Paper Tiger Posted January 1 Share Posted January 1 https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/tsd3/combat-mission-battle-for-normandy/cm-battle-for-normandy-campaigns/the-road-to-montebourg-revised-for-v4-0/ Don't worry, this won't overwrite or otherwise delete the original campaign that came on the disk. IIt's a completely different file. This is substantially different from the vanilla campaign and the number of changes made is huge but the most important one to note is that you will need both the Market Garden module and the Vehicle Pack to play this. Other important highlights are that the 2/8 INF core units are now mostly Green with High morale which means you'll need to manage them more carefully in a firefight. All-new AI plans using triggers and most of the tricks that came with later versions of the game. Flamethrowers are included in some missions. Some maps have been revised, most notably the map for Turnbull's Stand which veterans of the original campaign will probably notice quite quickly. A 'new' mission has been added although those of you who found and played the earlier revised version that was uploaded to BFC's old Scenario Depot will recognise it. The campaign has a prelude phase consisting of the new mission and then the old campaign opener Beau Guillot. You should notice quite a few changes made to that mission as well - some extra help to make up for the drop in experience. There is air support in quite a few missions now and less artillery, at least the bigger guns anyway. Anyway, let's post this and then I'll see what needs to be 'fixed' or not in good time. This is an old campaign so i'm not expecting a ton of feedback for it for quite a while but let me know and I'll fix things. Now I'm taking a break from CMBN. I haven't quite decided what comes next - finishing Hasrabit or a new version of Gung Ho! for the German forces. Later, I'll get to work on the two Scottish campaigns I'd mentioned elswhere. Have a Happy New year. 20 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Warts 'n' all Posted January 1 Share Posted January 1 Happy New Year! And thanks for all the work you've put into this. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Warts 'n' all Posted January 1 Share Posted January 1 (edited) Just downloaded it, and taken a quick peek. I look forward to losing it in style once I've finished my current campaign. Edited January 1 by Warts 'n' all 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OldSarge Posted January 1 Share Posted January 1 I've just downloaded it and look forward to finding new ways to lose! Happy New Year and thank you! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Erwin Posted January 1 Share Posted January 1 Next on the list after PT's revised "Gung Ho!" campaign. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sweed59 Posted January 1 Share Posted January 1 Thanks Paper Tiger for sharing this campaign. I haven't played any CM in probably 10 years and that was still CMx1 titles. Just picked up BN and RT complete packs and am getting through the tutorials to get up to speed, so will be quite awhile before I dig into any campaigns. But it's nice knowing it's there when I'm ready. Thanks again. Cheers! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sttp Posted January 1 Share Posted January 1 Thanks for all your work, Paper Tiger. I'm looking forward to giving a couple of these missions a play! Is anyone else having trouble getting to the individual missions / btt files? I can extract the campaign files just fine (using either the most updated version of Rokko's Uncam that I can find, or Mad Mike's tool), but the individual missions are not showing up in my scenario list even though the btt files are in the scenario folder... i.e., same procedure that's worked for so many other extracted campaigns. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vacillator Posted January 1 Share Posted January 1 17 hours ago, Paper Tiger said: Have a Happy New year. Excellent work and the same to you. 17 hours ago, Paper Tiger said: you'll need to manage them more carefully in a firefight Can you offer any advice on this, as I usually cock it up . 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kohlbie Posted January 2 Share Posted January 2 Hey Paper Tiger, thanks for giving this campaign a facelift. I first came across across the CM games on YouTube a few years ago. The first episode of Hapless's playthrough series of the previous version is what finally convinced me pick up my first CM title. The Road to Montebourg was the first CM campaign I played and I had an absolute blast playing each mission and then getting on YouTube to see how other people had tackled them. Now after a couple years I've got all the available CM games and modules and I've been lurking around here on and off the whole time. So I've finally made an account to say thanks for the hours and hours of good, wholesome entertainment! It's really cool seeing you back making content for these games, can't wait to see what ya do next! What do you reckon are the chances that Battlefront will patch in the revised version of the campaign into the game at some point? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paper Tiger Posted January 2 Author Share Posted January 2 27 minutes ago, Kohlbie said: ... What do you reckon are the chances that Battlefront will patch in the revised version of the campaign into the game at some point? The thought did cross my mind briefly a while ago though. If they did want it as an extra, I'd be very happy for that to happen but I'm not pushing for it. It needs both the Market Garden and Vehicle Pack content to play so I can understand why that might not be appealing for them. The same will go for the revision of the Scottish Corridor that will come along some time in the future - it's going to need Market Garden and the Vehicle pack to work. I REALLY want a flamethrower tank or two in one or two of these missions as they were present in the real operation and there's no way that I'm redoing it without one. (Or at least trying it to see if it's as cool as I think it will be. I suspect it will completely destroy any existing balance in these missions but I want to try.) Watching Hapless's Montebourg and Scottish Corridor series is what got me back into this. He did a really good job with his AARs - very professional. My wife was astonished when I pointed out to her that I made the series he was playing. 