ASL Veteran

It seems to me that, because every soldier is individually rendered, that some players want to be able to command each individual soldier ... individually. I want that soldier to be standing in that corner facing that way. I want Sgt Slaughter to be commanding the squad while standing behind the fence. I want Private Jones to be laying down next to that bush over there, etc. If you are hoping for the ability to be able to place every single individual soldier exactly then that's probably never going to happen so you will be waiting in vain. Now then, I personally have very seldom had issues with the placement of individual team members within an action spot by the Tac AI. Sometimes, I will admit, the squad's fire teams just refuse to go in the action spot that I want them to - but in that case I will end up splitting the squad so I can place the team in the action spot that I want to place them in. On occasion I have had to use the "Face" command to get the individual squad members to position themselves within the action spot in the way that I want them to. Once the firing starts though the squad members will generally maneuver themselves into good firing position ..... and ....... there is still a little bit of abstraction in the engine too even though it's harder to detect. As far as the keyholing issue .... I'm going to presume you are talking about heavy weapons teams like HMGs etc. Yeah, sometimes there can be an issue with that. I think it's primarily caused by the LOS being traced from the team leader instead of the weapon itself since weapons teams (including ATGs) are treated as infantry units rather than like an individual weapon. The team leader is also not always in the best spot and it can get frustrating at times. I've found that many times, if I just place the weapon in the action spot where I want to place it that even though I seemingly can't trace a good LOS from that spot the weapon will still fire when I need it to since LOS is traced from the team leader and the bullets are traced from the weapon itself. The way LOS is traced through the terrain can be a bit frustrating as well because it traces LOS to the ground location of the spot you are trying to see to. If there is any grain or some tall grass or something in between you and the ground level location it may seem like you don't have LOS but when someone goes walking by you can see them because they are above ground level. So I guess what I would say is .... yeah, there probably can be a bit of frustration there with weapons teams. It honestly doesn't bother me too much though - I can generally get the results I need without much frustration. It might be helpful if you put up some screen shots of the behavior that is frustrating you so the beta testers here can see what the issue is. You know - I want to place my weapon here so it sees over there and my LOS is always blocked no matter what I do. A picture is worth a thousand words, and you can get much better results that way. I wanted to edit this in .... I'm actually not 100% certain anymore that using the Target command to trace LOS with a weapon team will trace LOS from the team leader instead of the gunner. That may have been changed in one of the beta versions .... although I'm not positive about it. That'll teach me to post without double checkng first!

In order to load pixeltruppen into a vehicle, just select the troops you want to load, select a movement command of some type, then move the cursor over the vehicle you want to mount. The cursor should change to indicate that you can mount if eligible (I don't remember the exact colors). If eligible to mount just click on the vehicle and your truppen will load up.

Perhaps. However, you may want to consider that if a tank crewman were bailing out of a tank there was probably a good reason for him to not want to be in there in the first place - and maybe that crewman won't be so eager to meet the enemy after exiting the tank he was in. Try to imagine yourself in a confined space .... a loud Crack ..... sparks flying .... the smell of sulphur ..... you look behind you and the man sitting next to you no longer has a head and blood is splattering all over the interior .... is the tank on fire? Full of the fear of burning alive you attempt to open your hatch .... it's stuck!! Try the hatch again ... and again ... wiggle it a bit .... finally the hatch opens. You jump onto the deck of the tank but you are tangled up in your intercom wires and enemy machine gun bullets are whizzing about. Finally you free yourself from the entangling wires and make it to the ground - fortunately in one piece. Your next reaction will be a) I'm done for the day - that was quite enough thank you (likely) Bring it on - I've only begun to fight (very unlikely) In fact, I've yet to read of a single personal account where a tank crewman remanned a vehicle that they've just recently bailed out of. A commander might mount a different vehicle to continue in command of their unit, but not your average crewman. It might be good to remember that what is being simulated in the game is a nasty, dirty, bloody, terrifying, and chaotic environment. Actions that may seem reasonable while sitting in your home playing a game that represents actions in a fairly clinical environment with pixeltruppen who have no fear would be shown to be to be almost totally unreasonable and extraordinary when done in real life.

I hope you aren't suggesting that Michael Wittman is in any way representative of the average tank soldier in WW2 .....?

...two Germans appeared in the window, one with a credit card, and one with a panzerfaust. :eek:

So is this thread about Panzerfausts or credit cards? I'm starting to get confused over here. :confused:

LOL, we have an excellent tactician here. No doubt a worthy PBEM opponent when the game is released.

I actually recently read a first hand account of a guy who witnessed a grenadier fire a Panzerfaust from a foxhole and kill himself with the backblast because the firer didn't raise the back end of the tube above the rim of the foxhole. If it's necessary I can dig it out, but it was a member of the Hitler Jugend fighting around Caen.

