Hensworth

Belgium ranks 30th in the GDP rankings (76th in population, no natural resources to speak of) and is among the top 10 exporting countries in the world. But yeah, we're only good at making waffles .

I figured it out when you posted the second instance where you supported an assault with fire from mortars and Tigers. I'm unable to watch your video, but my guess is you have your suppressing units set to area fire in an effort to keep them firing when the target goes to a generic marker. That's fine and dandy until such time as your own grunts are moving in. Then you should definitely switch to targeted fire so they'll stop once their own guys get too close. Your troops aren't getting spooked by the enemy fire, they're getting spooked by friendly fire. This would indeed happen typically about 20m from the targeted unit, because that's where blast radii from HE and beaten zones from MGs start taking effect. Running through your own MG fire is no problem, incidently, because the path of small arms rounds isn't modeled.

You heard it here first, release date set for 2052 !

So far : :cool: 2 17 14 :mad: 1 (Only people who clearly picked a category counted)

Unrealistic infantry model. Unrealistic heavy weapons model. Unwieldy. Not good enough.

I've been trying really hard to get into this game, but I too am getting more and more frustrated. I was baffled by the defense tutorial mission, which apparently was a freak occurrence. But I find myself confronted by exactly the same problem in the first Polish campaign mission. You have 4 guns and another entering as reinforcement. How the hell do you keep them alive to kill the 14 German tanks that spill onto the battlefield ? One time I got to 9 kills playing, I believe, on medium difficulty level. I had the guns hold fire until the tanks were getting close to the first trenches. The remaining 5 German tanks just waltzed over the rest of my force. I just tried it again on hard. This time my guns were being spotted before they fired a shot (yes, they are deployed 'in cover'). So I let them open up but as far as I can tell they didn't score a single hit before dying.

I agree. I don't particularly like the game and I didn't think I would based on the videos I had seen prior to release. But I got it anyway to support BFC and along the way I've learned a lesson. I'm impressed by the ability of the guys at BFC to divorce themselves from their own philosophies in game design and to detect quality and merit in games that follow a completely different concept. Clearly discussions here show that that is quite a difficult thing to do. I think it shows their creativity, their gut instinct for what makes a good game, the many different things they can get their head around when many of us can't. CMx2 looks to be every bit as revolutionary as CM was and only an exceptional group of people like the guys at BFC could pull off such games. I think they are a better judge of what is a good game than I am. So if I don't like it, it's probably not just my cup of tea or my thinking is too focused on what I already know. If we were all like that, games like CM just wouldn't get made.

I stubbornly persisted until I finally beat the scenario. I did it by saving every time I killed another PzIII (= gun kill) and reloading every time I lost an ATG. Once the PzIIIs are dead the rest is a doddle. Same for the second part, save and reload to get favorable hits on the tanks. All the advice given here is tosh. You cannot beat this scenario in a single go no matter what you do. After finishing the training scenarios (the LOS and LOF one was particularly enlightening - what is that all about ?) I started on the Polish campaign. I wanted to take great pains to place my guns because I knew it would be key. But where in relation to a brush or tree graphic do you have to put a gun for it to work in your favour ? I noticed that by putting my guns in cover, I was also limiting their ability to see out. I only tried the scenario once and there was too much chaos to ascertain whether my guns were shooting at the tanks more than vice versa.

G - 16 S - 9 U - 12 P - 5 O - 7 49 / 100 Graphics are quite good, best part of the game. Couldn't give a passing grade for the sounds, too sterile, too subdued, too monotonous. User interface is always a matter of personal preference and I need to get more used to it, but I do think I'm going to be pausing a lot. Gameplay is awful. Tanks rule all, the rest is just there to reinforce a case for realism, but it just doesn't work. The representation of cover and concealment is too weak. Overall the game is as I expected from watching the pre-release videos, so I'm not disappointed. I've basically donated $56 to BFC to keep making WWII based wargames. Now we just have to get the annoyance of CM:SF out of the way and then hopefully they will get back to it. Edit : 68.4 average so far. [ April 21, 2007, 08:26 AM: Message edited by: Sgt_Kelly ]

Well I've just tried a couple of more times. It seems you have to depend on knocking the tank guns out rapidly so you can get the upper hand with your ATGs. If you can quickly put the guns on two PzIIIs out of commission then the tide appears to turn. You have to watch closely and switch targets as soon as you can see the main gun is damaged. I don't know if the positioning near the trees even has anything to do with it. All a little too ridiculous for my liking. I don't want to be reloading games until the freak of nature that I need occurs so I can get on with the game. This one is going back in the box.

I'm trying to play through the training scenarios now and I must admit I don't understand how I'm supposed to be playing this game. My conundrum may be best explained using the defensive tactics training scenario. You get one small squad of infantry with 2 AT rifles, 2 45mm AT guns and a trench. The setup zone is small, just the area around the trench. It appears to be as flat as a board and there is no cover. So, going on what the briefing tells me I put an AT rifle on each flank, the officer in the middle and leave the 45mms where they are since there seems no point in moving them. No specific orders are given. The German tanks knock the AT guns out in seconds, advance on the trench and eventually mow down all my infantry. Second try. Same setup, but now I order all units to hold fire and hunker down in the trench so hopefully they won't be spotted right from the off. The German tanks knock the AT guns out in seconds, advance on the trench and eventually mow down all my infantry. In spite of orders to crouch or even go prone, my infantry are regularly putting their heads above the parapet. They also appear to be aiming their weapons but I can't really tell if they're firing. Can anyone tell me how you're supposed to change the outcome ?

