hoolaman

That is a great video, especially the scene where they are firing a good 50m across a canal. But the fact that it is "mostly psychological" is not contradicted by the fact that the enemy got so worked up about it that they shot the crews.

Catchy.

Wouldn't it be "CM: Beyond Overlord, but not too far beyond it until the second module."

NNooooooo, a connection between locals and attacks? Never! </font>

It's a truck bomb VBIED, you can see it pull over just before the blast. Also interesting the cars on the other side of the road being pulled over by some guy, I'm guessing there is a connection there.

I'd like to see, instead of one giant void as a whole wall comes down, each wall divided into three or four sections. These would collapse independantly, and leave a concrete pillar between them even when collapsed. I think there also needs to be a way to have roofs collapse independantly of walls. Especially going to ww2, there were plenty of solid european buildings where the walls remained a shell whith the roof burnt or collapsed.

Just want to add, welcome to the forum to Treadhead Martin. The more contributors here the better!

Hi CB, I agree with a lot of these points. Once the official campaign is over, or if you didn't enjoy it much, the game is back to being nothing more than a sandbox. Now I can understand making a limited sandbox for reasons of economy of programming time, but to limit things based solely on the fictional setting is not a great option. The longevity of the game, especially with the module concept is going to be it's sandbox nature, not the official canon. People will buy modules to get more toys, not more scenarios. I do however, get the impression that the inclusion or otherwise of this stuff is still mainly due to time constraints, and that it will hopefully crop up eventually. I would also like to see arty calls on places out of LOS. It worked ok in the first games, and I think it takes away realism more than it adds.

I'm not sure I get what you are talking about, but as I understand what you are requesting has always been in the game. Click on the final waypoint and add your face order, it will emanate from that waypoint. It is not relative, the unit will face the way you want at the final waypoint.

Dragon67, I agree, the auto-surrender in this and earlier CM games could be annoying when you have an vindictive desire to hunt down and destroy every last straggler on the map. Not remotely realistic, but fun as an option to keep playing, maybe after the score is calculated.

Tux, just wanted to let you know I am reading and enjoying your reports, keep up the good work.

Each one has a different dead white guy too.

I am with you on that. While they can look primitive, its a bit like an impressionist painting; not all the elements are rendered in photorealistic detail, but overall they look right. Compare those movie-set ToW screens to CMAK, CM really looks like the NA desert.

YD is right. This was addressed in the last patch I believe, that a unit won't retreat from something it is engaging. I think that is still a good change, but maybe it could use further tweaking. The other issue is that these vehicles are not designed to duke it out with armour, when playing that scenario (I play WEGO too), I used shoot and scoot tactics too ensure a slugfest did not ensue. My MGS still died though .

For insubordination, you are sentenced to death. The sentence will be carried out immediately.

I'd say keep in mind that if you never played combat mission before (and even if you have) there will be a pretty steep learning curve, so give it a bit of time. Some important points are not covered in depth in the manual, but as you can see, a question in good faith will be answered quickly and cheerfully here in the forums, and there is plenty of good info if you go digging.

Webwing's explanation is good but I will add a bit more. The elevations in the editor are NOT intuitive, but once it "clicks" they are a truly brilliant way of doing it, much quicker than CMx1, and one of the more innovative parts of the CMSF design. The best explanation I can give is that the black bits are like "pins" in a sheet of 3d rubber. If you want a certain area to remain flat level at say height 20, you only have to pin 20 around the edges, not black out the whole area, if you want to make a cliff or something you pin the line of the cliff edge at 30 and pin out the base parallel to that at 20 and the rest will go where it should. I find the most realistic results come not from drawing solid contour lines (although this works), but from roughly pinning one or two squares here and there along the contour line.

Yes it would, what you really need is a move to LOF command or even both (why not! ). Because of the different way LOF and LOS are treated, I find it is easy to get visual LOS to a point, because the unit mass is used to calculate the spotting, and the target line equals the LOS height line, so there are visual cues to where you should be. The hard bit, which is impossible to control in any meaningful way, and hard to get feedback about, is getting all your guns in a position that they can all fire at the enemy.

This is a pretty basic one, but I was struck by how freaking awesome the models are in this game when I came up to this beast from this angle. Looks like it could be in the general dynamics catalogue.

I should point out that the balcony and rooftop protection was increased in 1.08, and infantry behaviour also tweaked to the effect that suppression makes them duck and therefore not die. So I find it much improved. YMMV of course.

At first reading I thought he meant they were soluble like the Wicked Witch of the West.

I'd like to know if there are planned to be any additional terrain tiles flavour objects or any significant game function changes in the modules. I am thinking the answer is NO, but In general I would rather time is spent on interesting terrain for more interesting tactical combat, than more units. I know how much harder it is to make sure ever unit behaves correctly on a new tile than it is to add "just another tank", but the payoff would be there in game terms.

You can do that until the unit centre has LOS, but you can't do it in WEGO, and you can do it so each man gets LOF. As for it being unrealistic, I don't think so. I would use it to get guys into position for an ambush even in the absence of any enemy units. If there is an enemy unit, it is no different in concept to what you can do now, you just end up with a better result.

Should infantry be able to scale that slope? (No not RuhrRiver's the ones in MarkE's post.) I think they could (slowly) get up there if their lives depended on it (which they might). There's no really sheer cliff at this height because there is always a slope from one map tile center to the next map tile center. So a 6m rise over a 8m run with a broken rocky face is not an insurmountable challenge. You would be useless for combat while you were doing it. Anyone know what doctrine would be about scaling slopes? The Taliban could probably haul 5 recoilless rifles and 4 donkeys up there to set up an ambush, but the US would be separated from their vehicles.

I think you are pretty much on the money there JasonC. But I will add that a lot of the problems you seem to encounter probably come off as a perfectly realistic result of a bunch of Syrians with outdated ATGM taking on the US. Of course that's no consolation to the player who wants to have fun playing RED. The ability of a squad or team to deploy behind a ridgeline and get LOF while still taking cover from the terrain feature is still a bit patchy. There is limited feedback to the player about which individuals are in and which are out of LOF, and the grid-snap problems and lack of any kind of formation controls mean even if you want to tweak manually you can't really. What I would love to see is a "Seek Hull-Down" or a "Get LOF to this point" command for infantry that would see your guys crawl forward until they have an eyeball on a point of your choosing. Another BIG improvement in 1.08 that you may have missed in that specific scenario is the increased concealment given by treelines and foliage. I guess a lot of scenario designers don't make use of blocks of "Forest" tiles like there were in CMx1, but Tree D now seems to give the concealment you would visually expect, and your guys can deploy along treelines using individual trees for cover quite effectively. The Chance Encounter remake is a pretty good example of a CMx1 style map and battle converted to CMSF and is worth trying.