CM Ergonomics

[womble]

Why is anyone surprised that when you make a game that repays giving commands to every team or even pair of infantry soldiers, the playable scale shrinks?

Only if you use a metric that has some basis in "number of games played per hour in front of the CM screen". That very detail translates, in my opinion, into a more complete depiction, at whatever scale your hardware can handle, if you choose to go that way. I'm entirely happy to spend an hour or two on some turns of a reinforced Battalion scale game (played WeGo with every squad split in the setup phase), and really envy the various large AARs, as I've not yet played vs human at that scale.

As VAB says: an hour is an hour, whether it's 15 turns of a platoon-sized game vs the AI, or one turn of a monster battle against a human.

[Erwin]

"But if that is all you make you are demanding that only people without jobs or lives play CM."

Jason, I agree with everything you said. I am NOT advocating that we/BF only produce huge scenarios.

I wuz simply trying to point out that us old time CM1 players actually enjoyed the huge scenarios. Yes, they are much more time-consuming in CM2 than in CM1. However, the ability to have operational-level games with a reinforced regiment on each side is what turns us on. We miss the mobility of CM1... armored columns racing from one side of the map to reinforce another side and it took 4-6+ turns to get anywhere. We enjoyed the need (and resources) to have a reinforced mech platoon or even an entire company with armor formations in reserve as a "Fire Brigade".

There is nothing wrong with small scenarios and certainly they are much easier to design. So, am sure people who prefer small scenarios will never run out of them.

It is a lot more work to produce a huge scenario, and even more daunting to make a campaign that features huge scenarios.

In fact, I worry that campaigns themselves appear to have become an "endangered species".

They will always be greatly outnumbered by small scenarios. So, you don't ever have to worry.

[JasonC]

Erwin says I will never runout of small scenarios. Um, how to put this - I already ran out. There aren't more than a handful as small as I like. I am currently playing a tiny QB meeting engagement, infantry only, vs a human opponent, turn based PBEM. And we each have a full company with attachments. This is literally the smallest the game goes in QB settings and it is as big as I like em and bigger than my preference by a factor of 2 or 3. We have to add whole battalions and delete practically everything, because the designers thought a battalion command net would be normal C&C. And I would happily cut our points available in half, and still consider it not small or tiny, but medium.

The same creeping giantism hits the time settings. The bare minimum is 30 minutes. In our game we were in contact by the end of minute 2 and after 10 minutes the front has gone static through mutual danger. It shouldn't end at 10 but we definitely won't need 30 - even with whole companies. 20 turns would be plenty.

You say they are easier to make - but only if people actually make them. Meanwhile I can find any number of entire companies of the heaviest tanks on multiple kilometer maps - that I will never play and about which I do not care. Oh, and the BF supported scenario site here doesn't even tell me scenario size.

I'd say those "ergonomics" are pretty well hopeless...

[Skwabie]

A heavy company plus supporting units on a 10 km x 10 km open map = heaven

Lots of firepower, lots of room to maneuver, not that many mouse clicks.

or.... BF could work on ergonomics. Much better solution!!

[SeinfeldRules]

I think the issue with making small scenarios, or at least the issue I'm having with them, is that there is a lack of publicly available material on small unit actions on the Eastern Front, especially during this time frame... Most accounts talk of divisions and armies, not battalions and their individual companies. So it can be hard to come up with a realistic situation that a company or less would experience on any given day. I've made 20+ CMFI "scenarios" (the majority not being released) with the largest being 2 plain engineer companies on a 1024x1024 map, because the US Army Green Books has great accounts and excellent maps depicting unit locations down to the individual company. It's easy coming up with a plausible small unit situation when you have that level of detail in the accounts. Red Thunder doesn't have a similar resource for me to use. We have great, period topo maps of the area, but which of the countless tiny villages, treelines and were actually defended? Some basic ideas of typical day-to-day combat situations and a basic idea of what the map would consist of would go a long way towards the development of these smaller scenarios. It's far "easier" to model the big battles because that's what the majority of the source material talks about!

