Alchenar

Obligatory question for when this happens: have you decided whether to issue Steam keys to current customers to let them transition over to that platform? In case anyone hasn't used Steam and is wondering why - the quality of life improvement from never having to worry about installer .exes and getting automatic patching is something you'll never want to come back from.

Yeah I'd suggest grabbing something like RevoInstaller and doing a full uninstall. Also troubleshooting: are the campaign files in your Documents>Battlefront>Combat Mission>Shock Force 2 folder? Narrows the problem down to know if the files are stored on your computer and the game is refusing to read them or if it's something else.

Okay so to be absolutely clear: the manual is self-contradictory on what is hidden and what is not. A command described to 'detect and mark hidden minefields' is not obvious that it can only be used to target non hidden minefields. This is also literally the only move command that works like a target command. It's inconsistent with how all other controls work, if it worked like other move commands then you'd expect it to be a special form of 'hunt', which is clearly what so many new players expect.

I love how your strategy for clearing mines is to have your squad of engineers stand and work right in front of a platoon of Abrams shooting downrange. I just came to the forum having experienced exactly the same issue. At a minimum it is completely intuitive and not really apparent from the manual that in order to 'mark mines' you have to actually see the mines first, and by 'see' them actually see them even if you 100% know they are there because the briefing and map tell you they are there. Right now the scenario is designed to tell you that CM doesn't handle mines well.

My orders are gone, I put in a ticket at the helpdesk. This might be a bit awkward because my name and my email are the only things I can really use (other than dragging up bank records for transaction numbers) to prove I've actually bought the products I claim I have. Well that, and the fact that they're installed and licensed on my PC right now.

Different circumstances. Cheating in MP is bad. But there's nothing really wrong with people messing about with the stats in their own games. Obviously self-delusion is self-delusion, but it's unclear why anyone following their Wehraboo fantasies to mod their own game should be stopped from doing so. Obviously if they're going to come online and claim that everyone's game should be modified so that the King Tiger has a layer of spaced Aryan superiority between its armour plates then they should be rightly mocked. But there's no virtue in shutting down moddability for the sake of having everyone play the One True Version.

Oops, my bad. But still, there's no reason an IS2 should have any trouble knocking out a KT from any range up to around 2.5-3km, even a non-penetrating hit to the turret will cause enough spalling and internal damage to take it out of the fight.

Because there weren't very many of them and the battlefield isn't exactly a controlled environment? It's just statistically unlikely to expect this evidence to be available when only 500 of the things were ever made, only a certain proportion of those went to the Eastern Front, and a hilariously large proportion had to be abandoned or destroyed by their own crews before they even got into combat because the engine broke or they ran out of fuel. And then we get down to the chance that a KT that actually gets into combat is actually on the same battlefield as an IS2. So the sample size isn't exactly huge, you know? We have the evidence we have, which is that in test conditions at 2.5km an AP hit from an IS2 can penetrate right through a KT turret. Note also that the tests with the D-5 85mm gun showed it could penetrate the front hull at 1km: http://tankarchives.blogspot.ca/2013/03/soviet-85-mm-guns-vs-tigers.html So if the KT couldn't be penetrated from the front in combat, one is left with the puzzling issue of why Soviet testing showed it could be, and why the Soviet tactics manuals for fighting Tigers say 'you should be able to penetrate it from the front from 1km away'. Finally as a side-note to the issue of penetration, one should not forget that a huge proportion of non-penetrating hits in testing caused spalling sufficient to eviscerate most of the crew and knock the tank out anyway.

I presume it's a combination of: 1) TOW-2b having a range of 4.5km whereas the video says they fired the' HELLFIRE II missile from 6.4 km'. 2) Infolink with Apaches.

EnsignExpendable (the guy who writes the blog I linked) is really good for this stuff. He's got access to a lot of archive material nobody else has, mainly because it's his job to research and translate the stuff. I really recommend getting in touch with him. He's also really used to the usual grognard forums arguments, from 'no, the KT was not an unstoppable uber-tank' to 'here is why German and Soviet armour penetration tables have different values' (hint: the Soviet ones are the right ones to use).

