Dschugaschwili

If the turret is the only vulnerable part of the PzIV, it will last longer hull up. That's because while the size of the vulnerable area of the PzIV stays the same, the aim point will be closer to this area (assuming center-of-mass aim) if the tank is hull down, making hits against the vulnerable area more likely. Dschugaschwili

Arty spotters always target a ground point, but it's possible to see a tank in CM, but not the ground the tank is standing on. If you now target the tank with your spotter, he will target the ground under the tank. If this ground spot is out of LOS, the fire mission will count as unobserved. Conclusion: Don't target tanks with FOs. Hit shift-V and look if the ground beneath the tank is visible and target it directly. Then you can switch on tank display again. Dschugaschwili

It seems that being zeroed in on a tank can be transferred to other targets. I noticed that in CMBB the listed to-hit percentage was higher for tanks near the target of last turn than for tanks farther away. You're right about the area being quite small though. Do you think you'd get the same number of first shot kills under combat conditions? Dschugaschwili

Explosions (from on-map shooters or arty) can reduce minefields, but the marker won't disappear. You have to judge for yourself when you feel comfortable moving through as the game won't tell you anything (think of it as fog of war). Dschugaschwili

Your argument would only make sense if a. the shot distribution of the gun was a uniform distribution and b. the range of the shot distribution included the entire turret when aiming at the center of mass. While we can usually expect ( to me true most of the time, the shot distribution is much closer to a normal distribution in reality. This means that an area near the aim point will be hit more often than an area of equal size that is farther away from the aim point. So hitting the turret more often if one is aiming at it (read: hull down target) is realistic. Dschugaschwili

This has been proposed a couple of times before (as early as CMBO). Answer (from Charles) was that internal implementation details would make this very hard and lengthy to code, so we most likely won't see it until the engine rewrite. Dschugaschwili

I'd think so. I just finished an operation that had weakened troops in battle 1 and fit ones as reinforcements later. None of them changed fitness levels between battles. Dschugaschwili

A WWII gun would probably be better off shooting HE at modern tanks. If all the external equipment is destroyed, the modern tank is most likely less combat capable than the WWII tank because the WWII crew is much better trained in using optical sights and so on. So a quick arty strike at the modern tank should probably do the trick. Just a thought... Dschugaschwili

Make a backup copy of your combat mission executable before installing the patch. That way, you can have both versions of CM installed. You just have to start the right executable. Dschugaschwili

That's exactly what seperates CM from the other computer games for me: CM is probably the only game where I never reloaded a previous savegame if something went wrong. (Ok, Nethack is the second one.) Dschugaschwili

It has been discussed before here. No clear answer back then though. Dschugaschwili

Actually, that would be my preferred solution. I just can't think of a situation where planned fire would make sense for the defender. If you really want to be able to hit the attacker on the approach, make the map 500m longer and increase the time by 10 minutes. That way the defender has to at least aim at a moving target with his arty. Dschugaschwili

Generally you use area fire if you think that you will lose sight of the enemy unit as soon as it takes cover. If you're sure that you won't lose sight, target the unit directly. Dschugaschwili

Ah, another easy-to-implement approach to AI by JasonC. Perhaps we should for once accept that in a program as complex as CM there are practically no easy-to-implement changes. I have proposed a few of those myself in the CMBO days (per-weapon ammo tracking for squads and a secure 2 email per turn PBEM system come to mind), but if Charles says that there are subtle problems in the code that make those improvements quite tricky and time-consuming to implement, I have to believe him. After all, he's the one who knows how the CM source code works, not me. And I'd think that changes to the AI are much more complex than my proposals above. Perhaps the guys advocating some easy improvements should go back and read about the TCP/IP floating point problems during the development of CMBO 1.10 and the amount of time needed to fix them. Dschugaschwili

JasonC, you're not being fair here. The fact alone that CM is not a game with full information (unlike chess) makes programming a CM AI so much harder. I have a master degree in computer science, and I do think that I'm a good programmer, but they would have to pay me lots of money to write an AI for a game as complex as CM with an audience as demanding as CM's. Mimicking human behaviour is very hard to do for a computer. Chess programs have taken a long time until they could handle concepts like positional advantage. CM's AI was written by a single guy just a few years ago, and I honestly don't think that you can expect it to hold its own against the best human players on this planet, nor should you assune that there are easy improvements that nobody has thought of before (especially since AI threads pop up in fairly regular intervals). Dschugaschwili

In that case I'd say that they should first implement friendly fire casualties for units in front of tanks and guns, and for units crossing the line of fire of squads and MGs, and so on. Wouldn't be very funny unless the TacAI would enforce some fire discipline in those situations. Dschugaschwili

Covered arcs can also be used to "protect" area fire orders from TacAI intervention. For example I had situations where I wanted to smoke a specific spot with a gun, but the TacAI always decided that it would be better to fire at a MG somewhere completely different. So I set a very narrow covered arc around the smoke target spot, and then it worked. Your suggestion would make this use of covered arcs almost impossible because my gun would switch to any unit within the arc. I guess we can't have everything. Dschugaschwili

Who cares? I just played a game of CMBB as the Russians. And I didn't really have a problem with not being able to understand what my men were saying. I mean, I don't have to understand them to tell that they're panicking (which they were doing a lot). Same for just about everything else that can be seen in the status messages for my units. On the other hand, understanding the enemy troops when they say "Ich brauche mehr Muni!" can be quite useful. Dschugaschwili

AKAIK Sergei is right. The current movement type (if any) does not have any effect on the chance of unbogging. Dschugaschwili

Andreas, why should I follow someone who has a higher member number than I do? Dschugaschwili

atiff is right here. In the example above, you would see a firepower rating of 87 even if the enemy unit was in a trench. The firepower rating in CM includes range and experience (probably also the fp bonus from HQs), but not terrain. That is covered in the exposure rating only. Dschugaschwili

I second that. I have been visiting the CM forums since even before the CMBO beta demo days, reading lots of excellent threads (often from those people who have been so heavily attacked in this thread) and writing a few posts myself (on game issues, not on historic topics, I'm no WWII history expert). But I must say that lately a disappointing number of threads has quickly turned away from an educated discussion of a perfectly valid topic towards senseless name-calling. With that in mind, I'm not really surprised that the Battlefront guys rarely participate in any discussions lately. I guess the good old days on this forum are over for ever. Dschugaschwili

If we're already talking about engines: Half-Life is based on the Quake 1 engine, so the engine Counter-Strike is based on is really outdated. And still thousands of people are playing it all the time, especially those with lower-end hardware. I can't see why CM should require cutting edge hardware to run. Dschugaschwili

Most likely the reason is ammo. It seems that each nation is using its own ammo in captured tanks, and German ammo is generally better in CMBB. A look at the penetration charts should confirm this. Dschugaschwili

Certainly. If we ignore the large amount of randomness in CM for a moment, we can look at the following scenario: You have one tank that can shoot an enemy MG. Unluckily, the MG is able to regain its morale at the same speed as your tank is lowering it. So you will never be able to break it. Now, add a second tank. Suddenly the MG's morale is dropping twice as fast as it is going up, so the MG will break eventually. Add another tank and it will break twice as fast, and so on. So yes, bringing more firepower to bear against a single target helps tremendously. Dschugaschwili