A Scen Design AAR PDF Book PDF

The Sheriff of Oosterbeek
A Scenario Design DAR/AAR

Jon Sowden
CMBN – Market Garden
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................... 3
1 – OUTLINE SCENARIO CONCEPT ............................................... 5
2 – RESEARCH ................................................................................. 9
3 – REFINED SCENARIO CONCEPT ............................................. 18
4 – THE MAP PT.1; WORKING WITH OVERLAYS ....................... 22
6 – THE MAP PT.3: BUILDINGS, WALLS, AND TREES ............... 33
7 – THE MAP PT.4: DETAILING ..................................................... 39
8 – THE MAP PT.5: FINISHING UP ................................................ 48
9 – BRITISH FORCES ..................................................................... 52
10 – GERMAN FORCES ................................................................. 60
11 – OBJECTIVES .......................................................................... 68
12 – WALLS AND BRIDGES .......................................................... 77
13 - SCENARIO SETTINGS ............................................................ 82
14 – DESIGNER’S NOTES ............................................................. 86
15 – BRIEFINGS AND IMAGERY ................................................... 88
16 – PROGRAMMING THE AI ........................................................ 97
17 – TESTING ............................................................................... 107
18 – PUTTING A SHINE ON IT ..................................................... 114
19 – SCENARIO DESIGN IS EASY. IT JUST TAKES TIME. ...... 116
20 – FORMS AND CHECKLISTS ................................................. 118
www.battlefront.com
Copyright 2013, Battlefront.com, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Note: There have been a steady stream of updates and improvements to the editor as Combat
Mission has matured, with more to come in future games and upgrades. This booklet uses the editor
in CMBN: Market Garden v2.10. Depending on the game, version, and modules being used some
specific elements discussed here may not be present or may function differently.
Battlefront.com 2
Introduction
Creating a scenario in the Combat Mission editor has been described as the-game-within-
the-game. I know a number of people who’ve spent more time playing with the editor than
they have playing the game. Creating a good scenario - and hopefully getting positive
feedback on it from players – can be an incredibly rewarding process, and I think it’s a
shame more people don’t give it a go and use the scenario editor they’ve bought and paid
for.
This booklet walks through the process I used to create a scenario, one that’s included in the
CMBN module “Market Garden”. Along the way various aspects of the editor will be
examined and explained, some of them in a fair amount of detail. There’ll also be some
riffing on how I going about designing a scenario, what I think is important, and my
philosophy of scenario design. While this scenario is particular to the Market Garden
module, the process and techniques are applicable to any of the games in the series. It is
my hope that this booklet will answer a lot of questions about using the editor, and
encourage more players to dip their toes in the pool and start making more scenarios!
At various points I’ll refer to ‘story telling.’ I think that most things we do in life revolve around
telling stories. To me, creating a scenario involves telling a myriad of independent and inter-
related stories, to set context and explain why things are the way they are. Some of the
stories are told to players explicitly with written words, but not always. I’ll expand on this
theme as we go along.
In my estimation, and regardless of the specific content of a scenario, I think that a good
scenario should present the player with a number of meaningful problems that have to be
resolved. Each problem should be solvable in a number of different ways, but should also
require the player to actually think through the problem, come up with a plan to overcome it,
and then execute that plan with a modicum of competence. To put that in concrete terms;
setting a company of Tigers against a platoon of Stuarts on a large flat, open, map doesn’t
really present either side with a problem to be solved – the German player simply doesn’t
have one, and while the Allied player certainly does have a problem, there’s no plausible
solution.
In my experience, designing a scenario seems to mostly consist of solving a seemingly

endless series of design problems, from finding useful sources to wrangling the editor to do
what you want. I try to keep in mind that I need to stay flexible. What seems like a good
idea initially sometimes ends up being unworkable, or just not that much fun. Either way, I
change the design to make something more engaging and entertaining. Feedback comes in
to the mix here too – what I like might not appeal to others, or my storytelling isn’t good
enough, and my style of scenario design has altered as time has passed.
Scenario design is an intensely personal and creative activity, and these posts are not in any
way intended to be prescriptive, or a set of rules that must be adhered to. Instead it's an
outline of how I go about this, and some guidelines that you might choose to follow. To
misquote German doctrine; scenario design is an art, a free and creative activity, and each
designer needs to find their own way of skinning these cats.
Battlefront.com 3
What follows might also seem like it's a rigid linear sequence, but I really don’t work like that.
Instead I flit about depending on what I’m thinking about and how I’m feeling. While working
on a CMBN scenario, for example, I spent a couple of weeks working on nothing except the
map. One night I got fed up with it all, and instead played around with the forces for a while
before eventually going back to finish the map.
If you are new to scenario design you should definitely read George McEwan’s Scenario
Design Manual. George clearly explains how to use the various parts of the editor to create
a scenario. I don’t intend to go over ground that he’s already trodden so well. Instead I’ll be
taking a more philosophical approach to scenario design, and hopefully explaining how I get
the different mechanical elements of the scenario editor working together to tell a story.
Anyway, enough of that. On with the design!
Jon Sowden
Wellington, NZ
2013
Starting a fresh scenario in the CMBN Scenario Editor. I love the smell of new-scenarios
in the morning!
Battlefront.com 4
1 – Outline Scenario Concept
Ideas won't keep; something must be done about them.
Alfred North Whitehead
Scenarios usually begin with a hazy idea of what I want to do. There are scraps of paper
pinned to the wall in my study with various ideas scribbled down, some of which eventually
get worked up into full scenarios. The idea could be something read in a book that I think
would make a good CM battle, or it could be a tactical problem like “hmm, what happens if an
anti-tank screen is attacked by an armoured and mechanised force?”
Part of the hazy idea, or following on from it, is a question: What is the basic proposition and
motivation for each side? Why are they fighting this battle, here, now? The answers help to
set the scene for a lot of my later design decisions.
For this scenario, given that it’s for the CMBN : Market Garden module, I was thinking about
various battles in and around Arnhem itself, fought by the 1st Airborne Division. In the back
of my mind is a recurring idea, based on something I’d read, somewhere. My memory of it is
that on the second or third day, the British tried but failed to break through the growing
German defensive ring around Frost’s battalion at the bridge. In the wake of their failure, the
British forces fell back in considerable disorder towards Oosterbeek, closely pursued by the
Germans who had some armour. In the midst of this mounting disaster a guy called “Sheriff”
Thompson1 stood up, took charge, and formed the first part of what would soon become the
Oosterbeek perimeter.
1.1: From: Middlebrook “Arnhem 1944, The Airborne Battle”
1
It’s funny the things that stick in your mind. Sheriff Thompson’s name is one of those things. I think I
probably first read about him and this action in the appendix to Cornelius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far,
some 25 years ago, and it’s stuck with me ever since.
Battlefront.com 5
So that’s my setting, in outline:
• UK Paras vs. German mechanised
• Brits retreating in disorder, trying to form a defensive line
• Germans exploiting success and trying to prevent the establishment of a coherent

defence
• “Sheriff” playing some kind of important role
• located on eastern outskirts of Oosterbeek
1.2: Failed final attack towards Arnhem Road Bridge, morning of Tuesday 19th September.
From: Middlebrook “Arnhem 1944, The Airborne Battle”
At this point I’m thinking that the British force will be about company(+), maybe a little bigger,
and the Germans will be 2-3 times that size.
It’s a good idea to have some kind of hook, or gimmick in a scenario. It could be
emphasising a particular piece of equipment, a particular map element such as a bridge
crossing a river, or some feature of the editor. Done well gimmicks can really make a
scenario stand out from the crowd. Done poorly, they’re … gimmicky. For this scenario I
want to try something I’ve never done before: start with no German forces on the map, and
only a few British troops, then add a lot of British forces arriving in disorganised groups at
random times, then start introducing the German forces in an increasing torrent. The British
player will thus have to identify a series of defensive positions, then rush his arriving forces to
those locations and get them set up before the Germans start arriving. That ties in with the
outline narrative, and hopefully will accentuate the ad-hoc nature of the British defence.
Battlefront.com 6
1.3: From: Middlebrook “Arnhem 1944, The Airborne Battle”
But I’ve never tried that technique, and it might not work. To be honest, it’s fairly likely that it
won’t work. Right off the bat I’m concerned that a canny British player might decide to just
camp at the arrival area and destroy the Germans as they arrive, and the way reinforcement
scheduling works in CM means that the first 10 or 15 minutes could be deadly dull. There’s
also some concern because variable arrival times, which I’ll probably want to use for both the
UK and the Germans, can mess with the proper execution of AI plans. So I’ll have to be
prepared to amend the concept. That’s okay though – it gives me something to work
towards, and while I’d like to have it work out, I think the scenario will still work without it. I’ll
stay flexible on that, and see how it goes.
Back when I was working on a scenario for CMBN I came up against a much worse problem.
I had just read Armoured Guardsman by Robert Boscawen, which contained what seemed to
be a good scenario prospect. He described his own experience in some detail and included
a really good sketch map. I cast about a bit and came up with some other descriptions of the
same event, which provided enough to be going on with. So I dived in and started making a
massive map … then eventually realised that, actually, the battle I was trying to make would
be kind of dull in CM terms. So that got jettisoned, and instead the map got used for Be Evil
Unto Him, a fictional but plausible reconnaissance scenario set about ten days earlier, and
reused in a slightly modified form for NorMons, a ding-dong historical battle set about five
days later.
I’ve got my concept now. Next up is research.
Battlefront.com 7
1.4: Armed with Sten guns and pistols, a mixed group of, possibly, paratroopers, 1st Border
and Glider Pilots clear a wrecked building. In fact the search had already been completed,
and they were re-enacting it for the photographer. Copyright: IWM BU1121. From: Pegasus
Archive website
1.5: Bellerophon astride Pegasus, the British Airborne patch. From: Wikipedia website page
on 1st Airborne Division
Battlefront.com 8
2 – Research
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
Arthur Conan Doyle (via Sherlock Holmes)
Since the beginning of the CM franchise there’ve been three basic categories of scenario:
historical, semi-historical, or fictional.
The boundaries between each are highly blurred, but basically a historical scenario consists
of actual forces, fighting an actual battle, in an actual place, for actual objectives. These
require a great deal of research, and even then the designer must often take many liberties
to overcome deficiencies in either the CM scenario editor or in the level of detail that can be
uncovered. Historical scenarios also tend to be of iconic battles which can make them very
engaging for players, but because of that it’s often difficult to maintain any meaningful Fog of
War. When discussing the battle to clear LZ N on the Groesbeek Heights, Colonel Eckman,
commander of 505th PIR, said “We knew what we were going to do, when we were going to
do it and what was coming, the enemy did not.” That knowledge disparity would be irrelevant
when playing against an Allied AI, and impossible to duplicate in a HTH battle.
2.1: LtCol William Francis Kynaston “Sheriff” Thompson, Commanding Officer 1st Air Landing
Light Regiment. From: Pegasus Archive website
Battlefront.com 9
It can also be surprisingly hard to find a CM-worthy historical battle. It’s easy enough to find
examples of men shooting at each other, and killing and dying, but I think a good scenario
needs more than that. Without some definite tactical problem, some definite and discrete
engagement with worthwhile objectives, trying to create a fully historical scenario can leave
me floundering around trying to mallet a square peg into a round hole.
Semi-historical tends to include some level of fictionalisation of the map, the forces, or the
battle. It could be that the player was simply unable to find out exactly what forces were on
“the other side of the hill”, or a decent map. It’s for this reason that a lot of scenarios start out
as historical and end up being labelled semi-historical. Or it could be that I had a particular
tactical scenario in mind, and used real forces and real locations to create a plausible, but
fictional, battle. It could just be that I want to change something to make a real battle more
interesting – altering something about the time of day, the length of the scenario (maybe
compressing events that occurred over many hours into a much shorter scenario), the
weather, the force sizes – to make for a better, more interesting, more engaging, and more
fun scenario. This is why I’ve chosen to move quite strongly away from Historical scenarios
and instead construct mostly semi-historical ones; there’s more freedom to create interesting
battles. It is also much easier to control the information available to both sides, and therefore
the effect of ignorance and FOW.
Fictional battles are just that, and give the scenario designer a lot more latitude to make
things up to suit the battle they want to create. However, I firmly believe that fictional
scenarios should be grounded in historical reality. For example, the location can be set
roughly were the front line was at that date, and it’s easy enough to use real (or at least
realistic) names for force elements. In a WWII US Army infantry regiment E, F, G, and H
companies are always in 2nd Battalion, armoured infantry battalions were never organic
components of an infantry division, and the weather in north-west Europe in late December
probably isn’t going to be warm with dry ground and the sun rising at 0500hrs. While “B
Company, 2nd Armoured Infantry Battalion, 32nd US Infantry Division are fighting in the
blazing heat of a sunny New Years Day in Poland” is certainly fictional, it isn’t plausible. I
assume stuff like that sets player’s teeth on edge.
If the fictional back story is weak players will fill it in themselves, and if what they come up
jars with what’s in the scenario they’ll be taken out of the moment and lose some enjoyment.
But as long as the briefing and scenario are consistent it can make telling the story easier,
since there’s less need to explain every element of the scenario – reasonably informed
players will already know about standard company naming, and the climate in winter.
Patrick’s Epic Mockumentary video AAR is a brilliant example of fictional story telling.
I tend go fictional when I have a definite idea for a particular tactical problem in mind, and
don’t want to cast about to find something real to fit my circumstances. This how Platoon
Patrol and 18 Platoon came about. I’ve little doubt that there were thousands of actions in
Normandy that would broadly fit the setting of each of those two little scenarios, but finding
detailed descriptions of battles that small is really difficult and I really didn’t see the point in
even trying. I had a clear conception of what I wanted to create, and from there it was mainly
a matter of setting it in a realistic context.
Bois de Baugin is a completely fictional scenario, but one that I think has credible setting.
That scenario started off as a simple idea: how would a mostly foot-based defence holding
Battlefront.com 10
some hills do against a mostly mechanised attack through low ground? It was based on
some overall impressions I'd gathered about the 1941 Greek Campaign, of all things, and
something I vaguely recalled about the US Army being caught out a few times early in WWII
because their doctrine called for the weight of an advance to be made along valley floors
where mobility is much better, while German defensive doctrine called for the main weight of
defence to be up on the hills where cover, concealment, and dominating ground are all
prevalent. So that's what I made: a wooded hill on either flank with a low saddle and small
hamlet in the centre. The US objectives focussed on the mobility route, while German
objectives focussed on dominating ground.
It was only towards the end of the design process that I looked for somewhere to situate the
battle. Since the action was broadly part of an advance against collapsing - but not yet
collapsed - defence, it had to be shortly after Op COBRA started, but on a flank rather than
directly ahead of the steamroller. A notional spot south-east of St Lo was selected, and
some actual town and forest names chosen for landmarks. It was then pretty easy to pick
some units that were actually in that area at that time using the 12th Army Group daily
intelligence maps. All of that was then fed directly into the briefings and graphics.
For the CW module I created a set of fictional British (The Loamshires) and German (The
Kingdom of Hannover Grenadier Regiment, a name recommended to me by a native
German speaker) unit names, re-using then wherever needed. That saved time since I only
needed to research the unit compositions once, it provided continuity between battles
because the same names were being recycled, and since the Loamshires were always
fighting the Hannover Grenadiers there were no issues about “but, actually, this British
battalion never met this German unit, and on this date they were both 100 miles further
west.” Also, since the higher level brigade, regiment or division to which they belonged are
never described, I could freely - but plausibly - mix and match battalion types.
Despite all those fictional examples, I tend to create historical or semi-historical scenarios
more often because I do enjoy broadly accurate scenarios based on real-ish events. It’s also
easier in a lot of ways to create a compelling narrative based on real units and events, even
if the story gets massaged to make the scenario I want.
So, what I look for when researching depends a lot on the type of battle being created. I find
that ‘research’ tends not to be a single discrete activity, and instead gets tackled in layers –
fairly shallow initially to get a broad overview and the main moving parts, then increasing in
detail as time goes on. Sometimes, it’s incredibly narrow and focussed as part of another
activity, like map making or force development. What is the name of this street or that farm?
What letter sequence did this battalion use for its companys?
The Sheriff of Oosterbeek is going to be historical, so I’ll need to do more, rather than less,
research. That’s cool – I like this bit!
For a historical a scenario I’m after details about the buildup, rather than course of the battle
itself. That is; how did these forces get to be here, rather than what they did. This is
because the course of the battle is represented by the scenario, and that bit is up to the
players, not me. The designer’s job is to set the context and conditions at the point where
battle is joined, and then step aside. The historical course of the battle should be just one of
many possible outcomes when playing the scenario, it should never be the only one. So I
Battlefront.com 11
look for forces, force sizes including anything that was absent for some reason, specific
equipment used, any odd or unusual Order of Battle details, as well as specific times and
locations.
I also want to know the basic course of battle, so I can get a time-and-space appreciation of
how I envisage battle playing out, from each side, in general terms. This is important
because it will affect everything from map size to scenario length to the objectives for each
player. Then there’s any key features to include in the scenario, such as the weather or time
of day, significant terrain, or an important force element.
Finally, I want to collect some mapping and relevant, important, or iconic imagery. The map
is especially important. For Normandy we were spoiled with the excellent combination
provided by the French Geoportail maps and the IGN 1947 aerial photo survey. Putting
those both into Google Earth as layers provided an astonishingly good basis for any map, but
neither extends its coverage as far as Arnhem. This is a basic truth for every theatre: each
time CM moves location - from Normandy to Sicily to mainland Italy to Holland to Belorussia
to the Ardennes to Germany - a new set of resources will need to be found and shared.
The following is the list of resources I looked at for this scenario.2
Digital Sources:
US CGSC CARL digital library
http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/search/collection/p4013coll8/searchterm/arnhem!market
%20garden/field/all!all/mode/all!all/conn/and!and/display/200/order/nosort/ad/asc
Search term: Market Garden. Also try Arnhem. Mostly US, but does have a lot on the British
forces too. Useful for some timings, but like the MLRS Books material, it tends to be at a
level that’s not detailed enough. For this scenario, I could probably have got away without
using these.
1944 Aerial Reconnaissance Photos http://watwaswaar.nl/
Many thanks to Broadsword56 for bringing this site to my attention! It shows a reference
map of Holland and when you zoom in on locations you can see the flight paths of photo
recon sorties conducted in 1944. Click on the images and to enlarge the aerial photos.
1:25k maps of Holland http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdquery.html
Search terms: 1943 Holland. This collection of 1944 maps is gold! These are the actual
maps used during Op MARKET GARDEN, so any grid references in war diaries can be
plotted exactly. They are also sufficiently detailed to provide a great overlay to use in the
editor. Curiously the main road bridge, where Frost’s 2 PARA fought and Gräbner met his
maker, is not shown on this map.
2
There is a good annotated bibliography for all of Operation MARKET GARDEN here.
Battlefront.com 12
2.2: Extract of 1:25,000 map [06 NW Arnhem]. From: Library of Congress website
MLRS Books
http://www.mlrsbooks.co.uk/bookstore/index.php/search?PHPSESSID=325fcf5c686cdd5e08
3f8004e6445eb6&qry=arnhem
Search term: Arnhem. Although these documents are highly interesting, they don’t tend to
have the kind of specific detailed information that’s useful for creating scenarios. For this
scenario, I could probably have got away without using this.
War diaries
http://www.pegasusarchive.org/arnhem/frames.htm
Includes war diaries for all 1st A/B Div units and attachments. The war diary for 1st AL Light
Regt includes report by LtCol Thompson, both of which have a lot of useful detail for this
scenario.
Organisation of an Air Landing Light Battery
http://www.ww2talk.com/forum/airborne-forces/28526-airborne-artillery.html
http://nigelef.tripod.com/abnltbty44.htm
I’m planning on having at least one of the Pack How batteries on-map as the German’s
objective. This will provide the information I need to have the complete battery – not just the
guns - properly laid out. The WW2talk site has excellent, CM-relevant details on all UK
TOEs for north-west Europe.
Battlefront.com 13
Royal Artillery Units Netherlands 1944-45
http://www.royalartilleryunitsnetherlands1944-1945.com/index.html
Nice resource on gunnery in the area, including a number of US units. Contains war diaries
for many artillery units, including 1st A/L Light Regt, and 2nd A/L Light Battery.
Google Maps https://maps.google.com/
Arnhem in the area immediately around the bridge has changed quite a lot, but Oosterbeek
less so, and G-Maps is really useful for road names, which are mostly missing from the 1944
maps.
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnhem
The Arnhem article includes a highly detailed 2011 topographical map. Wikipedia battle
articles tend to be too general to ever be of much use. They sometimes have some good
maps, but those are invariably snagged from public online sources, and usually you’re better
off using those directly rather than the filtered version at Wiki. Wiki articles can be good,
though, as a pointer to sources.
Books and Magazines:
Bradbeer They stood to their guns (World War II magazine, Oct 2007). Pretty general, and
ultimately not really useful.
Brooks Black Tuesday (World War II magazine, Sept 2004). Again this is pretty general, but
it does have some really good maps.
Ellis Victory in the West, vol.II, the defeat of Germany. Once again this is pretty general but
with some really good maps.
Kershaw It never shows in September. Really good for the German side of the hill, with lots
of relevant detail. The hardcover has much better maps.
Middlebrook Arnhem 1944, the Airborne Battle. Brilliant for the course of the battle from the
British perspective. This book really allowed me to get a good grip on the sequence of
events.
Public Record Office Document Packs Battlefront: Operation Market Garden - The Bridges at
Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem. Some really interesting documents, but none were
especially relevant to this scenario.
Reynolds Sons of the Reich. Reynolds isn’t my favourite author, but this was still useful for
identifying units and to lay out the sequence of events on the German side.
Rossiter We fought at Arnhem. Has some fish tales, so needs to be treated with caution. Ok
for the course of the battle from the British perspective, good for colour and some personal
details. One of the main characters, Pat Gorman, was in 11 PARA, and so was intimately
involved in the background to this scenario.
Battlefront.com 14
Ryan A Bridge Too Far. Dated now, and too general – it largely glosses over the British
defeat on Tuesday 19th, and in consequence covers Thompson’s actions only briefly,
although of course this is book the which was the ultimate inspiration for the scenario.
2.3: StuGs of StuG Bde 280 working in west Arnhem. From: Zwaerts, “German Armored
Units at Arnhem September 1944”
Zwaerts German Armored Units at Arnhem, September 1944. Useful for confirming types
and quantities of armoured vehicles present.
There is another book – Wilkinson’s The Gunners at Arnhem – which would likely have been
excellent, but I was unable to obtain a copy.
That’s already a long list, and there are literally hundreds of other books and websites on
Arnhem I could have looked at. The ones I’ve listed here those that actually describe my
battle in some useful detail – rather than just talking about MARKET GARDEN in terms of
“this division moved here, then that division moved there” – and which don’t merely
regurgitate what I’ve already read in other books. Also, I’m mainly looking for the build up,
rather than detailed descriptions of the battle itself. For most of these books this means only
a few, maybe up to 10 or 15, pages are at all relevant. Still, I do need to remind myself from
time to time that I’m not writing a thesis, and if I had to fall back on just one resource for this
battle it’d be the brilliant Pegasus Archive website.
The main point to remember here is: Do enough, but know when to stop researching and
start creating. As they say in my country, less hui, more doey.
So, after going through all that, what did I learn? Well, the biggest thing I learnt was that my
concept is flawed. Sheriff did stop the disordered withdrawal from Arnhem, and formed the
paras and airlanding soldiers into a coherent defence in front of his guns in south-east
Oosterbeek on Tuesday afternoon. But for various reasons the Germans weren’t following
up closely and Thompson Force wasn’t attacked until some time the following morning. So
Battlefront.com 15
as a strictly historical scenario, my idea of having the British appearing, setting up a hasty
defence, then immediately fending off a German attack doesn’t work
2.4: A 75mm Pack Howitzer of the Light Regiment's "D" Troop dug in at Oosterbeek. Left to
right: Gunner Miller, Gunner Davey, Bombardier Allsop, and Sergeant Prentice. Copyright:
IWM BU1101. From: Pegasus Archive website
On the other hand, I now know that:
• the German force consisted of KG Harder, which was composed of 350-odd dismounted
crewmen and administrative personnel from 9th SS Panzer Regt, supplemented by ~100
naval personnel, and grouped into three companies (plus additional increment of Alarm
personnel on the morning of Monday 18 Sept). They were organised as a company of
tank crews (high motivation, with low-ish skills?), a company of logistics folk (medium
motivation, low-ish skills?) and a company of the naval bods (medium-ish skills, low
motivation?). As an ad-hoc KG made up from non-infantry components, these guys will
be very lacking in terms of heavier support weapons. KG Harder were supported by an
armoured platoon with two StuG III and one StuH from the 280th Assault Gun Brigade.
• There was an artillery regiment supporting German operations in Oosterbeek – ARKO

