zaybz

Of course it has nothing to do with C2 or unit experience. If this is a very large scenario (huge map, more than a battalion per side) then similar behavior has been noted before:
 

Is there a slider or hotkey or control somewhere to adjust the music and/or sound effects volume?  
 
The options screen only has on/off toggles.  I would like to lower the music volume, but keep the sound effects volume up.
 
Does this game allow you to do that, please?

Yeah, I did it when the repository was still alive. The Blitz links are all pooched too. 
I have plans for updating and fixing. I even had some help from @Falaise. I will let everyone know when it's fixed.

If you liked Devil's Descent, I'd recommend The Outlaws
https://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/4490522/re-combat-mission-campaign-compendium#Post4490522
Similar in scope to Devil's Descent. American paras, with some help from the straightlegs near the end.

Does it have to be a campaign?  There are some excellent standalone scenarios - for example anything by @George MC. 
If it does have to be a campaign, I have had great fun (and pain) from Final Blitzkrieg campaigns, and also from an unexpected source which was @kohlenklau's Fortress Italy 'Wacht am Rapido' made I believe some time before FB came out.
Thinking about all of these, they all have great '3 dimensional' maps and the need to use or cope with elevation changes on CM maps is one of my favourite things about the game.

Driven by curiosity I went to see "the poppy grow"
Quite the kind of game I love with a role playing level
On the other hand once the game opens, surprisingly the platoons only have 4 tanks ???
in view of the level of detail I am surprised, it should not be a hazard
 

Sadly Amiens Tonight is cursed by troops missing from certain missions. But, if you can live with that it is still playable.
Courage and Fortitude is a work of fiction. But again, if you can live with that it is still playable.
Poppies  is fun, and worth giving a go.
Carpiquet is best played if you have a powerful comp, due to both map size and troop numbers.
Scottish is a realistic portrayal of Operation Epsom. Awful weather, and SS reinforcements being thrown in to the battle. "Punishingly hard?" No. A tough challenge, yes.

You probably won't be surprised to find me agreeing with you if you've read any of my interjections in the other C&F threads. I'm in the middle of writing up a critique of the campaign, and have gotten sidetracked a little: I realised I could deliberately fail from my saved setups and actually have a look at University and Bolleville so I could add them to the essay. I'm playing University now.


And where they weren't, the AI setup was completely unaware of its flanks (Bumper Cars, I'm looking at you).


Me too.

The campaign briefing says the player is commanding the 3/314, so why does the Bttn commander make soooo many ****ed up decisions?


The only saving grace is that sometimes it's just about possible to brass your way out of the straitjacket.


Over Hill and Down Dale is easy if you spot the right flank.
School is an exercise in sadism. With an 'easy win' that shouldn't make sense (so won't occur to most).
(So far) University's hardest aspect was the lottery of the first couple of minutes.
Crossroads is actually quite a fun idea.
Bumper Cars was a fairly standard scenario, I think, with a slightly cruddy AI placement that made it easy.
Razorback Ridge is easy if you get lucky with the AI plan and how your previous casualties interact with the scenario. Edit: a murderous deathtrap otherwise.
La Haye du Puits is a grinding assault. If you've suffered before, you'll suffer again.


That's unlucky. I only had replacement issues at the beginning of School, really. And of course between RR and La H du P, where paranoid reading of the briefing for RR should have led me to have expected it. I redid RR once I found out that every bullet spent in RR isn't available in H du P.


Did you not receive any engineer reinforcements? I got loads. Two platoons, I think.


I had that a few times, mostly when trying to bring down buildings. One time, an apparently clear 75mm shot at a building was disallowed (I think because the small building in front occupied more volume than the graphic suggested) but the MG I was trying to neutralise still managed to gack the TC. So it was a one-way bullet mirror...


To be fair, you can't blow mines most of the time even with engineers. You have to go around 'em.


There does seem to be an unhealthy "I can write a scenario nobody can beat" vibe circulating. It's not hard.


Good luck with School. It's the hardest of the lot. It's also the most futile, because you get a minor victory if you ceasefire on setup. Still have to go through University, but you do that with fresh troops, fully replenished, and it's an order of magnitude easier to start with.

Would definitely save that one for when you believe you have mastered the game.  I thought that the final mission with what seemed to be a Regimental TF to play with (so a huge mission) was one of the best scenarios I have played.  

I am not sure i agree with this.  For repository campaigns/scenarios thats fine, but for QB maps/campaigns/scenarios shipping with the game they should also be updated to work with the latest code. 
 
Otherwise you could be buying a new game (with the latest patch) with parts of the game are not-working or incomplete. 

I was playing the 3rd scenario yesterday. It's the one where you defend against an attack by infantry supported by Tiger tanks.

Well, either I'm absolutely useless (quite possibly), incredibly unlucky, or the game is hopelessly unrealistic. As I've managed to win other scenarios without losing too many men I don't think I'm that poor a tactician. And I only play the game because it seems realistic (albeit hampered by the limits of the AI). So that leaves bad luck?

