CM Final Blitzkrieg Tournament

[BFCElvis]

Combat Mission: Final Blitzkrieg Tournament

The Tournament will begin February 5, 2024 and you can join now.

This Tournament will feature 3 rounds with 3 different scenarios.

Last Man Out- Remnants of 17^th Armored Infantry Battalion attempt escape from Herrlisheim. Axis probe

Trouble with Siegfried- Forward US elements meet the Westwall. Allied attack.

Cutline to Grosshaw – Opposing infantry platoons clash during a fighting patrol into the Hurtgen Forrest. Meeting engagement
 
Before joining the tournament, please take a moment
and carefully read these instructions that are specific
to all Combat Mission Tournaments!!!
 
-         Please DO NOT join the tournament unless you can commit to playing about 1 turn a day and playing the tournament through to it's completion. Not doing those will ruin someone else's tournament.

-          Because of the way that Combat Mission’s original “play by email” system works, both game
files have an in-game field for password protection of the file. This field should be left blank. For the
Allied side the password has been selected before the battles were sent and that field is to be
left blank. You can use a password for the Axis side but it isn’t needed because the Tournament
feature handles protection from cheating without using the in game system.

- The Tournament will have you playing 2 individual battles where you are playing both sides of
the same battle. If you get into the game before your opponent, you will see 1 game turn to play. If
your opponent has gotten there first then you will see 2 turn files and each turn thereafter should
have 2 files.

 - Once a tournament begins you will receive the files in the "Saved Game and PBEM"; drop menu
under Automated PBEM++ In Progress. You will receive email notifications when your opponent has
sent you turns. 

- When logging in you MUST use the email address associated with your Martix account 
- You will need a Matrix user name and password to play any tournament (or PBEM++ battle). If you
don't have one already you can get one here:

https://www.matrixgames.com/login

Sign up now either through the game or here:

 

https://www.matrixgames.com/tournaments

[Centurian52]

I didn't have much luck with the previous tournament. But I suppose I should give it another go before I give up on MP entirely. It will be interesting jumping straight to the end of the war. I'm still in Sicily in my current SP playthrough.

[MeatEtr]

Gonna sign up for this one too, good times! 

(btw, @BFCElvis at the top of your post it says Red Thunder)

[Artkin]

You guys gotta remove the area target command for these tournaments. It ruins them. 

[BFCElvis]

31 minutes ago, Artkin said:

You guys gotta remove the area target command for these tournaments. It ruins them. 

We can't remove any of the UI but we changed the set up areas and have all offboard arty now a reinforcement. So you can't get pummeled turn 1 arty. So, the changes we did make should help mitigate some of the issues. 

[Artkin]

Meh, artillery really is only an issue for mirrored matches. Area targeting a problem for all tournaments and regular multiplayer games.

[MeatEtr]

6 minutes ago, Artkin said:

Area targeting a problem for all tournaments and regular multiplayer games.

No its not, its part of the game. Opposing forces quite often fire on one another without seeing each other. Often referred to as suppressive or harassing fire. Although it does give the player an advantage vs the AI since the AI doesnt do this.

But if you dont like area targeting thats fine too, find an opponent that will play by this odd rule. Just dont expect something like this in any tourney.

[Artkin]

1 minute ago, MeatEtr said:

No its not, its part of the game. Opposing forces quite often fire on one another without seeing each other. Often referred to as suppressive or harassing fire. Although it does give the player an advantage vs the AI since the AI doesnt do this.

But if you dont like area targeting thats fine too, find an opponent that will play by this odd rule. Just dont expect something like this in any tourney.

It's part of the game when I have a rpg team hiding in a forest, which kills a vehicle, and then is subsequently gunned down by 10 bmps at the same time from across the map?

Come on bro. 

[Centurian52]

22 minutes ago, Artkin said:

Meh, artillery really is only an issue for mirrored matches. Area targeting a problem for all tournaments and regular multiplayer games.

