wyskass

This reminded me of another mistake/reminder. Being too focused on the objective, discounting other possible important enemy positions, and getting flanked.

Yes, surely, it involves more, including actually playing out a successful retreat when being pursued. It sounds like 'surrender' wouldn't be result in the same outcome then, but made me wonder the point of having it as an option. Now, I suppose it's applicable to defensive side battles where it can continue campaign, or PvP.

Well, in practice I wasn't willing to continue with losing multiple vehicles, so "willing abandoned the objectives" and went to bed. LOL. End of game end of battle. Mostly a joke but in effect it incentivized my withdrawal from conflict. But the idea of having retreat choices is quite interesting, as a way to disengage and engage in more favorable conditions later. Does the existing "surrender" option not equate to retreat, by not meeting objective and triggering a different following scenario? Would be odd to surrender to a defender you're assaulting though. To the point of competitive vs war movie observers.. It's interesting to consider that some people can disassociate with their actions to enjoy watching it as a movie. In my case, I wouldn't call it competitiveness as much as meeting intentions of actions. It's not so much to "win" or beat another, but to enjoy the satisfaction of well planned and executed action. Like designing and building something that works well. Without getting too philosophical, are we playing to feel like being in a real battle, or as exploring outcomes of different actions as how real militaries use war games. The latter may be enjoyable in the learning aspect itself where the "mistakes" are just another explored path. So maybe that's along similar lines of the war movie analogy As to tutorials and guides, I tend to prefer to read rather than watch tutorials, due to controlling my own faster pace past what I know, and slower to think about what's new. But I'll check out the ones suggested. It's also interesting to hear about considering WW2 titles in the series. I've played HOI4 (quite different domain than CM of course) with WW2 and generally know more history about it so wanted to go with more modern stuff to complement CMANO for tactical level. It actually sounds like going further back in time to WW2 rather than Black Sea may be better to improving under my circumstances. Black Sea sounds brutal. It seems that maybe it's the random aspects of things such as artillery risk as well as the integral part of unknowns of enemy, which is more amplified than most all other games, increasing frustration.

Well, I tried to go with advice reminders and good principles. After 10 minutes of slowly advancing observers and making safe vehicle positions, I noticed a whole line of entrenched AT in a far corner. What was bewildering is how it seemed to wake them up to suddenly see and attack the vehicles that have already been sitting in that same position over 10 minutes. How does getting spotted by one unit, give them visibility of all other units previously unseen. I had to retreat everything and advanced basically 0 minutes forward and in worse position than I was last week. I give up. Whenever I think I'm doing things right, I find out that I have no idea what how I'm supposed to do this. Had enough for now, after 3 hours of nothing but frustration and zero progress. I'm done until I forget how much I dislike this game again.

Oh boy. If I'm already getting too frustrated with Syria, that will be difficult. At least good to know ahead of time and adjust before. It seems to assume certain things before the real conflict illuminated realities about Ukraine and Russia, but at least playing more like an underdog defensively may help with those expectation. afaik there should be less MOUT at least. Yea, for sure about getting too used to COIN and needing service wide adjustment in training and equipment focus. NATO has also learned some new lessons from Ukraine.

Yea, I tended to complete scenarios with zero casualties or just let a couple go because I didn't want to replay again. So ya, that seems excessive perfection seeking. Also as noted, if a movement path was executed unexpectedly and into line of fire. Or getting bogged down and immobilized. I don't care much for that realism feature as there is already enough to go wrong to not need random vehicle losses. Maybe I'm not distinguishing terrain types properly, but whatever. Also, agree that often my most memorable and satisfying playthroughs in other games, for example HOI4, is when surviving and returning from the brink. So good to apply that here too. I'm actually just trying to finish the Syria campaign so I can move on to Black Sea next. Will be interesting to see the differences.