[JasonC]

Hmm. If that is truly the issue then it is easily supplied. All you have to know is typical missions and roles, the tasks that a platoon to a company would typically be expected to perform. Every operational narrative suggests just scads of these as I read through them. It is just a matter of reading between the lines and realizing what must be happening on the ground, to make up that short bit of operational narrative.

For example, a Russian mech force has a basic unit that gets even the smallest fighting task - a T-34 platoon with its riders. Russian motorcycle recon gets recon and security tasks, and would have a couple of armored cars or perhaps light tanks, to one platoon as half squads on jeeps. A motor rifle platoon would normally get an instant defense mission, but occasional securing a crossing site or a night recon - and would have only its squad infantry, an ATR or 2, a sniper, maybe 82mm support from 3 tubes.

The force mix cross the tactical task practically defines the scenario. The opposing force should be something it can handle, thus comparably small.

That covers the smallest cases. The next level is just crossing any two such, including themselves again, with a mission to match. E.g. Two rifle platoons on a night "raid", not just recon but attack by stealth - a bog standard infantry mission.

[Michael Emrys]

CMx2 is simply a game at a different unit scale, down one from the previous. But scenario designers have not sufficiently reacted to this obvious fact, in my opinion. The tiniest infantry only quick battle clocks in at a full company with supporting heavy weapons on each side, which is about the same total command span and intensity as a *battalion* scale fight in CMx1. Nobody would have called a CMx1 battalion scale fight "tiny". By the time one is commanding whole CMx2 reinforced battalions - which the command structure determined unit selection screens positively encourage, incidentally - you have the command span requirements and micromanagement intensity of regimental sized CMx1 games. Which people tried, but as essays in giantism (To the Volga e.g.) or as whole campaigns.

Then people wonder why the learning curve to CMx2 seems daunting to many.

Yep. That's what I've been saying since BN came out. In CMx1 I routinely played with a reinforced battalion. In CMx2 I play with reinforced companies mostly. And that is all the work I want to do...sometimes more.

Michael

[Doug Williams]

We need far more CMx2 scenarios set at the single platoon scale, and the bulk of them should be set at the single company scale. Yes a few die hards will want giant ones, fine. But if that is all you make you are demanding that only people without jobs or lives play CM. Face the reality that CMx2 is a smaller unit scale game and that therefore the *easily playable* action size it can depict is a *full unit scale lower* than was readily playable in CMx1.

Well said, Jason. I couldn't agree more (with your entire post, not just the part I quoted). I find that the bulk of my playing, either H2H or VS AI, QB or Scenario, is at the Medium size force pick or smaller.

I'm currently involved in a three hour Huge H2H QB (my first ever), and it presses me to do a turn a week on work weeks, and even then I rarely bother to split my squads and don't feel like I am giving my best effort.

When I'm playing the smaller battles, I do split squads and pay far more attention to details, thus giving my opponent a better challenge.

@Erwin, good thread. If I could add to your wish list, I would like a faster/easier way to look at maps when selecting them for a QB. Not sure the best way to accomplish this, but there has to be a better way than what we have now.

[Baneman]

... I would like a faster/easier way to look at maps when selecting them for a QB. Not sure the best way to accomplish this, but there has to be a better way than what we have now.

Agree with this, finding a map is a bit of a chore.

Staying in the ergonomics arena - it would be nice to have an option to "lock" the End of Turn 'Big Red Button' ie. have it generate an "Are You Sure ?" dialogue.

Obviously some people may not want or use it - especially vs the AI, but an option to set that would be useful.

[tdogg]

Doesn't always have to be historical to the letter, there's enough room in bagration to make scenarios through the eyes of a platoon.

On ergonomics, I would love for more support for big scenarios. In steel beasts we have a nifty command for road movement where you hold down shift with a platoon selected and all the waypoints auto plot along the nearest road. Really handy. The biggest, hassle in big scenarios is all the transport management. Would be nice to alleviate the strain with more group movement functions.

[womble]

A toggle to turn off edge-scrolling.

[Hellas]

Do mouse modes like RTS, FPS count as ergonomic functionalities?

If so, I would like a mode in which the player can view the battlefield only from the positions and height of his units. Moving over the battlefield = only possible by moving from unit to unit, no flying over the map. Kind of a hardcore mode. Very small scenarios and even playing the AI could become exciting with it.

