Christmas Bone

[A Canadian Cat]

I think that all this argument comes from differing views about what CM actually is or should be.

For some it seems to be (or they want CM to be) a supreme commander simulation where you pass orders down the command chain to your men. In such a view command delays seem a good and realistic idea.

But for me it appears that CM is not that game. Its concept bases on the idea that you are not only the supreme commander (battalion, company, whatever forces you have at your disposal) but rather you are EVERY commander, at every level, from the main HQ down the chain to every squad and team leader. You make decisions at every level, for every lowly commander, not only the main HQ. That's why any command delay does not make any sense in CM.

Spot on. That was pretty much what I was going to write after reading @Dadekster's very well though out post. I am in agreement with you.

[A Canadian Cat]

Very well said. I knew things were moving too fast calling out all those steps makes it clear.

* During that last year of WWII, CW brigades were able to plan and prepare a brigade attack - from a standing start to H-Hour – in 2 hours, in the right circumstances. That is; the thought-to-action time for the Brigadier was as low as 2 hours. The actual advance/battle was on top of that. I think that is rather impressive, although it would make for a stunningly boring scenario.

The thing is, at Brigade level that 2 hours (or more) before H hour would be before the scenario. Of course all your earlier comments about the company and platoon level leaders actually executing the plan and responding to the battle field events still hold.

** the perfect terrain knowledge possessed by every CM player is, I think, a significant factor in speeding up the flow of CM battles c.f. 'real battles'. Resolving that would, I think, have more impact, and slow battles more, than imposing command delays, because command delays would naturally follow from not knowing exactly what's out there. I have little expectation that 'terrain FOW' will be part of CM any time soon.

That and our perfect knowledge of the enemy lintel is certainly a big speed up.

Oh having terrain FOW would be really cool. It could even be scenario dependent. Have the bulk of the terrain rendered as a topo map - if there were good maps available or just black if there were not. That would slow us down.

[JasonC]

Dadekster is right about the downward, and JonS about the planning, but decision loops are even longer than either says because there is a whole incoming arc that creates its own delays. JonS is partially referring to that in his recce step and the unnatural perfect view of terrain players have. Basically the information flow *to* the commanders is full of noise, false reports, delays, mistimings, surmises by lower officers and NCOs and staffs that are half accurate and half nonsense. They have to assess it, each piece and the total picture. Their own confidence in their assessment of what is happening has to rise to their personal decision level.

Impulsive commanders may have that very low - and chase shadows, get distracted by every false report, change their plan way too often and introduce chaos below as part of their formation hears about the change of plan and part does not. Indecisive commander may place it high, and while they wait for certainty their subordinates wind up making their own decisions, without coordinating those with one another. Good decisive commanders decide before they know, on sound guesses about enemy intentions or what is likely, that experience has taught them - and still get things wrong because they were fed incorrect information, and have to show their command ability again in adapting rapidly to those jars and jolts.

There is a constant trade off between an area just behind contact where the most is known accurately about enemy action (very front, info drops off again because men are heads down and disoriented, panicked, busy trying not to bleed to death, little things like that), but the least is known about what the rest of the friendly force is doing or planning - and higher up, where in principle all information has been gathered and collated and sorted and assessed, and a brilliant effective reply crafted that answers every threat with economy of force, "just so" - but in reality a quarter of the info is bogus and all of it is old.

Do I want all that simulated so exactly that I have no control of my forces? I do not. Do I want to play only the front line sarge or lieutenant with the best info about the immediate front but no knowledge of the rest of my own army's actions and plans? No. Do I want to play only the highest local commander with everything delayed and half my decisions just ignored by subordinates who dismiss my orders as irrelevant because out of date? No.

Strategy games must give players more control over elements than people can actually muster in real life. They need to carefully control the command span and number of levels they let the player coordinate, however, or they make godlike nonsense. The wider they expand the span the player can coordinate, the more realistic sand they need to put in the gears. But the trade off between playability as a strategy game and realism as a simulation has no perfect solution. Just like the right command level to make decisions, it is always a trade off.

[poesel]

+1 to terrain FOW

That would also be great for hiding entrenchments that are dug into the mesh of the battlefield.

I'm wondering if we had this discussion if we had a 'hard core' mode where you only get to switch between HQs at level 1 view and you could only give orders to units in C2.

