SlowLarry

@com-intern: you asked on the first page for evidence, that nvme vs satassd speed differences are noticeable at consumer level. Thats what i replied to, should have made that clearer, somehow i managed to qoute the wrong post. I guess we both agree that this advantage is very small and i stated that the "enormous advantages over sata ssd" is something that i dont agree with. I still think though that if you are building a really fast gaming pc and money is not that much of an issue its totally ok to go with an nvme if only for loading a couple of seconds faster. @Erwin@Armorgunner is referring to your cpu cooling solution. using liquid Helium this guy boosted an i9 9900k to over 7GHz.

Just go to youtube and look at a couple of hundreds of videos that are focusing on just that question. I am seeing an advantage when it comes to loading times( no wonder as we are talking about a harddrive). It might not be much but its there. For your normal desktop work, well you probably wont notice it. Erwin otoh is going for a top notch cpu, which i would never buy because its overprized. Do you really think that the 20-30 bucks, he is going to spare for going for a non nvme will make or break the deal? On the contrary, id say if you wanna go full throttle you should go there with a nvme.I too think that the "enormous advantages over sata ssd" is quite an overstatement, though. Erwins questions: The G.Skill and the Corsair are totally ok brands. If you really want to be on the safe side for the years to come, go for 2*16GB, especially if you install Google Chrome . Just for comparision, im running 16GB and im really hard pressed to max out on ram usage, even when running a game while watching a couple of hd streams and running dozens of tabs in the browser. And as you wanted to buy two hds anyway, why not go with a nvme as prime boot drive with windows and stuff and an additional ssd.

Basically it comes down to what you want from your pc. This really makes a difference. For example, you want serious( meaning no compromise...) 4k gaming? There is just no way around a 2080Ti atm. Those beasts cost 1000+though, basically the price of a nice budget 1440 gaming pc with almost all components. CPU: Top-Level i9-9700k / Ryzen 7 3700x / Mid-Level i5 9600k / Ryzen 5 3600 GPU: Top-Level Nvidia 2080Ti/2080Super/2080( awesome to ok) Mid-Level 2070Super/ Radeon 5700xt SSD: if you go for the high end gear, its totally ok to get a nvme, its gonna be standard in a couple of months anyway, otherwise stay with sata ssd RAM: depends on the cpu, new Ryzen is said to make good use of high speed ram, so you could go with 3200MHz, maybe even 3600MHz( and why two banks? because dual channel) PSU: depends on cpu, the Ryzens are using noticable less power than the top end intels,especially when overclocked Board: again comes down to what you want. there are boards with built-in wifi for example, which is nice, but costs extra of course Im not trying to dodge your question, but its really up to you. Your budget, your gaming needs. If all your gaming is CM + two hours of flight sim in a month it makes little sense to get a high end gaming machine. If on the other hand you want to experience GTA and other stuff in 4k and money is no issue make no compromises. If i were to get a pc in the 1000+€ range right now id go with this, and its pretty close to what @com-intern wrote: Ryzen 5 3600 ~170€ RTX 2070 Super ~520€ Samsung 970 Evo plus 500GB M.2 ~120€ ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming4 ~150€ G-Skill Aegis 16GB kit( that means two banks) 3000 ~70€ be quit! Straight Power 11 550W ~100€ + not overly expensive case maybe this: be quit! Pure Base 500 white+window This will give you a pretty solid gaming pc for ~1200€. It will run pretty much everything at WQHD at high to ultra settings and low to mid at 4k. Going for a Radeon 5700XT will save you ~200, but you loose ray tracing( not a big deal if you ask me) and a bit of performance for 4k. The rest of the setup is just personal taste, for example ive had good luck with ASRock boards so id go with one of theirs again. I dont need wifi onboard, because the pc sits next to the cable. CM will work decently even on a budget 500$ build and no 1000$ graphics card will make it look any better. You will still get light flickering, shadow issues etc. Its really old now as a software. I love it anyway... One word to your software. Dont you have a Windows 10 version already? What are you using for Office right now? And Chrome, Firefox and Adobe Reader can be downloaded for free from the internet, no need to pay anyone to do it for you imho. It s just two clicks away anyway.

