ASL Veteran

A lot of things are put in training manuals and leaflets, but the actual fact of what happens in the heat of battle seldom matches the ideal of what a leaflet might expect. We have had discussions about what happens when a tank is hit by fire and I've collected as many first hand accounts as I was able to. Here is just one example of what happens when your AFV is destroyed in battle. As you hopefully can surmise reaching around and packing your belongings are one of the last things a crewman is thinking about and in most cases a bailing crewmember would likely be completely unarmed. There are many aspects of the game that is more forgiving than in real life - like the fact that in the game every crewmember who survives the killing hit on the tank gets out. In many cases that isn't true. The only instance in which the number of submachine guns being carried in the vehicle would be relevant would be in situations where the crew voluntarily dismounts and does some recon or something while dismounted.

When CMFI was released it was not possible to close assault tanks with infantry in buildings - the only exception was open topped vehicles from the second floor or higher IIRC. However, a great debate ensued within the beta halls, arguments and sacrifices were made, blood was spilt, and eventually Charles relented and allowed infantry to close assault from buildings. If they aren't assaulting from buildings anymore then Charles changed it back while nobody was looking. So anyway, if someone says that they can't then they either aren't updated past whatever version was released post CMFI base game, or it was changed back for some reason without anyone noticing. Vehicles will usually need to be sitting near the building in question for a period of time before the infantry will assault it - it's not an immediate thing. Vehicles spot so well though that infantry don't usually get to remain for very long in such close proximity.

The Blitz website and The Few Good Men website are good for finding opponents.

I think you actually understand the situation completely, but because 'you don't have much of a problem with elevation restriction' you can't identify it as a problem. However, the fact is that you don't actually know if you have a problem with elevation restriction because it isn't in the game. Sure, you can eyeball your tanks and assume that they would always fire when you want them to, but inevitably there would be situations in the game where you might assume that a vehicle could fire and it wouldn't. It would just sit there doing nothing and in some instances where you exposed your vehicle to enemy fire by carefully positioning it in a location where you assumed that it would fire I'm sure your response to that would be - well I won't assume, but most players would immediately post to the forum that the game was broken. However, let's just assume for the sake of argument that Bulletpoint is always going to be 100 percent accurate in his assumptions about when a tank will be able to fire and when it won't. How many other players will make a mistake at least one time when positioning their vehicles? 80 percent? 50 percent? 20 percent? How many posts do we already have on the forum about 'my tank won't fire' and elevation restrictions aren't even a factor? I don't know how many scenarios you have made … perhaps you have made a few, but the idea that a designer can just spend hours upon hours micro positioning tanks at every point that they will occupy or potentially occupy just to check for elevation restrictions is pretty comical. It already takes many hours of work to create an AI plan (many aspiring designers don't even try and make their scenarios H2H) and in some of the bigger scenarios you will probably not be able to position tanks individually since an AI group will contain several tanks in it. It's already difficult enough to get all the tanks in one AI group to point in the right direction when you want them to let alone individually checking for elevation restrictions. That's not even considering the fact that any given vehicle might choose a different action spot to stop at when arriving at any given waypoint. That's also ignoring the fact that tanks in AI groups can be given orders where they individually stop in spots between waypoints designated by the designer - for example I can give a tank platoon an Advance order from one location to another and half the tanks will move and then stop somewhere in between waypoints - where? Don't know and I have no control over where they stop. How about the AI in Quick Battles? The guys who do all that work creating Quick Battle maps have no idea what the player is purchasing. It is simply impossible for an AI plan for a Quick Battle to account for elevation restrictions. So, don't get me wrong, I would love to have elevation restrictions in the game as much as the next guy. I would also love to have elevation restrictions in terms of where vehicles can move since all tanks can negotiate any terrain grade no matter how steep - short of cliffs of course. They also don't lose any speed while driving over said elevations. However, I also recognize and accept the reasons BFC has given as to why they haven't included these things. We were actually able to convince them to put some sort of penalty into the game for some of the extreme examples which crop up during city fighting so at least they added that in, but to have historically accurate elevation gun restrictions is probably never going to be in the game.

Cut off at Koevering and Eerde Dunes were both included stock in the Market Garden module and were created by 'Jaws'. I found the original scenario threads in the beta forum and for Koevering he said "Thank you Broadsword! I never intented to make this a huge battle but it was like this in 1944 Only the forces of KG Walther are extra in this what if." I don't think he ever made a non what if version and I didn't see the bit about Eerde Dunes that made it a what if, but I think he added some additional forces to that one as well. I don't know if Jaws is still hanging around here, but he's the one to ask about it.

