CMx2 WWII? Scenarios & Quick Battles?

[markshot]

IanL,

You know you can see the impact of Moore's Law everyplace in our society.

But what is little spoken of, but is equally significant is productivity.  COGNOS was a productivity company.  Putting more development power in the hands of your everyday programmer to deliver applications.

Back in the 1970s with COBOL, the creation of a basic report could take a programmer months of work.  When I retired, such a report could be done with any number of tools like Excel or Access in a few minutes.  In fact, in many cases, an end user could do it without a CS degree.

The revolution in productivity is simply amazing and rivals the industrial revolution.

[A Canadian Cat]

For sure. And then they did it again and put reporting capabilities into the hands of end users. No programming required to get a new report. I was part of that process. Of course we hit lots of challenges because the average business user doesn't know SQL but that was what our tool (Impromptu) supported. Fun times, successful product, lots of challenging work.

[markshot]

Well, this was one of the reasons Microsoft introduced QBE (Query by Example) for the Access product.  It wasn't as representative as SQL, but it was graphical.

I heard Dr. E.F. Codd speak one day, the father of relational DB and SQL.  To think, IBM had it all under their roof long before Oracle and SyBase, but they actually suppressed his work for years before starting late on DB2.  REASON:  IBM had their own hierarchical DB, IMS.  It was a nice revenue stream ... so rather than being the future, they played catch up.

I ended up running the DB evaluation project/deployment for a large financial firm ... S&P.  I selected Oracle despite that it was highly inefficient and most of Wall St. was buying SyBase.  But it was clear that Oracle had the right approach ... run on everything.  DB transactions were going to just be a commodity you bought and not hardware vendor you were married too.

Can you believe I actually bought CMBO in 2000?  It was like banging my head against the wall.  I had no concept of terrain, lanes of fire, combined arms ...  After air combat, ground combat was a whole new ball game.  My wife was watching a TV series the other night.  I said "terrible ambush".  She said "No, it is a Japanese column and those are Chinese fighting for their country."  I said, "They only hit the front and not the back forcing them to be boxed in.  And they are positioned against the Sun.  Their muzzle flashes are easier to spot."  She said, "Well, they don't have good weapons ..."  I said, "if they win this fight, then maybe they could pick up a couple of Japanese MGs, ammo, and grenades".  CMBO was my introduction to the Art of War. 

About this thread ...   I realized I asked the wrong question.  Is there enough content?  My days of CMx2 will more be determined my movie viewing than scenario count.  Just a single battle can easily require 3-7 movie views per turn.  If you think you will win by looking at the icons from 800M up, you are going to get your butt handed to you. 

[MikeyD]

I usually say there's two types of CM players but there's really three. First there's the 'play-to-win' personality type where winning is everything. Then there's the 'enjoy the movie' personality type whose in it for the emersion. But I overlooked a third - the 'play-to-learn' CM player. Used properly, CM is an excellent tutorial in basic combat tactics. The British MoD didn't get in touch with BFC just because they like the pretty pictures.

[grungar]

On 10/5/2019 at 4:14 PM, markshot said:

You do go back, way back! 

Yes, Falcon3, Flanker, and the Spit9 all had guides and/or online students/classes.  Got to the top of the Compuserve Falcon3 ladder in '94.  Remember modems and a time before the Internet?  I even remember PONG, the first mass computer game.

                   who does not remember pong?

[A Canadian Cat]

3 hours ago, markshot said:

Can you believe I actually bought CMBO in 2000?  It was like banging my head against the wall.  I had no concept of terrain, lanes of fire, combined arms ...  After air combat, ground combat was a whole new ball game.  My wife was watching a TV series the other night.  I said "terrible ambush".  She said "No, it is a Japanese column and those are Chinese fighting for their country."  I said, "They only hit the front and not the back forcing them to be boxed in.  And they are positioned against the Sun.  Their muzzle flashes are easier to spot."  She said, "Well, they don't have good weapons ..."  I said, "if they win this fight, then maybe they could pick up a couple of Japanese MGs, ammo, and grenades".  CMBO was my introduction to the Art of War. 

LOL awesome - I find my self driving around the country side planning how to take the next field. I wish I had known about CMBO in 2000. I only found out about these games in 2011. I would have been playing for 11 additional years if I had known

[markshot]

So, do you plan your drive not to crest any hills and skylight the car?  Yes, I have played Steel Beasts too ... maybe 10 years ago or so. 

I have been playing ancient combat for the last couple of years now.  It's very linear, but the approach is so entirely different.  If you want to control terrain, then you must stand on it.  Here, you must be able to converge fires upon it.

