Market Garden...polder fields?

[gunnersman]

Yea...I'm bored and getting ahead of things. But my curiosity is getting the best of me and looking for a change here.

So I've searched through previous posts and found where Steve said there will be terrain tiles specific for Market Garden.

So does that mean polder fields will be proper polder fields or will the scenario designer have to make the terrain "wet".

I would imagine just "wet" wont cut it.

Going back to work now.

[Gpig]

I feel that it's possible now to re-create Polder. Wet or "Mud" could suffice to represent low fields between raised embankments/roads. But perhaps you are right in that Polder requires it's own terrain type...

I'm curious as to how "mud" will be added to the game (if at all). I recall that CMBB and CMAK had it as an option. Nothing visual was represented, but your vehicles would likely bog as soon as you went off the road (and even sometimes when ON the road).

Looking forward to creating many battles with this game.

Gpig

[Gryphonne]

Yea...I'm bored and getting ahead of things. But my curiosity is getting the best of me and looking for a change here.

So I've searched through previous posts and found where Steve said there will be terrain tiles specific for Market Garden.

So does that mean polder fields will be proper polder fields or will the scenario designer have to make the terrain "wet".

I would imagine just "wet" wont cut it.

Going back to work now.

"wet" terrain surely wouldn't cut it, I don't think a tank would be able to cross a polder. Especially not the polders typically found in the Netherlands. However, the terrain in the (South)Eastern parts of the Netherlands is a tad more solid than here (West-Netherlands).

[para]

Will we be able to blow,take or defend bridges?

[tyrspawn]

Polder was a major determinant of the battle plans in Market Garden -it basically forced both sides to use roads, hence why "hell's highway" existed at all. Off-road maneuvering was difficult or impossible in most areas. Arnhem for instance was literally surrounded by polder to the south, and this was a major reason why XXX corps was unable to break through and relieve the British airborne. The germans effectively stuffed their attack on the road leading into it.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

Wet grasslands might come pretty close, I reckon.

The apparent removal of ditches is going to be a bigger problem in re-creating the Dutch countryside, imho.

[Sequoia]

I wonder if we'll get one off models of the Arhem and Nijmegen bridges. Boats would be nice to do the 82nd's crossing at Nijmegen but Steve said no boats so I guess that's out.

[Erik Springelkamp]

Polder itself doesn't say much about the firmness of the ground.

There are polders with solid clay ground that are perfectly good for tanks, but then there can be water filled ditches that are just too wide for tanks to cross. The polders along the big rivers in the Netherlands are of this first kind, with the water ditches being the major obstacles, not the ground.

There are other polders that consist of peat ground, those are the ones in the West, in Holland proper, and they will not support tanks. This can be simulated by wet grassland where tanks will bug down. They certainly have wide water ditches as well.

The water ditches can easily be 8 metres wide, too wide for a tank to cross, just wide enough to represent as a water feature without using the ditch from CMSF.

Already in the Middle Ages these polder lands were bad country for knights on horses. The horses got stuck in the mud, and couldn't cross the ditches.

The warriors from Frisia, the Northern Netherlands, used long pikes, that doubled as a jumping pole to jump over these water ways.

You can see the fork at the base of the spear, that prevents it from sinking into the bottom of the ditch while they are using the spear as a jumping pole:

[Gpig]

Hmmmm . . . I wonder why Horrocks' XXX corp didn't rig up some Sherman's with that kind of fork thingy . . .

[Michael Emrys]

The water ditches can easily be 8 metres wide, too wide for a tank to cross...

I believe the Commonwealth forces had a small number of these available for use in the Netherlands campaign:

Look like they would bridge the ditches you describe handily enough, although inadequate for anything bigger.

You can see the fork at the base of the spear, that prevents it from sinking into the bottom of the ditch while they are using the spear as a jumping pole:

Interesting. I always wondered about that.

Michael

[joethejet]

Speaking of Market-Garden, do we get to see paratroops and gliders actually floating to the ground in this version?

