War Thunder. Not even joking. But not the German or Soviet tree, go like Italian or French or Swedish and do stupid shit. There is nothing funnier than killing 3 tigers with a piece of shit that can't fire APHE rounds.
wargame series if you can suspend your disbelief at laughably OP russian units that are completely removed from reality
multiplayer is good but really hard and there's lots of team stacks
I just can't grasp the gameplay of the wargame series. it feels very arcade-y, everything moves so fast. it seems like it's much more about memorizing unit counters and stats than trying to simulate maneuver warfare. Just a nonstop rock paper scissors game with tanks and jets painted over it.
https://i.imgur.com/1LNNeFG.jpg
One of you recommended this and it's pretty good, not worth the price though.
this game has so much potential but it is strangled to death by arbitrary constraints. The units move at the actual pace that the vehicles/personel would move IRL, and the fights take place in real time, yet they put time limits like "Take this entire c5 block sector of a city in 45 minutes" like that would ever happen IRL. An excellent simulation completely wrecked by gamification.
Wargame sucks ass. >wargame >wargame red dragon >steel brigade >warno
All rts zerg goyslop
World in Conflict is good
Combat mission would be good if they improved performance
Xcom is good
Clear seas is good
That new game broken arrow looks VERY GOOD
Falling frontier is good
Hearts of iron is good
Stellaris is good
Nebulous fleet command is very good. It's autism enough to be interesting but casual enough to enjoy while drunk. Conquest mode for it in 2024 also seems VERY promising
In Combat Mission 1 you can play as the US Army, Airborne, British Army, Airborne, Marines, Polish Army, Airborne, Canadian Army, French Army, Wehrmacht Heer, Gebirgsjager, Luftwaffe Falschrimjager, Feld Division, SS, and Volkstrum. You can choose any time to fight from June 6th 1944 to May 8th 1945, in France, Holland, Belgium, or Germany. It costs $5 and you can install it as many times as you'd like on GOG.
In the updated Combat Mission: Battle for Normandy, you can choose either the US Army or the Heer, fighting in France from June 6th to September 7th 1944. There's DLC that adds the British army and forces that took part in Operation Market Garden like paratroopers, SS, and Kreigsmarine ground forces but it costs $160 for the base game and the two DLCs. The game can only be purchased from the publisher's website and has DRM which locks the download code to two computers at a time.
Oh yeah, I remember playing Barbarossa to Berlin, which I believe had Germans (Heer, Luftwaffe, Waffen-SS), Finns, Hungarians, Romanians, Italians, Soviets and with them (IIRC) the Poles. One big reason I didn't buy a single new Combat Mission until this year was because they just didn't seem worth the price, considering how limited the scope has gotten in each new game.
Shock Force 2, it has the Germans and Dutch as well, it's really fun with new mechanics related to insurgents, the Syrians also play in a very different way.
NTA, it's probably the IFF integration, in how units aren't modeled onscreen until the spotter gets a positive ID on the target, and consequently the tactical AI won't engage a partial spot no matter how contextually unlikely it is to be a friendly. If you set the difficulty to Iron it shows the spotting system being applied to friendly units, but it also makes the UI an absolute bitch to navigate.
In Combat Mission 1 you can play as the US Army, Airborne, British Army, Airborne, Marines, Polish Army, Airborne, Canadian Army, French Army, Wehrmacht Heer, Gebirgsjager, Luftwaffe Falschrimjager, Feld Division, SS, and Volkstrum. You can choose any time to fight from June 6th 1944 to May 8th 1945, in France, Holland, Belgium, or Germany. It costs $5 and you can install it as many times as you'd like on GOG.
In the updated Combat Mission: Battle for Normandy, you can choose either the US Army or the Heer, fighting in France from June 6th to September 7th 1944. There's DLC that adds the British army and forces that took part in Operation Market Garden like paratroopers, SS, and Kreigsmarine ground forces but it costs $160 for the base game and the two DLCs. The game can only be purchased from the publisher's website and has DRM which locks the download code to two computers at a time.
>he game can only be purchased from the publisher's website and has DRM which locks the download code to two computers at a time.
It's on Steam now, along with Black Sea, Red Thunder and Shock Force 2, with Final Blitzkrieg coming next IIRC. It seems like their deal with Matrix to get Professional Edition up and running came with a clause to be slightly less retarded.
I used to love the hell out of Beyond Overlord, but when I tried the first Shock Force I really couldn't get into it, I think for the reasons you mention.
The UI was clunky and confusing, the AI was meh and that spotting system wasn't really all that fun. I think Beyond Overlord was just the right amount of autism for me.
Disregard Shock Force, get Cold War. It's way better, especially in multiplayer (you can easily get a PBEM game started on the official discord). CM in general is underwhelming when it comes to SP because most official scenarios are poorly designed (bad reinforcement spawns that result in playing around spawns) and the AI is dumb as fuck. PvP is absolutely amazing though, and the scenario editor allows you to create a map of any non-urban area in the world within a couple of hours as long as you know where to get your elevation data and use google maps for details.
