Hensworth

I've just finished the first battle in Scottish corridor and saw both things happen. In one case one guy was left alive in a bunker and could neither be killed nor persuaded to leave, no matter how many penetrating hits the thing took. Since it was positioned inside one of the objective areas, it cost me control of that objective. The crew did bail within seconds of coming under fire from the rear from a second bunker I found. So it looks like there's a problem when there's one guy left.

What happens if your PC crashes and you can't unlicense the instance you had installed on it ?

Can you see fog ?

The utterances of all sides in all CM games are all fairly litteral and uninspired translations of the original English exclamations. So if you want to know what they are saying, sit yourself down in front of your PC, play all the wav files from CMAK for the Brits or the Americans in sequence and then do the same for the Germans. They are saying exactly the same thing. Once you've done that, you can go for the Masters Degree and learn Russian based on your German. Fire => Feuer => Agon Enemy => Feind => Vrak Enemy tank => Feindliche Panzer => Vratcheski Tank

I have Vista and CMBB and CMAK both work fine on it. It does indeed take an enormous amount of time for the installation to start but as others have indicated this is not only a problem with CM. My impression is that it has to do with the exe that has to be started to run the installation because Vista checks any exe that you start to see if it is not malignant and to ask you if you are sure you want to run it (irritatingly, I know). So if you have one huge humdinger of an installation file, as is the case with CM, it takes forever. The only problem I have with running it on my new PC is that I can't see fog anymore. But that has to do with BFC using fog table emulation which, from my research, appears to have been a shortlived fad and quite an exotic technology not likely to be supported by any new GFX cards. To all the smartasses : some people simply have to walk into a store and take what's on offer. They do not know : a) where to get a replacement operating system that doesn't cost a fortune how to install that OS on their PC If you have been blessed with the 'talent' to overcome this hindrance, good for you. Perhaps you would care to share your great knowledge with us lesser mortals instead of merely ridiculing us for not being as savvy as you.

In Vista you are not allowed to write any files to C:/Programs or any subfolders thereof. You're supposed to work in user specific folders exclusively. Unfortunately the PBEM folder for CMx1 games installs under the main game folder on C:/Programs. When loading PBEM files there is no problem because you get a file browser to go look for your file. The PBEM files the game generates though are put hardcoded into the PBEM folder that's created with the install. Is it at all conceivable that we might have a small patch which will allow you to put generated PBEM files where you want them ?

Trying to put a few things together : CM:SF has a greatly asymmetrical setup whereby one side doesn't really have a hope in hell to beat the other in a straight, visors open fight. So the scenarios have to be designed in an asymmetrical way to give the poorly equipped Syrians a chance to win the scenario by claiming victory points that the Americans can't afford to lose. This generally makes the survival of individual men and pieces of kit much more important than it generally was in CMx1, and the loss of them through 'freaks of abstraction' much less acceptable to the player. You might lose a King Tiger by having it get hit through a building in CMx1 and seriously endanger your chances of winning. But if your M1A1 gets hit through a building in CMx2, you may have lost the game there and then because you had to keep that tank alive. So it's not the glitches in and of themselves that are the problem, it's those glitches in an overall game environment that makes them much more important. Maybe the overall model is much more accurate than the CMx1 model was, but the accuracy hasn't increased enough so as to make the much more detailed world of CM:SF work as well as the somewhat more abstracted world of CMx1 worked with its less accurate model. The CMx1 level of abstraction worked particuarly well for the East Front, where an individual life wasn't worth anything and hundreds of thousands died an anonymous and forgotten death. I think this perfect match between model and scale has a lot to do with what makes CMBB the favorite of so many so far. From reading what I've read here, I feel that CM:SF does that job of matching model to scale a lot worse and that's why I'm not going to buy it (I know that not owning the game is instantly going to invalidate my opinion in the eyes of many, so be it).

Just because the date of the last post is fairly recent doesn't mean there's anything going on in there. Even this forum manages an average of 4 posts a day. If you really want to get an idea of whether or not there's any activity, you need to not only look at the date but also by how much the post counter goes up over a certain period.

You can't. The only thing you can do is take your old map and trim off the stuff you don't want anymore using the buttons to increase and decrease the size of the map. Holding down Shift or not switches the side of the map terrain is taken away from or added to, top or bottom, left or right. When you're left with the bit of map you want to retain, you build the new map around it.

Well said.

Battlefront are not developing this game. They are only going to publish it, same kind of deal as ToW.

People are getting too carried away with this anyway. No system that automatically determines win / loss is ever going to make for a realistic feeling campaign. Most battles are not overwhelmingly won or lost but somehwere in between. If not there would be little point in playing them out in CM. Yet at the end of the battle the computer needs a binary decision about who won and who lost. So one side is almost always going to get more than it deserved (full control of the hex / square / whatever when actually the other side still had capable forces left) while the other gets screwed. Anyone who's played or GMed in metacampaigns will know about the endless bitching that goes on about the outcome of battles, when human GMs take infinitely more into account when they resolve the outcome than an automated system ever could. The same problems that bedevil the CM operations concept will crop up in any other game that uses discrete tiles that you do or do not control. Example : you can push across a river and establish a sizeable bridgehead, but if it isn't big enough it will be taken away from you.

The like minded people will know it's pointless to comment. However, if I had to give out experience points to BFC, I'd add them to the big 'software development' pile and expect no miracles in terms of 'diplomacy'.

Wouln't have touched it with a bargepole. If I hadn't bought and shelved ToW I might have pre-ordered it now to get a feel for the engine, but one purchase of a game I don't play is enough support for BFC. Contented myself with getting a feel for the engine from playing the demo and wasn't impressed enough to get over the 'let's go bonk some ragheads' subject matter. [ August 23, 2007, 07:07 AM: Message edited by: Sgt_Kelly ]

If they're regular or better, tell your men to hide and soak up the mortar barrage. Even in scattered trees you shouldn't take more than the odd casualty if you're hugging the dirt. If this freaks you out pull your men back a bit or move them sideways if possible. Wait out the barrage, take out the spotted ATG, then exploit the hole in his AT defense.