ASL Veteran

You seem to be suggesting that BFC games are some sort of 'open beta' games or something.  That's not the case.  Bug tracking is not chaos for BFC.  Actual software that is designed for bug tracking is used by the company in order to get the appropriate information to the appropriate individuals and the beta testers are charged with providing the appropriate information through the use of that bug tracking software.  While it is appreciated when players find things in the game that may need to be addressed the gaming public has no obligations of any kind in terms of bug tracking.  Customers play the games and enjoy them if they like playing them or stomp around angrily if they don't like the games.  Players can report things or not report things as they desire.  Customers will know that a bug has been addressed when a patch gets released and the patch log is published.  Bug tracking, reporting, and fixing is the obligation of BFC to the customers who buy the game.  There is no obligation by those who play the game to track, report, and fix bugs.  If something gets reported on a public forum more than once or even not at all then it really makes no difference because the public forums are not where the bug tracking is done.  Describing BFC bug tracking as chaos is wildly misinformed.  It may be different than what some are used to, but that doesn't mean that it's chaos.
Leave the bug tracking to BFC.  Perhaps if you get invited to the Beta team some day then you can participate in all the bug tracking and reporting that you would ever want, but for now just go and play the game and enjoy yourself.  

You seem to be suggesting that BFC games are some sort of 'open beta' games or something.  That's not the case.  Bug tracking is not chaos for BFC.  Actual software that is designed for bug tracking is used by the company in order to get the appropriate information to the appropriate individuals and the beta testers are charged with providing the appropriate information through the use of that bug tracking software.  While it is appreciated when players find things in the game that may need to be addressed the gaming public has no obligations of any kind in terms of bug tracking.  Customers play the games and enjoy them if they like playing them or stomp around angrily if they don't like the games.  Players can report things or not report things as they desire.  Customers will know that a bug has been addressed when a patch gets released and the patch log is published.  Bug tracking, reporting, and fixing is the obligation of BFC to the customers who buy the game.  There is no obligation by those who play the game to track, report, and fix bugs.  If something gets reported on a public forum more than once or even not at all then it really makes no difference because the public forums are not where the bug tracking is done.  Describing BFC bug tracking as chaos is wildly misinformed.  It may be different than what some are used to, but that doesn't mean that it's chaos.
Leave the bug tracking to BFC.  Perhaps if you get invited to the Beta team some day then you can participate in all the bug tracking and reporting that you would ever want, but for now just go and play the game and enjoy yourself.  

You seem to be suggesting that BFC games are some sort of 'open beta' games or something.  That's not the case.  Bug tracking is not chaos for BFC.  Actual software that is designed for bug tracking is used by the company in order to get the appropriate information to the appropriate individuals and the beta testers are charged with providing the appropriate information through the use of that bug tracking software.  While it is appreciated when players find things in the game that may need to be addressed the gaming public has no obligations of any kind in terms of bug tracking.  Customers play the games and enjoy them if they like playing them or stomp around angrily if they don't like the games.  Players can report things or not report things as they desire.  Customers will know that a bug has been addressed when a patch gets released and the patch log is published.  Bug tracking, reporting, and fixing is the obligation of BFC to the customers who buy the game.  There is no obligation by those who play the game to track, report, and fix bugs.  If something gets reported on a public forum more than once or even not at all then it really makes no difference because the public forums are not where the bug tracking is done.  Describing BFC bug tracking as chaos is wildly misinformed.  It may be different than what some are used to, but that doesn't mean that it's chaos.
Leave the bug tracking to BFC.  Perhaps if you get invited to the Beta team some day then you can participate in all the bug tracking and reporting that you would ever want, but for now just go and play the game and enjoy yourself.  

You seem to be suggesting that BFC games are some sort of 'open beta' games or something.  That's not the case.  Bug tracking is not chaos for BFC.  Actual software that is designed for bug tracking is used by the company in order to get the appropriate information to the appropriate individuals and the beta testers are charged with providing the appropriate information through the use of that bug tracking software.  While it is appreciated when players find things in the game that may need to be addressed the gaming public has no obligations of any kind in terms of bug tracking.  Customers play the games and enjoy them if they like playing them or stomp around angrily if they don't like the games.  Players can report things or not report things as they desire.  Customers will know that a bug has been addressed when a patch gets released and the patch log is published.  Bug tracking, reporting, and fixing is the obligation of BFC to the customers who buy the game.  There is no obligation by those who play the game to track, report, and fix bugs.  If something gets reported on a public forum more than once or even not at all then it really makes no difference because the public forums are not where the bug tracking is done.  Describing BFC bug tracking as chaos is wildly misinformed.  It may be different than what some are used to, but that doesn't mean that it's chaos.
Leave the bug tracking to BFC.  Perhaps if you get invited to the Beta team some day then you can participate in all the bug tracking and reporting that you would ever want, but for now just go and play the game and enjoy yourself.  