[markshot]

1 hour ago, MikeyD said:

I usually say there's two types of CM players but there's really three. First there's the 'play-to-win' personality type where winning is everything. Then there's the 'enjoy the movie' personality type whose in it for the emersion. But I overlooked a third - the 'play-to-learn' CM player. Used properly, CM is an excellent tutorial in basic combat tactics. The British MoD didn't get in touch with BFC just because they like the pretty pictures.

I think that is accurate.  I have no desire to ever see war personally.  I have no desire to command ... management of tech organizations was enough for me.

For me, CM is an intellectual exercise in the way chess has been for 500 years in its current form.  I greatly prefer CM to countless fantasy and sci-fi games.  It is not that those games are not well programmed or well designed.  But how can I reason about a game that models/portrays what does not exist?  CM by definition is a very well modeled closed system, because what it models, in fact, occurs.  There is recorded history/data.  There is a base of human knowledge and martial discipline which is quite extensive; especially about past wars ... the future is anyone's guess.  So, CM offers fun, graphics, goals, achievements, and a complete mental work out.  I hope on my final day if it should occur before the faint glow of a display that when they find me, the text at top reads TOTAL VICTORY. 

[Commanderski]

 

On 10/8/2019 at 3:40 PM, markshot said:

For me, CM is an intellectual exercise in the way chess has been for 500 years in its current form.  I greatly prefer CM to countless fantasy and sci-fi games.  It is not that those games are not well programmed or well designed.  But how can I reason about a game that models/portrays what does not exist?  CM by definition is a very well modeled closed system, because what it models, in fact, occurs.  There is recorded history/data.  There is a base of human knowledge and martial discipline which is quite extensive; especially about past wars ... the future is anyone's guess.  So, CM offers fun, graphics, goals, achievements, and a complete mental work out.  I hope on my final day if it should occur before the faint glow of a display that when they find me, the text at top reads TOTAL VICTORY

I agree... I recently retired and am getting back into this. I also like War in the East but these games offer something different on a much smaller scale.   I'm glad to see that there is still lot's of user created scenarios and campaigns and hope that people still create them.  Lot's to learn in both games. Beats anything on TV or the movies these days.

 

[Erwin]

8 hours ago, Commanderski said:

Beats anything on TV or the movies these days.

Sadly true.  Partly the entertainment market aims for the teens-30's.  Partly that China now invests heavily tin Hollywood productions to ensure there is nothing made that is "political" - and Hollywood wants the Chinese market for their movies - hence the proliferation of super hero movies with no depth re comments on society.  (When is  the last time you saw a movie in which the Chinese were the villains?  Now the stand in for villains is either Vietnamese or Korean.)

 

Edited October 10, 2019 by Erwin

[BletchleyGeek]

On 10/9/2019 at 6:17 AM, markshot said:

If you want to control terrain, then you must stand on it.  Here, you must be able to converge fires upon it.

And here you have summarised what is CM about in two sentences. 

You wrote magnificient guides for HTTR many years ago too. Your writing has that rare quality of marrying clarity with brevity.

/me waves at @Commanderski too

Edited October 10, 2019 by BletchleyGeek

[markshot]

1 hour ago, BletchleyGeek said:

And here you have summarised what is CM about in two sentences. 

You wrote magnificient guides for HTTR many years ago too. Your writing has that rare quality of marrying clarity with brevity.

How very kind of you.  Thank you.

[Commanderski]

1 hour ago, BletchleyGeek said:

/me waves at @Commanderski too

Hello to you too    I wonder how many WITE and WITE 2.0 people are also CMRT players.

[BletchleyGeek]

You're the first I have spotted so far

[landser]

1 hour ago, Commanderski said:

Hello to you too    I wonder how many WITE and WITE 2.0 people are also CMRT players.

One more here, I am Zug on the Matrix boards, as landser was already taken. You're the fellow who just bought Black Cross Red Star volume 4 correct? Nice to see you again

[Commanderski]

39 minutes ago, landser said:

One more here, I am Zug on the Matrix boards, as landser was already taken. You're the fellow who just bought Black Cross Red Star volume 4 correct? Nice to see you again

Yep, that's me...nice to see you here too. 

[General Jack Ripper]

On 10/8/2019 at 3:02 PM, IanL said:

LOL awesome - I find my self driving around the country side planning how to take the next field.

And here I thought I was the only one who did that.
Whenever we took family trips when I was a kid, I was always staring fixedly out the window as we drove along.