The problem is that the game has no mechanism to identify cut off / hopeless situation so that's basically a non starter. For a lack of ammunition, I'm not sure you would want units to surrender automatically if they are low on ammunition or even out of ammunition because they may be in a position where they aren't threatened by enemy troops. Ideally there would be a way to code some level of awareness into the AI such that units could identify such circumstances, but we can't even make our pixeltruppen's suppression levels a trigger for specified activity in an AI plan so we are a very long way from having troops who are aware that their situation is hopeless. Just file this in the 'nice to have in some distant future' version of CM but not going to happen any time soon.

There is no way to render an opinion on what you are describing without a screen shot or a video. Generally speaking, if you can see something you can shoot at it so my assumption would be that your vehicle was partially obstructed in some odd or unusual way or perhaps there was something going on with the state of your crew. For the 88s you don't need to acquire the ammo from the bearers. When the bearers are close enough to the weapon the ammo will automatically be added to what shows as available for the gun. You can easily test this by setting up an 88 in one spot with the ammo bearers somewhere else. Look at the available ammo. Then move the bearer close to the gun and look at the ammo again - you should see the gun's available ammo increase by the amount the bearers are carrying. If you don't want to be seen I think your best bet is to hide, although they don't spot as well that way either so - not sure what to tell you there. Spotting is as it is.

No. Nice job of deliberately misunderstanding what I wrote though. Thirty meters away in game looks like something is very close when thirty meters in reality isn't necessarily as close as you might think. That's especially true if you are looking through thirty meters of forest. So you see, the distance is the same in game and in reality, but because of perspective that same distance might look different between the game and reality if you are someone who doesn't necessarily have a good grasp on how those distances actually translate to reality from the game. However, I'm not going to waste my time on a discussion when you aren't actually looking for an explanation but rather are simply interested in grinding an axe because you don't like something. There are a lot of gamers who don't like the way spotting works in the game and you aren't the first one to complain about it. At this point in time though, since it's almost a guarantee that it will never change, you can either choose to grit your teeth and play through it or you can quit the game and play something else. Belly aching on the forum isn't going to accomplish a single thing except perhaps to get like minded individuals to pat you on the back and say 'I agree'. I suppose maybe that might make you feel better about how much you dislike the spotting in the game, but it's not going to accomplish anything meaningful in terms of how the game plays if choose to play it.

I feel that this topic is probably a waste of time to discuss, but I'm going to toss some stuff out there anyway even though this entire thing is pretty subjective. Basically what a gamer's expectations for spotting are might differ from how the game handles spotting and no amount of discussion is probably going to sway them. With respect to the video of the IS2 - I'm not bothered by that in the slightest. For one thing in game perspective is probably different from real world perspective in that items that are twenty yards away in game in a forest might look like they are on top of each other, but when seen in real like really aren't that close to each other. Each action spot is essentially 8 meters square and that vehicle appears to be at least several action spots from the soldiers when they spot it - it looks close in game but go ahead and stand on an American football field and see how far twenty or thirty yards is and it might change your opinion of how close something is. Another thing to consider is that 'real' vehicles might have a considerable amount of foliage tied to it perhaps even including full on branches and other stuff. The vehicle models are all identical for any particular type and such foliage or additional things attached will not be represented for a variety of business or practical reasons. You will just have to use your imagination for that. Similarly all the trees of a specific type are identical in the game. A map maker can change things up a bit by mixing different tree types but that doesn't alter the fact that every birch tree will look identical in game. Anyone who has spent time on Earth and seen a tree will know that trees don't generally look identical in real life, so there might very well be 'branches in the way' but you just can't see them because the differences between individual trees aren't represented. The ground the trees are sitting on are probably either light woods or heavy woods which adds some bush art to the bases of the trees - once again an abstraction. I know that this probably isn't going to sway anyone, but if the spotting just doesn't work for you in this game then I'm not sure what anyone can say about it since it's not going to be changing any time soon, if ever, and contrary to popular belief military personnel and vehicles are not 'automatically spotted' as soon as they are in someone's LOS because - well it's part of life or death for them to try and avoid being spotted so troops actively attempt to conceal themselves on an active battlefield. Those that can't conceal themselves don't usually have a long lifespan in a combat zone.