Thanks Jim. I can't really be bothered at the moment anyway since I don't play CM that much anymore. I've switched to a wireless router as well and I can't play TCP/IP anymore as a result. I'm going to have to get that sorted before I worry about fog again.

Thanks Schrullenhaft. The problem seems to be that Rivatuner can't find my driver. Can't remember the exact way it shows that, I'm at work now, but it said something to the effect of 'No driver found'. The version of Rivatuner I downloaded said 'Vista ready', so I don't think it's because I'm on Vista. It's probably more to do with the fact that it's a laptop custom driver as you describe above. If I had known about this I probably would have given the purchase of a laptop some more thought. I don't like the idea of not being able to go to Nvidia for my drivers. So now how do I get Rivatuner to recognize my driver ? Throw it on the forums at 3DGuru ?

Well, I'm on a new laptop with Vista and a GeForce Go 7600 and I can read the briefings but I don't have fog. After checking in here I downloaded Rivatuner to try and turn fog table emulation on but I can't find the setting. I was looking in the registry editor under the Poweruser tab but I couldn't find it. Any hints ?

***SPOILER ALERT*** I've played it as Allies and couldn't find anything wrong with it apart from the deal with both side's reinforcements entering in the same corner of the map. There's nothing wrong with it as such and I realize it's probably a historical aspect of this battle. But it can easily play out in a rather slapstick fashion. The terrain immediately surrounding the entry point invites the Allied player to set up an ambush as he knows he is being chased. I did this and slaughtered the first batch of German tanks as they raced towards the action. The next batch was so large however, that they ended up surrounding my tanks and I got slaughtered in turn. I found this a bit weak as it is a direct consequence of how CM works with reinforcements appearing out of nowhere. I would eliminate the bumps you've got there to encourage the Allied player to race his tanks into the town before 'ze Germans' get there. Other than that, very good game. Excellent map and good balance, probably more challenging for the Axis player.

I should hope not, seeing as it is a grammatical monstrosity.

I try to be gracious to the elderly, but these are clearly the ramblings of an old fogey. He raises a grand total of 3 different points and can't seem to decide where he stands on any of them. This rather illustrates why I'll take the word of the scholar with no first hand experience over that of the simpleton who was there, but that's just me of course.

This picture illustrates the problem, being not so much that the gun is hard to kill (because incoming direct fire either flies over its head or hits the ground well in front of the position) but that it is free to fire over the slight rise to its front. The targeting line clearly curves. So while the gun enjoys the protection offered by its location, it does not suffer the consequence of not being able to fire on targets within a considerable stretch of dead ground that should normally lie in front of the gun. Only positioning that exploits this can be termed gamey.

Then you were under the wrong impression.

There are some gamey effects in favour of the attacker too, to the extent that any AT gun not so placed must expect to die after maximum one turn of firing. That's over the top (pun not intended) too. The Borg allows the attacker to immediately bring all available firepower to bear, making sure fire is kept up by selecting area fire instead of targeting the gun directly. There are tricks to make sure of the kill even if the gun is only shown as a generic marker or even as a sound contact. The attacker doesn't need to be worried about the gun being recrewed. Once it's out, it's out. Then there are those who have perfected the fine art of driving a tank to JUST outside of LOS of the gun and then killing it with area fire. Finally, it is not ENTIRELY gamey. The invulnerability is exaggerated but guns can make use of slopes so as to be extremely hard to hit even without the limitations of the CM HE chucking model. So if you forbid the defender from using this you rob him of a fair advantage as well as an unfair one. Most of the unfairness, in my view, does not come from the fact that the gun is almost impossible to hit, but from the fact that the amount of dead ground is much smaller than it would be in reality. The difficulty of killing it, in my experience, only becomes an issue when the gun is in a trench. The best countermeasure, by the way, is to suppress the gun with MGs, as their beaten zone curves over the crest the same way the 'hull down' gun's LOS does. [ December 13, 2006, 10:56 AM: Message edited by: Sgt_Kelly ]

You mean you, as the German player, get 480 points and your opponent, as the Soviet player, only gets 400 ? Sounds plausible. There's no reason why the points distribution over the various arms would have to be exactly the same for both sides, although I wouldn't like to hazard a guess as to what this difference reflects.

The same people who have need of a points system for purchases. It does play less of a role in scenarios as you can give the Soviets their proper numerical advantage and force the StuG to earn its keep, but it still matters since the point values are used in the score.

Can you change the fact that you build troop factories on the map to buy your troops from ? I can just about overlook Tiger style armor on a Sherman but setting up an engineer squad cloning facility in a Normandy farmhouse sort of breaks the spell for me.

I don't remember if the Sherman was termed hull down but the outcrop is most definitely not in front of the Sherman doing the targeting here. The targeting line runs from the bottom of the Sherman up to the upper hull of the Tiger and it's a completely clear LOS, straight as an arrow (if it went over the outcrop you would see it curve over it), so how could it possibly be hull down ?

You guys aren't paying attention. Obviously they are delaying the release of the game so we can all get our name in it !!! :eek: :eek: :eek: . See front page. Notice the repeated mention of the words 'each week' in that announcement .