hoolaman

I guess it would be correlated pretty strongly with human losses. A HMG team gets nailed by an arty round, the gun is probably dead too. Otherwise a healthy soldier will maintain and repair their kit and it should keep on working. Interesting question though. I wonder if there is info on whether spare MGs or mortars were kept on hand in case of failures.

There is no need to guess, because CMSF allows you to work out a LOS+LOF from any waypoint you plot. You just have to select a waypoint and target from there and you can see which points that unit will be able to target when it arrives there (possibly a tad unrealistic but neccesary from a gameplay POV imo). Just make sure that your move is going to end up in a place that leaves you in LOS to the target and all should be well. However, there are some abstractions in LOS. Any individual vehicle can only trace LOS from one height (usually near the turret sensors or the commander's head), so individual trees can be a 100% LOS block for vehicles within an action spot and certain positions will leave you blind behind a tree. What I do is make sure my vehicles don't park behind a tree that will block LOS in a critical direction. But as others have said, if your unit has spotted the enemy already, it should be shooting. I've never known trees to prevent LOF on a spotted enemy. At worst, the shell will explode on a branch or something. The game system isn't perfect, but when you understand its limitations and the tools you need to allow you to reliably do what you want to do, it turns the frustration level down a lot.

looking forward to it.

I'm playing in the editor. I mod two different class of ships (a cruiser and a carrier) to have stats that are identical in every way. I set up combat in the simulator, but playing two carriers or two cruisers gives different results to playing a cruiser vs a carrier.

They are meant to be hasty shell-scrapes type positions and I believe they give an abstracted amount of cover slightly more than they appear to visually.

Salt, saturated fat. Kind of obvious really.

Ok now I'm really confused. In the combat simulator, I have two different ships with identical stats (ie a cruiser vs a modded carrier) and they give me a 100% kill on the carrier. But if I matchup two identical ships (ie two cruisers) they give me the results I expect. Very strange.

Thanks for the explanation Brit that is exactly the info I was looking for. So I figure I need to make an attack of 50 and a defence of 1 to have a 0.5 odds of hitting each turn. Plugging that into the combat simulator gives exactly the results I was looking for. Another question, have you considered the implications of setting combat to last for 3 or 4 or ten game turns? I can easily set very high hitpoints and have combat run long enough for units to theoretically withdraw or for reinforcements to be brought in. If this were based on unit speed giving some chance to disengage it would make the combat so much more versatile. Realistically most units like a bomber fleet would not be completely destroyed and it would be nice to have the option of limping home and having to seriously repair or refit your depleted units. I know that is a pretty big deal, just something to think about.

Defense value double the attack value doesn't intuitively sound like a 50/50 odds. What makes you say that? For example if the defense value and attack value were identical I'd imagine a more like 50/50 matchup. Actually I just now found the unit combat simulator which is quite s udeful tool despite revealing little of the under the hood calculations.

I can't find this in-game manual combat info and I still can't find a comprehensive explanation on the forums of how combat is calculated. For example I am working on a very simple ruleset, and I want to know how to get a simple 50% chance of hitting and doing 1 hitpoint of damage in each combat round/"tic". I don't know how the "To Hit", Damage, and Defence values interact. Say if I wanted to prolong an infantry fight to last three or four turns so I could reinforce the infantry is this possible? Is it possible for fast units to disengage and not kill each other? Also in the city combat section, what are the hits per turn and damage ratings? If you want 10 points of damage per turn you can either say 1 hit and 10 damage or 10 hits and 1 damage right? That would make hits per turn a bit redundant I guess.

Unit of measure is 1 pixel, that is metric not imperial. Turns can be set to tick over any period of time but with the rulesets being adjustable in so many ways for movement and production, a turn and a pixel are very rubbery measures. I'd guess a turn is about a week in the official ruleset.

Yes that is what I was getting at. The idea is that the player can load a "Scenario" which is a neat package with either a designer map or a random map within certain parameters.

Is it possible to save a scenario containing a ruleset but instead of a single custom map, instead save the parameters for a random map. I know it is possible to create a single random map and save it, but I'd like to see a random map that the scenario maker specifies to give the ideal mix of land and sea etc, but replayable differently each time.

That's cool. Actually I was going to post about the lack of official scenarios and rulesets, which really makes the game seem a little devoid of human created content (Sorry Brit, I know the random map generator is created by a hardworking human). Even the "New Game" menu is not very conducive to loading a mission or scenario, the new game menu is quite cluttered and unstreamlined, and possibly should start with a short list of options like "Load Scenario", "Random Map and Ruleset", and "quick game" and possibly a "Get Community Content" linking to the downloads area. The best community rulesets could be included in the release.

I can say I always have had prompt and efficient service when submitting a ticket to the helpdesk. Occasionally emails direct to the various battlefront emails have not been answered. This is a shame because several place on the site and game manuals still tell you to email support@battlefront.com which may no longer be the best approach.

I'd say at least half of those are not even sligtly obsolete, and half are not even skills for that matter. EDIT: I just read the identifying obsolete skill entry, very good. Cleaning a fish?! The guts don't automagically jump out of fish in the modern era. My uncle did a three year newspaper typesetting apprenticeship which was completely obsolete within a few years of completion.

There was some discussion about a lee-enfield rifle appearing in the screenshots.

Yeah thanks I'm not licked yet. Some of my remaining BMPs may even have gunners

I've just watched the trailer and I think Cate needs to lay off the ciggies, she sounds like a dude. And I unfortunately have to agree, Rusty Crowe is very distracting and not a great fit in this role. Oh and the movie looks kind of sh1t.

Gunners popping up and dying is a serious problem for me in CMSf. Even when they should pop up they expose themselves a lot, the 3D model is exposed so they die quickly. But many gunners such as .50 cal gunners on Humvees and those recon strykers, pop up under real withering fire, the sort that should have them being suppressed or cowering in some way. Popping up somtimes is suicide, and I don't think intentionally getting blown away is a good way to keep the .50 cal manned. Similarly I have a big problem with BMP commanders trying to fire their external missiles at every opportunity. These guys are almost always popped up in the turret if the vehicle is stationary, and I usually end up with a field of BMPs with ok drivers, dead commanders and nobody to fire any of the weapons.

Who are the other people like Russell Crowe?

This should do the job.

Good idea, I think I'm game for PBEM, though it may be a one or two turn per day due to time zones and real life stuff. I think maybe signing up for a PBEM and waiting for 6 players might be interesting?

Another suggestion: for the "you are about to suffer an {resource} sortage" popup is to have a "only show new shortages" checkbox so the window doesn't popup every turn if you are stuck with a shortage of something.

I'd like to suggest that it be much easier to save your most favourite custom map and ruleset and preference set together in a save prefs/scenario file or something. "Load scenario" seems far too hard to find in the game menus, and in any case there is only a couple (one?) "official" scenarios and game setups. Maybe the custom scenarios files could be more prominent in the game loading menu?