You seem to be suggesting that BFC games are some sort of 'open beta' games or something.  That's not the case.  Bug tracking is not chaos for BFC.  Actual software that is designed for bug tracking is used by the company in order to get the appropriate information to the appropriate individuals and the beta testers are charged with providing the appropriate information through the use of that bug tracking software.  While it is appreciated when players find things in the game that may need to be addressed the gaming public has no obligations of any kind in terms of bug tracking.  Customers play the games and enjoy them if they like playing them or stomp around angrily if they don't like the games.  Players can report things or not report things as they desire.  Customers will know that a bug has been addressed when a patch gets released and the patch log is published.  Bug tracking, reporting, and fixing is the obligation of BFC to the customers who buy the game.  There is no obligation by those who play the game to track, report, and fix bugs.  If something gets reported on a public forum more than once or even not at all then it really makes no difference because the public forums are not where the bug tracking is done.  Describing BFC bug tracking as chaos is wildly misinformed.  It may be different than what some are used to, but that doesn't mean that it's chaos.
Leave the bug tracking to BFC.  Perhaps if you get invited to the Beta team some day then you can participate in all the bug tracking and reporting that you would ever want, but for now just go and play the game and enjoy yourself.  

Ultimately any designer has to make personal choices about the soft factors that he assigns to the units and those soft factors may / should be influenced by how the scenario or campaign plays out during testing.  However, Ts4ever and Bulletpoint bring up some excellent points to consider.  I will generally start with a sort of baseline from what I know about the units involved and modify to match that.  I do follow a couple of general guidelines though.  Because of high turnover I have adopted a policy of almost never assigning any experience level higher than veteran.  The only exception that I will make is with small units such as tank crews, HQ units, snipers, and various teams if the situation is warranted.  These units are small enough that they could develop a level of cohesion and continuity that would be consistent with how I view the various soft factors.  A full strength rifle squad would simply be too large a unit and subject to such turnover that assigning anything higher than 'veteran' seems unlikely to happen even in what might be considered 'elite' units (which aren't always as 'elite' as some might think).  I never paid too much attention to command values until, during the course of creating one scenario with late war German units, I found that the German conscript and green troops armed with lots of automatic weapons would simply cause US squads to rapidly melt if I didn't adjust the command rating down from +2 to either +1 or 0.  The firepower effectiveness of the command value is fairly dramatic when combined with an abundance of automatic weapons.  For the HQ units a higher experience can be justified in some cases because, for example in the Soviet army, apparently tank unit commanders would hand pick their own crews and unless the tank was damaged or destroyed those crewmembers would stay together for as long as the commander retained his position.  So you could theoretically see a big experience disparity in a Soviet tank platoon for example - you might see a Veteran platoon commander with a good modifier but the individual tanks in the platoon could be rated as green or even conscript in some cases given the level of training common during certain time frames.
How would you rate a squad that had a veteran core of a solid squad leader, maybe two or three long term veteran squad members, and five new green replacements (or even Ukrainian 'Booty' solders)?  How much weight do you give the squad leader in that situation and how much weight do you place on the replacements?  If a unit hasn't had any replacements for a while then you might be able to justify a rating higher than veteran, but only in situations where perhaps a battalion has been in continuous combat and had been reduced to 100 men or something like that.  In that instance the continuity could justify a higher experience rating, but then the morale factor comes into play.  How motivated are those survivors to keep on fighting?
Ultimately you have to just take a stab at it and see how it plays out during playtesting.  How the campaign plays out is ultimately more important than some notion of 'historical accuracy' because the reality is that there probably isn't any sort of solid guide to what is accurate or not accurate.  I suppose that if you just made a blanket setting for all of a certain side's troops to be 'Elite' then some gamers would look at that as odd or maybe off a bit, but short of doing something dramatic like that you should probably just do what's best to have the scenario or campaign play out the way you intend it to play out.     

