You will now hopefully have some kind of map of the battlefield or at the very least have researched the terrain type the battle was fought over. American designers frequently get their representation of European urban areas wrong, so this is an area to watch out for. Villages, towns and cities are generally very different in Europe from the grid layout of United States urban areas. This is because they have evolved from at least medieval times and can have very narrow winding streets, which are difficult to reproduce in CM. Cities have different forms in different countries; the planned factory towns of the USSR are different in form and look from German medieval cities, which grew around a market or cathedral. Terrain has also changed since WW2, for instance the medieval bocage country of Normandy, have now been replaced with large modern open fields, very much like the large planned field system of the Soviet collective farm! Villages in countries such as Russia and Italy are almost always one storey, lightly constructed that line both sides of a road. Stalingrad although it had modern concrete structures such as the "Factory" or Popov's House was mainly made up of wooden houses and after the intial bombing, many parts of the city were left empty, apart from rows of brick and stone chimneys, that marked the remains of such structures.
Many CM scenario designers like to fix the terrain to make it more defensible or give avenues of attack with long lengths of scrub. This looks false either try and recreate the battle terrain or at least make it typical for the region the battle is in. It is justified in giving the defending player in ridge or hill in Tunisia to defend as these features existed and were historically used (rather than false orchards in desert terrain) or add a few trees in here and there to block Line Of Sight (LOS) and prevent a fire-fight on turn1.
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Open the Map Editor, which has three separate modes - Place Terrain, Change Height, and Setup Zones. The different terrain tiles are shown on the left, and the ones available are dependant on the Ground Type chosen from parameters. There is a Generate Random Map button, which if you are a beginner to designing CM scenario is interesting to use just to see some of the effects that can be produced. You can also open other peoples scenarios in the editor and look at their maps and settings. Preview takes you to a 3D view of the map in which you can check it and place units. The actual view is at a low resolution than is shown in the actual game and you can see even very large Operation maps in it all at once. Pressing Go will exit you back to the map interface. Clicking on the different tiles will display their names. Done moves you back to the main interface screen.
The default mode is Place Terrain and this is where terrain tiles are 'painted' on the map. The first step is to decide how big a map to create. This is done by pressing on the + and - minus buttons on the Width and Height controls. The arrows in the top right of the control box allow you to scroll up and down the map, if not all of it is visible at one. I chose a width of 1350 m and a height of 880m but some experimentation is needed to find the correct size. The buttons will increase the width at the right of the map and increasing height will cause it to appear at the top of the map. You can increase the left and bottom of the map by pressing shift before clicking on the + and - buttons. (This is very useful and an obscure feature not widely known!)
I find that it is easiest to place the road and river network on the map first as this will enable you to use this as a guide to place the other terrain features on the map in correct relation to each other. It may help to copy your map and draw a square grid over it to use as a guide. You can also "blow up" the sketch map using a feature of photocopiers or in a paint programme.
The roads are rarely straight and tend to follow the easiest course through the landscapes relief or its hills as do rivers. The road tiles have a number of turns, which can be used to make a realistically twisting road. However, units suffer a delay every time they change direction so if your road is very twisting, you will find that they will go slower on a road than they would travelling in a straight line cross-country!
Road tiles should be used to reflect roads only not tracks or driveways into houses. Open ground tiles in a wood can be used to represent forest tracks. Tarmac or paved roads are rare in WW2 era Europe and should be used sparingly to only represent main roads. They would be non-existent in North Africa and should be used only to mark main highways in Italy or Russia.
Using the river tiles you can produce small one tile wide rivers all the way up to Rhine sized rivers that are many tiles across. You can also produce lakes and a coastline, although there are no beach tiles as such. The Steamroller Farm map does not have an actual river network to reproduce, but there are dried up stream and river beds called Wadis to recreate.
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It is best to create the road and any river network
first.
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This is the first stage completed showing the road network and the major terrain feature of steamroller far itself using a tall light building (rather than a tall heavy building as it looked much more like an arab city house than a farm) and a heavy building. Although light buildings are easily destroyed in CM, the British player will only have two Churchills with guns that have HE capability.