Yes, I agree that playing this as the movie Edge of Tomorrow to predict every event and achieve perfection is against the spirit and intent of the game. This "game" makes me muse on the purpose of gaming or simulators. Enjoyment and realism eventually does diverge when taken to a certain point. I tend to enjoy simulators and maximizing realism in gaming, with planning and skill to succeed being enjoyment itself. It just tends to cross the line at times subjectively. I have gathered but haven't read through Marine Corps and Army field manuals on tactics, because they are so voluminous and limits even me with. I wonder if those would actually be useful to improve tactics and/or enjoyment of the game. As far as I've come to understand, CM is as close to pro ground warfare simulators as it gets while still being a game and affordable. I also enjoy Cold Waters for subs, and Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations. To return to original topic, I surely try to avoid doing obvious mistakes like running into identified kill zones or exposing myself too much. I even developed a process for creating topographic maps of each scenario. (Included example) As was said and I had hunches, patience seems quite important, which was maybe a clue that I'd end up finishing scenarios at much less than 50% of the time given. That, with the Edge of Tomorrow style play. What I'm taking from the advice so far, is.. - Have more patience with recon, and delay assaults a little more. The challenges I've had is multiple minutes of no activity and not well identified further observation points, and then upon movement, new unobserved threats responding to thwart. The hiding and waiting aspect of the enemy being most challenging. - Thinking like enemy. Identifying OPs that may be other than objectives. I'm going to try to incorporate than more and do scouting or strikes against these points. The challenge here is lack of feedback when devoting barrages to what may or may not be effective. Still working on getting a good feel for support fire intensity and length. Getting the timing right with spotting, accuracy, delays and choice of weapons. - Accepting losses as part of it. This is more emotional as most games tend to not want to make players get irritated. As most have suggested, playing through mistakes and random losses is both part of it and makes you better ultimately. Of course it's subjective and anyone can play as they want, but it's about getting the most out of the game. - Lead with foot troops. Spot and call in arty, before bringing in vehicles too close. I do try this, but easier said than done and the challenge is temporal. It's almost contradictory, that I need to expose my vehicles to fire on spotted enemy but exposing my vehicles also places them at risk to unseen AT fire. Usage of IFV and tanks is a current unsure aspect for me. It's the question of using their armor as protection vs their standoff capability. On one hand I can bring in troops faster and closes to an objective with vehicles avoiding their exposure, but at the same time exposing the vehicle to AT. With tanks the same, as I can come in closer for better angles and with protection that can't be done at distance. Sometimes it feels not much more progress can be done from a particular position and there is no new movement, so I move to next identified topo cover and then get hit with an awakened AT or some game trigger. Anyway.. enough ramblings for now. Actually, in the scenario below.. an odd thing happened where from my positions indicated, it became mostly quiet, and I've eliminated existing and incoming armor and observed enemy, but then when I tried to advance with snipers on the southern most building.. Upon spotting a line of fortifications along the higher elevation line, it seemed it caused an awaken trigger. and AT fire from the south started against my northern placed units on the hills. Are there triggers in this sim, based on being observed to "awaken", because while nothing else changed, seeing units got them to soon after fire, which they haven't before.

All good advice. How do you manage ATGM threats against vehicles? I do try to lead on foot and clear/observe, but too often end up moving up thinking it's safe to get better angles for fire from vehicles, and get blown up out of never observed shooter. I generally consider them for standoff fire support, but not entirely sure how to use IFV's properly since I get into trouble with them. When best to give squad protection during movement, and when to use as fire support. Can't seem to square both contradictory usages. As to Humvees? I have even more trouble with those, especially TOW ones. I guess standoff again.

This is good advice. Thanks! I do appreciate using supporession, and have improved in timing it more effectively with advancing movement into buildings. Yes it's a good insight to target what I'd consider good enemy spotting locations to take out spotters who will not show themselves. In general looking at things from that perspective is important. Yes, I have seen that it takes a few minutes of running through exposed topography before a wide area gets shelled. My problem has been feeling safe and settling in behind cover to spot and bomb, while not considering that the exposure to get there will call in fires with some delay. I tend to either get to slow or too fast. So yea, good timing with suppression and targeting likely OPs, while also continued advancement sound like the right way. That said, this may not be a good game for everyone as it is quite punishing and emotionally humbling.