191 with 10.5cm howitzers and 21cm Mörser(!) – but these weren’t really in play around
Oosterbeek on the 19th and 20th. Instead German artillery support will be 8cm mortars.
• The British forces consisted of 1st Air Landing Light Regiment (23 x 75mm Pack How, in
three batterys). Remnants of 1, 3, 11 Parachute Battalions, the 2nd South Staffordshire
Battlefront.com 16
Air Landing Battalion, and maybe some Glider Pilots, all highly disorganised, and
combined totalling less than a full battalion. Amongst this detritus was a platoon of
Vickers MMGs (from the S STAFFS), three or four 6-pr anti-tank guns (probably from the
S STAFFS), a 17-pr anti-tank gun, a bren carrier, and several jeeps.
• British indirect support by a small number of 3-in mortars (on map?), and of course the
75mm Pack Howitzers of 1st Air Landing Light Regiment, on and/or off map.
• Grid references in several of the war diaries pin the location down to a strip of terrain
about 1km wide by 1.5km long wide along the Benedendorpsweg to the west of the rail
crossing, which conveniently runs east-to-west.
• in terms of sequencing, the British parachute and air landing battalions had made a final
– futile - attempt to break through to Frost at the Bridge in the pre-dawn hours of Tuesday
19th September. This attack had collapsed by about 10am, and from midday remnants
of the five battalions involved were streaming back towards Oosterbeek. Thompson
organised them – and coincidentally created the first piece of the Oosterbeek perimeter –
during the afternoon of the 19th, and the first real attacks on Thompson Force (soon taken
over by Major “Dickie” Lonsdale, and re-named Lonsdale Force) occurred on the morning
of Wednesday the 20th.
I’m going to have to re-set my concept, but I’ve now got ample information to be going on
with. I’ll do more detailed and focussed research later as I need to.
FUNFACT: did you know that the Dutch destroyed the Arnhem Bridge during the May 1940
campaign? It was rebuilt during the war, and only reopened in August 1944! That’s why
there was the pontoon bridge between the road and the rail bridges – it was needed to carry
all the road traffic between 1940 and 1944. This explains why the road bridge isn’t shown on
the 1944 map – it didn’t exist when the map was drawn! The bridge was destroyed again in
October 1944 by the USAAF.
I didn’t know that, until now. Research! It’s fun!
2.5: Divisional insignia for 9th SS Panzer Division “Hohenstaufen.” From: Wikipedia website
page on 9th SS Panzer Division
Battlefront.com 17
3 – Refined Scenario Concept
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not
'Eureka!', but 'That's funny...'
Isaac Asimov
You’ll recall that the original scenario concept was, in outline:
• UK Paras vs. German mechanised
• Brits retreating in disorder, trying to form a defensive line
• Germans exploiting success and trying to prevent the establishment of a coherent

defence
• “Sheriff” playing some kind of important role
• located on eastern outskirts of Oosterbeek
• British force about company(+), maybe a little bigger
• German force about battalion(+)
• a ‘hook’ of no Germans on-map at-start, and most British forces arriving at random.
Research has nixed that, at least as a historical scenario. I can either amend the concept to
a semi-historical scenario, or just go with a fictional scenario. I haven’t fully decided yet, and
won’t need to until I start looking at forces and objectives, but I’m probably going to go with a
semi-historical scenario. Therefore, my refined scenario concept is as follows.
German forces will be KG Harder, reinforced with a mixed platoon of two StuGs and a StuH.
Training state will generally be low, motivation will be highly variable. Support will be by a
platoon of 6 or 8 x 81mm mortars. German strength will be around a battalion, with a clear
advantage provided by the presence of the armoured vehicles.
3.1: Beret badges of main British units in ‘The Sheriff of Oosterbeek’. Top left – The
Parachute Regiment. Top right – the South Staffordshire Regiment. Bottom – The Royal
Regiment of Artillery. Background is an airborne forces Denison Smock. All images from
Wikipedia.
Battlefront.com 18
British forces will consist of disordered elements of the four defeated battalions (1, 3, 11
PARA, 2 S STAFFS) fleeing back from Arnhem, trying to form a line to defend the ground in
front of Thompson’s gun batteries. I might include elements of formed and coherent Glider
Pilots coming down from the North, to provide some stiffening. There’ll also be a small
quantity of anti-tank guns, Vickers MMGs, and light vehicles. Training state will be high
across the board, and motivation fairly high. Fitness, though, will be quite low. The Paras
had been on the go non-stop for 24-48 hours by this point, and most had had little or no
sleep. Fatigue was a rapidly escalating issue. The units falling back from Arnhem will have
low ammunition, and especially will have little or no PIAT ammunition. Ammunition supplies
will be available back near the church, or forward a little bit, but they will have to go back to it.
Actually, this could be a way of ‘forcing’ the British player to keep his units moving back –
without ammunition they’ll be largely helpless once the Germans arrive on-map. Hmm.
That’s an idea to hang on to.
The British force will be, in total, company to battalion sized, although any of Thompson’s
artillery positions which end up on-map will be in addition to that.
The date is Tuesday 19th September. Time of day will be mid afternoon, say 2:30pm.
Temperature will be cool or warm, wind is mostly irrelevant, and it is overcast.
3.3: A wrecked self-propelled gun on the Benedendorpsweg, Oosterbeek. This is one of the
vehicles destroyed by Lance-Sergeant Baskeyfield VC on Wednesday 20th September.
From: Pegasus Archive website.
Battlefront.com 19
Objectives will be, very broadly speaking, terrain based with a lesser emphasis on inflicting
casualties. In particular, the Germans will gain increasing quantities of points the further
west they advance. Similarly, the British will gain points by holding the Germans as far as
possible to the east. The “draw” line will be about where the historic perimeter stabilised.
3.2: Men of the 2nd South Staffords being led away to captivity on Tuesday 19th September.
The man second from the left is Signaller George Parry, and in the foreground, looking
towards the German cameraman and in the process of sticking his fingers up at him, is
Lieutenant Jack Reynolds. Reynolds was already angry at the destruction of his Battalion,
but when he observed a cameraman grinning as he filmed the captured men being marched
past, he decided to express his opinion of him. Copyright: Bundesarchiv 497/3531A/34.
I’m still not sure whether I’ll be able to use my ‘hook’ of the Germans chasing the defeated
battalions on to the map. Luckily that doesn’t matter at this stage. I can carry on with
designing and creating the scenario, and will only need to make a definite decision about that
quite late in the process.
The map will be approximately 1.5km E-W by 1km N-S, stretching from the railway
embankment in the east to somewhere past the Oosterbeek Church in the west, and from
the Rhine in the south to somewhere in Oosterbeek in the north. Given the map size and
predominantly infantry nature of the battle, at this stage I’m estimating that the scenario will
be about 90 minutes long.
Now I can open the scenario editor and get cracking!
Battlefront.com 20
3.4: The ruins of Oosterbeek Church, home of Lonsdale Force, after the battle and the loss
of its spire. Copyright: Municipal Archives, Oosterbeek. From: Pegasus Archive website.
Battlefront.com 21
4 – The Map Pt.1; Working with Overlays
The British Army always fights its battles uphill, in the pouring rain, at the junction of two
map-sheets.
Field Marshal ‘Bill’ Slim
First up is the map, but I can’t get cracking in the editor just yet. First I have to prepare some
map overlays, and a bit of time spent here can save a lot of time later on.
In the refined concept, I figured the map would be about 1.5 x 1km, stretching from the
railway embankment to the church, and from the Rhine to somewhere in mid-Oosterbeek.
What I want to do now is be very specific about where exactly the boundaries are going to
be. The best way I’ve found to do this is to lay up the relevant mapping into Google Earth,
and use that to select the boundaries. The layers I’m going to use are the 1944
topographical map from the Library of Congress (this provides the best view of the terrain at
the time), the 2011 topo map from Wikipedia (very clear and detailed information, and the
contours especially will still be perfectly valid), a map of the perimeter from Middlebrook’s
book (which has detailed dispositions of the British forces), and the partial coverage offered
by the 1944 aerial photos (the top left corner is missing from the photo coverage). It takes a
bit of jiggering about – especially with the overlapping aerial photos - and the overlays never
quite line up with each other, but ultimately you can end up with a series of overlays that
show how different elements relate to each other.
4.1: Google Earth, with landmarks shown.

Battlefront.com 22
I then often add landmarks and special features to give a rough overall sense of the map. In
this case I’ve picked out some prominent features – like the Church, Kate ter Horst’s house
which will be familiar to anyone who’s read “A Bridge Too Far” or seen the movie, the
Oosterbeek Laag referred to by Middlebrook as Arnhem’s “Menin Gate” where the
Benedendorpsweg passes under the railway embankment, and the location and orientation
of each of the six 4-gun troops in Thompson’s regiment.3 I’ve also added the unit deployment
areas from Middlebrook’s map as filled polygons, which means I can get rid of that overlay
but still apply the information from it to the others. I’ll probably add other landmarks and
features as time goes on.
Now I want to define my map boundary, using an unfilled polygon. There are three primary
considerations here. Firstly, the map must be big enough. I don’t want the players to feel
unnecessarily constrained, and given the size of the forces I’m thinking about using, the map
will need to be decently sized.
Secondly, and conflicting with the point above, I want to be as brutal as possible and cut out
anything that isn’t going to be used. There are lots of good reasons for this. A smaller map
is faster to make, faster to load, and smoother to play. It also restricts unrealistic manœuvre.
In this case, I don’t want to extend too far to the south because it opens up a big flat open
area that – for whatever reason, neither side used much throughout the battle.
Finally, I want to ‘frame’ the battle. By this I mean I want to create clear, logical boundaries
that tell the player why the map stops where it does. It’s the same idea as framing a photo;
the player’s focus should be concentrated inside the frame, to prevent them wondering
“what’s over there?” In this case I’m quite lucky – the Nederrijn to the south and railway
embankment to the east provide really good boundaries. Neither of them run exactly north-
south or east-west, but that’s ok. Like framing a photo, the map frame doesn’t have to run
along the entire boundary - hinting at its presence on map is enough to communicate its
existence off map. Lastly, the key terrain for this battle is the Benedendorpsweg, a road
running E-W from Arnhem along the southern edge of Oosterbeek, and away to the west.
This was the primary axis of advance for KG Harder, and so I want it central to my map.
Middlebrook’s map with the gun troop positions provides me with a rough location for my
western boundary. I want to include the western-most position, and include at least a little
manœuvre room further west of it. To the north, I’ll go about as far north of
Benedendorpsweg as the area to the south.
Initially I had a map that was 1920m x 1144m, but with a bit of care that’s come down to
1808m x 1040m. That doesn’t seem like much of a difference but it’s saving about 15% in
size, which means almost 5,000 tiles that don’t have to be attended to. I’ve kept a bit of
ground east of the railway line as this is where the Germans will be coming in – the rail
embankment will conveniently provide them with cover and concealment behind which to sort
themselves out. There is only the barest hint of the Nederrijn in the southwest corner, while
to the west the map cuts off just past the westernmost gun position. To the north, the edge
runs through the middle of Oosterbeek, leaving the Benedendorpsweg running roughly
through the middle of the map.
3
Actually, 5 x 4-gun, and 1 x 3 gun. One of the guns was lost on the fly in, but I haven’t been able to
find out which battery it was from yet.
Battlefront.com 23
Pulling that all together, this is what I have:
4.2: Google Earth. Yellow line shows boundary of map to be built in CM editor.
Next, I tweak and adjust the polygon so the sides are perfectly N-S and E-W, and so that the
overall dimensions are a multiple of 16m (which is the minimum step when changing the CM
map size in the editor). Then it’s a simple matter of zooming in as far as possible and taking
multiple screen shots with the different layers, with and without the landmarks turned on.
Finally, in a picture editor the screen shots are cropped down to the yellow border.
4.3: 1944 topo map overlay ready for use in CM editor. Yellow line around the edge is the
same boundary shown in previous image.
Battlefront.com 24
In this case, the topographical contour lines are reasonably clear, but when they aren’t I
generally overdrawn them with lines in Google Earth, then take a screenshot of that, saving
each as a BMP. This comes in really useful when setting contours in the editor. Incidentally,
if you look carefully you’ll notice that the grid of that 1944 map isn’t quite square with the
frame, even though the frame itself is set up to run N-S, E-W in Google Earth. The
difference is explained by changes in the mapping grid over the last 70-odd years. Cool,
huh?
These are the overlays prepared for the Sheriff of Oosterbeek:
1) 1944 topo, with and without landmarks and force-location polygons.
2) 2011 topo, with and without landmarks and force-location polygons.
3) Google Earth, with and without landmarks and force-location polygons.
4) 1944 topo with heights of elevations annotated
5) 1944 Aerial Photo with and without landmarks and force-location polygons.
To use an overlay in the editor it must be named exactly special_editor_overlay.bmp, and

located in the Data/z folder. Now, this is a problem, because for this one scenario I’ve
prepared nine overlays, and other scenario will have their own sets.
All five files are named consistently and obvious way and placed in their own folder to keep
them out of the way. When I want to change the overlay being used, the existing overlay is
deleted, the one I want copied (not moved) down into z, and the file name edited down to
what it needs to be. That way all nine original overlays are retained, and the one I want is
active.
I don’t expect to use them all directly as overlays in the editor, but preparing them has helped
me become really familiar with the terrain. It’s also handy to print the overlays out on A3, if
possible, to refer to, mark up, and annotate. Printouts will also be really useful when
planning out the AI’s scheme of manœuvre later on.
4.4: Store all the images related to a single scenario in a named folder nested in Data/z.
Right, now am I ready for the editor? I think I am.
Battlefront.com 25
Overlays Quicksteps:
1) decide exactly what area your CM map is going to cover.
2) crop and save an image (from Google Maps, Google Earth, some map you found
somewhere, an aerial photo, whatever) to exactly those dimensions. If you add the originals
as layers in Google Earth, the ruler tool to help here.
3) name the overlay image from Step 2 special_editor_overlay.bmp and place it in your Z
folder
4) open up CM, go to the Editor, go to Map
5) you will see your overlay on top of the map square, but it'll be compressed. Use the +
buttons to stretch your map to the desired dimensions, and the overlay image will stretch
right along with it. Once you get to the right size map, there should be no distortion in the
overlay image.
Battlefront.com 26
5 – The Map Pt.2: Elevations and Roads
Just drive down that road, until you get blown up
General George S. Patton, on the delicate art of reconnaissance.
We’re on the road to nowhere
There’s a city in my mind
Talking Heads
When crafting a map I think the best way to approach it is to first create a ‘civilian’ map, then
modify it – if necessary – into a ‘battle’ map. By this I mean have a mindset that you’re
creating a place where civilians would live, work, and play. I believe that this gives the most
natural and pleasing overall results. Battles are an exceptional and rare event, which means
the environment around us is primarily driven by civilian use of it in peacetime, and not by
soldiers and their battles.
It’s also useful to have a general plan for how the map will be built up. I usually start with
elevations and roads because they’re fairly easy to do, and because once they’re in I have a
general framework around which to ‘hang’ all the other map elements.
Let’s start with the elevations. For this I need the file Sheriff 1944topo elevations
special_editor_overlay.bmp. So, that get’s copied out of the overlays folder, down into the
z folder, and the file name truncated to special_editor_overlay.bmp. Then fire up CMBN,
go into the editor, and start a new scenario. I usually add some bare-bones details like the
name of the scenario, then head into the Map section of the editor. The overlay I’ve chosen
is now visible, but horribly distorted because the map size is square and far too small.
PROTIP: press o (little ‘oh’, for ‘overlay’) to alter the So, first up, we need to
transparency of the overlay to make it much easier to see what stretch the CM map to the
you’re doing. Depending on what you’re working on you’ll find a same size as the overlay.
sharper or dimmer overlay image more useful. The o key does not Press the + and – buttons
work in elevation set mode. to stretch the map in width
and height, and when it
PROTIP: expand the map equally to the right and left, top and gets to the correct size the
bottom so the original 320m sq map is in the centre of the newly overlay will look right.
sized map. The default 320 x 320m map can only be increased on Holding down the SHIFT
any one side to 2160m. If you want a map over this size you need key while clicking + or - will
to increase it in the other direction. Increasing the map on both increase/decrease the map
sides at the outset will prevent the problem of wanting to add just a in 80m (10 tiles) steps
few more metres to one side of the map, only to bump up against rather than the standard
the 2160m max. While you can, at this time, add metres on the 16m (2 tiles).
other side you can't move the map features After resetting the map’s
Battlefront.com 27
size to 1808m x 1040m the overlay looks as it should, and I’m ready to go.
Now it’s a simple matter of tracing over the contour lines on the overlay at the correct
elevation. The 20, 30, and 40m lines are all pretty straight forward, but the intermediary lines
require a bit of guesstimation because they’re at 2.5m intervals. Also, the polder area
between Benedendorpsweg and the Nederrijn is a bit tricky, because while it is mostly very
low lying (around 9-10m above sea level), it is criss-crossed by dykes and the railway
embankment. Careful reading of the contours on at the slope/cutting markings suggest the
railway is set at 22m. The dykes are trickier, but fortunately the legend on the full map is
pretty good at explaining how high each is. That, plus a careful look around in Google Maps’
Streetview, provides sufficient information.
5.1: A section of the Rosander Polder with the elevations set. Because this area is so flat it’s
difficult to see the changes in elevation on the otherwise naked 3D map, but by looking at the
edge of the map the rise of the dyke can be seen. On the 2D map a number of dykes can be
seen, matching the ones on the overlay map.
The contour engine in CM is pretty good, but it can sometimes use a little help. I almost
invariably use ‘Direct’, and whenever possible set the map altitudes to be the same as the
real-world altitudes. CM doesn’t care – you can set the base altitude to be whatever you like,
and work from there, but I find it a lot easier to keep track of things – especially when coming
back to a map in the future – if the map and real altitudes match. The Oosterbeek area is
pretty flat, too, so there’s no real need to be too definite about exactly where each contour
goes. I usually plonk down one ‘black tile’ elevation every three or four tiles, and let the
engine interpolate the rest. The railway embankment, though, and the dikes will have to be
more directed, because I want to closely control how wide those things are, and also
because I want the tops to be quite flat. Those require tile-by-tile placement of elevations.
Battlefront.com 28
5.2: Select the ‘Roads’ menu, select a road style, click on the auto complete tool, then click
on the tile you want the road to stat on, and again where you want it to end.
Roads are even easier. Using the same overlay, and the ‘autocomplete’ tool it’s simply a
matter of clicking start and end points for each section of road and the editor fills in the rest.
As far as I can tell (from the map and period photos) the roads in this part of Oosterbeek
were either cobbled or dirt tracks. The auto complete tool attempts to draw a straight line
between the two points selected, so wherever a curve is called for a large-ish number of
short straights can be used.
Unfortunately the ‘autocomplete’ tool isn’t great at using the right road pieces, and it doesn’t
handle intersections all that well. That means there’s usually a quite a bit of tidy-up needed
to get the roads looking nice. In particular, there are two specific pieces that should be used
for bends in the road which autocomplete completely omits.
Using the right pieces means the road will end up looking smoother and more attractive.
5.3: The autocomplete tool creates ‘jaggy’ corners. By using what I think of as the ‘tick’ or
‘flared’ piece and the ‘corner’ piece, road curves are smoothed out.
Battlefront.com 29
Having a map to work to makes laying out roads on a historical map a fairly thinking-free
activity. When I’m creating an imaginary map, though, I try and pay attention to where the
roads are going in relation to the contour lines already laid out. Historically speaking, roads
are usually formalised versions of walking tracks. By that I mean that walking tracks became
horse tracks became cart tracks became roads. And that history tends to inform the route
taken by any road. People are basically lazy, and like water they’ll take the route of least
resistance Instead of chopping down a copse of trees, they’ll walk around. Instead of
bridging a river they’ll walk along it to a ford. Instead of walking over the top of a hill they’ll
contour around it or go over the saddle. All of which tends to make roads, especially in rural
areas, quite meandering. Intersections tend to turn into quite large Y junctions or even
diamonds as folk cut the corner instead of going all the way to the intersection. Eventually
corner cutting becomes the norm.
Roads aren’t always wriggly, of course. The Romans famously built straight roads almost
regardless of obstacles, and major point-to-point routes tend to be straighter. But apart from
those few exceptions roads are quite organic, and ‘fit’ into the environment, rather than
reshaping the environment to suit the road. I try and remember that, and create my roads
with gentle corners and easy gradients.
The section of rail line I want is