A landscapes relief is produced over millenniums and is cut to shape by the action of water and wind in a process called erosion. Even desert areas will not be flat but will have hills and large rolling sand dunes. It is important to reproduce accurate representation of the terrain, as this will affect LOS and the tactical possibilities of each side. (If one side proves to be unbalanced, I have gone back and tweaked terrain by adding a few small hills or woods.)
The next stage is to place the relief on the map, which is done in Change Height mode.
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The next logical stage is to add relief or map
elevation.
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Each elevation represents a height difference of 1.25, 2.5, 5 or 8 meters, depending on the Map Contours setting in parameters. (I set it to steep 5m for this map). The sketch map shows a valley with steep hills on either side, and a few dried up riverbeds in the centre part of the map.
You use the + and - keys on your keyboard rather than the interface to change height and then paint the necessary tiles. The default is 7 and is not shown on the map to reduce information overload!
Painting relief on to the map, I produced the valley sides and wadis shown on the sketch map. I also added some very small hills and depressions in the centre part of the map, as few landscapes are truly flat. Reducing the gap between a hills change from one height to another will make it steeper and tanks cannot traverse very steep slopes. You will have to test the game to find this out. You can find LOS in preview by moving a test unit about the map.
Water features cut into the landscape or fill depressions so should be represented by being at a lower elevation than normal. If you intend to use the light and medium bridges place the rivers two elevations lower than normal which will typically be level 5, as this will make the bridges flush with connecting roads. If you are using the heavy bridge, make the river 4 elevations below standard, which should be level 3.
There are no stream or ditch tiles as such in CM but you can cut a streambed using the elevation tiles. Ditches can also be represented in this way but using hedge or wall or even brush tiles may be a better way of reflecting them.
We now have the basic 3D outline of the terrain and now needed to flesh out the map with brush, rocks and trees to give cover and make it aesthetically pleasing. Go back to Place Terrain mode to do this
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The final stage is to flesh out the map with woods,
individual trees, bushes, rocky areas and soft ground.
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Although in 3D view the terrain looks bare, as does Tunisia, you can see from the screenshot that is in fact busy with only a few areas with no terrain feature at all. I used rocky and rough terrain tiles in the wadi, apart from giving a realistic stony river bed look, it increases the chances of tanks becoming immobilised which try to cross the wadi, which historically were impassable to the tanks.
This terrain will favour dug in defenders as they have a good field of view and the attackers has little cover with which to make his advance. This was the experience of the allies in Tunisia and this factor should be borne in mind for game balance when buying the units.
I suggest that you do not use the Shift-left click command to place a square of 5 by 5 tiles as there is no undo feature in the game. Landmarks or text labels describing terrain features are placed by CTRL-left click on the desired tile, this opens a dialogue window to place your message and places a small yellow triangle on the map. Opening it again and deleting the text will remove it from the map.
Other possible terrain features are craters, which can be placed in preview mode using Alt 1-5, which gives increasingly bigger shell holes. This feature is heavy on computer performance so should be used sparingly. You can remove some of them if the game slows down to much. To make destroyed buildings and bridges on the map, place a rubble tile on the desired spot, going into Preview, which fixes the destroyed tag and then go back and place the desired bridge or building on top of the tile. In Preview mode and the game it will appear destroyed. An open ground tile will undo the damaged tag.
The last task is to place the Setup Zones. You can have a maximum of 3 different setup zones per side which limits the area the player can place units. Having different setup zones is useful for when you want to represent more than one unit that have different starting positions or paratroopers who have become scattered after a jump. This is done by painting a colour on a part of the map, which allows the player to move troops placed by the designer in this area anywhere inside this box. I have not shown this, as it is a spoiler to those who want to play the scenario.
Players greatly dislike it if their troops are in contact at the beginning of a scenario, so you should place them apart so that there is no Line Of Sight possible in certain areas of the map. This could be behind dead-ground behind a hill, in which the player can set-up troops knowing he will not lose half his force on turn one.
The next stage is to decide what troops are going to be on either side, this is done in the Unit Editor.
This allows you to buy troops available on the date you set the battle much he same as for a QB battle. The Unit Editor gives you a points total so you can roughly balance your game by keeping the points in the same proportion as for a QB battle.
At the top of the dialogue screen, the Army choice allows you to pick which side to currently buy for either Allied or Axis. Nation gives you a choice of available nations to pick troops from. Division takes you to the organization type such as Infantry or Panzer Grenadier. This usually effects the uniform more than the TO&E. You can mix and match to get a variety of different troop types.