Getting rid of area targeting would be pretty unrealistic though. You don't exactly limit your fire to clearly identified targets in a real war (maybe in a low intensity guerilla war, where your main priority is limiting collateral damage). Particularly not in WW2. Both known and suspected enemy positions are fair game. And properly executing fire and maneuver tactics requires maintaining fire on enemy positions, even after they have all put their heads down and units in CM would lose the spot, so that other forces can freely maneuver.

[Centurian52]

13 minutes ago, Artkin said:

It's part of the game when I have a rpg team hiding in a forest, which kills a vehicle, and then is subsequently gunned down by 10 bmps at the same time from across the map?

Come on bro. 

Yes, of course that's part of the game. Do you really think that wouldn't happen in real life? There's a reason that the Javelin being a fire-and-forget ATGM was such a big deal when it first came out. Because being able to run away the moment after you fire, without having to stick around to guide the missile, is really helpful for increasing your chances of survival.

Edited January 25 by Centurian52

[Artkin]

9 minutes ago, Centurian52 said:

You don't exactly limit your fire to clearly identified targets in a real war (maybe in a low intensity guerilla war, where your main priority is limiting collateral damage).

Nobody's arguing against this. Obviously now you have discovered that there isn't a perfect solution yet. Removing the feature is the lesser of two evils though.

9 minutes ago, Centurian52 said:

Do you really think that wouldn't happen in real life?

Have you played multiplayer? Have you seen combat footage? The answer to your question is "absolutely not".

[BFCElvis]

31 minutes ago, Artkin said:

It's part of the game when I have a rpg team hiding in a forest, which kills a vehicle, and then is subsequently gunned down by 10 bmps at the same time from across the map?

Come on bro. 

I've never been in the military but that's kind of exactly what I would expect to happen in the real world. RPG gets a kill and isn't postively spotted and all the fire power that has eyes on the suspected location open up on it? Sounds right to me.

  

46 minutes ago, Artkin said:

Meh, artillery really is only an issue for mirrored matches. Area targeting a problem for all tournaments and regular multiplayer games.

Mirrored matches are all that we peddle in.

[Artkin]

No its not realistic at all or true to the game's intent when vehicles all across the map even from kilometers away target your two man team.

Players consistently abuse the area target command. It's at its worst in tournament games and that's exactly why I wont be participating in any more until it's dealt with. I'll play the invitational tournament but that will be the last one. At least in my private games I can request that my opponent not play like an animal. 

[Jackal2100]

Why would a soldier not target a suspected enemy position? Especially if it is a big enough threat to destroy vehicles. If a commander wants to allocate a large amount of energy dislodging a 2-man team, isn't that a win for the defender anyways?

[Centurian52]

15 minutes ago, Artkin said:

Removing the feature is the lesser of two evils though.

Again, without area targeting it would be impossible to correctly execute fire and maneuver tactics. After you have gained fire-superiority, you are supposed to maintain it. You don't stop shooting just because all the enemy soldiers in a position have put their heads down. Making it impossible to properly execute real tactics would rather defeat the point of a realistic wargame. That's before remembering how absurd it would be for modern Russians/CW Soviets, or WW2 anyone, to eschew speculative fire. So removing the feature would very clearly be the greater of two evils, by a very wide margin.

15 minutes ago, Artkin said:

Have you played multiplayer? Have you seen combat footage?

I haven't played multiplayer, though I've seen videos of other player's multiplayer matches. I have seen a lot of combat footage though. There is usually only ever one AFV in the frame, if there are any at all (mostly it's just drones, infantry, and artillery). So most of the time it isn't possible to tell if there are even 10 BMPs around to shoot back. But, I've heard an anecdote of a Ukrainian Javelin team that stuck around after firing to see if they hit their target, and were promptly fired on (thankfully they survived this time). And I recall a video of a British volunteer firing an NLAW at a BTR. He promptly turned and ran back into the woods without sticking around to see if he hit, because he obviously understood that if he missed, or if there were any other Russian troops or AFVs present, he and the rest of his team would have been very quickly torn to shreds (the main video was shot from his GoPro, and he turned before the camera could catch if he hit, but drone footage of the same event showed that he hit).

