Dschugaschwili

As far as I know, a squad will never hurt itself, even at night, only other friendly troops. Dschugaschwili

I don't think so. From my experience, CM gives small arms an area effect about 20-25m in radius. You can notice this even during the day: if a unit is fired upon by a squad, nearby units sometimes take cover too. During the day, this area effect doesn't affect friendly units, but at night it does. So if you fire at an enemy unit at night, you have to expect every friendly unit within a distance of 20-25m from the enemy to take casualties too. I have never seen a one-on-one fight lead to friendly casualties though, so I don't think a squad can hit itself, except perhaps with grenades, demo charges or similar area effect items. Dschugaschwili

Why? CPU usage is what, 5% when I plot my moves, do I need 980 MHz to keep the camera steady? </font>

I suspect that just about any game that uses a 3D engine will use 100% CPU power. If your laptop overheats, you shouldn't really blame the application. Even a laptop must be able to sustain a couple of hours at 100% CPU usage without temperature problems. Dschugaschwili

I don't think the hard disk usage would be a problem. Many people save all files from their PBEM games anyway, and having the game play the movie files one by one wouldn't be too difficult. There's one problem though. Currently the action doesn't stop at the 60 second mark, but all tank and arty shells that are already in the air continue the way to their impact points. So even the full battle movie would probably have to stop at the end of each turn if there's any kind of action. Otherwise we'll see tanks suddenly start burning although the shell that killed it only strikes two seconds later. On the other hand, BTS could change the engine so shells can be stopped in flight at the end of a turn, so the "over-time" at the end of the turns wouldn't be needed anymore. Now that would be nice. Dschugaschwili

In "exit the map" scenarios, your units are worth a lot. I'd suggest not to bother with small flags at all in your situation (except you can control them with something very cheap, say 20 points), and only go for the large ones if you expect to be able to hold them with a force of less than 60-80 points. Of course, this only applies if you can get those units off map. If you don't think they will make it, it's obviously better to have them control a flag at the end. Dschugaschwili

In previous versions of CM there was a bug that prevented any vehicle that was driving backwards from ever bogging in or triggering a mine. It is fixed now though. For more info on bogging see this thread. Be warned though, it's rather old, so some things may have changed since then, especially the reverse bug. Dschugaschwili

Gun hits are essentially treated the same way as track hits. They will never damage anything except the gun. One of my 250/1 halftracks once suffered a MG hit from a bazooka and survived with just a damaged MG. Dschugaschwili

I don't know... I was under a different impression. IIRC, in an operation I wanted to set two tanks that had been abandoned close to each other on fire, so I targeted one of them. After a turn of shooting by my gun I checked with the LOS tool and I'm almost sure that the hit probabilities for both tanks had gone up. I'm not sure how large this "bonus area" is though. I can't do any testing right now, but if anybody does, I'd be interested in the results. Dschugaschwili

As far as I know, a track hit will never penetrate in CMBO. So the best possible outcome is an immobilization. Dschugaschwili

Constantly delayed? I can't remember a release date being mentioned by BTS. As far as I understood, the release date was always "when it's done", and it still is. Dschugaschwili

I remember that a while ago someone from BTS (probably Steve) said that tanks/guns in CMBB will switch to HE if they see that AP is ineffective against an enemy tank to try to damage the gun or tracks. So it seems that it will be implemented, although it may not be in currently. Dschugaschwili

This problem is not limited to mine fields. The first part is basically the same as seeing the impact of arty shells beyond LOS (technically speaking). The second part is probably the same issue as "seeing" the destruction of houses or the start of fires (either terrain fires or vehicles that have received a top hit) without LOS. Dschugaschwili

There was a bug that allowed scanning the map for foxholes by dragging a movement order around the map. It was only present in the beta demo though. Later versions of the game had this effect fixed. Of course it's possible that a similar effect still exists for other man-made terrain features or units. Further testing would be required. Dschugaschwili

I think that you can enlarge/shrink the map on the "other" sides by holding shift and clicking the resize buttons. So if you want to shift the whole map north, you can take off some terrain at the north edge and add some in the south. I'm not sure about the keys though, best check the manual. Dschugaschwili

Personally, I need the possibility to send the PBEM files myself because I play at home and get my e-mails at work. On the other hand, as long as the current system stays available, I don't mind BTS putting in more features, but I wouldn't give this one a high priority. Dschugaschwili

Mud, this was tried by BTS when the TCP/IP code was built into CM. It didn't work because CM uses floating point arithmetics and different CPUs calculate those numbers differently, leading to small differences that let the movies on both computers diverge. Bad luck. Dschugaschwili

In the current system, there are one small and two large PBEM files per turn. Lets call the small size X and the large size Y. The proposed system would require two files per turn, with sizes of Y and (X+Y), respectively. Because X is usually smaller than 30kb, this increase in size would be almost neglegible. Dschugaschwili

Sadly, the previous thread didn't seem to catch BTS's attention. At least, I don't recall them respond on that issue. A streamlined PBEM system would be a great thing for all the PBEM players out there. Dschugaschwili

This has been proposed before, and it's even doable (see for example this thread ). Another wish: per-weapon ammo tracking, with the option to collect ammo of the same type from fallen comrades if the squad is unsuppressed and not moving. Dschugaschwili

There have been a couple of suggestions on this topic before, most of them much easier to implement than your method. A search would turn them up, but it doesn't seem to work on the archives right now. The answer has always been no to this date because changing the system would require changing the PBEM file format, and the guys at BTS don't want to spend much time on stuff that works as it would delay CMBB even more. Dschugaschwili

I don't think there's a way around this. Who plays scenarios that huge anyway? Dschugaschwili

Well, that would be 20M per rendering. But what I don't understand here is, why does it have to be in VRAM? With AGP 2x (which should be a reasonable minimum), you have 566MB/s. That enough bandwidth to render that 20M worth of buildings 28 times/sec, which seems like it should be plenty fast. </font>

I don't know about the setup zone issue, but everybody (attacker and defender) digs foxholes after every night battle in an operation. Dschugaschwili

My opinion regarding the borg spotting: As long as CM lets the player control every unit directly (by giving orders to it), a part of the problem is unavoidable: the player's knowledge is the sum of his units' knowledge. This has to be the case because he must have the ability to take a single unit's role and issue orders based on this unit's full knowledge. The second part of the problem can be (at least partially) "fixed": Currently, if the player knows about an enemy unit, every friendly unit within LOS of this unit also know about it, not necessarily immediately (if an enemy unit is spotted during a turn, not every friendly unit will fire at it immediately; especially buttoned tanks often need a while to notice), but at the start of the next orders phase. To get rid of the problem, several things are required: </font> Each unit needs its own list of known enemy units (preferably with the possibility of mis-identifications independant of the other friendly units). </font>A communication system (like discussed in previous posts) to simulate units telling each other what they just spotted. </font>Restrictions for the use of the area fire command. </font>As for restricting are fire, this is of course difficult to balance. Only allowing it near enemy units known to the area firing unit may be a possibility (at least for guns/tanks/mortars). Dschugaschwili [ March 05, 2002, 05:44 AM: Message edited by: Dschugaschwili ]