3rd Battle, German MG campaign (SPOILER)

[Rokko]

Has anyone reached that particular scenario?

I'm in my third try and this time I am doing resonably well, but I don't see how I am supposed to acutally win, i.e. occupy ground, I have just managed to get the right pacing for these troops, that apparently are only supposed to be used for deck scrubbing.

My analysis so far:

- you have ABYSMAL troops

- they are ABYSMALLY equipped

- you have NO fire support or combined arms stuff whatsoever (except for 2 50mm mortars)

- you have NO time (40 minutes to conquer the entire map on foot)

- you attack from terrible terrain (very sparse trees and all soldiers bunch together behind one tree because there is only one tree per action spot, in fact all trees in the forrest are placed in orchard mode)

- your advantage in numbers is not too great, maybe 3:1 but probably less

- the enemy troops are absolute pros and are deadly at all ranges

- the points per objective increase the further the objective is away; I think I can call myself lucky if I manage to get out of the forrest and take the first objective

I get that there are scenarios in campaigns that you are not actually supposed to win but rather experience. Is this one of them or is there actually a way to ace it?

I mean I suppose in RL a Kriegsmarine company couldn't have thrown back an American glider platoon (+), so I wouldn't be too suprised.

[Seedorf81]

I think there maybe the possibility that the makers of these battles want to be as realistic as possible, and (IMHO at least) sometimes forget that we want to play this game for fun and that, how realistically it may be, losing without a chance of winning is not very funny.

Playing a(n) (near) unwinnable battle would be ok for once or twice, but CMBN, CMCW and now CMMG, seem to have quite a lot of those. In stead of a relaxing game, I find it teeth-grinding, fist-clenching, swearing-ridden and frustratingly difficult.

Maybe I'm a softy, but I would have liked a little more ease at times..

[Childress]

Haven't checked out MG - except a glance- but Gustav Line introduced a disturbing trend: campaign battles in which the player hunkers down in defense. No dig on the designers or the game engine but outside the Command Ops series (I'm told) this doesn't work out very convincingly unless you pad the AI's forces or impose punitive goals on the player.

[ZPB II]

I have gotten a Total Victory from that battle. I didn't even play particularly well there, just basic stuff, fire and movement, plenty of suppressive fire, "find, fix & flank" and spreading out your men a bit so they don't get all wiped out by a single machine gun. You have plenty of men and ammo, 2x HMGs and 2x light mortars, that means you can throw tons of lead at any para that pops it's head up.

I don't know if I'm in the majority or minority, but I'm of the opinion that in order to have contrast there needs to be easy battles and hard battles. Sometimes the campaigns have battles that you don't even need to win in order to proceed. (you don't need to win every battle in a campaign to win the campaign, so there isn't a need to bash one's head into a wall)

I did suffer abysmal casualties, but the AI didn't have men left and had to surrender. C'est la guerre.

[Seedorf81]

Well, you Finnish boys were very good fighters against the invading Red Army in 1939, while we Dutchies didn't even last five days in may 1940.

Maybe winning or not winning is a matter of genetics?

[sburke]

Haven't checked out MG - except a glance- but Gustav Line introduced a disturbing trend: campaign battles in which the player hunkers down in defense. No dig on the designers or the game engine but outside the Command Ops series (I'm told) this doesn't work out very convincingly unless you pad the AI's forces or impose punitive goals on the player.

I wouldn't quite call that a trend yet. However creating a campaign in certain periods gets a bit difficult if players want to play a side that is primarily on defense. MG certainly can have some of those issues and I think they do try to have a campaign for each side if possible. Personally I thought the German campaign in MG was interesting and creative concept that also managed to side step the issue of how to do a German campaign when the Germans other than assaulting the Oosterbeek perimeter rarely had a unit in an extended attacking posture.

I would have to agree though that creating a good AI attack is very difficult in CM. The AI just can not use the tools at hand on attack or coordination that a human player can and as such is handicapped in performance.

[Childress]

The AI just can not use the tools at hand on attack or coordination that a human player can and as such is handicapped in performance.

In the Panther Games you get (based on the demos) a kind of swirling, real time ballet of NATO symbols colliding over a not very detailed map versus the rigorous and precise 3D spatiality of CM. The latter renders the AI's task much steeper- just the nature of the beast, the Command Ops productions left me feeling detached. So defensive scenarios in CM are, imo, best left to HvH games.