Well, to be honest, that looks like a rather average build, some stuff is too much, some is a bit lacking imho. CPU is an amazing piece, but pretty powerhungry. Same goes probably to the RAM, 32 GB, as said before, right now its more a neat have, definetly no must have. Interestingly there is no brand mentioned for the RAM. Oh, and just to be safe, make sure its 2*16GB, if you go for it. The Samsung drive is a decent one, though there are even faster drives out there. Coming to the "bad", the GPU is rather mediocre. Nothing wrong with it per se, just in combination with one of the best gaming CPUs makes little sense to me. Im also not sure if it can do 1440 gaming with reasonable framerates( outside of CM). Same can be said about the mainboard. The PSU on the other hand is a pretty hefty one, again, makes somewhat sense given the CPU, makes less sense given the GPU. You could probably power twin 2080s with that unit. So it all comes down to pricing. Truth is if you can somehow manage to screw a couple of screws for yourself, building your own pc is always the better way. Will save you a couple of hundreds probably, gets you the pc you want and delivers a truly satisfactory experience, when your done building. BTW i play CM on a 55 Samsung 4kTV in 1080, because in higher resolutions i cant read any texts and the UI is really really small. Still looks good enough, and in its best moments its like im right in the middle of an awesome war movie.

So, as the release of SF2 is close, to kill the waiting time i decided to replay this great campaign and started the first mission. In the briefing and in my memory its mentioned that you get battalion mortars as soon as they are available( T+5). The clock ticks away and among the other reinforcements a message pops up saying battalion mortars ready. But when i open the arty menu they are not shown. I started the mission a second time and they still never showed up. Maybe a change in force structure or sth like that? As a side note, with the new infantry behaviour and minus the mortars its a totally different game...i remembered the first mission being a walk in the park, more or less. Now i have to be a lot more careful with my troops, and the firefights last a lot longer( which is a good thing!).

The 7700k is a great processor, im going to get one too in the near future. You will find things speeding up in CM too. As others have said here, the single biggest factor for CM perfomance is cpu, and as CM only uses a single core thats all thats needed. So one core of 4,2GHz will be quite comfortable, ie boosting your experience a lot. When i went from a 3.2Core2duo to a i5 with 3,4 it almost doubled up turn processing. Loading times get a little faster with ssd, not as much as i had hoped. Though its still noticeable. Im not so sure about fast RAM. I might be wrong, but i feel that all those different RAMs are more or less unnoticeable when playing and built because people will pay more if there is some kind of boost associated with it. I played around with an old pc a while back, and setting different RAM timings, using higher memory bandwidth etc did not change much gamewise( not talking about CM here). Id still go for dual channel RAM, ie 2*8GB. Re the gpu, both the 1060 and the 1070 will play CM at highest setting, no problem. They are totally overpowered for the CM engine, and will probably die bored...

That would be great indeed! Totally +1

Well, as said, 2 pzIV and 7-9 halftracks. The last halftrack set off the mine tile killing a whole squad and the ht crew of 2. After seeing this i felt that i had been totally lucky there driving so many vehicles over the mine tile.

I am 100% sure that i crossed barb wire with a tank in the third mission of KG Peiper. Afterwards a piece of wire was missing. I drove 10 vehicles( pz and ht) through the hole, the 11th triggered a mine, that was placed right behind it....

Seems you are right! When i load up a new game, the rain looks fine, when i alt-tab it starts the stuttering.

Wonder if this is being looked at by the devs? Noticing the same here...

I can handle the game quite good, but it took me a lot of time to get there. I m using a 11-button mouse and dont need the keyboard at all and i love the cameracontrol. I got so used to it that i try to use similar settings in different games. More automation, so i dont need to paint every single move path, especially for long road marches. When on a large map and with huge forces i usually doubleclick on a formation, paint the path for a single unit and then drag the waypoints for the others to fit to the roadnet, but its still quite a lot of work. So, a "follow this road" command would be outstanding. I know its been asked a thousand times though... It would be pretty cool if i were able to designate some units to have a kind of permanent picture in picture camera, possible in the now oh so dark corners of the ui, like you always sees what a certain tank sees while you are looking around the battlefield. Infantry animations, lots of them, new ones and variations, so there is more, well, variance in them, and some cool graphic effects like tilt-shift( not sure if those are available though). Tanks visibly breaking down trees, vehicles leaving trails, all those bells and whistles... I actually liked TS4evers idea with some kind of notice on the units icon as soon as it spots something. Hand to hand combat... if you see one going on, you can press start on your controller and a beat em up minigame starts... And of course, totally yes to permanent map damage, exportable.

