Overview
Want to “git gud”?
CMSF2 for you
So you want to “git gud” in a Combat Mission game, in this case CMSF2. Here are a few tips for
you to get you started.
“Engine 4.0 Manual”, the real manual
It is in your install location, in the “Manuals” folder, it is the real(!) manual, the one on the
store page only has the basic tutorial and description of units and weapons.
The engine 4.0 manual has all the rest, everything you need to know about how commands work, the editor, C2, … it explains it all, give it a shot it will not fail you.
The Controls
To be honest, the default way the controls work is not ideal, either you have to switch tabs with a hotkey or mouse and have one and the same button do 3 or 4 different things depending on what tab you have selected. They called that the “realative” system back when they came up with it.
Again i think it is fair to call it nothing but terrible. In oder to save you a lot of time klicking, you best use 5 minutes and go to “Menue” and “Controls” and put down your own “absolute” hotkeys.
That way you can lay waypoints, switch orders on the fly, and use target commands and what not with out ever clicking any UI button, is is very fluid and works by far the best.
Here some examples how i set it up, you can pick your own.
W,A,S,D for camera forward, back, left, right, with mouse you tilt up/down and turn it
F -> (F)ast
Q -> (Q)uick
U -> Hunt
I -> Assault
N -> Move/Normal
H -> (H)ide
E -> Slow/Crawl
B -> (B)op Smoke
Z -> Open/Close hatches
O -> Rotate/Face
G -> (G)rab = Acquire
K -> Cover Arc
M -> Cover Armor Arc
T -> (T)arget
Y -> Taget Light
J -> Target Briefly
C -> Cancel stacked order like rotate or target/Cease Fire
V -> Turn camera 180° (super usefull!)
You can configure more, but these are the commands you use 90% of the time. Once you have set these you can control like 90% of everything you do in a scenario without ever clicking a button in the UI.
You can move the camera wtih WASD, while you do that you lay waypoints with mouse and switch order type on the fly with hotkeys to change order type and so on.
Believe me on this one, clicking everything all the time, that is nonesense, it does waste so much time and does not flow. Take 5 minutes to set these as you like them and you will see it is so much better!
The button promts on the orders buttons in the UI show the hotkeys you have set, so if you can not remember all at once, you can always look at the order button and it does show you, after 2-3 times you remember and just use the keyboard button.
(First two pages is all you need)
WEGO is your friend, not your enemy.
WEGO mode is the way to go for most players. Its replay gives you maximal situational awareness and based on that intel you can formulate the best possible action for the next turn(60seconds).
If you are new to WEGO mode you will need to do some adjusting and get a feeling for its flow
and how it rolls along, but soon you will reap the benefits of useing it.
Most all oldtimers and long time players play the game in WEGO mode, if you play realtime
nobody can help you, things will just blow up and you wonder what happened 😉
That said, there are players that enjoy the game in realtime, and if you play it like a Total War game, Real time with Pause where you pause a lot to give order, it can be done, but it has drawbacks, as said most prefere the WEGO system, “it just works”.
And it is very enjoyable to watch the action down on the ground from all sides if something cool happened, you miss all that in realtime play as you are constantly busy doing something somewhere on the map.
Fog of War(FoW)
The game offers you several FoW settings, i recommend and assume, you as connoisseur of realistic games, play on the highest one, “Iron”, it is not as bad as you think and all the lower ones are for “girly man” anyway 😉
Disregard what the manual says about it, you do not have to jump from “unit to unit”, you can see all your units at all times. Only when you have a friendly unit selected, you see only what this unit can see. You will see, it just makes sense. They should fix the manual on that one.
These FoW settings do not change anything about the units, their performance or how their weapons work, it does not make the AI harder or easier.
It does modulate how hard or easy it is to spot enemy units and how much
information you get on the enemy unit when you klick its icon.
It does reduce time needed to call indirect support or air missions, that aspect of the game does get easier on low FoW settings.
While on an easy setting, when you spot an infantry unit, you know right away it is for
example a HQ(flag icon) or a FO(binocular icon) and when you klick it you can see its
experience level, see the full amount of soldiers the unit has and such information, while on
the highest setting you only get a generic infantry icon and when you klick it, all the
additional information is blanked out.
Also on higher settings you do not(!!!) spot the full unit all the time, if for example only 1
soldier in the unit shoots at you(often a RPG-7 shooting your vehicles), only that 1 person may
get spotted,… now lets say your troops kill that 1 person, the enemy icon can be gone now but
that does NOT mean there is nobody left, there could be more guys in that location, your
troops just did not spot anyone else but that 1 rpg guy there!
The result is that on high FoW settings you often can not be absolutley sure if you killed them all or if there is someone left till you are quiet close or right at the location. It introduces a certain
uncertainty that mimics reality on a battlefield quiet well and does spice things up a bit.