[Childress]

+1 to terrain FOW

Which eliminates historical scenarios. Or limits them to no replays. That's not what CM is about. Unknown or partially known terrain factors is only suitable for QBs drawn on the fly. Also a battle conducted in an urban zone, a well mapped out city like Arnhem or Berlin, does not much suffer from the mystery factor. Unless, perhaps, it's bombed to cinders prior to entry by the enemy. Terrain FOW will never happen.

[dan/california]

I would say this is my two cents but it probably isn't worth that much.......

Thee game needs a formal planning stage instead of the current opening turn/set up phase. At an absolute minimum this phase should include phase lines with times of arrival, movement corridors, and general areas that it is acceptable to area fire blindly. The area fire designations could be tied to the phase lines. Such that area fire into a copse of woods is allowed until the plan says it should be occupied by your own side.

Now here is the first trick, any orders that are within the units preplanned movement and fire zones have zero delay. The second trick is make a unit do something outside of it briefed and mapped plan you get delays. These delays are affected by all the factors already discussed exhaustively above.

You can reflect the brittleness of a given forces command structure by through things like allowing narrower bands of free movement for lower quality forces. Russian conscripts weren't allowed to change their line of attack, or fall back from defensive position without orders. A modern U.S. armored calvary platoon has a rather broader freedom of action. This would reflect that with a reasonable level of programming effort. Especially if some the specifics about who gets what are left scenario designers instead of trying to make an AI parse it from scratch each time.

[Wodin]

Another here in agreement to your post..

I'm sure there are ways to replicate training and doctrine that aren't command delays..in another game at a higher scale command delays would be great..but not at this scale with this sort of gameplay where you are all leaders from squad upwards. Now if you where giving the order to the Coy leader or higher who then using tac ai issued orders down the line to carry out your order..then the gameplay would suit command delay as this would take into consideration the forming up and and passing along the order etc etc. I.E Command Ops has command delays and it works well for that game.

If CM can get it so the Russian player has lots of expendable troops and maybe his soldiers are slower to hit the deck when under fire but command delays just seem odd at this scale with this sort of gameplay.

Or maybe you can only give an order to a platoon once every three turns this would be a way to restrict the player from being to decisive when using early war Russian troops for instance.

Then again it's a tricky thing training levels etc..take Cholm for instance..they held out against a much bigger force in terrible conditions and many where reservists or supply troops. I think troops on defense shouldn't be to harshly penalised compared to them being on the attack.

I think that all this argument comes from differing views about what CM actually is or should be.

For some it seems to be (or they want CM to be) a supreme commander simulation where you pass orders down the command chain to your men. In such a view command delays seem a good and realistic idea.

But for me it appears that CM is not that game. Its concept bases on the idea that you are not only the supreme commander (battalion, company, whatever forces you have at your disposal) but rather you are EVERY commander, at every level, from the main HQ down the chain to every squad and team leader. You make decisions at every level, for every lowly commander, not only the main HQ. That's why any command delay does not make any sense in CM.

As I see it, it's mostly a micro scale tactical game in its roots and even if you take it up to battalion level or even higher, it still is that game. It still has all the micromanagement that it was designed for despite the larger scale. And that's why it can't function as a purely supreme commander simulation. You can't simply drop all the micromanagement and give more power to the AI to carry out your orders. If that was the case then sure, some delay would be appropriate. But it's not and delays simply don't make any sense if you look closely at the game concept.

CM is an abstraction, it gives you godlike powers, sure. But it's designed that way and does a great job doing exactly that, and adding delay simply doesn't fit it. Because it's just not that kind of game.

[JasonC]

Ever notice that everyone seems to automatically assume that pushing initiative downward and forward will automatically result in instant response and perfect decisions by imaginary action superheroes out of a Sgt Rock comic book?

Next time you play CM, you can't touch any of the controls. You have to give all of your orders to your girlfriend, a niece, or the neighbor across the way who doesn't know anything about video games, let alone the tactical situation. They can listen to you or just push buttons as they like, entirely up to them. Hey, you pushed the decision down and forward, that must make it better, right? Even if the implementer is Gomer Pyle, and the orderer who thus gets ignored is George Patton...

Moral - command push exists for a reason. There is an actual problem it exists to solve - not everyone is Sgt Rock, and large armies have to use lots of people who are not expert at much of anything. Therefore, sometimes actual obedience is helpful - it distributes military expertise and thereby multiplies the effective supply of that very scarce commodity.

[costard]

Good one Jason. Scarcity of intellectual capability, scarcity of intelligence (accurate knowledge of the circumstances), scarcity of resources all needing to be managed.

