Josey Wales

There was a lot more going on with SF's release than "unachievable expectations". Lets be honest. SF was easily 8 months early. Paradox walked away without a scratch though, didn't they? BF learned a painful lesson and worked their asses off to rectify it and have more than made up for it in the 12 years since. They may suck sometimes with communicating and stuff can be beyond long in coming at points but I've never doubted them once after watching them brunt the storm and wrestle SF into shape.
I can get irritated with the silence sometimes but I think Elvis has been doing a good job keeping people up to speed these past few months. People are forgetting that. Communications have actually gotten better.
Mord.

Personally, the development communication and release dates are of no concern to me.
A software company has a product and sells it. It does not sell what it does not yet have (except some pre-order exceptions). Whenever I am contemplating things that have not yet been released, it just means that I am probably bored. Which is fine in itself, as long as it doesn't get me annoyed. That is then my problem, not the software company's problem.
It was only the initial state of the v4 upgrades that I was not happy about. I have mixed feelings about that time between v4.00 and v4.02.

Brilliant!

The ability to watch and re-watch cool moments like that makes WEGO worth every penny of development time they dumped in it. That's one little moment in what's probably a 30 turn+ battle, so imagine ALL the other stuff that is going on during the fighting. CM is one of the very few game titles that actually affords you the means to enjoy ALL the graphics and not just the stuff you are focused on at a given moment.
I've said it a million times and I'll say it again. What is the friggin' point of having all these cool graphics when you can't enjoy them because you have to play the game at nose bleed altitude so you don't lose. It's idiotic and infuriating all at the same time. Anyway, CM doesn't do that. You'll see stuff so cool you'll want to alt-tab out so you can start a thread and tell everyone about it.
 
Mord.

Being the author of that video, I can confirm that yes it can happen. 😁
I’ll parrot others here by saying that Steel Beasts is similar in effect to CM, though there are some major differences. SB is primarily a training tool, a sim focused specifically on modern armored warfare. Further, it is meant to be played from the turret. Yes, you can order units around in a map, and it does have a robust mission editor, but it’s primary goal is different to that of CM. It’s fantastic at what it does, and it has a lot of overlap with CM, but I would argue that it is still fundamentally more different than similar. 
That said, it can go a long way to giving some context to what you see in the modern CM titles. Anyone who thinks the Abrams spotting ability is overmodeled in CM should play some Steel Beasts. When you’re able to read the belt buckle of an enemy infantryman at 2km while looking through the x50 magnification thermals on the M1A2 SEP, you start to understand why they act as they do in CM. 
My personal views of the Graviteam games are mixed at best. I really like the operational layer, and the diverse and varied conflicts covered (early war Eastern Front, Angola, etc) as well as some of the graphical effects (mud being thrown by tracks, ground deformation, light gore and destroyed vehicle models). However, I find the games to be extremely clunky. Some say this is actually a feature of the games, but I don’t buy it. The TacAI also leaves a lot to be desired for me, and I think CMs TacAI is far superior in every way. 90% of any given battle comes down to your unit deployment, whether you’re attacking or defending. If you give yourself a good setup, you’ll usually slaughter the enemy. The only real exception to this is when you’re blatantly outmatched, say as an infantry company going up against a horde of heavy tanks. Also, Graviteam lacks an editor which really hurts it in my opinion. 
To me, CM is the clear choice. That said though, there really isn’t any reason not to own and play both. 

The other day I heard the Beastie Boys' track Sabotage which I haven't heard for years and I thought to myself 'that would be a good accompanying track to a Shock Force 2 montage'. So I took some inspiration from the track's video and put this together. See what you think.
 
 

Tactical operations at that scale don't really fit for this game engine.  To do those justice you'd need a smaller scale and actual individual unit order capability.  You might also find it excessively boring. 
Your mission - take up a remote observation post and monitor the village from hiding for two days..... report your findings later.  Larger operations on the scale of Mogadishu with Delta, the Rangers etc can be done.  A little creativity even w/o modding.   I wanted to see about doing Generation Kill.  Thing is ToE for Marine Recon seems to be a platoon is 3 "squads" of 6 men each.  So I took a Marine platoon, assigned headcount to 50%, combined and then split the resulting squads to have 3 and 4 man teams depending on how CM split them up.  I then got a bunch of Hummvees dismounted the crews and mounted up Assassin 1 and off they went.

 

Oh, they can be found, here & there. 
 

As IanL noted that isn't quite true if you actually read the content of what he said, but hey you are free to chose.  As noted in some of the comments above I have been one of those specifically citing the first battle of the Scottish campaign and honestly not even the whole battle, just one specific location where it CAN happen frequently, but not always.  I have not duplicated it anywhere else so beyond being overly dramatic, your comment does not reflect my experience with CMBN much less the entire CM series.  But again you are certainly free to chose never ever to play again.  That would be amusing.

