hoolaman

Yes I agree. And the amount of work involved makes it significantly inferior imo. OTOH of course the AI plans can do much more interesting things when they work, like aggressive flanking. I have never observed an AI unit stalled by "just a few" casualties. They more often get themselves wiped out when on the move. Some sub-routines were added for the static defnders in CMSF, like the "bugging out" manouvre, but we need much more of this sort of thing before the AI is even a little bit plausible. My dream is a little bit of CMx1 in the CMx2 AI and a lot of tweaking of how units behave with the various plans and dispositions. Even the AI tools we have right now could be working so much better.

Yep this is my usual experience even with the AI even in scenarios. Infantry especially just RUN. Doesn't matter how many piles of corpses there are for them to trip over, if you have caught them on the move it's like cutting down lemmings. As for the TacAI remembering contacts. They will re-pick up a contact faster if there is a ? nearby, and they will also directly remember a target for a short period.

I don't think anybody said that either.

Yes, since 1999 there have been many people registered on these boards, as I recall I was somewhere around 13000 in 2003. Only a very, very small percentage of them would have bought CMBN or indeed be playing any battlefront game today, and quite a few only played other battlefront games. Selling "only" 5,000 copies in three months would still give BFC reveues of ~$300,000 from CMBN alone. They don't have an office costing them overheads, but they would have to pay for warehousing and production of all the hard copies. I can't really conceive of a world where this barely promoted and extremely esoteric game has sold anywhere near 50,000 copies. But again that is just my opinion.

I have never seen BFC give out any real numbers and I doubt the quote above tell us anything. The most downloaded scenarios on the repository have around 1600 downloads. I guess there is no more than around 500 active posters on the forum. I imagine there might be a couple of multiples of those numbers who are not using either service but I'd guess more like 5,000 in sales rather than 50,000. Of course BFC have other revenues and Steve is fond of saying that their games are a "slow burn", so I guess they are doing ok.

It's probably a false dilemma in the first place. I still play both but honestly the games are similar enough that I'm kinda burned out on both. But I've been playing CMBN long before May this year. There are many many things in CMx2 that are immature and need a lot of serious testing and tweaking to get right. It's not a failure of the game system, and it is now down to the community really because no beta testing team can ever cover this amount of detail. Things CMx2 does a lot better that now really annoy me in CMx1: *The camera interface *Squad morale - Not routing as a unit *Units not routing off the map *Squads not all firing at the same target *Vehicle sub-system damage (though it often makes no sense atm). Things I think CMx1 does better that really annoy me in CMx2: *The dynamic AI gives a consistently more satisfying opponent. *Finer resolution of vehicle hull down than CMx2. Try getting a true hull down in CMBN, or even a turret-down. It depends if the LOS trace is in the right spot or not. *Finer resolution of movement than CMx2. Even though this is false for infantry because all squads occupy a singularity in space. *Less esoteric system for vehicle penetrations. *TCP/IP WEGO *Autosave *It is about 1000 times easier to make a scenario. *Quick Battles are quick, and they are 100% consistently playable, even if they give you an unwinnable game.

That is a terrible and incorrect analogy. The "direction indicator" has exactly the same function and appearance as a compass but instead of using the widely understood functionality of a compass it doesn't.

The superstructure is very different

I don't think that's true about Ludendorff's speech. Sounds like a "General Ludendorff said if the [insert favoured nationality] troops had been on side we'd have won" apocryphal kind of thing. I think the only thing he praised in that letter is tanks.

Remember Experience and Motivation are separate settings now. I think higher experience level DO make some aspects of the game a bit more "as expected". Such as snipers missing all the time for example or artillery delivery time. However poorly motivated troops also seem to behave more realistically, getting pinned sooner rather than dying to a man etc. Motivation seems to be the "deathwish" setting, and arguably the grizzled veteran has much less of a deathwish than the enthusiastic greenhorn.

I think it could easily serve as a rifle pit, but given its poition in a sunken lane, I'd guess that it is actually the reverse side of the dugout, with a rifle pit on the other side. The links below show some more pics of foxholes dug right into the bocage. Imagine this on one side with a tunnel under the bank out into the dugout on the other side.. The dugout in my previous pic certainly isn't 4 or 5 metres from the embankment, it is right underneath it (just to be clear in that pic I see a sunken lane with bocage embankments on both sides). These positions were not on the reverse slope AIUI they were on the side facing the attackers. It's pretty hard to find good pictures actually, but the famous map of the defenses around Le Carillon shows a lot of rifle pits and dugouts that would be similar to these ones. http://www.wehrmacht-awards.com/forums/showthread.php?t=216628&page=8 http://www.flamesofwar.com/Default.aspx?tabid=112&art_id=817&kb_cat_id=35 350 kb IMAGE of le carillon defenses: http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/100-13/mp16.jpg

looks like a plain old Marder III to me.

I think the M18 was pretty rare in the timeframe, if it was going to be in, it would be in now. All British tanks of note would be in there. Cromwell and Churchill almost certainly.

