Scipio

I guess the point is that many players won't kill Americans, not even virtually.

Play PBEM vs human opponents. They have build-in AI. At least most of them

Just an idea, since the CMSF autopurchase doesn't work very well, especially in tiny and small battles. CMSF doesn't use a random map generator for known reasons, so premade maps are randomly selected instead. I wonder if something similar wouldn't work for troop selections, too, if CMSF could be programed to create a QB by combining three randomly selected files. File one is the map, file two blue and file three red forces. This may not be an optimal solution, since it means some work on creating a sufficient number of OOB varities for the different types of force selections and battle types, but on the other hand it would solve a number of problems that might be more difficult to program to come to an acceptable result. It's surely easier and faster to create a number of OOBs as the time & work needed for a single map. Quality and eqipment can still be randomly generated depending on the general QB settings, what would still leave some random factor. As an additional imaginable feature, the presetting of reinforcements from the OOB editor could be used, maybe with a random factor regarding the timing, depending on the length of battle.

Was the gun damaged or destroyed?

Everybody says that this war is lost right from the beginning, that Syrian forces are chanceless from the stratic point. I bet somewhere I've said that, too . May I mention: Vietnam and Afghanistan 1980s, and the conflicts of today? Even after 7 years of combat, the current war in Afghanistan is undecided. Same for Iraq. If Allied forces would leave Iraq or Afghanistan today, it is unpredicable if the country can keep a stable political situation that pleases the Allies for a long time, other than Germany after WWII. Funny enough - with the release of CM:A we have indeed this contradictory stratic problem. The USSR goes into the war against a clearly inferior opponent, but other than in CMSF, everybody knows that they are fighting a war that is lost. CMSF covers just the three month that might be necessary to invade the country and defeat the regular Syrian forces. If we concentrate only on this operation, of course the Syrians will lose. But the war ain't necessarily over with this. Syria ain't a worthy military opponent for the Western Allies, or Afghanistan for the Russians? A quote from the movie 'Heartbreak Ridge' about the Vietnam war: 'We have lost the war, but we have won all the battles'! Maybe this should be kept in mind, even if this is clearly out of the scope of CM.

I hope this also includes infantry smoke, since the random targetting of smoke does often produce unsatifying results

My biggest appeal is playing PBEM. This was already the case before even CMBO was released and I played the Campaign Series game from late great Talonsoft. I was very disappointed about CMSF when it was initially released, but not because of the modern era setting or the Syrian theatre, but because it was so flawed. That has changed after 1.08, and I guess it well get even better with 1.2 and future patches. Playing PBEM vs real human opponents is the real deal for me. So I have no problem with the setting and theatre, because I go into battle with a completly different attitude. The opponent I have to defeat is not the USA or Syria, it's the person that's leading the other side. Beside that, I like to go into a battle which I can't eveluate in the scenario editor in all details before I start; I'm not forced to do so with normal scenarios, but I just can't resist when it's possible . So the only thing that still drags me down is that the QB system is by far not as pleasant as it was in the CMx1 games. Not because there ain't no 'cherry-picking', but because the random troop selection produces often so odd forces that many battles are not decided by my own or my opponents abilities, but by the poor auto purchase of forces, and the very limited influence I have on it. Statistical anomalies can always happen for sure, but much to often you start with a pure ATGM force, with no transport especially as Syrian in a meeting battle (what usually turns the battle into a red attack scenario), or with a pure tank force even if a mixed force was preselected. Even if you got a good mix, it's not unlikely that the red forces are simply twice outnumbered by the blue forces. That's unpleasant, but I hope that this can and will be fixed to an acceptable degree.

Good to know, thanks!

Would be interesting to find out if this happens in all vehicels, or if design and/or training reasons make it impossible in various vehicels, or if each crew member can take each place in a vehicel.

Not necessarily, it strongly depends on the output format (codec) and bitrate (compression)! So if you do not furtherly reduce the bitrate, the result doesn't lose additional quality. But seriously, movie compression is a sience of it's own ! If you won't go deep into this, I recomment to buy a external drive, since they are rather cheap now.

Okay, here's what I have learned! Indeed, the driver switched position when I gave a 'covered arc' order and took place of the gunner, at least in the BMP. Exciting! In this case it makes of course sense that the combat commands are kept active, even if the gunner is hit!

I wonder in which part of the world are wargamer communities that are strong enough to justify the development of new '(niche) games'? Northern America is for sure the biggest market, Russia seems to be an ascender at the moment. The interest in Western Europe appears to me very different from country to country, but may generate enough sales if all is put together. Middle & Far East (except ANZAC countries), Africa and Southern America are blank areas on the map. Beside that, there were very few conflicts in the 20th/21st century that's worth a game, except the Commonwealth, the USA or USSR (and it's successors) took part. There were countless guerrilla wars all over the world surely, but honestly it's nearly always the same story with very similiar equipment. Israel is the only country that comes to my mind that doesn't fall into this categories.

