Talespin Jim

I played as the U.S. I'm still new to the game, but it was the most fun I've had yet on defense. Personally, I don't think the Germans have a fair shake.

Sergei's last point accentuates what I was going to say. Being a marketer by trade, getting a very public lashing about the game would only be a bonanza for BF, helping them attract new gamers through free publicity, that otherwise would never have heard about this wonderful game. On a moral level, it may seem odd, but I feel greater respect and admiration for those who fight in the wars these games are about, so I feel that playing such a game while the war in progress will actually help me to understand what is going on better and revere, appreciate and be more generous to those who have needs created by the conflicts. I would appreciate timely games for such a reason, even if I might feel a little weird about playing it.

You guys are too much. lol. I was wondering if anybody would even notice the cigar in the ear. But seriously, for those who don't know, the panzerfaust is a very short range weapon and it's my understanding that to help players out, on this one weapon, the designers put the approximate effective range, which is what the 30 is for--30 meter range. This is the stock user interface that the game comes with, so a lot of you guys probably don't even recognize the 30 because you have loaded up some mod or other that doesn't show it. Anyway, thanks for the explanations of why he has so many grenades. I've lost several night's sleep wondering about that. (snort) Womble's answer makes the most sense, as usual. The team may very well have been an assault team, in fact, I bet it was. So as he says, they would have had more grenades. Then he says the trooper probably picked up extra grenades off of his fallen comrades, as he can do that even without rendering buddy aid, as Womble said. But the idea that he might have gotten them from ammo sharing doesn't seem right (not said by Womble), because my understanding is that ammo sharing tends to average the ammo each party has, not concentrate it. I could be wrong there. If so, I'd like to know, because that means I don't understand ammo sharing correctly. I was also trying to figure out why all he had was a panzerfaust, but I realized the answer to that when I was posting the picture: Like others have said, if he is using his rifle, it will show up with every other soldier's weapon in the UI portion that shows all of the unit's 'weapons in use' together. If he is using the panzerfaust, obviously, since that is his weapon in use, it will show there instead. To expound on that a little, when the rifle is in use, the panzerfaust being a special weapon will still show in the special weapon's inventory section of the UI, but the rifle will not show when the panzerfaust is in use, because it is not a special weapon. (That's the part that had me stumped.) Therefore, the only way to see the rifle when the panzerfaust is in use is to see it on the silhouette. But when I looked at the soldier prior to this picture, he was laying on it or something and I couldn't see it, even though he had it. Ironically, he never switched to his rifle when I told him to attack an enemy nearby, he just hucked grenades at them. He's one grenade huckin fiend, which notably makes sense, because when ammo is plentiful troops use it more generously. The only mystery left to me really, is why he had selected his panzerfaust as an active weapon when I first took notice of him prior to this picture. He was in a large field without an enemy vehicle in sight. But I doubt it matters, it seems that when a trooper decides to change weapons it is done in an instant and doesn't seem to hurt his time firing at the target much if at all. I've watched them several times switch weapons during a firefight, it seems to take less than a second, if any time at all. Again, thanks for the help.

Several turns have passed and it was deleted on my home computer so it's probably now in the trash on that puter. But now I'm on vacation on my laptop, so I can't give you the exact pic from the turn I am talking about. But here's a pic of him several turns later. as you can see, he has used some of his grenades. He was inspecting a bunch of row houses and there were a lot of explosions there, but I didn't pay attention to what was going on. He must have been throwing grenades at something. Now you can see he has shouldered his panzerfaust and is bearing a rifle, but when I was looking at him earlier, he was bearing the panzerfaust and I couldn't see the rifle. It doesn't show up in the unit munitions roster, probably because it is a personal weapon. He still has 12 grenades left.