In general for Combat Mission and more specifically for the Marines in Syria campaign, what are expected casualty rates for Blufor? Are we to expect casualties as normal? I've gotten myself into rerunning every minute save when I get casualties as a mistake, and it's making me find this game masochistic and frustrating. It's taking me weeks to finish every 2 hour campaign, with breaks to forget how much I don't enjoy playing this. But I used to like it more in the beginning with other campaigns though unfinished due to become a chore rather than enjoyment. The main reasons are getting myself too exposed instead of waiting to pick off everyone, or the dreaded house clearings. Also for enemy mortar fire, not willing to accept if it's supposed to be random deaths on my side. Are random deaths also supposed to be normal? Should I not be angrily replaying minutes multiple times whenever I get hit and killed with mortars on way to objective? Was enjoyment factored into the design of this or is this supposed to also model how battle sucks? Maybe if they didn't allow every minute saves I'd be forced not to run it differently. I like it because of the realistic modelling, and needing tactical skill, I'm also not really wanting to take a an Army course or read textbooks and field manuals to play this enjoyably.

nvm

The tedious nature of MOUT is sapping all enjoyment of SF2 from me, and I end up getting sick of it and quitting. I know this is reflecting reality and this is more a simulator. But what's the point when going house by house for hours, especially the Marines in Syria missions, specifically Crossroads in the city. I return to Shock Force 2, to only be reminded how annoying this is. I like the idea of this more than actually doing it, and am trying to find a way or reason to enjoy it.

Ah yes, good explanations and suggestions. The pause until remaining turn time is a good solutions, which I didn't consider. Just shifting action to end of turn so kind of working in reverse, but pretty much same result. While I wasn't expecting to fire a TOW on the move, I expected the Pause to be for just movement giving opportunity to fire. Maybe would be useful to distinguish move pause and engage pause. As to mounting / dismounting, yes did notice that, after finding the ptruppen abandoned by transport after not giving enough pause to mount.

After playing for a while I still can't figure out how to fire THEN move. I want to get into range, fire, then reverse. The Pause seems to pause firing as well as movement. If I get into range and set fire with a pause and reverse on a humvee it won't fire at all and just reverse. I don't want to stay exposed for 3 minutes to execute a TOW missile attack. Can't use pause because it won't fire, but If I target and move without pause it also won't fire. Any way to execute a shoot and scoot?

So installed Acrobat Pro, and now am able to get perfect OCR. There does seem to be a maximum size so the elevations grid needed to be broken into 4 pieces. To get good results, it was also required to use the 2nd closest zoom in the editor to space out the elevation numbers more, to indicate the distinct 2 digit numbers for OCR, so as not to pick up just all single digits. It only took a couple minutes to delete the buildings, then at that zoom and my resolution, was 12 screenshots to stitch. Then process to black and white, black on white background, then cut into 4. Each grid png, opened in Acrobat and running OCR, allowed direct output to excel and each number and grid placements was exactly correct. Then I combined the 4 pieced into one spreadsheet and ran the color formatting as originally. As suggested, there may be a better process with some coding to make it easier to batch a bunch of the maps.

That's interesting. So you traversed the image and compared the subset of pixels for each number grid? How did you determine which font type matches the font they use? Did the font loading give you an image for each character? They it sounds like comparing each grid to a number value for that same font, should show no difference if the digit matches? Could you share the script?

Yea, the two aspects of elevation are the editor import/export of data and the in game visualization. Providing an import/export should be a trivial feature if they chose to add it, as they store the grid already in the scenario file. Translating from a csv would be easy. It may be possible to hack out the grid from the scenario binary by looking at the hex number patterns, but I'm not too keen to get into that. As to the in game, with shading it may be complicated by the time of day and sun which they use for shadows. At night there are none, but as soon as sun comes up the hills are definitely more visible. Of all these options providing at least export or just a small step further a topo map by the scenario designer if data was exportable. That would be easiest.

