Length of battles in operations.

[kipanderson]

Hi,

One of a long list of factors that sets CM apart from the rest is the lack of any “artificial” restrictions on play. Part of this is the lack of gamey rules. CM is a true simulation of the tactical problems faced by soldiers in WW2.

However, there is one place in which there is still an “artificial” restrictions that forces gamers to play to the clock in an unrealistic way. That is the restriction on the length on battles in operations.

I have found that the “natural” rhythm of battle is about 30-50 turns. Of course, others will differ, this is pure personal opinion. The problem is that the maximum battle length in operations is only 30 turns. This means that all/most of my battles are “artificially” truncated when playing operations. I find my self watching the clock in a way that is unrealistic. I am not saying that in the real world there was not often time pressure. Just not in quite this way.

My wish is that in operations I could string together a series of “full” battles using the same forces. Not “truncated” battles, as is the case presently.

Over all I prefer operations, potentially they are more realistic, but could the maximum battle length be increased?

Thanks for your time,

All the best,

Kip.

[Quenaelin]

I think this is not hard to implement, how about it BTS, unlimited number of turns should be somekind of option? Of course then there should be retreat option implemented too.

[Guest Seimerst]

I have felt the same time pressure in a game or two. But I have also worried over my infantry (and some weapons) running out of ammo even in some of the shorter 20-30 turn games. If they went much longer, I would be assaulting with entrenching tools and defending with dirt clods. In the operations that I have played, I have not felt them to be truncated. I have to keep reminding myself, that the battle is short and I am but a small part of an operation that is going on both of my flanks.

[Quenaelin]

Supply trucks, answer is supply trucks, in Muzzle Velocity there was supply trucks where to get additional ammunition and medical trucks to get first aid. So Battles could last about 1-2 hours or more, but that was in realtime. So if you want longer battles it could be good to implemented these too to CM. And of course this whole supply system could be simulated with factories, trasportations and logistics. Maybe I am just dreaming of these things, programming effort would be quite much, I realize that.

[Guest MantaRay]

Well this is simulated between the end of the turn, and the beginning of the next turn. Which in a way is unrealistic, but keeps the flow going in the battle, which is far more important IMO.

I think the clock is fine. Very rarely do I not have more than enough time to accomplish my objectives. The second half is usually just mopping up to get my kill ratios a little higher.

Now I don't win 95-5 a lot, because I push my troops, and if some meet Jesus, well that is the cost of doing business. Only units I am careful with are tanks, but lately I have been playing mostly infantry battles. I find that after the arty barrage, a quick strike at the weak points are the best way to win.

And I am not interested in 8 battles of 60 turns. What if on turn 28 I have accomplished my goal? Then I will have to sit there and hit go for a long time.

And what if you have a 60 turn battle in an 8 battle OP, and you get the the edge of the viewable map? Then you have to sit and hit the go button forever also. Personally, I like 20 turn HUGE OPS.

Besides, the more battles there are, the more enemy troops I get to kill (reinforcements wise)

Ray

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Quenaelin:

Supply trucks, answer is supply trucks, in Muzzle Velocity there was supply trucks where to get additional ammunition and medical trucks to get first aid. So Battles could last about 1-2 hours or more, but that was in realtime. So if you want longer battles it could be good to implemented these too to CM. And of course this whole supply system could be simulated with factories, trasportations and logistics. Maybe I am just dreaming of these things, programming effort would be quite much, I realize that.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

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[This message has been edited by MantaRay (edited 12-28-2000).]

[kipanderson]

Hi,

Clearly the length of battles in operations is not a problem with most players; or there would have been more response to my post. Obviously a minority issue.

There are two reasons why I still have some hope that the powers that be will take mercy on me and implement the change I have requested.

The first is that common sense tells me that it requires very little work; by the standards of these things. I know everyone at BTS does long hours and already has more than enough to do but having seen the way Charles can get through coding problems it must be a relatively small job. At least hopefully it is.