When you are bundling out a Javelin launcher to every squad then that's your organic AT capacity. Putting a massive gun on a chassis that can't absorb more than light arms fire does not an AT capacity create. The Bradley has done okay in combat, but that's only because it got to fight Iraqi tanks with TOW missiles from beyond their effective engagement range. And in order to do that it had to be terrible at actually transporting troops. The job of the APC is to move troops rapidly around the battlefield/operational area while attracting a minimum amount of attention. If it's getting into fire-fights then it isn't doing its mission.

Going to the archives: http://tankarchives.blogspot.ca/2013/03/is-2-vs-german-big-cats.html Nothing wrong with an IS2 penetrating a KT's turret at 1km. If anything the inaccurate bit is that the turret doesn't fly right off (engine limitations accepted).

It's like Pentagon Wars all over again. The Army finally gets an APC that does the job of an APC and they're slowly trying to turn it into a Bradley. Ring alarm bells when someone suggest mounting Javelin launchers onto the turret.

So I can believe that a rifle is accurate to x by y target dimensions at a certain range. I can also believe that a riflemen can work a bolt, level a rifle and fire it once every 4-5 seconds. But there's no way in hell that the rifleman in the second scenario is going to be achieving the accuracy in the first. That rapid rifle drill the British army liked to train for is about being able to cause suppression and win the firefight against another rifle-equipped unit, not about having an army of guys shooting down enemy soldiers the moment they appear. Never mind the fact that anyone firing 10-11 rounds a minute is going to shoot through all the ammo they have and find themselves in trouble very rapidly. So it would be nice if the game modelled riflemen from different nationalities and facing different targets varying their rate of fire depending on what they might plausibly have done in real life, but it seems like an incredibly marginal feature and rifle fire seems fine now.

This. The level of spec knowledge on these forums is continuously impressive, but people have a tendency to fixate on an inaccuracy and suggest a fix to it which would completely upset the cart of abstractions and rules the game has in place to produce a plausible end result.

Yeah that's the thing. I get how to play the tactical game. What's annoying is having to stare at a blank screen for an accelerated hour because it's a night battle but the two sides never meet. Or watching tanks show up and having literally no capacity to do anything about it. A couple of games like that in a row and I lose the will to keep on playing.

This isn't an evil conspiracy to turn the game into DOOM, people would just like some kind of visual feedback on what's happening because it helps immersion (and sometimes with vehicles is useful info). I'm unsure that there's really anything to be gained from hit decals on infantry given how small they are. But having said that, I would *love* to see a zombie themed expansion where you have to fight Hitler's undead army that shambles towards your infantry and only dies to headshots.

Yeah this is the thing that gives me hope. While I haven't yet managed to climb over the learning curve of GTOS, I've seen enough posts from other people who have and declare from the other side that it's actually a pretty fun game that I can't dismiss it out of hand.

You guys are all bad at buying video games, I paid $2 for the base game and $1 for an expansion. Despite my criticisms it remains on my hard drive and eventually I'll have another go at breaking into it and I'm open to the idea of buying from Graviteam again.

It's fun to watch, the problem I have with it is that it's a little too good at generating realistic company level engagements on the 1943 Eastern Front - to whit it largely consists of platoons fumbling around a huge barren landscape, occasionally blundering into enemy force. Because of this you can all too often spend an hour long battle (with time acceleration) staring at a screen where absolutely nothing is happening. You can seize objective points and never see the enemy, you can defend them and never see them. On the other hand, because the battles are generated according to the operational level you often encounter unwinnable fights - the first operation involves battered German infantry companies with no heavy weapons getting overrun by Soviet tanks. Sure it happened, but it results in you sitting there with nothing to do. Finally I found it really unclear what the player is actually supposed to do in tactical battles beyond point in the direction you want your guys to go and let the TacAI do the rest. Pretty to watch, but my preference is definitely for a game that asks for a bit more interaction from the player.

