hoolaman

Nobody would be getting excited or otherwise if it were never mentioned.

No not that I know of, posting to the forum or PM a beta tester is the way to go. I can share with you what I mean by a good bug report though. In almost every case a save game is the best way to outline what you are talking about. Posting screenshots is fine and allows a clear explanation of the problem, but doesn't give Charles anything to go on as I figure he has ability to debug save games to see what the code is doing. Ideally the problem should be reproducible. Reproducible means you can build a test situation where there are clear steps to trigger the problem, OR a save game right before the even happens, during WEGO orders phase or Real Time. As for establishing that the data or parameters in the game are wrong, that is a bit of a harder sell. A well designed and explained test scenario is the way to go. The more iterations the more convincing it will be and will eliminate the possibility you are seeing outlier results.

The firing on the move thing is a valid point, but I've not seen anyone else reporting penetrations where there shouldn't be penetrations on Panthers and Tigers, and you know the forum members here would be complaining long and loud if there were. Desirable, obviously not, but it is all too normal. The game is a picture of bug-free stability compared to some even big name titles. A beta testing team can never cover the same territory that 1000 or 10,000 players can. If the players could provide a decent bug report instead of "this game is sh1t" things would be a lot more likely to get fixed.

Yes I think this is a very important difference. I have read accounts of some of the fiercest infantry firefights and a common theme is being pinned down for long periods of time. Not neccesarily taking casulaties unless they stick their necks out or mortar bombs start falling, but just sitting back being pinned down, maybe even having the luxury of digging in over a period of a couple of hours. Properly spaced infantry might have a couple of scouts shot down and the rest of the platoon spend the next hour trying to work out where the shots came from while some other formation tries flanking and probing the line significantly further away. I sometimes get a sense of this in CM too though, it is pretty easy to get tactically pinned down even while your individual troops don't have a "pinned" label. One thing I believe is a lot more difficult in CM than "IRL" is disengaging a squad from contact. Because they get into such full-frontal mutual exchanges of fire, moving out of there easily gets you cut down. I believe in reality infantry got a lot less tangled up than they do in CM.

Those 45 shots could easily have happened in two minutes out of those three days though. And logically they probably would have fired off their ammo in a couple of short sharp engagements, or more likely a handful of boring speculative area fires.

That could be the case. I think higher off-map (non-existent) HQ's are linked in by default to enable comms between otherwise unlinked subordinate formations. Could you make a save and post here or send to myself or akd (PM for my email address).

Yes an obstruction with a bottleneck seems to greatly exaggerate what is a legitimate problem. The map squares are used for infantry pathing and troops will tend to rooute through the centre of each tile and it is very easy to get them strung out in a very tight column which can have serious game effects when automatic weapons open up on them. The best way to prevent this though is to simply use more waypoints. Troops will always touch base and stop in their team formations at a waypoint to regroup.

To be fair it shows up as a bafflingly absent radio C2 icon. I believe a failed radio link is not a permanent state of affairs though, so if it persists for the whole game as mentioned above, or remains the same when reloading the mission again there may be something else going on.

er apparently I do.

One thing not explicitly stated in the manual and not shown at all in the UI is that radios can fail in the game. This shows up as an inexplicable missing link that lasts two or three turns.

Each line of mines in the editor is an action spots of mines, so you get ten tiles. Regardless that still only makes a very thin or a very narrow minefield. I'm a fan of minefields being already well identified in most cases, they serve their purpose just as well or better if the attacked knows where they are. You can then have dummy fields too. Just buy some barbed wire in PBEM and tell your oppponent that all barbed wire has dense mines behind it, even if there aren't.

So can you cheat in PBEM or not?

Yes it isn't "covering" it's "cowering". These guys are supressed and in a poor morale state. The idea is that guys that are ok will always attempt to put fire down on the target, as it should be perhaps. There's no explicit action to take cover.

Do the tanks have hitpoints? Can you enter buildings? Is spotting, cover and supression improved? If the answer to any of these is no, I'll pass.

It would help to know what the gunner is doing based on the little text on the left. The game shows an icon for what that guy is "holding" at the time, so if he's not be actively "gunning" he would revert to his sidearm briefly. I've never noticed this though. Maybe hes getting rounds from some other stowage or something?

Can't you just rotate it with the arrow icons before placement?

This has been tweaked and tweaked again, so if you think there is a problem please post specifics.

brz files are designed to be used by the game, so having multiple versions of the same texture in one brz is against the rules. What you should be doing is rezpaking each uniform set into its own brz and then zipping those into your file for distribution.

I stopped particpating in PBEMs because just when it got interesting my game would lose synch to the other players. Happened two or three times when I'd invested days of turns in my expansion phase.

Land units can't attack a city directly from an ocean transport, if you click a city with your transport the game thinks you are trying to attack it with the ship. It's like trying to pull into the harbour of an enemy city and unload an invasion force at their docks. It wouldn't happen. You have to unload them on an "invasion beach" adjacent to the city. There is a sticky thread on how to do this at the top of this forum.

The sample rate and sample size have to be the same too IIRC, or it can sound glitchy. Save them as mono, 44.1khz, 16bit.

You can't really have the TacAI do an automatic shoot and scoot, but a manual one is certainly doable with pauses and move orders timing. With short engagent ranges it gets a lot tricker to do it manually having to wait 60 sec but it is a better way to ensure your guys don't get into exactly the situation you describe.

As far as an arc affecting spotting, it doesn't in any direct way but there is a significant bonus to spotting based on facing (or rather a penalty for facing the wrong way) so there will be benefits just from looking in the correct direction. But with two identical units looking the same way one will not spot something better even with a laser-thin cover arc. Even in reality they would still be scanning their sector. As for units breaking hide for an arc ambush, yes they do. They can often have degraded spotting simply by being prone behind some obstacle, but AIUI there is even some abstracted peeking that will have them unhide from behind a wall. I've never noticed spotting to be any worse with a hiding unit vs an identical non-hiding unit.

It's not from the painting, its from the photo I linked earlier. That's not to say I am sure it is the right one, but beggars can't be choosers.

womble has it right, most of this in in the manual but there is also plenty of experience with the way the engine works from CMSF. Surrender is deemed to be all your units literally throwing up their hands and surrendering the playing field to your opponent. By default this means that all your units are captured and all the terrain objectives would be free for your opponent to occupy after the battle. This also helps in campaign play where if your AI opponent auto-surrenders you don't lose the battle just because your haven't gotten to the objective. I think but am not 100% sure that all your units that can exit are deemed to have done so if your opponent surrenders. Cease fire is tallying up the score where the game stands.