Command delays turn the game into less of a game - I'm not inclined to sit around waiting for my lost tank column to turn up, wondering why they're not where they are supposed to be. Realism has its limits as far as entertainment is concerned.

[poesel]

Which eliminates historical scenarios. Or limits them to no replays. That's not what CM is about. Unknown or partially known terrain factors is only suitable for QBs drawn on the fly. Also a battle conducted in an urban zone, a well mapped out city like Arnhem or Berlin, does not much suffer from the mystery factor. Unless, perhaps, it's bombed to cinders prior to entry by the enemy. Terrain FOW will never happen.

Well, I don't know if terrain FOW will happen or not but I think there is a small misunderstanding:

I guess you think about FOW like those grey areas where you can't see anything. Terrain FOW (for me) is for example about not being able to see a trench (a real one that is dug into a field) until some of your soldiers has LOS to and spotted it. Currently such a structure would be visible to the enemy right from the start of the game. Or that you could not see every broken fence anywhere on the map.

Not having FOW means that currently all things have to sit on top of the mesh that makes up the map. Take a close look on trenches or foxholes. They are always ON the ground and not below it.

That is one of the abstractions of CM that you get used to but are not true to the 1:1 representation we have in many other parts of the game.

[Michael Emrys]

I'll end it for now on that and thanks for making it this far if you have...

Outstanding post! :cool: Thanks for bringing some much needed clarity to what has been at times a pretty muddled discussion. I think you have defined the desired behavior well, but whether that can be brought about within the existing code might be another matter. I would like to think that BFC has pondered the problem along these lines, and if they haven't found a way to implement it...Well, at this point I have no suggestions. I can only hope that something along the lines of what you have described can be done, soon or late.

Michael

[Childress]

Poesel71: So, you're proposing Terrain FOW Light. Fine by me.

I recall reading that the placement of trenches and foxhole in CMBN was determined by coding challenges. The sunken trenches in Shock Force were always visible to the attacking side.

[JonS]

Which eliminates historical scenarios. Or limits them to no replays.

That would be a personal choice, not an inviolate rule.

Unknown or partially known terrain factors is only suitable for QBs drawn on the fly.

I completely fail to see how that follows.

Also a battle conducted in an urban zone, a well mapped out city like Arnhem or Berlin, does not much suffer from the mystery factor.

That really is not true. The following image is a crop taken from the excellent 1944 1:25k map of Arnhem used by the British:

Now, as excellent as it is, use that map and tell me:

* which buildings are 2-story, and which are 3-story?

* how many buildings are there in the grey built-up area? How large are they? How many storys have they? Where are there gaps between these buildings?

* Which ones have internal connections/doors, and which are standalone?

* Which building-walls have windows and/or doors, and which are blank?

* How large are each of the churches?

* indicate all the fence-walls, and gates in the fence-walls.

* which parts of the built-up area are parks?

* How deep are the ponds?

* apart from the three or four patches of woodland (orchards?), are there any trees south of the river? Where are they?

* exactly how far and what can I see from the high ground north of Sonsbeek?

* Exactly where on this map the bridge that Frost defended is located?^

* etc. etc.

This point here is that that map is a very good map. You could happily use it for conducting battalion and brigade level operations, and directing artillery fire. You could also happily use it for conducting company and platoon navigation. But you could NOT use it to dispel the kind of terrain FOW that is important at the section-platoon-company level.

Terrain FOW will never happen.

Never is a long time, and there have been various efforts in various games to enact it. As I say; I don't expect it in CM anytime soon, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to see it edging it's way in over time (and, arguably, a slight amount of Terrain FOW already exists in that obstacles and fortifications are currently subject to FOW)

Jon

^ its southern end is located at the 'S' in Slachthuis, and it extends NE across the river to to join the road that heads off north along the western side of the lower pond. That's right: THE major terrain objective of the entire MARKET GARDEN operation wasn't even marked on the maps being used ... talk about terrain FOW!

[Childress]

Getting a bit tired of your gainsaying everything I say, Jon. So the girlfriend and I kidnapped your Australian Cattledog and will keep him until we see some improvement. I'm holding his tags . Rambunctious fellow, this one, so we had to sedate him. And what grown man names a male dog 'Whimsy' anyway?

[JonS]

Well, perhaps you could try not saying trivially gainsayable nonsense? You never know - it might just work!

[altipueri]

In other words for most captains/lieutenants and men its walk/drive down that road until you get blown up.