Well, you are right, in the war movies they usually didn't go shopping . Anyway, as I have written above, I have no problem with auto purchase if the problems with it will be resolved. I'm especially worried about the module incompatibilty as I described here : http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=87759

That's very interesting. I will try to find out if giving a fire or covered arc order will make a driver switch to the gunner position!

I always saw the CMx1 cherry picked forces as some kind of 'Kampfgruppe' meaning 'let's gather what's around here' concept, with somebody who took command, or was ordered to do so. Hard for me to say how realistic this is or was, since my memories are a crude mix of warbooks and movies, both documentary and fictional. I won't put a spoke in your wheel, Steve. Maybe I missunderstand the basic problem of C&C and force picking.

That's a little something I observed. Crew casualties happen in nearly each battle, that's normal and realistic. But that leads me to some thinking. Let's take an armed vehicel with a two men crew. The gunner is taken out by enemy fire. This means that the vehicel can still move, but not shoot anymore, since there's nobody to operate the gun. Depending on design and/or training reasons, the driver can not simple change his position to take the place of the gunner. This is relative obvious in this simple example, but in some cases we have crews of 3 or 4 men, but that still doesn't necessarily mean that one crew member can take the place of another for above reasons. That's still fine and realistic, but it ain't so obvious anymore to the player, who may simply not have knowledge which crew member is necessary to operate which weapon(s) in this special tank model. Wouldn't it make sense to deactivate all commands that can't be executed anymore, in my simple example all combat commands, and/or list the weapons in the status display as inactive!? Some details about the status display, in the special case I observed, I had a BMP with a 73mm gun, machine gun, AT-4 and smoke launcher. After the gunner was killed, only the 73mm was listed in grey, but with a bold green '+'. All other weaponry was still listed in green and with a bold green '+', too. But the driver can't even use the smoke launcher on it's own. At least he didn't when ordered. Now I'm not sure if he really can't in a BMP, or simply didn't for whatever reason. But obviously I'm now rather confused about that, even in a simple day-to-day situation.

I had setup a QB and send to a new PBEM opponent, but when he loaded the file, his CMSF crashed. Point is, he owns only the original game, while I own CMSF+Marines. So I played out my setup for both sides (without crash). My test run showed that the red side has T-90 tanks which are AFAIK only in the Marines modul. Simple solution was of course that my opponent setup the next battle to avoid this problem. No big deal as long as only a single modul is released. But with the release of the UK-Modul we can easily run into trouble since it containes also new US units which can not necessarily kept out by QB settings. What if player one owns CMSF+Marines, player two CMSF+British? It could become very tricky to setup compatible QBs for both. Since this incompatibilty wasn't considered for the Marines Modul & v1.11, I wonder if it will be covered in v1.2!?

There's a file in your CM install folder that's called "display size.txt", and as far as I remember you can use it to manually set a custom resolution, but I don't know exactly what you have to enter there. May I recomment to do a forum search, I bet it's explaint somewhere.

Mh, just to make this point clear - the casualties % I've set in the editor is not used in a QB, but replaced by a generic value set by the game!? Or have I missunderstood this? I won't disappoint you, and to be honest: creating maps is real pain the a.. for me, especially building roads! I convert scenarios and downloaded maps.

Thanks for your help, files have been send with the proposed password!

Windows XP SP3

Good point MarkEzra, and indeed I don't mind so much about myself. I guess I'll know when I've won, even if the end game screen tells me something else But if I'll realease the QB maps, I won't get complains about senseless results.

I understand, but let me ask a stupid question. Is it to difficult to code the editor to simply delete things he doesn't know (buildings, flavor objects etc.) and/or replace unknown ground tiles with a standart 'open ground' tile? If BFC isn't up for it, is it in theory imaginable that a third party could program such a converter? Depending on the format/coding of maps, it could be an interesting project... Of course I have no idea how maps are coded, but if they would be for example in some kind of sequential format (meaning basically tile by tile is loaded), it should be as easy as to replace an A with a X. From my narrow point of view, converting of maps wouldn't hurt somebody, especially not future sales of whatever CMx2 game .

This is, unfortunatly, only correct for normal scenarios. In QBs "the code automatically adds an enemy-casualty threshold victory goal for each side" (quotation from the manual).

I'm pleased to hear that news. The most important part of it for me is that BFC 'licenses' the game engine to third parties for complete new theatres. This means more CMx2 games that I've expected to see! Okay, the term 'license' may not be fully correct, but I guess you get what I mean. Steve, a questions. I do understand that units are hardcoded within the main program (or something like that), with all consequences. But how about the pure maps, talking especially about maps for QBs? Needless to say that desert maps won't be compatible with the Normandy game, but Afghanistan terrain ain't to different from Syria. Should it be possible to use CMSF maps in CM:Af? Or if there's no native support, is it imaginable to get a map converter? Another question, will there be water and/or bridges in CM:Af?