Battle Simulations (Campaign)

[SolSolari]

A friend and myself are looking to use Combat Mission to play out interesting battles for a Table Top game we are playing. The problem we are having is that the game is mostly concerned with units at a Batallion level with units occassionaly broken down to Companies.

We are following the Canadians from Juno to Caen

We can't agree on what is a fair way to simulate these engagements. My friend favour's going the organic battalion route (infanty and armour OOBs as per basic unit list ie: a Fusilier Battalion gets the Fusilier Battalion from the unit Selection, a Canadian Infantry Battalion get's the Infantry Battlion). which has the benifit of simplifying the combat set-up.

This seems unreasonable to me given the amount of equipment found in German vs Canadian infantry battalions.

My question is am I wrong, are the Organic Battalion a good historical generic representation of the equiment the units would bring to a fight? If not how should we look at fixing the scenarios wihout overly complicating the strategic game?

[JonS]

The ToEs in CMBN are very good reflections of what a full strength battalion of that time would take into battle, if the entire battalion were committed.

And those caveats provide at least part of the answer to your question. Was the battalion at full strength, and if not what were the losses? Was the entire battalion committed to the battle, and if not, what parts were retained?

Also relevant, is: what support did the battalion take into battle - tanks, towed or SP anti tank, engineers, recce, machine guns, mortars, artillery, etc.

Finally, British and US battalions in Normandy were highly standardised affairs. Any given battalion in one division was organisationally identical (barring losses, detachments, and attachments) to one in a different division in a different corps in a different army. Three of the five British-style armoured divisions were identical in terms of OoB and ToE (right down to the same model of Sherman being used), while the other two - 7th Armd and 4th Cdn Armd - differed only in exchanging Cromwell for Sherman or vice versa. The British infantry divisions were all identical to each other, as were the Canadian and US inf divs.

However, the Germans were logisitically incapable of achieving that degree of standardisation. To take a gross example; there were eleven panzer divisions in Normandy, but NONE of them were the same in terms of either ToE or OoB. Their infantry divisions were even less 'standardised.'

The take away from all that is that the simple answer to your question is inaccurate, while the accurate answer isn't simple. Only you can decide how much simplicity and inaccuracy you're prepared to put up with.

Quick&Simple&Inaccurate |<-----------[you?]--------->|Slow&Complex&Accurate

[Broadsword56]

+1 to the suggestions of JonS, as someone who has (and is) doing the exactly the same thing with two boardgames and CMBN at the moment.

Find some workable compromises, and make yourself a set of "conversion" rules that translate things like counter strengths, supply states, and other factors into CMBN terms, and vice-versa.

We've found that "soft" factors matter a great deal in how your tabletop battles will play out in CMBN. So you need to decide how you will handle a unit that's "disrupted" or "pinned" in the boardgame, for example. What would that mean in a CMBN unit's motivation or leadership or fitness?

Does your tabletop game's combat results use men/vehicles or step-losses to track casualties? If it's step-losses, you'll have to think about and make a judgment about what a "step" represents in concrete terms in CMBN troop numbers, etc.

Be prepared to see your tabletop campaign generate some VERY unbalanced, asymmetrical and "unfair" battle setups for CMBN. But that's the realistic nature of war, and part of the fun of playing this way. After all, the "operational art" consists of arranging to fight the enemy on your terms at a time and place of your choosing. So I find one gets a lot of maneuvering, a lot of dull and highly imbalanced setups that are better off resolved on the tabletop. But every so often you'll get a truly interesting situation -- a meeting engagement, a probe, or a desperate fight to hold a positionat all costs -- that make for some truly memorable CMBN battles that no one is ever likely to design as a standalone scenario.