You can give orders while the game is paused (ESC). It would indeed be unplayable (and un-fun) in realtime otherwise.

Basically I suck at all these games. I play them for the drama that invariably brings.

OK I see, for whatever reason I envisioned playing without pausing.

Earlier I mentioned the Kampfgruppe Engel campaign and the mission to force the river Dives. It's proving a tough nut to crack, probably the most difficult mission I've yet played. You have strong forces (provided you've kept them alive to this point), but a single bridge to use that is heavily defended by tanks, ATGs, PIAT team, MGs, infantry and heavy artillery. In addition, my armor that I've taken good care of is showing the effects of prolonged battle.

I have a Panther with tracks in such bad shape that it can move only at a crawl. My King Tiger has it's optics shot out. A couple Mark IVs are without radios or MGs due to battle damage. And as mentioned earlier this battle is fought with only the ammo remaining from the previous battle 'Hunters in the Mist'.

It all adds up to a big challenge. I've made it across the river, but at a cost, and there are still two objectives to go. Great battle, great campaign.

Throughout this thread I keep mentioning the KG Engel campaign and I have finished it finally. This was a lot of fun, challenging and quite inventive in a few cases. The author made some interesting and varied missions and deserves credit. When I first got CMBN I scoured the 'net looking for info on campaigns. Which ones were out there? How did the mechanics work? For example how are reinforcements, repair and re-supply handled, how does the branching mission structure work. And also I wanted to read some AARs and reviews. But really, there isn't much out there, which was rather surprising. I know this is a niche market, but I was disappointed to see so little discussion about CMBN campaigns. However I did find one thread in which the OP offered a list of campaigns to play, and to avoid. KG Engel was on his avoid list. He said the player faced overwhelming odds and that the campaign is too difficult and not worth the effort

In fairness to him, the campaign is indeed very challenging, and the player does indeed face huge odds, it is the Falaise Pocket after all. I can see it isn't so hard to fall behind if you take too many losses early on. The player needs to be cautious especially with his armor. The enemy has such an overwhelming superiority in armor quantity you need every last barrel on the line. But the player gets some serious German hardware. If you can keep them alive the odds even considerably.

But played prudently, the campaign is quite winnable. The missions are a mix of attacks/assualts, ME's, probes and defense with a few very interesting twists thrown in. There is a mission where you have to recover an abandoned but intact King Tiger (loved this one). Another mission is a meeting engagement against one force, with a second huge armored force moving across the map toward an exit. The player needs to fight the ME and take a couple of hamlets while simultaneously dealing with the enemy armor as it crosses his front. Good fun.

Another mission is at night and you need to get your column of troops and tanks across the entire map which is littered with enemy strongpoints. I loved this mission too, but that's only because I chose the perfect route. I wouldn't have liked it so much had I chosen more poorly.

All in all I thought this campaign was excellent and don't let perceived difficulty put you off. Here you can see I was successful to a certain degree in preserving my forces, with a regiment's worth of enemy casualties.





And the star of the show. This King Tiger is acquired in about the fourth mission, which is a challenge in itself. But oh my, this thing is a beast. You can see where multiple 76mm rounds failed to penetrate the front hull in this shot as well as the list of enemy it destroyed.




I lost the final mission, Deliverance, which was an assault on a heavily defended hill. My hat's off to anyone who was able to win that one. I took a minor defeat on this one, the only mission I managed to lose in this campaign.

Full necro powers over my own thread right? Haha, Red's SF2 thread got me thinking about Combat Mission again, so I had hopped on the Battlefront forum, read a few threads, made a few posts, and got the itch to give it a go once more. Two years since I've played.