It's absolutely a common thing in the video game industry when at the concept stage for people to throw together prototypes in a day or two in order to get a feel for how a developed product might end up playing and what the potential difficulties are. You don't need anything close to a complete design, you just need a sketch to see if what you are thinking about has merit. e: also you really need a grasp on numbers. The wargame genre is small, the proportion of wargame customers who sit on game forums is absolutely tiny (it's about one in ten customers ever register on a forum, far fewer make more than one post). A project wholly advertised on a few forum threads could only ever get a few dozen donations at most. The numbers thing also goes right to the core of what's dodgy about the kickstarter: it's not enough money to pay for one programmer. But there's a team of 10? Given that this is a project that's obviously going to rely on large donations of programmer time in order to get off the ground it seems fair to question why none of that has happened already.

Well there's a big warning sign in itself - you have a team that's been 'meeting for months' and there's no code to show for it. That's not an onerous request - a barebones prototype for a game is something you'd expect someone to be able to knock up over a weekend. If after months and months of work you have nothing to show for it but a design document that could have been knocked up in an hour then the reasonably impartial observer has every right to question the competence of the team behind the project. I don't think this is something that could ever be suited to kickstarter or similar early-access programmes, but if it were then the point to ask people for money would be after showing Steve a prototype and getting the go ahead to try and get the thing to work with CM.

There's isn't a viable option on the table though, that's what he's saying. And he's right. 42 people pledging for this kickstarter isn't 42 people having an interest in an operational game, it's 42 people having poor judgement with their money. As it happens I think there probably isn't a viable market for a operational plug-in game to Combat Mission. It's niche of a niche market. But as far as operational wargames go I have Decisive Campaigns, Flashpoint Campaigns, Command Ops, a whole range of options open to me.

I'll admit, it was a trap to see who would start apologizing for the Nazis. It did not take long. e: and yeah, I'm fine with them existing in games because they got the cream of the equipment and it's fun to play with formations full of rare equipment. But the number of people crawling out of the woodwork to fetishise people who were committed Nazis and were hated by all sides (including the German army) for being utter ****s who broke all the rules of war really is disturbing.

As long as the OP started talking about the 122mm vs the KT, here's another translated Russian archive: http://tankarchives.blogspot.ca/2013/03/is-2-vs-german-big-cats.html Key juicy quotes: "Shot #1. Target: upper front plate. Shell: 122 mm HE-fragmentation. Result: spalling across an area 300 mm by 300 mm. The welding seam between the upper front plate and the machine gun port burst on 3/4 of its circumference. Internal bolts holding the machine gun ball were torn off. The welding seam between the upper front plate and the right side burst, and the right side was displaced by 5 mm. The tank caught fire internally." "Shot #2. Target: upper front plate. Shell: 122 mm AP flat type. Propellant: reduced. Distance: 2700 m. Result: dent 165 mm by 260 mm, 60 mm deep. The shell ricocheted." Well, looks like shooting at nearly 3 kilometers out with a reduced propellant charge won't do you any good. Let's consider a more realistic scenario. "Shot #3. Target: upper front plate. Shell: 122 mm AP flat type. Distance: 500 m. Result: dent 310 mm by 300 mm, 100 mm deep. On the rear side, a piece of armour 160 mm by 170 mm and 50 mm deep cracked off. The welding seam between the upper front plate and hull roof burst. All seams between the upper and lower front plates burst. The seam between the lower left hull and the left side of the hull burst. The driver's observation device was torn off." "Shot #34. Target: turret front. Shell: 122 mm AP pointed type. Propellant: reduced. Distance: 2500 m. Result: A piece 700 mm by 220 mm was torn off the turret front. The shell penetrated completely. The roof of the turret is missing a piece 460 mm by 300 mm. The rear of the turret has two cracks through its entire thickness, through the welding seam of the roof and left turret side, 1100 mm in length, and on the turret roof, 1350 mm in length."