It's extremely autistic. IIRC, it was originally designed for the military to plan their drills or something, and then became an actual wargame.
HOI is just a GSG with an emphasis on the military side of things, much like Victoria has an emphasis on economics, Crusader Kings is basically Sims 3 in medieval Europe, and EU is a mix of everything. HOI is definitely not as complex as CMO. When you play HOI, you play as country leader, when you play CMO, you are a Chief of Staff.
Just use the create scenario tool and tinker around with it a lot. I have probably 800 hours (not all genuine, a lot of it I was AFK or had it paused while I was doing something else) and a lot of it comes down to practice. It has basically all modern military platforms in it but a lot of them are boilerplate (F-16A might be pretty similar to MiG-29A with differences in some stats, fuel capacity, weapons, turn rate, etc, other than that they're basically the same and the game doesn't simulate any IRL differences in how they're maintained or operated, a MiG-29A will take AWACS contacts at the same speed a F-16A will despite that not being realistic at all lmao), ships are pretty notorious for being basically RNG calculated death circles (Arleigh Burkes with SM-6s will always detect contact X with RCS Y at Z range, 99% of the time they will defeat it before A range from the ship, etc, you can throw a Moskva class in and it'll bat down 6 Neptunes without much issue), ground stuff and logistics needs work, etc.
But it's still a bloody great simulation. It'll let you get an intuitive sense of how fast a group of X can go to Y through Z defense, it'll let you practice being in charge of tasking for a squadron (I have to defeat a S-300 with 12 F-16C Block 40s, how do I do it?), it'll let you mess around with large scale things like carrier ops and see how those might be done, what the difference between an F-14 and an F-18 is, how S-3s worked and how things change now that they aren't around, etc.
It's just a good thing to have. Next time a Chinese poster claims their air defense network could shoot down Tomahawks 500 km away from their coastline, plop in some air defenses and see how that works. If a vatnik claims that the MiG-31 can shoot down F-16s over Kyiv, try it out and find he's obviously full of shit. Etc.
It's ancient, but Harpoon II is great choice if you want CMO bit with slightly less autism. Unlike CMO, you get a description of each unit and weapon/sensor effectiveness expressed in meaningful terms like hit% and detection range for targets x meters long. The manual has a lot of advice on tactics and strategy and units have descriptions so you don't need to google every random platform name.
It's also free.
combat mission is comfy jank when you feel up for it, playing titles where you can just absorb losses on either side is more fun like cold war, ww2 or ukraine rather than shock force where you lose more americans in 1 battle then a decade of irl afghanistan
steel divison 2 for slightly more tactical RTS army general campaign, red dragon for fun quick matches with friends
The trick to playing Combat Mission games is to just to blow everything on the map away. It's war crimes simulator. Also get tracer and sound mods. Also there's a chocolate chip camp reskin for the Americans in Shock Force.
There is one vanilla mission too as the Syrian army vs rebels in a city. I installed a better uniform mod for them as well. The way the designer has it, you'll drive down three narrow streets in separate columns to reach your objective. Not doing that. So I moved everything over to a highway along the edge of the map, bypassed the city, sent the inf to secure elevated strongpoints along the route, and then leveled the city with tank fire, BMP fire / missiles, and lots of artillery.
its the only way, urban combat like afghan doorkicking is impossible and will just lead to a dead squad of americans, you either accept battle of berlin grind or just level everything and hope there isnt a guy still sat in the objective
It's possible, just don't rush the building without overwatch and suppression. You also need to pay attention to where the doors and windows are.
A typical urban attack without heavy weapons boils down to suppressing the enemy and placing a fireteam on a wall with windows so that they can shoot inside the building.
If you need to check the area and you don't want to suppress everything that has LOS on your troops, you need to ensure you'll have fire superiority in any possible fight and accept that some of your guys might get shot if there's an ambush.
It's actually quite easy to finish most CMSF and even CMBS scenarios with only a few casualties if you know what you're doing and you understand the mechanics. The field consists of action squares, you DON'T want to enter an action square occupied by an enemy unit, ideally you want to get your dudes to an adjacent square when the enemy is at maximum suppression to get a clean kill. Doorkicking in a literal sense isn't possible because the interiors simply aren't modeled beyond some cover bonuses. You might get some action inside larger buildings, but it's the same playbook - suppress, move an assault team to an adjacent square with LOS, kill, move on.