[Sequoia]

Speaking of Market-Garden, do we get to see paratroops and gliders actually floating to the ground in this version?

No. Troops and gliders don't drop into a tactical situations to which some one will reply Pegasus Bridge and the Poles at Arnhem to which some one will reply they don't include features for one time situations.

[ChrisND]

Speaking of Market-Garden, do we get to see paratroops and gliders actually floating to the ground in this version?

My very safe guess will be no, and my reasons for this guess are two-fold:

1. CM depicts the height of the battle itself, not how the troops get to the battle. With very few/no exceptions, you don't want to parachute right onto or jump out of a landing craft smack on top of an enemy formation. So it doesn't fall into the scope of the game.

2. The times when this did occur (arrival of troops by air/sea tactically right in the middle of a battle) are very few compared to the rest of the battles fought in the war, or even in Market Garden. Since these features would require quite a bit of development time to get right, look good, and be realistic, they wouldn't be worth that time spent for a few specific situations when that time could be spent on things that would apply to nearly every scenario.

Not that it wouldn't look great, mind you.

[JonS]

I believe the Commonwealth forces had a small number of these available for use in the Netherlands campaign:

Not just Netherlands. Every armd/tank bde HQ had at three of them. The carried a 30ft bridge (actually 34ft long), so 8m would be well within the span it could cope with.

Finding somewhere to actually, usefully deploy the thing might have been the larger challenge - it's not much use deploying a bridge if the surrounding ground is so soft the tanks can't get to it.

[joethejet]

... jump out of a landing craft smack on top of an enemy formation. So it doesn't fall into the scope of the game.

So, I take it, no Omaha Beach then.

Not that it wouldn't look great, mind you.

yeah, that's what I was thinking, but I do understand the logic.

[YankeeDog]

Finding somewhere to actually, usefully deploy the thing might have been the larger challenge - it's not much use dropping a bridge if the surrounding ground is so soft the tanks can't get to it.

Not to mention that temporary bridges usually don't work very well when the ends are resting on soft ground -- they're prone to slip, sink and/or capsize without hard abutments to rest upon.

AIUI, these type of bridging devices were most useful to quickly re-bridge in a location where a span had been recently dropped by the enemy. In this case, you'd usually have abutments available -- with a little explosives and know-how, it's pretty easy to drop the span of a bridge, but destroying the abutments takes a lot more time and/or explosives.

And in any event, as you correctly note, spanning a ditch on the middle of a muddy, soft field doesn't really do much good since the vehicles are likely to bog before they get to the bridge anyway.

[Erik Springelkamp]

And in a polder, you usually have lots of these ditches, one after the other.

[Michael Emrys]

And in a polder, you usually have lots of these ditches, one after the other.

That was on my mind too. As Jon says, each brigade only had three, so even if none are lost or wasted due to mischance, it's hard to see that they were going to get very far if there were many water obstacles to overcome. Of course, at that time and place they weren't advancing very fast anyway.

Michael

[Broadsword56]

[bumping this thread into 2012 since the OMG module is a year closer now, and because I want to learn all about how to map Holland as authentically as possible within the limits of what CMBN gives us.]

It's taken time, but in the 8 months or so that CMBN has been out, I think we've all learned a lot more about Norman bocage and terrain and building patterns, and many user-made maps have grown better and more realistic as a result.

After the Commonwealth module, CMBN will be taking us to Holland. And it's probably going to take time for us to explore the best ways to create that terrain in ways that not only look good and historically accurate, but contribute to realistic tactics and battle outcomes.

I hope some of our Dutch forum members will post first-hand knowledge, photos, etc., and that some of our history buffs will post links and anecdotes that give us all a clearer idea of what the terrain really looked like.

One thing we could certainly use is a resource for 1940s aerial photos of the OMG area, like the one we've been relying on for France.

