Elmar Bijlsma

Yeah, that looks about right.

I can't off hand think why he should. You'd be better off with active weapon systems then the Eyeball MkI out the hatch.

Indeed. Don't use regular rifle armed infantry for this! Aside from the aforementioned objections they don't have the range. Assault rifle armed troops who do recon by fire can be shot at by practically any enemy unit in the area. As a last resort only! It has to be the long range 7.62mm machine guns or better. Up to and including IFV auto cannons. It's pretty much what they are there for. Sadly Red forces don't have spare 7.62 MG ammo for some reason. But pretty much any Blue force should have more then enough on hand. Tank gun HE rounds are rare enough for you to more cautious with their firing. I'd use the tanks machine guns only, except against practically guaranteed occupied positions. And then there is artillery. Some preliminary airburst on a suspicious treeline or inconvenient ditch will do wonders. While artillery is rare and precious, it's so effective then even a handful of airbursts can neutralize enemies in large areas. Don't wait to use it till some of your guys are dead! And it's a quite real tactic, especially against a not very disciplined opponent. In a shooting war, that is. The objective IRL and in game is to provoke a response from beyond effective range of the enemy, fix the enemy in place, lower morale and possibly inflict casualties. Area firing in this fashion is far from gamey.

It's a big trick to get the enemy to reveal his units without getting slaughtered in return. There's really no easy way to do it. But your best bet is recon by fire, AKA area fire. I like machineguns (dismouted or vehicle) for flushing out enemies from long range. You'll either provoke counter fire from a potent weapon worth killing ahead of time or make people at the target area very unhappy. Infantry that you've gotten as close as you can without breaking cover/concealment should spot most of those units that do return fire. They needn't get stuck in at this point. Watching is enough. And unlike in CMx1, machineguns are lethal at range and tend to have plenty of ammo, unless playing Red. So hosing down suspected enemy positions tends to be it's own reward. You get penalized for casualties. Ammo usage... not so much.

A moderate size +1. Though I fear the worst.

Oh, good catch. The commander is to the left, and he seems to be the one unbuttoned in the 15th screen shot (though it's though to tell for sure) But why the gunner is out of his hatch in the 14th screenie is not entirely clear to me either. Though at least in the CV9035NL the commander can control the gun as well.

post 34 http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=86689 But Steve's overconfidence is not really the point I'm concerned with. At least he tried to keep us in the loop. I'm annoyed that he stopped trying to do so mid way through a slide down the calender that should have warranted comment. It is mid 2010, and we aren't any wiser as to if it might be a 2011 release after all! Instead of some form of revised ETA to keep us informed Steve is closer to denying all knowledge of the Normandy game whose name we still don't know.

That's not even a question for me. I'm sure he did. But he needn't have shared it with us. Or, having shared it with us, should've kept us up to date as the ETA slide became increasingly large.

But Steve's optimism got the better of him, so he said some things and after a few spectacular delays he changed tack, back to the aforementioned method of keeping stumm. Keep us informed, don't keep us informed, I'm fine with either method. It's the attempted combo, the belated discretion that's so utterly failing to satisfy.

The whole things has been pretty thoroughly mishandled, IMHO. At first Steve's optimism as to the release date, which now seems to have been an error of judgement bordering on some pleasant form of insanity. And following that mistake a radio silence causing even more confusion and bafflement. And which, given the high expectations given earlier, is harder to swallow. Had Steve been more tight lipped from the start I wouldn't have had nearly so much problems with it. From definitely X-mas 2009 to very early 2010 and now here we are, summer 2010, and we still don't even know it's name. To me, the whole thing has been a "how not to communicate with the fans 101".

Why not ?!

The Korean games market is amazingly insular. A few smash hits excepted, they don't play the games we do in the west. And as a wargamer, the west doesn't play our games either. And a wargame with your country in it is a lot less fun if it might really come about.

Well, numbers are not the problem, IMHO. In a war I wouldn't expected Syria to get a numerical advantage sufficient to offset their poor quality. It's the point off manoeuvre warfare to keep the Syrians on the back foot. And any massing of troops would quickly get disrupted by air activity anyway. The trouble lies in scoring. Especially in early scenarios the scoring is too generous by far in allowing Blue casualties. It should be punished much harsher. Even in more recently made scenarios the designers seem reluctant to severely punish Blue for casualties that would be a considered disastrous these days.

A sound mod is pretty much a must. BFC tends to have really feeble sounding small arms fire in particular. They need to Hollywood it up a little. Every time I hear the sound of a video with native sounds I cringe. Except vehicle sounds, they are just annoyingly loud for something you get to hear pretty much every minute of the game. I really don't need to hear it that much, that loud.

There's a unit list on the website. http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=257&Itemid=421

It comes as a CD in a slim jewel case, IIRC

Hi and welcome to the forum. Yeah, performance is, on the surface, a bit disappointing. But that's mainly because there's so much more going on. For instance, Medieval Total War isn't checking for LOS for any of those soldiers. That's rather tough on the CPU. No doubt some further optimization could be done (and some has been done already for Normandy, so we are told) but there is just one programmer so he has a lot of other things to do. Like getting CM:Normandy ready. You could ask for CM:N to be delayed to get CMSF running better. But if BFC actually listened to you then my above greeting is the last friendly greeting you'll ever get around here. As for the scripting: You'll need it to make it appear smart. Any AI is stupid, the trick is to prod it in the smart direction as well as you can. And like it or not scripting is rather good at that. Compared to Total War this AI is rather stupid. It's got the sense to seek cover when shot at, but that's about it. However, where this AI design does things better then the Total War AI design is that the AI isn't really in charge of anything important. In Total War, the much "smarter" AI gets to do dumb things at all levels. It's simply not up to the tasks it's been given. With the scenario designers fingers at the controls of the CMSF AI much smarter plans can be made. Especially in the modules scenario designers got quite a bit of mileage out of the OPFOR. *hint* *hint*

Isn't that the heat reducing camo netting?

Note that the Danish CV90 is low on it's suspension.

Ín the vid and screens? :confused: Nope, dirty camo and the correct FN MAG.

LOL My take on Facebook as well. Except I won't give in.

FYI, I thought we were promised at least one Red unit. Yup, that's what I'm thinking too. But it'll cost more, with all the modules. Significantly more. I just don't see how we customers have particular cause for complaint. We made out like thieves with Cmx1 but we'll still get a game worth it's money.

LOL We haven't seen a unit list yet, and you feel pre-short changed? Yes, I get it, we got crazy units in CMBO et all. And if they still looked like that you'd have a semblance of a point. But they don't, they look much better now. That takes more time. Time=money. And please point me to the game that has all those many, many units for it to be assumed the new standard. There's CMBO, CMBB, CMAK and then a colossal gap in unit roster size. And considering the past I doubt BFC will be very stingy with the units we'll get. They'll not exactly be ripping us off, I think. I think this time they might even model the 25pdr.

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showpost.php?p=1189900&postcount=237

As for the rolling maps, I assume you refer to Cmx1 ability to play on a large map where parts of it would move on the progression of the fighting? That's not in CMSF, sadly. Campaigns are a point where CMSF is rather weak, and it's not much better in the modules. The campaigns don't feel all the campaigny. The battles don't always feel all that related to each other. Mind you, it's still well worth any one's time to play through them. And Brits and Marines are really great fun to command. In the case of the Marines that was much to my surprise, thinking them US Army 2.0. Far from it! The relative scarcity of Javelin and the presence of SMAW, AAV and the M32 grenade launcher are real game changer. I found the Brits and Marines much more fun to command.