Centurian52

For how to play the game, I believe @Hapless has a playlist on youtube that should have you covered:
For WW2 doctrine you should be able to find anything you need at the Nafziger collection:
https://nafzigercollection.com/product-category/tactical-studies-for-all-ages/
For Cold War and modern US tactics I think FM71-1 and FM71-2 are a good place to start:
https://www.bits.de/NRANEU/others/amd-us-archive/FM71-1(98).pdf
https://www.bits.de/NRANEU/others/amd-us-archive/FM71-2(77).pdf
For Cold War Soviet tactics I'd recommend FM100-2-1 (and this has served me well for any faction operating Cold War Soviet equipment, including modern Ukraine and Russia):
https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm100-2-1.pdf

I had a section chief who, after a phone call with Naval Reactors told us, "10 years from now he won't remember you were late, but he WILL remember if you were wrong, forever." 
My favorite boss I had in 38 years at EB. Of course we always tried our best to hit the deadlines, but not at the expense of being correct. It was nuclear submarine reactor plant design, after all. Incorrect is not an option.
Dave

Looking forward to it!
For everyone else, I really think it's best if we interpret the 2024 look at the year to come as "this is what they're working on this year", rather than as "this is what will be released this year". As was pointed out a couple pages back, Battlefront has committed to quality, and that means time needs to be flexible
Companies that commit to releasing their products by a promised date often end up being rather flexible on quality. 
In any case, I suspect it takes two or three years to develop a base game or module (I haven't payed much attention to how long it normally takes to develop Battle Packs). So it's probably reasonable for us to hope for some of the things that were announced at the beginning of 2023 (with work presumably starting sometime in 2022) to be finished in 2024 or 2025. If they announce that they're working on anything new in 2024, that doesn't mean it will be released in 2024. The better interpretation is probably that work started in 2023, and a release might be expected in 2025 or 2026. A two or three year development cycle actually isn't that long for something as complicated as a video game.

In the short term (next year or two) mainly I'm waiting for the CMCW BAOR module, the CMFB module bringing it to the end of the war, and the CMBN Battle Pack adding Utah Beach and Carentan. In the medium term (next several years) I'm hoping to see a Cold War module adding West and East German forces, WW2 modules/base games moving the clock back to earlier in the war, and a CMBS module or new base game adding all the equipment necessary to recreate the actual fighting of the Russo-Ukraine war.
I would love to see them go straight back to the beginning of the war, with Poland 1939 and France 1940, as well as Barbarossa. But they've explained multiple time why that's not practical (too much new equipment would have to be modeled all at once), so I'm anticipating a more incremental move back. Perhaps the next game can turn the clock back as far as Tunisia 1943 for the western front titles, while either a module to Red Thunder or a new eastern front base game might roll the clock as far back as Kursk 1943.
And of course, while the CMFB module will bring all the fronts up to the end of the war, that's no reason the clock can't keep incrementally inching forward. One reason why it might be a good idea to include the Pershing in the CMFB module (keeping in mind the more features and units we demand the longer we should expect to wait), even though it barely saw any action, is that it might help pave the way for a base game set in Korea later down the line.
Ultimately what I'm really waiting for is for realistic wargames to cover every front of every real and hypothetical war from the dawn of time to the distant future. But my expectations are somewhat more modest than my ambitions.

I understand the impatience. I really do. We all want our new toys sooner rather than later.
But my day job is testing software, and I've dabbled in a bit of programming in the past. So please trust me when I say it's not a good idea to rush these things. Some bugs are harder to squash than others. Some features are harder to work in than expected, and will frequently cause new bugs. It's always better to wait for a good product than to get a rushed piece of garbage. There is plenty of Combat Mission already out to keep us busy in the mean time.
I believe everyone at Battlefront is probably working diligently. Battlefront releases have always been slow. In part I expect that's a result of the limited resources they've always had to work with, and in part that's just because properly developing and testing any product takes time. But the releases have always come. We will get our new toys when they're ready.

