hoolaman

You can see what rounds are counting down while your AC is firing. But even with a regular AP round you are going into pretty thin armour at 0 deg. The figures used in the previous CM games call that a marginal penetration and I can't see why CMBN would be too different. It's also going right into the engine or fuel tank if does penetrate. IOW it is not so unlikely as to be suspicious.

Going by the CMx1 figures, its a 51mm turret side, at 85% quality, so equivalent ~43mm. The 20mm AP goes in at 32mm at 100m, I doubt that would go up at any less distance, but maybe. Anyway it sounds like it is approaching being a marginal pen, but sounds a bit of a long shot. Maybe a weak spot? I don't think weakening of armour after a hit is modelled, but with the above figures I can easily believe a burst of 3-4 20mm AP rounds would damage and penetrate. Edit: I notice you didn't specify turret, the hull sides are only 38mm*0.85=~32mm, so easily possible.

Some significant testing and tweaking was done in the patch.

My WAG or anyone else's is as good as yours. Glad you enjoyed it though.

I wouldn't just take CMBN as gospel any more than CMBO was gospel. Heavy stone buildings, with stone walls up to a foot thick, even stone barns are very common in Normandy and tragically under-represented in CMBN maps.

Yes the TRP/First turn arty combo make little sense in CMBN. The CMx1 system as mentioned above by TheVulture seems much more realistic.

try ctrl alt del? I find the game gets a bit flaky loading back up (or re-maximising) especially in the editor, but have no problem minimising it.

I recall in the mists of time that Steve said CMBB sold quite a lot less than CMBO. IIRC this was the reason for going to the smaller episode based releases, after taking 2 years doing the entire Russian front and getting a lot less reward. I don't know what that means for CMBN but it seems it has a lot less press coverage (and no retail at all) compared to CMBO. That might mean a breakdown like: CMBO 250k, CMBB 75k and CMAK 25k. There's not much hard info from BFC, but plenty of WAG's on the forum. I'd be surprised if CMBN has sold more than 10k copies based on the downloads in the repository and the forum traffic and the lack of press . But they are all full price sales direct to BFC, so maybe they make more money out of 10k CMBN than 100k CMBB sold out of the bargain bin.

Are you trying to directly target the TRP through the house? I don't think that will work, I think it needs to be called in from a spotter.

I'm ok with data and units being hard-wired, but one thing it would be nice to open-source is the AI. A collaborative effort by the community could do amazing things with the AI, and since you only play it solo it doesn't matter if you are using Bill's Improved AI or Johnno's AI version 3. No cheating, no fracturing the multiplayer community, just an improved single player experience.

Even if there is no stab-stab simulation in the game, "close combat" could be vastly improved. The combat resolution seems geared to distance shooting, there's no emergency fire and stumbling into the same tile as an enemy does not give the chaotic and decisive fight that I'd expect. I think there would be a few quick kills and a lot of quick surrendering or running away. If there were a few swinging rifle butts so much the better, but get the shooting, grenading and surrendering right first I say.

I don't remember anyone demanding crap explosions. I also disagree that the CMx2 explosions are more realistic or better than the old games, but that's a matter of taste I suppose.

Er, they were Para's of the 101st Airborne.

Where the hell are they going? They're just running back around to the same dike/berm they started on. The explosions are pretty sweet in BoB though, no gas flash mushroom clouds there, it's "real" HE. BFC could learn something from those explosions! They've gone for the exploding flash bang version in CMBN.

Child crying in the background was pretty funny. Sounds like my house.

For starters mortars in CMSF aren't really all that different to their WWII equivalents, and I can't see why they couldn't achieve quite tight spreads in ideal conditions.

You should paint one on your car and try telling people its a buddhist good luck symbol.

Sub-system damage never made any sense to me in CMSF or this game. There are some indications it is hit-point based, but it never makes enough sense for me to work it out. You can get cumulative track damage from turret hits. You could have a HEAT shell explode on the pintle mounted MG and have it still work. The radio seems to get destroyed instantly every time anything hits anywhere. Not to mention I've seen plenty of times sub-systems completely destroyed that don't seem to degrade the performance of the tank one bit.

Yes I'm sure we do agree . The LOS "pre-check" is actually the only check that matters. If you have it you can spot the enemy, if you don't you can't. Everything else is LOF, for example your MG setup wrong against the bocage can "see" the enemy because he is part of an indivisible unit that can see the enemy. He can't shoot at it though cause he is set up too low. He will TRY to shoot them, cycling the gun etc, but he cannot.

Yes radio communication can fail for a period of a few turns. There is no way to tell from the UI but in my experience if there is something that makes no sense this is the reason. Just wait and see if it comes back. IIRC "Out of contact" means that there is no communications to establish an otherwise valid FO link. If the asset cannot be used at all it will be "denied". So there is some faulty communication to the Mortars but without more info I couldn't say where the break is.

Yes for the most part you have it right there and you're certainly right it is comparing apples and oranges. LOS is actually a binary situation in CMx2 as well: At least one member of an infantry unit must have LOS from its current action spot to the target action spot or LOS will not be granted. There is no Partial LOS for a team in an action spot which "sees" as a single entity. This means that the granularity of positioning and spotting in CMx1 is coarser than that of CMx1. The electron cloud is actually an interesting analogy. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle tells us that if we try to observe the exact position and momentum of an electron we ruin the whole thing, and that they are best viewed as a cloud of probabilities. Heisenberg would probably have preferred CMx1's electron cloud infantry. Of course there is also partial LOF where some guys don't bring their weapons to bear but the first coarse LOS check must be completed first before this comes into play. What CMx2 has that complicates LOS is vertically stratified action spots. Vertical obstacles like walls and berms can block LOS in ways that aren't always easy to eyeball from the 3D depiction. That's the reason for these weird "reverse slope" messages, where there is LOS to that action spot but a marginal elevation block before the target. This is coarser in some ways too. For example try getting CMx2 to give you true "hull-down". It is very difficult.

This seems to be an enduring myth. CMx1's map tiles are much larger, but the game simulation grid is much smaller. I think it is 1x1m or 2x2m. The reason LOS in CMx1 was so easy was because terrain was homogeneous and units occupied a singular point in space. You knew that LOS extended exactly 5m (or whatever) into any woods tile so you could easily estimate where to place units so they could see past obstacles. Elevations did not seem to cause such hard LOS blocks either.

You fail to address the point many posters above mentioned, the black and white is arguably desirable more often than not. How far out of a carefully laid web of ambush arcs should your hidden AT guns to start ignoring their orders?

My post wasn't even specifically aimed at you really, there seems to be a lot of extremely vague "I've seen this dozens of times and it is annoying me" posts that don't even give enough detail to know where the problem is, let alone screenshots and saves. For example I've never seen a full LOS target line snap to somewhere else that is out of LOS and the target order being lost. Were you targeting a unit or area firing?

There are almost certainly still quite a few things that can be classified as bugs. Then there are parts of the UI that are poorly documented and/or poorly understood that mean players aren't doing the right things to get the results they want. Lastly there are parts of the sim that are working as designed and perhaps you don't like the results. It would be helpful for everyone if people would provide a bit more info on these problem situations so we could all work out which is which.