[Artkin]

4 minutes ago, Centurian52 said:

I haven't played multiplayer

Not to be rude, but that's all you had to say.

[Anthony P.]

There's obviously a nuance some people seem to either be missing out on or ignoring.

Yes, harassing fire, recon by fire and lighting up suspected enemy positions are all real practices which require area targeting to be present.

What is not realistic is "borg mind area targeting", where the human player abuses his super human awareness to achieve instant, pinpoint targeting of enemy units by units which have not even a tentative spotting contact, in so short time spans that it is completely unreasonable that they could have been informed by other units of said enemies to be targeted. E.g. a unit spots a target, and the next turn the player directs a whole tank company of another battalion (which doesn't even have C2 with the first unit's parent formation) to shell that exact action square to oblivion. Or worse yet, the unit which made the spot was killed before it could even transmit that information to its parent unit... or maybe no unit made the spot, and the player just used the camera and the rewind control to track down the action square that the incoming fire originated from by looking for the tracer and rewinding, or moving the camera around and rewinding to find where exactly a certain weapon is fired from.

I'm guessing that the latter is what @Artkin is referring to. I don't agree that area targeting should be removed, but I agree that it can (and is) abused in that manner, which is obviously far from realistic.

[Artkin]

Yep that's exactly what I'm talking about and I didnt think that anyone needed to explain it for the point to get across. It would be nice to have the option to remove it. Because in the tournaments the behavior/abuse is really prevalent. 

It's unfortunate that the only way to survive these tournaments is to play like a cheeseball too. 

My games are much better when we agree to not use it (Unless a unit was spotted previously). 

[Centurian52]

11 minutes ago, Artkin said:

Not to be rude, but that's all you had to say.

It is a bit rude to imply that my opinion doesn't matter because I haven't gone up against a human opponent. It might be fair to suggest that my opinion matters less because I haven't played multiplayer yet. But to suggest that the value of my opinion is zero? That's just ridiculous. And if I change my tune after I have gone up against a human, then I'll cede your point. I don't think I will though.

I may not have the direct experience of how other people play (though again, lots of people have posted their multiplayer matches to youtube, so it's not like I haven't seen people abuse the target command). But I know how I play. And I know how real armies have fought over the last century. Allied WW2 doctrine and Soviet Cold War doctrine were both very firepower-heavy. They would bombard a tree-line, flatten a town, and pump HE into a building now, and find out whether there were really any enemy troops in those areas later. Partially inspired by real-world tactics, my own play style is very area-target heavy (mostly target-briefly commands, since when you combine those with waypoints you can get each unit to fire into multiple suspected locations each turn). The only thing unrealistic about it is that the AI doesn't do it back to me. If you can light up a known or suspected enemy position with heavy firepower, and don't, you're doing it wrong. I fully expect my opponent to take the same view. And I fully expect to take a hammering.

I'll always remember something that Pvt Webster (of Band of Brothers fame) reportedly said to a replacement who was reluctant to fire his weapon, because he couldn't see any targets to fire at: "You never see them. Shoot where you think they are."

I don't want to imply that there is nothing unrealistic about the way the target command can be used. Of course units can respond too quickly and too accurately to situations they shouldn't even be aware of. But frankly the same is true of every command. Units move into the right positions to support each other and to facilitate your plans far too promptly and precisely for troops who don't have a telepathic link to their commander. The truth is that you can never have realistic command and control in a game in which you are basically playing as every single officer and NCO simultaneously. If you want realistic command and control you need to implement and orders delay system. And because the delay needs to be based on how long it takes for the orders to be transmitted across the available communication channels, they need to have a point of origin, a single officer on the battlefield from which orders are originating and the delay is calculated (if the delay isn't being calculated based on a point of origin, then it's just an arbitrary delay that isn't based on anything in reality). You would cease to be every officer on the battlefield. That is possible, and has been done in some games. And it can really help to give you a sense for the difficulties and complexity of command and control on a real battlefield. But the tradeoff is that you lose any role in the small unit tactics being employed by your forces. You can only macro-manage. So it wouldn't really be Combat Mission anymore.