Looked in to what improvements Engine 4 makes and I'm guessing I didn't see the entire changelog, it was just a few things, including new facing commands, a hull down command (handy) and the absolute kicker, F/O stats! Might seem minor, but not to me. That single change convinced me to get the upgrade. I reinstalled CMBN and the upgrade. I'm a sim and gaming vet, been around a long time. I did indeed manage to sort this process. But I feel sorry for anyone looking to get in to Combat Mission with little savvy about these sorts of things. BF could really use to get with the times in some respects. The engine upgrade costs US$10.

I played a small quick mission to re-acclimate, and went in search of some good new campaigns. Oh boy. Ya know, two years ago I was complaining about what was out there. And this time I found maybe one or two new ones. The Scenario Depot, which is generally one of two go-to places for these sorts of things, has a grand total of 11 campaigns for CMBN. Eleven. And all of them were there two years ago. I would wager there are less than one dozen good campaigns for this game. And they are all over the place. Big ones, small ones, medium ones, all different nationalities. So if your taste is a bit more focused, say like me, where you want to play reinforced company-sized campaigns, you have maybe four to find. And if you are even more focused and say prefer airborne, or German, or defend or whatever, you're really out of luck. It's a sad state of affairs that this amazing tactical simulator is so hamstrung by Battlefront's campaign system, and by their refusal to entertain any sort of campaign generator. They were headed in the right direction with the Operations in CMBB, but that was then scrapped altogether. So you're left with two choices, either play what others create, or make your own. The problem with making my own, other than the time and having no idea how, is that I would know everything about it. Units, reinforcement, off map arty. because I put it there. That's no fun.

So that leaves playing what others create, and while I am eternally grateful for their efforts, there is just so little available. I've already played most of them. I could play them again, I guess I will have to really, but in most cases I already know what's coming, how to win each battle, because I already did it (not that I don't lose, I do)

For me it's even further compounded by the removal of the Combined Arms force choice in quick battles. That setting used to give me some really good quick battles, but with it gone I find the AI purchases lead to some uninteresting or frankly non-sensical force compositions. I could pick them myself, but that's no fun either. Add to that the fact that CM AI isn't very good on the attack and what are you left with?

This game, this series, is crying for some sort of campaign generator, to give players the ability to always have new campaigns to play, and not have to sift through the user-generated stuff hoping to find a handful of them that they actually like. CMBN was released in 2011. That means that in seven years there are 10 or 12 campaigns I've found enjoyable. One of the best scenario designers is a fellow called Paper Tiger. He is detailed, and a real pro at this stuff. His campaigns are hard. That's OK. But as the engines have changed, and especially as AI behavior has changed, what was play-tested balanced then, plays quite differently now. You cannot expect these designers to update their old campaigns every time a new change affects how it plays out. And surely the fact that there are so few to choose from means that actually making them is no walk in the park. So we need a way to set the parameters ourselves, and click generate campaign. This game has no equal on the battlefield, but it struggles to give folks for whom single scenarios are not enough the content they need to enjoy it.

One of my favorite CMBN campaigns is one called Devil's Descent. I like it because one, it has paras, and two, it's company sized. So after all the stuff I wrote in the previous post it's the one I chose for my renewed interest in the game. And it's still a good one, but already knowing what's what removes a great deal of what makes playing new campaigns so good. The first battle is fairly simple, take a farm at night with a hodge-podge collection of 82nd paratroopers. I lost one man. That's good, but it's mostly down to the fact that I already knew what to expect, the best avenues of approach. I don't think I lost many more in the original blind run, but still, replaying these sorts of campaigns while already knowing the enemy OOB and positions removes the uncertainty that forces caution and you to constantly second-guess yourself.

Knowing the enemy's forces is the worst part. If I know they have two AT guns and I've already taken out two AT guns, that means I know they have no AT guns left. These sorts of missions NEED the uncertainty of not knowing if they have another three or four AT guns still waiting for you. So my point is that while the CM campaign system allows for some really good campaigns, the lack of dynamics/randomness means any subsequent attempts fail to shine in the same way they did when you went in cold.

