What is your favorite campaign and what campaigns do you recommend for a newbie?

[Simcoe]

I have completed all the training campaigns and played a ton of scenarios but have never played an actual campaign. 

What are your favorite campaigns and which ones would you recommend for a newbie?

I've been looking at To Berlin from Fire and Rubble, Courage Conquers from Final Blitzkrieg and Hammers Flank from Red Thunder.

[Monty's Mighty Moustache]

I’m playing To Berlin right now, it starts quite easy and is steadily getting a bit tougher so that might be a good bet. I have only played the first battle of Hammer’s Flank and the size of the force in that battle is huge so lots of management of troops, I haven’t played Courage Conquers but from what I’ve heard it’s quite a tough one. 

MMM

[Simcoe]

Thank you. I'm starting to lean toward To Berlin. Do you know if the artillery ammo is consistent for each scenario or does it resupply like Courage Conquers? (Ignoring the sections that fully resupply your troops)

[Monty's Mighty Moustache]

I have had different artillery assets in each scenario iirc, so you get a full supply every time. At least as far as the fifth battle that I have only just started. 

MMM

[Codreanu]

Hammer's Flank is not very good IMHO and almost all of the scenarios in it give you a full battalion to play with which is a pain in the butt but it's very generous with giving you fresh troops to play with even if you get them massacred. To Berlin on the other hand is really fantastic all the way through with a great mix of small and big battles in open and urban terrain and has a nice difficulty curve as mentioned previously, it feels very fair and historically authentic too so I would recommend it 110% for a first campaign.

[Simcoe]

Thanks! To Berlin it is! 

After playing CMCW. It's very interesting playing a Russian mechanized unit with 7 man infantry squads and copious tanks. It feels like a proto Cold War unit in WW2. It's only missing the IFV's.

What's YOUR favorite campaign?

[chuckdyke]

Blunting the Spear, by the way nothing wrong by putting the hard ones aide for a while. Till you know how to manage battalion size formations. Experience is the best teacher. FB has only 3 campaigns but they are all very good. 

[Erwin]

If you have CMSF, Zawiya Uprising is a superb campaign.  Not an overwhelming amount of units and good tactics and intelligent play is rewarded.

[Simcoe]

50 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:

Blunting the Spear, by the way nothing wrong by putting the hard ones aide for a while. Till you know how to manage battalion size formations. Experience is the best teacher. FB has only 3 campaigns but they are all very good. 

All the campaigns you mentioned seemed to get a lot of criticism around here. What do you like about blunting the spear?

[chuckdyke]

3 hours ago, Simcoe said:

What do you like about blunting the spear?

Organizing your forces, when you start it looks like chaos. I will post something about Hammer's Flank you really need to use P7 Proper, Professional, Planning, Prevents, P*ss, Poor, Performances. 

[Simcoe]

I can understand that. Whenever I'm in the deployment phase I like to organize everyone into orderly groups to visualize what I have available and then lay them out how I want for the firs turn.

[chuckdyke]

5 hours ago, Simcoe said:

I like to organize everyone into orderly groups to visualize what I have available and then lay them out how I want for the firs turn.

Like this?

[chuckdyke]

By clicking the plus (+) key you will open a unit in this case The Regimental HQ. 

Under the three flags you see the troops under his command. I click to select the 1st Company. 

As the Russian HQ don't have a radio the SU 76 is the communication channel as they are the support. I select the 1st platoon. 

You see here the blue hq button you need to click this to unlock his units. 

In this case I select the team. Also when you split units they also show up here.

In five clicks you can find any unit. By selecting any unit you can find any hq unit on the bottom left corner. 

[Simcoe]

Thank you that's really helpful.

[Bozowans]

I liked Blunting the Spear but I might consider it to be a little too big for a newbie, at least for a first campaign. You get such a huge mechanized force with a million vehicles and it can be a pain to micromanage and click through everything. Of course some players might like that sort of thing.

I'm not quite sure what would be best for a first campaign. Maybe something from CMSF2 as one of the western forces. The default Task Force Thunder campaign is pretty simple and straightforward. The battles are not that large, the pacing is pretty fast, you get to play with the modern US Army so you can afford to make mistakes, and many of the missions are just simple exercises in fire and maneuver tactics against weak enemies deployed in fixed positions, so it's good practice. A lot of the time you get to just sit back and pick apart enemy trenchlines with your fast-firing mortars and artillery and follow up with a textbook assault with hardly any losses. Some of the missions can be a challenge though, and the Syrians are still capable of giving you a bloody nose especially with their ATGMs. 

[chuckdyke]

You can learn by forward chaining or backward chaining. You can go from small to big or from big to small. Both methods have their merits. From big to small you need to know how the administration works and every turn becomes a mini game. Big games I found are best played in WeGo. 

[dbsapp]

On 10/10/2021 at 3:47 AM, Simcoe said:

I have completed all the training campaigns and played a ton of scenarios but have never played an actual campaign. 

What are your favorite campaigns and which ones would you recommend for a newbie?

I've been looking at To Berlin from Fire and Rubble, Courage Conquers from Final Blitzkrieg and Hammers Flank from Red Thunder.

Amonge those you mentioned - To Berlin.

[landser]

My four favorite CMx2 campaigns are Blunting the Spear for CMRT, and Devil's Descent, Road to Montebourg and Kampfgruppe Engel for CMBN.