Ultimately any designer has to make personal choices about the soft factors that he assigns to the units and those soft factors may / should be influenced by how the scenario or campaign plays out during testing.  However, Ts4ever and Bulletpoint bring up some excellent points to consider.  I will generally start with a sort of baseline from what I know about the units involved and modify to match that.  I do follow a couple of general guidelines though.  Because of high turnover I have adopted a policy of almost never assigning any experience level higher than veteran.  The only exception that I will make is with small units such as tank crews, HQ units, snipers, and various teams if the situation is warranted.  These units are small enough that they could develop a level of cohesion and continuity that would be consistent with how I view the various soft factors.  A full strength rifle squad would simply be too large a unit and subject to such turnover that assigning anything higher than 'veteran' seems unlikely to happen even in what might be considered 'elite' units (which aren't always as 'elite' as some might think).  I never paid too much attention to command values until, during the course of creating one scenario with late war German units, I found that the German conscript and green troops armed with lots of automatic weapons would simply cause US squads to rapidly melt if I didn't adjust the command rating down from +2 to either +1 or 0.  The firepower effectiveness of the command value is fairly dramatic when combined with an abundance of automatic weapons.  For the HQ units a higher experience can be justified in some cases because, for example in the Soviet army, apparently tank unit commanders would hand pick their own crews and unless the tank was damaged or destroyed those crewmembers would stay together for as long as the commander retained his position.  So you could theoretically see a big experience disparity in a Soviet tank platoon for example - you might see a Veteran platoon commander with a good modifier but the individual tanks in the platoon could be rated as green or even conscript in some cases given the level of training common during certain time frames.
How would you rate a squad that had a veteran core of a solid squad leader, maybe two or three long term veteran squad members, and five new green replacements (or even Ukrainian 'Booty' solders)?  How much weight do you give the squad leader in that situation and how much weight do you place on the replacements?  If a unit hasn't had any replacements for a while then you might be able to justify a rating higher than veteran, but only in situations where perhaps a battalion has been in continuous combat and had been reduced to 100 men or something like that.  In that instance the continuity could justify a higher experience rating, but then the morale factor comes into play.  How motivated are those survivors to keep on fighting?
Ultimately you have to just take a stab at it and see how it plays out during playtesting.  How the campaign plays out is ultimately more important than some notion of 'historical accuracy' because the reality is that there probably isn't any sort of solid guide to what is accurate or not accurate.  I suppose that if you just made a blanket setting for all of a certain side's troops to be 'Elite' then some gamers would look at that as odd or maybe off a bit, but short of doing something dramatic like that you should probably just do what's best to have the scenario or campaign play out the way you intend it to play out.     

Ultimately any designer has to make personal choices about the soft factors that he assigns to the units and those soft factors may / should be influenced by how the scenario or campaign plays out during testing.  However, Ts4ever and Bulletpoint bring up some excellent points to consider.  I will generally start with a sort of baseline from what I know about the units involved and modify to match that.  I do follow a couple of general guidelines though.  Because of high turnover I have adopted a policy of almost never assigning any experience level higher than veteran.  The only exception that I will make is with small units such as tank crews, HQ units, snipers, and various teams if the situation is warranted.  These units are small enough that they could develop a level of cohesion and continuity that would be consistent with how I view the various soft factors.  A full strength rifle squad would simply be too large a unit and subject to such turnover that assigning anything higher than 'veteran' seems unlikely to happen even in what might be considered 'elite' units (which aren't always as 'elite' as some might think).  I never paid too much attention to command values until, during the course of creating one scenario with late war German units, I found that the German conscript and green troops armed with lots of automatic weapons would simply cause US squads to rapidly melt if I didn't adjust the command rating down from +2 to either +1 or 0.  The firepower effectiveness of the command value is fairly dramatic when combined with an abundance of automatic weapons.  For the HQ units a higher experience can be justified in some cases because, for example in the Soviet army, apparently tank unit commanders would hand pick their own crews and unless the tank was damaged or destroyed those crewmembers would stay together for as long as the commander retained his position.  So you could theoretically see a big experience disparity in a Soviet tank platoon for example - you might see a Veteran platoon commander with a good modifier but the individual tanks in the platoon could be rated as green or even conscript in some cases given the level of training common during certain time frames.
How would you rate a squad that had a veteran core of a solid squad leader, maybe two or three long term veteran squad members, and five new green replacements (or even Ukrainian 'Booty' solders)?  How much weight do you give the squad leader in that situation and how much weight do you place on the replacements?  If a unit hasn't had any replacements for a while then you might be able to justify a rating higher than veteran, but only in situations where perhaps a battalion has been in continuous combat and had been reduced to 100 men or something like that.  In that instance the continuity could justify a higher experience rating, but then the morale factor comes into play.  How motivated are those survivors to keep on fighting?
Ultimately you have to just take a stab at it and see how it plays out during playtesting.  How the campaign plays out is ultimately more important than some notion of 'historical accuracy' because the reality is that there probably isn't any sort of solid guide to what is accurate or not accurate.  I suppose that if you just made a blanket setting for all of a certain side's troops to be 'Elite' then some gamers would look at that as odd or maybe off a bit, but short of doing something dramatic like that you should probably just do what's best to have the scenario or campaign play out the way you intend it to play out.     