The following settings must be chosen before you buy a unit and apply to all of it. Although you can change many of the settings later on for individual sections or tanks.
Experience allows you to set the rating from Conscript to Elite.
Fitness sets the physical fitness of the units or formations you want to purchase (not available for vehicles) rating that can be fit, weakened or unfit. The idea is to represent troops that have been kept in the line for an extended period of time and have become fatigued such as the US paratroopers who continued to fight in Normandy long after it had been intended to withdraw them. In a personal account, I read that the German infantry were required to continue fighting when they were ill and used this game factor to convoy this. The effect of low fitness is for them to tire and exhaust quicker than normal and take longer to recover. This factor is rarely used and is best done on an individual basis.
Headcount allows a percentage casualty to be spread over the units separate sections, (not available for vehicles), which represents the casualties taken by a unit that has been in combat for some time. This factor also reduces the units price in relation to the loss of troops.
The Location factor sets the troops directly on the map or in one of 30 reinforcement slots.
Your research will give you a good idea as to what troops were on each side and for the British it is a Squadron of Churchill tanks and a company of Coldstream Guards. (Unfortunately, CMAK missed the Churchill III, which was historically used in Tunisia, so I had to use the Churchill IV, instead!) From my research I knew the exact number of combat ready tanks in the Squadron, and that Tables of Organization and Equipment (TO&Es) showed that a Churchill Squadron had a section of two Churchill Is that were used as Close Support (CS) tanks as they were armed with a 3inch gun that fired HE. It is all to common to find even in the professional CM scenarios more Tigers than there were in the whole of Tunisia, try and give each side a believable mix of troops.
The Unit Editor allows you to Delete tanks and troops from formations, although you have to at least keep the commander. This is useful to remove sections as casualties or change the unit organization, which is not always correct. I deleted some of the Boys AT Rifles as they were now obsolete and of little use. The freed crewmen, would have been used to make up casualties in the rifle platoons.
Edit is an important tool not always used by CM designers and allows you to change individual factors on a unit basis and give unit commanders historically names. For armoured units you can change ammunition amount carried, Experience rating, give the unit a Special Name such as the historically commanders name. You can also give Leadership factors including command and morale.
For infantry, the factors that can be changed are ammunition levels; suppression; fatigue; Number and Type of Anti-tank weapons (Missing for British troops in CMAK), Experience, Fitness, Special name for commander. (Unfortunately, you cannot give an historic commander his historic rank.) I knew the names of many of the British tank commanders in the Steamroller farm battle and their individual performance.
Ammunition can be useful to reduce ammo levels to reflect units that have started the game short. Units have an historic maximum, for MGs this would represent units in prepared positions with extra amounts, not normal MGs supporting an attack or defence. AT grenades and Panzerfausts are more common for German troops at the end of war, when they become the primary German anti tank weapon!
The Experience and Fitness levels are very useful to differentiate individual sections. In CM terms, Crack and Elite are used for individuals who are tank aces and should not be applied to whole units. Veteran units are well trained, battle hardened or elite units. Regular represents the standard infantryman of the time. Green are badly trained or inexperienced troops and Conscript are troops with little or no training such as German homeguard - Volkssturm. Even elite SS units or British Paratroopers might have some Green replacements that are unsure of their job and are not properly integrated into the unit. I would describe the Soviet Unions forces at the start of the German invasion as being Green, but could include some individual conscript units and even a few regular and veteran units representing senior NCOs or veterans of the wars with the Finns and Chinese.
You cannot actually start a CM scenario with troops whose morale has broken. The fatigue and suppression levels will quickly be recovered unless the units immediately come under fire. I have used these factors together with casualties to represent troops that have gone through a long preparatory artillery strike just before an enemy assault.
For infantry commanders there are four separate Leadership abilities with a bonus of 0-2; Command that increases the effective radius the commander influences, Combat that increases the combat ability of units or shortens time taken to zero in an artillery barrage; Morale reduces the chance of a unit under command breaking and reduces the time of recovery; Stealth increases the chance of the unit remaining unspotted and increases chance of successfully steering through a sewer system.
© Mark Gallear 2004