Yes, thanks, I did see that when searching about mapping. It's just that I'm looking for the reverse direction process. I haven't yet needed to code anything for this, and wasn't trying not getting into a project, but yes there maybe be some useful code around data to editor interface that could be used the other way. It promised to be working well with a simpler process, until I started with another map and the OCR fell apart for some reason, I haven't yet identified.

Yes true, good thinking. But the process you describe is pretty much the difference or subtract blending setting for 2 layers included in major image editing software, but in a general sense. When I took the 2 layers which is what you described, I was able to quite well eliminate the extra text pixels of the building numbers. It left only a very few single missing pixels which both images used. A bit more tweaking with the image editor could do it well. Though, while automation is nice and surely preferable, manually deleting each building for the screenshots, eliminates this problem altogether, and really just a take a couple minutes of clicking. Not too bad But the bigger problem is the terrible inconsistency of OCR. I'm currently trying to figure out how the same process on 2 maps or even just smaller images can vary wildly. I've been trying to make the images exactly the same settings and process and cannot figure out how one can be read almost perfect and another close to garbage. it's very puzzling especially with how clean and similar formatted different grids are, so am testing different setting permutations, but it's starting to get increasingly frustrating. Different resolutions, number densities, image sizes, contrasts, color spaces etc, and no clear pattern yet. I wish I had my PC working because Acrobat Pro OCR has always been the best.

Sound that maybe you were eluding to it, but the building numbers are indeed the source of errors as they are same colors and stay in the processed number grid. It was more apparent on the next map with much more buildings. I'm trying to find a way to hide those numbers and if not will need to be handled in image processing. Also a bonus, is if you supply an empty overlay file, the editor hides the terrain and you can just see the elevation numbers on black background. Yet, the buildings don't hide for some reason. Deleting the buildings for the elevation grid screenshot would work, but then there also isn't a Select all, so have to click on each one. Soa bit annoying on that part. Combining layers with difference isn't too bad, but leaves a gap sometimes in the digit. OCR may be able to still handle it, but haven't yet tested. That said, the second map, Google Docs OCR is now garbage. I don't understand how a perfect black and white grid of numbers is difficult for OCR. We've had this technology for decades. THere is nothing in the pixels with any anomalies and yet the output is combining numbers and adding random new lines and missing whole sections of lines.

Google Docs was very good. There were a few spots with an extra digit or a missing digit, but yes it was likely due to the graphics file having some anomalies. It's a big file and some pixel errors can be missed, and I did miss a few even though I thought I eliminated more than the OCR errors would suggest. The doubles and extras are easy to fix with regex on the text, but more difficult to spot missing numbers which throw off row counts. It's easier to spot and fill in Excel with the coloring on, as you can see it visually much better than trying scan the number grid. As to numbers over structures, those are numbers of levels, and I didn't see an option to turn off. Now that you mention it, it could be a source of anomalies in the processed graphics file since the filtering is done by while text color. So there are a few things to tweak in the process and how the screenshot image is filtered and processed to get a clean grid of numbers. It looks very good now, but hard to see the few pixel errors sometimes.

