Elmar Bijlsma

Uh, there is no higher level AI. The "difficulty" level are realism levels instead. One hand not knowing what the other is doing is very much the way armies do things. This relative spotting models that difficulty to coordinate between units. Part of your task as a commander is to use your omniscient presence to ensure everyone is in position to support the others when push comes to shove. IMHO it is preferred to every unit on the map instantly seeing and taking out a well hidden opponent even though only one unit ever really "saw" it. That frequently devolves in to shoving firepower at the enemy. Relative spotting requires tactics. Once you get used to it I hope you will learn to use and enjoy it because the enemy AI suffers from the same thing. Oh, and hi and welcome to the forums.

Manually. It's a .txt file in the demo folder. Just rename the alternate one to the old one. You can also edit the hotkeys.txt to change individual keys. Bit low tech, but it works.

Tutorial Mission is actually kinda nice. Though I attribute the embarrassingly hard time I had mostly with me and Mr Default Hotkeys not getting along in a RT game. Oh, and me just generally farting about. I was too busy gaping at stuff and making big exchanges of fire happen (which immediately attracted a fair bit of HE to my massed men. Cool!) to really play well. Also, charging across open fields look VERY good. In CMSF the troopers moved weird and got mown down a lot. It's much more fun to use infantry now. Scenarios were all fairly big. Even the tutorial had a respectable number of units. I expected a more modest unit count. I wonder if that wouldn't have been better, as to not overwhelm a novice player, whom this demo is after all really aimed at.

I finally got he German link working. Took 15 minutes or more but it finally got started.

But it'll be at least two years before the Americans start playing.

The German mirror is not working for me.

Hooleeey shjjjjit. 30mb! :eek: They don't even make trailers that small any more.

The buzz in BFC's notional office is the pump in Charles' brainjar struggling with the coffee grind that is being thrown directly into the liquid in ever increasing amounts.

It's so predictable to do this that I had no expectation of actual demo. There is always someone that climbs Mount Lame to plant his flag.

Uh... I don't think a group of families were ever called anything. Call them whatever you like. I suggest a collection of families gets called "Mafia".

No more "a Battery Commander, his batman and a cook"? Keeping a gun in action was a big priority for a commander but now it becomes unusable if the crew is ever driven off? Excuse me while I look at you with disapproval, Steve. *glares*

Family means the base game and its modules. So Normandy and Bulge would be two different families. Though I still hope that one day they will have a change of heart and put all previously released (WW2) families in to one overarching game. Seems to me the easiest way to charge me for stuff I already own, and I would cough up the cash for it with a smile on my face.

Hehe, yeah, that did happen. Though generally the AI did an outstanding job. Usually when running low on "T" rounds it would try an ordinary round or two for range, even if it had no hope of getting through. Only once it was happy about the hit chance would it part with it's precious "T" rounds. Pretty prudent most times but sometimes you need to get that first shot take down. The TacAI giveth, and the TacAI taketh away. But I would rather have that then any complications stemming from round selection. I can see myself catching a Panther in the flanks and insisting on only ordinary 76mm. But if the Panther then survives long enough to turn and face my shooter the HVAP I told it not to use is my only hope.

Except that in 99.9% of cases, it would just be an unneeded hassle.

I'm sorry ~Viajero, but I don't really get what you expect from BFC. Either you inform yourself and make the decision to cancel, or you don't. Them telling you the release timeframe does not make a jot of difference. It comes across to me that you, having found BFC at a moral disadvantage, are engaging in a bit of a "respect my authoritah".

What I don't get is the following: Unless it is done different from CMSF, BFC have assigned these weapons a maximum range beyond which they will not fire. Why not have that in the manual rather then a max/effective/sighted range that is neither here nor there?

He is doing exactly what I considered doing: Typing in Dutch to illustrate to our Slovene friends the value of sticking to English.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Abg29p1fKz4 Watch that an tell me revisionist are unfairly questioning the truthiness of TacAir claims.

As I understand it manuals are limited in number with the larger chunk going to pre-order customers. Actually, today is the first time I've read that there was a number of big manuals for regular orders at all. But it is not clear to me at all that I'd be guaranteed a big fat manual if I forgo pre-orders in future. btw Thanks for the offers Steve, much appreciated. But at this point cancelling would be a bigger hassle/downer then any potential charge. The risk of which is pretty low as, as has been confirmed by my compatriots, Dutch customs seems to go easy on small consumer goods.

Badly, being out of shape and overburdening the supply lines with Pizza, Cheetos and Cola and in fact being generally unwilling to leave the house at all.

Hmmm, well, let us see how it arrives. Usually Dutch Customs seems to not make a fuss about such items. *knocks on wood* Though I'm not overly pleased to learn that as a pre-order customer I am at risk of extra charges. Seems wrongheaded to me, whatever the realities at your end are. Doesn't seem worth it, in hindsight. Serves me right for not reading all the small print, I guess, But I just figured you guys would be shipping out of Germany as usual. Can I take it that you guys are selling more to the US market then the EU? Otherwise it would appear to make sense shipping everything from Europe, eliminating a lot of differing import rules in one go.

Meh. Swearing is not a leading cause of cancer so I don't really get the fuss that surrounds it. And any parent thinking he is preventing his child from coming in to contact with the F word is deeply deluded. And if you want to prevent your kid turning in to a sweary little git, I suggest more effort in guiding output, not input. My objection to swearing in CM is far simpler: It stands out to much. Some vanilla comment by my pixeltruppen will not stand out as much as some line containing a string of expletives. Since I expect to be hearing these lines a lot, the more vanilla they are the better immersion is maintained.

Yeah, grouping seemed too tight to me too. Not only in the fire pattern grouping but also the accuracy with which that pattern is achieved. I like how there seems to be more dust and it seems to linger longer. Really improves the look. Though I still miss shockwaves. They might have looked hokey on the small stuff but never failed to put a grin on my face when hammering away with navy guns.

Except this is a discussion forum. If we are all just vomiting opinions this is going to turn sour very fast. So yeah, acknowledging the points another makes (and this works both ways) is essential to discussion. This is not Speakers Corner where shouting on a soap box without listening is very much apreciated. No-one was asked to agree with the others, just to acknowledge the other point of view is not totally stark raving mad. Under the circumstances (a not totally stark raving mad point of view) that'd be helpful. Otherwise everyone is wasting their time. Anyway... so much talk about the features of CMBN, whereas I understood this thread to be about gameplay, which I deem to be a different beasty altogether. The gameplay, the whizz bang stuff that happens when you push start, is IMHO superior. So much more detail, less abstraction (especially in armour hits/penetrations etc) and visual candy. The latter does help.

But if you let a player do it, he will do it all the time. Since that is not what actually happened, you get closest to what did happen. That or dedicate scarce coding time to implement some more advanced modelling of backblast and such.