I once read a thread where it was stated that BF are opposed to a different campaign system because it's 'unrealistic'. I don't have more to go on, no inkling of what they might mean by that, or if they even said it. But there IS a quick battle generator where you could pit any sort of force compositions you could conjure up against one another. So I doubt this is the reason. Whatever the reason is though, Combat Mission, in my opinion anyway, suffers for it. A dynamic generator would by nature lack some of the finer touches, especially in regards to briefings, custom OOBs,potential historical accuracy (though this is not a given) and those sorts of things. But it would allow for an unending stream of content that is focused on the exact type of stuff the player is interested in. I realize that all I'm typing is in vain, but I'm passionate about it. It's akin to having a race car and only city streets to drive it on.

I've mentioned the operations from the CMBB days. They had issues, but they were promising with further refinement. Some long time players will recall the excitement of the announcement of Combat Mission Campaigns, which was eventually cancelled, much to my dismay. That was a dark day, and the point where I felt that CM would remain stuck in some sense. And here we are, a decade later, with no progress on the campaign side of things.

This thread is a good read about the fate of that title. Oh, what could have been!

Funny, i also got back to CMBN. Bought a laptop and first game i installed was CMBN. I bought Battle for Normandy on day 1. Even got the exclusive steelbook:) I also have Shock Force and Black Sea which i like very much. I'd like to get more but the pricing policy definitely isn't inviting. I get that BF is almost a garage company and always has been. Actually i'am surprised they've lasted that long. But it is very sad that the so called "progress" of CM titles is so slow. Too bad that they can't hire more specialsts.

These engine upgrades which take years to make should be patches delivered on monthly basis. And the engine itself is sooo dated. I wonder if they did any research about using other engines. I know that CM games are quite complex underneath with tons of stuff being calculated. But it's also hard to believe that there isn't more modern engine that could do the same and much more (like maybe Graviteam Tactics games engine).

I wish they got some external funding. I'am afraid that they're coming to an end. It takes them so long to make new content and we're still waiting for a patch for v4 engine upgrade which has issues.
I hope they stay afloat but without some serious changes CM will mostly end it's course. I don't know how much more of the same can keep this game and BF alive.

All good points Cheyenne, and I appreciate it from a player who has been in it for the long haul. You've seen the course it's taken. Combat Mission is one of the very few games where I got in on the ground floor, playing the CMBO demo on the day it came out. I usually don't do this. But my interest in this sort of game is sky-high. Tactical and strategic combat is what I love. And CMBO was heaven-sent at the time. I can still picture the demo battle, I played it over and over again with a friend PBEM. Combat Mission is right up my alley.

And yet, I have purchased just four titles, CMBO, CMBB, CMBN and CMRT. I've been thinking about this and pondering why I haven't invested more in what is one of my all-time favorite games. One that I have been playing for almost 20 years now. Your points Cheyenne are certainly near the core of this.

The game really hasn't evolved all that much. It's a relative thing I suppose, because there are many improvements since CMBO. There used to be no Hunt for example, Infantry units were 3-man representation. Relative spotting is far superior to absolute spotting. So it has evolved. But at it's core it's much the same as it's always been. A strength, or a weakness? Regardless of the answer, it means I feel less compelled to buy them all, since it's more a theater change than a feature change. When I was last heavily in to this game, playing BN and RT a lot, Final Blitzkreig was announced, and then released. It sparked little interest in me. I saw it as new maps and new units, but the same gameplay. So I passed.

BFs pricing reflects the niche market and keeps them afloat since fewer folks buy their games. Or at least I assume this is the case. But it also means that I will only buy a title if I am fully interested in it. You don't spend $120 on a punt. And I thought that I wouldn't be getting a novel enough experience to justify the outlay. At a $35/40 price point I might have done. They can charge whatever they like, and I can decide if it's worth it for me.