Just in case - the quality settings only affect the loadout when you initially purchase a formation. If you have a previously purchased formation and you attempt to change the quality setting then it will have no effect. Once the quality setting is chosen then the loadout will change within the confines of the quality setting every time the scenario is loaded up. What you should see, for example, is when loading a scenario with US armored infantry you will get variable numbers of BARs in each squad and it will always be different every time you load the scenario. You can see this effect in the scenario 'Last Man Out' as an example where the Germans have lower quality formations and the loadout can be pretty dramatic between squads with some of the heavy VG squads getting two MG42 and some getting only one or none.

For something this specific it would probably be easier to figure out which units were in the geographical area that you are looking at and then try to find out what vehicles were in those units. The 233rd Reserve Panzer 'Division' was located at Horsens in Denmark from August 1943 until the end of the war. It only had 34 tanks and was used as a training unit so I doubt that any Panthers were present in the unit, but you never can be sure without finding more details about the unit.

Infantry can't swim in the game. They can cross fords. There is a bit of terrain overlap where normal ground interacts with water when the map is put together so in certain instances it can seem as though someone is 'underwater' or standing somewhere that they shouldn't but those situations would be map specific. Only certain amphibious vehicles can cross non ford water obstacles so if you are truly seeing infantry crossing non ford water obstacles then it might be a bug of some sort.

You can also find content created by the community at … I think it's still called the scenario depot over at 'The Few Good Men'.

well just so you know, when you set the headcount to 50% the game cuts the overall force by that amount and not necessarily each individual unit. The end result is that the headcount will vary from unit to unit - it might even be varied each time the scenario is loaded, although I'm not absolutely certain.

I can't say that I've ever experienced this situation, however, some buildings do not entirely fill action spots when set up diagonally and some of the independent buildings don't fill action spots entirely both ways they could be set up. I can certainly see a situation where a building does not fill an action spot completely and a squad who is deployed in such a building might, on some occasions, end up with a man or two left outside within the portion of the action spot that the building doesn't fill completely depending upon where in the building you click when you have them enter it. In other words, if you select a portion of the building that completely fills an action spot then everyone should make it inside, but if you select a portion of the building that has half an action spot outside then your chances of someone being left outside are probably increased. I'm just guessing that's what might be going on in your example, but I don't know for certain. This might simply be an artifact of the action spot and a game limitation that can't be overcome with the current action spot system.

The scenario comes with the Market Garden module IIRC - when the Fallschirmjager were added to the game.

If there are problems with the patch then we do need to know about them, but in order for something to be fixed it usually needs to be happening on a consistent basis and / or reproduceable by Charles because if he can't find the part of the code that's causing the problem then he can't fix it. That's assuming there even is a problem with the code to begin with. Sometimes game behavior can simply seem odd because we, as players, assign our own logic to what the pixeltruppen should be doing at any particular point in time but the game has its own logic and sometimes those two things come into conflict in unusual situations.

AI behavior could mean anything depending upon the context. He could be talking about the Tac AI for his own troops and if that's what he is talking about what is shown in the video could be unusual, although, once again, depending upon the context the 'friendly map edge' could be a determining factor here since troops will run back towards the friendly edge. However, he just asks about AI behavior and since the American force is the attacker in 'Sacrifice for a New Religion' it seemed probable that he was playing as the American against the German AI and that he was questioning the 'AI behavior' of his enemy. It's possible that he was playing as the German defender, but if that's the case he would probably have plenty of examples of American AI controlled troops performing the same illogical tactical maneuvers since the troops actions are timed. Only he can say which side he was playing and what difficulty level he was playing at.

It's hard to tell from the video above from the MG42 perspective because we have to see through the building transparency, but there appears to be an infantry contact that seems to positioned such that the Panther is directly in between the firer and the target. It is a contact only, but the Tac AI will sometimes fire on contact targets that you, the player, can't directly target if you leave the Tac AI to choose its own targets. The hard contact does seem too far over to the left to put the Panther between the firer and the target though - but the AI can take some inaccurate shots on occasion. As far as the Panther commander is concerned, the AI does tend to button up a bit too slowly for my tastes, but in this instance I'm pretty sure that he isn't buttoning up because he is in the line of fire of friendly troops and doubtless nothing is registering on the suppression meter. If you place an MG on a map and set an Area target some distance from the MG, and then put enemy troops between the target and the firer I don't think the enemy troops will be hit since the game does not simulate Grazing Fire. It has been a while since I've tried it so I'm not going to say I'm 100 percent certain, but I'm around 95% certain. Well, my earlier testing and the fact that Steve has acknowledged that Grazing Fire is not in the game and that he has bounced ideas that he had off the Beta Team in order to get Grazing Fire into the game. IIRC the problem was the number of calculations that the game would have to make because the game isn't only calculating stuff at the end point or target, but rather calculating all points in between - which apparently the game doesn't do other than armored vehicles. Whoa, sorry for the late posting - I just clicked on the thread from the Beta board because someone was asking about the first page and I didn't realize that was three pages ago.

