callada

I sit alone, my sighs unheard,
A lonely, sad computer nerd.
The tears I cry, they silently glisten,
Shed for no news of Combat Mission.

Come on mate. It's not too late and the weather is great.
Summer is here and the pub is near so your mission is clear.
Forget the game and all those flicks. 'Tis the time to go out with chicks

I sit alone, my sighs unheard,
A lonely, sad computer nerd.
The tears I cry, they silently glisten,
Shed for no news of Combat Mission.

I sit alone, my sighs unheard,
A lonely, sad computer nerd.
The tears I cry, they silently glisten,
Shed for no news of Combat Mission.

I sit alone, my sighs unheard,
A lonely, sad computer nerd.
The tears I cry, they silently glisten,
Shed for no news of Combat Mission.

I sit alone, my sighs unheard,
A lonely, sad computer nerd.
The tears I cry, they silently glisten,
Shed for no news of Combat Mission.

I sit alone, my sighs unheard,
A lonely, sad computer nerd.
The tears I cry, they silently glisten,
Shed for no news of Combat Mission.

Probably the last bone for BP2 before release. A small thing, but the main menu screen is getting cluttered.  

This is a total mess and doesn't work quite right, so more of a POC: https://gist.github.com/spdral/0afee5917714bf01d4e647a3822d1c77
 

I have some thoughts about this news, but you'll have to wait a few months until I post them.

I have some thoughts about this news, but you'll have to wait a few months until I post them.

I have some thoughts about your post, but you'll have to wait a few months before I post them 😉.

Thanks so much @BFCElvis, Charles, @Battlefront.com, @Ultradave and @Buzz for getting a fix done quickly.
My Chaffees have commenced screening for the incoming Pershings ...

Boy, is that a strange looking machine.  Simultaneously bigger and smaller than it appears, somehow.

Historical accuracy 😉.  No harm in trying in the game though...

Requin87 and I played a CMBS Meeting engagement and are releasing daily Turn-by-Turn videos.  We just dropped turn 3 today.  For any that are interested...

Chap's Playlist - Dance of the Javelins

Requin's Playlist - Dance of the Javelins

I think if Hapless and Free Whisky knew how many times I have watched some of their videos they would be a little bit frightened.