7 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kohlbie Posted January 2 Share Posted January 2 1 hour ago, Paper Tiger said: I REALLY want a flamethrower tank or two in one or two of these missions as they were present in the real operation and there's no way that I'm redoing it without one. Ahaha a flamethrower tank sounds like exactly the kind of catharsis that would make up for the frustration caused by the British Infantry's weedy firepower. 1 hour ago, Paper Tiger said: Watching Hapless's Montebourg and Scottish Corridor series is what got me back into this. He did a really good job with his AARs - very professional. My wife was astonished when I pointed out to her that I made the series he was playing. Yeah his channel is a real gem. Moments like that must be about as satisfying as it gets for a scenario/campaign designer eh? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paper Tiger Posted January 2 Author Share Posted January 2 (edited) 48 minutes ago, Kohlbie said: Yeah his channel is a real gem. Moments like that must be about as satisfying as it gets for a scenario/campaign designer eh? Yes. Absolutely. The 'feedback' I got from watching that was incredibly helpful. I was actually embarrassed when he flunked the Scottish Corridor mission and went onto the Green path. That will definitely influence the remake. I want people to be able to win if they devise a good plan. I have a hope that one day he'll do The Khabour Trail, the Canadian campaign I made for the CMSF NATO module (the first one). That's the campaign I'm most proud of. I had a look at the revision that was made for CMSF2 and it looks almost identical with very little changed (probably because of the way I do the AI in my campaigns. It must have freaked them out when they realised they'd either have to do it all from scratch or try to fathom out how to update that so it still is pretty much my baby. Edited January 2 by Paper Tiger 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AlexUK Posted January 2 Share Posted January 2 Great news, a fantastic reason for playing this campaign again, thank you very much indeed 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Warts 'n' all Posted January 2 Share Posted January 2 11 hours ago, sttp said: Thanks for all your work, Paper Tiger. I'm looking forward to giving a couple of these missions a play! Is anyone else having trouble getting to the individual missions / btt files? I can extract the campaign files just fine (using either the most updated version of Rokko's Uncam that I can find, or Mad Mike's tool), but the individual missions are not showing up in my scenario list even though the btt files are in the scenario folder... i.e., same procedure that's worked for so many other extracted campaigns. I used Uncam without a hitch. When I opened the new campaign folder all the missions are listed as .btt files. Click on the ones you might want to look at, then just copy, and paste into your Scenarios folder. I tested it out because I wanted to see how the new "Silence" battle compared to "Silence the Guns" from the base game. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paper Tiger Posted January 2 Author Share Posted January 2 1 hour ago, Warts 'n' all said: I used Uncam without a hitch. When I opened the new campaign folder all the missions are listed as .btt files. Click on the ones you might want to look at, then just copy, and paste into your Scenarios folder. I tested it out because I wanted to see how the new "Silence" battle compared to "Silence the Guns" from the base game. I'm not familiar with a base game mission called 'Silence the Guns'. I recall Pete Wenman did a Brecourt mission which featured the entire map from Brecourt to Utah beach so that he could have the AI guns perform fire orders. A genius solution I might say but I chose to do it differently I guess there are no spoilers possible as it my interpretation of a very famous historical mission and I found that doing it the way they did it in real life works just fine. But sometimes the AI gets lucky. I've tried to pull the AI's teeth as much as possible to prevent bad luck from stuffing up your starting mission but barring making them completely broken, that's as good as I can get it. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Warts 'n' all Posted January 2 Share Posted January 2 @Paper Tiger The full title of of the scenario that came with the base game is "Silence the Guns - Brecourt Manor". So sorry for any confusion. It's been a long time since I played it, but I don't recall the guns firing off into the distance. To be honest I was so focused on attacking the gun position that I never rotated the camera to see that the map took in Utah Beach until you mentioned it above. One quick question about your own new mission. There appears to be a US truck knocked out just in front of the Set-up Zone. Is that right? Or, am I seeing things? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paper Tiger Posted January 2 Author Share Posted January 2 Yes. Historically, there was an old, derelict truck there. There used to be a special flavour object mod for CMSF that turned one of the dustbins into such a wreck which was perfect but that's long gone. So I used a destroyed truck instead. The enemy won't fire upon it. It's just there for flavour. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Warts 'n' all Posted January 2 Share Posted January 2 49 minutes ago, Paper Tiger said: Yes. Historically, there was an old, derelict truck there. There used to be a special flavour object mod for CMSF that turned one of the dustbins into such a wreck which was perfect but that's long gone. So I used a destroyed truck instead. The enemy won't fire upon it. It's just there for flavour. Okeh, thanks for the reply. Perhaps a German truck would have been better. But, I will just pretend that a local haulage firm bought a truck from the US before the war to gain bragging rights over their competitors. