Front line

[poppy]

Irregular front lines were the rule in the real world WW2. They depended upon the terrain and the forces involved in that area. The static operation is a good step forward but a lot of playing and menuvering goes to waste when the next battle leaves too many isolated pockets and a straight front line behide them. This is an excellent game and I look forward to cmx2. Pop excuss the spelling

[Moon]

Hello Poppy,

front line calculations in CM's operations have been debated a lot. Admittedly, we didn't manage to get them to work as well as we had hoped to initially. But besides that, a lot of the problems that I have seen reported are also a mix of misunderstandings how the various types of operations work; and wrong expectations on the side of the player.

Let me try to explain - how front lines are fixed depends to no small degree on the strategic context that a CM battle plays in. The type of the operation you play does set this context. In an advance op, front line is determined differently than in an assault or static op. For example, an advance op could be seen as implying a certain balance of forces (on a strategic level, i.e. the advancing party is a lot stronger than the defender, who is forced to conduct a fighting withdrawl, really), other strong assaults on neighboring fronts and so on.

I have seen reports where people complained about how front lines were drawn but clearly did not understand the concept here.

Secondly, sometimes it seems players (don't mean you specifically Poppy ) lose the relation to the time and scale in CM. One second in CM is one second in real life. One meter of game map is one meter in real life. People want to magically end an operation 25 meters away from the enemy, be able to replenish ammo and even get some fresh reinforcements in, and then play battle 2.

This just isn't the way it works. Op designers are as much to blame as the players here. Ops should have long enough battles so that both sides can withdraw a little before a battle is completed and consolidate ground won, unless you specifically want to simulate one long engagement with next to no resupply - but then you need to give people enough reinforcements, and the players have to make sure to rotate, rest and withdraw "used" units, and move them back.

I am the first to admit that Operations are very difficult to make. They take a lot of testing and a lot of balancing and tweaking to make sure all the parameters are right. And this, coupled with some misunderstandings about how they work, and some wrong expectations from players based on movies, stories and other games, leads to problems. Out main fault is that we didn't foresee this, and therefore the new engine we'll have something else in place.

Martin

[Sergei]

Originally posted by Moon:

therefore the new engine we'll have something else in place.

Hmmh?

I hope the idea of a series of battles on the same big map isn't outright thrown into dustbin.

[junk2drive]

i agree with sergei. i play ops more than battles. i actually like having to deal with the troops that are cut off and unsupplied. you have to make hard decisions. and i sometimes pull them to the back, saving them for another battle, counting them as reinforcements, holding flags.

every game system has its pluses and minuses. some can't be fixed. cm has some things that are hard to deal with, but i still enjoy the games.

[poppy]

Thanks Martin for the repley. Ive been playing CMBO for several years. I recently purchased CMAK and am just getting started. I think that in a huge operation using the largest map possible and in the static mode to be able to creat a salient say 1500meters deep by 500meters wide in battle one and then defend/attack this salient in the next battle using the setup move to position forces would be fun and it would provide more continuity between battles. Please keep the gameplay at the squad level in CMX2. Poppy