I didn't have a chance to respond to one of @The_Capt's post in the How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get thread this weekend (too busy sleeping, visiting family, and playing video games). Since it took me so long to get around to it I figured my response didn't belong in that thread anymore, hence the new thread. But military history and tactical development are hobby subjects for me, so I did want to get around to responding. Though my opening post is on tactical lessons and development leading up to and during WW1, I'm going to make the topic of this thread generic to tactical development in any era. I think a discussion of tactical lessons learned, missed, or miss-learned in the past could be helpful for grounding our understanding of tactical trends in the present. Understanding that the tacticians of the past may have had good reason, based on the evidence and analytical tools available to them, for reaching conclusions that we now know were wrong may help us have humility in our own conclusions about tactical trends in modern warfare. And understanding that they actually got more right than they get credit for may prevent us from too hastily rejecting the received view on a subject, merely because it is the received view.
I think it's arguable just how obvious a shift to defensive primacy should have been. The Franco-Prussian war certainly wouldn't have signaled a shift to defensive primacy for any casual observer of the time. The Prussians overran French defenses with hasty (bordering on reckless) attacks in battle after battle. If anything the war repeatedly demonstrated offensive primacy until the French field army was defeated at Sedan and the Prussians settled in for the Siege of Paris. While the Prussians weren't able to storm Paris's defenses, that alone didn't prove defensive primacy since it couldn't set it apart from any other siege that had been conducted over the last several thousand years of warfare. For all of recorded history up to that point there were field battles and there were sieges. Field battles lasted from a few hours to a few days, while sieges were attritional slogs that lasted for weeks or months. In fact even the Siege of Petersburg would have looked just like any other siege. It and other months-long sieges in the American Civil War would not have alerted anyone to any sort of shift towards defensive primacy. In fact, far from the participants of the Siege of Petersburg noting some new form of warfare, reports and letters from 1915 refer to WW1 as if the entire war had become one giant siege.
It's fair to criticize the French, who went into the Franco-Prussian war believing in defensive primacy, for overcorrecting and assuming absolute offensive primacy. But it's clear that the overcorrection didn't come out of nowhere. I'll note that the French seem to have a habit of overcorrecting too hard, assuming defensive primacy in the Franco-Prussian War, overcorrecting to total offensive primacy in WW1, and overcorrecting to total defensive primacy in WW2. Another tragic downside of Prussia's reckless attacks during the Franco-Prussian War being met with repeated success is that it led the Germans in WW1 to think that reckless attacks were a good idea. I think the Franco-Prussian war may have a number of cautionary tales for how we derive lessons from wars.
Defensive or offensive primacy are useful as broad concepts. But each is brought about by specific factors, and soldiers in the field still need to adapt to them with specific tactics. The difference between close order and extended order formations is not trivial. Close order means fighting in a multi-rank formation (normally two or three ranks deep) with each file brushing shoulders with the files next to it. Extended order means fighting in a single rank (technically Napoleonic skirmish lines were multi-rank formations, with filemates forming small teams, but I'm focusing on the late 19th/early 20th century here), with several meters between each soldier (as few as one or two meters in the early 20th century, but 5 to 10 meters is more common today). A close order formation is the classic Napoleonic block of infantry. The dispersed formations of modern infantry are examples of extended order formations (even if no one thinks to call them "extended order" anymore).
With the invention of smokeless powder bullets had enough penetration to tear through multiple people, so no only is a close order formation a much easier target to hit, but each hit is sure to inflict multiple casualties. Add in artillery firing high explosive shells and a single shell could inflict dozens of casualties on a close order formation, where it may have only inflicted a handful of casualties on an extended order formation. For a worst case scenario, at the Battle of Magersfontein the 3rd Highland Brigade was caught in quarter column, the densest formation possible for British troops, by Boar riflemen and was virtually annihilated. The British suffered nearly a thousand casualties at Magersfontein, 700 of them were suffered by the 3rd Highland Brigade in the first few minutes of the battle. Over the course of the 2nd Boar War British infantry in extended order were frequently able to overcome Boar defenses, albeit with heavy casualties. But every single British unit that attacked in close order was massacred. Even the Japanese, at the Battle of the Yalu (1904) took such heavy casualties while crossing the river in close order that they stopped in the middle of the battle to extend their order.
The importance of extended order was not the only lesson drawn from the wars leading up to WW1. Mostly what I have are lessons learned by the British army (it seems that most English speaking historians have a preference for writing about the British (which is very annoying for me, since I'm interested in everyone)). The importance of snap-shooting, and the ineffectiveness of volley fire, was taken to heart by the British after the 2nd Boar war. Post-Boar War British marksmanship training is some of the earliest that I'm aware of to feature pop-up targets. The need for the cavalry to be armed with the same rifle as the infantry was learned through the frustrating experience of cavalry armed with carbines being repeatedly outranged by Boars armed with rifles. This was a lesson that was apparently only learned by the British, with the other cavalry forces in 1914 going to war with carbines. The need to conceal the artillery, rather than firing from the open, was a lesson that was theoretically learned, but not taken to heart by every artillery officer. In 1914 it seems that even trying to keep the guns in concealed positions wasn't good enough, and they needed to be pushed back to the rear where they could only provide indirect fire support. And of course that introduced the problem of infantry-artillery coordination which would plague armies for much of WW1 (it's a lot easier for the artillery to know what to shoot at when they can see what they are shooting at).
And unfortunately, defensive primacy doesn't mean you can get away with just defending. You can't win a war by sitting in your trenches forever. Sooner or later you need to figure out how to push the enemy out of theirs. You have to find ways to attack successfully despite the primacy of the defense. This means finding specific countermeasures for specific causes of defensive primacy. The most frequently cited cause of defensive primacy in WW1 was the firepower imbalance between the attacker and the defender. The machinegun, being relatively immobile at first, provided more firepower to the defender than to the attacker. It was easier for the defender to use artillery effectively, since they only needed to put up a screening blanket of artillery in front of their positions, while the attacker had to figure out how to get the artillery firing on the right targets at the right time as the infantry advanced, all at a time before man-portable radios had been invented. The solution that was found for the firepower imbalance essentially came in three parts. The first was to get better at creating an artillery fire plan to support the infantry as well as possible (WW1 artillery tactics could, and probably do, fill entire books). The second was to invent tanks, which could provide more flexible direct fire support, engage targets which had been missed by the artillery, and continue providing heavy fire support to the infantry after the artillery fire plan inevitably broke down. The third was to increase the organic firepower of the infantry by introducing light machine guns and rifle grenades. All of those were important, but that third point in particular is not to be underestimated. Imagine playing as Commonwealth forces in CMBN, but your infantry have no Bren guns, only SMLEs. Attacking with rifle-only infantry, with no automatic weapons of any kind, is unthinkable on any post-1917 battlefield.
Another cause of defensive primacy was that armies had gotten so much larger. That, plus the increased dispersion of troops necessary to survive modern firepower, meant that armies could hold an unbroken frontline along an entire border. So you can't attack the flank of an army the way you might in the Napoleonic wars, because there are no flanks. It's frontal attacks or nothing. The obvious solution is to create some flanks by breaking through the frontlines. Unfortunately railroads make it easy for the defender to bring up reserves to plug a breakthrough, or to prevent a break-in from becoming a breakthrough. And the lack of mechanization, and the difficulty of trying to bring a field telephone up to recently captured positions, makes it difficult for the attacker to push reserves through a breakthrough to exploit, or into a break-in to turn it into a breakthrough in the first place. Another difficulty is that the dispersed battlefield makes command and control far more difficult. The obvious adaptation to the difficulty (near-impossibility, prior to man-portable radios) of issuing new orders to a unit in the middle of a battle is to script out every step of the attack in advance. This makes the battleplan rigid. When things went according to plan, the initial stage of a battle could go very well (the first day of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle). But even if things went to plan, the script would inevitably run out, with the result that any attempt to exploit initial success would fail miserably (second day of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle). And of course, things didn't always go to plan (first day of the Battle of the Somme).
The solution to these problems came in two parts. The first was to stop the battle before the script runs out. Give up on trying to achieve a breakthrough, or indeed on achieving any single decisive battle, and instead focus on wearing down the enemy with a series limited objective attacks at different points along the line. The hundred-days offensives which broke the German army in 1918 were a relentless series of limited objective attacks up and down the line, never letting up the pressure on the German line, while being careful to never press any one battle past its culmination point. The second was to accept that complete, centralized control of a battle was no longer possible. A single commander could not issue timely orders to react to developments in every corner of a dispersed battlefield. The solution was to invent the modern concept of mission command. Delegate greater authority down to lower and lower levels. The basic tactical units got smaller (from company at the beginning of the war, to squad at the end), with leaders at each level empowered to make decisions based on their local situation without being expected to wait for orders from above.
The trend in WW1 scholarship over the last couple of decades has been to reject the "Lions led by Donkeys" narrative (see Blackadder's portrayal of British high command (great comedy, terrible history)). The emerging view is that the leadership of the major combatants of WW1 (with the possible exceptions of the Russians and the Austrians) were generally competent and did about as well as could reasonably be expected (they certainly made no shortage of mistakes, but I've played too many wargames to judge them too harshly for that). In any case, they invented modern warfare in the space of just four years, with a pseudo-Napoleonic system as their starting point, so they must have been doing something right.
PS: I definitely have to grant that you have a point about the Austrian cavalry. But I think it's worth pointing out that the Austro-Hungarian army was a train wreck even by the standards of the time. Even the Russian army was less dysfunctional than the Austro-Hungarian army. And the only respects in which the early 20th century Russian army was better than the modern Russian army were that it could raise more troops and produce more stuff.