I never replay turns that don't go well for me. My feeling is that if I make a mistake in real life I'd have no choice but to live with it, so I force myself to live with any mistakes I make in-game (the point is to recreate real war after all, at least as much as the technology allows). I do save every turn, but that's mostly because I like to go back and re-watch old battles from time to time, and because I like to imagine that one day I'll go back and make Hapless-style videos of them (not that it's terribly likely that I'll ever get around to it). When I do make a costly mistake I console myself with the knowledge that even the professionals blunder from time to time. I do my best to recover from the mistake, make the most of the troops and resources I have left after the mistake, and try to understand why that particular set of actions was a mistake under those particular circumstances so I'll do better in the future.
Casualties are inevitable in war. I'm playing through the WW2 titles right now. That was a high intensity peer vs peer war, so the casualties that I'm experiencing in the scenarios I'm playing these days are higher than what could reasonably be expected in CMSF2. CMSF2 is still high intensity, but much more asymmetric. So the NATO player can usually expect to take fewer casualties. But even in CMSF it's rare that I take no casualties. With some skill you may be blessed with the occasional zero-casualty mission, but that will not be the norm. I'd advise aiming for lopsided casualties, rather than zero casualties (obviously zero casualties is best if you can manage it, but it's usually not realistic). In CMFI I'm happy if I can get 2:1 (maybe 4:1 if I'm fighting the Italians), but in CMSF2 you should probably be getting at least 10:1. If 10:1 gets to be too easy for you, then try shooting for 20:1 or higher. Aim for a loss exchange rate that's high enough to be challenging, but low enough to be attainable. Keeping in mind that some scenarios will be more challenging than others.

The thought did cross my mind briefly a while ago though. If they did want it as an extra, I'd be very happy for that to happen but I'm not pushing for it. It needs both the Market Garden and Vehicle Pack content to play so I can understand why that might not be appealing for them. 
The same will go for the revision of the Scottish Corridor that will come along some time in the future - it's going to need Market Garden and the Vehicle pack to work. I REALLY want a flamethrower tank or two in one or two of these missions as they were present in the real operation and there's no way that I'm redoing it without one. (Or at least trying it to see if it's as cool as I think it will be. I suspect it will completely destroy any existing balance in these missions but I want to try.)
 
Watching Hapless's Montebourg and Scottish Corridor series is what got me back into this. He did a really good job with his AARs - very professional. My wife was astonished when I pointed out to her that I made the series he was playing.

https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/tsd3/combat-mission-battle-for-normandy/cm-battle-for-normandy-campaigns/the-road-to-montebourg-revised-for-v4-0/
Don't worry, this won't overwrite or otherwise delete the original campaign that came on the disk. IIt's a completely different file. This is substantially different from the vanilla campaign and the number of changes made is huge but the most important one to note is that you will need both the Market Garden module and the Vehicle Pack to play this.
 
Other important highlights are that the 2/8 INF core units are now mostly Green with High morale which means you'll need to manage them more carefully in a firefight.
All-new AI plans using triggers and most of the tricks that came with later versions of the game.
Flamethrowers are included in some missions.
Some maps have been revised, most notably the map for Turnbull's Stand which veterans of the original campaign will probably notice quite quickly.
A 'new' mission has been added although those of you who found and played the earlier revised version that was uploaded to BFC's old Scenario Depot will recognise it. The campaign has a prelude phase consisting of the new mission and then the old campaign opener Beau Guillot. You should notice quite a few changes made to that mission as well - some extra help to make up for the drop in experience.
There is air support in quite a few missions now and less artillery, at least the bigger guns anyway.
 
Anyway, let's post this and then I'll see what needs to be 'fixed' or not in good time. This is an old campaign so i'm not expecting a ton of feedback for it for quite a while but let me know and I'll fix things. Now I'm taking a break from CMBN. I haven't quite decided what comes next - finishing Hasrabit or a new version of Gung Ho! for the German forces. Later, I'll get to work on the two Scottish campaigns I'd mentioned elswhere.
 
Have a Happy New year.

