hoolaman

I don't see this, have you already pressed the button? There is a different thing going on with jeeps, I knew I should probably have added this: Jeeps and their equivalent such as kubelwagens, humvees, do not "own" a crew in the same way that a truck or halftrack does. Sometimes they have a driver but he is not bound to the vehicle in the same way. For some reason related to this special status they do not display a BAIL OUT button, only DISMOUNT. Any unit that will fit can jump in and drive, and their icon whether it be a HMG or a HQ then morphs into a jeep icon. Notice in the screenshot the single dot for the "driver" is blank, because the vehicle is being crewed by its passengers. The dismount order works the same as I mentioned above. Click it, and it becomes greyed out, the icon still shows as a jeep but really this team is now going to immediately dismount and will accept orders and jump out and execute them. Sometimes they can carry a passenger team and a jeep-morph team that is doing the driving, but BAIL OUT never displays. In this case you can hit dismount and only take off the passenger team, but hitting dismount on the crew team will dismount both teams.

With a light fog and the camera down in the trenches the game looks magnificent. Worse: In this game, as in Shock Force, the terrain LODs don't match well and you get a very noticeable LOD border. Also the terrain simplifying LODs where roads lose their ditches and bocage loses its base seems to pop up very early for me. I don't like the way the grass doodads draw in a circle radiating out form the camera.

My brother sent me some goodies from Germany by priority airmail at great expense and it took 6 weeks! for the parcel to arrive.

Yes they can dismount at the start of the turn. Select their icon and hit dismount, then give them a move order. They will jump out and go to where you have ordered. They will otherwise only dismount when their transport vehicle stops moving ie they can't dismount at intermediate waypoints.

Yes that's what I thought too. I see the red X's often enough .

There were some threads about dismounting and giving orders so I thought I'd add this last one. If you select the vehicle itself or if you select the passengers, the Bail Out and Dismount buttons do different things. In case 1 below, both buttons are highlighted. You'll see this if the vehicle is carrying passengers. To disembark passengers only, select the PASSENGERS and hit dismount or bail out. They will execute this order at the start of the WEGO turn. With the VEHICLE selected, you can disembark only the PASSENGERS by hitting DISMOUNT. If you wish to bail both PASSENGERS and CREW hit BAIL OUT. In point 3 you can see both buttons are greyed out. This means whatever orders you place are "locked" so BE CAREFUL, the order cannot be reversed. With the crew or passengers given the order to bail, you can select the VEHICLE and give it a move order. This will be executed by the bailing crew when the turn starts. Similarly, give the passengers a move order and they will do it. To dismount the passengers at the end of the turn, don't hit bail or dismount. Just give both vehicle and passengers move orders and when the vehicle does its move, the passengers will jump out and do theirs.

I agree there are very few restrictions imposed on the player, its certainly arguable that that is a good idea. Even splitting a squad three ways could be seen as a tad unrealistic. However, these splitting effects do make up for the overly dense squads and allow some kind of sub-squad tactics if that is your flavour of micromanagement. But even in the real deal I don't think its unrealistic for scouts to be couple of hundred metres in front of their squad, maybe even out of sight sometimes. If they make contact they can fire a rifle shot as a signal, or blow a whistle. Having a scout team within schmeisser range rather negates the usefulness of them. Their job was to "go down that road until someone shoots at you" and save the rest of the squad being cut down in an ambush. I hope that isn't as combative an answer as you seem to be expecting??

Try it, it is very CM old school.

I thought I'd share a couple of things that are extremely useful but briefly or not at all mentioned in the manual. Command & Control Links and the UI From the manual page 64: Did you know that these parts of the UI are CLICKABLE? This effectively gives you a unit roster and a way of quickly clicking through command levels. However this only gives you a direct line from top to bottom, and it is best used in combination with the HQ formation tabs. These allow you to CLICK directly and be taken to the HQ of other formations under the command of a HQ, and also to see (and click on) teams directly attached and under the command of the HQ.

Yes even if the default disc campaigns were opened up to two players, you'd have to find a VERY understanding opponent who is willing to be the outnumbered static defenders over many many WEGO turns. A two player campaign is a very interesting proposition but getting it right would be hard. I guess historically "maintaining balance" over a campaign was called a stalemate, and it is inevitable that gains in early battles will compound into a walkover in later battles. So its likely that many of the later missions will not even be played, and/or two distinct branches must be created depending on who gets the upper hand.

Well I am a beta tester and I have been using this interface for years and am pretty comfortable with getting the best out of it, but Steve and I have still been having a good-naturedly... robust... conversation here. I can assure you things are no different in beta land. The difference is that when Steve says "no we absolutely don't have time to do that", beta testers will generally let it go . What saddens me is that there are a few things that will (and do) put off new players where some game UI conventions have been ignored. And there are some of these that are ojectively better even withing CM's more complex orders system. Unfortunately this is the sort of stuff that was probably set in stone 6 years ago or more and only now is there a hope of getting changes. Ironically if you change the UI, everyone who has gotten totally used to it over 5 years or more will probably make a FAR bigger noise than the smaller group who couldn't even give it a chance, probably myself included .