PROTIP: in the 2D Map Editor window CTRL- relatively straightforward,
RIGHTCLICK will cycle through directional facing for the although a design compromise
selected terrain type. This means you don't have to go up and is needed here. The real rail
press one of the arrows at the top of the UI to change facing,line runs at a bearing of about
just use the key combo to cycle through them. This works for 20-25°, but CM rail can only be
all terrain that can be oriented (such as buildings), but is at multiples of 45°. I can either
especially useful for roads and walls. shift the alignment of the rail
line, or break up it’s
straightness with zigzags in order to more closely follow the original alignment. Because the
rail embankment is only over in one corner of the map, and because it runs straight as an
arrow, I’ve decided to rotate the alignment so as to keep the straightness as much as
possible. I’ve used the point where the rail crosses over the road to pivot around, which
means that the location where it exits off the eastern edge of my map is barely affected, but
the southern exit – on the way to the blown rail bridge – is much further west than it should
be. That’s ok, and minimised by adding a single kink in the line. That corner of the map
shouldn’t see too much action, and the range between the embankment and the Church isn’t
affected too much.
Creating a map in the CM editor inevitably involves making compromises. I understand the
desire to be fully historically authentic, but I also think it's an impossible goal. For starters,
linear features in CM are limited to 45° angles, which as we see above means the rail line
has been given a new alignment. Similar compromises are often needed for the roads, but
because roads generally do sway back and forth it’s generally a better decision to follow the
original alignment more closely. The question I usually ask myself is “If I put a switch in here,
LOS will be affected. Is that good or bad?” If the real road really was long and straight with
clear LOS, then I’m more likely to change the alignment. But if the road is through trees,
Battlefront.com 30
buildings, or other stuff that might affect LOS then I’m more likely to throw some S-bends and
switches in to retain the original alignment. There is a strong ‘design for effect’ ethic at play
here.
Secondly, I'm pretty sure that no one actually cares how accurate the map is. It's not like
reasonable gamers aren’t going to compare scenario maps to closely with Google Maps, and
complain because some building is 15 or 20m east of where it's supposed to be, or some
field is only 1/2 an acre when the real one was 3/4 acre. I trust people understand that as
good as the editor is, it has limitations. As long as designers create attractive and authentic
maps, that should be more than good enough. Also, after creating a ton of maps I just can't
be bothered anymore stressing about the exact location of this building, or the exact
alignment of that road. I hope you understand!
Getting back to the map, I decided to throw the water in at this point too. There’s only a bit in
the corner, and because this is the Nederrijn it’s all just deep water. A bit of dickering around
with elevations along the water’s edge produces a nice, steep diked effect. Later on I’ll need
to do something about the network of channels that drain the Polder area, but that can wait
for later.
I’ve also spent a bit of time working on the rail embankment and especially the area where
the road goes underneath the rails. I’ve had to push the rail lines one tile further apart in
order to get two adjacent rail bridges, and used lots of fixed elevations to get a nice steep
cutting that units shouldn’t be able to climb up out of. Heavy Forest has been used along the
eastern side of the embankment to ensure that vehicles can’t get up on top, and gravel along
the top because, well, it’s a railway line.
5.4: 2D map showing how the terrain tiles and black and blue fixed elevations were set
around the cutting, and 3D showing how it looks.
Battlefront.com 31
New in the Market Garden module is so-called ‘Ditch Lock’ for elevations, which can be used
to create narrow ditches, small berms and dikes. This is a way to make a narrow ditch rather
than a wide "trough" even though the depth is the same. It can also be used to force abrupt
and steep changes of elevation – while learning how to use this new feature I created Castle
Ditchlock, complete with curtain walls and turrets just for giggles. Ditch-locking is perfect for
creating the vertical walls I want through the rail underpass.
To use Ditch Lock, hold down the CTRL key when directly placing elevation markers. The
elevation number will show up on a blue (rather than black) background square. The effect
created in the 3D map is a slope between set elevation tiles that is much sharper than
between two black elevations.
So, now my framework is complete. But it’s just a framework at this stage, which means
there’ll be changes to accommodate other terrain and map features.
It’s time for … hmm. What’s next?
5.5: The map with roads and elevations complete, the Nederrijn corner finished, and the
railway line and embankment mostly complete.
Battlefront.com 32
6 – The Map Pt.3: Buildings, Walls, and Trees
The reason the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marines bicker amongst themselves is that they
don't speak the same language. For instance, take the simple phrase "secure the building."
• The Army will post guards around the place.
• The Navy will turn out the lights and lock the doors.
• The Marines will kill everybody inside and set up a headquarters.
• The Air Force will take out a 5 year lease with an option to buy.
Buildings, walls, and trees. That’s what’s next.
For these things the 1944 topo isn’t as much use because it doesn’t really show individual
trees. Oosterbeek was quite a prosperous area at the time, populated by retired planters
from the colonies. Descriptions of the battle are thick with the difficulty of moving about the
area because of all the branches bought down by artillery and mortar fire. So I’m going to
use the 1944 aerial photo overlay for the trees, and it’s also quite good at showing the
individual houses.
6.1: 1944 aerial photo overlay ready for use in CM editor. Yellow line around the edge is the
same boundary shown in previous image. Note the overlapping black and white photos on
the left, and the area to the north-west in colour that was missed by the recce sortie.
Compare the coverage of trees show in these photos with that shown in the map at image
4.3 above. Note also the way the roads in the photos have been made to line up with the
roads in Google Earth. Aerial overlays from the http://watwaswaar.nl/ site.
Battlefront.com 33
Looking at ground level photos of the area, it seems that Oosterbeek was a mix of large-ish
manor-type houses that were generally two stories tall, and low single story smaller houses.
I’m going to use the size of the house marker on the map as my guide for which is which.
Happily, it seems there are few high-density areas where adjacent buildings touch, and also
the buildings are generally square or rectangular. That makes my life easier.
But to start with, I want to first build the Oosterbeek Church and the Seminary, also known as
Kate ter Horst’s house. Almost as iconic as the bridges or the Hartenstein Hotel, I want to
get those two distinctive buildings looking nice.
6.2: The battle damaged house of Kate Ter Horst, as seen in 1945 from a photograph taken
by C. van Rijn. I imagine the grass was a lot shorter during the battle. Copyright: Renkum
Municipal Archives. From: Pegasus Archive website.
The location of the church is well marked, and the kitset of pieces make creating one pretty
straight forward. Interestingly, the British did actually have a machine gun mounted in the
church spire at one stage of the battle. That ended abruptly when Germans explosively
lowered the spire’s height. The ter Horst house is just a little further to the rear, and photos
clearly show it as being two stories.
For the houses I have a choice of using modular or custom buildings. Because there are few
touching buildings the choice is a little easier – custom buildings generally look prettier. But I
will mix in some modular buildings too, in order to get more visual variety.
At this stage buildings are just placed the where I think they’re going to go. Where they
actually end up will be close, but it might not be in these exact positions. Later on, when I’m
adding other terrain and dickering around with the elevations, I might shift them a tile or two
in any direction in order to make the map more attractive. Right now they are in broad-brush.
Battlefront.com 34
I’ve also adjusted the alignment of the road in a couple of spots to suit the inclusion of
buildings.
6.3: Damaged buildings along the Weverstraat. Glider Pilots of G Squadron fought in this
area, and the house on the left was used as a base by Lt Mike Dauncey DSO throughout the
battle. G Sqn were in the blue rectangle that has ‘2 Bty’ at the bottom in image 4.2 above.
Even though the layout is somewhat rough, I like to go around and adjust the facades and
windows and door configurations. I try to break up any visual monotony by avoiding having
adjacent buildings look exactly the same, unless there’s a good reason for it. Changing the
look of buildings is pretty easy in the 3D view with various combinations of ALT, CTRL,
SHIFT and click.
CTRL-LEFTCLICK changes the window/door layout for wall, or the roof style (only on
modular buildings)
ALT-CTRL-LEFTCLICK changes the window/door layout for all floors simultaneously (only
on modular buildings)
CTRL-SHIFT-LEFTCLICK adds a balcony to the floor clicked on (only on modular buildings)
ALT-LEFTCLICK changes the window/door style for the building (only on modular buildings)
SHIFT-LEFTCLICK changes the building facade style (i.e., the wall covering)
ALT-SHIFT-LEFTCLICK cycles through major damage, including complete rubbling.
Battlefront.com 35
Most of the buildings on the Sheriff of Oosterbeek map are free standing. There is one,
though, which I’ve made by connecting several modular buildings together. Since this is all
one building I want it to look like it’s all one building, and that it belongs together.
The difference is fairly

PROTIP: use broad swathes of terrain types to quickly and
subtle, but this is yet
roughly draw in fields, wooded areas and so on to make it
another example of story
easier to visualise the finished map and the spatial
telling. The story I want to
relationships on it. Then go back and adjust edges and
tell to the player here is
terrain types as required. Use some kind of reminder to
‘this is all one building. It
identify which sections of the map are finished, and which
belongs together, and you
are only roughed in.
can move around inside
it.’ Part of that story-telling includes going inside, and making sure there’s no windows on
internal walls,4 and that there actually are doors between the sections. As long as one of the
touching walls has a door units will be able to move from one “room” to another, but I don’t
like the aesthetics of that. Instead I try to ensure that there is a door on both sides, and that
the two doors are more or less aligned. With sections the same size that’s easy, but when
one of the walls is longer than the other it’s a bit trickier – usually the best bet is to push the
door over to the far left or far right of the wall. It’s not perfect, but it is pretty close.
6.4: On the left is two adjacent modular buildings, as placed by the editor. Note that it has
different walls and windows. On the right is the same building after a bit of tweaking. The
brick facade has been used, since that was a fairly common building material in the Low
Countries, and made sure the windows are the same style. Also gone are any windows
hidden behind the single story ‘lean-to’ extension closest to the camera. As a final touch,
there are no windows or doors on the centre of any wall that has a chimney, since on the
inside of these walls the chimney would be taking up that internal space. Not visible are the
internal walls between the two pieces, which have an adjoining door, and all windows
removed.
4
That, incidentally, is why the customised independent buildings sometimes aren’t a good choice for
buildings that are touching. The windows and doors in the independent buildings cannot be adjusted,
so you either have to put up with internal windows, or not use those buildings. Some independent
buildings do have blank walls especially so they can be placed adjacent to each other, and so it’s
worth getting familiar with the specifics of each. I have a reference sheet blu-tacked to the wall
showing which walls on independent buildings have openings.
Battlefront.com 36
Holland has some unique

PROTIP: to get a door on the upper floors, use ALT- architectural features, and the
CTRL-LEFTCLICK as you’re cycling through the Market Garden module allows the
door/window combinations. This forces every floor on designer to reflect that with a
that side of a building to have the same setup as the variety of flat and tapered roof
ground floor, so when you have a door on the ground styles that better reflect what is
floor there’ll be a door on each of the upper stories too.found in this part of the world. In
the 3D viewer press CTRL-LEFTCLICK on the roof of a modular building to cycle through the
options. This is a nice way of linking a row of houses together visually. You’ll need to
ensure that “Holland” is selected in Mission -> Data -> Region to access this feature.
Personally, I don’t like seeing vegetation growing up through the floor of buildings. Where
practical I replace the ground tile under each building with something ‘short’. Ideally that’d be
cobblestones or dirt, but where the tile overlaps the edge of the building short grass is a good
alternate.
I won’t be adding any battle damage anywhere because this area was basically pristine
before the fighting began on Tuesday afternoon.
Trees, walls, and hedges in an area like Oosterbeek are mainly about providing privacy
between houses. So it’s mainly a matter of adding boundary fences or hedges, and placing
trees on them in a “neatly gardened” kind of way, as well as trees and bushes in yards and
road sides and whatnot. I also try to mix up the undergrowth, especially along hedges. Not
all homeowners are diligent gardeners, especially in the midst of a global war, so it’s ok to
have patches of long grass or light forest scattered about the place. The walls and hedges
themselves are fairly permeable to infantry, so terrain types that don’t block infantry have
been used, or gaps have been included. I don’t want vehicles to have too much freedom of
movement off road, so I’m not too worried about making sure the StuGs can move anywhere
and everywhere.
In a carryover from Normandy, I’ve used Bocage quite extensively. Technically, of course,
there’s no bocage in Holland. There are dense and high hedges that would restrict infantry
and vehicle movement and make good fighting positions, and that’s the sense that bocage
has been used here. ‘Bocage’ is easier to write - and visualise - than ‘tall thick hedge of
vegetation that creates an obstacle to movement and provides good cover and concealment.’
The Rosander Polder area south of Benedendorpsweg is basically farmland, so wire fences
have been used to break that up into good sized paddocks, with positioning largely driven by
the aerial recce photos. It’s essentially a floodplain down there, so that land would be used
for livestock – which can be moved – rather than crops, which are a bit hard to get out of the
way when the Rhine floods. While I’m in the area I decided to mix up the ground types a bit.
There’re no crops, but I have filled some paddocks with long or extra long grass to give the
idea of stock rotation and some of the fields being empty for an extended period of time.
Tactically, having long grass helps units move easier, so in this particular area it makes
sense to go pretty light on that, but even having some, and using a variety of ‘short’ ground
tiles breaks it up visually, and tells a story of activity and peacetime use.
Battlefront.com 37
During the campaign in 1944, the polder adjacent to the river wasn’t the scene of much
fighting. I suspect that was because of a few major considerations. Primarily, it’s a flat open
plain, and commanders had learnt in 1916 that advancing across a flat open plain typically
led to poor results. By default, this CM map will have the polder as a flat open plain, so that’s
good. But I also suspect that there must have been another reason. Cutting off the British
paras from the river was a fairly obvious way to doom them, yet it never happened, and I
think that’s probably because simply moving through this area would be too slow and difficult.
Drainage ditches will be used to severely constrain vehicular movement, either with water or
marsh, but that’s still not enough. I’ve used a fair bit of mud and/or soft ground to discourage
movement through this area. Players will still be able to move through it if they really I want
to, but it’ll be slow and risky, which suits my purposes.
The auto complete tool comes into play again with walls, fences and hedges, and in some
ways it’s more useful here than for roads. For one thing these things are generally shorter
and straighter than roads, and there are fewer pieces in the editor so there’s less gotchas for
the tool to muck up. On the other hand, those things make the tool less useful anyway –
sometimes it can be easier to just do short runs manually.
There’s also the Bato’s Wijk Park (or Batoswijk), which has large open areas as well as a
good number of trees. For this I want to use the Sheriff GoogleEarth naked
special_editor_overlay.bmp file. Re-creating this area is more artistic and free form. The
overlay gives a good idea of where trees are, and from the size you can sort of guess their
height, but I treat that as more of a guide than gospel; “some trees here, thick bush here,
hedge over there.” As far as I can tell, there were no extensive orchards in this small part of
Europe, it’s more a case of upper-class faux-forest. Mixing up the tree types used and the
density helps with that.
6.5: The map so far. Some of the ‘blocks’, defined by roads, have been fleshed out in detail,
but most of the map is still quite plain.
And that’s the map so far. There are still a lot of walls, fences, and vegetation to add, but it’s
starting to look like a proper map, and somewhere you might live - or have a battle.
Battlefront.com 38
7 – The Map Pt.4: Detailing
You gotta pay attention to detail.
Private Caparzo
The success of a production depends on the attention paid to detail.
David O. Selznick
Finishing off the buildings, foliage, fences, and most of the ground tiles (crops and the like)
from the previous section took a long time. It’s an absorbing task, and it’s easy to find
yourself obsessing over whether individual tiles should be Crop Type 3 or Extra Long Grass,
or whether a fence line should turn at the second tile or the third. It’s often necessary to
slightly alter the exact alignment of a road, or shift a building slightly, or fiddle about with the
elevations to get the various elements working together harmoniously. Overall, doing that
part of the map is probably the most time consuming part of creating a scenario. For this
map it took the better part of two weeks elapsed, although that included some days when
nothing got done, or maybe only a single block.
I usually break down the map into blocks, say an area bounded by a road or river, and finish
that off before moving on to the next block. It gives me a better sense of progress and
accomplishment as each one gets ticked off. I also find that the editor overlays aren’t usually
much use from this point onwards. The detail and resolution generally isn’t good enough to
figure out what you’re looking at, especially at the lower transparencies, while at the higher
transparencies you can’t see the work you’ve done. What’s most useful is a large scale, high
resolution printout that can be referred to while working. Failing that, open up the overlay in
a picture viewer or editor, and alt+tab between it and the editor.
Eventually it all gets done, or at least done enough that you can move on to the next stage …
detailing.
With detailing the aim is to try and really bring the map alive, to make it a real place where
real people might live. This gets back to an earlier point about maps – I think they should
look like places where people would live, work, and play, and which just so happen to be the
location of a battle. I think that a realistic looking map will go a long way towards produce
good and interesting battles, while a map that is specifically and solely designed for a battle
tends to be soulless and uninteresting.
First up are landmarks. These have two functions, and the first is to anchor the map in
space. I do this by putting “to [LOCATION] x.ykm” wherever a major road or route exits the
map edge. On this map there are four:
• the rail line heading off the south map edge “to RAIL BRIDGE 0.4km”
• the Klingelbeekseweg road (not landmarked, but it’s a continuation of the

Benedendorpsweg beyond the rail underpass) where it exits off the east map edge “to
ARNHEM ROAD BRIDGE 3.0km”
Battlefront.com 39
• the van Eeghenweg road where it exits off the north-east map edge “to HARTENSTEIN
HOTEL 0.6km”
• the Benedendorpsweg road where it exits off the west map edge “to WESTERBOUWING
HEIGHTS 1.3km”
This way, anyone who’s at least passingly familiar with the area will be able to think to
themselves “Oh, that’s near ___”, and anyone who isn’t familiar with it will be able to find it on
a map fairly quickly.
The second function is to help the player make sense of the internal space of the map, which
means naming any and all prominent landmarks. Since Oosterbeek is a built up area there
are a lot of road names. I’ve just used the main ones, rather than naming everything:
• Benedendorpsweg
• Weverstraat
• Polderweg
• Prins Bernhardweg (shortened to Bernhardweg)
• Acacialaan
• Jonkheer Nedemeijer van Rosenthalweg (shortened to Rosenthalweg)
• Fangmanweg
• Bato’sweg
• Unksepad
• Vogelweg
• van Eeghenweg
• der Koogweg
There are plenty of other names that could be used, but at a certain point landmarks do
become too dense. This spread should give reasonable cover in breadth and depth, as well
as marking the major routes and laterals, which are likely to become phase lines or
objectives during play.
And lastly some particular locations of interest:
• Oosterbeek, of course!, entered as O O S T E R B E E K to give it some gravitas
• Bato’s Wijk Park
• Oosterbeek Church
• ter Horst House
• Rosander Polder (same format as Oosterbeek)
• Oosterbeek Laag Station
• Nederrijn
Battlefront.com 40
Across my various maps I try and use standard Landmarking conventions, such as always
having the ‘to’ distances to the nearest hundred metres (for example, ‘7.2km’ and ‘0.5km’
rather than ‘7km’ and ‘450m’), and having the ‘to’ destinations all in CAPS, while the on-map
locations are written as Normal Place Names.
Landmarks should be used a lot more than they are. They're really helpful for orienting the
player to the scenario via the briefing, and they also provide mental triggers when you get a
turn; "ah, that's right. I had 1 Platoon is moving towards 'The Nook', while the rest on the
company provides covering fire from the area of 'Route 66'", rather than "um, I think I had 1
platoon moving towards that nondescript piece of ground, while the rest on the company did
... something ... uh, somewhere?"
They're also really useful when describing the scenario, either in a public AAR or to your
opponent during or after the battle. It’s always nice when people talk about your scenario,
especially when you can follow exactly what they’re talking about.
That said, the purpose of landmarks is not to indicate objectives or even areas of particular
tactical interest. It is to give players reference points to hang their plans and conversations
on, and also places that can – and should – be referenced in the briefings. Aim for a good
spread of landmarks across the breadth and depth of your map.
7.1: The Landmarks. There’s obviously a heavy bias in the area north of Benedendorpsweg,
because there just aren’t that many pieces of land to mark out on the Rosander Polder.
Compare this to images 5.5 and 6.5 to see how the map has been progressively fleshed out.
Sometimes there is a place that should be highlighted with a landmark, but still retain some
FOW. It might be a phase line noted in the briefing, a particular choke point, or perhaps
suspected enemy locations. The aim is to draw one player’s attention to the spot, while
keeping the other player ignorant of its significance. For these tactically significant locations
unused victory location slots work well, marking them as TOUCH objectives worth zero (0)
points. The objective location text will remain in place even when touched, the player won't
be tempted to garrison the worthless location, and even if they never touch it doesn't matter
because it isn't worth anything. And the opposing player sees nothing – NOTHING!
Battlefront.com 41
In summary;
1) mark locations found on a 1:50k map as map-editor locations/landmarks.
2) mark locations that would only be found marked in chinagraph on a talc overlay at
company HQ as an objective worth zero points.
Due to the way landmarks are tied to the ground, I sometimes find it necessary to move them
by a tile or two in one direction or another to ensure the text ‘pops’ up over any obscuring
terrain such as trees or buildings. Another thing to watch out for is any landmarks co-located
with terrain objectives. Visually the overlapped text looks poor, so it’s worth moving the
landmark (or adjusting the objective’s shape to move its text) or perhaps even deleting the
landmark – the objective itself can stand in as a landmark.
The next task is water. The Nederrijn has already been drawn in, I want a dike along the
river’s edge, and some of the distinctive water breaks that can bee seen in the aerial recce
photos.
7.2: Water breaks in a 1944 aerial recce photo from the http://watwaswaar.nl/ site, how they
were built in the editor, and how they look in the game.
The river is edged with low fords to give a smooth, rather than stepped, appearance.
Both of the land-based elements were built up with anchored elevations. The water breaks
were topped with a stone wall to force nicely vertical sides, and covered with ‘gravel’ terrain
to give a nice visual effect. The space between the waterbreaks was filled with Mud tiles,
representing silt buildup, and the dike was covered with long grass and a bit of brush, as if it
had been left untended since the German invasion in 1940.
Rosander Polder is criss-crossed with a number of drainage ditches. Running water in CM

can be a bit tricky, since all water is forced down to the lowest elevation of any water.
Luckily, this area of the Netherlands is preposterously low – the Nederrijn is just 10m above
sea level here, the Rosander Polder only 2m above that and pancake-flat, and the highest
elevation anywhere on this map is just 40m. That means that I don’t have to pay too much
attention to ensuring that the water in its bed looks natural, or where I’ve used something
other than water for water (like swamp or marsh) that the flow is consistently downhill.
Tactical considerations drive how the ditches are constructed. The tactical effect I’m after
here is something that obstructs wheels and tracks crossing, but allows foot movement, and
Battlefront.com 42
which allows infantry to move along the ditches slowly but with some degree of concealment.
Therefore the ditches have been built up by using mud + scrub, and ditch-locking the ditch
itself.
This combination of elements provides cover to infantry, as well as restricting vehicular

movement.
7.3: Drainage ditches on the Rosander Polder (right), and how they were created (left). Note
the blue and black elevation-locked tiles.
Streams in Normandy or creeks in Sicily would have quite different tactical considerations,
and would therefore be constructed differently. It’s worth investigating and thinking carefully
about exactly what effects the water courses have in the particular area where each map is
being constructed – Streetview in Google Maps can be invaluable in gaining some
appreciation of the specific watercourses being modelled, and from that extrapolating what
effects they’d have on cross-country movement for different unit types in CM.
Something I do during map creation is to think about how animals and humans would
actually move around this space. Most CM maps contain at least some farm land, and in the
real world farmers need to move their livestock about, generally as efficiently as practical.
This means that all fields should have at least one, and more likely two gates. For these I
generally use the ‘gapped’ wooden fence, since farm gates tend to be wooden. I use the
gapped wooden fence, rather than just a wooden fence, because it means that players can,
with care, move vehicles including tanks through the gap without destroying the fence. I hate
leaking FOW when I’m playing, and seek out routes that allow my vehicles to move without
potentially betraying their presence to the enemy player. Since farmers would have been
regularly moving their farm equipment through these gaps without knocking the gate down
every time, I figure that players should be able to move their military equipment through them
too. If players aren’t careful, or the TacAI takes over in a moment of panic, then it’s likely
that the errant vehicle will knock down a fence or gate and give itself away, as they should.
Battlefront.com 43
Gates also represent areas of high traffic density, which means that there’s often no grass in
the immediate area of the gate, gradually fading out as you move further from the gate itself.
To model this I use a dirt tile under the gate itself, then an additional one or two dirt tiles in a
line leading towards the next gate. Depending on how I’m feeling, I sometimes link up the
dirt areas around gates with short yellow grass – representing trampled grass – to create a
continuous path. If the area is particularly wet, such as during winter time or in say Holland,
then the ground at gates can easily become mud instead of bare dirt.
7.4: The neighbouring house, visible through a gap in the hedgerow between two houses.
Similarly, around built up areas people – especially kids - tend to make themselves pathways
and shortcuts. This can be replicated by adding regular holes in any bocage or tall walls
used around buildings. I try to avoid creating fire lanes, though, by staggering the offset of
any holes. If you want, you can accentuate gaps in bocage by underpinning them with a
particular type of terrain tile. Dirt works well, since that plays to the idea that these gaps
represent high traffic routes, but really anything distinctive can be used depending on the
effect you’re trying to create. In this map of Oosterbeek I haven’t really accentuated the
bocage gaps at all – I’ve made any bocage I have added reasonably porous by including a
lot of gaps, and these aren’t being used to represent paths or gaps, strictly, more that the
bocage itself is less dense and impenetrable than something you might find in rural
Normandy.
I’ve also used a lot of high walls to give houses some privacy from their neighbours, and
these too often have gaps – especially to permit access to crop fields or paddocks. There
Battlefront.com 44
aren’t the frequency of