And here's a little update for anyone who doesn't want to read the entire thread:

 
And another overview of the strategic situation and the localization of the individual campaigns:

Read the article @Chudacabra just posted.  Gives a very good break down of what is happening.  A veneer of defence is just that, under scrutiny it becomes pretty evident very quickly that laws of armed conflict are being violated.  For example, blowing up a high rise full of civilians because “Hamas met there once” is well outside the LOAC.  The power targets, which are an admitted IDF target set, are also no more legitimate under the LOAC than Russian cruise missile strikes on Ukrainian high rises.
Finally, you are clearly a civilian and do not understand just how dangerous the scenario you paint is for a military organization.  Beyond moral injury and exposing your own troops to war criminality, this sort of “painting over” is how really bad things happen.  It creates a level of acceptability that erodes military discipline.
 “Ok guys, we all know higher is playing cover up so shoot who you want.”  “Hey Sarge, can we rape Palestinian women too?”  Civilians have just about zero understanding about just how slippery a slope warfare is.  They think it is all “drama”.  In reality “killing” is among the easiest things to do.  Morally a military organization can find itself upside down very fast.  Officers and NCOs spend an inordinate amount of time making sure scared heavily armed teenagers don’t get out of hand in fighting the enemy.  They do this primarily to ensure things don’t get so bad that those teenagers don’t start shooting each other.
If the IDF keeps going the way they are it will be nearly impossible to tell them apart from the RA in a few months.  

I don't think warfare has a cyclic nature. Humans are infamous for seeing patterns where there are none (which is exactly why we can have so much fun staring at clouds). A lot of historians have written at length about patterns they thought they've seen in warfare, and even proposed causes for those patterns. But those patterns are likely no more real than the patterns we see in clouds. What I've heard from competent statisticians is that when wars break out actually appears to be completely random. The pattern is best explained, not by invoking cycles, but by describing a more or less constant probability that two belligerents will go to war each year (one of my favorite descriptions of this is "every moment Mars rolls the iron dice, and if they come up snake eyes he sends a pair of nations to war"). Of course individual wars have very real, non-random causes. But the scattering of wars across the centuries is completely random. There are clusters, with several wars starting in close proximity to each other, followed by calm periods with relatively few wars. But this is the normal clustering that you expect to see in any truly random process (data points are only evenly spaced apart when they are driven by a non-random process, random processes always have clusters).
While it should be intuitive enough that it takes a non-random process in order to space events evenly apart, people are still often surprised by the clustering that comes with true randomness. An experiment that has been run many times in classrooms is to take two groups of students, tell one to actually flip a coin 100 times in a row and write down the results, and tell the other group to write down the results of an entirely imaginary series of 100 coin flips. Ideally this is set up in such a way that the teacher has no idea which group is which. The challenge is then for the teacher (or someone who doesn't know which group is which) to guess which group actually flipped the coin. It's very easy to tell which group actually flipped the coin when you know what to look for. The group which didn't actually flip the coin will almost never write a cluster of three or more heads or tails in a row. The group that really flipped the coin has an 80% chance of having a run of six or more heads/tails in a row (the probability of a run of seven or more is 54%). This tendency to underestimate the clustering involved in random processes is apparently the psychology behind the Gambler's fallacy. This is the fallacy someone commits when they exclaim "we've had a run of five heads, surely we're due for a tails" or, perhaps more relevant "we've had a long run of peace, so we must be due for a major war" (it's called the "Gambler's fallacy" because gamblers routinely commit it when they think they're due for some good luck after a run of bad luck). The reality is that no matter how many heads have come up in a row so far, there is still a 50/50 chance of the next flip coming up heads again.
WW1 and WW2, the two bloodiest wars in human history, coming within 20 years of each other, are a good example of the clustering that comes with randomness. We weren't at the inevitable point in a cycle where it was time to have humanity's two bloodiest wars. We just had an abysmally unlucky run of die rolls in the first half of the 20th century. There are no cycles.
So, will there be another major war between 2025 and 2050? Possibly. Tensions between China and the US/Taiwan seem to be pretty high right now. Those tensions may ease off without a shot being fired, as happened with NATO and the Warsaw Pact at the end of the Cold War. Or they may ignite into another major war, as happened between France/Russia and Germany/Austria-Hungary at the beginning of the 20th century. If we do get another major war, it won't be because we were due for one in the cycle, but because we had a very unlucky role of the dice.