Yes, go for it! I remember in my very first CMAK-TCP i killed an M 10 with my very first mortar round fired. You can do it, too! ( it wasnt until later that i found out just how lucky i got there...)

As no one else wants to get the ball rolling, ill take a shot. The issue with the PzF seems to be a matter of chance, sometimes the squads will have some, sometimes none. I have played the campaign more than once, especially the first mission and at times the left most platoon had 5 Panzerfäuste, sometimes none. All things told, in this campaign at least they dont need them so desperately because you will always have enough own armour to fight the red tanks. I would even refrain from attacking any tanks with PzF in this scenario, because this usually leads to dead halfsquads or tankhunters in a minute...For the truck bourne infantry you can dismount the driver, he will have the PzF. This could be a bug though. At least this unit has a Schreck, making it actually quite usefull against enemy armour. Re scoring in mission 1: you need to wipe out the red armour, of which some retreats of the map once the game starts. There are a couple of positions on the map, where you can take on the fleeing t-34s, at the chance of getting hit by the tanks hidden in the trees. So this is kind of a trade off or tactic if you will. While technically you get a score for the mission the briefing states IIRC that your job is to kill as much tanks as you can so they wont be present in the final battle of the campaign. Which means kill enough of the tanks and you will score a victory. This goes for all missions in this campaign, again IIRC. 2nd mission: yep, quite a timelimit here. Its what makes this mission difficult, you have to live with it. Once you have killed of the tanks guarding the broad entrance to the town center you can move your own armour around at will, the russian infantry has no means to stop you unless you get very close. I used my armour in platoon strength to clear the roads, always 2 pairs a 2 tanks per street. First one pair moves in, followed by the second at 50m, then followed by infantry mounted in halftracks 50m back. The tanks hose all houses in their path with mg fire, move slow and take a 15sec stop every 20m or so. No need to lead with infantry anywhere, at least not vs the ai. 3rd mission: no need to move anything from the map, the exitzones are again for the russians, your job is to hinder them from retreating off the map. I played this one just recently and got 28 tanks while losing 1, ironically to a groundattack plane shooting through the open hatch...in the end the russians surrendered. There is no need for units to stay in their trucks, from their entry point let them dismount, take up a defensive position on a flank or hide them in the center woods, and once your Panzers have cleared out the enemy armour have them mount on your tanks and move up to the next position. All in all, outstanding campaign. Dont get distracted by the scoring, your job is to kill 3rd tank corps. Wether you do this over the course of the campaign or in the final mission is up to you. The final mission will be easier if you extracted a serious toll out of your enemy in the missions before.

Wow, that was certainly more then i hoped for! Thank you, Sir! Now i had a bit of time to chew on this and try some of it ingame, im rather impressed by my own ignorance. I thought the Grenadier-squads were useless and usually would go for either Panzergrenadiere or Füsiliere, but after playing around utilizing your tips ive come to another conclusion- it was me I also noticed that the Grenadiere have a MG-Platoon at battalionlevel, where a section fields 2 binoculars, outstanding at spotting! Some questions came up while playing myself: i found out that the best way to counter this tactic is actually either have a mobile armor reserve or at least responsive artillery massing( not the russian strong side though- trp!!). Ive read about german mgs being told to change position every now and then, but on the typical cm battlefield, only few such dominating positions are to be found. It definetely helped the german attacker to maneuver on a rather large map. The next problem encountered is that on a typical cm battlefield you need to actually be on top of the victory location, so that the idea of making a nice web of firelanes around a enemy position only helps you so far. Somewhen in the game you usually have to assault. Sure, softening up with arty and the like, but if you need to clear out russian smgheavy squads, sooner or later casualties will rise.