PROTIP: when more than one flavour item is placed at exactly the gaps used for bocage lines,
same location - either by clicking on the exact same spot in the 2D
but walls are a lot easier to
view, or shunting them together in 3D - any excess above one will
breach than bocage, and
be automatically deleted. Sometimes. This is kind of annoying,
real walls tend not to have
because it would otherwise be possible to create some interesting
too many portals.
items by combining objects – like a plinth sticking up in the
Flavour
middle of a pond. Sometimes you can combine objects, but I objects are
optional. Adding them can
haven’t figured out what the magic incantation is to do it reliably.
My operating rule of thumb is that it can’t be done quickly turn in to a massive
time sink, and too many of
them can affect performance by overloading processing and graphics. But … used
judiciously they are well worth the effort.
The flavour object UI is profoundly unhelpful, with different objects in any given category
identified only by number. So your first task is to get or make yourself a flavour object
reference chart, or keep page 122 of the manual handy.
The basic mechanics of placing flavour objects is fairly straight forward – click on the
numbered item you want, then click on the 2D map where you want it to appear and …
nothing happens. There is no feedback on the 2D map in the editor to show you that there
are flavour objects. However, once you go in to the 3D map you’ll see them, and you can
move them around.
LEFTCLICK rotates the object around its vertical axis. This is handy to, for example, get
power poles aligned along a road, or a park bench neatly tucked up against a wall. Note that
for some objects – most obviously posters – the vertical axis is at some distance from the
object itself. This allows you to place the poster on the internal or external wall of a building
which have a definite thickness.
SHIFT-LEFTCLICK pushed the object directly away from the camera by one (1) metre. By
adjusting your view point you can use this to nudge the object where you want it to go.
CTRL-LEFTCLICK deletes the object
ALT-LEFTCLICK moves the object. The first click will cause the object to vanish, then it will
reappear under the mouse pointer on the next click. This is useful for moving items long
distances. Be aware, though, that although you can place a unit anywhere, it will snap back
to the 1m grid when you exit and return to the 3D map. This can be a bit annoying if you
thought you had the object placed just so.
The main thing, not surprisingly, with flavour objects is that they’re all about story telling.
Why are these objects here? How do the flavour objects put on the map relate to each other,
and to their environment?
A fairly simple use of flavour objects, and one that adds a lot of texture for relatively little
effort, is power poles. In WWII the use and distribution of electricity was a lot lower than it is
now, so it isn’t necessary to ensure that every house and building is connected to the grid. I
generally run them only along main roads, with a spacing of around 8-12 tiles between each
pole. I usually adjust the spacing out so that intersections and sharp corners each have a
Battlefront.com 45
pole – running the wires in the Real World is basically a case of ‘join the dots’, so to follow a
road the poles must be located at prominent spots.
Beware of anachronisms. For example, discarded tires weren’t very common in WWII
Europe, because the Germans were chronically short of rubber, and they didn’t have much in
the way motorised transport anyway. Therefore, in my opinion, CM maps should have few if
any discarded tires.
When I first used flavour objects I went a little mad. I laid down hundreds of tires here,
dozens of barrels there, a swag of park benches over there, each in a discrete blob. “Cool!” I
thought “Look at me! I’m using flavour objects!” I went in to 3D mode, shifted them around a
little, and came out feeling very chuffed with myself. A few days later I went back and took
another look at the map for some reason and thought “What the heck!?” There was no story
to the flavour objects. It was all so stupid and naïve – a massive clump of one tyres here, a
massive clump of barrels there. Totally unrealistic and implausible. I deleted almost all of
them, and mixed the remainder up so that, for example, tires were mixed with barrels and
other junk, in discrete little vignettes. There were far less objects in total, but the overall
effect was far more pleasing and engaging.
7.5: A petrol station in Oosterbeek. There are at least 11 flavour objects in this image, with
more around the back of the garage. The story behind the open topped wooden barrel on
the left corner of the building is that it's there to catch rain coming down off the roof. I’ve
used this same collection of terrain elements and flavour objects in a number of scenarios.
Speaking of vignettes, work some unique signature combinations of map elements and
flavour objects to create little scenes of interest such as a wood chopping scene, a walled
garden, or a petrol station. Think carefully about what your vignette is showing, and what
elements you’ll need to create it. With a bit of trial-and-error, and some practice you’ll be
able to create them fairly quickly, and they’ll add your distinctive flair to the map. It’ll also
create an item of interest for players to examine while they’re playing on your map.
Battlefront.com 46
Common vignettes I use include a petrol station made up of a single story commercial
building, a couple of petrol pumps, maybe a street light, and some miscellaneous junk.
There’s also a backyard garden made up of several elements. There’re also much smaller
scenes I use, such as a single open topped barrel positioned at the corner of a house or
building to catch rainwater coming down off the roof, which helps give buildings a bit more
shape than the standard CM box.
I don’t think it’s necessary to plaster the entire map in flavour objects. A spread of significant
objects – like power poles and road signs – over most of the map, coupled with occasional
vignettes, provides enough visual interest for the player without completely bogging you the
designer down with time-consuming work in the editor, or bogging the game down during
play trying to render them all.
Battlefront.com 47
8 – The Map Pt.5: Finishing Up
Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing
it.
Greg Anderson
Having created a map on which civilians could live, love, work and play, it’s now time to start
thinking about how two opposing sides will fight on it.
For this battle, my general concept is that the British forces will be mostly on-map during
setup, but they will be dispersed and disorganised, having just fallen back from Arnhem in
great confusion. That means their setup zones (SUZs) are spread across the map, in
discrete blocks, but mainly along the main route. There will also be some units – notably
Thompson’s artillery batterys - set up outside any SUZs. When I get to placing individual
units I’ll probably distribute them so that elements of any given platoon will be scattered
amongst the different SUZs in order to further degrade British C2.
The Germans, on the other hand, will start with a fairly small on-map force, but it will be
concentrated and coherent. They, therefore, get a single main SUZ, on the eastern side of
the railway embankment. This area is also where most German reinforcements will appear.
This main SUZ is shaped so that initially there cannot be any units from either side with LOS
into it across the railway embankment. This ensures that the majority of units won’t start
immediately in-contact. Having units immediately in contact sounds like it’d be fun, and in
the right circumstances it can work, but usually it’s just annoying.
8.1: The German SUZs are in red and orange to the right/east. British SUZs are in blue to
the left/west. Note that the German SUZs are compact, while the British ones are quite
straggling and scattered.
Battlefront.com 48
The smaller area west of the underpass is to add some immediate interest to the battle, and
impel the German player into action as soon as possible. I’ll probably allocate a small, under
strength platoon to that SUZ, and it will probably start in contact with the British forces, or get
into contact within the first turn or two. It’s likely that this will cause the German to drag more
forces quickly through the underpass to support their colleagues under fire, and so the battle
will start off with a roar rather than a whimper. But the roar will be of the players own
choosing.
The British SUZ is necessarily more complex. I want to create SUZs that are big enough for
the forces to be contained, and allow players to shuffle them about and re-organise them, but
also small enough that the British player’s set up options are quite constrained. I also want
the SUZs to tie into the overall story – disorganised forces, falling back in disarray, trying to
congeal into an effective defence.
There are three main British SUZ, which I think of as ‘forward’ (nearest to the Germans),
‘centre’, and rear (near the Oosterbeek Church. These are irregularly shaped, and largely
follow the main roads, with a little bit of spill-over into the houses on either side. There are
also a few little outlining sections of the SUZ, which the player can use to start establishing
some breadth to his front. I think of these outlying SUZ as being occupied by a handful of
guys who have become isolated from - or absented themselves from - their units and are
wandering almost at random through the streets of Oosterbeek.
The foremost section of the Forward SUZ is either just in or just out of LOS to the western
German SUZ, although I haven’t checked exactly. Either way I’m not too worried. If it is in
LOS, the British player will only be able to pack a few units in that area, and anyway placing
to much force too far forward risks compromising the main defence later in the battle.
Nevertheless, I will have to make it clear in both briefings that the Germans are following
hard, and that the lead units on both sides are in, or have just broken, contact.
When I get to the point of actually placing the British forces on the ground, I will probably mix
units up so that platoons are split across the three SUZ, further complicating C2 and the
development of a cohesive defence over the first phase of the battle.
There will also be British units in ‘fixed’ locations, outside of any SUZ. This will particularly
apply to the 75mm Pack Howitzer gun batteries.
So, that’s the SUZs done, based on my overarching idea for the forces to be used. They are
in plausible locations that are consistent with the overarching story. The Germans are
concentrated to the east of the rail line, while the British have three broad deployment areas
– one around the church at Oosterbeek, and at two discrete locations along the road from
Arnhem. They are falling back at speed and in disorder, so it isn’t plausible that they’d
spread out much either down into the Rosander Polder or up into the heavily built up areas of
Oosterbeek. It is not my task – in this particular scenario – to set up a coherent defence for
the British. It is the player’s task to take a disorganised force moving along the road and
fashion a defence as best they can.
It’s a good idea to go back now and look at the map in detail in the area of each SUZ.
Depending on the tactical task and situation, each SUZ should be free and clear of obstacles
so the player can rearrange forces at will, and isn’t faced with an obstacle course just to get
Battlefront.com 49
his units moving. The main German SUZ has been changed by removing quite a few trees
and some fences to open it up so the German player has more open space to use.
In the back of my mind is the idea that these SUZs will probably change as the forces
become more defined, and as a result of playtesting. At this stage they’re mainly
placeholders to give a sense of where the major moving parts will be starting.
At this point, consider releasing the finished map as a QB map, in addition to using it for your
scenario. The world can always use more QB maps. Even if you don’t know how to modify
a map for QB use - and I don’t - there’s bound to be someone around who will do that for
you. Also, large-ish maps can often be broken up into multiple smaller pieces, so you might
be able to create two or more sub-maps, in addition to the full map.
8.2: Potential sub-maps for QBs to be made from overall Sheriff of Oosterbeek map.
And that’s the map done. Well … sort of. It’s finished, but I never really consider any map
Finished, with a capital-F, until the scenario is released. And sometimes not even then.
There’ll be tinkering and twiddling and adjusting, right up to the last moment. But it’s good
enough to play on now, which means that the most time consuming part of creating the
scenario is complete, and we can move on to other things.
But before we do that, let’s have a quick look around the map.
Battlefront.com 50
8.3: View towards the east from the Oosterbeek Church, out across the village and polder.
8.4: Some of the new roof styles available in the Market Garden module - flattened, and
tapered end pieces. The skins for these were still in development when this image was
taken.
8.5: View back west across the open polder to the Oosterbeek Church. Examples of
ditchlocking to create dykes and ditches can be seen in the foreground.
Battlefront.com 51
9 – British forces
There, look at him! It all depends on that article whether we do business or not. Give me
enough of them and I am sure of victory.
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, referring to a disreputable looking Redcoat before
the Battle of Waterloo
Immersion is created by telling the story of a situation in which the player feels the forces
really are theirs, where they feel involved in the story, the battle and the units, and where the
player cares about the units and the outcome he can craft with them.
It’s hard to get attached to a completely fictional unit or one that is obviously not real. Using
portions of actual formations helps the player get into the role of commander and create an
attachment to the force. There are also plenty of mods to increase that sense of belonging.
Using a fictional force can deprive the player of the opportunity to engage in that immersion.
For this battle I’m lucky because the British forces are easily identified, and a cohesive and
coherent story about why these particular units are fighting here in this place is easily told.
With other battles, this aspect isn’t always so straight forward, and the designer should give a
lot of thought to the exact force structure they intend to use, and the names they give to their
forces.
As a rule of thumb, by 1944 every army in Europe ‘got’ combined arms, and practiced it with
a degree of competence and professionalism. There were practically no battles fought
during the second half of World War II by ‘pure’ forces, so pitting a pure rifle company
against another pure rifle company isn’t just fictional, it would be fantasy.
For the British or Canadian armies a ‘combined arms’ force means that – generally speaking
– a CM infantry battalion could reasonably be supplemented by up to a squadron of
Shermans or Churchills, a battery of 25-prs, a platoon of engineers, a platoon of Vickers
MGs, and a troop of SP or towed anti-tank guns. Basically, and very coarsely, at each level,
a unit is a miniature of the one above it. So a brigade is a mini division, with about a third of
the divisional assets, a battalion-group is a mini brigade with a third of the brigade’s assets, a
company-group is a mini battalion with a third or a quarter of the battalion’s assets, and a
platoon-group is a mini company with a third of the company’s assets. Other nations have
similar ratios specific to their own force structures, and they can be roughly determined by
looking carefully at standard divisional organisations and accounts of battle.
A designer should have a clear reason, and a good story to tell, if some element of the
combined arms team is not going to be included in a battle, or if the ratios are going to be
skewed too much. The reason will probably be related to the central idea for a scenario – an
infantry force with a few anti-tank guns in defence, or a tank heavy force trying to clear a
town, for example. That reason then needs to be conveyed to the player in a plausible way
… but that’s for the briefing. The immediate task is to create a British force for this battle in
Oosterbeek.
Battlefront.com 52
Referring back to the Refined Scenario Concept, at a very gross level the British force
consists of the following units:
• 1st Air Landing Light Regiment (23 x 75mm Pack Howitzers in three batteries, and a lot of
jeeps)
• 2nd Battalion The South Staffordshire Regiment (air landing battalion, remnants, only C
Coy still a coherent unit)
• 1 PARA (weak remnants, ~40 men all told)
• 3 PARA (weak remnants, ~40 men all told)
• 11 PARA (remnants, ~150 men all told)
• 1st Air Landing Anti-Tank Battery, RA (elements only)
• Glider Pilots (from B and G Sqns, 1 Wing)
9.1: This map was produced by Sheriff Thompson after the battle, and shows the layout of
units around his guns in Oosterbeek. Although showing the situation a day or two after the
setting of this battle, this map provided a lot of guidance on which units to include, and where
to place them. From: Pegasus Archive website.
Battlefront.com 53
Obviously that’s different to the typical British combined arms force described earlier, mainly
because the scenario is dealing with airborne forces. Still, even with depleted forces, that’s a
lot of moving parts. All the more so given that it is a defending force. I’m going to have to
heavily prune that structure for the final scenario.
While researching this battle I came across the following snippets of specific information,
which will be incorporated in the purchased units either directly or as specialist teams:
C Troop, 2 A/L Bty missing one gun. (from 2 Bty war diary)
50-odd glider pilots attached to each A/L bty, and 30-odd attached to RHQ
B Sqn, 1 Wing, Glider Pilots with 2 Bty, A/L Light Regt
There was a knocked-out 17-pounder anti-tank gun, named "Pathfinder", on the Benedendorpsweg
to the east of the Church in Oosterbeek. The gun belonged to "P" Troop of the 1st Airlanding Anti-
Tank Battery.
From Thompson’s post-battle report:
Monday 18 SEP: 3 Bty being somewhat isolated I proposed to the CRA that I should spend the
night with them and take some of 1 and 2 Bty's Glider Pilots with me. He agreed and gave me
some A tk guns in addition (I think 4 6-pdrs and 2 17 pdrs)
Tuesday 19 SEP: By midday I had three 3" Mortars, two Vickers [later reported as 3 x MMG] and
a bren carrier. … The S. Staffords had some Vickers and 6-pdrs. The Vickers were deployed
covering the rly embankment, but it was difficult finding any good positions for the 6 pdrs. … the
only troops in the area I could rely on for offensive undertakings were the Glider Pilots
1st Airlanding Anti-Tank Battery, RA
Commander : Major Bill Arnold
A Troop : 6pr (12 glider pilots)

B Troop : 6pr (12 glider pilots)
C Troop : 6pr (12 glider pilots) (1 lost on landing)
D Troop : 17pr (16 glider pilots) (2 lost on landing)
P Troop : 17pr (16 glider pilots)
Z Troop : 6pr (12 glider pilots)
Based at Heckington and Helpringham, with P Troop at Tarrant Rushton. Flew in 30 Horsas from
Manston (mostly) and Blakehill Farm, P Troop in 8 Hamilcars from Tarrant Rushton.
Went in: 191 men Died: 24 Evacuated: 52 Missing: 115
Info from various pages at Pegasus Archive
I’ve given some thought to exactly how to represent the British forces. One way would be to
buy a single battalion, make Thompson the Battalion Commander, and reconfigure the
various companies to be the elements listed (S STAFFS, 1, 3 and 11 PARA, 1 AL Light Regt,
and others). That would have the advantage of wrapping it up in a nice neat bundle, and
having Thompson as the commander of all British elements, so he could move about from
Battlefront.com 54
place to place to rally routers and other feats of derring-do. It would also make some sense
in that the combined total of the four airborne battalion remnants will be somewhat less than
a single battalion at full strength. The unit editor is sufficiently powerful and flexible that I’m
fairly certain that I’d be able to create a pretty authentic force that way.
However I’m not going to do that, for one key reason: command and control. Having all the
forces in a single hierarchy would, I believe, bestow too much C2 on the British forces, when
they should actually be stumbling backwards in great confusion. Therefore, each real
battalion sized force will be represented by its own weak battalion in CM. This should greatly
impede the passage of information, and make it harder for any single HQ unit to wield too
much influence.
I’ve also decided to only have 2nd Air Landing Light Battery on the map, instead of the whole
Regiment. 23 guns deployed near the church would look really cool, and it’s highly tempting
for that reason alone, but it’s just too many men
and too much force. Cutting it back to just one
7-gun battery means that the British defences
will be that much weaker, the British player won’t
be able to rob the gun line to shore up crumbling
positions to the east, and it also means that I
can have one of the other batterys available as
off map artillery.
9.2: The basic structure of the British units in the

editor. Some customisation has already been
applied, notably the unit names. This has ended
up being a fairly large force, and so I expect this
will change as the scenario is tested and refined.
In particular, I expect that the number of men the
British player controls will be reduced.
The next bit of customisation relates to the ‘soft’

attributes – morale, experience, and motivation.
The 1st UK Airborne Division had seen combat
in 1942 and ’43 in Africa, Sicily, and Italy, but
only returned to combat in Europe in September
as part of MARKET GARDEN. Crucially it
completely missed the furnace of the Normandy
campaign where the rest of the Allied forces
learnt a great deal about fighting high intensity
war. As a result, while the men’s performance
was uniformly good to excellent, the division was
specifically criticised for the poor quality of its
staff work compared to what would be expected
from any unit that had been through the mill in
Battlefront.com 55
Normandy. It was a highly motivated, highly trained, combat tested division, but with less
than stellar staff work.
By mid-morning on the 19th September – the time of this battle - the units involved had been
on the go and in heavy combat continuously for 24-48 hours. They had also just been
decisively defeated in a final attempt to reach their primary objective. The parachute and air-
landing battalions, in particular, had been severely damaged. Therefore, I am going to use
the following settings as average across the force:-
• Experience: Veteran to Regular
• Motivation: uniformly High
• Fitness: Weakened or Unfit for the forces falling back, Fit for the remainder.
• Leadership: +1 or +2
• Supply: Scarce or Severe for the forces falling back, Adequate for the remainder. All on-
and off-map 75mm howitzers Scarce.
• Headcount: 50-70% for the forces falling back, 80-90% for the remainder.
Supply, especially for the forces which start nearest to the Germans, will very restricted.
There will be sufficient jeeps about the place that these units can acquire more ammo, but
that is a tactical dilemma the player will have to deal with – they will have to hold with forces
that are running out of ammunition for long enough for a new main defensive position with
units more fully supplied to be established, then somehow withdraw the units that are out of
ammo back through the MDP and to the rear to be resupplied before they can be used again.
This does create problems for an AI-controlled British force, since the AI will not acquire
ammo.
There are exceptions to the above average settings, both higher and lower, so that players
will need to pay close attention to specific settings to get the best use out of each unit. There
will also be a couple of ‘hero’ units, too. Thompson, obviously, will be one, and so will Major
Cain of the S STAFFS, and Major “Dickie” Lonsdale of 11 PARA. These three officers were
pivotal in holding together the British position at Oosterbeek. I’m also going to name Jack
Reynolds as the STAFFS 1 (HC) Mortar Platoon commander even though technically he was
a PW by this time, and have Lance-Sergeant John Baskeyfield in charge of one of the
STAFFS 6-prs. In fact, with the information available at Pegasus Archive it’s possible to go a
little crazy naming the British commanders.
The glider pilot units will be the most cohesive and effective force the British player has. The
Glider Pilot Regiment was composed entirely of sergeants and higher (no privates flying His
Majesty’s gliders, thankyouverymuch!), and were comprehensively trained in ground combat
in the expectation that once they had delivered their aircraft to the LZ they may as well
contribute to the fight, rather than just standing around waiting to go home. Generally the
glider pilots were retained as formed bodies, acting as brigade or divisional reserve.
I don’t want to have all the British forces on-map at start, because it’ll make them too strong,
especially because the German forces will be coming on piecemeal. Also, having
reinforcements coming on can provide impetus to a battle at later stages, when the initial
forces might be flagging.
Battlefront.com 56
9.3: Detailed breakdown of 2 S STAFFS in the editor, showing how the unit was customised
by deleting many units, and re-naming the remainder. Many of the HQ elements have been
given personalised names, which I've indicated by including their initials.
The editor allows reinforcements to arrive either at a specific time, or during a window of
time. In principle I prefer to use windows, because it adds a bit of variety and tension during
play – when are these units going to arrive!? However when creating AI plans that
randomness can be downright problematic, and means that the first AI move generally has to
be a null move to waste time, or cannot begin until after the arrival window has closed so that
you – as designer – know that the units will be on map and will commence their plotted string
of orders. In terms of programming the AI it is much easier – and more reliable - to simply
have reinforcements arrive at a definite time.
Ideally I wanted some of the British forces coming on the eastern edge of the map, ahead of
the German forces, but for gameplay reasons that isn’t going to be practical, so all the forces
that are notionally falling back from Arnhem will be on map at start, except for a few small
remnants from 1 and 3 PARA arriving to the north of Benedendorpsweg and the rail line,
away from where all the Germans will be arriving.
On the other hand, units like the Glider Pilots, the off-map 75mm pack howitzers, and the
towed 6-pr anti tank guns can all quite happily arrive at various times from the direction of the
DZs and LZs to the north west. The 17-pr can be set-up, moved, and packed up during the
battle, but it’s really slow. To give the AI a helping hand I’ll probably start one of them on-
map in a good position, and leave it there.
Battlefront.com 57
9.4: Setup for British Reinforcement Slot 1, due to arrive at exactly 35 minutes into the game,
and are given the useful title “A-Tk Pn, 2 S STAFFS” to let the player know what has arrived.
The anti-tank guns are arriving earlier because they’re motorised, and so would be able to
move about easier, and also because they take longer to get into position and set up than
infantry. The proposed scenario length is 90 minutes (although I’m thinking now that might
be too short), and generally there isn’t much point bringing in any reinforcements in the last
third or quarter of a scenario because there really isn’t time for them to go anywhere or do
anything. That means all British reinforcements are in the period from 5-60 minutes, or a 55
minute block of time. I want to use six reinforcement slots for units, and spacing them out
more-or-less evenly means that something will be arriving about every 10 minutes.
Reinforcement Slot No.7 is reserved for ‘Unwanted HQs’, with the arrival time set to the
maximum 3 hours. There always seems to be a few company HQs, or XO units that cannot
be deleted but which aren’t wanted on the map. Exiling them to a never-never arrival time
gets them out of my hair and off my map.
Battlefront.com 58
The on-map forces – most of the three Parachute Battalions, and 2 S STAFFS - are mainly
spread along the length of main east-west route, Benedendorpsweg. Sections have been
separated from their headquarters, and all four battalions are thoroughly intermingled. Most
of the rifle elements are forward, while most of the support weapons are back around the
church at Oosterbeek. The thinking here is that the support weapons would tend to be back
a bit in any battle, and would have missed the worst of the disaster earlier in the morning.
The infantry are weighted forward, and un-coordinated because they’ve had to break contact
with the Germans then make their way east as best they could. This deployment of the
forces is supported by Thompson’s sketch map (see 9.1 above), and also descriptions of the
battle. A few key people, including Thompson having his fateful face-to-face meeting with
Major Cain, are in the thick of the rout, ready to start organising a defensive line.
The early stages of the battle will probably be chaotic for the British player. I anticipate that it
will be necessary to sacrifice a number of units to try and stall the initial German advance,
buying time to sort the remainder out so that platoons and companys are more-or-less
together, while simultaneously establishing a defensive position. This will be made all the
more difficult by the weakened fitness state of most units. Rushing to try and get into
position before the Germans arrive will just result in a lot of Tired or Exhausted units.
That’s the British. The Germans are next.
9.5: 2 Air Landing Light Battery deployed in the open ground north of the Oosterbeek
Church.
Postscript: This is a really useful site that breaks down the structure of a standard US 1944
infantry division, and shows the kinds of typical attachments that could be expected. It’s not
much use to me for the Sheriff of Oosterbeek, but I’ve used it a lot for other scenarios
involving American forces.
Battlefront.com 59
10 – German Forces
You haven’t been to war until you’ve fought the Germans.
Winston Churchill
Before getting to the Germans, I want to talk a bit about unit experience ratings.
In the NWE campaign in WWII, so called 'veteran' units - especially infantry units - were
predominantly manned by men with less than a couple of months service with the unit. The
proof of that is in the casualty stats.
For example:
• 4th US Infantry Div suffered 250% of TOE strength in casualties (299 days in combat)
Therefore, on average, someone in:
• 4th US Inf Div saw 120 days of combat before becoming a casualty
That’s averaged across the roughly 14,000 men in an infantry division, but the vast majority
of those casualties were concentrated amongst the fairly small number of men in each
division labelled "Infantry." Without rummaging through detailed statistics (which I anyway
don't have access to), I suspect that no more than half that number of days-in-combat –
about two months - would be the very upper limit of what a rifleman could expect to survive.
Therefore I think that the average quality of individual riflemen probably declined across the
campaign as long-service, highly trained men in the first waves were replaced by
questionably trained men with little esprit de corps, led by 90-Day-Wonders.
There's also this to consider. In any infantry unit from mid-June onwards there'd have been
a mix of men representing every stage of that chart, which would tend to reduce the overall
effectiveness of any given unit. As the campaign progressed and men started getting close
to the 60 combat days referred to above, large-ish numbers of those survivors would have
been in the combat-exhaustion and even vegetive phases. At the rifleman-squad-platoon-
company level, infantry units were NOT on an ever escalating performance curve.
Battlefront.com 60
10.1: Effects of continuous combat. Few units in NWE were continuously in combat for more
than about 20 days. However the recovery period is quite long, meaning units and men
didn’t move far to the left during their rest periods. Graph from Dave Grossman’s Killology
site
How, then, did divisions learn and improve if the individual riflemen weren't really getting a
whole lot better at their jobs? They did it by becoming much better at the stuff that actually
matters. Battalion and regimental staffs tended to survive much longer. And I specifically
mean the staffs, rather than merely the commanders. Men in supporting arms like artillery,
logistics, and even armour also had much greater longevity. Improvements in those areas
meant that combat infantry units were fed into combat much better prepared and supported,
and working to a plan based on realistic assessments and objectives. Given that, it didn't
matter that Private Snooks in 3rd Squad, 1 Platoon, C Company, 2nd Battalion wasn't
becoming a better soldier, because less was being asked of him, since he was being given
more support to achieve objectives.
A very similar process was at play in the German armed forces.
What does this mean in terms of CM? I think it means that there is hardly ever a plausible
justification for elevating the experience or motivation of the combat elements we see in CM
scenarios, regardless of the scenario date and regardless of the post-war mythology that has
built up around particular units. Improvements in the real unit staffs and their planning
equate to increased player experience and skill. In other words; the CM units start doing
better once the CM player figures out how to "do" combined arms on the CM battlefield …
which means that some players simply will not be able to ‘win’ some scenarios until they
become better. It is also reflected in the way that scenarios are designed - additional
artillery, modest and realistic objectives, casualty consciousness, additional time, narrow
frontages, improved CB work reflected in lesser enemy support available, and so on, all
Battlefront.com 61
reflect the better effectiveness of experienced staffs at Battalion and higher levels. None of
that has anything to do with the quality of the infantry, but it all directly impacts on how 'easy'
a scenario seems to be, and it directly reflects the kinds of real improvements that saw units
in NWE become 'veteran.'
Furthermore, I think that the difference in quality – motivation and experience - between the
two sides is often more important than the absolute values chosen. Many Green troops vs a
few Veterans could be an interesting battle. Conscript vs Crack is probably going to be
absurd.
Also, from my personal perspective as a scenario designer, I don't think that the highly
elevated quality and motivation levels were ever really meant by BFC to be employed to
whole formations. They are instead meant for certain individual units, vehicles, and teams,
to provide for heroes and variation in the tapestry of unit responses. Battalion HQs, support
company HQs and some of the support company elements could justifiably be given
elevated quality, due to their comparative longevity in the real world, but it doesn't make any
sense to apply that across the board to the rank and file. Making whole battalions Vet-High
is about as realistic as using naval gunfire in a scenario set in the Ardennes.
This is clearly the case for the German force in this battle. KG Harder was formed from part
of 9th SS Panzer Division. A naïve take on these guys might have them all as veteran
fanatics, because SS! But the devil is in the detail. KG Harder was employed as an infantry
battalion, but it was composed of 350-odd dismounted crewmen and administrative and
logistics personnel from 9th SS Panzer Regt, supplemented by ~100 naval personnel, plus an
additional increment of Alarm personnel scraped up from somewhere. All up the KG
comprised about 500 men, grouped into three infantry companies even though none of the
men were trained as infantry. This is not exactly the best and brightest Germany had to
offer. The detailed breakdown of the KG is as follows:
KG Harder:
• HQ company
• 1. Company, ~150 dismounted SS tank crew (low-ish skills, high motivation?)
• 2. Company, ~150 former SS logistics personnel (low-ish skills, medium motivation?)
• 3. Company, ~150 Kriegsmarine and Alarm personnel (medium-ish skills, low