Yep, for sure.

Here's some better pics

Hello everyone, I have decided to make a mod to replace the unit icons with NATO symbols, there's a few mods that already sort of do that but this one prioritizes clarity, conciseness and adherence to APP-6(C) to the best of my abilities. Currently all the vanilla and DLC icons have been replaced but I'll be revising my work in the following days and making updates, hopefully I'll be able to get some feedback here as well.



CMSF2 - NATO Joint Military Symbology by Locating.zip

A few thoughts on what I've been doing these last couple of day. I've been working on Turnbull's Stand and learning how to use Order triggers. After quite a bit of experimentation, I understand how it all works and there are some cool things I can do with them but building an entire attack plan with them is an exercise in frustration. I can achieve much the same result by using objective triggers and Exit After timers  so I revised my attack plan today.
I reread the account of Turnbull's action on D-Day this evening and was surprised to read that he had no heavy weapons, no mortars, just a couple of MGs he'd picked up along the way and a bazooka team. Vandervoort dropped off a 57mm AT gun before the main German assault and that was all he had.
Also, the German 'tanks' were not French tanks but were probably Stugs so I've taken them out. To be honest, they were 100% pure crap and utterly useless in the hands of the AI so subbing them gave me great joy. The only way to keep them alive was to keep them hidden which is not much fun.
In keeping with the historical account, I have made several major revisions to the map and the mission. Now you can only set up in the orchard on the west side of the road. The two East Touch objectives are also gone - you're only keeping the Germans out of the orchard.
Finally, you have two squads now with the attached teams giving you 42 men, the exact number Turnbull had on that day. The German don't outnumber you 5:1 but the mission is only 50 minutes long so who cares?
I am pretty sure my original OB was inspired by an ASL scenario, probably called Turnbull's Stand. That's where the French tanks and the Marder came from. So it's ASL no more and now as historical as I can make it. When reading about the action this evening, I was surprised to find that I've scripted something the Germans tried to do and Turnbull had to react to so I'm happy with the AI work I've done today.
I'll continue to test this tomorrow which makes three days of work on this. After this, I'll get back to much easier AI defensive plans.

Some of you may have noticed that I've poked my head up again after a very long absence. I've just been very busy with real life and wanted to spend some time playing games rather than designing content. But this game is a bit like crack for me, it's just so addictive and watching Usually Hapless play this campaign on Youtube got me back into it. (Yes, it's ALL your fault Hapless  )
I've done a bit of work fixing things and now want to turn my attention to my first campaign for CMBN, the Montebourg campaign. It's the oldest and was made using v1.0 of the engine meaning that there are only 8 AI groups and no air support. There have also been a number of changes to the game which mean that I can experiment with some of the new stuff while reworking this one.
It's not going to be a total overhaul but it will no longer work for players with only the CMBN base game so it's a Repository jobbie. I'll let you guys know what you'll need but it will probably require the full Monty as I want flamethrowers in it. It's also worth saying that anything new in it will be historically accurate and not just added in for the laughs. So no SS with JgPZIVs. Pity.
So, I'll keep you up to date with my progress on this. I'm not looking to do a LOT of work. It's mainly to reacquaint myself with the scenario designer and writing AI plans.
 
Mission 1
I have no plans to change anything at all about the opening mission at all. It's fine as is.
Mission 2
There is a 'new' short 'Brecourt' mission. It's not really new though as it was in the revised version on the Repository. I'll need to tweak this one as the game seems to have become more lethal since I last played it but otherwise, it's good to go.
Mission 3
The first mission to get a full rework is Turnbull's Stand. I'm reworking the AI attack as there were only two AI plans and they were terrible. I've made a number of revisions to the map itself to reflect the reality of the day so it's a bit more open with less bocage and more hedges.
I've spent pretty much all morning and most of the afternoon learning how to script an AI attack using the new tools and the first AI plan is almost done. I want a second one with an entirely different focus but it should be much faster to do as I'm not 'learning' anymore. Then, I'll mix it up so that there's four attack plans.
 