It's actually quite fun when you have the explosives to tunnel through adjacent apartment blocks and shit.
its just janky and not fun most of the time as sometimes suppression doesnt work on units on the other side of building etc or its several buildings deep etc and an assault team having to actually enter either rushes in and dies or hunt moves in and dies outside cause the enemy unsuppresses or dies inside anyway lol
Yeah, ideally you'd want to isolate the building and go one action square beyond what you're actually penetrating with your fires, i.e. if a building consists of 2 squares, you need to clear square 1 from the outside while suppressing both, then lift fire on square 1 and enter it while maintaining suppression on square 2. I agree it's pretty janky and quite mechanical, but this isn't a CQB game. It works best in rural or mixed terrain. Also, don't use Hunt, it's a noob trap that's only really useful when you have all the time in the world and you want to limit potential casualties while running a patrol in some woods.
I do 90% of my infantry movement with Quick, only use Fast when I need to cross some really dangerous terrain (like running a squad across the street), and only for short 50m bursts (100m will tire your guys out). Move is useful when you want to conserve stamina and the area has been cleared by other units. Assault is kinda neat when you have that 3:1 advantage and want to move that assault squad in for the kill, but if you're using full squads in close combat you're probably doing it wrong because artillery is a bitch in all modern warfare games, including CMCW.
In PvP I absolutely love exploiting this as Americans, all you need is an Elite FO team and some 155s running a maximum duration fire mission with well-placed TRPs. If it's DPICM... oh boy, Ivan is in for a rough time. Contrary to what some people in the community think, it's also really good at killing tanks and is very point-efficient if you can consistently drop the sub-munitions on like 3-4 tanks. I really recommend launching a hotseat game, dropping a DPICM mission on 2 or 3 stationary companies (both MBTs an BMPs/BTRs), and giving them like 5 minutes for a quick demonstration - you'll be amazed with what these little fuckers can do for you.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Also can I ask you about artillery duration? You mentioned maximum duration but how much intensity do you use? There's harassing, a little bit, a moderate, and heavy. I've never really figured out what works best, but I'd usually just end up using heavy to flatten an area.
1 month ago
Anonymous
This really depends on what I'm doing with a mission and how risky my FO position is.
If I'm defending and my FO is hidden in a spot that'll realistically never get hit and I'm relying on TRPs with 155mm/152mm, I'll use medium intensity, 2 tubes and maximum duration and shift fire as my units spot the enemy moving from TRP to TRP (I typically use 10-15 TRPs depending on the map size when employing artillery in this way). That way you get 29 minutes with M109 (DPICM or HE) and 53 minutes with 2S3 (HE only), with adjustment time ranging from 2 minutes (US Army) to 3-4 minutes (USSR, it sometimes pays to take elite artillery instead of conscript, but your FO should always stay elite).
If I'm using mortars to do this, I'll use harass to get maximum duration.
If you're running setpiece assaults, you can use more tubes and heavy missions, although you should keep in mind that heavy and medium are very similar about 2 minutes deep because the ROF drops over time due to the heat mechanic.
On-map mortars allow for lightning-fast missions, both in terms of call times and adjustment times, but I typically don't bother with them because that's a niche better filled by tanks. I want my artillery to hit the immediate objective and to isolate it from the enemy, or to work both on the first and second echelon when defending.
It's also worth noting that artillery can be very dominant against infantry that isn't entrenched, and buildings are deathtraps because they're likely to be hit with 207s, 203s, 155s, 152s, or 240s - or heavy mortars, which will still collapse them and cause high casualties. So you should definitely use foxholes and trenches in your PvP QBs, and you should allow for rotations between firing positions and backup positions (I typically place them on reverse slope and only man forward positions when I want to engage the enemy). Wooden bunkers also offer great protection, esp. in woods.
1 month ago
Anonymous
DPCIM? Never saw that, is it the precision munition or am I missing something?
1 month ago
Anonymous
It's cluster munitions for the US, only available in CMCW. It's absolutely amazing and you'll always want to have it once you learn how to use it. As for soviet cluster munitions, it's good when mixed with heavy mortars for infantry removal as long as the other player doesn't know how to counter it.
I only ever played CM Black Sea but even though I never finished a single campaign I did still find it fun and engaging even though I was getting my ass beat vs normal AI because I am trash
One thing it did make me realize is how important positioning and spotting the enemy first is and that situations can go from perfectly fine to an absolute cluster fuck in mere seconds
Though some times enemy units would just reinforce spawn on top of or right behind my units when flanking the enemies starting side which was a bit infuriating
Yeah, ideally you'd want to isolate the building and go one action square beyond what you're actually penetrating with your fires, i.e. if a building consists of 2 squares, you need to clear square 1 from the outside while suppressing both, then lift fire on square 1 and enter it while maintaining suppression on square 2. I agree it's pretty janky and quite mechanical, but this isn't a CQB game. It works best in rural or mixed terrain. Also, don't use Hunt, it's a noob trap that's only really useful when you have all the time in the world and you want to limit potential casualties while running a patrol in some woods.