That said, I'm not a starving artist. I have discretionary income. I'm 50 years old with a job that pays well and I can afford it. But I still consider value in anything I purchase. CM titles don't offer me enough to buy more. That's fully my choice, but I'm left to wonder if there were more innovation along the way and if there was a pricing structure to reflect the passing of time how many of these I might have gone for?

All of this could have, no would have, been overcome if somewhere along the line the developers had committed to a worthy campaign system. In another thread I suggested that all they really need is a system akin to Close Combat 5, the Normandy one. Bulge used the same sort of system. There is a strategic campaign map divided in to sectors. Battlegroups for both sides are moved around the map, from sector to sector. If two battlegroups move in to the same sector on the same turn a meeting engagement takes place. If occupied, an attack/defend. If the occupying battlegroup has been there for enough time, they are dug in and an assault occurs. Supply lines, off map support, reinforcement all should be modeled. The battles themselves are the standard CM stuff. Map-state results reflect the outcome, either with a saved front line state on the same map, or one side takes possession of the sector due to eliminating the enemy or perhaps they withdrew. There is so much potential here. And that's just one idea, there are many more ways to do this.

It frustrates me because I love the gameplay so much, but I want my successes and failures to mean more. To carry over to the next battle, the next phase. Something as simple as preservation of force means little in the Combat Mission universe. This game could have been so much more. And really, this is what Combat Mission Campaigns aimed to add. That failed 10 years ago, and no attempt has been made to fill this void. It's still the same old stuff we've been playing for years.

Obviously, more linked battles with outcomes carried over to another would be a next best thing. Let alone a full blown dynamic campaign. I can live with the old engine with clunky animations. Again i will mention Graviteam Tactics game. Their engine is also very capable and it looks a tons better than CM. And they were able to create a very good operation layer and battlefields that kept remnants of previous battles, very accurate and huge maps and a supply system. And they're also quite a small team - 10 ppl according to their web site. The outcome is very impressive. So it's doable. I wonder if only the money is the barrier for BF to go much further.

Maybe i'll ask at the BF forum about that. What's their plans for the future beside new modules/battle packs. They're very secretive so i'am not hoping for a lot. Usually they publish some dev diaries not more than twice a year.

I'll propably jump the Shock Force 2 train although it's the same game with same campaigns and missions as the first one. But i have a soft spot for modern combat:)

I have GT, didn't click right away but I didn't give it a fair shake yet. I should get around to doing that. That decidedly domestic UI makes me not want to lol. Must be mods for that?

Yes, the operational level is the thing it's missing, linking the battles together. I'd love to have a front line, and reserves, and tails and have things like weather, railheads and supply dumps factor in to my operational planning. Exploiting breakthroughs and closing off salients. Persistent core forces. Imagine that BF, instead of creating another theater as their next title, somehow made this DLC that worked with all of their titles. Take me money.

Like Cheyenne said, I'm also fine with the graphics, the animations, textures. The mantra that graphics sell is true usually, but not for the folks who buy Combat Mission games I wouldn't think. We'd all rather have detailed penetration tables and extensive, accurate OOBs than better tank track textures or raindrops or whatever. And if that choice has to be made I'm fine with the way the tactical part looks, plays and feels now. And the sounds. Love the battle sounds. But ya know there comes a point where you might say it's possible to have both of these things.

Another thing that frustrates me is the inability of the engine to allow on-map indirect fire outside of LOS. Mortar fire for example should be allowed anywhere within the weapon's range, with of course accuracy penalties for unobserved fall of shot. As it is I can't shell that crossroads on my map because I can't see it through the copse of woods. But it's right there on my map! Can't I transmit co-ordinates or something, like over the radio? We should also have the ability to add range. Any object should be considered an aiming stake, and you could add 10 or add 50 or what have you. This is a CMx2 engine limitation right? It didn't work this way in CMx1 I don't think. Even if I know that place is full of enemy, I can't get mortar rounds in there unless I can see the spot. I can't lob rounds over that barn to hit troops behind it if the mortar squad or a spotter cannot see that ground.(Don't tell me this changed in Engine 4 after all of that!)