And that's where I'm up to. There's no timetable on this. I'm not in any hurry but by posting about it here, I've kind of declared my intentions and am far more likely to stick with it.

The Canadians will have the Leopard 1. The A3 version I believe. So we'll be getting a good preview of some German equipment at least.

We were definitely overoptimistic to hope for a release in 2023 given that work apparently hadn't started until late in 2022. But a release in 2024 is entirely within reason. Around 2 years from first announcement to release is not uncommon for Combat Mission base games and modules. If anything, rather than getting worked up, I was hoping to temper expectations a bit for anyone who might still be hoping for it to come out any month now (Millien's comment reminded me that there might still be a few such people). But I'll grant that I'm only making an estimate based on past precedent, and there is a fair amount of variability here. While 2 years seems to be pretty common, it wouldn't be surprising if it ended up taking them 3 years. Which would bring the release out to the third or fourth quarter of 2025. I would be surprised if it took 4 years though.

Civilian deaths per building is not really a reliable metric.  Were they all in a few of those buildings. Were they evenly distributed across all of them.  What we have are a series of shoots that resulted in a large number of civilian deaths.  A full review and investigation would have to be done to determine if those deaths were simply background collateral damage or criminality occurred.  
By the metrics of deaths per building then Hiroshima wasn’t “that bad either”.
https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/med/med_chp9.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
At the high end, Hiroshima “only” resulted in about 2 deaths per building.  So what is all the fuss over?  By your initial estimate, you calculated up to 1.6 deaths per building in Gaza.  So if we play the statistics game: Gaza is only 0.4 civilian deaths per building less than Hiroshima (OMG !!!!!).   This is frankly silly.
As to “let them back in through some sort of filter system”…let them back into what?  The area is uninhabited.  Water, electricity and transport are all blow to hell.  Medical and government services will be non-existent until major reconstruction is done.  “Welcome home good Palestinians!  That crater is all yours!”  Those “good Palestinians” are likely to spark up new insurgencies and terror groups in minutes because the IDF just blew up their homes and left them ruins without power and water.
Finally, we have no idea how many dead civilians are left under those buildings.  One cannot drop a high rise and expect good morgue services.  Without a longer more extensive investigation all we can say is that an investigation is needed.
What we can see is highly suspicious levels of destruction (eg If a Hamas fighter would have been in every single building the IDF would have wiped out Hamas twice over by now).  Either Hamas is much larger than estimate gave, like twice the size.  Or the IDF has one helluva crappy targeting enterprise and keeps missing while knocking buildings down.  Either way, the most obvious potential violation of LOAC remains the indiscriminate destruction of civilian infrastructure with intent that Palestinians never can come back.  That matches the evidence we can see and a plausible Israeli motive.  There is easily enough suspicion that destruction at those rates should be placed under scrutiny and the international community has every right to say “hey wait a minute”.  
 
 

Amen.  This speaks to the larger issue.  No point "winning" if we have to become the bad guys to do it.  We fight to defend something more than security.  We fight for an idea.  How we fight impacts the integrity of that idea.  Right now the idea of Israel is taking tremendous damage.  This is what we have been supporting for decades?  They are looking worse than Russia right now with respect to indiscriminate strikes...and that was one helluva low bar to get under.  
If the idea is corrupted by "some people are more equal than others", we are dead in the water.  