I do 90% of my infantry movement with Quick, only use Fast when I need to cross some really dangerous terrain (like running a squad across the street), and only for short 50m bursts (100m will tire your guys out). Move is useful when you want to conserve stamina and the area has been cleared by other units. Assault is kinda neat when you have that 3:1 advantage and want to move that assault squad in for the kill, but if you're using full squads in close combat you're probably doing it wrong because artillery is a bitch in all modern warfare games, including CMCW.
In PvP I absolutely love exploiting this as Americans, all you need is an Elite FO team and some 155s running a maximum duration fire mission with well-placed TRPs. If it's DPICM... oh boy, Ivan is in for a rough time. Contrary to what some people in the community think, it's also really good at killing tanks and is very point-efficient if you can consistently drop the sub-munitions on like 3-4 tanks. I really recommend launching a hotseat game, dropping a DPICM mission on 2 or 3 stationary companies (both MBTs an BMPs/BTRs), and giving them like 5 minutes for a quick demonstration - you'll be amazed with what these little fuckers can do for you.
Yeah those are good tips on assaulting buildings. What usually ends up happening when I play is taking fire and then ordering all my army men to destroy everything in their general direction -- artillery also helps -- even if I can't see the enemy like Arnie in Predator. Then move the entire team forward and discovering lots of dead bad guys, others shocked, or running away. Or essentially spending much of the game maneuvering everyone into a position to slaughter the computer in one go.
There are some good YouTube channels that do PVP. I saw one player get lured (I believe as the Germans vs. Americans in BN) onto a contested hill and then destroyed by artillery with TRP. Then another Shock Force H2H with both sides as Syrian army (so, a civil war) and the player selected a lower amount of higher quality vehicles with thermals, dropped a lot of artillery to fill the map with dust, which blinded the other guy's vehicles and then he killed them all.
I own more CM games than is prudent and house-to-house combat got a lot worse in the less abstracted games. That's because the spotting is awful, and it's a crap shoot whether the squad will stack in such a way that they can still fire into the house without getting mowed down instantly by someone they can't see
You have to isolate the building you are going to assault, with smoke or suppressing nearby buildings with LOS to it or simultaneous assaults.
Set a waypoint right next to the side of the building you want them to enter from, small pause and then a waypoint inside the room.
i meant more the mechanics of it, due to spotting an enemy insurgent in the building in the second floor can shoot through it to hit US soldiers outside etc with the dedicated command for this time of situation not mitigating it and basically meaning you have to suppress the building even as people run into it (which can get suppressed and pinned by friendly fire) otherwise you'll get wiped to a man. So like i said stacking up and doorkicking buildings like IRL is straight up impossible
and, theres no suppress command which means youll have a team or squad full lighting up a building constantly while having a fire command which can quickly burn through ammo on smaller capacity squads
This series, it's predecessor and it's spiritual successors.
Ever escalating war between self replicating robots is fun and it has the best off topic threads on /k/.
Also note that the whole dynamic changes when you're doing drone-corrected artillery in CMSF and CMBS. Typically, in that case (US forces) you'll have access to fire support vehicles that drop you call time to 1 minute, so in that case you just use short missions and precision shots to target enemy across all echelons with precision strikes and short/heavy 155mm linear missions when you can hit something like a platoon column/line. Combined with that expensive drone that can't be targeted by AAA this creates a devastating combination - you can easily chew through a Russian battalion while using a company team (I typically roll with 2 M1A2 platoons and 2 Bradley platoons). You just need to fight really dispersed, because the Russian will (anemically) try to do the same to you. Anemically, because they still have to run maximum duration missions and try to shift fire, and they'll still have a 2 minute response time at best. If they bumrush you, your M1A2s will get to shine - and if they try to turn the game into an artillery fight, you'll just outmaneuver them. Just stay dispersed and rotate, rotate, rotate.
If you do the same to Syrians in CMSF they just collapse no questions asked, which is why CMSF PvP is playable only if you do blue on blue/red on red or if you do some urban attack/defend stuff.
It's also why I won't ever recommend CMSF or CMBS to anyone as their first CM game - the drone fights and playing around M1A2s is just too much in CMBS, and CMSF is too asymmetrical to be fun. In CMCW you get pretty fair games (especially with standard rarity), with both sides being forced to play around their strengths and weaknesses.
>the occasional bullshit
Ya it's a great game but the bullshit is more than occasional, especially for a single plan enthusiast like myself. Plus they didn't fix the god gun Mk18 from DK1 at all
I used to love the hell out of Beyond Overlord, but when I tried the first Shock Force I really couldn't get into it, I think for the reasons you mention.
The UI was clunky and confusing, the AI was meh and that spotting system wasn't really all that fun. I think Beyond Overlord was just the right amount of autism for me.