It's getting late in this scenario. One fire-team had lost all of its men but one, but I figured he would be useful to help lay down a little extra suppressing fire on an enemy team that was suppressed and being overrun. So I clicked on him. That's when I noticed his weapon was a panzerfaust and nothing else--nothing except 19 HAND GRENADES. I could just imagine this guy back at the weapons locker, "Maybe I should choose this rifle. No, all I need is the panzerfaust and a box of grenades." I should mention that this unit had not rendered any buddy aid. I had some tank crews that lost their tanks and I had them following right behind the front line and rendering aid so that they could pick up some good weapons to use. So I was being very careful to only have them doing buddy aid. As funny as I thought that was, it made me wonder, how this guy wound up with 19 grenades. His fire team started off with between two and four men. If he took everybody's grenades, he still wouldn't have had that many normally. Also I've noticed that once in a while a pixeltroop carrying a bazooka, panzerfaust or panzershreck will need to shoot at infantry and will switch from his anti-tank weapon to his secondary weapon. Usually it's a pistol, but I'm pretty sure I saw one pull out something other than that once, though I can't remember what. I'm thinking it was a grease gun of some kind, and I think it was an American. But these weapons don't show up on the weapons roster when you click on the unit. So I'm wondering how often a trooper has a secondary weapon and is there a way we can see what it is? Incidentally, my pixeltroopen with the 19 grenades successfully threw one the next turn and killed the enemy he was supposed to suppress. So he was right, that was all he needed in that entire battle.

I just wish state of the art was better than it is. I mean, according to 2001 A Space Odyssey, we were supposed to achieve self aware AI 13 years ago. Where did we go wrong? Oh, I know, it was those stupid kids and their cursed rap music. They threw the whole culture out of kilter. I can hear the first self aware computer now, "Ptew, ptew ptew ptew... My name's Hal and I'm your pal, got a question? I'll show you how. Ptew ptew ptew Will I sleep? Will I bleep? Am I a creep? You're in deep..."

Thanks Mark Ezra. That is truly a big feat. I've been thinking about how redundant it must have been for someone to create all of those different maps, for each terrain type and map size and that's what got me to wondering if someone had to set up a strategy for each map and various force types for both sides and maybe varying force selections or different nation's armies. I think I would have had to kill myself before I finished. I'm sure there are a lot of those monumental tasks in this game that requires a novel strain of heroism to complete.

That brings up something I was wondering about. When I do a quick battle against the AI, is there some pre-programmed AI for the quick battle or is the AI left entirely to its own to figure out a battle plan?

I believe you, when you say the AI is far more advanced than HOI3--though admittedly, as you say, they are not comparable. I did not mean to insult this game by mentioning a feature of HOI. Sorry. I simply meant that if they did decide to allow players to give missions to commanders, the system HOI came up with where you designate theaters of action for leaders actually works, whereas a bunch of other things they tried did not, and some time and effort could be saved by looking at how they did that one thing and roughly modeling it--should they decide it's worthwhile, not that this would extend to any programming, just the general concept. I apologize for mentioning it and withdraw the thought.

It would be kinder if you did not besmirch me for stupid questions. Previously your comments have been enlightening and I thank you. I went to school for systems analysis before there were things like hard drives or color--I'm admittedly out of date with programming. At least I know enough to realize that I was comparing apples and oranges. But the actual programming is not what I was talking about. You see, Paradox tried all sorts of approaches to making this general idea work and they put up with years of embarrassing failures. Then they finally hit on an approach that shows some promise, though even last I knew they were bungling it--but at least the units were doing more than just sitting there, they would carry out their missions with seeming intelligence. I was simply pointing out that a company could look at the "approach" they are using to avoid trying all the ones that didn't work. And I know it would be hard.