motivation?)
• Support Company, 40-50 SS men, four 81mm mortars, a 15cm sIG, and three 20mm
Flak 38s.
• One platoon from Sturmgeschützbrigade 280, 2 x StuG III, 1 x StuH and a few
dismounted Heer infantrymen.
That’s easy enough to construct directly, based on an SS grenadier battalion, with some
specialist teams and vehicles added in. With all its units in a single chain of command,
command and control for KG Harder should be simpler and more robust than the British have
to deal with.
Battlefront.com 62
The CM unit editor provides a large menu of standardised company and battalion
organisations, which are all based on extensive research into official tables of organisation
and equipment form the period. This is great, except that few units ever went into combat
with their officially sanctioned strength or scale of weapons and equipment. Happily, CM
provides a number of different ways to customise units. This allows a scenario designer to
build something closer to what was actually used in the particular battle they’re trying to
recreate, or to add flavour and variety to what would other be quite homogenous.
The soft settings for each company are adjusted according to the above sketches, with the
command elements generally set a level or so higher. Supply has been set moderately high.
The distinctly different characters of the three rifle companies will make for some interesting
gameplay, and is something to point out to the German player in the briefing.
Apart from the soft unit settings of Experience through to Vehicle Status, all of which are
reasonably self-explanatory, there’s also ‘Appearance’, which allows the designer to give the
units a certain ‘look’ by altering their uniform. In the case of the SS Grenadier Battalion you
can pick Standard uniforms, Camo, or No Camo. Other unit types have different choices,
and in the case of the US Airborne it affects which unit patch is displayed on their shoulder. I
have given each rifle company in KG Harder a different appearance: Late Camo for the
panzer crews, Standard for the logisticians and No Camo for the Kriegsmarine men to reflect
their scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel status.
10.2: Battalion customisation options – uniforms, whether the battalion mortars are on- or off-
map, and weapons carried in the rifle squads.
Battlefront.com 63
The grenadier battalion’s mortars can be on-map, in which case you get the mortars, some
ammo bearers, headquarters elements, and some vehicles, or off map in which case you still
get the platoon HQs to use as spotters but all the rest is moved tidily off the map. The rifle
squad settings determine whether some of the riflemen carry rifle grenades. These settings
can be altered before or after purchase, and they can also be applied uniformly to the whole
battalion, or selectively to individual platoons. So, for example, some of the medium mortars
can be on-map, while the rest are off-map.
10.3: Setting the Quality of the Battalion about to be purchased, which affects the type of
equipment held. This must be selected before the unit is purchased, and it’s an easy thing to
overlook. Try not to forget about it.
There is one other setting, an easy one to overlook, which alters the force at the time it is
purchased. This is the Quality setting in the middle of the left hand panel, and which has a
default of ‘Typical’. The system's vernacular has things rated ‘Excellent’ to ‘Poor’ in five
Battlefront.com 64
steps. But in many cases the terms are better thought of as Typical through Rare, with
perhaps the "best option being the one at the bottom of the picking order.
This setting alters the mix and quality of the weapons the battalion is equipped with. In the
case of the SS grenadier battalion making up KG Harder, Excellent means:
• All rifle squads have a rifle grenadier
• Rifle squads have a higher proportion of G43 semi auto rifles and MP44 assault rifles.
• All MGs are MG42s
Poor means:
• None of the rifle squads have a rifle grenadier
• Rifle squads have a lower proportion of G43 semi auto rifles and MP44 assault rifles.
• All MGs are MG34s
In the case of the SS Grenadier Battalion, quality steps between ‘Excellent’ and ‘Poor’ affect
the ratio of G43s and MP44s, the proportion of MG34s to MG42s, and the number of
grenadiers in the battalion. Although the grenadier setting can be changed post-purchase,
and any MG34s swapped out for Specialist Team MG42s, the ratio of G43s and Assault rifles
can’t be altered once the unit has been purchased. Other battalion types each have their
own particular way that the quality setting affects them, so do some experimentation with any
units you’re considering buying to see what the quality setting does to them, and try and be
sure of what you want before you start purchasing your force for real. Otherwise you’ll be
buying it several times – something I had to do for this battle, several times.
It’s worth spending a bit of time exploring exactly what the different quality steps offer –
there’s some fairly exotic equipment hidden away in CM, some of which only shows up
through the Quality settings. It’s also a handy way to customise a unit and give it some
character.
The StuG Battery and its

PROTIP: The overall identity of each side’s force is supporting infantry are
determined by the top listed unit, which is the first unit added as Single Vehicle
purchased. If you intend to use a force that has mixed and Specialist Team
nationalities (for example, Polish anti tank guns in a British selections (with a force
airborne unit, or an SS Kampfgruppe supplemented with type of Heer) within the SS
separate Heer forces), ensure that the top/first unit is from Battalion. This is done by
what you are thinking of as the main nationality. This selecting a unit level
extends to fortifications so if, for example, you somehow end (battalion, company, or
up with “Luftwaffe” TRPs as the first thing purchased in an platoon) to attach to, then
otherwise SS force, the end-game victory screen will report changing the Purchase
the whole lot as Luftwaffe. Type (middle left of the unit
editor screen, just above
the Quality setting) from Formations to either Single Vehicle or Specialist Team as needed.
By changing the force type from infantry to armour, airborne, or whatever, and also changing
the nationality, means that basically any vehicle or team can be added anywhere. By fiddling
with the Force vs. Force setting in the Mission -> Data area, it’s even possible to have Allied
Battlefront.com 65
vehicles turning up embedded in the German force! Pictures taken in and around
Oosterbeek show that the StuH 42s in Stug.Bde. 280 did not have muzzle brakes, so I’ve
selected the (late) model to properly reflect that.
Two SdKfz 251s have been added to 1st Company, and a pair of trucks to the KG HQ. This
provides some mobile but fragile firepower to the Germans, gives them some limited ability to
move forces and heavy weapons about, and provides some ammo for resupply. I may also
add a second platoon from StuG.Bde-280 if testing shows that the Germans are too weak.
10.4: The framework for KG Harder consists of an SS -> Infantry -> Grenadier Battalion. On
the left can be seen the basic SS grenadier battalion with its sub-elements expanded, while
on the right can be seen KG Harder with its sub-elements also opened up. One of the
medium mortar platoons has been turned into a StuG battery by deleting the mortars and
attaching some StuGs and supporting infantry.
Sequencing the German forces is a bit problematic. The initial set up area is quite modest,
so only one of the companys will be on map initially. The remaining two companies will
arrive over the first half hour – one at about 15 minutes, and the other at about 25-30
minutes. The StuG platoon and the HQ elements will arrive at some point during the same
time period.
As this scenario will ultimately be playable both ways against the AI and H2H, there is a
consideration relating to reinforcements that I need to be aware of. AI plans work on timing
Battlefront.com 66
windows – units will attempt to start and complete AI orders within set windows. For units
that start the game on-map, there’s no particular issue (although more on that in a later post)
but for reinforcements their first window should open after they have arrived on map. This
creates a bit of a problem with reinforcement timings. If I set a reinforcement window of 10-
15 minutes, the first AI order for that group cannot begin until sometime after 15 minutes, but
if the unit arrives at the start of the reinforcement window then they’ll be sitting around for up
to 5 minutes with nothing to do. The alternate is to have a definite arrival time so that you
definitely know when the AI plan cycle can commence. It’s a tradeoff – either have a
reinforcement window to add uncertainty and stress to a human player, or have a single
definite reinforcement arrival time to make AI planning easier, and there is no right answer.
I’ve chosen to use fixed reinforcement times to make the AI programming a bit easier.
10.5: Part of KG Harder formed up behind the railway embankment. A group of rough men
standing ready to visit violence on those who would do them harm. Here we can see the
subtle effects of the Appearance setting – these three HMG teams are each from different
companys, and the appearance of their uniforms is slightly different to reflect their different
military backgrounds. Upper right of this image is normal view, lower left is Movie Mode.
The forces for this scenario were more-or-less decided for me by the historical battle, but
when creating a fictional scenario and trying to balance forces a useful rule of thumb is that
each platoon is good for one serious attack. After that their casualties will be mounting,
ammo will be depleting, and morale will be dropping. The platoon will still be able to
contribute, but not as forcefully. This rule of thumb can be applied by counting or estimating
the number of platoon sized attacks the player will have to conduct, then comparing that to
the forces they have available. If the numbers are about the same then the forces are
probably about the right size. If they have significantly more platoons then perhaps some of
the force could be trimmed. If the player has significantly less platoons then maybe more
force needs to be added, or the scenario made smaller or simpler.
This means that KG Harder is good for about nine serious, platoon sized attacks: this can be
estimated as four or five along the Benedendorpsweg, two or three in the built up area to the
north, and a couple in reserve. Is that enough? I think it will be, but only testing will confirm
that.
Battlefront.com 67
11 – Objectives
A prince or general can best demonstrate his genius by managing a campaign exactly to suit
his objectives and his resources, doing neither too much nor too little.
Clausewitz
Combat Mission has a number of different ways to award points, and how they’re used and
combined will have a strong influence on how the battle is fought out. To start with it’s useful
to understand how victory is determined. The algorithm that Combat Mission uses to
determine victory is as follows:
A = points for the side who had more points
B = points for the side who had fewer points
(note: these are the definitions as given to me by A Guy Who’d Know, but I think that
technically it’s actually “percentage of points pool for the side who had more/fewer
points,” or something along those lines, rather than just a raw total.)
then
V = (A + 10) / (B + 10)
and
V < 1.25 : Draw
V < 1.75 : Minor Victory
V < 2.5 AND 30% of Side A pool: Tactical Victory

V < 4.0 AND 55% of Side A pool: Major Victory
V >= 4.0 AND 80% of Side A pool: Total Victory
For the higher victory levels the player must to attain both conditions to achieve that
level. If side A gets a V value of 2.6 (nominally a tactical victory) but only gets 20%
of the potential points pool, they’ll only score a minor victory.
This formula is one really good reason why I generally have multiple small value objectives,
rather than a few big-ticket items. Having many small value objectives means that there are
more viable combinations of points for each side. To give a specific example, imagine a
game in which each side was going for two objectives, each worth 500 points. Thus, each
side can score either 0 points, or 500 points, or 1000 points. And when the two sides are
compared to each other, there are only a few possible outcomes.
Battlefront.com 68
11.1: Possible outcomes of a hypothetical scenario with just two objectives of equal value on
each side. This would be an unsatisfying scenario to play.
There are only nine possible distinct outcomes, resulting in either a Draw, or a Minor or Total
Victory. There is no mathematical way of achieving a Tactical or Major Victory. But if each
side had been going after a dozen separate objectives then there would be a gross number
of potential discrete outcomes, and any level of victory would be possible.
I think more objectives also makes for a better narrative, since there is nuance to the
objectives, and the player must decide which ones on the smorgasbord he will go after. That
means that the battle will be more interesting, because the player must actively decide which
objectives to go for and which to ignore and incorporate those decisions into their planning.
It also allows the player to change course mid way through a battle if a particular objective is
proving too difficult – another objective can be selected, the plan re-formulated, and the
player can carry on with some prospect of success. Furthermore, it becomes less likely that
securing a single objective will grant the player a decisive points advantage, resulting in a
closer and more exciting battle. Finally, I think it makes the end-game screen more
interesting if there are a number of different objectives, some met and some not, to
investigate.
As a rule of thumb, I give each side a total pool worth 1,000 points, to be divided amongst
their various objectives. There is no technical reason for doing this, and in fact the pool size
can be as large or small as you like, and there is not even a need to make the two side’s
pools the same size. However given that the victory level algorithm basically works on a
ratio of the two scores, I find it easier to do the mental arithmetic of comparing likely scores
by keeping the pools the same size. A nice round number was chosen so that it’s easy for
players to assess the relative worth of different objectives in comparison to the entire pool.
1,000 was chosen because it seems more manly to go for one thousand points than for ‘only’
100 points, although it makes exactly no difference whatsoever.
So that’s my starting point: 1,000 points available on each side, to be divided amongst Unit
Objectives, Terrain Objectives, and Parameters. The next step is to roughly decide the split
between those three categories, then delve into allocating points explicitly.
With Unit Objectives I generally use lots of relatively small value objectives. So instead of
having a single unit objective worth 500 points that covers the entire enemy force I’ll use one
objective worth 200 points for the infantry, another worth 200 points for the armour, a third
Battlefront.com 69
objective worth 50 points for engineers, and 50 points covering the support weapons. Or
some other split that makes sense. This approach helps with storytelling, and it also means
that different elements of the enemy's force can be weighted to create high-value and low-
value targets.
What I generally do is divide the points available by the total number of units to get an
average-points-per-unit. Then I multiple that by the number of units in each Unit objective,
then massage up and down to weight certain force elements within the overall points budget.
Let’s look at a concrete example from this scenario. The points pool for British Unit
Objectives is 500 points, and the enemy force is made up as follows:
U1= KG HarderHQ (HQ, XO, Kubel, 2trucks = 5 units)
U2= 1 Company (18 units, including 2 halftracks)
U3 = 2 Company (15 units)
U4 = 3 Company (15 units)
U5 = 4 (Heavy Weapons) Company (10 units)
U6 = StuG Pn (3 StuGs)
In total that's 66 units, and on average each unit is worth 500/66 = 7.6 points per unit.
Multiplying that by the number of units in each unit objective gives:
U1 = KG Harder HQ : 5 units x 7.6pts = 38
U2 = 1 Company : 18 x 7.6 = 137
U3 = 2 Company : 15 x7.6 = 114
U4 = 3 Company : 15 x 7.6 = 114
U5 = 4 (Wpns) Coy: 10 x 7.6 = 76
U6 = StuG Pn : 3 x 7.6 = 23
That’s not too bad, except the StuG platoon and KG HQ are each worth next to nothing. I
want to massage those values, by increasing the relative value of the StuG and HQ
elements:
U1 = KG Harder HQ : 50pts
U6 = StuG Pn : 120pts
An additional 12 + 97 = 109 points has been given to those units. That has to come off the
infantry, and at the same time I want to differentiate between the three infantry companies.
The final allocation of points is:
U1 = KG Harder HQ : 50pts
U2 = 1 Company : 120pts
U5 = 4 (Wpns) Coy: 75pts
Battlefront.com 70
U6 = StuG Pn : 120pts
Now each unit in battalion HQ is worth 10 points, and each man worth about 5 points. Each
of the three tanks are worth 40pts. The rifle platoon units are worth 4-to-7 points each, and
each man about 1 point, while the weapons company units are worth 7.5pts and the men
there about 2 points each.
I invariably make unit objectives Destroy, rather than Destroy All, because bug hunts for that
last man are annoying. From a story telling point of view using Destroy means that the
player gets some recognition for each and every enemy killed, which in turn greatly increases
the number of discrete scores that are possible, and makes the end-game screen that much
richer.
I’d generally only use Destroy All as a unit objective for a very small component of the
enemy’s force, and one that has some particular narrative value. For example, a scenario
might be an attack on an enemy headquarters, so the actual HQ unit, and perhaps the 2iC
too, could be designated Destroy All, while the remainder of the enemy force would be split
amongst a number of standard Destroy objectives. Also, I usually include all enemy units in
one of the various unit objectives. Leaving some part of the force outside any objective is
essentially calling them worthless, which seems a bit heartless to both the attacker and the
defender – those guys aren’t worth saving, but they aren’t worth killing either!
11.2: Composite image showing the Unit Objectives for the British player. Each company or
platoon sized group gets its own objective. Names for Unit Objectives include the potential
points available (120ps for U2) so the player can see from the end game screen how much
damage they inflicted on each unit. Objectives are ‘Known to Player’ because there’s no
need to tell the enemy what the player is trying to achieve.
Battlefront.com 71
I apply a similar approach to Terrain Objectives. From the first step I know how many
points I have available, then it’s a matter of allocating those points to various terrain
objectives in a way that makes narrative sense.
Selecting the location of terrain objectives should take into account how the battle is
expected to progress, and in particular what the mission of each side is in this battle. If the
stated mission for a side is to secure a village, don’t give them a high value terrain objective
that’s a small hill away over on the other side of the map, no matter how cool that hill you’ve
built is. Either change the mission, or get rid of the objective. Objectives which are
incompatible with the stated mission cause dissonance and frustration for players, and that is
never a good outcome.
Staggering the value of terrain objectives, so that – broadly speaking – the least valuable is
closest and the most valuable is most distant, provides players with an incentive to pusher
further and harder. However objectives need to be realistic and achievable. There is no
point allocation a deep objective to an infantry only force who’ve only got a short time to get
there – there’s no reasonable way they’d be able to fight through a competent defence and
move across the map.
Objectives should also make sense in the context of the mission the player will be given.
Think about what ‘secure the bridge’ actually means – is simply holding the bridge itself
enough? Well, maybe, it is at night or if visibility is drastically restricted. But usually it would
mean holding the high ground on the other side of the river, or that cluster of buildings
nearby, or pushing out over open ground to at least small arms range. There is no hard and
fast rule for what ‘secure’ means, but there will be a meaning that makes sense within the
context of the scenario, given the map and the forces in play. It is that contextually relevant
definition of “secure” that terrain objectives should reflect.
Furthermore, I think it is good practice to decompose terrain into a number of smaller