Secondly, there is no adverse side effect to such a change. If you change the way a certain command works, say “sneak”, there will be those that liked it the way it was and those that requested a different change. By increasing the maximum length of battles in operations you offend no one, but greatly please some.

I did not request the change six months ago because I took it for granted that many others would lobby for an adjustment and it would happen anyway. I got that wrong.

Still hopeful of an adjustment before CM1 is put to bed.

All the best,

Kip.

[ASL Veteran]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by kipanderson:

Hi,

Clearly the length of battles in operations is not a problem with most players; or there would have been more response to my post. Obviously a minority issue.

There are two reasons why I still have some hope that the powers that be will take mercy on me and implement the change I have requested.

The first is that common sense tells me that it requires very little work; by the standards of these things. I know everyone at BTS does long hours and already has more than enough to do but having seen the way Charles can get through coding problems it must be a relatively small job. At least hopefully it is.

Secondly, there is no adverse side effect to such a change. If you change the way a certain command works, say “sneak”, there will be those that liked it the way it was and those that requested a different change. By increasing the maximum length of battles in operations you offend no one, but greatly please some.

I did not request the change six months ago because I took it for granted that many others would lobby for an adjustment and it would happen anyway. I got that wrong.

Still hopeful of an adjustment before CM1 is put to bed.

All the best,

Kip.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Personally, I think that the time lengths for operations are perfect. An operation must create a fine balance between the time needed to get the job done and the forces available. I wouldn't think of an operation strictly as 6 20 turn unrelated battles for example, but as one 120 turn battle with 6 breaks in between.

The main problem is that if a battle in an Operation is lengthened to 40 or 50 turns, then that gives the attacker much more time to win the operation in one battle rather than forcing the attacker to split his time between several battles. Also, If one side or another takes super heavy casualties in the first battle, he will just get overrun in subsequent battles - and the time limit functions as a cap for casualties.

[dog6880]

CAP ON CASUALTIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! thats rediculous. that shoul dbe the number one reason not to have a time limit. if an operation ends in 3 battles instead of six due to heavy losses then thats how it shou8ld be.

if i force cant fight on then too bad. the reserves could be used and sent in on the computers judegment. i read something in the book about that.

[Major Tom]

Increasing the length of battles in operations does only serve the attacker. There are MANY games in CM where a person who suffered at the beginning was saved by key delaying actions slowing the enemy advance so they couldn't reach their objective, or, cut off and destroy their remaining forces. CM Battles and Scenarios have been playtested to determine what length of turn will suit the plot of the Operation. These Operations are designed urge the players to follow a certain storyline. Lengthening these turns beyond the correct length suitable for the map size and number of units will unbalance these scenarios.

Removing turn limits entirely will make the game too long, and battles too tiresome. It only really serves the people who take joy not from just winning, but, also beating their opponent into the dirt.

Check out the Ideas on Time limits thread. Removing a time limit will give the person who is attacking unlimited time in which to start their attack, giving them an unrealistic infinite amount of time to take an objective. In reality, there were limits imposed by their own commanders, as well as enemy reinforcements. What would the point be for a defender to delay the attacker with ambushes if the game ends only when the attacker says so?

[kipanderson]

Major Tom, ASL Veteran, hi,

I may have expressed my self badly, not for the first time.

I am not lobbying for the “removal of time limits” in battles in operations. All I am asking for is that the maximum number of turns one can set for battles within the “operations editor” be increased.

Those that prefer 15 or 20 turn battles could still set such limits within the editor. I am not asking that players with such preferences be expected to give up the option of short battles within operations. I am requesting that those of us that believe longer battles are more realistic, I am not claiming we are necessarily correct in that belief, should have the option to set a limit of say 50 turns per battle in a given operation using the editor.

I agree with much of what you both said but cannot see the harm in having an option to set longer limits on battles in the editor, for those that wish to.

My view is that in reality there may often have been periods greater than 30 minutes between pauses in battles to reorganise and re-supply. Which is what the break between battles in operation represents.