FS3 Sensor Package
The recon Strykers and M707 Knight HMMWV have the FS3 sensor package “box” on top, in order to get the benefits from it, you need to unbutton/turn out the crew so they can use that thing. It does look like this.
(FS3 Sensor Package on a recon Stryker)
Vehicle Offroad Rating/Bogging Down
Vehicles have a few ratings to them, Speed, Power Offroad, and Turning.
While it is nice to have Speed, Power and Turning, in the end the Offroad rating is the most important one, it tells you how easy a vehicles boggs down.
When a vehicle is bogged down it does try to free itself, it does that by itself, but once it is bogged and fails to free itself, it gets immobilized, and that is bad news. It means the vehicle can no longer move for the rest of the scenario!
Wheeled APC´s are the worst offenders here, they are heavy and have wheels, they have a offroad rating of 2, that is not great. This is for Strykers or LAV´s for example.
Abrams tanks come with a offroad rating of 3, bradleys have 4.
So how do you avoid getting bogged and possibly immobilzed?
You need to pay attention to the ground type, each different ground typ has a different chance to bog down a vehicle.
I do not think the exact values are available.
Very bad for offroad “2” vehicles is “Mud” or “Forest” surface, or that little 2D water streams, things like that. Also “Rocky” terrain does bog down your vehicles quicker.
If terrain looks bad for vehicles it often is, so try to drive around the worst spots or dont send the wheeled APC´s into mud. If you see mud, try to stay away from it with any vehicle, offroad ratin 3 Abrams like to get stuck in mud too.
(Offroad Ratin 2 HMMWV “immobilized” in Mud, vehicle wheels are slightly sunk in and unit base turns yellow)
Supression.
Take note here, small arms do not cause friendly fire in the game, only explosives like a Mk19
AGL/Machine Cannons and upwards do cause friendly fire. So you can supress a building with rifle fire and assualt it with another unit. The assualting unit will not take damage from rifle fire.
In the game, the more incomming fire is directed toward an enemy the more supression stacks up
and the more soldiers in the units are in “cowering” state(you can also observe this on your
own troops that get shot at), means they do not shoot at you or react to things when they are
cowering. Their spotting ability is also greatly reduced.
However this is never a 100% thing, while it does reduce the likelyness of return fire while
you assault a building some individuals of the units may get up and pop off a few shots, and
if your assualting unit is close at that time, as it often is, death may happen. Dont be let down by that, it happens.
Soft factors do influence this;
Unit levels like green, regular, veteran… and “motivation”. The more experienced and more
motivated the less effect supression has and its effect decays faster.
A “Green” Uncon unit with “Fanatic” motivation(highest one), may shoot inaccurate sprays but they are hard to supress effectively.
Or a “Crack” unit with “low” motivation does perform well in combat but is reluctant to keep
their heads up when fire does pour in.
Building Penetration
The game does pay attention to penetration of building walls to some extent and the different performance of the calibers, the 5.56mm and 5.45mm weapons are not terribly effective againt buildings, especially from a distance.
On close range the 7.62×39 from the AKM/AK47 does outperform the 5.56mm quiet a bit in that regard, it does punch through walls better.
The syrian special forces use AK74 and the 5.45mm suffer from the same problem as the 5.56mm.
For you as blue player that means that for supressive fire from your infantry your MG teams are best, the 7.62×51 does go into buildings way better and most important, they carry that punch out to longer ranges. On red side your PKM teams fill that same role, the 7.62x54r gets the job done.
If you hose down a building from 400-500 or even 600 meters with your PKM or M240 machine gun(s) it still does something at least, the 5.56 is already completely useless at that range.
Waypoint commands/Orders
Your plan can and often will benefit from micromanageing waypoint chains and adding certain
orders to waypoints to better control what a unit will do in a 60 second turn.
For example, you can order a tank to drive to a waypoint, have it engage a building in area
fire while stationary at that waypoint for X seconds with the pause command and after the
pause is over it moves on to another waypoint with a rotate command or cover arc
which will cancel the area fire. Or use target briefly 15 seconds+Pause 15 seconds on that waypoint.
Or instead you can just add another area fire command+pause to the next waypoint so it does fire at another location.
You can make a “shoot and scoot” action by giving a vehicle a waypoint to peak over a crest,
have it pause for X seconds and reverse back behind the crest with the revers command after
the pause is over.
(I put many things on one waypoint chain in the screenshot, that is just to demonstrate)
With this you can either shoot and scoot or try(things may “Blow Up™”) to bait out enemy weapons like a slow flying ATGM that takes several seconds to reach your unit.
For example if you expose your unit for 15 seconds in total and the ATGM team does spot your
unit after 7 seconds, takes 5 seconds to aim the weapon, that leaves only 3 seconds for
the missile to reach your unit which may not be enough if the distance is right.