I had mistakenly assumed that discipline would be better maintained if all the C2 lights were on. I think I also understand from the 3.0 manual that spotting stays pretty much within platoon level C2, or at most company level, because it says that spotting information is useless at battalion level and would not be communicated and it seems like it is saying the same for company level. And the third reason to maintain C2, indirect fire, is kind of out of the picture because Soviets don't usually have radios below battalion level unless it is with a designated spotter such as a forward observer, and for that reason, I think the indirect fire assets are generally attached to battalion, not company or platoon. So indirect fire is not an issue with C2 at lower levels. Lack of radios makes it rare or nearly impossible to maintain C2 between the Company Commander and more than one platoon commander. And even harder to maintain C2 between Battalion and more than one company command. It would seem from the above factors, that there is no reason to keep a platoon near to the rest of its company. Therefore, there is no reason not to run each platoon like its own independent fighting unit, not worrying about C2 upline from platoon, just using upline HQ's to fill in for lost leaders or babysit squads that are otherwise out of C2 with the platoon leader. This is assuming there are no attached indirect fire assets, because that would give a reason to maintain C2. It seems like the game would be more realistic if you give units missions with objectives and lines of effort (or whatever they're called) and should they wander out of C2 with battalion or they lose their radio, putting them out of C2, you lose control of them and they just go about autonomously performing their last mission. But I suppose since the AI can't be all that great, we would all scream about how harsh that is on the Soviets and forces with similar C2 challenges. On the other hand, having them act as a cohesive, intelligent fighting unit is hardly realistic either. And before anybody says, "Do you know how hard that would be to program?" Let me point out that last I knew, Hearts of Iron 3 does that on a strategic level, where you can assign groups of units missions and the programming carries them out fairly well (at least with ground units) so perhaps that could serve as a rough model and save a lot of time and effort, should Battlefront actually ever consider such an idea.

Glad to hear I'm not the only one in the dark on this. Right, Michael, I was talking mostly about a Soviet platoon leader squad, where the commander (it sounds like you are saying) is actually the leader of one of the squads as well as the platoon leader, and there is one soldier designated as a "commander" and another soldier designated as a "leader" in the platoon leader's squad. Sorry, I should have said that. When I first started thinking about the fact that the platoon leader squads have a leader as well as a commander, I was thinking that maybe the commander was the commissar. However, I got to checking around and realized that some German units have both commanders and leaders as well. At that point I realized this whole leader concept is lot more murky to me than I had thought. So, Womble, if I understand what you (referring to you knowledgeable chaps) are telling us, the commander and not the leader, is actually the one that imbues the platoon with the leadership bonuses or deficits and it is his ratings we are looking at in the UI and that if he is killed, that is when the platoon suffers the leader loss morale penalty (or gain as it may be) and that someone will in fact step up to replace him if there is an executive officer, but it will actually be from a different fireteam in the platoon's leader squad, because the second in command is running another fireteam. Is that right? And if that is the case, your area of command and control will shift to another fireteam and that shift will probably leave one or more of the platoon's fireteams out of command and control since it is difficult to keep a whole platoon in command and control in most terrain you tend to have your troops taking cover in. Have I got that right? If there is no XO, then does the platoon just no longer have a leader? And if that is the case, I have command lines turned on, and if I remember right, I see command lines going to the original commander's fireteam, so in this case, those command lines are faulty and should not actually exist, because there is no longer a platoon leader right? (It also begs the question--If I'm quick moving a platoon leader's fireteam and the commander is running slower than the rest and has dropped behind the leader's fireteam by thirty meters, the command lines all go to the main body of the platoon commander's fireteam, but since the commander is way behind, is the actual command effects where he is or is it where the flag on his fireteam's floating icon is?) So if the commander is the one running the platoon, what is the soldier designated as the "leader" in charge of? Because the platoon leader squad has both a "commander" and a "leader." Is the soldier designated as the "leader" one of the sergeants Michael spoke of? See it confuses me that platoon leader squads, especially Soviet platoon leader squads have a "commander" and a "leader" when we know that the commander is in charge of both the squad and the platoon. So what's the "leader" designated soldier actually in charge of--what is he leading?