I also feel the battle UI gives too little feedback to the player. I'd like to see spotting reports, or ways to tell unit state from a glance. Which units are pinned, low on ammo, flanked. It leads to a lot of if not micromanagement, then at least a high level of attention to your units. Which I would probably do anyway I guess. Excellent UIs are not all that common, so you have to make do. But it's one area where I feel the visual and even audio cues could do more to transmit to the player the state of affairs on the battlefield. If we argue that CM is stuck in a sense, then you need an evolution. One that would do exactly that is to add a radio net. Imagine it. What a step it would be. Like when Football Manager added the 3D engine lol.

One more thing to be critical of, then some good stuff, and that's the way the enemy AI is handled, through scripts. When you play a battle the AI doesn't react to what you're doing, and doesn't change things up to exploit it's own successes. If this could change it would go a long way toward not only making this a better game, but adding a hell of a lot more replay value to the missions, and could even be the thing that makes a viable dynamic campaign generator possible in the first place..As it stands now, challenge and complexity is a function of the designer who created it. It relies on placement and timing in part, it's a puzzle, which isn't bad thing necessarily. But if it somehow became fluid as each side reacts to, or exploits, the other it would make for much more compelling battles than even the great ones we already have.

Now some stuff I like about Combat Mission, just for balance you see.

Spotting is exquisite. No other game handles it as well. The switch to relative spotting from absolute (Borg spotting) was one of the most brilliant changes made to this series I think, and it adds so much to the mental side of a battle.. The ambiguity, the inexactness of it all is so nicely done. Everything's a Tiger I tell ya! In CMx1 once your unit was spotted, every freaking tank on the other side opened up simultaneously on your position. Relative spotting has been a huge improvement in my view.

WEGO system. It's brilliant. It works perfectly to give you that often uncomfortable mix of assuredness and panic. One minute is like 90 feet in baseball. It just works splendidly. I know some folks play real time, and I guess I want to applaud this ability, not sure I could do it, unless you're just pausing all the time in which case it's like eraser-mode I suppose. WEGO however is such a great way to play. To switch every few minutes from tactical genius to nervous spectator never loses it's appeal. Add to that the ability to watch the turn again and again, from any perspective makes it my favorite wargame system.

Command and Control. It's so important to a tactical game of this scale. Not all have it, and most don't get it right anyway. Combat Mission does. I might even suggest that they did. I liked it better in CMx1. CMBB (CM2 in Europe) was the high point, for two reasons. One, it had command delay. Two, it featured opposing armies with wildly dissimilar command capability, mostly because one side made widespread use of radios, and the other did not. So the effect was really pronounced. I find asymmetric warfare more interesting for the most part, so this sort of stuff I ate up.

This post is long so I'll just add the game has fantastic ballistics and armor modelling, and orders of battle. The formations are always interesting and while you could argue about an omission here and there, Battlefront mostly gets it spot on.

Inability to fire without LOS is certainly a big issue. Very frustrating not to be able to shoot through a smoke screen even when we know exactly what is behind it. I also wish we had more orders. Being able to set only one target in a turn (unless we move) is very limiting. Some sort of shoot and scoot order also would be nice. Now we have to do lots of clicking to achive it. All of the above are most likely engine limitations so my guess is we won't see any improvements in these areas. Same goes to lack of proper AI. Fortunately BF has some very talented scenario makers but still it's not the same thing.

I won't argue about pros of CM. All things aside, i love this game. Basically CMx2 has no competition which isn't good in the long run.

What i like the most is the level of unpredictability. You can create some excellent plans but one grenade thrown by a soldier who got killed in next second or some lucky mortar round which got your FO, can completely change the outcome of battle. The phrase "no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy" fits to CM games perfectly

Good post.

.

Agreed on both parts.