The CMx2 games are infinitely worse engine-wise (what the fuck do you mean "no audio spotting", you had it in 2000), but sadly the only game in town if you want modern
>but the bullshit is more than occasional
im glad popular youtuber got jumpscared by a bathroom suicide bomber so we all get the pleasure of every map having one for now on!
Games good, community is VERY hardcore into the LGBT propaganda. And I don't mean they're just gay people, they're legit into the propaganda "we're coming for your kids" shit.
War Thunder. Not even joking. But not the German or Soviet tree, go like Italian or French or Swedish and do stupid shit. There is nothing funnier than killing 3 tigers with a piece of shit that can't fire APHE rounds.
wargame series if you can suspend your disbelief at laughably OP russian units that are completely removed from reality
multiplayer is good but really hard and there's lots of team stacks
Eugen games' lack of urban warfare sucks. it's one of the only good things about pic related.
I just can't grasp the gameplay of the wargame series. it feels very arcade-y, everything moves so fast. it seems like it's much more about memorizing unit counters and stats than trying to simulate maneuver warfare. Just a nonstop rock paper scissors game with tanks and jets painted over it.
this game has so much potential but it is strangled to death by arbitrary constraints. The units move at the actual pace that the vehicles/personel would move IRL, and the fights take place in real time, yet they put time limits like "Take this entire c5 block sector of a city in 45 minutes" like that would ever happen IRL. An excellent simulation completely wrecked by gamification.
Wargame sucks ass.
>wargame
>wargame red dragon
>steel brigade
>warno
All rts zerg goyslop
World in Conflict is good
Combat mission would be good if they improved performance
Xcom is good
Clear seas is good
That new game broken arrow looks VERY GOOD
Falling frontier is good
Hearts of iron is good
Stellaris is good
Also add graviteam Tactics
Nebulous fleet command is very good. It's autism enough to be interesting but casual enough to enjoy while drunk. Conquest mode for it in 2024 also seems VERY promising
Endwar
I almost forgot about this one. The whole voice command gimmick was cool for 5 minutes.
Holy shit that was a fun game. I think for HAWX they put the fighter plane from Endwar as a DLC plane too
get on my level
>AIRBORNE ASSAULT
>reboot
yikes
I never understood the soul v soulless until now
Bottom looks like a mobile game
I'm on Xbox, so my options are limited. Regardless, these two are kino.
>Age of empires 2
>Original Halo wars.
Oh yeah, I forgot about purge the xeno based Stelaris. Too bad it takes a fucking month to play one game.
The first three games are on GOG for like $5 each and are immensely more feature packed if you can get over the shitty graphics and UI.
I also recommend the Graviteam Tactics series for more of the same type of strategy autism
>immensely more feature packed
Spoonfeed me, how?
In Combat Mission 1 you can play as the US Army, Airborne, British Army, Airborne, Marines, Polish Army, Airborne, Canadian Army, French Army, Wehrmacht Heer, Gebirgsjager, Luftwaffe Falschrimjager, Feld Division, SS, and Volkstrum. You can choose any time to fight from June 6th 1944 to May 8th 1945, in France, Holland, Belgium, or Germany. It costs $5 and you can install it as many times as you'd like on GOG.
In the updated Combat Mission: Battle for Normandy, you can choose either the US Army or the Heer, fighting in France from June 6th to September 7th 1944. There's DLC that adds the British army and forces that took part in Operation Market Garden like paratroopers, SS, and Kreigsmarine ground forces but it costs $160 for the base game and the two DLCs. The game can only be purchased from the publisher's website and has DRM which locks the download code to two computers at a time.
Oh yeah, I remember playing Barbarossa to Berlin, which I believe had Germans (Heer, Luftwaffe, Waffen-SS), Finns, Hungarians, Romanians, Italians, Soviets and with them (IIRC) the Poles. One big reason I didn't buy a single new Combat Mission until this year was because they just didn't seem worth the price, considering how limited the scope has gotten in each new game.
modern warfare is cooler
Is this Cold War?
Shock Force 2, it has the Germans and Dutch as well, it's really fun with new mechanics related to insurgents, the Syrians also play in a very different way.
you saying that reminds me of gran turismo. such a good game because of deetz
I don't like Combat Mission games because there is no AI, vision is absolutely retarded and it runs like crap because it's a 1990s engine
what's wrong with the vision?
NTA, it's probably the IFF integration, in how units aren't modeled onscreen until the spotter gets a positive ID on the target, and consequently the tactical AI won't engage a partial spot no matter how contextually unlikely it is to be a friendly. If you set the difficulty to Iron it shows the spotting system being applied to friendly units, but it also makes the UI an absolute bitch to navigate.
>he game can only be purchased from the publisher's website and has DRM which locks the download code to two computers at a time.
It's on Steam now, along with Black Sea, Red Thunder and Shock Force 2, with Final Blitzkrieg coming next IIRC. It seems like their deal with Matrix to get Professional Edition up and running came with a clause to be slightly less retarded.