And while that ATGM slams harmlessly into the dirt some of your infantry units may spot the
launch and give you its position, next turn you can direct weapons onto the ATGM position if
they are still alive.
It may not be the best option but sometimes that is the best you got.
In short, get creative and use the things at your disposal to the fullest, you are not
supposed to just lasso all units and attack move onto the enemy like in an RTS but to manage
each unit to is fullest potential.
Target/Target Light/Target Briefly
In this game, units do engage the enemy by themself if they can see them and think their hit
chances are fine. They are quiet reactive to threats that do pop up or take cover.
Also that way an infantry unit for example can fire at 2 units at the same time.
That means most of the time you do NOT need or want to order each and every unit where and
what to fire at. You just make sure your troops can see the enemy, and they will engage the
enemy just fine by themselfs. Same for vehicles.
You do use these commands when you want to;
– supress a location, if it is a house, make sure you target the right floor if possible
– when you want to fire at any location that has no enemy or no spotted enemy in it
– you want to destroy a wall segment with gunfire
– an enemy is in “reverse slope” and your unit is reluctant to fire because of bad hit chance.
– you want to force usesage of a weapon, like a javelin team that does not fire on a PKM technical
420 4 Life
Never forget or underestimate the power of smoke in the game. When you start a scenario make
sure to look at the “Conditions” tab and inform yourself about the wind direction and strenght.
Will your smoke blow toward the enemy or your side? Will it disperse quickly or linger a long
time?
Where to aim a smoke mission depends on the direction the smoke will go when it builds up. And
the strenght of the wind gives you an idea about how long your time window is to use the
concealment provided by the smoke.
It can be a very valuable tool to get to places while denying the enemy shots. The
individual vehicle smoke can conceal a unit so you can dismount troops or break contact with the enemy. You dont have to wait till you “need” smoke, sometimes just use it preemtively to avoid a sticky situation.
You can build up lot of smoke with mortars and artilery, move into exposed positions or
through an exposed aproach and set up things, and when the smoke clears and the shooting
starts your units are prone and in optimal position ready to fight. Only drawback, it does
cost some time to wait for arty smoke to arive if you did not plan ahead for it.
To use the US vehicle smoke(works very well on strykers, bradley smoke builds up more slowly)
to mask your dismounting troops, have a “pop smoke” command stacked on the last waypoint where the vehicle stops and maybe even have the infantry have a few seconds extra pause so the
cloud can build up, and they can dismount without getting shot at.
.
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White is regular smoke, vehicles with thermal visual systems(Like your Abrams and many other vehicles) can see, and so, also fire through it.
That means you can have your Abrams pop smoke, and while it is concealed, it can spot tanks and things through the smoke and destroy them. (Beware syrian AT14 ATGM, T90 and T72 TURMS-T have thermals too, but they are rare in scenarios)
Brown(ish) smoke is multispectral smoke(like on strykers), it not only blocks visual light but also other non visual spectrums like IR/heat radiation, that means thermals can NOT see through
it.
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Black smoke; Almost all syrian vehicles use regular smoke, they do not have
multispectral smoke(T90 has for example). Their smoke on the russian vehicles is black.
Also their smoke launcher use follows a different doctrine.
US smoke launchers are used to protect the individual vehicle. The smoke launchers on the
russian vehicles are made to fire the smoke ahead to mask the advance of a formation. You can
use that to best effect if you fire a volley of at least a platoon, 3 to 4 vehicles, the more
the better.
After a turn(depends on conditions) a smoke wall formed where you can advance into it and fire
another smoke volley or dismount troops or so.
In game the western doctrine is mostly more usefull as you can use the smoke on an individual
vehicle to protect it, but sometimes the ability to hurl smoke with several APC´s, toward the
enemy positions and smoke the path of advance is quiet usefull too.
Just remember the difference, if you have BMP´s just dont try to use its smoke to protect
the individual vehicle, it will not work well or not at all.
If you want to use smoke with syrian vehicles, always fire at least full platoon volleys toward
the enemy for best effect.
(3 BMP-1 launched smoke toward the intersection ahead to provide concealment for their dismounts)
( One minute later)
Split Squads
The closer you get to the enemy, the more dangerouse it is to use “full” squads, if a RPG gets fired into your squad, it is often not a pleasent experience.
So best is to split your squads into 2 fire teams with the “Split Squad” command.
You can recombine the teams at any time when you send them into the same action spot, same vehicle or same building, they recombine after short time.
If you do not want to bother with the “MOUT” squad structure in case you get these in a scenario, that are the US Army squads that come in 3 fire teams instead of 2, you can hit “Combine” button, to combine them into a regular 2 team squad, and after that you use split squad and you get the 2 fire teams.
How to hold fire
Simple, use very short cover arc.
