Command Ops: Battles From The Bulge takes the highly acclaimed Airborne Assault engine back to the West Front for the crucial engagements during the Ardennes Offensive. Test your command skills in the fiery crucible of Airborne Assault’s “pausable continuous time” uber-realistic game engine. It's up to you to develop the strategy, issue the orders, set the pace, and try to win the laurels of victory in the cold, shadowy Ardennes.
Command Ops: Highway to the Reich brings us to the setting of one of the most epic and controversial battles of World War II: Operation Market-Garden, covering every major engagement along Hell’s Highway, from the surprise capture of Joe’s Bridge by the Irish Guards a week before the offensive to the final battles on “The Island” south of Arnhem.
I suspect that units with 0 Bombardment rating aren't conducting any bombardment at all. I agree with this button should be greyed out for units not capable of bombardment.
Some side effects is that any bombardment order ticks (ROF ect.) will also be saved for all subordinates not actually meant to take part bombarding. Actually there´s one sub layer for ARTY units missing, i.e an Arty Rgt HQ unit, or any one higher above Div level. Usually germans have sort of HARKO (higher artillery commander), responsible for coordinating Arty on Corps and even Army level, to ascertain that Arty can be concentrated for main efforts on most important sectors. I already experimented with adding those units, but couldn´t finish tests yet, as I was busy with more important matters. AFAIK, the AI has some problems with this extra command layer for Arty, but a human player can make some good use of it.
ORIGINAL: Bletchley_Geek
I suspect that units with 0 Bombardment rating aren't conducting any bombardment at all. I agree with this button should be greyed out for units not capable of bombardment.
Actually, I just checked, and units without Bombardment capability cannot be issued a Bombard task (see attached screenshot).
As per issuing a Bombard task to a Force whose components include bombard capable and not capable units, I think the bombard subtasks for the units uncapable of bombarding are actually an artifact. Dave is more familiar than me with that part of the engine, but I'd say that those tasks displayed as Bombard are actually Defend tasks.
I suspect that units with 0 Bombardment rating aren't conducting any bombardment at all. I agree with this button should be greyed out for units not capable of bombardment.
Some side effects is that any bombardment order ticks (ROF ect.) will also be saved for all subordinates not actually meant to take part bombarding. Actually there´s one sub layer for ARTY units missing, i.e an Arty Rgt HQ unit, or any one higher above Div level. Usually germans have sort of HARKO (higher artillery commander), responsible for coordinating Arty on Corps and even Army level, to ascertain that Arty can be concentrated for main efforts on most important sectors. I already experimented with adding those units, but couldn´t finish tests yet, as I was busy with more important matters. AFAIK, the AI has some problems with this extra command layer for Arty, but a human player can make some good use of it.
Yes, something similar to what you mention is a feature requested by beta testers, since it would help a lot to keep micromanagment low if one wants to conduct preparatory barrages.
With the AI arty mechanics revision in build 258, what you mention (attaching artillery either directly to the forces conducting a major attack or more effectively I think, to their immediately higher HQ's) should give you reasonably good results.
Harry..you really feel you have to micro manage to get a decent game going?
I've always played at Btn level with the odd coy sent here and there.
I can see a game working well though set at coy or platoon scale where you give orders to the individual units using this realtime engine and map set up etc without the higher HQ order aspect...but as this games main feature is the HQ aspect and giving orders to it it kind of defeats the games main purpose if played that way with this particular game anyway. Also I'd want alot lower unit density if a game came out where you give orders to individual units only. I do see a game like that solving alot of the current issues we have at present, however thats why we are giving back all this feedback to get the game to play out as if we've given out the orders to each unit ourselves. Thinking on this if you do micromanage with CO surely thats also taking away some of the leader aspects? As poor positioning could be down to poor leadership within the unit..doing it ourselves then makes that kind of redundant. SO it's a tricky one.
Anyway I'd easily buy a game at Coy or Platoon level where you give orders to individual units who then carry out the order based on their leadership levels, but you don't have this higher up order mechanic. Not only would it be alot easier to programme and get working compared to CO it would also solve alot of the issues we have had with the game.
Everyone will find their sweet spot regarding micromanagement at a slightly different place, I think. Yet there are ways to micromanage causing the least disruption to friendly AI plans. This friendly AI is what makes these scenarios playable at this level (compare Command Ops ability to handle your troops on your behalf in a reasonable way with that of other similar computer wargames).
On the other hand, I find some people have trouble accepting the fact that changing their mind in the middle of a task being executed might be delaying progress towards achieving an objective. There are many occasions where it's best to wait and see.