Black Sea, Cold War, Shock Force 2, Red Thunder and Normandy are already on Steam.
I used to love the hell out of Beyond Overlord, but when I tried the first Shock Force I really couldn't get into it, I think for the reasons you mention.
The UI was clunky and confusing, the AI was meh and that spotting system wasn't really all that fun. I think Beyond Overlord was just the right amount of autism for me.
Disregard Shock Force, get Cold War. It's way better, especially in multiplayer (you can easily get a PBEM game started on the official discord). CM in general is underwhelming when it comes to SP because most official scenarios are poorly designed (bad reinforcement spawns that result in playing around spawns) and the AI is dumb as fuck. PvP is absolutely amazing though, and the scenario editor allows you to create a map of any non-urban area in the world within a couple of hours as long as you know where to get your elevation data and use google maps for details.
>M60a2 Starship, M60163 VADS
I'm sold
Command Modern Operations.
How autistic is this compared to HOI4?
It's extremely autistic. IIRC, it was originally designed for the military to plan their drills or something, and then became an actual wargame.
HOI is just a GSG with an emphasis on the military side of things, much like Victoria has an emphasis on economics, Crusader Kings is basically Sims 3 in medieval Europe, and EU is a mix of everything. HOI is definitely not as complex as CMO. When you play HOI, you play as country leader, when you play CMO, you are a Chief of Staff.
CMO is literally peak autism. You aren't a /k/ user if you aren't jumping into it every 30 seconds to sanity check some dumb claim a vatnik made.
I would like to know more. Any examples of how this could be done?
Just use the create scenario tool and tinker around with it a lot. I have probably 800 hours (not all genuine, a lot of it I was AFK or had it paused while I was doing something else) and a lot of it comes down to practice. It has basically all modern military platforms in it but a lot of them are boilerplate (F-16A might be pretty similar to MiG-29A with differences in some stats, fuel capacity, weapons, turn rate, etc, other than that they're basically the same and the game doesn't simulate any IRL differences in how they're maintained or operated, a MiG-29A will take AWACS contacts at the same speed a F-16A will despite that not being realistic at all lmao), ships are pretty notorious for being basically RNG calculated death circles (Arleigh Burkes with SM-6s will always detect contact X with RCS Y at Z range, 99% of the time they will defeat it before A range from the ship, etc, you can throw a Moskva class in and it'll bat down 6 Neptunes without much issue), ground stuff and logistics needs work, etc.
But it's still a bloody great simulation. It'll let you get an intuitive sense of how fast a group of X can go to Y through Z defense, it'll let you practice being in charge of tasking for a squadron (I have to defeat a S-300 with 12 F-16C Block 40s, how do I do it?), it'll let you mess around with large scale things like carrier ops and see how those might be done, what the difference between an F-14 and an F-18 is, how S-3s worked and how things change now that they aren't around, etc.
It's just a good thing to have. Next time a Chinese poster claims their air defense network could shoot down Tomahawks 500 km away from their coastline, plop in some air defenses and see how that works. If a vatnik claims that the MiG-31 can shoot down F-16s over Kyiv, try it out and find he's obviously full of shit. Etc.
>MY SCENARIO STANDS
It's ancient, but Harpoon II is great choice if you want CMO bit with slightly less autism. Unlike CMO, you get a description of each unit and weapon/sensor effectiveness expressed in meaningful terms like hit% and detection range for targets x meters long. The manual has a lot of advice on tactics and strategy and units have descriptions so you don't need to google every random platform name.
It's also free.
combat mission is comfy jank when you feel up for it, playing titles where you can just absorb losses on either side is more fun like cold war, ww2 or ukraine rather than shock force where you lose more americans in 1 battle then a decade of irl afghanistan
steel divison 2 for slightly more tactical RTS army general campaign, red dragon for fun quick matches with friends
The trick to playing Combat Mission games is to just to blow everything on the map away. It's war crimes simulator. Also get tracer and sound mods. Also there's a chocolate chip camp reskin for the Americans in Shock Force.
There is one vanilla mission too as the Syrian army vs rebels in a city. I installed a better uniform mod for them as well. The way the designer has it, you'll drive down three narrow streets in separate columns to reach your objective. Not doing that. So I moved everything over to a highway along the edge of the map, bypassed the city, sent the inf to secure elevated strongpoints along the route, and then leveled the city with tank fire, BMP fire / missiles, and lots of artillery.
its the only way, urban combat like afghan doorkicking is impossible and will just lead to a dead squad of americans, you either accept battle of berlin grind or just level everything and hope there isnt a guy still sat in the objective
It's possible, just don't rush the building without overwatch and suppression. You also need to pay attention to where the doors and windows are.
A typical urban attack without heavy weapons boils down to suppressing the enemy and placing a fireteam on a wall with windows so that they can shoot inside the building.
