Faelwolf

+1 on that, my old coonhound is so nearsighted now that I wonder how he can walk in a straight line, but he can still trail everything that went through the yard the previous night by scent alone, and show me every spot they even paused for a moment. My shepherd/rottie mix can't do it, but he can tell me by sight and hearing if one of my neighbors is sitting on their porch on the other side of the woods. Between the two, nothing even comes near my place that I don't know about.

I haven't run into any bugs yet especially as I am not a scenarios designer, and don't push the limits of the game as a player either, but I did want to add to this thread that I bought the 4.0 upgrade primarily for the new AI, and I am a very satisfied customer! No more ant lines running headlong into enemy fire, and I noticed that on arrival, they get to position faster, and start going to work on the enemy quicker too. It may just be my imagination, but it also seems that both sides are quicker to respond to incoming fire, and returning fire as well. All in all, a great improvemnt. The other features are icing on an already delicious cake. I am sure that any bugs will get ironed out, there are always a few with every release, and this great game just keeps getting better.

Campaign would get pretty slow for several months before the bulge. How many patrol actions would be needed to simulate the ghost army being stalled just short of the Rhine, while Monty got all the fuel and supplies? We would need someone to make a sound file mod of Patton cursing and screaming about it too.

Having just gone through this exact thing within the past hour, I can give a couple tips, and my experience. I can't complain too much, my old drive had 13.5K+ hours on it, and was still limping along as best it could, but it was time to replace. I downloaded the 3.0 patch, which gave me the 9GB file. Once it downloaded, I did the install, which put a bunch of icons on my desktop. One of them is for the activator. I have my keys in a .txt file I created, which made the process a lot easier. If you don't have something similar, you can copy and paste from your account on battlefield.com, so they are not lost. Goofy thing with the activator to be aware of, at least it's what happened to me. It will ask for the serial # of the CMBN game, which looks like it is asking for the original serial #. It is not, it wants the serial for the 3.0 update. This will give you the base game, updated to 3.11. Don't launch yet, if you own the other modules, you need to close the activator, and re-open it again to be able to add another serial. Do this for each module you own, then launch once they are all in. It won't hurt if you launch early, but you won't have access to the other modules until you run the activator again, so best to just knock it out. Also, I had an odd graphics thing where it didn't tell me what modules are active, it's like there is a header, but the info doesn't get put in underneath it. Not a big deal, as there aren't that many modules to track, but it could use a fix, along with the lack of an ability to active more than one module at a time. So in summary the interface is a bit goofy and confusing, but it sure beats the old system of having to figure out installation order and hope you didn't foul it up! I would also prefer not to have so many icons on my desktop to have to clean up when I am done, but that's also not a major problem, just an annoyance. Edit to add: Nice K-Bar is it a genuine Camillus?

And this is why I skipped the vehicle pack, and now the update. There is nothing wrong with my install, I am not a pirate, and having paid good money for the base game and modules, don't appreciate going through this sort of hassle. So, if this is the way I am going to be treated, my very limited spare cash will go elsewhere. If BF wants to go with a different DRM, more power to them, but put it on a new game, don't screw up existing games.

Yes, this is a training film, designed to teach basic tactics of offensive employment for heavy machine guns. All training films are staged, the old ones more entertainingly so, by our standards. Yes, there is a certain "Rah Rah" factor as well, but that's to be expected. You don't teach your troops that they're a bunch of losers and everyone's going to die! Despite the fact that no plan survives first contact with the enemy, it's good to have a plan, and a basic knowledge of how to employ weapons. And yes, they do gloss over the shortcomings, some of them try to overlook glaring shortcomings. Try this one, and notice how they try to pass over the ineffectiveness of the 37mm against tanks. (It's also a pretty good overview of infantry weapons of the U.S. in WW2) Notice they don't ignore it's weakness against frontal armor, they try to trivialize it. And frangible grenades?! A bunch of volatile, self igniting liquid carried in your pocket in a glass bottle designed to break. I'll pass, thanks!