My average battle goes something like this,

1) take full advantage of set up phase,

2) then 5-10 turns preparation within the battle,

3) 10-20 turns assault

4) 5-10 turns reorganising/gathering forces,

5) 10-15 turns final push.

Clearly more often than not this extends the battle over 30 turns, the current limit in operations.

Hoping I have expressed myself more clearly,

All the best,

Kip.

[kipanderson]

Hi,

I fully recognise that for most people the length of battles within operations is not an issue. Most are happy with things as they are; they find a maximum of 30 turns per battle adequate. I also realise that BTS cannot, and should not, agree to every tweak that is suggested. I have had suggestions politely turned down before, and am relaxed about it. I still enjoy the game just as much. However, I am a little disappointed that the request to give us the “option” of building longer battles within the “operations editor” has been turned down, i.e. did not make it into patch 1.1.

No doubt we all think of “operations” in slightly different ways. When I think of an “operation” in CM I imagine an event or series of events that to most military historians, i.e. in most books, would be described as a single “battle”.

By this I mean that when a historian talks of the “battle” for the village of Marnach, in the Ardennes, he is talking about an “operation” in CM terms. Lets assume that the struggle for Marnach took most of the 17th of December 1944, say 6-8 hours. This struggle may have been made up of 2-4 separate “assaults” or “attempts” to storm the village. Each one of these “assaults” taking between 20-120 minutes. The gap between “assaults” being used to re-supply and reorganise. In some of these pauses there may have been a company orders groups, i.e. the assault plan may been tweaked. In CM terms each “assault” is in fact a “battle” within an “operation” to take Marnach. Or at least this is how I imagine things.

Given the above it seems unrealistic to assume that each separate “assault”, or in CM operations terms each separate “battle”, should be limited to just 30 minutes. Clearly, this is just my personal opinion and I am not claiming I am correct in this view.

It has long been my view that there were two remaining minor “gaps” in the realism of CM’s modelling of WW2 battalion level conflict. One was the fact that the mantlet on the Panther was not modelled in enough detail. I considered this “a detail too far” even for BTS. However, this issue has now been dealt with in patch 1.1!

The second is the issue I have been hammering away at here. The fact that the maximum number of turns per battle in the operations editor is only 30. If this maximum was to be increased to 60 those that wish to set a shorter maximum could still do so, but those of us that feel 50-60 turn battles are more realistic could also set such limits.

Given that making such a change would take very little work and given that it would be a change without any “adverse” effects for those that prefer shorter battles, they would still be free to model shorter battles, could you not find the time to increase the maximum length of “battles” in the “operations editor”?

For me it would make a big difference.

Thanks for your time,

All the best,

Kip.

[jasoncawley@ameritech.net]

I don't see any reason for you not to have the option, but I can tell you that and why it will not work as you imagine. The truth of the matter is all CM players are bloody and reckless by real historical terms, for the obvious reason that they are playing with bits, not facing death before nightfall. In long scenarios, the entire force on the map will generally kill or be killed. There will thus rarely be a next time, and this not for historical reasons of the deadliness of weapons or anything of the kind, but simply because CM players do not face anything remotely like the same reluctance to press in and get killed that the historical commanders did, in longer battles.

You could put it this way - rally is too easy and to complete in CM game terms. That works fine for battles of a certain scale. But stretch a battle to an hour and the game system is going way outside the parameters it was designed for, and realism will go down as a result.

In single scenarios, this doesn't matter very much because the game is going to be over with a winner at the end of the scenario. If overkill results or sides do not tire or become cautious as rapidly as they actually would, so what? It makes little difference to the overall outome.

But half the point of operations instead of single fight scenarios, is to put the proper level of emphasis on force preservation. Historical fights were in general much less bloody than CM simulations of them - something that is true BTW for just about every simulation. The instinct for self-preservation is always less than it was in reality.