I would like to remind everyone that one can always reduce the Orders' delay to their liking, getting a much higher - yet unrealistic - responsiveness to players' orders.
Harry..you really feel you have to micro manage to get a decent game going?
I've always played at Btn level with the odd coy sent here and there.
I can see a game working well though set at coy or platoon scale where you give orders to the individual units using this realtime engine and map set up etc without the higher HQ order aspect...but as this games main feature is the HQ aspect and giving orders to it it kind of defeats the games main purpose if played that way with this particular game anyway. Also I'd want alot lower unit density if a game came out where you give orders to individual units only. I do see a game like that solving alot of the current issues we have at present, however thats why we are giving back all this feedback to get the game to play out as if we've given out the orders to each unit ourselves. Thinking on this if you do micromanage with CO surely thats also taking away some of the leader aspects? As poor positioning could be down to poor leadership within the unit..doing it ourselves then makes that kind of redundant. SO it's a tricky one.
Anyway I'd easily buy a game at Coy or Platoon level where you give orders to individual units who then carry out the order based on their leadership levels, but you don't have this higher up order mechanic. Not only would it be alot easier to programme and get working compared to CO it would also solve alot of the issues we have had with the game.
Yep, I certainly defeat the main purpose by not letting the various HQ´s do their own thing independently. As you´d noticed, many support weapon units are not well employed at lower level and get far too close to the frontlines, or do not fit well within given formations with regard to optimal combat support. While the given "schematism" works fairly well for line units, I oftenly wish for line support or support units to stay farther back, particularly indirect fire support units, who do not need to be that close and exceed firing range far beyond the actual assault, or defend objective.
While not directly related to AI employment, one example for wrong setup can be seen in St Vith tutorial, where almost all german support units are directly in the frontlines. The situation is even more serious, when considering most these units are long range mortars (120mm) and IG´s who can employ their supporting fires equally well from 2-3km farther back, where they also are safe from direct observation and thus massed US Arty punishments. Same goes for that large 12 gun Pak unit at Steinebruck which will be a nice Arty target, before getting chances to shoot at enemy armor.
I've never tested or put a game through it's paces or lets say analysed one as much as some here do..sometimes I think ignorance is bliss;)...I was happy thinking it all worked well;)
I have no issues about order delays coming into effect if I change their orders..but I very rarely do change an order. The only time I give bombard orders for instance are to the big Atty Units I already have detached. Most of the time I put alot of the games I suppose some would say oddities down to poor pixletruppen leadership and go hey it's war these things happened.
HOWEVER....
Harry I do agree it's even very obvious to me IG, MG and Mortar units do need some more tac ai coding with regards to positioning..though I also think it's down to abstract terrain..small mortar units may have set up in a courtyard or behind some hedges etc etc and these things aren't modeled to they easy end up in LOS. It's lack of micro terrain that gets these units into trouble I feel. All are units that would use "micro" terrain as camo and keep out of harms way as much as possible esp Mortars..MGs will be in as much cover as possible...same as IG's and ATGs.
I can't offer a full rationale for the AI design, only Dave can do that.
Regarding support assets positioning etc. In my eyes, I think the AI does a quite good job positioning fire support assets such as mortars etc. I don't see them getting into harms way unless previously undetected enemy units come into sight. And that's something the AI (or you) can foresee. The observation Harry makes about the Tutorial is interesting. If you look into the ScenMaker, you'll see that the initial deployment of German units certainly can be improved (see attached screenshot in this post).
The enemy AI behavior is dictated by two things: initial positioning and the Objective Data specified (see screenshot in next post). As far as I know, unless there are other objectives active in the same time span, the AI will try - to the letter - to achieve the tasks specified. If one wants to have the AI, say, to perform a more flexible defense, then the scenario designer needs to add a suitable number of Objectives for the AI, playing with timings and priorities to have the AI allocate forces in an adequate fashion.
AI isn't "scripted" as such, but one can introduce in a scenario "hints" to nudge the AI to act according to some pre-established plan. Or perhaps, is more adequate to think of this as encoding knowledge about the importance and significance of locations in a way that the AI can exploit this knowledge (implicit in the terrain and other forms of "global" knowledge) at "run-time".
There's been talk of allowing the scenario designers to assign missions to Forces at "design time", but Dave has been reluctant to add that functionality. My impression is that hardcoding missions would result in having the AI committed too much to plans that eventually won't make sense in the face of player actions, especially in the face of repeated plays of an scenario, and constraining it in a way that it would become much more predictable (and less interesting).