Yeah, Zeno is my "go to" guy for anything WW2 film related, so far as training films etc. He's a great resource for era-made stuff, and along with the info, some of the training films are both entertaining and unintentionally humorous (at least by today's standards) I first found him looking for training films for WW2 aircraft, trying to get a leg-up in Air Warrior (and later, Aces high) If you know your weapons, you can also spot how they gloss over some of the weapon shortcomings in some of the films as well. Obviously, you don't want a training film that says "this gun/plane/whatever sucks, good luck" but I get a smile when I see some of the shine-ola going on at times. Look for Ronald Reagan in a number of them, iirc he did a lot of work for the Army Signal Corps during the war, along with a lot of other B list actors, and a few A list ones as well. Also, if anyone's missed it, there is a great parody of these films on DVD, (modern made) called "Military Intelligence and You" that is especially fun if you've seen a lot of these originals The blind/area fire in the film does show a relatively minor shortcoming in CMBN, I think the LoS restriction we have lessens the abilities of the guns a little. Perhaps we could have blind fire at reduced effectiveness or something. But, I am no programmer, and it certainly isn't a game-breaker for me. Given the requirements for pre-planning and placement pointed out in the film, I should think any blind fire capability would have to be for defensive positions or initial placement, and lost if the guns are moved. So again, not that big a deal to not have it at all in my view. I noticed that after the guns were moved up, they relied on LoS for targeting, which we have modeled quite well with the area fire command. The improvements in V2 to machine guns gave us better penetration and suppression effects, which I think better models the beaten zone than V1 did. So no complaints.

Found this on YouTube and thought I'd share. Don't know if it's been posted somewhere before. U.S. War Dept. training film with some good info.

I would much rather pay $10 to get the new features added to the game I have, in a theater that I am interested in; than to have to pay $50 for a new game to have those features in a theater I may not be interested in as much. Being on a fixed income, I don't have the luxury of buying all the games as they come out, either. For the foreseeable future, it is all I can do to keep up with the modules for this one. It certainly helps to know when I do buy a module that it is not going to be made obsolete in a few months when a new game comes out. This is the only gaming company I am aware of that makes the new features available for older games and not require the purchase of the new one. I do not mind paying a small upgrade fee, especially when that money is going to keep the company in business, and result in more features being made available. This is a development cycle I am happy to stand behind. It also has the benefit of continuing support. How many of us have old games tucked away somewhere that were abandoned by their developer long ago (or not long after release) because version 2/3/etc. came out? Certain companies are notorious for this, and I made a point of not buying any of their games. Frankly, they are also notorious for not supporting their current games, but I digress. One simple fact remains, however. No one is forced to buy the upgrade. If they are happy with the feature set they have, the game will not refuse to load without the additional purchase.

Motorcycles, esp. the German sidecar with machine gun mount, horses, and horse-drawn vehicles. I imagine the artwork and animation for horses and horse-drawn vehicles would be out of reach at this time though.

Nah, there's already one running on the hot air coming out of Washington D.C. It does alright, but the real money is in the compost!

Yeah, and I wish Aris would make a downloadable multi-pack, say one for Allies, one for Axis, or bundles by expansion, so we can just do a few downloads and simplify the install. He bundled some of his upgrades, which was a blessing. Failing that, maybe BF can just hire him!

That would be a great way to implement it, also the length of the right click drag could set the spacing, so we could have that option as well. Or perhaps have something similar to setting waypoints, have a start, middle, and end point so you could set up a V formation etc. and also set the spacing the same way, the troops would be set evenly apart along the line you create.

OK, so if I understand it, because of the angle needed, the shortest traverse was over the cab, so the turret didn't turn, rather than go back the long way around (AI limitation). Now that I know it is such a hard limit, I will avoid that situation in the future. My second run through, I caught on to the reverse facing, and all was well I did find out this morning to my frustration/amusement, the AA will not engage a strafing aircraft. I can understand the reason as aircraft don't have a physical presence in the game, but it was hard to watch my pixeltruppen get strafed mercilessly while the AA stood by and did nothing even as it starting taking hits itself. I had a small hope the AA would help me defend against the AI's habit of strafing my set up zone on turn 1.

I didn't have much time to play last night after installing MG, but I did do a quick scenario to try out some of the new AA vehicles. Anyone familiar with these from FI have any tips for those of us who are new to them? I can see I will need to experiment a bit to get the positioning right, and had a bit of trouble getting the M15A1 to rotate carriage to fire at a designated target. I don't know if it is a bug, as I haven't had time to work with it and see what is going on for sure. I was not trying to fire over the cab, I know that limitation, but the carriage was facing forward left, and refused to traverse back over to the right. I had to use a face command to turn the vehicle around 180 to get it to fire on the new target. From what I have seen so far, these things are scary! Words like "meat chopper" and "shredder" come to mind They seem very good at ripping through bocage, I noticed a lot of pass through and bits of hedge flying everywhere. The suppressive effects on the (few) survivors was pretty good too!