If you make 1 hour battles and string 6-8 of them together, what will happen is that force preservation will quickly become an entirely impossible task for whichever side weakens first. The side winning will have unrealistically long to pursue its edge with unrealistically high aggressiveness. It will take higher than historical losses doing so, but the other side will feel the effect even more strongly, and be effectively wiped out sometime in the second half of one of the middle battles. Virtually all of your operations will end in that fashion, one way or the other.

But that is not at all what actually happened historically. The average loser of a battle of the scale of an operation in CM terms, lost less than half of their total force, with the rest living to fight another day, even if they lost the operation in question pretty decisively.

So, I do not see any reason for you not to have the control-knob to dial as you wish, but I predict that you will see from it just what the designers saw in their testing. That dialing it past 30 reduces realism in operational scale fights, rather than increasing it.

One man's opinion.

[JenDragon]

wouldn't the battles or operations that already exist remain the same and only newly created operations or edited operations have the flexibley created turns. It shouldnt effect anything already done just if someone wanted to create an operation with 6 50t battles, or in an operation are all battles staticly set at 30 turns. I'm new to the game just got it for Christmas.

[kipanderson]

Jasoncawley, JenDragon, hi,

Jasoncawley thanks for taking the time for your considered response.

Strange as this may sound, I agree 100% with all that you wrote. I agree that the mixture of having weapons systems with “realistic” lethality and the fact that players are “unrealistically” ruthless in their use of their “bitmap” armies leads to far heavier losses than those which were historically suffered. I also understand and agree with the point about the shorter battles in operation forcing players to attempt to converse their forces.

However, I forgot to describe just how slow and cautious a player I am. I really do try to look after my “bitmap” men. I regard even light casualties as failure. I regard causalities of 20% as the upper limit of acceptability. I view CM as a stunningly/mind blowingly realistic simulation of WW2 tactical problems. What follows is a brief example of one of my battles.

Dense, city terrain. 800m by 1,600m. Attacking force, one company of Churchill tanks. Eight heavy 150mm-armour versions, eight light 100mm-armour versions. Also one company of British infantry. Defending force. One company German infantry reinforced with extra light anti-tank weapons. Plus two 75mm and two 88mm anti-tank guns.

The battle lasted about 70 turns and I cleared ¾ of the map for the loss of one immobilised tank and about twenty infantry causalities. I was a very slow, very cautious advance street by street. It was against the AI and not a more cunning human.

In short, I fully understand why most people go for the shorter battles both in single version and in operations. At times I like to play the same way and find myself wanting to take an objective regardless of losses. But mostly I do play very cautiously. I am not slow in the time I take for each turn but do not expect too much of my men in any one turn.

JenDragon,

Absolutely correct. If the changes I hope for were to happen only those operations you intentionally edited and changed would be effected. No one that wished to continue with shorter battles would be forced to change.

Because there is no adverse effect that I can think of to the tweak I have requested I remain hopeful that BTS will give us the “option” of increasing the maximum number of turns per battle within and “operations editor” above 30.

All the best,

Kip.

[jasoncawley@ameritech.net]

"I cleared ¾ of the map"

And killed, I bet, 3/4 or more of the defending force in the process. You think it is a successfully unbloody fight but you are only looking at one side of it. Losing ~3/4 of an infanry company, if the defender's core force for the operation is that infantry company, is the end of that operation. And the defender did in your example, I'll bet.

There is nothing stopping you from playing at the same pace in operations games of 30 turns. Because that is only .4 times as long as you took, you probably would have cleared only 30% of the map in the process. As a result, the defenders probably would have taken only 25-33% casualties.

You'd take some ground, and you'd keep your losses low, and he'd lose something more serious, and that would be a victory. In the next fight for the same city blocks, you would not be signicantly weaker and he would be.

But what would not happen is the defenders sitting there to be ground to sawdust without either pulling out or calling up reserves. It might be after the bloody nose you gave them, they wouldn't feel the least bit interested in making you expend another 40 careful minutes on the next several blocks, killing them in the process. They might prefer to high-tail it to the high ground outside the city and call in Hans the British armor specialist to shore up their crumbling front.