You do realize that the laws of armed conflict were written because all of the unconstrained warfare of the 19th and early 20th century?  They started with The Hague conventions in 1899 - and in fact the Lieber Code in the 1860 kicked things off.  The main purpose is to try and remember that there is a world states need to live in after the war.
But ok, let’s buy into your framework for a second.  So the Russian massacres in Ukraine in places like Bucha, deportation of children, along with the civilian terror missile strikes they have been waging…where do we sit in those?  Because in your framework we will be unable to prosecute or hold to account because Russia is only trying “to win as fast as possible”?
As to chemical or even nuclear weapons.  Well Hamas would now live under the same framework.  First off, we could not even prosecute for all the horrors they committed.  Second there would be zero legal restraint in Russia or Iran supplying Hamas with chemical or even nuclear weapons.  In fact under the framework you describe Hamas could legally employ them to “hit harder”.
The problem with “only one rule of war” thinking is that people forget that it applies universally.  What they more often mean is “the opponent has to follow the rules but we don’t”. Or they really mean “well let’s ditch these ‘rules’ but keep those ones”.
Lastly, the Rule of Might led directly to both WW1 & 2, the fact that the US had to “nuke Japan” is a bad thing you realize?  Both those wars were not “good news” and sparked a lot of our attempts to reign in warfare.  Legal restraint is designed to curtail the escalations we saw in both World Wars because they were bad for humanity.  
We do live with a thin veneer of civilization, that much is true.  But why would we abandoned the laws that hold that veneer together.  I mean, how does that make things better?
 

There is a fallacy that I think it would be helpful for people to understand for this discussion. Unfortunately logicians (really all academics) prior to the 21st century had an unhealthy obsession with Latin, so it goes by the difficult to pronounce (and harder to remember) name "Tu Quoque", which apparently translates as "you also". This fallacy is committed anytime someone asserts "they broke the rules, therefore I am allowed to break the rules". If you want a more memorable name, I believe people started calling this "Whataboutism" sometime within the last decade or so. 
https://www.palomar.edu/users/bthompson/Tu Quoque.html
The rules being broken does not invalidate the rules. Because Hamas broke the rules does not give the IDF, or anyone else, license to break the rules. If the question is "is the IDF following the rules", it is entirely irrelevant to reply with a list of all the rules Hamas has broken. We all know that Hamas has broken the rules. But how is that relevant to whether or not the IDF has broken the rules? 
There is no grading on a curve. It is not necessary, or even relevant, to ask which side was worse when considering whether or not one side conducted their actions legally.

There is a fallacy that I think it would be helpful for people to understand for this discussion. Unfortunately logicians (really all academics) prior to the 21st century had an unhealthy obsession with Latin, so it goes by the difficult to pronounce (and harder to remember) name "Tu Quoque", which apparently translates as "you also". This fallacy is committed anytime someone asserts "they broke the rules, therefore I am allowed to break the rules". If you want a more memorable name, I believe people started calling this "Whataboutism" sometime within the last decade or so. 
https://www.palomar.edu/users/bthompson/Tu Quoque.html
The rules being broken does not invalidate the rules. Because Hamas broke the rules does not give the IDF, or anyone else, license to break the rules. If the question is "is the IDF following the rules", it is entirely irrelevant to reply with a list of all the rules Hamas has broken. We all know that Hamas has broken the rules. But how is that relevant to whether or not the IDF has broken the rules? 
There is no grading on a curve. It is not necessary, or even relevant, to ask which side was worse when considering whether or not one side conducted their actions legally.

There is a fallacy that I think it would be helpful for people to understand for this discussion. Unfortunately logicians (really all academics) prior to the 21st century had an unhealthy obsession with Latin, so it goes by the difficult to pronounce (and harder to remember) name "Tu Quoque", which apparently translates as "you also". This fallacy is committed anytime someone asserts "they broke the rules, therefore I am allowed to break the rules". If you want a more memorable name, I believe people started calling this "Whataboutism" sometime within the last decade or so. 
https://www.palomar.edu/users/bthompson/Tu Quoque.html
The rules being broken does not invalidate the rules. Because Hamas broke the rules does not give the IDF, or anyone else, license to break the rules. If the question is "is the IDF following the rules", it is entirely irrelevant to reply with a list of all the rules Hamas has broken. We all know that Hamas has broken the rules. But how is that relevant to whether or not the IDF has broken the rules? 
There is no grading on a curve. It is not necessary, or even relevant, to ask which side was worse when considering whether or not one side conducted their actions legally.