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Quick question (but probably not one with a quick answer)...

How do you figure out where you should perform amphibious landings? There are, of course, several different terrains in Command, and each piece of land has its own slope. (By the way, roughly how large is each "pixel" of land?) What are the guidelines for choosing a place to drop off troops? What counts as a) a good landing zone or b) a not-so-good-but-yes-we-do-it landing zone or c) that is not really a landing zone...you should find some other place to drop off troops?

Thanks in advance.

Go to google maps drop yourself off on the map at the closest point to the beach you can. Survey the area. You can online get tide charts for rise and fall. Alot of beaches have the single camera points were you can look along the length of the beach.

On the CMO map be careful where the land and sea begin. Have the tick in for coastlines and borders. Dont go by the visual of where it starts and ends. Also your vessels course points finish away from the beach then with the final point drag that to see where it will allow the vessel to go.

It is an incredibly detailed and complex undertaking, with numerous variables that are probably outside the ability of the average CMO player to figure out. Here is an article from Indonesia looking at the elements of selecting a landing site-

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... NG_REGENCY

If you aren't able to access all of the environmental info needed to make a determination based on those criteria, I'd recommend looking up past amphibious operations (i.e. from WWII), looking at the location of the beach on Google Earth or simply within the game, and then going back to where your scenario will take place and picking a location as similar as possible to the site of that historical operation.

Its also much more than just the geographical/geological/environmental factors on the beach. Access off the beach, sight lines to the beach, and nearby ports/harbors play a bigger role than just the physical nature of beach area itself. Not many commercial wargames have good enough combat system combined with logistics to give a balanced enough simulation of all the factors. Thats why most games simulating beach landings are higher-level games where the details are heavily abstracted.

Created this simple scenario.

There is no beach terrain CMO. So, in a beach in Monterrey visible in the OpenTopoMap (the best way to view the beaches), created a polygonal CEZ with the beach and some water, edited it to grassland height 1 m.

2 Ships, Ponce and a medium landing ship.

8 Amphibious boats in the Ponce.

A platoon of Deltas as cargo in the LSM.


The amphibious elements are launched and land perfectly, moving them then to the normal land terrain.

The LSN has some problems entering the zone, not sure why, but is able to do it.

For some reason the Deltas need 4 hours to unload, seems surprising for SOF

I will create a bug report.

Any advice on which terrains in Command are better or worse for amphibious landings?

I'm assuming a key factor is how much the terrain slows down the ground units. So whatever terrain you're dealing with, more slope is worse than less slope. And you want to have fewer natural obstacles (trees, mud, etc.) so grasslands, barren, cropland, and urban are usually pretty good, while forested land and wetlands and water are less so.

Thoughts on this? Am I missing anything?

That sounds like a question about the combat taking place after the landing itself and less so about the actual landing.

As far as how terrain impacts landings, when I have played around with amphibious operations using the cargo function, LCACs have never taken any speed hit after moving on to land to drop their troops off. I would think it would be the same with non-amphibious landing craft as well, despite Nikel's statement about the LSM having a few issues (which may just be a bug).

You may not be able to avoid landing troops on the "water" terrain. I make most of my scenarios in the Japanese archipelago, and there are numerous instances of terrain close to actual (in-game) water being labeled as water terrain. One significant example is the Senkaku Islands, which are entirely composed of "water" terrain. Now, despite that, I have never had any issues with the water terrain. It doesn't seem to cause too much of a movement penalty compared to forests.