Take your turn as the point man. Hope that when you get hit it doesn't actually hurt that much and you get a ticket home, or an instant wipe-out. Being cooked by a flamethrower is to be avoided.

Bloody glad I wasn't there.

[sburke]

So the girlfriend and I kidnapped your Australian Cattledog and will keep him until we see some improvement. I'm holding his tags . Rambunctious fellow, this one, so we had to sedate him. And what grown man names a male dog 'Whimsy' anyway?

Heh heh that was worth a few chuckles

[Mord]

Well, perhaps you could try not saying trivially gainsayable nonsense? You never know - it might just work!

Don't like the dog, huh?

Mord.

[Lt Belenko]

Getting a bit tired of your gainsaying everything I say, Jon. So the girlfriend and I kidnapped your Australian Cattledog and will keep him until we see some improvement. I'm holding his tags . Rambunctious fellow, this one, so we had to sedate him. And what grown man names a male dog 'Whimsy' anyway?

When I had a Cattledog I lost 30 pounds (13.6 KG). I had to walk the beast 25 miles (40 km) a week to keep it calm. Damn. Why didn't I think of sedation?

[BLSTK]

So the girlfriend and I kidnapped your Australian Cattledog and will keep him until we see some improvement. I'm holding his tags . Rambunctious fellow, this one, so we had to sedate him. And what grown man names a male dog 'Whimsy' anyway?

Yo Childress, you should see what he calls his "girlfriend".

[BletchleyGeek]

76mm has a point regarding the level of training of troops. Something which would work would be that changes in orders (such as removing the current order they're executing and issuing another one replacing it) took an amount of time to register that depended on the training of the troops.

Pixeltruppen already carry some inertia with them (i.e. running soldiers might take some time to stop and change direction), but I wonder if such 'delays' are just a matter of the animation having to stop, or that time is actually dependent of how well drilled are those troops (target acquisition ability does indeed vary with training).

And JonS remark regarding 'terrain FOW' is totally spot on. Assessing possible approaches to a target and defensive positions both take time - they're required in order to formulate a plan. Recon along possible approaches does take time, either in real-time and WEGO. You need to send someone along that route to see what lies along, and that will delay you in both formulating and executing your plan. One hard-to-get CM skill is that of reducing delays by minimizing the amount of time units are 'idle'.

The thing is that in WEGO, the time for the latter, and identifying good hull-down/turret-down positions, isn't 'simulation time' but rather 'wall clock time' (i.e. the time the player spends zooming in and out or panning the camera to inspect the terrain). In real-time, such delay would depend on the level of familiarity with camera controls and clever hot-keys setup.

CM is a game where the player is not only the commander, but also needs to do staff tasks. In WEGO mode, going over these doesn't consume any 'simulation cycles'. I think that MikeyD remark about 'self-restraint' referred to keeping in mind this.

[Dadekster]

Thank you to those who complimented my earlier somewhat lengthy post. I am not good at doing the multiple quotes thing in a reply so apologies about that.

I'd like to preface this post by saying ahead of time that there is no perfect solution and I think we all understand that being adults. There will always be a tradeoff between fun gameplay and hardcore realism. On top of that this game also means different things for different people. Some play it as a competitive thing and enjoy the challenge of outplaying either a human or AI opponent. Some may play it because they simply enjoy the sight of military might rolling across the landscape. Some play to see if they can do a better job then what happened in history. To each of these people command delays means something different....which is why we are having this debate.

I play this game because I was always interested in WW2 from an early age. Combine that with my time at the NTC when we were still bad ass OPFOR Russians flying around the desert fighting in mock MILES battles at the regimental and battalion level and you have a game that appeals to me. I have a closer affinity to this then say WitP:AE which although is also WW2, doesn't involve me being on a floating target or wading ashore somewhere humid. Much respect to those that served doing that or are currently btw.

I like this game because to me it strikes a good balance between playability and realism. Part of the realism I desire for me is that if I am going to be the commander at all levels in the game then I should face some of those same issues they did. One of those being was that your troopers did not react like robots the second an order went out. Knowing and accounting for this delay is a very important detail to combat operations. It's the price you pay for giving an order and then being forced to wait for the result and not being able to do a darn thing about it. This is simulated rather well by the WeGo system in that you have no control for a minute as units carry out orders. Problem with that is once again that if an unforeseen event occurs early on you truly are screwed perhaps. If it happens in that last five seconds...fortunes of war? I will for the moment just blissfully ignore the real time mode for now.