[c3k]

We need far more CMx2 scenarios set at the single platoon scale, and the bulk of them should be set at the single company scale. Yes a few die hards will want giant ones, fine. But if that is all you make you are demanding that only people without jobs or lives play CM.

Agree with the desirability of platoon actions. There's plenty of material out there to create decently realistic, yet playable, battles.

More is better.

Although, I don't agree that it cannot be played at higher levels. A multi-battalion attack opens up a whole new challenge. The maneuvering, support, and reserves are important, as are resupplying and moving beyond the range of your artillery support.

I would enjoy seeing small campaigns. Linked battles with no more than a single company as the focus.

As for the OP: agree with all.

[Combatintman]

From the perspective of somebody who has designed missions and someone who has been fiddling around with a platoon sized scenario for a while my experience is that the reason there aren't that many of them is that they are bloody difficult to do.

I will caveat this by saying that my stuff is CMSF and I design solely for play against the AI but even so the principles are the same. The problem at this level with this type of game is that you have limited manoeuvre elements which severely limit your design options.

As an example - let's take the oft quoted 3 to 1 ratio for attack versus defence. That means if you design to those odds the platoon will be faced by a section/squad. That means that the human player has to be the attacker if you are going to appeal to the average player. Taking it further then - let's say that the human player has a bad turn as they are attempting to find the enemy and loses a section/squad in that turn. Many players will bail out at that point. Game over and where was the fun in that? On the other side of the coin, let's say that the player gets lucky and shreds the enemy in the one action spot ... game over ... total victory ... again, where's the fun in that?

While this game can do action at the platoon level I really don't think it is optimised for it because generally the smallest group you can split to is between 3 and 4 individuals - put them in one action spot and watch them get shredded by an SMG squad/section or half squad/section and you lose 10% of your manoeuvre/combat element in one go. FPS games do this level much, much better.

[JasonC]

Combatintman - sorry, that's just silly. First, 3-1 is nonsense on this scale. Second, if you are designing for play vs the AI one way (a human side designated), then it is only the human side force size you need to keep at the manageable scale. And then AI will never be able to use its force as well as a human could, so the practical odds ratios move again. Third, on single mistakes or turns mattering, um, that will always be true, and is even more prevalent when losing a key tank than a half squad. But a platoon sized force can readily lose a half squad and continue the mission. It is not something designers need to protect players from. You can't do things like force the player to move over a tiny choke point that is TRPed for a howitzer barrage, but such scripting is bad design to start with. About it.

[Jock Tamson]

Do mouse modes like RTS, FPS count as ergonomic functionalities?

If so, I would like a mode in which the player can view the battlefield only from the positions and height of his units. Moving over the battlefield = only possible by moving from unit to unit, no flying over the map. Kind of a hardcore mode. Very small scenarios and even playing the AI could become exciting with it.

Agree, I have suggested something similar in the past:

I would like to see more hardcore options:

Tracers only appear for weapons that historically would have used them.

Locked camera - to move the camera during planning and replay you have to select a unit and then you can't move the camera more than, say, 100 metres in any direction from the selected unit's position. I wouldn't limit it vertically.

Plotting limits - moves can only be plotted a maximum of, say, 300m from the unit's position to limit the amount of line of sight checking that can be done on the map during planning.

These wouldn't appeal to everyone but they might particularly appeal to people like me who only play the AI.

The camera and plotting suggestions might appeal to H2H players who want a game where their units can not be so easily scouted out by noise during replay, and which would introduce challenges with terrain management.

[Jock Tamson]

To start, these are my suggestions and desired improvements which I think would greatly speed up play, and possibly even increase realism:

.

I would add to these - being able to order a vehicle to disembark passengers at a vehicle waypoint. The logic would be that it causes the vehicle to pause until all passengers are disembarked. Passengers would then follow their own waypoints in the way they do now.

This would make it very straightforward (in WEGO planning particularly) to have your dismounts get out the vehicle and advance ahead of it while the vehicle follows at a slow pace.

[LukeFF]

Right-click capability for the Standard set of controls to bring up the orders menu (as is the case with the FPS & RTS control modes).