objectives too, in the same way Unit Objectives are broken down. In the case of our bridge
to be secured, instead of painting a massive Occupy objective that covers all ground out to
500m, consider creating cluster of related objectives. A small one just on the bridge itself,
another up on the ridge, another one taking in a cluster of farm buildings within direct line-of-
sight, and so on. Then divvy up the points available in a way that makes sense, perhaps
allocating a proportionately greater amount to one of the objectives deemed to be especially
important.
This is also a good way to break up an urban objective, and give players something within
reach that they can try to achieve. Clearing a whole village is a large and complex task, one
that the player may feel is beyond their available force or impractical in the time available.
As a result they may not attempt to clear any of it since they won’t be able to clear all of it,
and either way they won’t be getting any points. But if clearing a half or quarter of the village
would reap a tangible reward, then they’re more likely to attempt that, and breathe some life
in what could otherwise be a dull patch of the battle.
As an example, instead of a single monolithic 600 point "Village" objective, have six separate
objectives covering different parts of the village, each worth 100 points.
• If the player ends up holding the whole village and all six objectives: awesome, they win
big, as they should.
Battlefront.com 72
• If they player ends up only holding half the village and three of the objectives: well, that's
a draw and that's fair.
• If the enemy pushes them right out and the player has only one or none objectives; they
lose big, and deservedly so.
This also allows both players to come up with a range of viable plans to achieve success.
The defender might decide to concede one or two objectives in order to concentrate on the
remainder, knowing that that will give him enough to win. Similarly the attacker might decide
to go left flanking because that will secure at least four of the objectives and probably provide
a win. Forcing the players to go for big-ticket all-or-nothing objectives forces them to do
stupid things to try and win, or - even worse - to give up and not bother trying.
PROTIP: Check that the terrain objectives are all set to ‘Known to Player’, rather than ‘Known to
Both’. It’s an easy thing overlook.
Exit terrain objectives are a special kind of objective, which need a bit of care. The side that
has an exit objective is expected to exit all units that have a Unit Objective points value,
otherwise the opposing player gets those points for any that are left on-map at the end of the
scenario. In other words, the player that is exiting gets zero points for exiting his forces, but
the enemy player does receive points for any units that don’t exit. Exit scenarios can be a lot
of fun to design and play, but it is important to really carefully think through how each side is
going to score points, and what having to exit their force will mean for the affected player.
For one thing, Occupy objectives are a problem, since the player will have to either concede
points to the enemy by keeping some force on the map to garrison those objectives, or
concede the Occupy points to deny his enemy the Exit points.
11.3: Terrain objectives allocated to the British player. The player is rewarded for
maintaining control of the main east-west road, and keeping the Germans away from the gun
positions around the Church at Oosterbeek. The High Ground is where the line was initially
stabilised, and was held by ‘Dickie’ Lonsdale until pulled back to the main perimeter late on
Wednesday 20th September. The two Final Perimeter sections are along the line of the
actual perimeter, held from when Lonsdale pulled back until the final evacuation late on
Monday the 25th.
Battlefront.com 73
I'm not keen on using the Parameter objectives (such as percentage of force remaining, or
ammunition remaining) because of their binary nature - either you just make it and get all the
points, or just fail and get none of them. At the limit, the difference between getting all or
none of these points is always just one more or one less casualty. There are occasions
where they’re definitely useful, but I usually do without them, or only allocate them a very
small fraction of the points pool.
So, that’s how the objectives work and how I like to use them. What does all that mean for
The Sheriff of Oosterbeek? For the British, their tasks are to halt the Germans, stabilise on
some kind of defensive line, and to protect Thompson’s guns. Therefore their terrain
objectives are laid out as shown in image 11.3.
I try to give my objectives organic, ‘rounded’ shapes so they don’t look like big green Lego
blocks thrown down on the map. I also attempt to make the area they encompass logical
and coherent, which to me includes factors such as including all of a building – or local group
of buildings – if any of it is included, and generally keep the overall size fairly small.
The German terrain objectives have a similar feel, but are different because their task in this
scenario are not a simple mirror image of the British. I think in most battles it is normal to
expect that the mission for each side will not merely be “stopping the other guy”. For one
thing, it is psychologically better to give players something positive to do (‘Hold this hill to
provide observation into the enemy’s rear’, rather than ‘stop the enemy taking this hill’), and
at higher command levels the needs and objectives of each side can be quite divergent.
This means that each side should usually have different objectives, and different emphases
within their objectives.
Killing the enemy is more important for the Germans than the British, and conversely
securing ground is more important to the British. This marries up with the higher level story
telling, in which the Germans are trying to eliminate the British, and seizing terrain is merely
a means to that end. For the British, though, establishing a defensive position that they can
hold until the tanks of XXX Corps arrive is highly important.
I originally had the gun positions as specific objectives for the Germans, but removed them
when I remembered that the existence of guns in this area is subject to Fog of War, and will
not be revealed to the German player until he finds them for himself. Having a terrain
objective labelled “Gun position” would immediately dispel that FOW. The guns remain as a
valuable unit objective for the Germans because the guns were an important objective, but in
terms of the scenario it’s one that won’t be revealed explicitly until the battle has finished.
Basically, the objectives should be what makes sense in terms of the scenario and the battle.
Have the victory points screen tell a story to guide the player in what needs to be done
during the battle, and at the end of the battle explain how well each player did, in small,
discrete, and meaningful chunks.
Battlefront.com 74
11.4: An example of the worksheet I use, complete with multiple amendments and a coffee
stain, to keep track of objectives. There is no single place in the editor UI where you can
review all the objectives together, and having it in this form allows for ready comparisons
within each type of objective and between the two sides. The scoring schema here is
consistent with my overall story, although some objectives will probably increase or decrease
in value due to testing and feedback.
Battlefront.com 75
11.5: Oblique view showing how the objectives will appear to the British player during a
battle. Each objective has its value explicitly displayed as part of the Objective Name, so the
player can make informed decisions about how much effort and risk to apply to each one.
View looking east, the Germans will approach from the far end. Screenshot taken using
Movie Mode.
Battlefront.com 76
12 – Walls and Bridges
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.
Islington Green School Choir
Ryan O’Neal: What's the best way to take a bridge?
Robert Redford: Both ends at once.
We’re going to jump out of the mainline narrative for a moment to discuss a couple of things
back in the map editor which could use a bit more attention. We’ve already looked at
creating walls, but what follows are some post-grad tips, tricks and techniques to make your
walls better. Big Bridges haven’t been touched on yet, because they aren’t used in The
Sheriff of Oosterbeek.
Gaps in Walls and Hedges
There are twelve different rotatable wall pieces for each of the ten wall styles in the Combat
Mission editor, and they’re all useful for creating complex and realistic walls on your map.
However, four of those pieces have a tactical fish-hook that’s worth being aware of.
12.1: The wall pieces to be aware of, with the no-go corners highlighted in red.
These four pieces all contain small ‘internal corners’, which none of the CM units will go into.
In the case of the first two pieces, the ‘x’ and the ‘+’, this effectively means that the whole of
these tiles become impassable. In the case of the ‘T’ and the rotated ‘T‘ it means that half
the tile is out of bounds. Units can be “encouraged” to move through tiles with these wall
types (assuming it isn’t otherwise banned – infantry cannot hop over a tall brick wall for
example), but you cannot place an orders waypoint there. This remains true even after the
wall has been destroyed, and affects all wall types – stone walls, bocage, wire fences,
everything.
A decision should be made as to whether the aesthetics of the wall are more important than
the in-game functionality, and there is no universally correct answer here. It is also entirely
reasonable to deliberately use these tiles to prevent movement into a tile or half-tile. Use
them, or don’t, but be aware of the consequences.
Battlefront.com 77
Not using them does, however, create a conundrum; how to replace those four very useful
wall pieces? Fortunately, it’s actually pretty easy to replicate those shapes. Not exactly, of
course, but functionally the same.
12.2: Different ways of recreating the problematic wall pieces. Note that some of these
examples add a gap which otherwise wouldn’t have existed. More on that below. There are
no nooky-holes in the above examples that troops won't go in to.
12.3: Top two examples are the standard out-of-the box gaps. Below that are examples of
some complex and interesting gaps. The possible variety is almost endless.
Battlefront.com 78
The downside of these alternates is that most take several tiles to construct, instead of just
one, and also they’ll usually interrupt the smooth flow of a nice straight wall. Some of them,
too, can be quite finicky to get units to move through, especially if there is a nearby ‘easier’
route. Again, this is a decision to make depending on what is more important for the map. In
general I find that the extra space required usually isn’t an issue, except in really dense
urban maps, and that breaking up long straight walls is usually a benefit since it provides little
nooky-holes that troops can use for cover along what might otherwise be a deadly firelane.
Really dense urban maps are also the place where the ability to use every little nook and
cranny becomes most important, so while removing the problem pieces there is most difficult,
it may also be the most useful.
Overall, as long as you think about what you’re trying to achieve, I find that avoiding the use
of the four problem children doesn’t affect my map design in any negative way, and breaking
up long straight lines is often a good idea.
Once you break free from the idea that walls have to be straight, a range of new ways to
create gaps in walls opens up. The CM editor includes two dedicated Gap pieces for each
wall style, but with just a bit of creativity it’s possible to design some really interesting – and
tactically complex – gaps.
Infantry units will move through all of these gaps, and they can be made even more visually
and tactically interesting by adding brush plus shrubs or trees, and using an underlay of light
or heavy forest tiles, dirt, long grass, or whatever else matches what you’re trying to achieve
with the gap.
These bespoke constructed gaps will require players to spend a bit of time contemplating
how to deal with them tactically, because they provide cover from more than just directly
ahead. As an added bonus, these complex gaps tend to be easier for players to identify
during play than the standard prêt-à-porter gaps.
Big Bridges™
The Combat Mission Market Garden module includes some spectacular bridges – the road
and rail bridges at Nijmegen and Arnhem. These things are simply massive, and all
placeable on your maps with just a couple of clicks. However, there are a few tricks you
need to be aware of to get the best out of these bridges, and avoid some frustration.
First up; these bridges are massive. Beautiful to behold, but massive. They are each over
half a kilometre long, and if the map isn’t big enough for the whole thing, none of it will be
displayed – the engine will simply reject it. Similarly if the map is big enough but the bridge
placed so that some of it would be hanging off the map edge, the engine will reject the
bridge. This has some consequences for your map. For starters, if you want to include, say,
the road bridge at Arnhem for a scenario dealing with Frost’s stand at the northern end, you
have to include the whole width of the Nederrijn and some of the south bank.
Fortunately, stub-bridges have been included as well. Stub-bridges are half of the full bridge,
which means that only half of the river need be included. That’s worth remembering for
when you want to go large, but not really large.
Battlefront.com 79
12.4: Arnhem Road Bridge and surroundings in all its glory, recreated in Combat Mission by
map-maker extraordinaire Pete Wenman.
Positioning the bridges takes a bit of care. Each end of the bridge (only the shore end for
stub-bridges) must be ‘anchored’ on four tiles of fixed height. This is a bit tricky to explain, so
instead I’ll use a picture:
To use one of the Big Bridges™ you will need:
• a map that is large enough for the full or stub-bridge,
• a 2x2-tile anchor point at each end, 10m above the base terrain level (only the ‘home’
end for the stub).
• the anchor points should be 9 or 10m above the surrounding terrain (they don’t have to
be, but Arnhem Road Bridge looks best that way),
• the end of the bridge must sit on the anchor points. You may find it easiest to place the
bridge first, then build up the anchor points where they’re needed, rather than building the
anchor points then trying to accurately place the bridge on top of them.
• the road coming off the ends of the bridge is the two-tile wide highway.
Each of the other Big Bridges™ have slightly different constraints, particularly in terms of
how high and how far apart the anchor points must be. Once you know what you need to do,
though, they’re quite easy to place them nicely and integrate them into the terrain.
Easy as pie! And they look absolutely stunning.
Battlefront.com 80
12.5: Composite image showing anchoring point (outlined in red dotted line), bridge,
highway, and 3D view for Arnhem Road Bridge. Attention to detail with the elevations
around the anchor point, and careful use of Ditchlock, will create a neat blend between the
bridge and the approach ramp.
Battlefront.com 81
13 - Scenario Settings
Situating the appreciation
Anon., trad.
Selecting the scenario settings is mostly a tick-and-flick activity, since most of the scenario
settings have effectively been decided during the design phase. Some of the settings do,
however, have consequences that are worth considering before bulldozing ahead.
13.1: the basic scenario settings. Also shown here is the scenario opening image.
The Battle Type is German Attack, although I did consider German Probe because of the
disorganised overall nature of the engagement. I went with attack since the German is
expected to push forward and seize terrain.
Environment is a little tricky, since the map is half urban, half open. Because I think that
most of the fighting will be in the built up areas, and the built up area is fairly low density with
lots of open space, I went with Village.
Daylight in this case is easy; it’s Day time. One thing to be aware of if you’re setting a
scenario to be Dawn or Dusk is to check when dawn/dusk actually was in that place on that
day. This site allows you to calculate the actual sunrise and sunset times for any location on
any date, but you will also need to check that against when the sun actually rises/sets in
Combat Mission. You can do that by setting the date-time on a blank map and saving it as a
scenario, then fast forwarding through turns until the sun or moon crosses the horizon –
make sure you make a note when it happens! It’s annoying to spend the time to work it out,
then have to do it again a few days later because it never got written down.
Battlefront.com 82
Selecting the Battle Size is a bit arbitrary, and dependant on the designer’s perception.
Given the size of the forces (roughly a battalion of infantry on each side) combined with the
map size (almost 2 square kilometres) and duration (1½ hours) I’ve decided to call it Large.
My personal rule of thumb starts with scenarios like 18 Platoon or Kiwi Soldiers - which have
less than a platoon on the side with the larger forces - are Tiny, then reduced company-sized
are small, company-group is medium, battalion is large, and over that is huge. But those
might be modified up or down based on the length of the battle, and the size of the map.
The Title can be slightly tricky. Like the scenario opening image, the key is to come up with
something that’s catchy, interesting, describes the scenario, but which doesn’t leak FOW
information. Usually I manage to get one or two of those, but fail on the other. For this
scenario obviously I’ve chosen The Sheriff of Oosterbeek, because ‘Sheriff’ Thompson was
my original inspiration. The exact wording is a play on ‘The Sheriff of Nottingham,’ the Robin
Hood story is an old favourite of mine. That title does leak information since it’s fairly easy to
find out what ‘Sheriff’ means when combined with ‘Oosterbeek’, and therefore what British
forces are likely to be present. On the other hand, for most people that does require some
explicit effort. In favour of the title is that it clearly indicates where the scenario is located,
and ‘Sheriff’ is a little ambiguous and mysterious.
Description is slightly tricky, for the same reason. Since the cat is sort-of already out of the
bag with the title, I’ve used a short sentence that focuses on the high level situation of the
British falling back, chased by the Germans.
13.2: the detailed scenario Data settings.
Battlefront.com 83
The Length of Battle is set to 1 hour 30 minutes, meaning that the German player has until
1600hrs to complete his objectives, although that might change as a result of testing. I might
also add some variability to the ending, although given the overall length of the scenario that
is probably not necessary – longer scenarios tend to end before the nominated time limit is
reached.
The Day and Month is obviously 19 September 1944, and the Region is Holland. Selecting
Holland changes a lot of the skins used for map items, including the two-lane highway, road
signs, building facades, and so on.
The start Hour and Minute are set, somewhat arbitrarily, to 1430hrs. In the context of this
as a semi-historical scenario, and for scenarios set in the middle part of the day, the exact
time doesn’t really matter a lot. But for scenarios set around dusk or dawn it’s worth running
some trials to determine exactly when the various stages of sunrise/set occur, because they
have a significant effect on spotting distance. Depending on when sunrise/set occurs it might
be worth either shifting the start time so there is more/less time available before the visibility
changes, or altering the duration so there is more/less time available after the visibility
changes. Or do both – shift the start time and alter the duration.
Weather I’ve chosen is overcast. Although I don’t think that’ll really make any difference to
the way the scenario plays, the weather that day was actually overcast. Sometimes I use
foggy or hazy to emulate a lot of lingering dust and smoke from heavy battle or an especially
vigorous artillery bombardment, but that isn’t the case here.
Wind Strength and Source are set to Light from the south-west. I have no idea what the
wind actually was that day. My thinking here is that, generally and in the absence of
significant weather events, during the day wind will come from the ocean, which is to the
west. But I want any smoke screens that are laid to drift obliquely across the map, rather
than directly east along the roads, so I’ve offset the source a bit.
The Temperature is warm, just because. September is getting in to Autumn, but I’ve not
come across accounts by any of the participants mentioning the cold, except for maybe
towards the end of the siege at Oosterbeek when the rain set in.
Ground Condition is damp. Again, this was a bit tricky because of the bi-polar urban-open
nature of the map. The ground down on the polder should be damp – or worse – to make
vehicular movement there risky, but in the higher built up areas it should be dry. I’ve gone
with damp overall because making the polder dry would be too easy on the Germans. I
rationalise the increased risk of bogging in the urban areas with the thought that
manoeuvring vehicles in built up areas isn’t risk free.
Friendly Directions are east and west respectively for the British and Germans. I did toy
with the idea that the north edge could be a British friendly edge too, since the Divisional
main area was to the north of the Oosterbeek church, but decided against that since the
Germans should eventually advance across most of the map, and having the eastern end of
the north edge still friendly then would be absurd. Setting the friendly direction affects which
way off-map artillery and mortar fire arrive from, which way units retreat, and also has a
significant effect on the functioning of the AI.
Intel is nil for both sides, because of the confused nature of the fight. That may change
during testing because the British were generally aware of where the Germans were coming
Battlefront.com 84
from, although giving them some intel will also mean the British player also knows where the
Germans aren’t, which is probably too much to give away. I don’t want to give the Germans
any hints though, because the way Intel works means they’ll be immediately aware of British
troops all the way back to the church.
The settings are reasonably self explanatory, and in most cases don’t require a lot of thought
as they’re driven by the actual battle, but again it's worth considering the knock-on effects of
some of the settings in terms of the overall story being told.
13.3: Paratroopers cut down as they attempt to flee along the Benedendorpsweg
Battlefront.com 85
14 – Designer’s Notes
There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies
that did not tell stories.
Ursula K. LeGuin
The designer's notes file is another simple text file, editable in something like Microsoft
Notepad, but unlike the Briefing files it is just a flat text file with no internal structure or
formatting. There is only one Notes file, which both players view. Because of this it pays to
take care with what is put in here. Since both players read it it’s easy to create an
unintentional FOW leak.
The result of a fair bit of trial and error, and copying what other designers have done, the
format I use is shown on the next page.
What we have there is basically a run down of the battle parameters, the kind of information
that’s handy for players to have available, but not the kind of thing that’d be referred to often.
There is also no FOW information there.
14.1: Designers Notes section from The Sheriff of Oosterbeek.
Battlefront.com 86
I have seen Designer's Notes used for a detailed backgrounder on the battle, or for a
rundown of the actual battle, including the historical outcome and consequences. For
historical scenarios this is a reasonable place to put that information, since it really doesn’t
belong in the briefings, but for my tastes too much FOW information is leaked that way. If I
really wanted to include something about the battle’s outcome I would put it in the Notes
section of the side-specific briefings, but that effectively tells the player what the expected
outcome of the battle is, and would probably have clues about the actual composition of the
enemy. Generally I feel that if players really want to find out about the actual battle then they
should do some of their own research, which is one of the reasons including a few key
references in the Designer's Notes can be a good idea.
Battlefront.com 87
15 – Briefings and Imagery
[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that we now know we don't know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know.
Donald Rumsfeld
Scenario briefing and imagery are the opportunity to communicate directly with the player,
and to let them know what they’re trying to achieve in your scenario, and why they should
care. It is the place where all the various pieces of storytelling – on the map, with the units,
via the objectives, and so on – should come together as a cohesive and coherent whole. It is
worth the effort to make all the strands of the story plain so that the player is presented with a
clear and uncomplicated story, which sets them up to fight your battle in a good state of
mind.
Real commanders involved in real battles are immersed in their environment 24 hours a day
for weeks on end, and have a constant and intimate understanding of their own forces,
surroundings, and the enemy. Scenario designers work with the scenario concept, forces,
map, and objectives for a considerable period of time. Therefore the designer, just like a real
commander, understands the situation in great detail. The player, on the other hand, knows
absolutely nothing about the battle, its context, or what they must do to win, except what you
tell them. The scenario briefing must convey enough of that innate contextual information to
the player so they can properly engage with the scenario, rather than just pushing pieces idly
around the map while they wonder what they’re doing.
The opening image is the one displayed when selecting a battle from the scenario list, and I
find that it – like the scenario title – can be a tricky little beast. I want something that is
interesting, and relevant to the scenario, yet which doesn’t inadvertently leak information that
should be subject to FOW. For instance, imagine an opening image that includes a picture
of a Tiger. Well, the Allied player now knows that the German player has a Tiger, and the
German player knows that the Allied player knows, which blows a potentially significant
surprise for both sides. Therefore I usually stick to something generic but still interesting and
relevant. In a scenario between the US and Germans, for example, it wouldn’t be relevant to
have an image of British infantry.
There’s pretty much no end to the types of images that could be used here, including photos,
maps, icons, historic cartoons, propaganda posters, paintings, and in-game screen shots.
Just try and make it relevant, and not leak too much FOW. For this scenario I’ve used a
dramatic painting of Horsa gliders landing and British air borne troops coming out fighting. It
really has nothing to do with the scenario, which isn’t set on the landing zones, except that it
involves UK airborne forces, and in particular some glider-borne forces. (see image 13.1)
Artful cropping can be used to get an image that meets the maximum 170x170 pixel size, yet
still has enough detail to see what’s being shown. The image needs to be saved as a .bmp
file, and can be placed anywhere. For convenience I put them in a ‘Briefing Imagery’ folder
nested in my ‘Scenarios’ folder.
Battlefront.com 88
The Strategic, Operational, and Tactical images are specific to each side, so they should be
used for storytelling to transmit information specific to each player. My graphic design and
photoshop skills are terrible, so I’ve made friends with some artists, and have them create
these for me, based on the information I provide. Over the last couple of releases, Normal
Dude has developed a very elegant and consistent format for these images, which I tend to
default to.
The Strategic map (224x224 pixels) contextualises the scenario in space, giving a quick
indication of roughly where the battle is taking place.
15.1: screenshot showing the three briefing images that the British Player of ‘The Sheriff of
Oosterbeek will see. Strategic top left, Operational top right, and Tactical below. Note the
sheer amount of storytelling information conveyed to players through these three images.
The operational map (702x224 pixels) gives a rough indication of the size of the map, along
with indicating what main units are involved, and which sides of the map are friendly. Off to
the side is a table showing the objectives for that side.
The tactical map is an unusual size (952x350 pixels), being much wider than it is high. This
can make it awkward to find a scaling that displays anything pleasingly without a lot of black
space on either side. The style developed by Normal Dude overcomes all this with a stylised
representation of the CM map which shows major features, highlights objective locations,
and indicates the rough location and type of friendly and enemy units. In another table off to
the left side makes use of what would otherwise be blank space with a listing of off-map
artillery support and reinforcement’s arrival times.
Battlefront.com 89
What I like about Normal Dude’s style of briefing images is that they’re consistent with each
other, no space is wasted, and they elegantly convey a lot of information to the player.
Like the scenario opening image, these have to be saved as .bmps, and I keep them in the
same ‘Briefing Imagery’ folder. It’s a decent idea to name them in such a way that it’s
obvious which scenario they belong to, and also which side and which image slot they’re
destined for.
You can also think outside the box with these images – there is no reason that they must be
maps, and they don’t have to follow the strategic-operational-tactical flow. You could use
aerial recon photos, letters, orders, or really anything to convey useful information to the
player.
The side specific briefings allow you to get deeply and directly into telling the story, quickly
and economically. In Real Life(tm) the player-as-commander would have a ton of contextual
information that would guide him in the forthcoming battle. The briefing is the primary means
by which all that contextual information is presented so that the player has a good
understanding of the situation, why he’s fighting, and what he’s likely to encounter.
15.2: screenshot showing an early draft first page of the briefing which British Player will see.
In general the briefings – and in this I include the briefing imagery – serves one main
function: it must tell the player what they have to do in enough detail that allows the player to
develop a reasonable winning plan. This requires a lot of storytelling, and some judicious
application of fog of war.
In order to develop a worthwhile plan the player needs to answer several questions: –
1) what must I do? (objectives)
2) what forces do I have? (on map, off map, and reinforcements)
3) where must I do it? (terrain, weather, and environment)
4) how long do I have? (scenario length)
5) what is the enemy trying to do? (what are the enemy objectives)
6) what forces does the enemy have? (on map, off map, and reinforcements)
Battlefront.com 90
Not all of this needs to be explicitly or lengthily covered in the briefing. The player’s on-map
forces only need to be given in outline, since they can be studied intimately on the map,
although off-map artillery and any reinforcements are worth detailing. The map can also be
closely examined by the player, so there’s no need to go into that too much. It is, however,
worth highlighting any particular map settings, such as how soft the ground is, what the
weather and especially the wind is doing, since that affects how easily vehicles will bog or
smoke will form, and also note when sunrise or sunset will occur if that is due to happen
during the scenario. Scenario length is another item the player can discover for themselves,
but still worth noting. Related to duration is an indication of time and space issues – if the
attacker has a long way to go, but only a short time to get there, it might be worth mentioning
how long it will take to move between key locations when using the Move command.
Explaining the objectives to be achieved in order to succeed is relatively straightforward, and

can be done via the briefing graphics and by explicitly noting the value of terrain objectives
on the 3D map. At one time I thought it was a good idea to be coy about revealing exactly
what a player had to do to win, and used vague wording in an attempt to imply a sense of
relative importance between difference objectives. I’ve changed my mind about that. Tell
the players exactly what each objective is, and what it’s worth, down to the point. It’s easier
and clearer that way, and allows players to develop better plans.
Providing information on the enemy is crucial, but it must be tempered to try and retain FOW
and surprises. In general, I think it’s a bad idea to outright lie to players, but that it’s okay to
be vague or to omit some information, although the broad outlines should be correct.
Particularly important here is the approximate size and composition of the enemy force – is it
a company, or a battalion? Is it drawn from an armoured division (in which case there’ll
probably be tracked fighting vehicles of some sort), or an infantry division (in which case
there probably won’t be). Has the enemy been using artillery in this area, and if so what sort,
how much?
Also important are the enemy’s intentions. There is no need to provide a detailed list of all
the enemy’s objectives, with their locations and point values. But do include the main idea of
what the enemy is trying to achieve – seize or hold a nominated hill or town, inflict casualties,
exit in a particular direction, and so on.
Knowing what the enemy has and is trying to do, even roughly, allows the player to develop
a meaningful plan, and will help build engagement with your scenario. Their plan doesn’t
have to be perfect – players should expect that they will have to adjust in response to
developments during the battle. But modifying an existing plan is quite different to scrapping
it and starting over because the initial information was so bad.
There’s a lot to convey, but keep the briefing short and pithy - I aim for no more than two
pages of the on-screen display. Any more than that and you’re writing a novel that wastes
player’s time and attention. Remember that in addition to words there are the three briefing
images to help tell the story, as well as what the player can discover for themselves in the 3D
environment – it isn’t necessary to explicitly tell them everything.
So that’s the content of the briefings and some considerations to think about. What about
the format? CM uses a semi-fixed briefing format, containing the following headings:
• Situation
Battlefront.com 91
• Mission
• Friendly Forces
• Enemy Forces
• Plan
• Notes
This is a reasonable approximation of the standard NATO 5-paragraph orders format that a
lot of players will have at least some familiarity with, even if they don't have any direct military
experience.
Try not to repeat information in the various section headings, and also keep the briefing
pitched at the appropriate level – if the scenario is about a company group, keep the chatter
focussed on that company group and the battle it is about to fight, not the brigade or division
to which it belongs, or the overarching campaign.
Although I don't believe it has ever been formalised anywhere - and I don't think it should be
formalised – this is how I use these headings:
Situation
This should tell the back story. How did the player get to be fighting this battle, here, now. In
a general sense it should explain what's going on at a higher level and to the flanks. What is
the command echelon above you, and the one above that, up to? What are your flanking
formations doing. A lot of this is pure story telling, but it does impact planning. If, for
example, you say that the flanking formations are lagging behind you, it is reasonable to
suppose that the enemy might get reinforcements coming in from the map edges. If this is
nominated as the main effort, it’s reasonable to suppose that you’ll get decent artillery
support, and also that the enemy will notice something big is going on here and respond
accordingly. For that reason it is important to think through the back story and come up with
something coherent and consistent with the actual battle.
Mission
This is a single sentence using the [WHO – what forces does the player control?] is to [do
WHAT – what is the players main objective?] [WHERE – what is the location of the main
objective?] by [WHEN – how long is the scenario?] in order to [WHY – why is this battle
being fought? What is the larger context?] format. For example:
B Company [WHO] is to secure [WHAT] the crossroads [WHERE] no later than

