of it changes things, of course, but the pictures seemed to indicate he had 5.56mm scout squads and the like shooting at a hunkered target with "scoped rifles." The insinuation being that if we just shoot at the building long enough we'll eventually 'snipe' all the targets down. But if the guys inside are pinned and standing behind great cover, the probability of that coming true in a short period of time is pretty low. And more to your point, in the 2nd picture he says the guy in the building has an MG. That's even more incentive to move in and destroy it. A bunch of Italian rifles shooting 200m for a solid minute is literally going to be less effective than a burst or two of .30-cal/.50-cal back your way whenever he picks his head up.

Why would small-arms fire be effective in killing people in buildings in the first place? Unless you can shoot through the material it's unlikely that your bullets will find targets, and even more unlikely when the enemy becomes pinned down. Your troops are basically shooting at a vague silhouette standing behind blocks of concrete. If you spend 9mins shooting at someone in a building, you probably could have spent 1-2mins doing that while simultaneously moving an element forward to properly destroy the target. Personally, I find buildings to be death traps if the enemy has explosive weapons. Like in SF2 for example, if I hole up in a building and the enemy splashes it with an RPG I'm liable to lose a team or an entire squad.

This is why I like missions that design for a bit of back and forth flow; such as beating back an attack in the initial moments, and then evolving into a counter-offensive where you have to go and then take objectives to close out the map.

Sorry to necro an old thread, but felt it best to keep the 'literature' on the campaign in one spot. I had a question that maybe @Paper Tiger can help answer. These are the results of my campaign thus far: Mission 1 - US Major Victory https://www.twitch.tv/videos/726719104 Mission 2 - US Major Victory https://www.twitch.tv/videos/734166124 Mission 3 - UK Minor Victory https://www.twitch.tv/videos/739472085 Mission 4 - Draw https://www.twitch.tv/videos/746181765 I had to take a break due to life stuff but will be resuming the campaign soon. Before I start battles, I like to plot them out and then do the stream (so the stream isn't just me looking at the map for an hour). But on the Fifth mission, the one where you're tasked with capturing VPs with a platoon of American airborne, the game is giving me a three hour limit. I thought the three hour limit didn't kick in unless you suffered two defeats or draws in a row. Did I miss something on this?

Out of curiosity, what happens on Turnbull's stand if you succeed but don't inflict enough casualties? I destroyed all 3 vehicles, killed/wounded about 80 Germans and yet still did not get a checkmark for casualties inflicted. Will that affect future maps? It seemed to be that if you didn't cause enough damage you would lose anyway in the long term. Somewhat aggravating as blowing up 3 tanks and taking out 80 men is what I would considerable very considerable damage.