Hello...
I have started a little map project. My goal is to design a few quite large maps that still retain a fairly high level of detail. These maps will not be designed
as mastermaps ment to be split up into smaller sections but rather to be used as a 'full size' map but you as a potential user are offcourse free to cut and tweak the map in any way you please.
I will not be spewing these maps out in any great amont. I will be working on these at a relaxed pace and my current goal for the rest of 2023 is to release two more maps after this first one if you guys feel that this initial one is up to snuff.
This first map is for CMBN. Centered around a village along the Douve river, south west of Valognes. Mapsize is 2700 X 1900 meters. I have taken some liberties with the actual village but the terrain is very close to current day google earth (elevations are fictional).
I'm planning on making one more CMBN-map and then a CMRT-map this year. Dependant on RL situations i might be able to do a third one. We shall see. Two additional maps after this one should be doable though.
On this first map (Normandy) i have 'tweaked' the low boccage hedges somewhat. At various locations i have replaced a part of the low boccage with regular hedge tiles to allow for vehicles to cut through. This will come with the risk of bogging down though as the terrain tile 
at these locations are be mud ground. See pictures below. I have also included a fair amount of boccage gaps to allow for infantry movement.
These maps will have no units, no set-up zones or no objectives and no AI plans....They can be added as desired. Hopefully these maps will provide nice playgrounds for H2H gameplay or as a starting map for anyone wanting to try and design a scenario using them.
This first normandy map has been made using the majority of 37mm brilliant 'all in one' mod pack for CMBN. Hopefully the map will still look decent even if you are playing with stock graphics or use different mods. 
Enjoy ! 
Some pictures from this first map...
From google earth:


From the editor:

Some ingame pictures:
 

















This is what the boccage/hedge trick looks like in the editor:

And in-game:

Download link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/x3h7htnzcx1ykxp/Cotentin Peninsula.btt?dl=0
 

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.
 

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
 

This technique works for all area fire, and can save a lot of time finding firing positions compared to working from the other direction.   Actually I might have learned about it from one of your previous posts.

It's pretty wild that any of this works to begin with, really, particularly given the size of the development team, let alone well enough to sustain a business.  Writing a custom engine and all the component parts for a game of this complexity is in the "writing a compiler" world of difficulty.  When we're talking about graphics, it starts at the level of like -- "please draw me a triangle here on the screen".  And then somehow, a picture comes out... a picture of a Shillelagh missile punching a hole in my precious tank...

It's pretty wild that any of this works to begin with, really, particularly given the size of the development team, let alone well enough to sustain a business.  Writing a custom engine and all the component parts for a game of this complexity is in the "writing a compiler" world of difficulty.  When we're talking about graphics, it starts at the level of like -- "please draw me a triangle here on the screen".  And then somehow, a picture comes out... a picture of a Shillelagh missile punching a hole in my precious tank...

Do potential performance improvements include renderer performance improvements?  I'm not sure how tightly coupled everything is internally, but Cold War for example pushes the engine past its limits.  Trees stop rendering at a certain distance... but that distance is within possible engagement ranges.  Framerates are low even during the orders phases where presumably much less computation is happening.  This is evident even on the highest-end gaming systems available today.
 
I do wonder how much this would really matter from a business perspective, but it sure would make the game easier to play, and I suspect make it a slightly easier sell.  Hard to say on the latter part there since this is so niche to begin with.