Bridge Max Weight Capacity. Interesting feature down the road or just a pain in the A?

[Sequoia]

The new stream feature got me thinking about bridges and I recalled during my time in Germany in the late 70's early 80's almost every bridge had a sign listing the max weight capacity.  One could have a side road with bridges able to sustain things up to a truck or possibly an armored car but no heavier armored vehicle. This would be set by the mapmaker. Heavier vehicles would simply not be able to plot a movement path over the bridge eliminating the need to code bridges collapsing under the vehicle. Would bridges with a lesser weight capacity be something interesting you'd perhaps like to see in CM down the road, or is this a feature that you think would cause more frustration then what it's worth?

[Rokko]

This is already in the game I think. Tigers for instance can only cross the larger stone bridges for instance and no wodden bridges (talking about CMRT here).

[JonS]

Correct; it's already in the game. In some cases the limits are obvious (no vehicles on the wooden foot bridge, for example) but unfortunately the UI hasn't quite caught up with it yet, leading to a bit of confusion when some units won't cross an apparently perfectly functional bridge.

[Melchior]

In which case it would be awesome if the UI would notify you in some way that the selected unit cannot carry out the directed path *before* you hit the go button. I've lost more than a few Shermans to bizarre pathfinding moves when they decided the best way to cross the tiny creek was to take a nice drive down Pak 40 Road. 

[JonS]

In which case it would be awesome if the UI would notify you in some way that the selected unit cannot carry out the directed path *before* you hit the go button.

It will ... if you let it. The movement arrow changes to a 'NO!' icon when you hover over excluded terrain. If you're worried about a particular move, float the cursor along the path you expect the vehicle or unit to take, and check there are no impassable tiles along the way before you hit 'go'.

(the exception to this is, again, bridges, which don't have any explicit indication of what can and cannot pass.

[MikeyD]

I recall there was a recent issue where someone had inadvertently placed the wrong bridge type in a scenario stopping the movement of heavy armor. The bridge had to get swapped out to get the scenario to work the way it had ought. If you're mostly playing Shermans, Stugs and Pz IVs its an issue that doesn't come up. When King Tiger and Sturmtiger arrive on the scene it becomes an issue. Like JonS said, if you try placing a KT movement waypoint onto a bridge and it won't accept it that means the bridge is of the wrong weight class.

[Myles Keogh]

I recall there was a recent issue where someone had inadvertently placed the wrong bridge type in a scenario stopping the movement of heavy armor. The bridge had to get swapped out to get the scenario to work the way it had ought. If you're mostly playing Shermans, Stugs and Pz IVs its an issue that doesn't come up. When King Tiger and Sturmtiger arrive on the scene it becomes an issue. Like JonS said, if you try placing a KT movement waypoint onto a bridge and it won't accept it that means the bridge is of the wrong weight class.

That was CMMG's "Counterattack at Son" scenario.  The author used the neat looking "canal bridge" to represent the Bailey Bridge at Son, but no one, the author or his playtesters, noticed that the canal bridge couldn't support the weight of either the German Panthers or the British Cromwells (not exactly behemoths).  So, it led to the absurd result of the British being stuck on one side of the canal and the Germans on the other.

Eventually, a replacement scenario with a workable bridge was uploaded to the Repository, but a lot a of people found out in a frustrating way that CMx2 does indeed take into account that armor can only cross certain types of bridges.