Yes, the indirect fire LOS thing is an engine limitation in the general sense. But it didn't work this way before CMx2, isn't that correct? In the first series of games you could indeed place mortar fire on unobserved locations. Or am I misremembering? I'm sure I remember lobbing rounds deep in to forests for example. So perhaps a limitation, or perhaps just not coded to be a thing?

The inability to shift targets mid-turn is another one I agree with. Rate of fire is such that I rarely want to leave a mortar firing for an entire turn, so my work-around is to use target briefly, which has it's own drawbacks. Some refinement here would be welcome.

If you do inquire about some of these things on the Battlefront boards I'd be interested to see what comes of it. I don't think it would result in much other than speculation and defense of the current systems. I think it's clear that at least in regards to a new campaign system, it just ain't gonna happen. It seems the perfect place for a third party to step in, but that didn't go so well the last time.

And I'd like to amend something from earlier, where I said you don't spend $120 on a punt. I seem to have cherry-picked the most expensive option to make my point. Only one bundle costs that much. Some titles are $60. I paid $105 for the CMBN big bundle, not 120. I think my point still stands about the pricing, but I felt the need to soften it by calling out my own hyperbole.

Well, 60$ is still quite a bit for games that basically are the same since 2011.

Regarding CMx1 engine i can't remember how LOS and LOF worked there. Played them so long ago. Maybe i'll install CMBB or CMAK and see. Hope it works on modern computers.

Yes, it is, and that's why I included the bit about pricing reflecting the passage of time. BFC doesn't want to do that, as is their right. But as I mentioned, I wonder if I might have added SF and CMFI or others by now if this was approached differently.

As to the CMx1 games still working.... it seems that it's a qualified yes. There are issues apparently, but not decisive.

You would have already seen this if you're a member over there, but....

http://community.battlefront.com/topic/126821-win10-and-cmakcmbb/

I'm interested in your experiment, as I might want to play CMBB once again. I still have the disk

Do you know this game?:

http://www.matrixgames.com/products/391/details/Panzer.Command.Ostfront

I have it and i really like it, although haven't played it in a while. It's like a CMx1 game but with better engine and with some improvements. There's a demo if you'd like to try it. The game runs fine on Win 10 (64 bit).

Thanks for the recommendation. I am familiar with it, with the series. Matter of fact I've used it before in my argument for a campaign generator in CM. But I've never played it. I was just always in to CM as my tactical wargame of choice after I had moved on from the staples of my formative years lol. That was games like Panzer General, and the Talonsoft games like Battlefield Ardennes and that sort of thing. I then moved mostly in to Close Combat which I loved and still play from time to time. Played CC1 through to CC5 and about that time CMBO was released. From there Combat Mission took over since I loved it so much. I missed a lot of great wargames as a result. In '02 or '03 CMBB came out and so it was at least 5 or 6 years in a row that I really didn't buy any other wargames. And at that point I started branching out in to other things besides flight sims and wargames.

While I'm indulging in this stroll down memory lane I want to give special mention to Steel Panthers.This was my first true wargame. At the time I wasn't in to history like I am now. I knew WW2 was a thing and that 'we' had won, but I knew very little else. Steel panthers was like a portal in to an uncharted world. The thirst for knowledge it sparked in me was amazing, and it has continued to this day. I learned about all of the different vehicles and weapons and names of battles, strengths and weaknesses of the different nations involved. I could go in to so much detail about that game and the things it taught me, but my posts in this thread are long enough.

There's a story I like to tell about it, one that saw me lose the innocence of being a neophyte wargamer, and hardened me for the battles to come My older brother and I decided to play a hotseat one evening. I was Germans, he was Monty. Over the previous few weeks I had done nothing but play SP. I 'discovered' that a FlaK 88 could be used in an anti-armor role! It was highly effective and I really thought I had stumbled on to a secret no one else would know about. So of course I purchased a battery for our battle. I arranged them on a hill to the rear of my lines. My brother was on the attack, and it was a desert scenario. My fields of fire were endless and the thought of what was about to happen, the smoke from a couple dozen dead Valentines and Cromwells as far as the horizon, filled me with glee. On the first turn my brother sent over an airstrike that took out all four guns and I was crushed. It didn't take long for him to overrun me and I learned a a lot that day dammit.

