Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Combat Mission Battle for Normandy - Tactics Video Series from Armchair General

The second episode is up at the Armchair General website, gents. This time a frontal attack over a bridge!



This video series is by Lt. Col. (ret) Jeffrey Paulding, game editor at Armchair General.

Cheers,

4 comments:

Mike said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mike said...

Oh my god...this map is from Courage and Fortitude.

This specific battle is a real hair puller. I definitely would not suggest this for beginners.

I've played this a few times now, and I never seem to achieve much of a victory. I will 'win' but at the cost of lots of lives.

The first time I played, I ran out of mortar ammo long before I even crossed the bridge. Any time I had a squad get near the bridge, the Germans would open up on me from at least 4 different dug in positions. Firing mortars at them was ineffective, thus I wasted all of my fire support on them.

The second time I played, I tried to be more conservative with the mortar fire. However, I still managed to run out of ammo before the wooded trench line, which was almost un-takeable at that point.

The Lt Col in the video seemed to have some very lucky moments. I understand the importance of fire support in real life, but CMBN takes it to another level. You can suppress the enemy with a heavy barrage and as soon as your friendly infantry move, then the enemy is back up firing at you.

Very frustrating, and a very difficult map.

Mike said...

I just went back and attempted to play it again.

I got my ass kicked. The Germans let my engineers go forward and break through the wire.

Not long after that, my entire engineer platoon was wiped out by a massive barrage.

Shortly after I lost my engineer platoon, my assembly area was hit and I lost my BN commander and entire infantry platoon.

The Germans must've hit me with a full 5 minutes of artillery fire.

Thats when I quit.

CMBN is a very difficult game. At times, I'd say the difficulty outweighs the fun.

JC said...

Hi Mike,

I hear you. Some scenarios are way too difficult. I've seen those in Shock Force too. It's like they are compensating for the lack of good AI. Anyway, the challenge (artificially bloated or not) is there! :)

Cheers,