1400 hrs [WHEN] in order for the remainder of 1 Bn to advance on Aachen
[WHY].
The mission should be clear, correct - don't tell the players to secure a hill when actually
taking a church on the other side of the map is more important in terms of points – and
achievable. You don’t need to break it down into a series of nested objectives either; what is
the one main thing, the main idea, that the player should be working towards?
Battlefront.com 92
Friendly Forces
Explain in outline what the player has, including fire support and reinforcements, and identify
any key strengths or weaknesses (i.e., poor morale, low ammo). If it hasn’t already been
covered in the Situation paragraph, this section can set the scene by talking in more detail
about what the player's 'two-up' is doing in general and what their 'one-up' is doing in detail,
and what the immediately flanking formations are doing. I wouldn’t go any wider or higher
than that.
Enemy Forces
This is the same as for friendly forces, with an emphasis on what the enemy is about on this
battle on this map. Explain what the enemy has, including fire support and reinforcements,
and identify any key strengths or weaknesses such as poor morale or low ammo. Again, you
can set the scene by talking about what the enemy's 'two-up is doing in general, and what
their 'one-up' is doing in a bit more detail. There should also be an indication of what the
enemy is trying to achieve at a gross level. Obviously some FOW should be applied, so the
information will be more general than for the Friendly Forces, but be really careful about
telling outright lies. Some amount omission or slight under- or over-exaggeration, or
emphasising something that is actually relatively unimportant, is ok, but telling outright lies so
that any plan the player comes up with during setup is nullified once contact has begun is a
sure-fire way of ensuring no one will play your scenarios.
As a stylistic thing, I aim to talk about what the enemy ‘will’ do, rather than what it ‘might’ do.
Be positive and definite (and honest), so the player has confidence that the briefing actually
means something, and isn’t just a rambling collection of words.
Plan
I think this is the least important section. If the paragraphs above are sound, the player
should be able to come up with a sound plan on their own. And, in fact, coming up with a
sound plan is a big part of the game. 'Stealing' that from the players by giving them a perfect
plan here is poor practice. On the other hand, you can give a broad-brush general outline of
how you - as designer - think the battle will play out. Something like "1 Platoon will defend
The Copse until reinforcements arrive and can advance to secure The Bridge" is ok, since
you’re not telling the player how to defend the Copse, and are also reminding them that help
is on the way, and therefore 1 Platoon can be ‘used up’ conducting its defensive task.
You can also guide the player in terms of what they're meant to be doing at different phases
of the battle. So, the Plan could say something like
"3rd Platoon is close to the company objective, but isolated from the rest of A
Company. But being paras the rest of A Company will be making their way
here as quickly as they can. Use the time until they arrive to recon the
objective and secure an Forming Up Point for the rest of the company to use
when they arrive."
Battlefront.com 93
In principle the player could chose any location for the FUP, but presumably the route you
expect they’ll take will be quite obvious.
If you overplay the plan here in the briefing, it starts to look like you're telling the player
exactly what to do, turning them in to a mere observer rather than an active participant,
and/or trying to lead them into an ambush. In some ways, it's a no-win situation for the
designer. My best advice is: be honest. You don't have to tell them everything, but don't
deliberately lie about anything.
Notes
Um ... other stuff? I use it to list all the objectives and their points values, and to note any
sources I used during development of the scenario. You can also dump parameter data in
here (date, time, weather, wind, map size, friendly map edges, scenario length, etc) which
can be a handy reference for the players, although I tend to put most of that in the Designers
Notes since it's the same for both sides.
PROTIP: Check that the spelling of landmarks is the same in the imagery, in the briefings, in the
objectives section of the editor, and on the map.
PROTIP: I find it’s a good idea to compose the briefings in Word, or something that has a
spellchecker, then cut and paste the text into a .txt file, to avoid littering my briefings with silly
sbelling mistakes.
PROTIP: Be careful with abbreviations. Even if you use bog-standard military abbreviations, it is
guaranteed that not everyone will know or understand what they mean. Consider including
anything you intend to abbreviate in full the first time it’s used, followed by the abbreviation in
brackets. For example: “battalion (bn)”
With all that in mind, the first thing to note about the British briefing for The Sheriff of
Oosterbeek is that I’ve broken some of my own rules! This is deliberate, and is due to the
particular situation that Sheriff Thompson found himself in on the 19th September. The
British forces tumbling back from Arnhem weren’t his, and Thompson would have had only
the barest idea of what was going on, and what German forces were approaching.
Nevertheless, it is clear what the player must do to win, what the enemy probably consists of,
and what they’re trying to do. That in conjunction with an inspection of the map will allow the
player to develop a viable plan, at least for the first stage of the battle.
The second thing to note is that this version of the briefing is still quite rough. I find it useful
to knock up a quick and rough briefing fairly early in the design process, as it can help to
crystalise some thinking, and serves as an aide-mémoire for design ideas that might get
forgotten. It’s also a really good idea to have at least a rough briefing – even if there’s no
briefing imagery – in place before involving any testers, so they’ll have some idea of what
they’re supposed to be doing and why they’re fighting this battle, here.
Battlefront.com 94
15.3: an early draft of the full British briefing. Note the special characters used as delimiters.
The format of these files is fairly straightforward, once you know a few things about them.
It’s a basic text file which can be created and edited with something like Microsoft’s Notepad.
You can export a template briefing file from the game editor.5
Paragraph headings are automatically generated, and cannot be changed. The ^ carets are
used in the text file to indicate a break between paragraph headings – the carets themselves
don’t show up. Deleting the carets will delete the headings from bottom to top. In other
words, deleting one of the carets will get rid of the Notes heading. Deleting two will get rid of
the Notes and the Plan headings. It is not possible to delete an upper heading while
retaining a lower one, so for example you couldn’t get rid of the Plan paragraph but keep
Notes.
The / slash is used as a reminder to myself that this text needs to be deleted before it’s
imported into the game. Having the section headers there is a handy reminder, but they
have to go before the import, otherwise they show up twice – once auto-generated, and then
a second time from the text file.
5
see also pages 114-115 of the CMBN base-game manual for the template and the official notes on
the Briefing format.
Battlefront.com 95
Completed briefings can be saved anywhere, although again I find it most convenient to keep
them in a folder in my Scenarios folder called – imaginatively – Briefings.
As a final thought on the briefing and imagery, let me emphasise that there is no correct or
perfect format, and imagination should be used to craft something interesting and
compelling. About the only rule is that they should work together with other elements of the
scenario to tell a coherent and useful story, a story that is relevant to the battle the players
are about to fight.
15.4: how images are imported and exported in the editor. Note that you can also export
images, which is useful if you lose the original and want to do some updates, or want to
extract the images from another person’s scenario. The exact same process is used to
import/export the briefings.
Battlefront.com 96
16 – Programming the AI
Artificial Intelligence usually beats natural stupidity.
trad., anon.
Creating the scenario for CM can take one of two distinct routes.
The first is the scripted linear approach which is targeted towards making the AI, and playing
against it, the centrepiece. This can result in mazelike maps, with AI challenges stashed at
various points for the player to overcome - the scenario is a puzzle for the player to solve.
Design approached from that angle make it difficult to create a scenario suitable for H2H play
because that design approach is inherently at odds with H2H play. These scenarios are
artificial constructs and for the most part have very little connection with real accounts of
battle because the Order of Battle and the terrain is moulded to fit the puzzle being created.
An unexpected or undesirable outcome can be mitigated by adding extra force to the AI, or
restricting the player’s freedom of manoeuvre in an effort to tightly control the flow of the
battle and so maximise the strength of the AI. Scenario balance consists of creating the
circumstances by which the player’s options can be limited – through restrictive or
impassable terrain, restrictive setup zones, or force mis-matches – to produce the expected
outcome.
The other route sees scenario design as more of a Table Setting approach. The designer is
seeking to set the starting conditions with a map and an OB, and then allowing the player to
tackle the tactical problem however he wants to. Balance in this form of scenario consists of
weapon and overall force matchups, and careful consideration of the two side’s respective
objectives. Making and adjusting this type of scenario can be more difficult and time
consuming because you are always dealing with tradeoffs. Making a terrain adjustment to
make it easier for one side to get their weapons into action is almost heretical, because the
object is to give the player enough freedom to adapt and overcome the situation on their own
using the tools available and their own talent. The designer doesn't need, or want, to give
the player a crutch. A scenario like this is made appealing by giving the player command of
interesting force combinations, unique weapon systems, interesting terrain to fight on, or an
interesting tactical problem.
In practice the differences are never that stark, but designers generally fall towards one end
or the other on that spectrum.
For head to head play 'table setting' scenario design style is the only way that will work if you
want to make something fun to play for both sides. Scripted linear will produce great
campaign scenarios, but it will always be hard to make good H2H scenarios because the
mindset is fundamentally at odds with maximising freedom of action.
I aim to produce Table Setting scenarios, in which each side is presented with a problem,
and the tools by which it can be solved. Inevitably that means that my scenarios generally
aren’t ‘balanced,’ whatever that means in an environment in which player skill is wildly
variable. They offer different challenges when played in different play modes, but those
Battlefront.com 97
challenges are not all equally difficult. For the Sheriff of Oosterbeek I’m not aiming to beat
the player, exactly, but rather to offer them the challenge of going up against plausible
course of action by the AI. I expect that it will be:
• Easier to win as British Paras against the German AI. Planning a decent AI attack from
forces that will also be viable H2H is very difficult.
• Harder to win as Germans against the British AI. Getting the AI British to set up a series
of mini-fortresses, that the German player must reduce one by one, is a much more
achievable task.
• Easier as British in H2H, because defending in complex terrain is generally an easier

activity, and the Germans in this scenario aren’t favoured with overwhelming force which
would allow them to attack everywhere.
The AI in CM consists of two separate elements:
1) TacAI – the Tactical Artificial Intelligence routines control unit’s responses to in-turn
stimuli, in particular how they respond to the sighting of enemy units, target selection, and
how they react to incoming fire. It also controls things like the exact route that units take
across the map and around obstacles. The TacAI affects human-controlled and AI-controlled
units equally. It cannot be controlled by the scenario designer.
2) StratAI – the Strategic Artificial Intelligence is programmed by the scenario designer,

which provides the high-level scheme of manoeuvre that AI-controlled units will attempt to
execute. Human-controlled forces have no StratAI – that function is hopefully being provided
by the player!
There is, technically, also the Operational Artificial Intelligence – OpAI – which handles the
interpretation and execution of StratAI orders on a unit-by-unit basis, although I’ve never
given that much direct consideration.
The first thing to realise about programming the StratAI in CM is that you are creating a strict
schedule, and the schedule will be followed come hell or high water. The StratAI Plan you
create is not dynamic – the AI-controlled units will continue to try and take that hill or defend
that village, regardless of what the human player does. At a micro level the TacAI will
dynamically handle engagements with enemy forces as they appear, but the StratAI will not
alter its overall approach at all.
Therefore, it’s crucial to try and get ‘inside the head’ of potential players, and guesstimate
they different ways they’re likely to go about tackling the tactical problems your scenario
presents them. Also, I think that at a high level AI plans need to be fairly simple and generic
– broad sweeping movements to seize or hold ‘big’ objectives, rather than fine scale
movements from one piece of cover to another.
Of course, exactly how ‘simple and generic’ gets applied depends on the specific scenario –
if you’re programming a platoon-sized action, it is possible, reasonable, and often necessary
to include a large number of very specific orders for small groupings of units. But with larger
scenario I find I need to step back and use a more sweeping approach.
The Sheriff of Oosterbeek is a reasonably big scenario, which means that the planning is
going to be fairly sweeping. At a high level, there are three basic courses of action open to
Battlefront.com 98
the German player - straight up the guts along the Benedendorpsweg, left-flanking through
the open ground of the Rosander Polder, or right-flanking through the built up area along the
north of the map. Feints and diversions can add some variety to each of those broad
approaches, but those are the main outlines. The British player is most likely to create a
series of ‘fortresses’ which maximise the defensive benefits of the buildings and hedgerows
with liberally sprinkle the map and the short-range firepower of the multiple Stens present in
every unit.
16.1: Using a worksheet for each plan helps to keep track of the various AI elements, and
what they’re doing. Like the Objectives, I find it helpful to keep it information relating to each
plan for each side together in a single location. This sheet provides an overview of the basic
‘up-the-guts’ plan and its moving parts, and is not intended to provide a waypoint-by-
waypoint level of detail. I could have made my life easier by keeping all the elements of each
Kompanie – in particular 1 Kp. – in adjacent AI slots. Initially I thought I was going to need
slots A15 and A16 for a different force element.
Battlefront.com 99
Programming the Sheriff of Oosterbeek’s AI started with the German plan no.1, which I refer
to as “Straight up Benedendorpsweg” (or more technically “up the guts”), since that’s
basically what I will have the AI doing. I’m not going to programme a left-flanking-through-
the-open-ground attack, as that is too tactically naïve. However, I will develop at least one
plan based on the other two courses of action, and probably a variant of each of those, for a
total of four distinct plans. The discussion that follows, however, only covers the first 30-45
minutes of the ‘up the guts’ plan, otherwise this chapter would never end! For each of the
plans I am aiming for the Germans to secure enough terrain objectives to get a draw or minor
victory. I am not planning for them to advance clear across the map.
The worksheet shown in figure 16.1 shows how I intend to group and use each AI force
element, which in this case range in size from a rifle platoon down to a single StuG. There
are no hard and fast rules around grouping units, but some rules of thumb I tend to use are i)
try and respect the C2 chain, so units aren’t running about the place in weird amorphous
blobs, ii) try and keep units of different mobility in different groups so tanks and infantry aren’t
attempting to keep to the same timetable of waypoints, iii) avoid mixing on-map-at-start units
in the same AI group with reinforcements, because the reinforcements will have to leg it
across the map to try and catch up with their mates at the next waypoint.
The next step is to create a stepping-stone path of waypoints for each force element to move
along. In order to keep the development of the AI plan tractable, I tend to break it down into
discrete chunks, and develop each chunk through to completion before moving on to the next
chunk. In this case that means through to the 30-45 minute mark for the Germans, which –
all going well – will see them in possession of The Factory area. Once that is chunk is
complete for all the force elements, I’ll move on to the second chunk, and so on until the plan
is complete.
16.2: Composite image of the waypoints to be used by the German 2nd Kompanie, moving
from the setup zone east of the overpass west towards the Factory. I haven’t worried about
timings at this stage, only the locations the platoon will be moving to. This is one quarter of
the AI groups in use, and already it’s getting pretty complicated.
It is fairly easy to set a series of waypoints that will naïvely move the separate force elements
to their intended ultimate location, but that will, predictably, leading to a bloodbath for the AI.
Battlefront.com 100
Waypoints need to be set keeping in mind whether the force element is likely to be in contact
with the enemy during each leg, or simply moving point-to-point. That, in turn, requires some
consideration of how the overall battle is likely to be developing, and also how the various AI
groups are moving and supporting each other. I don’t worry about timings at this stage, and
instead focus on the larger picture of “while 1 Platoon is clearing the buildings between these
waypoints 3 and 4, 2 Platoon provides support from their waypoint in the Barn, and the MGs
are in overwatch from their waypoint on the Knoll.”
Next up is timings, and these can take a while to wrap the old noggin around. Each order is
created with a time-window during which it should commence.
Exit After: refers to the earliest time that the AI force element will start trying to execute the
order.
Exit Before: refers to the latest time the order will be commenced.
Generally, all being well, the units will commence their orders at the first possible opportunity.
The main exception is if they’re currently actively in contact with the enemy, in which case
the commencement of the order might be delayed until a safer moment.
The other exception particularly affects WEGO. If the time-window has not opened during a
WEGO orders phase, then the AI will not issue orders to the units concerned. This means
that if the Exit After time is set to 10:30, the units will not receive any orders until the 11:00
orders phase. Be a bit careful with the difference between Real Time and H2H - the overall
rate of movement is faster in RT than it is in H2H. Their actual speeds aren't any different,
but in RT they don't have to wait about for each turn to end before interpreting and applying
the next order.
The actual times entered refer to the elapsed time since the start of the scenario. So if, for
example, there is a series of three movement legs, which will each take 8 minutes, with a halt
for a couple of minutes at each way point, then the timers should be set as follows:
Order 0: Exit After 00:00/ Exit Before 00:30
Order 1: 10:00/10:30
Order 2: 20:00/20:30
Order 3: 30:00/30:30
That way the AI group will start moving as soon as the scenario starts (or at least within 30
seconds of scenario start), move the first way point, and wait there until 10 minutes in to the
scenario. Then within 30 seconds of the 10 minute mark the AI group will start moving to the
next way point, and so on.
You should ensure there is enough time to reach the waypoint within the designated time.
However, a technique to get units moving, and keep them moving without pauses, is to
deliberately leave the Exit Before/Exit After times at 00:00/01:00, but this is really only
suitable for admin moves out of contact. When a unit encounters a series of orders that are
all set to 00:00/01:00 it’ll move through the waypoints as quickly as practical, without halting
at each waypoint and waiting for the next Exit After timing. This can, for example, be a good
way of efficiently moving reinforcements up from a map edge, but ‘real’ timings will be need
to be in place when contact with the enemy is expected.
Battlefront.com 101
1
nd
6.3: waypoints and timings to be used by 1 Platoon, 2 Kompanie, moving from the area
near the overpass westwards towards the Factory. When overlaid with the timings for the
other platoons, and Kp HQ, the net effect is firesupport from HMGs on the rail embankment
while the platoons leapfrog past each other through the buildings towards The Factory area.
The timings shown here are the result of several cycles of testing and refinement.
PROTIP: be really careful with the arrival timing for reinforcements. It's quite easy to have a
reinforcement arriving in a time window that overlaps with its AI order time window. For example,
a unit is set to arrive sometime between 10-15 minutes, and its first movement order is at 12
minutes. If the unit arrives at the 10 or 11 minute mark there's no problem. But if the unit arrives
after the AI order was set to initiate the unit will "fall off" the orders sequence, and never move at
all. Therefore I tend to give units definite arrival times (rather than arrival windows), and set their
first order to initiate at least 1 minute after they will arrive. This is what I’ve done for the Sheriff of
Oosterbeek. Alternately, if I really want reinforcements to arrive in a window (which I think is
generally better when playing against a live opponent) I’ll set the first AI order to begin at least 1
minute after the arrival window closes ... which can mean that units which arrive early sit around
for a while before moving.
Initially I set all the time intervals between orders in 5-minute time chunks, which is assuredly
wrong but provides a start point from which elegance and subtlety can be progressively
introduced during a cycle of development-testing-refinement-more testing-etc. I’ll go into
testing in more detail later on, but just briefly; watching the AI go about its order in Scenario
Author Mode is an excellent way of checking that the units are moving the way you want
them to, and that you've allowed enough – but not too much - time between waypoints.
With the timings done the AI Order (basically, the movement stance, ranging from Dash
through to Max Assault) and any end-point conditions (such as the floors to be occupied, or
the range to engage at) can be adjusted. The following table shows the results of each AI
Order type applied to a UK rifle platoon.
Battlefront.com 102
16.4: observations of AI behaviour using different AI Order types over 800m on flat open
ground. A British Rifle Platoon was used as it has an HQ, some rifle sections, and the 2-in
mortar as a support weapon. The AI in CM treats each of these unit types differently. To
prevent unit getting too strung out many short legs can be used, instead of long distances
between waypoints.
Programming on maps with constricting
PROTIP: ‘Assault’ and ‘Max Assault’ will not terrain requires very careful thought and
work if there is only a single unit in the AI group, planning. A tank company in a single AI
or the units in the AI group would not be capable of Group trying rushing a bridge is just not
utilising the Assault command. As a rule of thumb, going to work, since they will all try and
‘Assault’ and ‘Max Assault’ should only be given cross the narrow bridge in a single blob.
to AI groups that contain several multi-team
NorMons, from the CW module, used
infantry sections.
an extremely authentic base map.
When AI testing started it quickly
PROTIP: The AI does not handle terrain that’s been became obvious that AI was having
bottle-necked very well, particularly with vehicles. trouble moving about because of all the
fields, and particularly because of the
narrow gates between each field. There were plenty of little man-sized gaps in the bocage,
but vehicles were limited to bottlenecks of a single-tile wooden gate in what was otherwise a
wall of green. The tanks were extremely vulnerable as they tried to get through each tiny
gap at the same time, jerking forward, pausing, and generally moving in tactically absurd
ways.
The map was therefore altered by adding two or three tiles of low wall on either side of each
wooden gate. Since the AI will happily drive tanks over walls to get to the next waypoint, this
made the pathing options the AI investigated more numerous. At a stroke that resolved most
AI pathing issues. The map wasn't quite as authentic anymore, but so what? It worked, and
that’s more important. This is, incidentally, an example of modify the map to ensure that the
OpAI can perform adequately.
Battlefront.com 103
16.5: On the left is an example of potentially bottlenecking terrain. One or two vehicles will
be able to get through this gap, but a platoon of four or five tanks will probably end up milling
about in confusion as they all try to squeeze through at once. On the right is the same
terrain, but with the bottleneck mitigated by replacing the bocage immediately adjacent to the
gate with rural wall. As far as the AI is concerned this creates a much wider movement
corridor, allowing multiple units to traverse it simultaneously with few problems.
Often bottleneck terrain won’t become obvious until you start plotting out the AI plans, or
running tests. If you notice that you’re trying to get a large number of units to squeeze
through a single narrow gap, make a note to watch out for that during testing, and consider
altering either the path units are using, the size of the AI Group using that path (that is: break
a company up into several independent AI groups, with different time windows for transiting
the bottleneck), or modify the map.
Once the whole plan is complete, and thoroughly tested, it can be copied and pasted into
another AI Plan slot and tweaked to create minor or major variations. This is a really useful
way of adding some variety to the AI without a ridiculous amount of effort – compared to
building an entire second plan from scratch it is relatively straightforward to, for example,
alter the assault route and/or timing of a platoon while everything else remains the same.
Once more than one AI plan has been developed, their relative frequency of occurrence –
that is the relative frequency players will encounter each plan - can be set. I believe players
will generally only play a scenario once against the AI, and as such the player is only ever
going to 'see' one AI plan. They won't know - or care - whether the plan they encountered
was a good one or a dumb one. From their perspective they get the plan they're given, and
that’ll be their impression of the scenario.
Battlefront.com 104
Furthermore, even if a player does replay a scenario, I think it's dollars to donuts that they
would want to play against a different plan. As a designer that’s certainly what I’d want for
them. But making other plans ‘rare’ or ‘infrequent’ just increases the chances they'll end up
encountering the same favoured plan again, which defeats the purpose of having multiple
plans in the first place.
Rare or Infrequent can be used as a way to ‘hide’ suboptimal plans, but I'm not sure that’s a
good idea. If you aren’t happy with an AI plan, either improve it or set it to 'never.' Setting a
sub-par plan to 'rare' simply guarantees some players will encounter it, and be disappointed.
Given all that, I think all plans should be set to an equal likelihood of appearance, and they
should all be, broadly, as
PROTIP: giving the AI a hide order for several minutes, then capable as each other
following that up with an ambush order (but no new movement In a previous chapter, the
waypoint) is a good way to lull an unwary player right into a trap.
friendly map edges were
set in the scenario parameters. One of the key uses for that setting is helping the AI interpret
terrain as either friendly or enemy. The AI will set up within each waypoint on the ‘friendly’
side of terrain such as hedgerows walls, using the Friendly Map Edge (FME) setting to
determine which side that is. However, since there can only be one FME, anytime you have
the AI moving in a direction that isn’t directly away from the FME they’re likely to struggle to
set up in the way you’d expect them too. Having infantry move to a hedgerow then set
themselves up on the enemy side can be frustrating, so careful consideration of the FME
setting, and reasonably simple AI plans that take it into account, are useful tricks to
remember.
Although not used in The Sheriff of Oosterbeek – artillery and mortars for both sides have
been deliberately delayed to arrive as reinforcements – the AI Fire Support plan is a good
way to have the AI make decent use of its artillery assets. Basically, paint a number of target
areas, then set the kind of fire support you want to arrive. During the setup phase the AI will
automatically assign its available artillery resources from top to bottom of the list. This means
that if there are more targets that fire units, the bottom targets will always be ignored.
With the designer’s perfect knowledge it is possible to use this functionality to smite the
player, badly. That’s the kind of thing that really annoys players, and is probably best
avoided. I tend to use it to shape the battlefield by applying low-rate maximum-duration
missions to deny areas I’d prefer the player didn’t move through, rather than high-intensity
but brief destruction missions. It’s also a good idea to save some artillery ammunition for the
AI to use as it sees fit on targets of opportunity later in the battle.
There is only one AI Fire Support plan slot available, which means that every AI plan will use
the same artillery plan. This effectively restricts how AI plans are constructed since all of
them are stuck with the same artillery plan. Very careful selection of target areas can mitigate
that, making the one plan suitable for several different schemes of manoeuvre. On the
otherhand, the AI is pretty good with opportunity fire for artillery, especially if they are given
some TRPs to help out. On the attack it is generally a good idea to have an FO sitting in a
static anchor OP with an overview of the whole battlefield, assuming the ground allows for
that. If the FOs are moving, generally they will need to be sitting at a waypoint for a while
before they will use indirect fire. If they are continuously moving then the AI doesn't have a
Battlefront.com 105
chance to drop it anywhere since they may end up running into the area that the FFE is
landing.
AI Plan Checklist:
• Think in terms of moving force elements, rather than individual units
• Try and keep the plan fairly simple.
• Pay attention to where the Friendly Map Edge is
• Get one plan working well before copying and pasting it
• Set reasonable ambitions for your AI plans. Don’t expect to be able to programme a
Rommel-esque plan without a lot practice.
Battlefront.com 106
17 – Testing
The reason the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the
American Army practices chaos on a daily basis.
from the post-war debriefing of a German General
Before getting into testing, I want to air some thoughts on CM as a game vs CM as a