If you need to check the area and you don't want to suppress everything that has LOS on your troops, you need to ensure you'll have fire superiority in any possible fight and accept that some of your guys might get shot if there's an ambush.
It's actually quite easy to finish most CMSF and even CMBS scenarios with only a few casualties if you know what you're doing and you understand the mechanics. The field consists of action squares, you DON'T want to enter an action square occupied by an enemy unit, ideally you want to get your dudes to an adjacent square when the enemy is at maximum suppression to get a clean kill. Doorkicking in a literal sense isn't possible because the interiors simply aren't modeled beyond some cover bonuses. You might get some action inside larger buildings, but it's the same playbook - suppress, move an assault team to an adjacent square with LOS, kill, move on.
It's actually quite fun when you have the explosives to tunnel through adjacent apartment blocks and shit.
its just janky and not fun most of the time as sometimes suppression doesnt work on units on the other side of building etc or its several buildings deep etc and an assault team having to actually enter either rushes in and dies or hunt moves in and dies outside cause the enemy unsuppresses or dies inside anyway lol
Yeah, ideally you'd want to isolate the building and go one action square beyond what you're actually penetrating with your fires, i.e. if a building consists of 2 squares, you need to clear square 1 from the outside while suppressing both, then lift fire on square 1 and enter it while maintaining suppression on square 2. I agree it's pretty janky and quite mechanical, but this isn't a CQB game. It works best in rural or mixed terrain. Also, don't use Hunt, it's a noob trap that's only really useful when you have all the time in the world and you want to limit potential casualties while running a patrol in some woods.
I do 90% of my infantry movement with Quick, only use Fast when I need to cross some really dangerous terrain (like running a squad across the street), and only for short 50m bursts (100m will tire your guys out). Move is useful when you want to conserve stamina and the area has been cleared by other units. Assault is kinda neat when you have that 3:1 advantage and want to move that assault squad in for the kill, but if you're using full squads in close combat you're probably doing it wrong because artillery is a bitch in all modern warfare games, including CMCW.
In PvP I absolutely love exploiting this as Americans, all you need is an Elite FO team and some 155s running a maximum duration fire mission with well-placed TRPs. If it's DPICM... oh boy, Ivan is in for a rough time. Contrary to what some people in the community think, it's also really good at killing tanks and is very point-efficient if you can consistently drop the sub-munitions on like 3-4 tanks. I really recommend launching a hotseat game, dropping a DPICM mission on 2 or 3 stationary companies (both MBTs an BMPs/BTRs), and giving them like 5 minutes for a quick demonstration - you'll be amazed with what these little fuckers can do for you.
Also can I ask you about artillery duration? You mentioned maximum duration but how much intensity do you use? There's harassing, a little bit, a moderate, and heavy. I've never really figured out what works best, but I'd usually just end up using heavy to flatten an area.
This really depends on what I'm doing with a mission and how risky my FO position is.
If I'm defending and my FO is hidden in a spot that'll realistically never get hit and I'm relying on TRPs with 155mm/152mm, I'll use medium intensity, 2 tubes and maximum duration and shift fire as my units spot the enemy moving from TRP to TRP (I typically use 10-15 TRPs depending on the map size when employing artillery in this way). That way you get 29 minutes with M109 (DPICM or HE) and 53 minutes with 2S3 (HE only), with adjustment time ranging from 2 minutes (US Army) to 3-4 minutes (USSR, it sometimes pays to take elite artillery instead of conscript, but your FO should always stay elite).
If I'm using mortars to do this, I'll use harass to get maximum duration.
If you're running setpiece assaults, you can use more tubes and heavy missions, although you should keep in mind that heavy and medium are very similar about 2 minutes deep because the ROF drops over time due to the heat mechanic.
On-map mortars allow for lightning-fast missions, both in terms of call times and adjustment times, but I typically don't bother with them because that's a niche better filled by tanks. I want my artillery to hit the immediate objective and to isolate it from the enemy, or to work both on the first and second echelon when defending.
It's also worth noting that artillery can be very dominant against infantry that isn't entrenched, and buildings are deathtraps because they're likely to be hit with 207s, 203s, 155s, 152s, or 240s - or heavy mortars, which will still collapse them and cause high casualties. So you should definitely use foxholes and trenches in your PvP QBs, and you should allow for rotations between firing positions and backup positions (I typically place them on reverse slope and only man forward positions when I want to engage the enemy). Wooden bunkers also offer great protection, esp. in woods.
DPCIM? Never saw that, is it the precision munition or am I missing something?
It's cluster munitions for the US, only available in CMCW. It's absolutely amazing and you'll always want to have it once you learn how to use it. As for soviet cluster munitions, it's good when mixed with heavy mortars for infantry removal as long as the other player doesn't know how to counter it.