Yes you're right, what I was thinking of is that CMBO has a left click that plots only ONE order and takes you out of orders mode. Right click chains them. This is actually not such a great way of doing things anyway. No I meant what I was talking about earlier in the thread where the drag box grabs a new selection instead of adding to the old one. Becasue CMx1 does it this way I always thought this was a bug in CMx2 related to the use of the SHIFT key. Yes, it might be worth reminding people of that actually because it really harks back to the old UI. I am talking about mouse only play but ths spacebar is pretty handy.

Watch part 4 it has a enfilading fire sequence that only leaves 4 balloons. It then goes on to explain how WWI MG positions fired from the flanks with interlocking fires. The shooter was some 30 year British Army veteran MG officer or something.

Actually its funny you mention the previous CM games. CMBO allows you to click directly on another unit WITHOUT deselecting. It also allows the drag box select to exclude previously selected units. It also has an awesome contextual menu that comes up right under the mouse cursor for every order. In the setup phase it has a rotate order that "sticks" to the previous waypoint.

Skip to 7:14 in this youtube video it has an interesting real world experiment on how easy it is to hit properly spaced infantry with one gun. It doesn't give range but I guess its about 200-300m.

Interestingly, the "St Fromond General map" linked at the start of the thread puts Le Carillon at only 25m elevation. Google earth and google maps put it at 40m but with a very steep rising slope just behind it rising another 30m over about 500m.

Picking up the interface can be difficult because it is rather unique, but I suggest sticking with it because like anything muscle memory kicks in and away you go. I'd suggest a couple of things to try and make it easier: 1: Don't use the relative hotkeys, they are anti muscle memory. Use direct hotkeys and or mouseing directly on the buttons. 2: Try playing around with some small battles in real time play even if you don't intend to play RT. WEGO only lets you get it wrong once per minute and it is harder to anticipate the results of you actions.

Are you sure? Google earth shows about 60-70 metres elevation change from la vire to le carillon. You certainly aren't out by a factor of three.

That's rather insulting but I'm going to look on the bright side and assume you meant to insult everyone and not just me . The target function could easily be left click to target and right click to select, currently no function is given to right clicking an enemy. I don't know how retarded you think your customers are but I think most of them could manage that without giving accidental targeting orders all over the place as your strawman suggests. Besides, making it exceedingly difficult to set an incorrect order is not the best design philosophy and CM hasn't managed it anyway (hunt vs bail). Yes its a matter of personal preference but it is also a matter of economy. You force everyone to do more movements, more clicks every time to prevent a few people doing something stupid occasionally.

When you are issuing orders to one unit, you have to right-click on nothing to cancel the selection before selecting another unit. In most games of this sort, the action of directly clicking another unit is taken to mean you want to un-select the first and select the second. In CM you can't do this in one click you must do it in two. Group selecting is the same, you have to deselect one grouping before grabbing another or the previous selection will be added to your new group. In most games you just drag directly and whatever is in the box is selected and whatever is outside is not. I use face to control the deployment of squads (the teams and even individual men deploy very differently based on facing). And I use facing with tanks to control the angle of armour I am presenting to the enemy.

The example I gave was a simple move and face order, and I'll grant you most RTS don't have different movement types, but since you asked some things that a standard RTS control scheme can do simpler than CM: Hold down and drag off the last waypoint to get a Facing command. (I refine my facing on almost every order I plot in CM). Not always having to deselect a selected unit. - Clicking directly on another unit will select THAT unit and deselect the old one. Similarly - Drag box select starts a new selection instead of adding to the old one. So many times I've still had my old grouping selected when I start a new one. Assign quick select groupings to number keys. Want platoon 1? Hit 1 and you have that group selected. Make the default action when you click on an enemy with a friendly unit selected TARGETING it. (duh) Some other ideas I think may work: Have the terminal waypoint remain selected rather than having to click on it. Scroll back and forward through waypoints on a path with the mousewheel. Have the contextual order menu appear under the mouse when required instead of clicking down on the HUD.

There are an awful lot of clicks required to plot a fairly basic move if you only use the mouse. To do one move you have many clicking units to select them, deselect them, selecting and deselcecting orders clicking waypoints then deselecting to add facings etc, it is ridiculous. A decent RTS game does the same thing with one or two clicks and drags

I don't mind FACE being a combat command but I do wish for a ROTATE move command. It would allow you to face the hull one way and the turret another, or with infantry, to deploy the teams in a squad one way then have the men turn another way.

You cannot because the fire orders have to be tied to move orders.

lol characters