I've always found it a bit annoying to have to probe with the Target tool in game and fly around near the ground to get an idea of the elevation topography. Working with topography is obviously a key aspect of tactical movement and positioning. Having access to good maps are an important capability and the whole NGA exists for mapping. One could argue that a proper topo is more realistic that being able to fly over the terrain at ground level as is normal in the game or use target tool from distant waypoints. Anyway, I couldn't find any existing visualization tools for CM maps, so generated it myself. My PC is out of order right now with all my good mapping and graphics software tools but have been able to make a basic topo on my Mac. So am sharing the process for those who are interested. The example here is from CMSF2 Semper Fi Syria, Marines campaign, from scenario 5 - Breakout. For my purposes this is enough to greatly improve situational awareness and planning. In standard green to brown topo colors of increasing elevation. Overlay on this are roads and buildings plus wooded and farmed (mud) areas for reference. You can see a few small rises in the eastern starting side which are enough for a hull down, or elevated viewing position, as well as better hidden areas. I missed noticing a couple of these useful features with just in game visual. Workflow This was more a proof of concept and some increased automation can make this process faster, and can be improved with better tools. Took most of the day, but much of the time for experimenting with different tools. Should be able to get a map done under 2 hours. 1. Open map in Scenario Editor and turn on cell elevation numbers display. Take screenshots of the elevation numbers. This map took 9 to cover area but higher resolution minimizes the number of files to stitch. A full screen screenshot, lets you crop these to the same size all at once for easier matching 2. Stitch these together. I experimented with automatic stitching tools, but just ended up using Gimp manually. It's a grid so easy to line up. Photoshop may be better and maybe could do auto stitch. Maybe 30 minutes to stitch and clean. 3. Color and contrast. Using Gimp (Photoshop) process the image to end up with just high contrast B&W numbers and nothing else. Select by color, invert, remove background, fill with black. This map was 8000x6400 image of a clean numbers grid. 4. OCR. I tried a few different tools, but Google Docs was by far the most accurate. Opening the image in Docs, creates a text file with all the numbers. Excel Data from Picture was unusable, which while similar number recognition, had no sense in how it assigned numbers to cells, without seeing the obvious pattern of spaces as suggestive of cells breaks. Some other online tools were worthless. I was surprised how with the cleanest possible black and white image with a grid of numbers so many OCR systems utterly failed. Yet Google Docs was so accurate. 5. Clean data. I loaded the data in a good text editor BBEdit (TextWrangler) to run Regex to find any errors and fix. You want to find anything that isn't 2 digits and a space. Looking at the image and data numbers, you can then determine the number of cells in a row. Then run a regex (grep) replace to break up into lines. End up with clean good data of the maps elevation at this point. This could be tedious if certain errors aren't anticipated. I found just a could small missing segments, but maybe hard to spot to correct. 6. Import into Excel. To create the graphic, I just set a conditional format Color Scale rule which colors from min to max values from Green->Yellow->Brown or any scale you like. Format the cell value numbers to not show. This map have 200x250 cell values. 7. Combine with features. Again took a screenshot of the resulting excel visualization, and back in Gimp (Photoshop), process the other terrain image to just extract roads and building. This was combined with the topo with pleasing and informative layer blending. This would be according to personal preference as to what map features to combine. I've used QGIS a bit which is a real mapping tool but would be overkill here, and again on my PC. Some of the intermediate working files are too large (Gimp xcf) to upload but shared them here: (Would have preferred PSDs) https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12PESzndNEc76ZaF7Zhi58yKPsFE1YOOb?usp=share_link

-why can't messages be delted?

The reason I don't think the periscope being modeled is that there is no vehicle position to indicate that. There is hull down, which allows you to fire the MG and get shot at which seems to expose more than periscope. Going lower than that doesn't indicate any spotting ability, since all we have for LOS tool is the Target pointer which show when you can fire the gun. The periscope should be higher than the gun and so I don't see any game tool to indicate spotting as separate from gun LOS.. Am I missing something here? I'm not concerned about the animation and abstraction is fine with me.. I just don't see in this case any indicator or action difference between exposing periscope for spotting and gun for firing which also puts you in vulnerable exposure. So, how are you distinguishing spotting/periscope exposure vs hull down/gun exposure? It sounds like you're saying there is a difference. And again, I realize there are qualitative differences between vehicle optics as in Fennek and more basic binoculars, but I'm trying to determine the equivalence point between observing distance capability of vehicle and being observed distance while on foot.. Vehicle Optics x Exposed visibility distance = Binoculars x Exposed visibility distance. Am I not wording this question clearly enough, because it's a simple question? Vehicle optics are better but you can't get as close as on foot before being seen.. But on foot you have less powerful optics, so you need to be closer to spot the same.. Where is this point? I know I can run experiments by setting up some test cases, but was thinking this may be known by people already to at least a usable practical degree.. Thanks,