Megalon Jones

The rematch!
Central Italy in spring '44.
I play ze Germans and Irish is the CW.

It'll be interesting to see how successful this is. Sacrificing CMSF2 to the gaping maw of Moloch might be worth it in increased brand awareness alone.
I can't tell you how many times I've had this conversation:
'What to you do?'
'I work for a game company.'
'That's interesting. What's its name?'
'Battefront.com'
'Oh, I know that game! Star Wars, right?'
'Sigh. No, it isn't Star Wars'.

I get obsessive about min max details, so huge game throw me. Are Final Blitzkrieg battles smaller and more focused? I have experience with wargames, but have yet to play Battlefront. 

If you haven’t played any Combat Mission games then it may help to know that there are four types of battles you can have:
 
1. Premade battles (“scenarios”) that allow you to pick one or any side and have forces pre-selected. You read the conditions, forces available and objectives and attempt to fulfill the latter to win. They can range in size from a few squads to a regiment. 

2. Campaigns - these are an interconnected series of what is mentioned above in 1 with outcomes of each battle determining various things for the upcoming battle.
3. Battles you create using the scenario editor - these are like 1 above, but you are making it. 
 
4. Quick Battles - these are battles where you can choose the purchase points for each side and then either specifically set all the conditions or let them be random, including map choice. Here you can still set battle size (or let it be random) so once more you can have battles involving a platoon and a few tanks, to something much much bigger, wIth two battalions or more per side. There are a fair number of customization options so that you can decide the experience, morale, equipment supply for each side, etc. This is my favourite mode, I rarely play anything else. Thousands of hours of fun and still haven’t exhausted all the possibilities. 

Single player run through on the Dutch scenario.  Last vid to be done on my ancient computer.  Next vid on new gaming rig.

Single player run through on the Dutch scenario.  Last vid to be done on my ancient computer.  Next vid on new gaming rig.

Single player run through on the Dutch scenario.  Last vid to be done on my ancient computer.  Next vid on new gaming rig.

Single player run through on the Dutch scenario.  Last vid to be done on my ancient computer.  Next vid on new gaming rig.

Single player run through on the Dutch scenario.  Last vid to be done on my ancient computer.  Next vid on new gaming rig.

This would make a superb mission pack. New and Unique situation (for now...give it 5 years and this type of strategic concern will be way more prevalent...).
That's interesting, how infrastructure improvement could be a harbinger of an attack. Although, as you note, it would make sense (given Russia's somewhat limited resources in the area?) to hold off construction or attack until absolutely necessary.
Conditions driving that threshold could be increasing civilian unrest in Crimea due to water issues, although realistically the Govt will only truly care when the military starts to get affected.
But it could an easy Blame Game to generate, to take the unrest (caused by local Govt incompetence) and blame it on UKR, "necessitating" local correction of the situation.
Nothing particularly Russian about such a move, of course. All Govt's are bastards to some degree :).

For a (short) while I was attempting to play by strict 'reality' rules. No moving your camera beyond your own forward line, no raising the camera above level one (except to facilitate placing movement orders). No rewinding to double-check where an attack came from. No flying about the battlefield like a bird, just naviagating by '+' jumps from unit to unit. The game suddenly became VERY challenging, even frightening. Being ground level with your troops in a patch of woods during an artillery stonking is unnerving. We don't realize how much we rely on the 'eye of God' view of the battlefield while playing.

BFC has their reasons for not allowing hard code modding, such as adding/tweaking the stats of vehicles or TO&E. I tend to agree with their approach and reasoning, but that is a different discussion that's been had a few times before. 
The good news is that Black Sea will be getting a module in the future that will add more equipment and forces to play around with. I think there are a few posts from the devs floating around that outline roughly what is expected to be included, and if I recall correctly it will add the Russian VDV and US Marines and all associated equipment. Plus, the existing US Army and Ukrainian forces in game will likely be fleshed out a bit more. That module is probably a ways off, but its something to look forward to.

... and another

That's all I seem to be able to upload for now, so for more look at the DropBox folder linked above ...
LS

A little preamble to this taster ... 
I grew up in rural Dorset in the south of England where our countryside is not so different than that of Normandy (though the Cider may be a bit stronger!). So whenever I fire up CMBN and gaze upon the monotonous green of the bocage, I start to dream of my younger days spent amongst the hedgerows of my native land. Those hedgerows, mostly long gone now, were so thick that we could actually burrow our way inside and create 'dens' where no adult, or rival gang, could find us. So, with some time to spare thanks to COVID-19, I got to thinking about the bocage in BN and wondered what could I do to make it into something like I imagined it to be. Well, the answer is not a great deal - the models for the bocage are hard to figure out, and even with new textures, it's not ever going to get close to what it probably should be, alas. But, having tinkered with the bocage for some time, and been inspired by @Falaise's treatment of those oddly uniform brush textures, I had a go at a lot of the other textures - trees, bushes, grass etc.
So, to cut through the waffle, here are a couple of tasters (some caveats first: it's not ready yet, I just couldn't wait to share some goodness, it will be a couple of weeks yet as I'm trying to iron-out some of the strange in-game distortions; I think this 'plays' best at, or near, ground level just because of the way the game handles LOD and stuff, from afar it's not really going to have much of an effect; screen caps are taken whilst running ReShade, hence the colours are much more muted and some effects are, well, effecting the images (at the end is a pic without ReShade for comparison); I design these for my own gaming pleasure so YMMV will apply when released; I have quite a few other tweaked textures that I may release at the same time just to give the complete 'look' - these are mostly not my work but rather tweaks of mods by luminaries such as @EZ, Aris ( @Fuser ), @Flesh, @Vein, @Kieme(ITA) to name but a few; these textures will be high res and if you want to use the ReShade 'look' then you'll need a decent graphics card in a Windows machine, I will release a lower res version. Enough ... some pics:
( You can study high res versions in my DropBox folder here )



More below 🙂

As the title says, I just ran across my Combat Mission games again.  I had the original Overlord and Barbarossa disks.  Wow!  Its come a long way!
I'm downloading the demo now, but it looks like Black Sea is probably the best for the conventional modern battlefield.
Would that be true?
Kind of a steep price tag for an older title, but I'm willing to pay it if it is as good as it looks.

I don't think their military leadership believed for a moment such a plan would ever work. For the simple reason that they knew the other side also had plenty of nuclear weapons. But they were told to make a plan, so they made a plan.

I don't understand why people keep talking about Fulda Gap as if any real fighting could ever have taken place there before the whole area was obliterated by nuclear weapons.

Another day another interesting post by John Kettler!

Nice. Blimey had a some rusted BMP and soviet truck hulks made a long time ago but they never got released. Problem is they don't function like real vehicles for blocking incoming. I've made a few suggestions for BF to give us a fifth vehicle state, "Parked". It would just be a stationary vehicle with no infantry, it would block line of site and take damage and catch fire when fired on. One can dream. Anyway, good work, man.
 
Mord.

Thought I'd open a new thread for previews of Steppenwulf's modded flavour objects for SF2. I'm going to open one for Black Sea also, over time I'll cross port all stuff (where applicable) for both games. These packs will become available for download as soon as CM Mods IV becomes active. 

A lone Tommy mech company stares down an unexpected Syrian attack!

A lone Tommy mech company stares down an unexpected Syrian attack!

A lone Tommy mech company stares down an unexpected Syrian attack!

A lone Tommy mech company stares down an unexpected Syrian attack!

Bootie put it up.