I only ever played CM Black Sea but even though I never finished a single campaign I did still find it fun and engaging even though I was getting my ass beat vs normal AI because I am trash
One thing it did make me realize is how important positioning and spotting the enemy first is and that situations can go from perfectly fine to an absolute cluster fuck in mere seconds
Though some times enemy units would just reinforce spawn on top of or right behind my units when flanking the enemies starting side which was a bit infuriating
Yeah those are good tips on assaulting buildings. What usually ends up happening when I play is taking fire and then ordering all my army men to destroy everything in their general direction -- artillery also helps -- even if I can't see the enemy like Arnie in Predator. Then move the entire team forward and discovering lots of dead bad guys, others shocked, or running away. Or essentially spending much of the game maneuvering everyone into a position to slaughter the computer in one go.
There are some good YouTube channels that do PVP. I saw one player get lured (I believe as the Germans vs. Americans in BN) onto a contested hill and then destroyed by artillery with TRP. Then another Shock Force H2H with both sides as Syrian army (so, a civil war) and the player selected a lower amount of higher quality vehicles with thermals, dropped a lot of artillery to fill the map with dust, which blinded the other guy's vehicles and then he killed them all.
>doorkicking a building full of unsuppressed enemies waiting for you
>wtf why i dead? game bad!
I own more CM games than is prudent and house-to-house combat got a lot worse in the less abstracted games. That's because the spotting is awful, and it's a crap shoot whether the squad will stack in such a way that they can still fire into the house without getting mowed down instantly by someone they can't see
You have to isolate the building you are going to assault, with smoke or suppressing nearby buildings with LOS to it or simultaneous assaults.
Set a waypoint right next to the side of the building you want them to enter from, small pause and then a waypoint inside the room.
i meant more the mechanics of it, due to spotting an enemy insurgent in the building in the second floor can shoot through it to hit US soldiers outside etc with the dedicated command for this time of situation not mitigating it and basically meaning you have to suppress the building even as people run into it (which can get suppressed and pinned by friendly fire) otherwise you'll get wiped to a man. So like i said stacking up and doorkicking buildings like IRL is straight up impossible
and, theres no suppress command which means youll have a team or squad full lighting up a building constantly while having a fire command which can quickly burn through ammo on smaller capacity squads
I like Silent Storm
foxhole
I didn't like how easily infantry destroyed armor, but after seeing Ukraine I understand.
Gary Grigsby's War in the East is pretty good.
But you basically need autism to enjoy it.
This series, it's predecessor and it's spiritual successors.
Ever escalating war between self replicating robots is fun and it has the best off topic threads on /k/.
Also note that the whole dynamic changes when you're doing drone-corrected artillery in CMSF and CMBS. Typically, in that case (US forces) you'll have access to fire support vehicles that drop you call time to 1 minute, so in that case you just use short missions and precision shots to target enemy across all echelons with precision strikes and short/heavy 155mm linear missions when you can hit something like a platoon column/line. Combined with that expensive drone that can't be targeted by AAA this creates a devastating combination - you can easily chew through a Russian battalion while using a company team (I typically roll with 2 M1A2 platoons and 2 Bradley platoons). You just need to fight really dispersed, because the Russian will (anemically) try to do the same to you. Anemically, because they still have to run maximum duration missions and try to shift fire, and they'll still have a 2 minute response time at best. If they bumrush you, your M1A2s will get to shine - and if they try to turn the game into an artillery fight, you'll just outmaneuver them. Just stay dispersed and rotate, rotate, rotate.
If you do the same to Syrians in CMSF they just collapse no questions asked, which is why CMSF PvP is playable only if you do blue on blue/red on red or if you do some urban attack/defend stuff.
It's also why I won't ever recommend CMSF or CMBS to anyone as their first CM game - the drone fights and playing around M1A2s is just too much in CMBS, and CMSF is too asymmetrical to be fun. In CMCW you get pretty fair games (especially with standard rarity), with both sides being forced to play around their strengths and weaknesses.
anyone like door kickers 2? i enjoy it despite the occasional bullshit and infuriatingly slow dev time
>the occasional bullshit
Ya it's a great game but the bullshit is more than occasional, especially for a single plan enthusiast like myself. Plus they didn't fix the god gun Mk18 from DK1 at all
The CMx2 games are infinitely worse engine-wise (what the fuck do you mean "no audio spotting", you had it in 2000), but sadly the only game in town if you want modern
>but the bullshit is more than occasional
im glad popular youtuber got jumpscared by a bathroom suicide bomber so we all get the pleasure of every map having one for now on!
I have 1,200 hours on it
graviteam tactics mius Front
tank warfare Tunisia
combat mission serie
armored brigade
Gary grigsby war in the east
Gary grigsby war in the west
Is Signalis any good?
Games good, community is VERY hardcore into the LGBT propaganda. And I don't mean they're just gay people, they're legit into the propaganda "we're coming for your kids" shit.