My parents thought I was some kind of nature buff, but what I really saw in my mind's eye was tanks rolling across fields in the midst of an artillery barrage.

 

On 10/8/2019 at 3:40 PM, markshot said:

I think that is accurate.  I have no desire to ever see war personally.  I have no desire to command ... management of tech organizations was enough for me.

For me, CM is an intellectual exercise in the way chess has been for 500 years in its current form.  I greatly prefer CM to countless fantasy and sci-fi games.  It is not that those games are not well programmed or well designed.  But how can I reason about a game that models/portrays what does not exist?  CM by definition is a very well modeled closed system, because what it models, in fact, occurs.  There is recorded history/data.  There is a base of human knowledge and martial discipline which is quite extensive; especially about past wars ... the future is anyone's guess.  So, CM offers fun, graphics, goals, achievements, and a complete mental work out.  I hope on my final day if it should occur before the faint glow of a display that when they find me, the text at top reads TOTAL VICTORY. 

...Nice. 

[danfrodo]

2 hours ago, General Jack Ripper said:

And here I thought I was the only one who did that.
Whenever we took family trips when I was a kid, I was always staring fixedly out the window as we drove along.

My parents thought I was some kind of nature buff, but what I really saw in my mind's eye was tanks rolling across fields in the midst of an artillery barrage.

 

...Nice. 

I agree to all this.  I still do that on car trips.  I bike to work and picture AT guns and tanks and infantry battling along the bike path & streets.  And to Markshot's point, yes, this is chess.  History chess.  Chess that's more open ended and lots more fun.  

 

[BornGinger]

On 10/4/2019 at 4:32 PM, z1812 said:

What I do is make a dozen or so QB's and l save them on the first turn. After a while I forget which is which and what forces I picked for the A.I. So it becomes like a "new scenario".

I decided to follow this advice and downloaded and looked through the pdf file with pictures of quick battle maps for CMFB. The result is a list of ~ 50 different quick battle maps which I'm in the work to prepare for future battles. It takes quite a lot of time to prepare those battles if one wants to give for example both artillery support, good FOs, armored vehicles and other things to the attacker and maybe similar things with some mines to the defender and decide what changes to make to receive all that. I have decided to have some battles which aren't balanced at all and it will be fun to see how they play out.

[SimpleSimon]

If you're prepared to learn even a little bit about the scenario editor the scenarios (and campaigns if you use the unpacker tool) become endlessly replayable. It takes quite a bit to figure out how to construct entire scenarios and campaigns from the ground up, but not all that much effort to figure out how to swap units, support, and spawn areas into scenarios. Now that some of the modules have pre-baked master maps it couldn't be easier.

One thing I did recently was create about 3 different permutations of Hot Mustard by adding a unit of M10 tank destroyers and giving the Americans a few extra machine guns. In another case I swapped out the Tigers for a fairly regular mixed brigade of Panzer III and IVs and compensated the Germans for the loss of the heavy tanks by giving them 4 FW-190s to soften up the American defense lines and attack their HQ. All of these modifications to existing scenarios took me all of about 10-20min to arrange, just remember to save your scenarios under a new file name or you'll overwrite the original scenario (you don't need to worry about the campaign files). 

Edited December 26, 2019 by SimpleSimon

[Erwin]

Don't you find that most of the game still plays the same?  What I love about new scenarios are the surprises.  Hate replaying.

Edited December 26, 2019 by Erwin

[SimpleSimon]

The RNG is strong with scenarios the larger they get. That's part of the reason why, unwieldy as they are, I would never advocate the removal or exclusion of those multi-company behemoth scenarios. There's some major butterfly-effect stuff that can happen by making some surprisingly minute changes...or nothing may change at all. That's the best part to me. 

I've been able to turn some played out scenarios into big surprises again with some clever and relatively easy changes to AI plans and timing, though the plan editor is a bit more daunting than the rest of the scenario editor's tools and it took a bit of trial and error to sort of figure exactly what was happening when I programmed it. I still get things wrong occasionally but honestly "Charlie Company never showed up" was a thing that could actually happen during the war so the learning process is amusing none-the-less. 

[markshot]

6 hours ago, Erwin said:

Don't you find that most of the game still plays the same?  What I love about new scenarios are the surprises.  Hate replaying.

This is what I loved about CMx1; 6,000 scenarios and campaigns.  Randomness is not the same thing as FOW.  There is nothing like a scenario with expertly placed ATGs or a spoiling flank attack of reinforcements.

A basic premise of combat simulation is "dead is dead".  War is not a game of levels and achievements; just victory/defeat and survival.