We still don't know what new Holland-specific building types, terrain tiles, etc., Battlefront might give us with the OMG module. So, rather than just indulge in wild speculation, maybe we can think about best ways to create Dutch terrain (forget buildings for now) with what we now have, circa early 2012:

1. Polder -- The OP and early posts to this thread give some valuable insights -- polders vary in firmness and aren't necessarily all soft and impassable to vehicles, they have lots of watery ditches running through them, etc. I'd still like to see some diagrams or examples so I can better understand what polderland really looks like. How frequent are those ditches, typically how deep, and how far apart? I guess they're all supposed to feed into some larger drainage system, so how does that work? The whole dike-and-polder system of reclaimed land is still a bit of a mystery to me.

2. Borders -- What separated Dutch fields most often in the OMG area, and what objects create that look and effect? Was wire fence in greater use in Holland than it was in Normandy? Trees seem more scarce, so fewer wooden fences perhaps? When there are walls, would brick have been the most typical material instead of stone?

3. Raised roads -- i.e., Hell's Highway. Not all roads would be raised, but many were. How high above the flatland would the typical raised roadway be? The most significant tactical effects were that the embankments blocked LOS, and that once vehicles were on a raised roadway they couldn't get off (because the banks were too steep). Keeping vehicles confined to a raised road would be easily accomplished with road placed over heavy forest tiles. But these would look brownish and weird, I think. So maybe BFC has something up their sleeve to make Dutch raised roads work better. That leads me to...

4. Dikes. We won't be needing bocage anymore in Holland. So what if those objects became dikes? They'd be maybe wider (3 or 4 tiles?) and the berm would be higher than the bocage berm, so maybe then you could even place roads atop them. Not sure if we'd really have to have this, but imagine having to place loads of hard-coded elevation points all around fields just to make dikes or road/RR embankments. We've seen how the game suffers when maps have too many fixed elevation points. So the placeable object seems a more elegant way to go.

[JonS]

4. Dikes. We won't be needing bocage anymore in Holland. So what if those objects became dikes?

Remember that Arnhem will be a module (is that the right term?) for CMBN, not its own game. Which means that anything that gets added for Arnhem has to be additional, not a replacement.

If dikes replaced bocage, then every scen set in Normandy would suddenly become very very odd.

[Michael Emrys]

After the Commonwealth module, CMBN will be taking us to Holland.

And presumably north-eastern France and Belgium as well.

Michael

[Vark]

Could you have discarded parachutes as a doodad, or a glider as a unique building? The photos show thousands of the former and dozens of the later scattered over LZ's and some scenarios will take place virtually on them!

[JonS]

You could mod various open terrain types to visually include discarded parachutes, although that'd probably get a bit repetitive.

The same thing would happen with doodads too, though. Even assuming there were, say 6 doodad slots taken up with discarded chutes ... there'd still be an awful lot of visual repitition. Too, the performance hit would be non-trivial, I think.

[Broadsword56]

Just discovered this amazing resource site for 1:25,000 military topo maps of Holland from the Library of Congress. It really gets my OMG mapping fingers itching...

The map site:

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?ammem/gmd:@field(NUMBER+@band(g6000m+gct00040))

And, since the images are in that huge jpeg2000 format, you'll also want to have an image converter (like irfanview, with the jpeg2000 plugin installed) to view and convert them to regular jpegs for your mapping purposes.

[Broadsword56]

I came across this book many, many years ago in my school library, and found it fascinating:

It's from the late 1960s and long out of print, I think, but I found it on interlibrary loan. It's filled with line drawings of typical Dutch farms and fields and settlements -- worth browsing if you want to get a better overall feel for the look of the place.

But beyond that, the book has several detailed diagrams that illustrate how the whole dike-and-polder system works:

So, if you're trying to make an authentic CMBN map of Dutch terrain and wondering what all this "polder" stuff is about, you can use this to better understand why a drainage ditch, a canal, or a set of windmills might be in a particular location and how they relate to one another.

Granted, most of Spier's book deals with regions farther north and closer to the sea than the Market-Garden battlefields. But much of it can still be helpful.

According to Peter Spier's Wikipedia page, he had a harrowing WWII experience (Jewish descent, concentration camp survivor). After the war he emigrated to the USA, and I think many of his books reflected his love and nostalgia for his native land.