Well given that is not what he said your point is - well not a point.
I personally still think there is an issue here and I am continuing to create a test case I can bring forward...

What you are seeing is German troops charging towards the British for no sensible reason and getting themselves killed. This behaviour did NOT happen with Engine 2. It did NOT happen with Engine 3, and did NOT happen with Engine 4 in it's original form. It has only been noticed SINCE the 4.01 patch was released. 
But I have followed the advice that you gave in a previous post, and re-installed the patches. And, hey presto! NO Germans charging towards my Churchills to get themselves killed. I don't have time to check "The Roadblock" now. But I will try to in due course, or perhaps others may like to  try the re-install method for themselves.

I took a look at the Indian Army TO&E I was most disappointed. No Concert Party Platoon, and no Punkahwallah Section. Hopefully this will be rectified by release date.

Hello everyone, just starting to learn the basics and I want to give a big thank you to Bill for his efforts and time on his blog, priceless material.
Cheers
Pedro
 

A huge improvement brought by the patches that I haven't seen mentioned is the fixing of QB AI setup regarding the use of buildings. I've done some testing across my titles and the AI seems to be consistently using buildings now and no longer highly favoring wall/hedge/bocage lines.
This should make for a massive enhancement of the SP QB experience on maps with a sufficient number of buildings.
I may be wrong, but the AI setup seems smarter in non-building areas as well. The AI force selection is still hit and miss, but I think may have improved as well. For every dud, I'm seeing 2 or 3 decent selections.
The current TacAI fallback behavior seems to work very well in extended wooded areas. I've got a large attack going as Soviets on a QB slice from Studienka and the German AI defenders are bleeding me in the forest areas. I'm being as careful as I can and making good use of area fire to prep for hunting forward, but the small number of remaining Germans there keep nickle-and-diming me with casualties and falling back out of LOS before I can bag all of them. It feels very realistic and the slow pace putting a major cramp on my advance time-wise.
So, good stuff and thanks BF!

Interesting to see that I’m not the only one who thinks this way. Especially when playing against  a stronger player, or one who has the stronger side, as we sometimes see in CMSF2 or CMBS, I decided some time ago to play more to deny the enemy an outright win than to try to win myself. And in some truly tough battles, eking out a draw can feel like a huge victory from my standpoint. If I exceed my expectations, so much the better, but not winning is not an automatic disappointment. 

I was installing Combat Mission Afghanistan when I recognized that the background picture of a Soviet soldier nearly being hit by a round in the installation menu looked very similar to another picture that I had seen of a U.S. Marine in Afghanistan. I did a little digging and managed to find the picture.
 
Here are the two pictures side-by-side for reference.
 
I originally saw the picture in a reddit thread about a year ago. Apparently the picture is of U.S. Marine Sergeant William Bee while he was taking fire from the Taliban in 2008. I thought it was somewhat fitting that the art for this game of a Soviet taking fire in Afghanistan was based on a U.S. Marine taking fire in Afghanistan decades later.

I think that is why Steve used the word tweaked. At any moment of stress the tac AI reserves the right to do something that *you*, the player, might think is dumb. It even reserves the right to do something that is objectively dumb But I believe Steve and Charles did not actually like how often it chose to do that in the new patch so they made adjustments.
To call it fixed might get players thinking that their pixel troops were going to read thier mind and do the right thing

It doesn't actually work that way.

When you receive a PBEM, you see the results of the incoming file, then can plot your next moves, and send them to your opponent. There's no option for you to see the outcome and re-do the turn.

 

Awesome, GOG is great for good old games. Hope to see CM2 there in 10 years or so when we all play CM3 and wish for the not so old days

Now you are talking.....Bon Scott version of Highway to Hell:
He's dead so he can't sue you! 

A nice little ambush against a Stryker. I really do like the corner peaking feature
All set up and patiently waiting. He and other teams can hear the Stryker coming down the alley...

Score. Unfortunately it was only immobilized.

