hoolaman

There's a reason the heavy panzer battalions were used as fire brigades. They couldn't be everywhere but wherever they went they could make a decisive impact on the battle. Often in CM we come across just one Tiger which can be almost trivial to deal with. A proper formation of Tigers mutually supporting each other is a fearsome foe. That sounds like a pretty fun game. A hopeless case, but playing red in CMSF taught me that sometimes it's fun trying.

I'm 31 and I mainly play WEGO, but will pick realtime if the situation is right. Pausable RT is a lot of fun in solo play and for very small scenarios, like a reinforced platoon at the very biggest. It keeps the pace moving and puts realistic constraints on what you can see and control at any one moment. The biggest problem with RT for me is the fact that you need to remain at high levels or miss blatantly obvious contacts with the enemy. CMx2 LODs are ugly as sin at the higher levels and the TacAI generally on responds with units that are directly fired upon, so cannot respond with realistic actions to a tank getting hit somewhere on the map. RT multiplayer OTOH is absolutely ridiculous. No pause makes it the epitome of clickfests. WEGO with 30 seconds or less timed orders phase like you used to be able to do in CMx1 would be perfect. I'd even like to see a timed orders phase in single player actually.

Yes your guess is correct, when you check LOS from a future waypoint it is based on the CURRENT height of your units. So a marching unit will check LOS from the standing height but then when they go prone at their destination their LOS is not clear. It is very easy to check this with walls, a team that is currently prone will show no LOS through a wall from a future waypoint, but a standing team will. This is one very important point that is not well understood.

It seems reasonable that if AP is ineffective the crew might try a HE round. The experience crew gets the idea quicker according to the tests mentioned earlier in the thread. The problem, to my mind, is that the only place these hits should be bouncing from is the lower hull/transmission cover area. The "pulpit" on a priest should not bounce 75mm AP. The vehicle should not even really have anything tagged "upper hull" AFAICT, it should be like a Sherman in the lower hull and a very lightly armoured superstructure bolted on top.

Sounds more like a priest bug than a stug bug. The light armour should take up at least half of the visual area.

If you have the impression that there is something deep and mysterious there that you don't understand, then you don't understand.

Not so sure about your other points, but this one always annoyed me too. A jeep with one bullet through the engine block can be knocked out, with the loss of every piece of equipment and cargo on board, and the unmanning of any mounted weapon.

I think CMSF is more fun, and certainly more unique. Those ATGMs can be awesomely fun, especially when you only have one roll of the dice to get a hit on a superior force. Part of the problem is that I (like BFC I suppose) had well burned out on CMx1 WWII by the time CMSF came out and fundamentally we have gotten a prettier, but less user friendly and less comprehensive remake of CMBO, so CMBN already seemed like it had been done before. I expect when the rest of the game arrives in module form there will be much more to hold my interest.

Yep one move order should just ADD one waypoint to all the units, which can be deleted in the same way it was placed.

Do you really want an answer, or are you just going to line us all up and tell us why our personal opinion is wrong? I have no real problem with the status quo. If you see that the "string" from the ground to the balloon is the same length for all units you can easily tell from the perspective where the units are. I would prefer the icons a bit lower and to scale a bit better with distance, but I very rarely have any trouble with things the way they are.

I still think the FJ should have been in the base game, (along with renault and hotchkiss light tanks, but I digress). Many of the iconic battles in the US sector had FJ as main resistance, and I doubt many will bother revisiting the US sector to make battles for them. Since they weren't in the base game I don't really mind if they are skipped again

There's no myth, there have been some looong discussions about this on the forums and there is some evidence pointing both ways. The best consensus I've seen is that in general the hedgerows were indeed difficult obstacles for both infantry and vehicles, but there were also thin spots and entry points used by farmers where it would be practical to send an infantry force through. The defenders knew about these gaps too of course, and it was partly the physical barrier and partly the well-laid defense that made them so formidable.

There's not really any obligation to use it if you dont want to.

The modules are basically content expansion packs so there is not any inherent change to the game or any of its bugs simply by making a module. What tends to happen though is a patch is released simultaneously with the content module. This process is a separate development stream and you don't even have to buy the module to get a patch to the base game. Making a beta build with installer, copy protection and actually distributing the thing is a non trivial process so I guess there are advantages to doing it all together. What you really want to watch out for is NEW bugs that go into a new patch .

Fair points, but the PC Gamer review praised the printed tutorial, and didn't mention sound FX or player matching.

Having re-read this thread, I see your posts actually are quite polite until your response to Redwolf. A bit unneccesary imo. You should be nicer, if only BFC would do the right thing and give him the source code to all their games, everything would be fine.

Is it any wonder that beta testers get a reputation for shouting people down.

Actually they do offer a hard copy. And you can download 10 times within 365 days. And you could have backed it up. And I think they will help you out once they find your message.

Good post. I think people here get blinded to just how much of a barrier the interface and graphics can be to new players. Graphics we can forgive and aren't too bad, but many indi games can manage a much higher bar for graphics and SFX. The interface still suffers from the same complaints that were a chorus after CMSF came out. Specifically the multi tab hotkeys rate a mention. I agree the review was very fair, there are plenty of good comments and a sense of the potential of the game, along with an explanation that it will be a very hard slog to get into it.

You could perhaps view the map in the editor and screenshot the 2D grid view. Be careful not to spoil-er it for yourself though.

That's basically my impression as a casual watcher of the games who doesn't really know all the rules. Grubbing around on the ground messily, then a penalty that I don't really understand, then points from a penalty kick. I've seen some more enjoyable open flowing games in previous years, but a scrappy game of rugby can be incredibly boring to watch. Maybe solid defense at the highest levels lends itself to brawls in the mud.

Thanks for doing this work winkelried. The 1.01 patch did attempt to address earlier problems with cover AND concealment in foxholes, I did quite a bit of testing to make sure it was so. Of course I'm not saying its perfect now, the point about cowering more often is a good one, but I still think many people were so scared off from foxholes in the original release that their original impressions have stuck.

1. Use Hamachi 2. Is there a software firewall at either end? I've had connections blocked and the only way I could get through was to shut the whole firewall program down. 3. Make sure your IP behind the router is the right one for your computer, then use one of those "whats my IP" websites to make sure you have the correct external IP.

The light mortar is basically the same flimsy tube firing dumb bombs now as it was back then. Wikipedia even tells me the modern US 60mm mortar can still fire WW2 model bombs. I don't think it is right to be too dismissive of 1940s technology and methods as being orders of magnitude less effective than modern. There are analogue versions of most modern technology that an experienced user can get good performance out of. Where now there are computers and lasers, before there would be paper tables, optical rangefinders and good old fashioned gut feel. I work in the oil industry where a lot of the standard processes are exactly the same as they were in the fifties. Now there are computerized centralized systems, but functionally it is the same as going out and looking at an analogue gauge, checking a guide table and turning a valve by hand.

FoW shouldn't really apply when you see the crew bail though.