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kohlbie Posted January 5 Share Posted January 5 (edited) Hey Paper Tiger. Just started the deployment phase on La Grand Hameau and for some reason I have a wild platoon of Shermans on the map, behind the objective (see image). They are the 746th Tank Battalion HQ tank, the A Company HQ tank, and my surviving tanks of 1st platoon A company from the previous mission. Stray Shermans aside, the first three missions played really well. Silence The Guns was a fun, snappy romp, and the changes in experience/motivation on Beu Guillot didn't make the mission particularly harder but certainly more satisfying than the original experience I had were the Germans just crumbled and ran almost immediately. Ecoqueneauville was also a noticeably improved experience. The AI moving and reacting to me coming up the main road felt a lot more natural than them just sitting around like lemmings. Good stuff! Edited January 5 by Kohlbie 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paper Tiger Posted January 5 Author Share Posted January 5 (edited) 4 hours ago, Kohlbie said: Hey Paper Tiger. Just started the deployment phase on La Grand Hameau and for some reason I have a wild platoon of Shermans on the map, behind the objective (see image). They are the 746th Tank Battalion HQ tank, the A Company HQ tank, and my surviving tanks of 1st platoon A company from the previous mission. Stray Shermans aside, the first three missions played really well. Silence The Guns was a fun, snappy romp, and the changes in experience/motivation on Beu Guillot didn't make the mission particularly harder but certainly more satisfying than the original experience I had were the Germans just crumbled and ran almost immediately. Ecoqueneauville was also a noticeably improved experience. The AI moving and reacting to me coming up the main road felt a lot more natural than them just sitting around like lemmings. Good stuff! Aaaw crap! There's always something that slips through the last check. I have no idea how that got past - I must have re-imported these units after all the testing as I played the vanilla version several times without any issues. It's funny because they're not in the variant which is almost exactly the same. That's game breaker for sure but I guess you'll have a fairly easy run at this particular mission. I have deleted these units and will get a fresh compilation up later today after I've run through everything else again. Thanks for letting me know. And thanks for the feedback on the first three missions. A new version with the tanks removed is now up. I've had a look through most of the other missions and there are no irregularities that I can see. Edited January 5 by Paper Tiger 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Warts 'n' all Posted January 5 Share Posted January 5 @Kohlbie Thanks for letting us all know so quickly. And @Paper Tiger for the prompt action. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paper Tiger Posted January 6 Author Share Posted January 6 (edited) All the campaigns I made for the disk were tested by some beta testers before the release so these kinds of mistakes were caught. In fact it was great having them because they used to catch things like flavour objects out of place, in the middle of the road etc. However, Hasrabit and Dinas, both large campaigns were not and were tested all by myself. I seem to recall a similar mistake in Dinas when it was released where there was some tank sitting in the middle of the map. I used to have what I called a 'Finished' folder where I moved missions that had all the checks performed and the artwork done before transferring. I missed that this time around probably because I was in a hurry to get finished. There's a kind of fatigue that sets in when you have a very large project under development and the desire to get it finished leads to some cut corners at the end. My bad. So the lesson is to take my time and make sure nothing like that slips through the last checks next time. Hasrabit is not as big a project as Montebourg (in fact, Road to Montebourg is one of the biggest I made after Road to Dinas) but I will start this process again with that. Edited January 6 by Paper Tiger 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sgt Joch Posted January 6 Share Posted January 6 Great news, looking forward to trying this. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Falaise Posted January 7 Share Posted January 7 Hello @Paper Tiger, I am delighted to be able to play again this campaign which is a pinnacle in the same way as Scotich Corridor for which I am developing a rain mod. I'm a little embarrassed, especially since I wake up after the update work to point out my only complaint with this campaign, the apple trees on the maps. You made orchards with low trees whereas in Normandy especially at that time, it was “tige haute; high trunk” like you make in Scotich Corridor; This makes it possible to put cows in the fields and optimize the production of milk and cider. Living in Normandy that hinders my immersion. I can modify all the cards if you wish but you will have to re-integrate them into the campaign merci for your merveilleux work 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paper Tiger Posted January 8 Author Share Posted January 8 6 hours ago, Falaise said: Hello @Paper Tiger, I am delighted to be able to play again this campaign which is a pinnacle in the same way as Scotich Corridor for which I am developing a rain mod. I'm a little embarrassed, especially since I wake up after the update work to point out my only complaint with this campaign, the apple trees on the maps. You made orchards with low trees whereas in Normandy especially at that time, it was “tige haute; high trunk” like you make in Scotich Corridor; This makes it possible to put cows in the fields and optimize the production of milk and cider. Living in Normandy that hinders my immersion. I can modify all the cards if you wish but you will have to re-integrate them into the campaign merci for your merveilleux work That's a very interesting detail. If you tell me which maps you want changed, let me know and I'll see what I can do. If you've decompiled the campaign, you can take a look at the orchards in the later missions and tell me if they're better. They're already remade like the orchards in The Scottish Corridor and improved further. But there's one which I won't redo and that's Orchard Hill - ironically and I'll tell you why. The reason is because changing the trees in the orchard blocked existing LoS and changing it would mean redoing the AI entirely and I just couldn't do all that work over again. It's a change that needs to be made before you do the AI. I spent ages finding good LoS for defending units not just for plan A but for plan B too and so I undid the changes when I saw that LoS was blocked. But otherwise, yes, I'm very happy to make the changes you recommend. If I have time, yes, I will redo the AI for the Le Ham series of missions but not just now. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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