Anyway, I never got around to trying games like Panzer Command despite it having some of the very features I moan about Combat Mission not having. How do you compare the tactical battle layer between the two games?

Well, there are some differences even though the core of the gameplay is the same.

Main difference is that you're giving orders to platoons and not individual units. Obviously that means less micro which i really like. I'am more of a macro type commander . But you get more orders to your disposal, like bounding (but only for Germans as they're better at c&c and have radios in their tanks), type of advance and path the platoon takes, choosing wich ammo type use and more.

The second biggest change is that instead of 60 seconds resolution phase, you can choose to have two 40 seconds phases. So during the order turn, you give your orders and hit play as usuall but after 40 seconds both sides get a "reaction" phase. And during that phase you can make some small adjustments like switching targets or facing direction. You can't change all of your orders. After 40 seconds of reaction phase you get back to order phase. So the full circle takes 80s. instead of 60. But like i said it's optional. You can stay with classic solution.

Maybe i'll find the time to make some small AAR. I just installed PCO (it looks definitely better than CMx1 and runs very smooth).

Unfortunately there aren't many videos of PCO on YT.

Interesting, thanks for the good info. I might have to give that a go at some point. As for Combat Mission I downloaded a bunch of campaigns yesterday. but honestly I'm not interested in half of them really. Large ones don't appeal. Battalion-sized missions are cumbersome to me. They aren't more or less difficult, just much more involved. Lions of Carpiquet is an example. The author is good, and the campaign is probably really good too. But it's just bigger than I want to play. I did play it two years ago, or tried anyway. It would always crash on me when I hit go after the setup phase on the second mission. That was a different computer though, so perhaps I could play it now. But it's really big.

So this is at the root of my complaints, I have all of these campaigns, but only a few are really the sort that I want to play. If Combat Mission had hundreds, or even dozens to choose from, the lack of a campaign generator wouldn't be such an issue. But with the distinct lack of good material, the absence of an alternative is more sorely felt. I played the second mission in Devil's Descent and while I enjoyed it, the fact I've already played it dulls the luster a bit.

I played through a few missions of the Devli's Descent campaign, which is one of my favorites for CMBN. But I need new stuff! The campaign is great, it really is. Just the right size for me, and when folks ask about campaigns, many players will trot this one out as a recommendation, and rightfully so. But the nature of Combat Mission means I don't enjoy a scenario or campaign nearly as much the second time around. So I said to myself, let me see which other titles have a good selection of campaigns to download. I even said to myself that I would consider forking over my hard earned ducats for whichever title proved to be the winner. What I found was so depressing I could cry.

Now I am only checking the Scenario Depot, and there is a chance that I am not finding them all. Lord, I hope so.... (is there a better resource these days?)

What I found

Battle for Normandy -- 11 campaigns
Fortress Italy -- 2 campaigns
Red Thunder -- 4 campaigns
Final Blitzkreig -- 1 campaign (I mean, seriously?)

To be fair, there are quite a few more for the modern titles, like Black Sea and Shock Force. But I'm not so interested in those, though I guess I should become so.

Well, I think I've made my point about this over the course of the thread. Something has to change, or I'm just going to lose interest completely. And I don't want that to happen.

I believe the CM editor is not user friendly. It's quite hard to create a good scenario, let alone a campaign. Not many players have the skills/time to do so. Plus i also think that within the main target audience of CM, multiplayer is the main course.

I'am playing Shock Force 2 demo now. It's definitely a purchse for me. I'am also really thinking of getting FB. I love the winter setting, good time for playing it:)