If you guys are used to CMx1 map sizes and haven't tried anything in CMSF yet, then I think you will find that the map sizes in CMSF are much bigger in game relative to a similar sized map in CMx1. A 1km by 1km map in CMx1 doesn't seem all that big when you look at it in game, but in CMSF a 1km by 1km map seems absolutely massive. I've made some partial SL maps in CMSF and the difference between CMx1 and CMSF is striking. The maps also take a lot more work because there is more detail in the new maps with the 8m squares. A map that might take me a week to do in CMx1 would probably take me three or four weeks in CMSF.

I'll give you that it may diminish realism to a certain extent - although probably not as much as you are maintaining. Commanders do have maps, binos, recon elements, and they make detailed orders so the pixeltruppen aren't just going out in the dark. The troops will know generally that a building is somewhere 'over there' or that an orchard should be 'by that creek'. They may not know with precision what the terrain looks like, but they shouldn't be totally and completely surprised by what they find for the most part. Regarding how perfect terrain knowledge makes you a superior player - well I hate to break it to you but that's going to cut both ways bud. If you are playing a superior opponent then that person is going to be able to use the terrain to their advantage just as well or better than you will. So depending upon the quality of your opponent you may actually be worse off from your opponent having perfect terrain knowledge rather than you being the one doing all the stomping. I'll even do you one better though - if you are playing quick battles the terrain may be known, but your opponents forces are not. In scenarios you can have perfect knowledge of both the terrain and the opposing force. You know what? I find that it makes very little difference in the outcome because the superior player will generally win anyway. I played a guy back in CMBB where the scenario essentially had equal forces on both sides - Finns vs Russians where the Finns were basically equipped identical to the Russians. We both had perfect map knowledge and perfect knowledge of each other's OB since it was identical. The victory conditions were also identical for each side. Guess what? It wasn't even close - I annihilated him. All that knowledge gave him no advantage whatsoever because my tactics were superior.

I'm not really interested in AAA in terms of firing at aircraft. I am interested in AAA in terms of ground fire though. There are a lot of personal accounts and small unit actions that involved AAA firing on ground targets and without AAA modeled those scenarios can't be created if you want them to be true to the historical situation. I do hope that AAA gets into the game at some point - for ground fire purposes.

From "WW1 Source Book" in the section about the German army "Despite increasing industrialization, most recruits continued to be drawn from rural communities or small towns (before the war only some 6 per cent were from industrial areas) as it was believed that countrymen were physically more suited to military service, more loyal and conservative than city dwellers and less susceptible to exposure to socialist or revolutionary propaganda. When the demands of war forced the enlistment of urban personnel, the traditional and very conservative attitude of the army was diluted, and some believed the unrest and mutinies of 1918 were attributable to these politically suspect city dwellers." Just tossing it out there

I don't think anyone but you was assuming that every formation of every Commonwealth nation was represented in the module. As an Australian surely you would know that Australian formations were primarily fighting in the PTO during the time frame that Combat Mission Battle for Normandy covers. Naturally since there are no plans to include any Japanese forces in either Combat Mission Battle for Normandy and Combat Mission Commonwealth forces is just an add on to the Normandy title it would probably be a waste of resources to spend time on Australian TO&E - surely we can agree on that? So really I'm not sure why you are surprised that there are no Australians in the Commonwealth module or, given the geographical location of the game topic, that you would assume they were represented in the first place. As far as "Commonwealth" forces serving in the Normandy area from June until August it seems like referring to the Canadian and British participation in Norman operations as the contributions of the "Commonwealth" forces to the liberation of France would be appropriate. Are you making an assumption that British and Canadian forces are not members of the "Commonwealth" unless Australian forces are also fighting alongside them? If so, then what would you refer to the Canadian and British forces fighting in Normandy since they can't be properly referred to as Commonwealth forces in the absence of an Australian presence? The British in the absence of the Canadians could be "British" and the Canadians in the absence of the British could be "Canadians" but what would be the proper way to refer to both British and Canadians as a group?

Magpie_Oz is right of course. The module should not be named "Combat Mission Commonwealth Forces" or something silly like that because obviously all Commonwealth forces are not included so the name of the module would be misleading. It would be a stain on the honor of Australians and New Zealanders everywhere to name the module the "Commonwealth" module because that implies that the entire Commonwealth is comprised of Wales, Scotland, England, Ireland, Canada, SS formations, and Fallshirmjagers. I think a more appropriate name for the module would be "Combat Mission: Nazi Fanatics" because the SS and Paras are included and I think that about covers all Nazi Fanatic formations so it should be considered an all inclusive name for the module. Due to their inclusion in the module, some might make the error of assuming that Canadians are Nazi Fanatics as well but that can't really be helped. Fortunately by their exclusion, at least Australians can't be mistaken for Nazi Fanatics and that's what's really important here.