simulation. WWII was vast and complex, and some really unexpected things happened from
time to time. But overall, there were clear trends about what worked on the battlefield and
what didn’t. Just because something actually happened in WWII does NOT mean it should
happen every time a scenario of that event is played. This is one of the issues with creating
strictly Historical scenarios.
Consider the battle when Dick Winters overran that battery behind UTAH, or when the British
paras overran the Merville Battery. Both of these were outstanding actions. But they're
outstanding actions, and remembered as such, because they shouldn't have been won by
the Allies. In either of those actions slightly different decisions by any of the actors on either
side could have resulted in an easy German victory.
In CM terms, those 'slightly different decisions' are the command inputs the player uses, and
the way the TacAI reacts to those prompts. A decent recreation of those battles as CM
scenarios should - I think - be really hard for the Allied player to win. At the very least it
should take more than just turning up with some uber 'leet paras and pressing 'Go'.
CM is a complex game, and it takes skill and effort to learn to play it well. As noted
elsewhere, this means that some players will take a while before they can win difficult
scenarios. Some players may never be able to win some scenarios, because they never
gain the skills to combine orders in ways that create the effect they need. And that’s ok.
It's not about 'solving the puzzle', although sometimes it might seem that way. To play CM
well you have to give precise, accurate, timely and relevant orders to your pixeltruppen, and
choreograph your available resources to create a unified team that is working together,
rather than a collection of individuals. One of my regular opponents is a wizard with
armoured vehicles, and I usually struggle to create the effect I want – dead German tanks –
because he is much better at creating the effect he wants – dead Allied tanks. Sometimes
the difference between winning and losing might come down to the difference between using
MOVE or HUNT, or giving a particular order on turn 10 instead of turn 11 ... or turn 9. I think
that kind of chaos and unpredictability is part of what makes CM such a compelling game.
Winning a scenario based on Merville Battery, or Winter's attack on the German battery,
should be a possible outcome, but it shouldn’t be the expected outcome.
The point here, as it applies to testing, is that I’m not looking for a particular outcome each
time I test. Instead I’m looking for coherent play that leads to a plausible outcome.
Right, on with the testing. Although testing is described here as a discrete activity, in
practice testing of one sort or another is going on pretty much constantly alongside all the
other scenario design activities.
Battlefront.com 107
There’s a number of simple and quick tests that are useful to make sure you’ve gotten the
basics right.
The first explicit test for this scenario was to see how long it took to walk using the Move
command from one end of the map to the other along the Benedendorpsweg. The answer is
42 minutes, or about half the length of the scenario. I’m reasonably happy with that. The
German player won’t be able to muck around, but with skill and some luck they should be
able to get in amongst the British gunline. Also, the trucks and halftracks provide the
German player enough seats for 55 passengers in a single lift. That’s enough to shuttle a
platoon(+) at a time, as long as the transport is looked after. However, some of the German
infantry doesn’t arrive until the 20 minute mark, and the final elements of KG Harder don’t
turn up until the 30 minute mark, which is pushing the timing envelope even with the
transport available. Therefore I added another 10 minutes to the run-time of the scenario,
taking it out to 1 hour and 40 minutes.
Another useful test is to ceasefire at the end of the first turn, and see who wins. Usually this
works out ok, but occasionally I’ve made scenarios where the “best” ploy against the AI is to
immediately ceasefire. While that would seem to defeat the whole point of playing the game,
but it’s usually fairly easy to fix if needs be.
Related to that is testing the distribution and value of objectives. For this scenario it meant
reallocating points significantly so that 50% of the value for terrain objectives are gained
once the German player reaches – or, for the British player, holds – the area designated
High Ground. This was the location where Thompson held the Germans on the 19th and 20th
of September. The thinking here is that holding the High Ground is a victory for the British
(as it was historically), and holding further to the east is more of a victory, while being pushed
back to the west is a defeat.
17.1: LtCol “Sheriff” Thompson exhorts a group of defeated paratroopers to turn around and
dig in.
A different, but still quick and easy, test was to see if vehicles could climb up on to the top of
the rail embankment. For various reasons I don’t want any vehicles to be able to get up
there. Starting the scenario as Germans, then placing a waypoint at various locations up on
top of the embankment showed that the StuGs could actually get up the top, so a thin
Battlefront.com 108
diagonal strip of Heavy Forest (without any brush, shrubs, or trees) was added to the ‘British’
side of the embankment to stop that.
The main and most time consuming component of testing is seeing how the scenario actually
plays. I break this down into two activities – Static Testing against the AI, and dynamic
testing against the AI or preferably against another human.
Static testing against the AI utilises the ‘Scenario Author Test Mode’ skill setting to watch
what the AI does, when it does it, and how it goes about doing it. It’s a pretty simple process.
I start the battle as I the British player, in Scenario Author Test Mode, using WEGO because
it’s much faster than Real Time.
17.2: Starting the battle in Scenario Author Test Mode. This functionality is a godsend for
scenario designers.
The key point here is not to do anything with the British forces. They’re just left in their start
positions. I’m not trying to prove to myself that I can defeat my own AI plan. That’d be trivial.
Instead the Scenario Author Test Mode is used to observe how the AI-controlled side
manœuvres, and how it deals with the enemy forces it finds. This can be run through pretty
quickly too – I’m not too interested in the second-by-second, bullet-by-bullet ebb and flow. In
fact getting down in the weeds can be confusing. Rather I’m watching the minute-by-minute
development of the overall battle, and how the AI advances its forces to apply combat power.
Because of this it’s often not necessary to watch the battle at all – fast stepping in 5-second
time chunks, or mashing the red button to quickly cycle through the turns gives a pretty good
idea of whether the AI plan coordinates the forces available, or if it still needs some work.
Battlefront.com 109
Predictably, this throws up a lot of outright gaffs, and areas for improvement, especially in the
first couple of trials.
This soon becomes a cyclic process of adjusting the AI, then running the battle to see how it
goes and taking notes on any issues, then adjusting the AI again, running the battle again,
and so on. Hopefully the number of issues raised each go-around reduces. I’m not looking
for perfection from the AI – that’s impossible. An active human opponent could be doing
almost anything, so the best that can be done is to create a plan which sees the AI controlled
forces securing a
17.3: Various issues that came to light during the first three test cycles of the first 20-30
minutes of German AI plan No.1. Issues are noted, but the scenario is allowed to continue to
try and catch as many issues as possible each go-around.
Battlefront.com 110
series of objectives in a reasonable manner that should be sufficient to overcome reasonable

resistance. You also need to be realistic about what can be achieved – testing is incredibly
time consuming, and there’s only so much that can be done with a strictly linear script.
Determined players will always find ways to ‘break’ the scenario, to beat it trivially by doing
something unexpected or impractical against an active opponent … but don’t worry about
that.
So, that’s all good, and the German AI plan progressed from utterly inept to reasonably
competent. Most of the tweaks and adjustments were to do with making the Germans more
competent when compared to their opponents (mainly by decreasing the experience or
motivation of the British, and the amount of ammo certain units are carrying), or producing
better co-ordination of the different AI teams in time and space. Once the first phase of the
first plan has been tested, then it’s on to the second phase, then the second plan, and then
the Allied AI plans.
While static testing the AI, also try and enrol a couple of people to concurrently test the
scenario H2H. Playing through a scenario can take quite a while, so it’s a good idea to get
this underway as soon as practical. It’s a good idea to make friends with a few tolerant and
reliable players who have an eye for detail and are able to present useful feedback. It’s also
a good idea to give guidelines on what sort of feedback is required. Examples of some of the
kinds of feedback I find useful are:
1) Is the briefing clear and helpful? E.g. Do you know by reading it exactly what you need
to do? Do you get enough info about forces and reinforcements?
2) If you ask for a cease fire right at the beginning, what result do you get?
3) Are the forces balanced? Is it reasonable to expect that players will find the mission
easy/medium/hard?
4) Are any reinforcements arriving on time?
5) Is the time given enough to achieve the objectives?
6) Is the AAR at the end of the mission ok?
7) Are the points assigned to objectives "fair", reflecting the goals of the mission as stated
in the briefing? Was the final result and score a fair reflection of the outcome of the
battle
8) is the overall scenario consistent with the intent of the mission as described in the first
post of this thread? Are the forces on both sides as suggested, is the setting, date, and
time correct?
9) is the spelling of reinforcements, landmarks, objectives, unit names, etc consistent and
correct?
Feedback is always going to be subjective, but it’s always useful even if you chose not to act
on it. I had a couple of people testing this scenario, and they’ve been invited to chime in
here with their observations on the role of the scenario tester in general, and things they
found while looking at this scenario in particular.
After a few run-throughs of the German AI-plan, static testing threw up a rather significant
issue. After watching the AI’s efforts on this large map, and assuming a moderately
Battlefront.com 111
competent opponent, I don’t think it is reasonable to suppose that the Germans will ever get
much past about midway, even though technically there is time for them to walk all the way
to the Church and back again.
There are also a lot of forces in play, particularly the British. The Air Landing Light Battery, in
particular, consists of seven guns and associated ammo teams, about ten HQ teams, and
over 20 jeeps. All up there’s getting on for 50 units just in the gun battery. The combination
of unit quantity and map size is causing some performance issues.
Furthermore, the guns shouldn’t actually do anything in the scenario. They’ll just sit there,
and maybe get involved in the fight if the German player does really well. Or, much more
likely, a canny British player will use them in a wildly a-historical fashion by moving them to
flesh out the forward defence lines.
17.4: 2nd Air-Landing Light Battery deployed in all its glory. There should be another 50-odd
Glider Pilots, represented by roughly 20 more CM-units, located in this vicinity helping with
local defence of the guns. Ideally, none of these units will play any part in the battle. A
complete waste of time.
All of this is a problem, and it’s caused me to rethink my concept and what I’m actually trying
to depict here. I’ve realised that I became too fixated on Thompson as an artillery
commander, and lost sight of his role as a leader. The real battle in lower Oosterbeek on the
19th and 20th was to establish a coherent defence line to protect the divisional enclave, and
for various reasons that line happened to end up forward of Thompson’s guns. But the guns
themselves weren’t, strictly, part of that battle.
So, as a direct result of this testing I’ve brought out the chainsaw to dramatically reduce the
size of the map, and with it the size of the British forces. The map has been cut down on the
Battlefront.com 112
western and southern sides, from 1808 x 1040m to a new size of 1264 x 640m, meaning the
reduced map is just 43% the size of the old map. As much as it pains me, the on-map Air
Landing Light Battery has been removed and replaced with an off-map module of 4 guns,
one of the Glider Pilot Squadrons has been deleted, and various support weapons are also
gone. In addition the length of the scenario has been reduced from 1hr 40 mins back down
to 1hr 10 mins, and may come down some more.
With the western third of the map (including the Church and the petrol station) gone the
terrain objectives have had to be substantially re-worked, but fortunately almost everything
else is still usable as-is, or with only slight adjustment. In particular, the German AI plan I
was working on is still fully functional. The cycle of testing, tweaking, testing, adjusting
continues with that plan until it’s complete, while incorporating feedback from my H2H
testers, and then testing additional German AI plans and the British AI plans.
Doubts that the larger version would ever really work as either an H2H or vs-AI scenario had
been growing during development, and testing confirmed those doubts. The new smaller
and tighter scenario ‘feels’ a lot better, and testing proceeds once more. In the short term all
my design effort is going into the small one, although the large version may be finished and
released eventually.
17.5: The reduced map, showing locations of the new British objectives, which now more
clearly focuses on establishing a viable defence line.
I’m glad this was picked up fairly early in testing, but I do wish I’d spent more time thinking
about this at the outset – with over half the map now gone, a lot of time could have been
saved.
Note to self: think harder about the concept next time.
Battlefront.com 113
18 – Putting a Shine On It
I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and
polishing.
Dean Koontz
With AI plans complete, and testing done, the scenario is about ready for release. But
because the little things matter, it’s worth taking some time to check the scenario over to
make sure that it is nicely polished. It’s highly tempting to rush this and just release the
scenario, but it’s really annoying to have to upload a second iteration of anything to the
Repository because you miss-sbelled somefink. Unlike Mr Koontz, I tend to draft and revise,
working fairly quickly to get a scenario that’s fully functional, but which needs a lot of
polishing before it’s ready to step out on the stage.
Proofread everything. The briefings, obviously, but also the briefing imagery, the on-map
landmarks, reinforcement arrivial notifications, objectives, unit names, everything that has
been typed in. Spelling and grammar are obvious concerns here, obviously, but also check
the use of any foreign terms.
Consistency. Check that the spelling of names is consistent in any imagery used, on map
landmarks or objectives, in the briefings, in the units editor, and so on. Also, check that a
consistent story is being told in the briefings, in the objectives, and on the map.
18.1: The name and spelling of 1 Kp. (Pz Crews) is consistent in the Briefing, in the Unit
Editor, in the reinforcement slot, and in the Unit Objectives editor.
Coherency. Take a last chance to check that the ‘story’ of the scenario makes sense. All the
various elements of the scenario should work together to tell a coherent story that is
plausible and engaging. This is a judgement call, but listen to your gut.
Battlefront.com 114
Check that all the total pool of points adds up to exactly 1,000 for each side, and that overall
the weightings still look right – that they reward success, that they tell the story you want told,
and that that story will be consistent with the scenario briefing. In this case, because the
map and forces have changed so much, this is something that had to be paid particular
attention, and was in fact badly wrong when I checked it. I also needed to modify the
location of some of the landmarks because they were either now off map, no longer central,
or clashed with the new terrain objective locations.
18.2: Overview of the final, reduced, map for The Sheriff of Oosterbeek.
And then, just like that, the scenario is finished!
Battlefront.com 115
19 – Scenario design is easy. It just takes time.
My heart is broken by the terrible loss I have sustained in my old friends and companions
and my poor pixeltruppen. Believe me, nothing except a scenario unfinished can be half so
melancholy as a scenario released.
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (if he’d ever designed a scenario for Combat
Mission)
I see regular requests on the BFC forums for more larger / smaller / infantry-only / tank-
heavy / town / country / whatever scenario type, which is completely understandable – we all
want more scenarios to play. That demand will only be met when you go out and make a
scenario or three.
This series of posts has methodically gone through all the main steps required to produce a
scenario, and taken as a whole it might seem overwhelming. However, what I’ve written
here is not intended as a prescriptive set of rules that must be adhered to, but as a
descriptive set of guidelines to follow.
The best way to get that whelm under control is to start with something modest, and keep the
scope strictly under control. But also start with something you would want to play, rather
than something you think someone else might want to play.
I would suggest that a first scenario should have no more than a company on either side,
which means that one side could be considerably less than that. The map should be well
less than 1km x 1km. Much of what has made this thread so expansive is the sheer size of
the original concept for The Sheriff of Oosterbeek, and ultimately most of that work got cast
aside. Even with that, a lot of what’s been described here is quicker and easier to do than to
describe. On the other hand, if your passion is to create a battalion sized scenario ... do it!
Lean on that passion to get the job done.
Detailed descriptions of real battles at the scale of a company or smaller are hard to come
by, so consider constructing a semi-historical vignette of an interesting battle. In otherwords:
use real forces pitted against each other in a plausible but fictional situation. The first step in
creating a scenario is often the hardest, so grab an idea, and get into it! The details will sort
themselves out, and if needs be the scenario can altered later.
At least as important as the size of forces involved is to have a very clear idea of what
tactical problem each player is being presented with. This should be simple and easy to
understand, and will often revolve around coping with adversity or insufficiency - trying to pit
weakness against strength, or coping with less than ideal odds. As with the size of forces,
cut anything that isn’t related to that core tactical problem or which doesn’t contribute to the
telling of your story.
After that it’s merely a case of working through, in no particular sequence, the various
elements that are needed for a complete scenario: map, objectives, briefings, AI, etc. Then
test, revise, polish, and release it.
Battlefront.com 116
That last step is key. A dozen partially finished scenarios sitting on the C: drive, or a fistful of
good ideas in your head, is no good to anybody. Finish one of them, and release the thing.
Don’t wait until it’s perfect, because that will never happen. Aim for ‘adequate and
interesting.’ As General Patton probably meant to say; "A good scenario today is better than
a perfect scenario tomorrow."
19.1: Well, are you up for it?
Go make that scenario you’re dying to play, and share it through the Repository. Then we all
win.
Battlefront.com 117
20 – Forms and Checklists
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.
Lao-tzu (ancient Chinese scenario designer)
The following forms and lists might be useful when creating scenarios. Feel free to use,
modify, and abuse them.
The Combat Estimate
The six fundamental questions that the player needs to address when planning how to fight a
scenario are as follows:
1) What am I required to do? (How do I score points to win?)
2) What are the enemy doing? (How does the enemy score points to win?)
3) What effects do I want to have on the enemy?
4) Where can I best accomplish each action/effect?
5) What resources do I have, and what do I need to accomplish each action/effect?
6) When and where do the actions take place in relation to each other?
The scenario briefing should give them enough information to answer those questions and
be able to develop that plan. Use these questions as a guide to what should be included,
and what can be left out, when writing briefings.
Questions for Testing
Questions to ask yourself, and any testers, when test-playing a scenario prior to release.
1) Is the briefing clear and helpful? Eg. Do you know by reading it exactly what you need to
do? Do you get enough info about forces and reinforcements?
2) If you ask for a cease fire right at the beginning, what result do you get?
3) Are the forces balanced? Is it reasonable to expect that players will find the mission
easy/medium/hard?
4) Are any reinforcements arriving on time?
5) Is the time given enough to achieve the objectives?
6) Is the AAR at the end of the mission ok?
7) Are the points assigned to objectives "fair", reflecting the goals of the mission as stated in
the briefing?
8) is the overall scenario consistent with the intent of the mission as described in the first
post of this thread? Are the forces on both sides as suggested, is the setting, date, and
time correct?
9) is the spelling of reinforcements, landmarks, objectives, unit names, etc consistent and
correct?
Battlefront.com 118
Battlefront.com 119
Battlefront.com 120

A Scen Design AAR PDF Book PDF

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

A Scen Design AAR PDF Book PDF

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

The Sheriff of Oosterbeek

A Scenario Design DAR/AAR

In my experience, designing a scenario seems to mostly consist of solving a seemingly

Anyway, enough of that. On with the design!

1 – Outline Scenario Concept

Ideas won't keep; something must be done about them.

Alfred North Whitehead

1.1: From: Middlebrook “Arnhem 1944, The Airborne Battle”

So that’s my setting, in outline:

• UK Paras vs. German mechanised

• Brits retreating in disorder, trying to form a defensive line

• Germans exploiting success and trying to prevent the establishment of a coherent

• “Sheriff” playing some kind of important role

• located on eastern outskirts of Oosterbeek

1.3: From: Middlebrook “Arnhem 1944, The Airborne Battle”

I’ve got my concept now. Next up is research.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

Arthur Conan Doyle (via Sherlock Holmes)

The following is the list of resources I looked at for this scenario.2

US CGSC CARL digital library

1944 Aerial Reconnaissance Photos http://watwaswaar.nl/

1:25k maps of Holland http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdquery.html

Organisation of an Air Landing Light Battery

Royal Artillery Units Netherlands 1944-45

Google Maps https://maps.google.com/

Books and Magazines:

On the other hand, I now know that:

• There was an artillery regiment supporting German operations in Oosterbeek – ARKO

I didn’t know that, until now. Research! It’s fun!

3 – Refined Scenario Concept

You’ll recall that the original scenario concept was, in outline:

• UK Paras vs. German mechanised

• Brits retreating in disorder, trying to form a defensive line

• Germans exploiting success and trying to prevent the establishment of a coherent

• “Sheriff” playing some kind of important role

• located on eastern outskirts of Oosterbeek

• British force about company(+), maybe a little bigger

• German force about battalion(+)

Now I can open the scenario editor and get cracking!

4 – The Map Pt.1; Working with Overlays

Field Marshal ‘Bill’ Slim

4.1: Google Earth, with landmarks shown.

Pulling that all together, this is what I have:

These are the overlays prepared for the Sheriff of Oosterbeek:

1) 1944 topo, with and without landmarks and force-location polygons.

2) 2011 topo, with and without landmarks and force-location polygons.

3) Google Earth, with and without landmarks and force-location polygons.

4) 1944 topo with heights of elevations annotated

To use an overlay in the editor it must be named exactly special_editor_overlay.bmp, and

Right, now am I ready for the editor? I think I am.

1) decide exactly what area your CM map is going to cover.

4) open up CM, go to the Editor, go to Map

5 – The Map Pt.2: Elevations and Roads

Just drive down that road, until you get blown up

General George S. Patton, on the delicate art of reconnaissance.

We’re on the road to nowhere

There’s a city in my mind

The section of rail line I want is

It’s time for … hmm. What’s next?

6 – The Map Pt.3: Buildings, Walls, and Trees

• The Army will post guards around the place.

• The Marines will kill everybody inside and set up a headquarters.

Buildings, walls, and trees. That’s what’s next.