I think COVER provided by plain hedgerows is currently pretty much right. I think concealment and LOS degradation through hedgerows is too low. The point about fortifications was in answer to your previous post: "It might help this discussion if we delved into exactly how the Germans used the hedgerows." They had very well prepared entrenchments that are not even remotely simulated in the game. You have to place foxholes or trenches in the middle of a field where they cannot get LOS through the hedge. The tunnels also allowed passage through the hedgerows for both sides boobytraps not withstanding. The best match in the game with what I think the german positions look like would be to put a foxhole on the forward side of a bocage tile, directly in front of a gap in the hedge. That allows firing positions across the field to the next hedgerow with a quick escape route.

The Germans had very substantial dugouts tunneled under the bocage making both a fighting position, an escape route and a bunker very well protected from artillery. In CMBN you can't even place a foxhole in the same tile as a bocage piece. I also get the impression that concealment or LOS restriction both ways through bocage is too little. If those are all heavy hedgerows that can't be crawled through, the guys deployed along it should be almost impossible to see unless they fire for a decent period of time. The spotting out by the guys along the bocage should also be pretty obscured.

There are a lot of things that influence this in the game. CM simulates the extreme point of the pointy end where the units are there and ready to brawl. It does not simulate: Areas with lots of civilians. Battles where the enemy is completely annihilated by artillery. Battles where the enemy is gone. Enemies that immediately surrender because they know the broader situation is hopeless. As has been noted elsewhere on the forums, the game also puts entire squads in good uninterrupted LOS to each other for longer periods of time than is realistic. Most infantrymen would not neccesarily see the enemy for long enough to get a good shot off, even if their squad was engaged. Probably a large % of infantrymen would have gone through the war without getting into anything like a CM style knifefight.

The cathedral and tower were always very strong.

Yes tree canopies do not block LOS like they appear to visually and should do in real life. I'm not sure how it works exactly but it doesn't give anything like realistic results. You don't notice on a flat map but situations like this are really bad.

IIRC troops hiding in foxholes are now very unlikely to be spotted at all, whereas before they could be spotted and IDed almost instantly. The cover should have been bumped up to the point where smaller mortars and arty are survivable except for direct hits. If the guys are up and firing obviously they can be seen and hit, but hiding and cowering guys should get vrey large boost.

Yes, as has already been mentioned this issue was examined fairly closely, though nobody would claim that it is now perfect. Part of the equation is that there is now intended to be a bigger payoff both for killing a TC and buttoning the tank. * Vehicles that lose an unbuttoned crewman to small-arms fire are more likely to pop smoke and/or retreat like they typically do when the vehicle itself takes a hit.

I doubt that was the motivation but I can understand a player's desire to know what figures are used in the game from that point of view. Firstly, everyone could check if the research is correct. Secondly, everyone could check if the data attached to all the models is actually working as it should. Eg I recall someone "bitching" about penetrations into part of the Tiger hull armour had actually discovered that it was rated as thinner than it should be in the game. While I am sure BFC's research is some of the best, it is not impossible that a typo or an incorrect tag somewhere might not occasionally be skewing the results in subtle but important ways. When a certain armour rating means the difference between a kill or a bounced round the subtleties can become very important.

There is a strong trend to dismiss people's legitimate complaints on the forum as either them being ignorant or the whole thing being so complex that what they are seeing must be attributed to some other hazily-defined factor that they can't possibly understand. Of course it is mostly very polite and civilised, but there is a bit of a condescending groupthink-y tone to this sort of post. I know from personal experience that documenting bugs in CM is very time consuming, even just taking screenshots, and the average man on the street is not likely to bother, or if they do they might not do a very good job. That doesn't mean there is no problem. For example in TCP/IP it is almost impossible to document bugs. You can't save, you can't rewind, if you are lucky the problem might persist long enough to take a screenshot, and often you don't even fully notice the circumstances to even give a clue how to reproduce a bug. I enjoy the game for what it is too, but sometimes it takes someone making some noise to get something done. We can go on all day saying "that's not a problem unless you do statistically significant tests controlling for all variables". But maybe it IS a problem, and who is going to bother testing unless people speak up? This thread really seems to have run its course IMO...

I'd suggest that having to employ tank tactics in an "abstract manner" in a game like CM is completely contrary to what the game has always prided itself on: being a detailed and realistic armour sim. The hunt and shoot-n-scoot orders from CMx1 did provide a lot more flexibility in WEGO that is now absent. There are definitely issues there, obviously they bother some people more than others, but Steve has basically already said that it is a problem though it won't be fixed. I've also seen pleny of the funky stuff that slysniper described a bit earlier, where trees seem to not be WYSIWYG and the tank that logically should have the advantage in a particular situation consistently seems to lose. Saying thinks like you need to be a WWII tanker to comment is fairly ludicrous.

AIUI the german half-track mortar teams are supposed to be firing mounted from their vehicle but don't. The extra ammo supply is unique to this model of vehicle to reflect this. If the game had other ammo in "trucks" I think it appears in ALL trucks which may have unintended side effects where there is a massive abundance of ammo for specialist weapons.