Ultimately any designer has to make personal choices about the soft factors that he assigns to the units and those soft factors may / should be influenced by how the scenario or campaign plays out during testing.  However, Ts4ever and Bulletpoint bring up some excellent points to consider.  I will generally start with a sort of baseline from what I know about the units involved and modify to match that.  I do follow a couple of general guidelines though.  Because of high turnover I have adopted a policy of almost never assigning any experience level higher than veteran.  The only exception that I will make is with small units such as tank crews, HQ units, snipers, and various teams if the situation is warranted.  These units are small enough that they could develop a level of cohesion and continuity that would be consistent with how I view the various soft factors.  A full strength rifle squad would simply be too large a unit and subject to such turnover that assigning anything higher than 'veteran' seems unlikely to happen even in what might be considered 'elite' units (which aren't always as 'elite' as some might think).  I never paid too much attention to command values until, during the course of creating one scenario with late war German units, I found that the German conscript and green troops armed with lots of automatic weapons would simply cause US squads to rapidly melt if I didn't adjust the command rating down from +2 to either +1 or 0.  The firepower effectiveness of the command value is fairly dramatic when combined with an abundance of automatic weapons.  For the HQ units a higher experience can be justified in some cases because, for example in the Soviet army, apparently tank unit commanders would hand pick their own crews and unless the tank was damaged or destroyed those crewmembers would stay together for as long as the commander retained his position.  So you could theoretically see a big experience disparity in a Soviet tank platoon for example - you might see a Veteran platoon commander with a good modifier but the individual tanks in the platoon could be rated as green or even conscript in some cases given the level of training common during certain time frames.
How would you rate a squad that had a veteran core of a solid squad leader, maybe two or three long term veteran squad members, and five new green replacements (or even Ukrainian 'Booty' solders)?  How much weight do you give the squad leader in that situation and how much weight do you place on the replacements?  If a unit hasn't had any replacements for a while then you might be able to justify a rating higher than veteran, but only in situations where perhaps a battalion has been in continuous combat and had been reduced to 100 men or something like that.  In that instance the continuity could justify a higher experience rating, but then the morale factor comes into play.  How motivated are those survivors to keep on fighting?
Ultimately you have to just take a stab at it and see how it plays out during playtesting.  How the campaign plays out is ultimately more important than some notion of 'historical accuracy' because the reality is that there probably isn't any sort of solid guide to what is accurate or not accurate.  I suppose that if you just made a blanket setting for all of a certain side's troops to be 'Elite' then some gamers would look at that as odd or maybe off a bit, but short of doing something dramatic like that you should probably just do what's best to have the scenario or campaign play out the way you intend it to play out.     