I know this has to be a stupid question, but I can't find the answer, so at the risk of being labeled the King of Stupid Questions, I'm just going to ask it... Some squads have both a leader and a commander and some squads have a leader and an asst. leader. What are each of their functions? The manuals talk about all the things the leaders do, and so do a thousand threads, but I can't find anything about what a commander does. Maybe it's something everybody knows, except me because I've never been in the military or something. Does it have something to do with commissioned officers verses enlisted men or leaders verses commissars? Also, I'm wondering about some leadership effects. I start out the first turn of a scenario. Immediately a shot rings out, and as usual, the first person to get shot is one of my platoon leaders. These of course, are Russian troops and the platoon's squads are all split up into fire teams, so now, even though they are all within command range of the dead platoon leader's fireteam, since the platoon leader is dead, all the troops now get a severe morale penalty for the remainder of the game, right? Or does the commander immediately take over? If not the commander, I notice the unit doesn't say anything about an assistant leader, but according to the manual all units have a hierarchy that gives someone an automatic leader status, so does this unidentified leader now control the platoon so that the platoon does not have the morale penalty of not being in command and control--or does his leadership status only apply to his squad? If another person does take over leading the platoon, would that person be from another fireteam in the platoon leader squad, such that the radius of command and control now shifts to another unit and now maybe some of my units are out of command and control? If so, how do I now know which fireteam is in control of the platoon? I'm sorry if this is a stupid or redundant question, but I can't find where it is discussed in the manuals or the forum.

My mistake, it's TheBlitz.org.

The first thing you should do is sit down and make a list of the top 100 best excuses you can think of for not coming to work today and plan to rotate through the list. Next, you should gag your wife, tie her up and put her in the closet. Get rid of any pets. Email all of your friends and tell them goodbye. Cash out your 401K to get some money to live on for a while. Hire a housekeeper who cooks, cleans, answers the phone, and doesn't mind bathing you. Make sure she is not so pretty as to cause a distraction and make sure she can cook something besides Mexican food--as much as I love it, it's making me fat. Email the courthouse and tell them you can't serve jury duty, so don't even bother calling you. Spray herbicide over your whole lawn--choose one with a one year guarantee. Set all of your bills up on auto-pay. Go to Walgreens.com and order a case of caffeine pills to be delivered every thirty days. Get a catheter with a one-year supply. If your doctor asks any questions, just tell him you are planning on becoming a "cathelete" and going to the Olympics. Buy 36 tubes of Preparation H. and one of those handles with a rubber grip on the end that fat people use to wipe their bottoms. Enough said. Start building a deep, loving, personal relationship with John at the Help Desk--pucker up and prepare to kiss his arse a lot. Never anger him. Finally, join TheFewGoodMen.com and the Blitz.com

GreenAsJade, is there somewhere where you keep a list of your bug reports and conversations that eventually leads to fixing them or a FAQ for the more common problems people have? Because I know other people have had this problem that I posted about here, but I couldn't remember how they fixed it and couldn't find the fix so I figured it out with my tiny brain. I'm sure if you don't already have some kind of list and fixes of bug reports, starting to keep one would really make your life easier. You probably have one, I'm just not finding it anywhere.

I was unsuccessful finding any place where it tells you how to fix common problems with GreenAsJade's wonderful CM Helper program, so I wanted to mention that I have a fix that I need to use sometimes. Computer Crash Breaks CM Helper If a computer crash (such as due to restart after failure to recover from sleep mode) breaks CM Helper in Windows 8.1, simply open a File Explorer (the little file that you click on and it allows you to navigate through your files on your computer) or go to This PC/My Computer or whatever you want to call it, and search C:/ GreenAsJade and delete the cmh_log and maybe AppState too. That fixes it. You'll have to "Edit Game" for most of your current games and direct the game files to be placed in the correct dropboxes, but otherwise this will solve the problem. Also, if you have any old files left from games long ago ended, they could start showing up in CMHelper as Ghost Games that CM Helper can't find or close out. All you have to do is go into the game file folders for incoming and outgoing mail and clean up any old files from games no longer being played and this will get rid of ghost games. Hope this helps somebody.