Attachments
Initial De..Tutorial.jpg (254.06 KiB) Viewed 368 times
Having said that, changing the priorities into more "definite" directives (such as specifying suggested amounts of APer, AArm and Bombardment "points" to those locations might allow scenario designers to have more control on the composition of forces the AI allocates to tasks), but similarly as with specifying missions from the get go, it would also make the AI less free to react to player's actions.
Another different matter, which is related to the discussion in hand, is the friendly AI and what's the "recommended" level of meddling.
This is a lot a matter of doctrine, and doctrine at the higher operational level cannot be easily modeled. Most importantly (in my opinion) is that the higher you're in the command chain, the more info the commander has about global conditions. For instance, a Bn commander might or not be aware that there is another Bn ready to back him up, and that's indeed a factor consider when making a decision about whether to hold fast or to delay the enemy while falling back to more defensively ground or nearby friendly troops concentrations.
And also, the actual significance of a particular local situation - say, an infantry Coy receiving the full brunt of a infantry Bn with tank support attack - is also context dependent since that Coy being overrun might be a critical thing or not at the Division level. The limited info available to commanders as one goes down the command chain is indeed a factor to consider when deciding whether or not to give a free reign to a Bn CO over Bn assets or intervening by issuing more definite orders to formations' assets.
I guess that some of you might be thinking that in some armies, such as the German or US Army, the level of intervention higher command echelons in the decisions made by lower level commanders should be very few (that's the celebrated notion of aufstragstaktik or "mission oriented command"). In the many years I've spent reading about the conduct of operations in World War 2 I have come to some realizations:
* A military organization can have a book with the sentence "You Shalt Not Meddle In Your Bn Commanders Business" turning up every now and then, yet at the same time, be composed by individuals with widely differing abilities and information. My impression of the style of command of the most successful leaders in WW2 is that whenever they knew they knew better than their subordinates, or whenever they distrusted their subordinates abilities, they didn't shy away from intervening and issuing more precise and detailed orders.
* Almost all major combatants had in their doctrines the notion of aufstragstaktik in one way or another. Even the Red Army.
I haven't read so much accounts about the German conduct of command during actual operations (and I've little interest in field manuals in themselves), but mostly the US Army Digital Library titles. These are very nice narratives, yet in order to gain insight into the plan formulation and execution (not the outcome of the latter) one needs to look into units War Diaries.
The military I have been most interested in and I've been able to find more material about is the Red Army. In the past two years or so I have been working through many accounts of the conduct of operations by the Red Army from 1941 well into 1945. Most recently, about the "battle" of Smolensk, covering all the way from late June to late September, in Glantz's "Barbarossa Derailed" volumes. It's not an easy read, as many chapters consist basically of translations of Army and Front command orders and scale-less situation maps. Yet I can get some interesting insight.
One interesting subtle fact is that one can see that the style and the content of the missions issued varies a lot. The biggest problem for Timoshenko (in my opinion) was that he had to deal with a substantial amount of commanders which were wearing boots two or three sizes bigger than they should. He was well aware of that, and redacted his orders accordingly.
So you can find a Front (Army Group) level commander like Timoshenko, issuing specific orders along the lines of telling 53rd Rifle Division CO to detach two battalions and some AT guns to cover one particular crossing. But you can also find more general orders, such as those issued to Konev and Rokossovsky. The only logical explanation for this difference in how orders were redacted is that Timoshenko didn't trust much or at all the abilities of 53rd Rifle Division Army Commander, yet was more comfortable with trusting Konev and Rokossovsky to do a decent job.
You can also see when this meddling becomes a negative influence. Usually and most notoriously, when Timoshenko has no idea of German units whereabouts and actions, or when he has incomplete information on his units status and level of equipment and supplies, and sends his units (unknowingly) after impossibly difficult missions.
Same thing at the Army level.
One especially interesting example is that of Konev, commanding 19th Army in early August. At this phase of the battle, the Red Army had managed to reform east of Smolensk and launched quite massive counterstrokes (yet in a patheticly disjointed manner) against Dukhovschina and Yeln'ya (that is, they were actually trying to do a double envelopment over Smolensk).
Konev's Army was tasked with the main advance against Dukhovschina (northeast of Smolensk), and is interesting to follow how he issued missions to his Division commanders as the days passed. You can see him detaching a Tank Regiment from a Tank Division and attaching it to one of his right flank Rifle Divisions (and who playing Command Ops hasn't been doing this more or less regularly, at a smaller scale). You can see him telling explicitly to another Rifle Division commander where he should be placing his AT batteries (same as with assigning armored assets), or where to send a Rifle Bn. But he doesn't do that in a consistent way: some division commanders get this kind of specific orders, others get much more free form instructions such as defend the line between Z-Town and S-Town, without no mention of where to put his artillery.