How is that a contradiction? You have two basic modes of play - We Go and Real Time. If you have Real Time with Pause then that is different from We Go either with or without replay.

Alright, as long as my namesake has been mentioned I feel the need to point out that ASL and SL didn't track casualties at all. You had a squad and the squad was either good order, broken, or pinned (heroic, berzerk). In order to eliminate a squad the squad had to break twice. Did they all die? Who knows. The squad basically stopped functioning as a cohesive unit. Did ASL do infantry combat well? I think so, given the limitations of using cardboard truppen. However, using that as a basis to compare casualties in Combat Mission is pretty much baseless since no casualties are tracked in ASL or SL. I have a great deal of experience playing both ASL and Combat Mission, and I can say without hesitation that CMx2 does infantry combat just as well or better than ASL does. I've even converted ASL scenarios directly into CMx1 and with a lot of tweaking I was able to get similar results to how the scenarios play out in ASL. I haven't had the pleasure of converting anything over in CMx2 though, but I'm confident that the conversions would work out even better than with CMx1. Comparing armored combat isn't even close - it's Combat Mission hands down. It's not even close.

If you want to learn how to withdraw while under fire in CMx2 just play as the insurgents in any scenario out there. Withdrawing under fire is basically a way of life for Red Forces in CMSF. Yes, it can be done while under area fire as well. In fact, if you are good enough and your opponent likes to do a lot of area firing, you can make your opponent waste a lot of ammunition firing at ghosts from old contacts. It just gets dicey if your pixeltruppen are subjected to so much firepower that they get pinned - then you are pretty much screwed unless the fire slacks off and you can slink away a little later. So, you have to time your withdrawal carefully. Wait too long and you get hosed. Do it too early and your position is surrendered before it needs to be.

The obvious problem with using enemy weapons aside from the recognition factor would be ammunition resupply. Even assuming that someone picked a weapon off the enemy they would probably only be able to use it for the rest of that firefight and maybe one more, then your pockets would be empty because the supply sergeant isn't going to have any more ammo for you. Having said that, I also agree that having it happen every once in a while as a random occurrence could add flavor to the game, just like adding heroic or berzerk status to soldiers would add flavor. It would make the pixeltruppen less robotic. The cost vs benefit calculation for something like that would be difficult though since it would be so hard to measure the benefit something like that would add to the game. The 'coolness' factor would definitely be there for many, and I could definitely see the forum explode as someone posted screens of one of those infrequent events after they took place. Eventually the novelty would wear off, but the impact of something random and unexpected would juice a few players I have no doubt about that.

FYI, TCP/IP is basically where you load up a game on your computer, then you give your friend your computer's IP number, then your friend goes into his or her game, punches in your IP and your computers are connected directly to each other. I play Civ 4 TCP/IP with several friends and you can currently play CMSF TCP/IP RT but not We Go which is the turn based option when selecting your mode of play.

Wooohooo, the T-28 is in! They built at least two of those .

Combat Mission won't be complete until the T-28 is included I can already see the scenario now - a platoon of T-28s encounters Hitler's convoy guarded by Maus tanks.

Aahhhhhh, well my friend that might work for you, but if Battlefront is going to add a feature like full movie playback Battlefront can't just add it to meet your standards and your standards alone. It would have to be added such that whoever desired that feature would be able to use it the way they wanted to, and those ways might differ from what you would use it for. Naturally that would include removing fog of war if desired and viewing the battle from your opponents perspective. What might work for you might be hopelessly broken and pointless to player X who has been waiting for this feature for the last ten years.

If you just theoretically combined your own PBEM files into one movie wouldn't you get a movie that showed the battle from only your perspective and at whatever fog of war level you had selected? How would you be able to combine the battle views of your opponents into this movie? It seems to me that you would have at least two data streams - one for the battle from your perspective and one for the battle from your opponent's perspective. In order to have a proper movie where you would be able to view the battle from either side then you would have to combine those files somehow wouldn't you? You may also find it desireable to be able to remove fog of war if you were trying to use the movie to learn tactics rather than using the movie to just relive fond memories of when you smoked that Panther. I'm thinking that this is a lot more complicated than you guys are portraying. If it was as simple as just taking a bunch of PBEM files and linking them together then I think it probably would have been added as a feature by now.

I noticed that too. I've got to think that for an American target audience at least, that the Pacific theater might possibly rank higher than even the eastern front. Of course, I'm not basing that on anything other than my gut feeling.

Merry Christmas to all. Enjoy