Yes, thanks, I meant "pop smoke," and I always play with smoke turned on, with only a couple of exceptions, like the time I had lots of artillery with lots of smoke rounds and I fired it across an entire ridge that covered over half the board, so I could make a wholesale advance without taking fire--that got to be a visibility problem, so I turned it off for a few minutes. At least I feel better knowing it is unreliable for others as well. I was thinking that it might just be unreliable and that I had just gotten very lucky the first few times I used it and very unlucky the last few times I used it. I haven't seen any of that misthrowing and such, it has worked flawlessly a number of times straight and then not at all a number of times straight. So it is probably just that I've been unlucky lately and not having enough experience with it, I'm jumping the gun on asking. Thanks again.

I've used smoke to great effect in this game sometimes and in other games as well, but I'm having a problem I can't figure out and I'm out of ideas to try. In the last five scenarios in which I've tried to place smoke, I've had infantry units I've tried to fire smoke with and they just don't follow orders. These are the only times I've used infantry units to place smoke recently, and in every case they have failed to do it. Of course I've made certain they have smoke to fire. I understand that they fire the smoke about 20 meters away in the direction they are facing. Sometimes the units firing smoke have been veteran, sometimes regular and once they were green. None of the times have they been suppressed or gone into suppression during the time I have told them to fire smoke. Most of the times there has been a little enemy fire in their general direction, but not a lot and no casualties or even have they come close, and in fact in two or three instances there was no enemy fire at all around them, nor could they see an enemy, nor was there an enemy probably within at least a hundred meters. I have given them the order to place smoke and in some cases renewed the order each minute for a number of minutes and in other cases I have let the order stand for several minutes, checking to see that they still had the order to lay smoke cued up. I can't figure out why in maybe four of the first games of CM2 I've played, my units followed the orders to lay smoke immediately and did it without fail, but in the last five games I've tried to lay smoke with infantry, I have had zero success. One thing I am sometimes doing differently than when I was having success, is that I'm being more 'creative' with the use of smoke. In other words, at first I was using smoke only to place between the infantry unit and enemy units which were shooting at it. Lately, I've been using it to place sometimes in the unit's own defense, but sometimes to protect another unit, or for example, to put smoke in the street so that another unit could run across the street. So I don't really think that is the problem. I've also been very careful with my facing lately, and it occurs to me that maybe I have not been facing in such a way that the smoke would deploy exactly at the center of an action square two or three squares away, I forget exactly how many squares it travels. But I'm sure the game must be smart enough not to require me to be facing exactly the center of the square the smoke will land in. I know I have had this problem playing as the Americans and the Germans, but I can't remember if I've had it playing as the Soviets. I haven't had opportunity to try smoke as other nations. Does anyone have any idea why I might be failing to place smoke? Thanks in advance for your help.

The height of Soviet tanks in WW2 being low to the ground got me interested, especially after seeing Wiki's picture of a KV2 monstrosity. I looked up a comparison chart and the Russian tanks overall, are very close to the same height as German tanks early on. So when comparing a T-34 to a Panzer IV, they are pretty similar. It's not until the Panther and the Tiger that the German tanks are significantly taller--with the exception of the Soviet KV line, the KV-2 being some sort of whacky mutation on the turret, which was as high as the hull. So if you consider the latter war tanks, the preferred tanks, Panthers VS. T-85s, the Russians are maybe a little shorter. But then I was looking at a comparison chart diagramming each of the tanks and when you look at the Soviets compared to the Germans, it looks to me like the Soviets had lower hulls, but I couldn't say definitively, because I couldn't find stats on just the hull height. If you think about it, if you are trying to use dips in the terrain, it would be advantageous to have a low hull, but have the turret stick up a bit above the ground. So I think if you compare the hull height, you'll find that what he is saying is probably true, even with that mutated KV-2--for a heavy tank, the hull was still reasonably low--and there weren't a lot of heavy tanks at that stage of the war, were there? So the KV line is sort of a noteworthy aberration, especially the KV-2.