So really, an orders delay system would be the solution (again though, that comes with tradeoffs, and it wouldn't really be the same game). Eliminating the target command is just ridiculous. You would be "solving" the issue, without really solving the real issue (units respond too quickly and precisely to their commander's will), while making it impossible to execute real tactics and making the game far less realistic overall.

[Centurian52]

If your argument is that the target command should be removed because it allows units to react to situations as if they had a telepathic link to their commander, then all movement commands should be removed as well.

[Artkin]

Accidental post

Edited January 26 by Artkin

[Artkin]

Nah I'm not rewriting my post after two alt-z's irrevocably deleted it twice.

You have a delayed command system already. And yeah you can move your vehicles/troops wherever whenever, at some point you have to compromise with realism. Otherwise, why even make a game in the first place. Just call all warfare impossible to simulate.

 

[Centurian52]

5 minutes ago, Artkin said:

You have a delayed command system already.

In the sense that a minute passes between when new orders can be given in WEGO. But that's not really how actual orders delay systems work in games that implement them intentionally (at least not in games that implement them well). The point of a delay isn't to inconvenience the player, but to model how real communication works. The delay is supposed to be based on the amount of time it would take for a message to travel from its point of origin (the overall commander), over the available communication channels, to its intended recipient. So if the overall commander is a company commander, and the player decides he wants to send a platoon to take a hill, the delay would be the amount of time it takes for the company commander to transmit his orders over the radio (or via voice if he's close enough, or via runner if the radio is destroyed/jammed) to the platoon leader, plus the amount of time it takes for the platoon leader to pass on his orders to his squad leaders. Any good orders delay system has no choice but to assume that the player is only role playing as one officer, the overall commander of the battle, so that there can be a point of origin from which the delay is calculated. If there is no point of origin, then the delay is arbitrary and effectively meaningless. Any arbitrary delay, which is not based on the amount of time it takes for a message to travel through the available communications links from a point of origin, does nothing to improve realism (which is probably why CM2 very sensibly abandoned the delay system from CM1). And an orders delay system can't be implemented unless AI leaders under the player (platoon leaders and squad leaders, if the player is the company commander) are self-sufficient enough to make some basic decisions without any player input at all, since the system would make micro-management impossible.

One neat thing about an orders delay system is that it opens up the possibility of units being cut off from player command and control. If a platoon's radio is destroyed, it is out of voice range, it is out of line of sight (so no visual signals can reach them), and no runner can survive the journey, then a player might find themselves completely unable to issue orders to that platoon. The AI platoon leader would have to act on their own initiative alone, without any player input. Which is something that can happen in real life.

Another neat thing is that the player would have no way of ensuring that the message reached all of their subordinate AI commanders at the same time. So if they want their subordinates to attack at the same time, they will need to set a start time for the attack that is sometime after they can expect all of their subordinate leaders to have received the order. Which is also how things generally work in real life.

Going a step further, it looks like General Staff: Black Powder will be implementing an information delay system (I'm not sure if that's actually what they're calling it). So the player only knows what the overall commander knows. They do not get to see an enemy unit appear on the map the moment any of their troops spot the enemy, but only after a message about the enemy unit can travel up the available communication links to the overall commander. This system should allow players to get a better sense of the fog of war as it exists for real commanders.

Again, in any good delay system, the delay should not be any arbitrary number. It is the amount of time it takes for a message to travel from a point of origin, through available communication links, to an intended recipient.

[weapon2010]

On 1/25/2024 at 6:24 PM, Centurian52 said:

It is a bit rude to imply that my opinion doesn't matter because I haven't gone up against a human opponent

 no its not , play a good human opponent .................its a mind altering different game..................incredibly challenging and difficult to win............playing the computer is ridiculously easy once you've played a few good humans

[Erwin]

1 hour ago, weapon2010 said:

playing the computer is ridiculously easy once you've played a few good humans

I think it depends on the designer.  I have found some designers provide as good an oppo as human.  ie: The H2H games I have played were not noticeably harder.