The logical conclusion (for me) is that this pattern was common amongst all combatants. The thing is that in the Red Army, because of human factors (the lack of experienced commanders or commanders with qualifications to do their job), this was just more apparent, frequent and more likely to happen between highly separated levels of command.
This is reflected pretty neatly in Command Ops - and I love this game because of that. Very much like these famous people I'm citing, I like finding myself having to assess whether I can trust the Bn and Rgt commanders judgement, skills and information at hand to be enough for accomplish the job or not.
This is a highly situation-dependent thing and a beautiful learning process (for me): one learns the skills as he interacts with the Command Ops engine, and I'm happy to recognize when I should have detached an AT battery and told it to deploy in some nearby heights overlooking a Bn line of advance and I didn't (or the reverse, when I shouldn't have done that).
And all of the above doesn't detract from the fact that there well might be tactical situations that Command Ops AI isn't programmed to recognize and act accordingly to. If anyone finds any such situation - and can characterize it in a precise manner - I'm inclined to think they can eventually find their way into the engine in one way or another.
And all of the above doesn't detract from the fact that there well might be tactical situations that Command Ops AI isn't programmed to recognize and act accordingly to. If anyone finds any such situation - and can characterize it in a precise manner - I'm inclined to think they can eventually find their way into the engine in one way or another.
St Vith was just an example and my personal solution for this actually meant to be a US introductory mission, is to attach the heavy assets under Regt or Div HQ control farther to the back. I played this setup as german player (which this mission was not designed for) and not yet from US side. Could be the (german) AI could not work well with that setup, as likely front line force allocations do not fit objective priorities anymore. Anyway, I find setting up a defending force way more difficult, than an attacking force, for the unnecessary movements the AI oftenly will conduct at game start, unless beeing hindered by special initial orders delay settings.
My special "problem" mostly is that I compare (too) much with the readings from my special collections, teaching almost all that (german) soldiers and officers were taught, before going into actual combat:
And all of the above doesn't detract from the fact that there well might be tactical situations that Command Ops AI isn't programmed to recognize and act accordingly to. If anyone finds any such situation - and can characterize it in a precise manner - I'm inclined to think they can eventually find their way into the engine in one way or another.
St Vith was just an example and my personal solution for this actually meant to be a US introductory mission, is to attach the heavy assets under Regt or Div HQ control farther to the back. I played this setup as german player (which this mission was not designed for) and not yet from US side. Could be the (german) AI could not work well with that setup, as likely front line force allocations do not fit objective priorities anymore. Anyway, I find setting up a defending force way more difficult, than an attacking force, for the unnecessary movements the AI oftenly will conduct at game start, unless beeing hindered by special initial orders delay settings.
My special "problem" mostly is that I compare (too) much with the readings from my special collections, teaching almost all that (german) soldiers and officers were taught, before going into actual combat:
Thank you for the link Harry [:)] Many field manuals, yet few "post-mortem" third party analysis of operations (that's really hard to come by, especially for the Germans, yet I guess there's heaps of material in German).
Indeed, setting a defense is harder than an attack, unless the possible attacks directions (and the tempo of operations the attacker can sustain) can be easily predicted. My point was that the problem you saw in the German dispositions in the tutorial, can be "fixed" by tweaking initial deployments and the hints you drop for the AI on the map.
And all of the above doesn't detract from the fact that there well might be tactical situations that Command Ops AI isn't programmed to recognize and act accordingly to. If anyone finds any such situation - and can characterize it in a precise manner - I'm inclined to think they can eventually find their way into the engine in one way or another.
St Vith was just an example and my personal solution for this actually meant to be a US introductory mission, is to attach the heavy assets under Regt or Div HQ control farther to the back. I played this setup as german player (which this mission was not designed for) and not yet from US side. Could be the (german) AI could not work well with that setup, as likely front line force allocations do not fit objective priorities anymore. Anyway, I find setting up a defending force way more difficult, than an attacking force, for the unnecessary movements the AI oftenly will conduct at game start, unless beeing hindered by special initial orders delay settings.
My special "problem" mostly is that I compare (too) much with the readings from my special collections, teaching almost all that (german) soldiers and officers were taught, before going into actual combat:
Thank you for the link Harry [:)] Many field manuals, yet few "post-mortem" third party analysis of operations (that's really hard to come by, especially for the Germans, yet I guess there's heaps of material in German).