Just for the record, if anyone from Battlefront comes upon this thread, I would pay good money for a 1945 Americans and Brits vs. Russia expansion, but I'd guess that would not be too popular with this group, due to it being fictional.

I've been a fan of HOI since the original and I enjoyed 3 and will probably buy 4. But I won't buy it until the game is working well. I'm sick of Paradox releasing a game that is a year away from being functional, and several years and upgrades to get to be fun to play, plus relying on player mods to make it good. Even then, not being able to have any semblance of a challenging AI or being able to find a multi-player game I can fit into. And then there's the endless updates to try to fine tune balance such that with version 3.333 having useless subs or planes and 3.334 subs or planes are the only thing worth investing in. It's all kind of like a bad dream that you can't resist going back to. So, yeah, I can't wait for HOI4. Though I will go to my psychiatrist to get a tune up on my meds before I start to play it. And after the last time I saw her, she had to retire. So now I have to find a new one. I'm sure you can imagine what that's like. Having to see doctor after doctor driving to cities 75 miles away from home because all the local ones have heard of me. I try to explain to them how HOI messes with my mind and it's like they throw open the door and push me out. I don't get it.

I agree. It is down the list of priorities and thus just for fun. But think on this--the more factors you can figure out how to control, the more effective you become. Isolating factors one at a time will gradually improve our effectiveness.

I've noticed it too. I thought it was a good idea to have a surcharge. The reason why, is because it makes it so that if you take a force that is solely a single formation as it would have been historically, you get a lot more for your money than if you pick a custom elite force. I for one am analytic enough and mathematically proficient to the point that I guarantee you that I can hand pick a customized set of troops that will trash any historical army and is perfectly modified for the battlefield I'll be fighting on (assuming I am playing myself or someone of similar skill level), and I can do it without paying for a bunch of headquarters that were generally structured to be more cumbersome than helpful--which in it's own way is self-defeating, but that's another issue. However, such a hand picked force just never existed on the battlefield. Commanders were given a pack of troops made up of what was on hand and they were expected to make it work and do the best with it. I feel like strongly weighting in favor of cookie cutter formations gives you a feel of this. (It also appears to me that the formations you can pick from there are more like what actually existed on the battlefield, rather than what the nations TO&E professed they were--for example, officially a platoon of Tigers I believe was five Tigers, but in reality they were usually one to three tigers and maybe they might have some older, lesser tanks like PzIV's or maybe even Stugs to fill the ranks--And you don't find a platoon of five Tigers for sale there.) Also, because it makes you want to pick troops that are all in a proper command structure. If I could pick troops the way I wanted, I would custom design a platoon with plenty of attachments under it that would round out its combat ability for precisely the set of circumstances I was going to be using it under and that was not the way each nation's TO&E was organized. So this allows you to do that within limits but makes you pay a penalty for it that is just prohibitive enough to make you not want to indulge yourself except maybe in one tailored branch of your force (the fifty point charge for a formation comes out to far, far less than the fifteen point charge per unit you custom select and place somewhere in that formation). I come from the old Squad Leader board game purchasing system and used that a lot and we always found that letting you buy whatever you want willy nilly, with no penalties allow you to buy ridiculous forces, while buying by rarity actually makes for ridiculous forces too, just ridiculously generic. So this is giving you something in between. And so far, I'm thinking it is a pretty decent compromise between reality and your ideal fantasy force. I still think it would be great to add in a few more formation options with upcoming improvements/modules, if there will be any. It is unfortunate however, that making this system work causes the math to not add up correctly as you see it on paper. That will get under the craw of guys who have to have everything add up. But it also kind of adds a fun element into it by trying to cut to meet your budget too, so it kind of represents the fact that forces were almost never tested in battle as well as filled out properly at the same time, they were always in a process of flux--at least that's what I imagine. And I took a Countrywide Loan and saved a ton of money. At the end they were giving fantastic interest rates and doing loans without any protocol, practically giving them away. I just made sure not to go for a predatory one and negotiated down my closing costs. Of course then wound up getting my loan taken over by B of A which is one very predatory bank and exactly who I was refinancing to get away from (by the way, we have $10K stock in BofA and my wife worked for them for a lot of years. They were a good bank and then some great high muckity muck retired and the whole thing turned into a very hostile, evil bank, so she left, I closed my accounts and switched banks and refinanced our loans and would have sold the stock but my wife wouldn't let me. So there's more than one gator in that pond and this one is still swimming.--And I should stipulate that my BofA comments are on the bank as it existed a decade ago--I have no idea how they might have changed today.)

