the hardest substance in the universe: CMx2 low hedges

[__Yossarian0815[jby]]

Time and again I run into this situtaion.

I forgot to buy satchel charges and my whole attack is stopped by a long line of low bocage. I fire 50 HE 75mm rounds at the same spot and nothing happens. Then again I do a quick and ready test and the bocage does get breached somwhere between 7 and 15 hits.

Has anybody done an in depth test of this strange behaviour?

IMO hip high bocage should not be an obstacle for infantry. At most 2 rounds should suffice to make a breach.

Rommel could have sealed off the atlantic wall with a bit of gardening if CMX2 physics were real.

[James Crowley]

The whole 'impenetrable' bocage issue has been raised previously by myself and others, to no avail.

As it stands it is, in effect, a force field that you can see and shoot through, but never move through, under any circumstances.

Unless you are 'close assaulting' a tank. In which case, it seems, your men can abstractly get through the bocage, attack the tank and get back through the bocage in a few seconds. Once the tank has moved away or been knocked out, your men can longer pass through the same section of bocage.

I still think that, for all it's faults, CMBO handled bocage more realistically. You could get through it but it could take several turns to do so.

[Doug Williams]

I would say it's a limitation of the game engine that we are just going to have to accept for now. Perhaps BFC may address this in V 3.0. I very much doubt they will make any changes to bocage right now, seeing as how the Normandy series is basically done, with the possible exception of an "odds and ends pack".

The best thing to do is remember to buy demo charges and/or choose your QB maps more carefully and/or make your own QB maps for H2H play and/or buy Rhino tanks, and/or attack through the openings that are already present on the map.

[Paper Tiger]

Feel free to tell me if this is irrelevent but I used to live in the beautiful heart of Suffolk. On evenings and at weekends, I would pack a bag (no demo charges though!) and go for a long walk around the countryside and enjoy the tranquility (and the smells) of rural Suffolk. On more than one occasion, I would walk around the edge of a field in an attempt to get somehere new only to find that my way forward was blocked by a chest-high hedge.

Even if I didn't care about damaging the farmer's property, there really was no way I was going through that hedge, no matter how much time I would lose by turning back and finding another route because going through that hedge would have resulted in terrible injuries. So maybe the bocage is not quite as badly represented as you think.

[James Crowley]

Feel free to tell me if this is irrelevent but I used to live in the beautiful heart of Suffolk. On evenings and at weekends, I would pack a bag (no demo charges though!) and go for a long walk around the countryside and enjoy the tranquility (and the smells) of rural Suffolk. On more than one occasion, I would walk around the edge of a field in an attempt to get somehere new only to find that my way forward was blocked by a chest-high hedge.

Even if I didn't care about damaging the farmer's property, there really was no way I was going through that hedge, no matter how much time I would lose by turning back and finding another route because going through that hedge would have resulted in terrible injuries. So maybe the bocage is not quite as badly represented as you think.

Not at all irrelevant. I have done very similar myself in various parts of the UK. Where I live in West Sussex there are some areas that have very bocage like terrain, in small measure, and, no, you certainly wouldn't want to try and get through in civvy clothing and would likely have bare areas of skin ripped to shreds and suffer a real danger of putting an eye out. Probably not much fun in battle fatigues either.

But as has been forcefully pointed out to me in the 'grenades v tanks' thread, the bocage was very far from being uniform in structure and was certainly permeable more easily in some parts. I know this can be, to a limited extent, replicated by inserting gaps but that is a rather mechanical solution, IMO.

Rather better to have permeability built in but with long and random time delays and automatic pinning for infantry. Vehicles are more problematic, I will admit but I think the various Cullin and Rhino attachments were to save tanks going over 'belly up' rather than because (at least some of them) they couldn't get over at all.

On an unrelated note would it be possible to discreetly ask if you are, or plan to, update your Scottish Corridor campaign - pretty please!

[sburke]

Personally I don't think it is an issue of the bocage properties, but rather the map designer is not allowing any variance in the field. This has been discussed extensively before including altering the tile at openings to reflect traffic (mud tiles or some such). The Bocage itself doesn't need to be permeable, but there should be periodic openings to some extent. Bocage isn't something you go down to home depot and buy. It is a product of years and years of field clearing etc. It isn't necessarily planned, but I doubt any farmer was going to allow himself to be boxed in so he always had to walk all the way around to cross his fields.

From what I can see in period pictures however, Bocage should not be a semi permeable surface that can be crossed anywhere given a little effort.

[Childress]

Personally I don't think it is an issue of the bocage properties, but rather the map designer is not allowing any variance in the field.

You're absolutely correct. It's not the tile properties, it's the placement. Some of the earlier scenario offerings are guilty of this. (Last Defense, I'm looking at you. )

[umlaut]

I agree with sburke too: If a field only has one opening that allows access through the bocage it is probably highly unrealistic. People want access and they dont like taking long detours.

As for "penetratable" hedges, you can always use small stretches of ordinary hedges instead of bocage.