This topic deserves to stay up high in the list of topics (no sticky topics here?)! So I thought I could add an interesting account I've come upon, cited from Joseph Klein, Fallschirmjäger. Piniere der 1. Fallschrimjägerdivision im Italienkrieg", p. 89 (poor translation by myelf ^^). The author - who was a platoon leader in the parachute-engineer ("Fallschirmjägerpionier") battalion -  narrates his encounter with a troop of Churchill tanks at Termoli in early October 1943. I found it interesting as it is an example of both "info sharing" and "shoot and scoot".
Context: He and his men stumbled into 4 Churchills when they peeked over a sharp ridge. The clostest tank was only at a distance of 50m and the tanks had to be taken out quickly as they were overlooking the path of approach of their unsuspecting fellow platoons. The author also mentions that they had no Panzerfaust, Panzerschreck ("Ofenrohre") with them. They had captured enemy AT guns, but were reluctant to use them as they had no experience with them. They also couldn't knock the tank out with grenade bundles ("geballte Ladungen") as there was no cover to approach the tanks safely. However, the company of the author was supported by StuGs. His platoon also had a StuG (of some short-barreled variant) at hand, which had to do the job: 
"Due to its inflexibility, our StuG was at a disadvantage against the British tanks. It had no turret, so the whole vehicle had to be turned in order to aim. Also, the short-barreled gun posed some problems*. We hurriedly discussed our options with the StuG-crew. [The author goes on to assert the truth of the incredible story, he also points out that the StuG crewmen - of the 16th tank division - were veterans from the eastern front and their StuG's two (?!) gunbarrels were marked with 8-10 rings, indicating the number of their kills] First, we directed our StuG to the left side of the road which offered better concealment. Then one guy went to peek over the ridge to spot the enemy tank and indicate the line of collimation/direction to the target to another guy, who acted as a grain on which the StuG could orient itself. Finally our StuG was ready. It would need drive up the ridge in a straight line. The StuG's low silhouette was handy in this situation, as only ca. 50cm would need to be exposed to the enemy tank-gunner. As they had also considered the angle to their target, the StuG's crew had depressed their gun to the maximum - it looked as if it would fire into the ground. One of our squad-machine guns and some riflemen would trigger the action by abruptly opening fire at the vision slits in order to dazzle the enemy tank. [details about the position of the MG and riflemen...]
Then we got started: Shortly after the MG started to bark, and rifles and machine-pistols started to fire, the StuG's engine roared as it made its short approach to the crest of the ridge, followed by the dry "bang" of the StuG's gun. The Churchill tank was ablaze. It had been taken totally by surprise. As planned, its crew had been distracted by the machine gun and rifle fire, so they were unaware of the more serious threat. But I can't rule out that perhaps the machine gun and rifle fire had also had some effect on the crew inside the tank. We all rejoiced and were so excited that we almost forgot about the second enemy tank and threw our arms up in the air. [the StuG had withdrawn back behind the crest immediately after its shot] 
 
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* "...wobei die kurzen Stummelrohre ihrer Kanone nur wenig Ausschlag und Richtungsmöglichkeiten auf das Ziel geben konnten" ???

Absolutely not, but when it comes to manoeuvre in a complex environment that would intimately familiar to them, IMHO they should not be placed at a disadvantage.
If I didn't value your content so much I wouldn't comment. 

I'd completely disagree with this assumption.....Time and again we've seen Unconventional forces run rings around technologically superior conventional units when fighting on their 'home ground'.  Everywhere from Vietnam through to Afghanistan, Syria & Yemen this has tended to be the case.
As it is CM:SF2 fails to provide Uncons with the ability to breach walls, which massively hobbles them in the urban environment, the very environment in which they tend to excel.  Neither do they have anything resembling a higher command structure, which may also rather limit their utility under these rules.
PS - The practical effects of this rule in play on a properly made urban map like @LongLeftFlank's Ramadi would be beyond ridiculous.....Imagine an Iraqi insurgent commander ordering his men to 'Go to the water-tower'.  In reality these men would likely make their journey reasonably quickly and by the safest possible route, observed only by drones at best, simply because they know the streets of Ramadi so well.  On the other hand your rule would have them running straight down the main streets due to the TacAI's utter inability to navigate such complex environs in an even vaguely realistic fashion.

This thread is an offshoot of the Co-op AAR that @IanL and I have ongoing in the CMFS 2 forum.  In that game we tested a set of realism rules we called the Hard Cat Rules.
Well I have been doing a lot of talking about perhaps adding some rule additions to that basic set and got some great feedback and ideas along the way.  What follows are my extended rules, my intent was to maintain ease of use, and the basic rules fit on one standard page, so they can easily be printed out and referred to during play.  My main goal was to create the feeling of Command and Control without overwhelming the players with spreadsheets or writing stuff down (like my previous attempt).  
I am looking for feedback and suggestions with these, if you think they are too complex tell me why.. if they don't make sense to you  let me know, etc.
Here are the basic rules - a formatted PDF Version available at this link This PDF includes all of the latest additions (version 2H) - UPDATED 01JUN22
Click the image to see full size.

The following Advanced or Optional Rules also fit on one page, they are on page two of the PDF linked above. 

Click the image to see full size.