Blunting the Spear is a big campaign. Normally I steer away from ones of this size, but I find this one compelling. It is not noob-friendly, quite challenging in fact. The campaign imparts a distinctly operational feel.  Getting all of your assets brought to bear in a timely manner is key, and a nice test of the player's ability to manage his forces beyond the tactical. Great maps, gobs of long-range armor duels and a good challenge.

Devil's Descent is much more friendly for a new player. Company sized makes it quite manageable and paras are fun to command in Combat Mission. Company sized forces are the sweet spot in CM for me. Large enough to allow some tactical leeway, while remaining very manageable and avoiding the cumbersome feel of larger campaigns. Top-notch campaign, from briefings, to map to missions. Play it.

Road to Montebourg is one of the most ambitious campaigns in the series. Sixteen missions long I think. Overall it's moderately difficult, not noob friendly, but that shouldn't put anyone off. If I recall correctly, Paper Tiger (mission author) utilized branching difficulty, which if I understand correctly, means if you do poorly subsequent missions become easier. and if you do well, they become more challenging. I suppose this (if true) allows players of any ability to get through it, while maintaining the challenge for the best players. I'd prefer the opposite, finding myself at a disadvantage if doing poorly, and with an edge as a reward for good play. It's a must-play campaign in my view.

Kampfgruppe Engel  is likely the most innovative campaign I've played in Combat Mission, even if I did think the exit mechanic is overused. It is also difficult, as you'd expect when playing a German force in the Falaise pocket. A number of great missions, along with a couple I didn't care for. Great maps, some of the most fearsome armor in the German inventory, ammo and repair-state carry-over, and memorable missions. Core forces is what I like, and the carry-over effects mean results have longer-term repercussions than many Combat Mission campaigns. This sort of campaign imparts more of a sense of agency in campaign play, you come to know the names of your leaders, each loss more keenly felt.

Two years ago I wrote a short thread @SimHQ with campaign reviews that includes a few more than I listed here if you're interested. I let it lapse when it was shown there was little interest, so only a few, but maybe you can take something from it.

https://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/4490340/combat-mission-campaign-reviews#Post4490340

Edited October 11, 2021 by landser

[Simcoe]

Thank you. Great answers from everyone! I've heard Scottish Corridor is good too?

[umlaut]

The Scottish Corridor is all in all a great campaign. But I got stuck in one of the last missions: When I had to fight a defensive battle over the same map twice, despite winning the previous. That might be realistic and everything, but I felt like Sisyphus. But I still recommend it.

Devils´ Descent is one of my favorites, especially because it is story driven and is focusing one a relatively small unit.

The Road to Nijmegen is also very, very good.

 

[SimpleSimon]

Blunting the Spear - The ultimate in Glorious Panzer Death Ride. This campaign is very big, so it requires some confidence and patience while you manage your force comprising full strength battalions + support assets. The plus is that - it captures the scale of operations on the Ostfront like few other games ever get near and "core troops" mechanic is well utilized in the context a pair of German Kampfgruppe being asked to conduct a challenging attack with zero prospect of reinforcement and little of resupply. CM's mechanics in both the clear and metaphorical sense very much favored this sort of campaign, even the briefings are well written, the entire campaign opening with...

The last several months have been a series of painful setbacks as the inexorable Soviet drive inches closer to the heartland of the Third Reich...

Which is putting it charitably - I sense the author was fully aware of the understatement within his prose. 

Another very wise element behind this campaign's design is that both sides are making use of core troops. The AI can find itself punished down the road for taking too many losses to the player's attacks. This is a big deal-because it means casualties are affecting the metaplay and thus matter far more than they usually seem to in a CM campaign...

 

[Simcoe]

Wow that's really interesting. Do other campaigns do that?

Also, what does everyone think of the German Fire and Rubble campaigns. They seem interesting and don't start out too big.

[AlexUK]

Another vote for Road to Montebourg. It's been a while, but force size rarely if ever felt unmanageable.

 

Lots of variety in missions, infantry focused but armour in several.

Edited October 11, 2021 by AlexUK

[Sgt.Squarehead]

I think Road to Montebourg might well get my vote too.

[SimpleSimon]

16 hours ago, Simcoe said:

Wow that's really interesting. Do other campaigns do that?

Also, what does everyone think of the German Fire and Rubble campaigns. They seem interesting and don't start out too big.

Almost all of the campaigns use core troops to some degree - unfortunately. For a number of them is does more harm than good since the scenarios are all designed to be challenging and this means that any one of them has the power to cripple your force before you get anywhere near the end of the campaign. Narratively, this was sometimes the case, especially for such infamous campaigns such as Market Garden or Bagration. For some of the Normandy campaigns I found it really unwelcome however. 

The other really great campaign in the game to me was Road to Nijmegan because the designers of the campaign have a bypass option that allows you sidestep the regular campaign difficulty if you get screwed over by one of the scenarios. That way you can still play the rest of the campaign but with more flexibility. Some other reasons I really liked Road to Nijmegan was the breadth of scenario types, situations, and units. It is a good "variety platter" of situations in the game. Unfortunately the reason I place it second to Spear is because when it was designed the rules governing air strikes in the game were very different and now they've been changed and the scenarios have not been rebalanced to reflect that. It's not crippling thanks to the bypass option - but I had to use the campaign decompiling tool and scenario editor to edit nearly the entire campaign (which was so heavily built around the old air support rules - which predate CM3.0 even) to basically abstract the airstrikes or just give the player more of other things to properly negotiate the scenarios. Note: They are and should still be difficult, Market Garden was doomed from the start.