Ultimately any designer has to make personal choices about the soft factors that he assigns to the units and those soft factors may / should be influenced by how the scenario or campaign plays out during testing.  However, Ts4ever and Bulletpoint bring up some excellent points to consider.  I will generally start with a sort of baseline from what I know about the units involved and modify to match that.  I do follow a couple of general guidelines though.  Because of high turnover I have adopted a policy of almost never assigning any experience level higher than veteran.  The only exception that I will make is with small units such as tank crews, HQ units, snipers, and various teams if the situation is warranted.  These units are small enough that they could develop a level of cohesion and continuity that would be consistent with how I view the various soft factors.  A full strength rifle squad would simply be too large a unit and subject to such turnover that assigning anything higher than 'veteran' seems unlikely to happen even in what might be considered 'elite' units (which aren't always as 'elite' as some might think).  I never paid too much attention to command values until, during the course of creating one scenario with late war German units, I found that the German conscript and green troops armed with lots of automatic weapons would simply cause US squads to rapidly melt if I didn't adjust the command rating down from +2 to either +1 or 0.  The firepower effectiveness of the command value is fairly dramatic when combined with an abundance of automatic weapons.  For the HQ units a higher experience can be justified in some cases because, for example in the Soviet army, apparently tank unit commanders would hand pick their own crews and unless the tank was damaged or destroyed those crewmembers would stay together for as long as the commander retained his position.  So you could theoretically see a big experience disparity in a Soviet tank platoon for example - you might see a Veteran platoon commander with a good modifier but the individual tanks in the platoon could be rated as green or even conscript in some cases given the level of training common during certain time frames.
How would you rate a squad that had a veteran core of a solid squad leader, maybe two or three long term veteran squad members, and five new green replacements (or even Ukrainian 'Booty' solders)?  How much weight do you give the squad leader in that situation and how much weight do you place on the replacements?  If a unit hasn't had any replacements for a while then you might be able to justify a rating higher than veteran, but only in situations where perhaps a battalion has been in continuous combat and had been reduced to 100 men or something like that.  In that instance the continuity could justify a higher experience rating, but then the morale factor comes into play.  How motivated are those survivors to keep on fighting?
Ultimately you have to just take a stab at it and see how it plays out during playtesting.  How the campaign plays out is ultimately more important than some notion of 'historical accuracy' because the reality is that there probably isn't any sort of solid guide to what is accurate or not accurate.  I suppose that if you just made a blanket setting for all of a certain side's troops to be 'Elite' then some gamers would look at that as odd or maybe off a bit, but short of doing something dramatic like that you should probably just do what's best to have the scenario or campaign play out the way you intend it to play out.     

the ARMA player video is probably the one that can be found on the video tab when you click on the Shock Force game on Steam.  It has something like 83k views in one or two days when I last checked.

An engine upgrade would be CM3.  Hopefully that will show up eventually.

That alone makes the move worthwhile 😁

That alone makes the move worthwhile 😁

On the victory screen shot only one check mark shows so only one victory condition was completed.  I assume that was one of the attacker's victory conditions - so obviously not terrain or a unit objective.  What was the objective that you were able to achieve, was it just a parameter objective?  Theoretically if you had a parameter objective of keeping say, fifty percent of your force alive and you get half the total points for that, then that could cause the cease fire situation becoming a victory for you.  Especially if the defender has no terrain objectives and perhaps has a parameter objective that is the opposite of yours.
It also appears from the in game shot that the Americans are all sitting on terrain objectives (probably yours) but from the victory screen it would appear that the Americans don't get any points for sitting on those objectives, so they must only be objectives for you (attacker) otherwise the Americans would have gained points for them - and yet they gain no points for anything.

If the scenario is a defensive scenario then you would naturally start on the objectives and get points for them while the AI attacker would have to try and take the objectives.  That's going to happen if you immediately ceasefire with any scenario that you are defending in.  I'm assuming that you are the defender in that scenario, although I'm not familiar with that battle in specific.  If you are attacking and you get a major victory when you ceasefire immediately then yeah, something is wrong.  Not so much if you are the defender though since, by selecting ceasefire you never give the AI an opportunity to capture the objectives.

MikeyD might be overstating it a bit, but I have watched videos of players playing a scenario who say nothing when they get the drop on the enemy but complain bitterly whenever the enemy gets the drop on them - sometimes within the same minute of action.  It's just the nature of the beast - selective memory.

MikeyD might be overstating it a bit, but I have watched videos of players playing a scenario who say nothing when they get the drop on the enemy but complain bitterly whenever the enemy gets the drop on them - sometimes within the same minute of action.  It's just the nature of the beast - selective memory.

I think I can say with some level of certainty that cooking rice was not essential in securing a Soviet victory.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.