In my view a scenario designer should always make plenty of ways to pass through bocage - at least for infantry.

[Michael Emrys]

Personally I don't think it is an issue of the bocage properties, but rather the map designer is not allowing any variance in the field. This has been discussed extensively before including altering the tile at openings to reflect traffic (mud tiles or some such). The Bocage itself doesn't need to be permeable, but there should be periodic openings to some extent.

It has been suggested before (and I think even incorporated in some maps) including here and there non-bocage hedges in the hedgerow to give discoverable places where it can be crossed by men on foot.

From what I can see in period pictures however, Bocage should not be a semi permeable surface that can be crossed anywhere given a little effort.

Agreed, but the inclusion here and there of non-bocage hedges could with care address the problem to some extent.

Michael

Ah, I see umlaut beat me to it by 15 minutes. Well done, umlaut!

[altipueri]

I think fields with only one entrance is exactly what there was in many parts of Normandy. Partly as a result of historical hereditary rules farms got split up between sons. The result was that a farmer has a couple of fields over here, a couple over there and some near the next village. A lot of inefficient traipsing between fields.

Devon and Cornwall in England have country most like the bocage in places with high hedges and sunken roads. It's really annoying as I often go there and instead of enjoying the view I'm thinking about whether I could drive a tank through the hedge. This game has ruined my enjoyment of the countryside. Let alone peering across fields trying to work out if I could spot anybody about to shoot me. It's all very stressful.

[MikeyD]

There have certainly been enough photos posted here showing what real world 1940s bocage looked like. The close-knit brush thicket at the top was the least of it. Pre-Culin hedgecutter, it usually took engineers a considerable amount of carefully placed TNT to blow a useful gap into it. BFC's frankly doing players a favor making sachel charges so effective at open gaps. If the game had easily breached bocage it simply wouldn't be a Normandy game!

[Freyberg]

I hesitate to complain about the map designers, because the maps in this game are fabulous in my opinion, but looking through photos of bocage, there are many that show sections that look impassable, and others (most even) that have earth ramparts a tank couldn't cross, but are not so high or solid as to be impassable by infantry. Others look even gappier. The bocage tile in the map designer only represents the toughest of these types.

I remember a couple of very good user-maps from CMBO, in which the hedgerows were made up of some bocage tiles, and some heavy-woods tiles, with little gaps here and there. They looked great, played well and I thought they were probably quite realistic.

I hate bocage anyway, because it usually beats me, so there's a grain of salt.

[SlowMotion]

+1. If you use StreetView of Google Maps you can see that there is no one kind of bocage that is equally impassable like a concrete wall. Very many kinds of plants. Various thickness and height.

[__Yossarian0815[jby]]

I simply want low bocage to be about as tough as a low wall in the game, not reinforced concrete as it is now.

[BLSTK]

*SPOILER ALERT*

I just finished the "Hell in the Hedgerows" scenario, after a third attempt.

It wasn't so much the hedgerows but that blasted barbed wire that slowed me down. Did someone say "blasted"? I wish.

[YankeeDog]

;1483012']I simply want low bocage to be about as tough as a low wall in the game' date=' not reinforced concrete as it is now.[/quote']

Bocage should not behave like a low wall.

An earthen rampart (which is bascially what bocage is) reacts very differently to explosives than a stone wall. Stone walls are brittle and tend to shatter when struck by large projectiles. Packed earth, on the other hand, tends to absorb HE blast up to considerable size with only minor deformation.

This largely why fortifications transitioned from stone walls to earthen ramparts in the Early Modern period, as siege cannon became more common and more powerful.

Now, it may be that certain aspects of the bocage modeling could be improved, and perhaps in game bocage is too tough in certain ways. Regardless, against most types of incoming fire, bocage should definitely be tougher to breach than a low stone wall.

[Holman]

Personally I don't think it is an issue of the bocage properties, but rather the map designer is not allowing any variance in the field.

I'd just like to vote my agreement here.

Bocage terrain exists to represent exactly what it is: hedgerows that can't be passed through without engineering work. If the question is whether every meter of every historical hedgerow actually posed that problem, the answer is that different terrain types (from gaps to thinner hedge to woods and brush tiles) already exist to simulate different levels of constraint on movement and line of sight.

[womble]

Bocage should not behave like a low wall.

An earthen rampart (which is bascially what bocage is) reacts very differently to explosives than a stone wall. Stone walls are brittle and tend to shatter when struck by large projectiles. Packed earth, on the other hand, tends to absorb HE blast up to considerable size with only minor deformation.

This largely why fortifications transitioned from stone walls to earthen ramparts in the Early Modern period, as siege cannon became more common and more powerful.

Now, it may be that certain aspects of the bocage modeling could be improved, and perhaps in game bocage is too tough in certain ways. Regardless, against most types of incoming fire, bocage should definitely be tougher to breach than a low stone wall.

Not to mention that many bocage rows started out as a low stone wall which, over the centuries, accreted a mound over the top of it and acts as the anchor for equally old (and concomittantly tough) thorn bush roots.