I can't tell from the video where you are on the map, but the AI plan for the Germans has the forward units withdraw back towards the town at specific time intervals. The AI in the game is completely unaware of it's surroundings and has no clue what you are doing. The soldiers are simply moving to their next assigned waypoint at the designated time. This plan was also created with no triggers which makes it even less aware than newer plans.

Not to disappoint you, but if it isn't enabled by now it probably will never be enabled since it's, no doubt, intentionally that way.

When they appear on the map depends upon who can see them. You can set terrain objectives for one side to see or the other side to see, or you can set them for both sides to see or neither side to see. They don't show up when you are looking at the map in 3D preview mode and when you are playing they will only show up when the appropriate side is being played and the objective is visible to that particular side. When you are in the editor to deploy troops all terrain objectives set up within that side's victory section should show up regardless as to who can see them while playing IIRC. So yeah, the terrain objectives will appear and disappear depending upon how you are trying to view them and what part of the game you happen to be in at the time. Example: I can set a terrain touch objective for a house while in the Blue forces section of the mission objectives. I can then set that objective so that it can only be seen by the Red Force. Thus, when I play the game as the blue force the objective will not be visible. When I play the game as the Red force the objective will be visible as an objective for the blue force. When I go into the editor to deploy Red Forces the objective will not appear and when I go into the editor to deploy Blue forces the objective will appear. If I go into the map 3D editor I will also not see the objective.

If you wanted to I suppose you could alter the briefings and upload the modified scenarios to The Scenario Depot. It's pretty easy to modify the briefings - just go into the scenario editor, locate and load the scenario you want to modify, go to the missions tab, select the side's 'mission' that you want to modify, select the 'Text' file and click the export button and the briefing text file will be taken from out of the game so you can alter it. You could even write something completely new if you wanted to and then just clear out the old one and load your new one.

There were a lot of scenarios that got adjusted between CMSF1 and CMSF2 and every briefing probably wasn't gone over as completely as possible. In most cases I would guess that any briefing discrepancies between what is in a scenario and what is in the briefing comes down to the briefing being unmodified or not completely updated between CMSF1 and 2. I will personally confess to Baker 1-1. I think I detailed a lot of the changes in the designer's notes if I recall correctly, but I don't remember how much I altered the actual side briefings from the original since my objective was to modify the original. The issue with the briefings is that most of the scenario material that we were working with were from designers who no longer produce stuff for Battlefront and in many cases there were either incomplete briefings to begin with or in some cases no briefing at all. Going in and picking up what the original designer's intent was without any context can be difficult to do, more difficult in some cases than modifying some AI plans or Victory conditions. For example, for the briefing maps in many cases we wouldn't have a clue as to where the battle took place in 'Syria' so how can one create an operation map when you don't know where the battle took place? I didn't modify many of the CMSF original scenarios, although I tried to retain as much of the original as possible for the ones I did since ultimately it wasn't my original work. I didn't want to create something that was entirely new or that would erase the original designer's intent completely.

I don't know how far along you are, but the only victory points each side earns are the victory points that you assign to each side. You should also assign each side an equal number of victory points in order to balance out the victory conditions. Sometimes that can be hard to do, but MikeyD's suggestion of the bonus points can work in those instances, but typically that is only going to work in a very unbalanced scenario where the side gaining them will probably have a difficult time achieving anything else. So if the only unit objectives that you have assigned are for 'German' forces destruction then only the Americans will be able to earn any points. You can offset that by giving the Germans a terrain victory location that they need to hold or you can give the German's unit destruction VPs for destroying American forces. There are also Parameter VPs as well as different variety of Terrain VPs to choose from. I have to admit that I've never tried to assign unit destruction points to non units, but I suppose it would be possible to assign VPs to something like a trench for example. The problem is that a trench is indestructible so I'm thinking those points would never be earned. Wire and mines I guess are theoretically possible to destroy I guess, but I'm thinking it would be more logical to leave those VPs out and just give the Germans a terrain objective to 'Hold'. So unit objectives for the Americans totaling 200 points and hold terrain objective for the Germans for 200 points. That gives each side 200 points possible so each side's available points are equal.