Examples:

Houses provide no cover whatsoever. Enemy stonks landing 50m away decimate sections of my hardy warriors. One presumes they were all standing at the windows watching. Almost all enemy barrages saturated my positions. On random barrage of three shells all landed on my carefully concealed AT gun!

Conversely, all my mortars missed their target areas by up to 250m, one whole barrage landed off map. I even corrected my targeting and that simply moved the stonks into another vacant area of bocage! I seem to recall that Brit arty was the best of all the WWII participants, regularly saving the infantry by breaking up overwhelming German attacks, especially around Caen.

LOS? I had a bunch of blind gunners. What's the chance of that hey!? Despite pre-checking positions, after carefully moving an AT gun and setting up, they couldn't see a road 50m away. Same road was clearly visible if you viewed it through the camera at ground level. On moving the AT gun, it got shot up by Germans whose eyesight must have been much better! LOL.

Oh, I don't know guys, I'm just a bit dispirited. I love the game and have been playing since the Combat Mission series began. I hate playing in a gamey fashion, so my defensive positioning reflects that. Then, after giving my hidden troops orders to hold fire until the enemy is crossing an open field in front of them, I order them all to open fire. What happens? My guys are all routed within a minute, after panicking when the enemy dares to return fire. The buildings give no protection. The enemy in the open is almost unscathed.

I'll try the scenario again. Maybe I'll try opening fire earlier? Problem I find with that tactic is that the enemy tanks simply drive up to the troops and murder them. The AT guns are next to useless against Tigers unless you catch them at close range from behind...

Sorry for the rant.

Yeah, but if only the best players, beta testers and designers can play these scenarios satisfactorily, where does that leave us regular folks looking for some light entertainment after a hard day's slog.

AFAIK this is still supposed to be primarily an entertainment product not a training sim (and while I could understand that motivation for CMSF, it doesn't seem that relevant for a WW2 game)..

I had about a platoon's worth of engineers throughout, (If I recall) but I lost most on the School mission at that bridge. They weren't replaced. I ended up with a small unit of engineers who had to do a hell of a lot of running around to blow a hole here, clear a mine here, and it just isn't realistic. I ended up regarding the 4 engineers I had left the most important units left in the game! I just got sick of it in the end.



Well this is why I started the thread - I want a good healthy discussion about it. I realise my opinion will differ to others.

I was awarded a minor victory in the last mission even though I quit only half hour in. I suffered 248 KIA with 169 wounded in total, and the enemy suffered 269 KIA with similar numbers wounded.



I am with you Womble. The briefings need to be less 'brief' and need to give you a bit more of a clue about reinforcements, replacements and replenished ammunition, instead it's a guessing game half the time.

I'm half tempted to replay the whole campaign again, although the frustrations would likely reappear, so maybe it's something for a rainy day. You wouldn't catch me saying that before!

It's such a shame that such knowledge doesn't extend to the briefings. I would argue that the maps might be sophisticated, but they have no subtlety. They beat you in the head with "no, you can't do that," at every turn. A subtle map will have opportunities for taking little advantages. Most of the C&F maps are designed to stop every approach except the one or two the designers want you to take. And then, if you do find an approach the designers hadn't thought of, the defensive deployment isn't adaptable enough to cope and the scenario starts to become a cakewalk.

For La Haye, I cleared the mines up to the outskirts, either side of the road, and threw a deep hook down my right to roll them up. I pessemistically assumed that the mine belt went right across the map, and was pleasantly surprised when I discovered I could drive my tanks round it. Enemy armour kills and neutralisation were by zook and arty. My shermans never saw 'em. Forced a surrender 1 minute past 00:00, though a ceasefire at the end of 00:00, going back to the save was also a victory, IIRC. With the forces I had, this scenario wasn't "too hard". I'd started losing the will to live by the time I had enough reinforcements on-map to get really stuck in, though, and my pTruppen suffered for it, due to lack of care and rushing to get a result. If you've suffered at the hands of previous scenarios, or their shoddy briefings, you might have a lot of trouble.

There does seem to be a belief that for a scenario to gain peer approval it has to be monitor punchingly difficult. We need to remember this is hobby that we do in our leisure time for enjoyment, sometimes I feel I'm still at work. That said I'm really grateful to anyone who's put their time into making a scenario for this game.

Everyone has different tastes but I prefer a scenario where a victory is possible through the use of some tactical thought but if you get it wrong and lose some men you should be able to try a different approach and still get a minor win without having to save and reload constantly.

Yes, I'd agree with that - I'm not dissing the amount of work involved in creating these scenarios, but I honestly think they've over-cooked them. They are trying too hard and the end result is an overly difficult if somewhat predictable slugfest. Some of them are just too linear - a good example of this is Razorback Ridge. It's an absolute nightmare and IMHO is pretty much un-winnable unless you are extremely lucky. I played it through twice after many, many restarts, and ended up with a draw. You don't get enough time to really warrant the exploration it needs (and deserves) either. I just don't understand why these maps are made to be so un-penetrable, it doesn't make sense to me. I realise there can be a never-ending supply of new missions and maps in the future, but that's not the point.