[BletchleyGeek]

I have gotten a Total Victory from that battle. I didn't even play particularly well there, just basic stuff, fire and movement, plenty of suppressive fire, "find, fix & flank" and spreading out your men a bit so they don't get all wiped out by a single machine gun. You have plenty of men and ammo, 2x HMGs and 2x light mortars, that means you can throw tons of lead at any para that pops it's head up.

That's some good advice in there :-)

I don't know if I'm in the majority or minority, but I'm of the opinion that in order to have contrast there needs to be easy battles and hard battles.

Not to mention that one can have fun and get whipped by the AI (or a human opponent). I can understand that there are people who aren't in this so to get ever whipped on the virtual battlefield, but please, leave the masochists have their fun as well. No real harm is done and it's stuff happening between two consenting adults (or an adult and a machine)

[BletchleyGeek]

I wouldn't quite call that a trend yet. However creating a campaign in certain periods gets a bit difficult if players want to play a side that is primarily on defense. MG certainly can have some of those issues and I think they do try to have a campaign for each side if possible. Personally I thought the German campaign in MG was interesting and creative concept that also managed to side step the issue of how to do a German campaign when the Germans other than assaulting the Oosterbeek perimeter rarely had a unit in an extended attacking posture.

I would have to agree though that creating a good AI attack is very difficult in CM. The AI just can not use the tools at hand on attack or coordination that a human player can and as such is handicapped in performance.

Now, on a serious note.

I followed with keen interest Jon's scenario design AAR - which I see is included in MG as a PDF document - and I find it to be a very interesting document about how to design defensive battles that are interesting to play both against the AI and against a human player. The AI isn't going to surprise you thinking "out of the box" and it's hard - i.e. requires quite a bit of experimentation - to get out of it behaviours that look "intelligent", but I think it's adequate if one takes care as well of

• designing the objectives - that is, splitting them to avoid the "winner takes it all" or the "mother hen" effect and distributing them in a clever way so the defender can deny them to the attacker without getting badly exposed, or allowing the defender (or the attacker) to withdraw from the battlefield (see George MC's "First Clash" scenario for an example of a well thought way of allowing this option).
  
• designing the map - especially offering enough depth for the defender to fall back and regroup, and for the attacker as well
  
• realistic force mix and battlefield dynamics - so at the start we are confronted with a quite realistic 3-1 ratio between attacker and defender, which becomes more even due to casualties and arrival of reinforcements for the defender, and realistic time frames for attacks and counterattacks to develop
  

one can get quite tense, realistic and really enjoyable scenarios, equally interesting to play on the attack and the defense.

So let's not oversimplify.

On the other hand, with the exception of a few notable individuals I'd say that we CMx2 players aren't very good at "real world tactics as enabled by the game engine". In CMx2 there are quite a few aspects of tactical combat which aren't streamlined or abstracted as they were in CMx1 or are in other tactical wargaming systems. The way one did "fire & movement" in CMx1 is quite different from the way one needs to do that effectively in CMx2. Bil's Battle Drill is going to be an invaluable resource to change that.

In the Panther Games you get (based on the demos) a kind of swirling, real time ballet of NATO symbols colliding over a not very detailed map versus the rigorous and precise 3D spatiality of CM. The latter renders the AI's task much steeper- just the nature of the beast, the Command Ops productions left me feeling detached. So defensive scenarios in CM are, imo, best left to HvH games.

Well, "not very detailed" is a quite unfair assessment for an operational level wargame modeling terrain at a scale of 100 meters, covering tens or hundreds of square kilometers in some maps. When you're commanding divisions across a frontage of 10 or 20 kilometers, the focus of the game can't be that of walking into the shoes of a squad leader - at best a Company or Platoon commander. CMx2 and CmdOps face the player with problems with have the same structure - effectively planning and executing a brigade attack involves the "find, fix & flank" tasks that are the bread and butter of what one needs to do to organize a company attack. Formations are as important at the tactical level as they're at the operational level. I'd argue that that the difference isn't qualitative - is rather quantitative (time, space, number of men, guns and AFV's involved).

Indeed, you can't look at the eyes of your soldiers in CmdOps as you can do in CMx2 and see them ripped apart by those nasty AA guns. But I'd say that's - objectively speaking - an irrelevant difference when it comes to discussing whether or not CMx2 scenarios are "impossibly hard" because of the constraints imposed on scenario designers by limitations in the AI.

[YankeeDog]

It's winnable. Not even all that hard with the right tactics, actually -- ZPB II's suggestions are a good place to start if you're having trouble.

View it as an early taste of the kind of tactics you'll need to use in the East Front titles playing with low-quality Soviet troops.