Some units, like your infantry HQ units or Forward Observers/FIST/JTAC units, they are too valuable and are not supposed to fire at the enemy with their rifles just by chance since it does drasticly increase the chance that they get spotted.
In order to keep them from fireing casualy onto enemy tropps and giving away their position,
give them a very short cover arc, like 10-20 meters. With that arc you can also command them
to look in a certain direction.
That way you can have your forward observer on the top floor of a building, have the whole
unit look toward the enemy direction and direct arty/mortar/air support onto the enemy while
they do not fire their rifles and so do not draw fire onto themselfs.
Preplanned Artilery or Air Mission
When you call offmap mortars or artilery fire or air mssions in the game, there is always some delay, it can be as low as ~3 turns for 60mm NATO mortars and as long as 15-20+ turns for syrian artilery pices like D30 or M46 guns. On easy FoW settings this is reduced a lot.
The only exception is when you order the strike while you are still in the setup phase.
In this phase, an arty/mortar or Air strike is considered a “pre planned” strike.
You can only order that in the setup phase and you can give it an extra time delay if you wish.
The delay on that strike will be 1 minute(unless you add extra delay yourself), means at the
end of turn 1 the shells will fall. You can order the strike or several anywhere on the
map also if you do not have Line of Sight to the position(!).
(Pre Planned Missions, all from one FO called from out of LoS)
This is a great way to call down massive smoke clouds with all your arty pices at once over a
large area, or use the big guns that are not reactive(high time delay on call) to shell
suspected enememy positions or objective areas where enemy presence is likely.
You will not need to use that function often, most of the time at least when playing as Blue
it is better to keep the arty and use it on demand on spotted and confirmed enemy positions to
get the most out of it, but if you play battles as Red(Red on Red battles are very enjoyable)
where you have arty pices with high time delay on call, it is often smart to use them that
way.
You could use half pre planned and keep some shells for later. In any case, syrian
big guns are not reactive enough to engage individual spotted units, by the time they fire you
probably alread destroyed that enemy by other means unless the target is far ahead of the
advance.
Syrian mortars on the other hand are another matter, they are not so bad to use.
Extra Ammo and things in vehicles
I hope it is clear but i just mention it real quick, do not just give a squad all the extra
ammo and equipment in a vehicle just because,… all that stuff has weight and it will drain
the unit quick if they are loaded too heavy. The less weight they carry the longer they can
use tireing movements(especially fast and crawling) before they get tired or even get
exhausted.
A unit needs to rest quiet a few turns to go back from exhausted status and it
degrades performace when they are tired so best is to avoid that.
Teams that are mostly stationary can take some more ammo, like machinegun teams that just stay put most of the time and fire and do overwatch, you can give them some good amount of extra ammo that is no problem but units that move around a lot benefit from a light load.
So for blue the javelin if you want it and like 500 extra 5.56 and for red some extra rpg´s
and 7.62×39 and 7.62x54R for the PKM, that is fine, just dont load them with everything there
is in the vehicle, you can always send in a team later and pick up more 😉
Map size and amount of turns
When you start a scenario, take note of the map size and how much time you have to achive your
goal. If a rather small map gives you lot of time, the scenario designer wants you to advance
quiet carefully, often for good reason.
Make use of that time, just because the map looks small and you could be at
the objectives very quickly, does not mean that it is a good idea to try rush there.
For example the stock scenario in the base game, “Al Amarah”, you will have it, it features a
rather small map but it gives you a generous 90 turns to win it. That tells the experienced CM
player that the scenario will be quiet a bit more tricky even if it does not look like that at first glance.
There are never any extra points for winning fast, so use the time well. If you get the last objective in the last few turns, but took few casualties to do so, that is quiet fine.
“Cheese”
You can use some gamey things if you want that. For small arms it is possible to fire through
vehicles of your own side while the enemy can not, means your infantry can fire “through” your strykers/bradles/BMP´s for example(this is done cause of AI). You can use this to block enemy small arms fire, at least partially, while your guys can fire back “through” the vehicle.
Its use it pretty limited, but it is possible, you know it now.
Play the game
I guess a lot more can be said about the game, it does have a certain complexity to it, but in
the end you just need to gain some experience, play some scenarios and/or just jump into the
“Task Force Thunder” US Army campaign(base game campaign), it starts out with some medium
sized but quiet easy missions.
Over time you gain knowlage about how to aproach different situations in game in ways to pull
through them without getting destroyed in the process.
It may be a no-brainer but before you end a orders phase, make a save, if something goes
horribly wrong in the 60sec realtime phase, you can reload the save and adjust some orders and
try different things, there is no shame in that, especially if you are new to all this.
The better you get the more you can just let the game flow and avoid reloading saves.
I hope you could learn at least something from all this that prepares you a little bit better
for your next scenario.
Enjoy the game and have fun!