The 1st was a puzzle yes, but once you solve it once the mission is actually quite straight forward. This is part of my problem though - the missions shouldn't be about 'puzzles' they should reflect allied numerical superiority, huge maps and plenty of time to play, more in line with the old series. These almost feel like scenarios out of the TOW series... The mission I found easy was a tiny map, with recon units. I can't remember what it was called but it was pretty easy. I had about 5 casualties and suffered a damaged M8 at the end of it.

I've just finished my first C&F campaign with an allied major victory, but only because I cheated in the last mission. I hated it so much that I quit out of frustration - I ceasefired very early and was awarded a 'minor victory'. I couldn't stand any more. I honestly found most of the missions dreadful Way way worse than anything Shock Force put our way.

Dreadful in the fact that the maps, although reasonably large at times, were so designed to stop any sort of multi-pronged flanking attacks. By and large there was only one way to the victory locations and you were going to get slaughtered along the way. Look at the last two missions. Nightmares both of them. A ridiculous amount of mines everywhere, blockades all over the place. If the US army had ran into a location like that in real life, they would have said, 'sod that' and chosen a different route, or bombed it into oblivion first. Then there's the bocage that you can't get through. I had lost all but four men from my engineers along the way and had just 4 demo charges - can't do an awful lot with that. Now I realise some people are going to say, 'hey, welcome to real life', but I stronly disagree. Sure, a real life dimension is important in this game, (and game is the word) but I think the map designers have taken things too far now. They are taking the fun and some of the flow out of the game by almost forcing you to a predictable and sticky end. It has to stop, it's just not that much fun anymore.

All but one of the missions were very difficult in my opinion (perhaps TOO difficult), and I had no replacements or replenished ammunition along the way. My mortar teams were useless as I had no mortar rounds. My engineers were mostly KIA/Incap and I was down to 4 men in the last mission so I instantly lost the ability to blow gaps big enough for my tanks - and tanks are by and large sitting ducks - you can't use them that well in the support role because there is hardly any LOS. Even when I thought I had LOS to a target, half the time the blue line just stops abruptly, and I've no idea why! Most areas suitable for tanks are predictably mined, and with no engineers, you can't blow the mines unless you 'volunteer' someone to go mine-clearing. This is worse than the IED's in SF! The whole campaign was full of frustrations like that for me. Not much fun at all if I'm honest

I am really hoping the future commonwealth campaign offers more diversity and scale. Larger maps, less predictability, better all round please!

Yep, that has been discussed in another thread already:
 

The "facing" command.

Normally I "Target Smoke" "Pause" for 5 seconds. "Reverse" one AS and "Face". Providing you haven't got a super fast Loader it should expend just one round of Smoke. 

Welcome!
Not really easy to do, LutzP.  You can Target Smoke, put a Pause Command for say 15 seconds or whatever, then put a short Movement order, like 1 Action Square or whatever, then on that Waypoint, use another Target Command. Play around with the Pause timing and number of Movement Orders to figure what works best for that vehicle to get X number of smoke shells. With on map mortars you can Target Light and they usually pump out 3 shells per minute.  (Unit soft factors will affect all this to some degree.) 

I don't mind fighting over the same ground so much, it's more that either:
I) it needs to be explained why so in the campaign in a narratively convincing way, or preferably:
 ii) the missions should respond more flexibly to the objectives you take. I.e. if I took the windmill in the previous mission then my setup zone should include the windmill in the following mission.
Otherwise there is so much attention to detail from the designer - it seems to me kind of odd that these overarching points aren't implemented.

I don't mind fighting over the same ground so much, it's more that either:
I) it needs to be explained why so in the campaign in a narratively convincing way, or preferably:
 ii) the missions should respond more flexibly to the objectives you take. I.e. if I took the windmill in the previous mission then my setup zone should include the windmill in the following mission.
Otherwise there is so much attention to detail from the designer - it seems to me kind of odd that these overarching points aren't implemented.

I have just played the Heuman Lock Bridge scenario and can confirm that the bridge is still bugged / broken / impossible to cross. Likewise, the ditches do not provide any cover (in fact it was straightforward to attain enough suppression to cross the open ground on the far left of the map, so this wasn’t game-spoiling).
 
I have now reached Night Fight and am somewhat dumfounded that, having taken Riethorst Hotel and the Windmill objectives during For Those About To Die, I now have to retake them. I can’t fathom why this is. Is this a glitch or as intended but underexplained? Perhaps a glitch due to me ‘losing’ with a tactical defeat despite taking those two objectives during FThoseATDie??

There is a fundamental problem in that scenario designers are usually the very experienced players, so their idea of a challenge is much harder than for most regular and casual players. Also, spending weeks working on the same map gives one a very detailed understanding of the landscape that a new player won't have.
A good rule of thumb for scenarios designers could be to make a scenario you yourself would find difficult but winnable, and then cut the enemy force in half and double the amount of time the player has available.