Indeed, setting a defense is harder than an attack, unless the possible attacks directions (and the tempo of operations the attacker can sustain) can be easily predicted. My point was that the problem you saw in the German dispositions in the tutorial, can be "fixed" by tweaking initial deployments and the hints you drop for the AI on the map.
While one could tend to say, theory (FM and TM) is this and practice is others, it´s a good foundation with what actual knowledge german soldiers/officers went into battle and adapt from there in the field. Gives reading postwar accounts bits of a different quality, even more so when written by veterans who are used to describe military actions in short military language. Non educated readers will likely tend to make more kind of assumptions and lots of fantasy takes over, as can be seen in many military movies like SPR and such.
It´s not actually that easy to collect the german wartime stuff in original (rare and oftentimes quite expensive), fortunately almost all from the US can be obtained at CARL and some other sites as ebook.[8D]
Bletchly I'm surprised you've never noticed nearly all destroyed or surrendered units in a game are support units on the whole..Mortars, MG's or IG's..
Garunteed they are the first to die. Again I think the issue is lack of micro terrain and also because they are relatively small units with only a few men thus far more fragile than an Inf coy. Micro terrain or some abstract modeling off could alleviate this so these units are abit more hardy than other units to make up for the lack of micro terrain they'd set up in, again esp Mortars who would very rarely get in an enemies LOS.
ORIGINAL: RockinHarry
It´s not actually that easy to collect the german wartime stuff in original (rare and oftentimes quite expensive), fortunately almost all from the US can be obtained at CARL and some other sites as ebook.[8D]
Such as? Just take those sunglasses off, please [:)]
ORIGINAL: wodin
Bletchly I'm surprised you've never noticed nearly all destroyed or surrendered units in a game are support units on the whole..Mortars, MG's or IG's..
To be honest, in my games, those are usually enemy units, not mine unless I'm playing one of those "desperate" German defenses so common in the scenarios covering the US counteroffensive.
On the other hand, these are the kind of units that have a harder time getting out of dodge before getting "destroyed" (I'm assuming that that most of the destroyed or surrenders are actually units disbanding due to losses and being merged into other units).
ORIGINAL: wodin
Garunteed they are the first to die. Again I think the issue is lack of micro terrain and also because they are relatively small units with only a few men thus far more fragile than an Inf coy. Micro terrain or some abstract modeling off could alleviate this so these units are abit more hardy than other units to make up for the lack of micro terrain they'd set up in, again esp Mortars who would very rarely get in an enemies LOS.
It would be really, really useful that someone could produce a savegame where one could repeat this result of mortars, IG's etc. "charging" at the enemy very much like HQ's used to do back in the day. If such a savegame exists, I would appreciate somebody pointing me to that post [:)]
ORIGINAL: wodin
Garunteed they are the first to die. Again I think the issue is lack of micro terrain and also because they are relatively small units with only a few men thus far more fragile than an Inf coy. Micro terrain or some abstract modeling off could alleviate this so these units are abit more hardy than other units to make up for the lack of micro terrain they'd set up in, again esp Mortars who would very rarely get in an enemies LOS.
I think the main reason for this, and I could be wrong, is that once they are spotted, they seem to be a very high priority target for enemy artillery.
I wouldn't like to comment on ifl it's right or not.
I guess in reality they would indeed be a high priority for the enemy guns, although like wodin says, they would be a lot harder to spot, at least until they start firing.
I think the combination of, the lack of micro terrain as wodin calls it, the fact there only a small number of men compared to other units, the fact they are a high priority for enemy fire, and the fact they have to be close to the front line due to lack of range, all add to their early demise.
I have not seen any instances of
"mortars, IG's etc. "charging" at the enemy very much like HQ's used to do back in the day"
and I don't think that is what wodin was meaning when he said they are the first to die, I think what he was getting at is they are too visible in the games terrain, which I am inclined to agree with.
No I'm not saying they charge..they are too visible coupled with the fact they only contain a few men and equip it's bye bye quickly..even if they take the same amount of fire as a Coy they will be still the first to die.
"BTW as a side note, no artillery gun anywhere (in the US Army at any rate) ever fired more than about 800 rounds in any day (Trevor Dupuy, Search for Historical Records of High Rate Artillery Fire in Combat Situations, 1978). This was the extreme high, and a more typical high for any given battery is likely to be on the order of several rounds per gun per day. Apparently logistical limits more than anything tended to prevent firing a larger number of missions."
