A Scen Design AAR PDF Book

8/17/2019 A Scen Design AAR PDF Book

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The Sheriff of Oosterbeek

A Scenario Design DAR/AAR

Jon Sowden


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CMBN – Market Garden

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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

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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.


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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 positivefeedback 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 ismy 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’l l 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.


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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 ScenarioDesign 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!


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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.


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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 19 th 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 tothose 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.


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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.


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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


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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 ofWar. 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


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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 thebattle. 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, 2 nd Armoured Infantry Battalion, 32 nd 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


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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 12 th 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 anotheractivity, 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


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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 eachplayer. 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.


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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 theguns - properly laid out. The WW2talk site has excellent, CM-relevant details on all UK

TOEs for north-west Europe.


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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 1

st

A/L Light Regt, and 2

nd

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.


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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-eastOosterbeek 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


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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 280 th 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


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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 onthe 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


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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 asemi-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.


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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.


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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!


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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.


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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.


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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 mapis 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 runalong 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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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 mostnatural 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.

So, first up, we need to

stretch the CM map to the

same size as the overlay.

Press the + and – buttons

to stretch the map in width

and height, and when it

gets to the correct size the

overlay will look right.

Holding down the SHIFT

key while clicking + or - will

increase/decrease the map

in 80m (10 tiles) steps

rather than the standard

16m (2 tiles).

After resetting the map’s

PROTIP: expand the map equally to the right and left, top and

bottom so the original 320m sq map is in the centre of the newly

sized map. The default 320 x 320m map can only be increased on

any one side to 2160m. If you want a map over this size you need

to increase it in the other direction. Increasing the map on both

sides at the outset will prevent the problem of wanting to add just a

few more metres to one side of the map, only to bump up against

the 2160m max. While you can, at this time, add metres on the

other side you can't move the map features

PROTIP: press o (little ‘oh’, for ‘overlay’) to alter the

transparency of the overlay to make it much easier to see what

you’re doing. Depending on what you’re working on you’ll find a

sharper or dimmer overlay image more useful. The o key does not

work in elevation set mode.


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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 thereal-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.


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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.


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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

relatively straightforward,

although a design compromise

is needed here. The real rail

line runs at a bearing of about

20-25°, but CM rail can only beat multiples of 45°. I can either

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,

PROTIP: in the 2D Map Editor window CTRL-

RIGHTCLICK will cycle through directional facing for the

selected terrain type. This means you don't have to go up and

press one of the arrows at the top of the UI to change facing,

just use the key combo to cycle through them. This works forall terrain that can be oriented (such as buildings), but is

especially useful for roads and walls.


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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 somefield 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 waitfor 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.


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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 forcreating 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.


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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.


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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 asKate 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 thechurch 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.


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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.


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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

subtle, but this is yet

another example of storytelling. The story I want to

tell to the player here is

‘this is all one building. It

belongs together, and you

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.

PROTIP: use broad swathes of terrain types to quickly and

roughly draw in fields, wooded areas and so on to make it

easier to visualise the finished map and the spatial

relationships on it. Then go back and adjust edges and

terrain types as required. Use some kind of reminder to

identify which sections of the map are finished, and which

are only roughed in.


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Holland has some unique

architectural features, and the

Market Garden module allows the

designer to reflect that with a

variety of flat and tapered roofstyles that better reflect what is

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.

PROTIP: to get a door on the upper floors, use ALT-

CTRL-LEFTCLICK as you’re cycling through the

door/window combinations. This forces every floor on

that side of a building to have the same setup as theground floor, so when you have a door on the ground

floor there’ll be a door on each of the upper stories too.


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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.


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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 toslightly 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 tofigure 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 theBenedendorpsweg beyond the rail underpass) where it exits off the east map edge “to

ARNHEM ROAD BRIDGE 3.0km”


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• 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


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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

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