The net result of your 40 extra turns was not to enable care on your part, because you could have played just as carefully for less time with good effect. The result of the extra turns was to turn your local success and a 25-33% lose of a limb for the defenders, into an entire body crush of the enemy force, which magically did not have any choice but to stand and die, because you put a turn counter at 70 (or didn't limit it, whatever).

Operations are not one sided things.

[Quenaelin]

I think this unlimited number of turns should be still an option and I am NOT suggesting that battle lenght increase should be mandatory.

There could be check after 30 turns, if both players are willing to continue fighting. So everybody could play until last man standing or force opponent off the map if they like (if opponent is retreating) or just end the game.

This last man standing subject is the one which BTS has allready taken to concern in some previous discussion. But I would like to add this unlimited number of turns to that also, so we could actually battle to the last man standing.

[kipanderson]

Hi,

Once again I can only say that I agree with all that others have written since I last posted. And yes, I did kill ¾ or more of the defending force. In fact if I remember correctly the defending Germans surrendered, I wiped them out. I was down to my last few rounds of HE for the Churchills and was about to call it a day anyway.

We have agreed that the mixture of “realistic” modelling of weapon lethality and the “unrealistic” ruthlessness of human players leads to heavier casualties than would be the case in the real world, in common with most simulations. However, I would add a third factor, which was much in play in my city battle. The AI in CM sets new standards, but is still not at formidable an opponent as a human and is also very ruthless. This was part of the reason for my extremely light casualties and the Germans very heavy casualties. I was also having a “lucky” battle. In order to deal with all these issues simply tweak up the forces commanded by the AI. I am sure a lot of people do this. Then one gets a more challenging game. When I next play my city battle I will reinforce the defending Germans.

The frustration for me is that due to the inflexibility in the length one can set for battles, in the operations editor, it is impossible for me to design operations that are as realistic as I believe they could be. (This is 100% personal opinion, I am not claiming my vision of a “realistic” operation is correct and others are wrong.) If the maximum length one could set for battles in operations were increased what follows is the type of operation I would like to play.

The attacking force would be comprised of one company of infantry and one of tanks with some artillery support. The defender, a reinforced company of infantry. The objective, to take a large village in the Ardennes or Normandy. I would set battle length to 60 turns and the number of battles to 6. If I were successful I would expect to have captured the village be the end of battle two or three. The six battles I set in the editor are “just in case”. The art is in giving the defending AI enough forces and reinforcements to create a challenging game given its weakness when compared to a human player. The point of all my games is for me to judge afterwards “did I do it right, or did I make too many mistakes”. The fun is to watch a “realistic” battle unfold before my eyes but without any real blood. The problem is that at present I either play a .cmb type single “battle” of say, 60 turns or a series of “truncated” 30 turn .cmc battles in an operation. If I go for the .cmb, 60 turn single battle, the job is often not complete by the time I run out of “puff”, ammunition. If I go for a series of .cmc, 30 turn battles, the “hand of God” intervenes ever half hour to stop the battle regardless of the position on the ground. In my view, neither is realistic. The .cmb type battle is very “realistic” in many ways because CM is a true stimulation, but it only represents “one” assault or attempt to storm a village in “real”, historical battle terms. As far as I can judge from the dozens of military history books I have read, I realise this is true of a very large number of CM players, an “average” battle for a village would last between 2-6 hours and be made up of a series of assaults each one of which is a separate “battle” in CM terms. This is what I want to model but cannot at present without having the “battle” artificially stopped every half-hour.

Still hopeful that the powers that be at BTS will take mercy on me and agree to the very modest, but to a minority, important change I am lobbying for and increase the maximum battle length that can be set in the operation editor.

Thanks for your time,

All the best,

Kip.

PS. Reading what I just posted I sound very rude about the AI. I am a huge fan of it. I just think that when a human is having a “lucky” battle the AI is stretched to keep up.