This is something I would never have figured out if you hadn't told me. I don't think I saw it in the rules or anywhere, and I just would not have thought to categorize into levels. So now I understand better what you are saying because if it says, "...reverse slope," I can actually see some height levels in that action space, now it's just up to me to figure out how high I can see and since a Sherman is so tall, I can just about for sure see it, I suppose. A walking man would be different. In this case where the slope is so mild, I could get a rough idea of that by how far I am from the point at which the text changed to "...reverse slope." All I have to do is go to a topographical viewing mode and close in, so I'm looking at the unit and it's immediate surroundings as though I were above it in a helicopter. Then I use the target tool to find the farthest space toward the target space where I could see the ground "Area target" and count how many spaces it says "...reverse slope," and stop counting when it changes to "No line of sight." There probably isn't anything above 9 feet tall (call it ten feet to make the math easy), so I can now divide the number of spaces by ten and then multiply the dividend by the approximate height in feet of the target, (which is maybe five feet if I'm shooting at a man) and the resultant product will tell me about how many "...reverse slope" spaces to count back from the farthest "area target," and that is about the first space I can expect to see the enemy infantry unit. So actually this is incredibly useful now that I understand it. It's something you can do in your head, if I'm making myself clear. For example, let's say we want to figure out how far away we can see infantry "hunting" toward us from the position we place our gun, when they will be walking up the slope of a small rise between us. We use the target tool to find the last action space where it says "area target," and that tells us where the pinnacle of the rise is. The first space beyond that will say, "Reverse Slope, no aim point," and we count that as space number one. We continue to count spaces as you move the targeting tool away from your unit, until you reach the point to where it says "No line of sight." Let's say that number of "reverse slope" spaces is 15, because it is a gentle slope. You take the number of spaces and divide it by ten (to make it easy), giving you 15/10 or 1.5. Then you guestimate how tall your target it, and I'd say an infantryman's head sits between four and five feet tall when they are hunting. So let's say five feet. So you multiply 1.5 times 5 to get the product of 7.5. You count back 7.5 "reverse slope" spaces and you have the approximate spot where they will come into view. To make it more useful, but more complicated, and yet simpler, then let's abstract the distance of the size and number of spaces. In other words, what if you are not firing directly down a line of spaces? What if you are shooting across rows of spaces at a diagonal? So you simply look at where your first and last "reverse slope" points are along that straight line of fire, and guess at how many feet tall your target is, then imagine that line segment of "no aim points" broken up into ten equidistant segments, and count about that many tenth's along that line starting with the first "reverse slope" segment. Keep counting one segment for each foot high your target is, and that will get you pretty close to where you will be able to first see the target. I think you would very quickly get to the point to where you can look top down on a unit and say to yourself, "It says no reverse point from here to here, and I want to shoot at something that is two and a half feet tall, so now I just guestimate about two and a half tenths of this line (which happens to be one quarter--so one quarter of the way down the line) and there is where the target comes into view. In a very short while, you could look at any line segment and make a fairly accurate guess as to where the enemy will come into view, based upon how tall the target will be. So let's take a vote. Who thinks I'm OCD?