Combined with existing TacAI I'd love to see a system that allows lower level units commands that could be executed immediately as a result of them being issued at the squad/vehicle level with others not being available as these require input from higher up. These units would be eligible to receive more complicated orders; however, this would be based on what the LT's stats for lack of a better word would be. Maybe this LT can run his whole platoon at the same time giving complex orders to squared away squad leaders making it look like the whole platoon moves as one...or maybe he's F'd up and it takes him two minutes to get one squad orders and moving them in any direction. These 'stats' would be modified by things like experience, morale, equipment, training, and whether say the LT is being shot at himself or if Battalion is currently experiencing strafing runs. I have heard the last two do impact command efficiency.

As we go up the CoC it continues. Company commander with lots of experience can issue complex orders at a rapid pace to his LT's. What that translates into is open for discussion. Maybe you can only order a unit to move so far or so many actions in a single command sequence? This would allow freedom for squad leaders to do what they need to do without them being able to charge all around the map like a mini Patton. Not sure what to do about RT other than maybe not worry about command delays as if you are playing RT command delays are probably not your cup of tea? With something like this in place though I can see people not so eager to throw their platoon/company HQ into the fray so readily perhaps since doing so takes away combat capability...and rightly so imo.

Ok, so there was a proposal. Not sure I really wanted to go this route when I first started typing but there you have it. Trash it if you want but remember I bruise easily

[Erwin]

+1.

Some cardboard games simulate this by only allowing a certain number of orders per turn for a formation depending on its training level. We should be able to do better with the aid of computers, but maybe something similar would work if we are not going to have global delays as in CM1.

Regarding the CM1 delay system people complained about it taking maybe 2+ minutes to get units moving down the road,

But, that seems to display a lack of skill in handling the delay system. Yes it's quite possible to build up huge delays, but not necessary. For greener units you would need to give simpler orders - ie FEWER orders at one time... and that would usually get em moving in under 30 seconds.

Personally, I only let the CM1 delays build up to over a minute when organizing a transport convoy in safe territory, when it's not that urgent that they move immediately, and when I don't want to have to attend to that formation every turn.

A good rule of thumb to avoid massive delays in CM1 is that it's best to only issue orders so long as the delay increase added by placing an extra waypoint isn't larger than the initial delay for the first waypoint you place. If it is, you are usually better off leaving the placement of any extra waypoint(s) for the next turn.

It also puzzled me in CM1 that if players were so bothered by the delay system, why not simply reduce the exponential delay increase so that it was harder to build up the massive delays?

It wasn't perfect, but the CM1 delay system imo did a great job simulating the RL challenges of getting units of different experience levels moving and cooperating in a coordinated fashion.

[A Canadian Cat]

You could also happily use it for conducting company and platoon navigation. But you could NOT use it to dispel the kind of terrain FOW that is important at the section-platoon-company level.

Indeed. My suggestion for terrain FOW would be to have a top map like that under the game field and the terrain you know about covers it up. So as you are looking at the battle field you can use the map for what maps are good for - picking a general route and making sure you take the high ground etc. But you would still need to do actual recon to conduct a proper assault.

[JasonC]

Erwin - someone else plays Panzer, it would seem. Yes I love the orders system in that game. It requires platoons to move and fight together, basically, if the whole formation is lower experience level, and in tighter groups too.

The mechanism is simply that the whole order budget for the turn depends on the number of still-alive units and the formation experience level, and orders can be shared between units close enough to each other. What counts as close enough again changes with the experience level - conscripts have to be stacked, elite can be 2 hexes apart, etc. High quality formations get about as many orders as units and can do anything they like turn after turn. Low quality formations have to move shoot and communicate in tight bundles; if they spread out then only a few of them move each turn. Works just great - if anything the order limits could be tightened considerably, and the ratio of orders to live units could fall as losses are taken instead of being about constant for a given experience level.

As for the delay comment, I agree. I didn't find it too bad in CMx1, personally, though there are cases where it broke, notably column "follow me" moves on twisty roads, that are conceptually very simple. Basically when the relationship between the number of waypoints and the complexity of the order broke, the system could. I don't think that is so hard to "patch". As for the penalty for additional orders, if that fell for each subsequent order one could make the max command delay 3 or 4 times the delay for a simple order, and that would work fine (convergent series added delays).

I would love to see some version of capped command delays and order limits varying by quality a la Panzer - as long as we also got the proposed "follow me" order, which I want anyway just to reduce waypoint micromanagement in column moves.

One man's opinion...