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Aside from whether our current command set is optimal, did anyone try to reproduce my results? I did think about that movement should be broken down into different parameters that could be stacked similar to way point actions. But then, I think from CMBO -> CMBB/CMAK -> CMBN/CMFI/CMRT/CMFB that the game has moved to ever increasing micro-management (which may have well increased realism), but at times has become tedious and reduces some of the fun of the game. For all, the improvements of relative spotting, it mainly has its biggest impact within the 1 minute, because planning each turn I take the global non-selected view of the battlefield to issue my orders. So, follow on tanks don't run blindly into ATGs, covered arcs are set based on spotted armor, platoons are moved based on what scouts have seen without communication ... In other words, the "Borg" is not the game, the "Borg" is >>> me <<<. I still remember CMBB/CMAK as great games (CMBO was not well balanced, I think the attacker had an easier time despite various heavy weapons). In summation, I would favor more parameterized movement commands a la Panther Games or Graviteam, IF THERE WAS GREATER DEGREE OF SENSIBLE AI BEHAVIOR RATHER THAN HAVING TO GIVE PRECISE ORDERS TO EVERY TEAM ON THE FIELD. CMx3 may be the most realistic game yet, but if it means giving orders to each individual soldier, I think I will be opting out.

Yes, there are documented cases of people having fallen through the ice of ponds and being resuscitated after 30 minutes. I had open heart surgery in 1999, and they chilled my body to add to the time that they could stop my heart (about 20 minutes) while they worked. The only time I have been dead in my life.

I remember it had been easy to determine terrain types in CMx1; just move the LOS terminator over the tile. Also, I thought there was a little window if you click on a unit, it showed you what terrain it is in. I think the only way now is by eye balling the map, true?

Hmm ... am I confusing this with extreme heat or cold of CMx1?

I have no idea. I was playing WEGO. I had two units in the same square; 2 scout teams. One I gave an order to which ran clear across the map. The terrain covered included some road, some clear, some light forest. I ran the turn and ended the movie phase; back to orders. Then I used a target command from the stationary team to the moving team to measure distance. The other end of my ruler was to the beginning of the path of the next turn's movement. When dealing with a squad and assault, I also needed to measure to soldier bases, since the order continuation point did not tell the whole story. I hope that helps. Give it a try and see what you get.

That is also an interesting an interesting design debate. Does the camera exist in the 4th dimension or in the game world? The 4th dimension (CM) definitely has advantages. You have to admit it is nice to pass in and out of building exterior walls without looking for a door. On the other hand, Graviteam's camera, exists in the game world. I complained on the tech support forums of 3D stuttering at ground level in the locked squad view. Well, it did seem like a graphics bug to me. I finally figured it. When running in close formation, a squad mate kept hitting the virtual camera holder in the back. It was not "stuttering", but "bumping". But the advantage of game world is that the camera more naturally navigates features of the virtual world. I am kind of undecided as to which is optimal.

Yes, soldiers should tire more quickly. I suppose if one was as "Beta Bil" has called me anal , it should impact projectile ballistics due to the density of air (velocities). Does the difference 120F in the desert versus -30F on the steppe impact physics of rolled steel armor in terms of its material properties of brittleness vis-a-vis kinetic weapons? BTW, I am asking for RL and not the game for those who are true students of history or material chemists among us.

That raises an interesting game design debate. If you bill your 3D presentation as an accurate representation of reality as opposed to a partial/sufficient representation of reality with quite a few abstractions, then I think it is fair game to criticize those two soldiers who are on the wrong side of the wall. The developers certainly have cast their game engine in the first camp, "accurate representation" right from the first day. With statements such as 'CMBO/CMBB/CMAK modeled cover for each tile as an abstract statistical phenomena; where as CMBN/CMFI/CMRT/CMFB is if you see a few trees in an action square, they are, in fact, present and one is in cover relative to small arms fire from the other side of them.' So, I think things like soldiers on the wrong side of the wall are fair game for critical comments, because they break the philosophy that the developers themselves exposed. That's my take. Finally, as CMx1 has "borg spotting"; I have decided to refer to this as CMx2 "quantum tunneling".

Then, you have to measure how many degrees/second AFVs rotate. Yes, troops pause at a way point, but pivot lots faster than a tank, and given that a tank reaches higher speeds ... the way point has proportionally a greater impact on AFVs than troops.

Make sure Chrome, Windows, and Firewall/AV suite is up to date. I haven't seen any trouble with the site, and I am sure BFC would be the first to notice any issue and inform the community. It might be a man in the middle attack. A DNS (Domain Name Server) has been compromised. So, you do put in the right URL, but you are misrouted to a malicious site. Due to Internet traffic patterns and load balancing, your routing might vary from forum session to the next. Just use common sense. If something looks fishy, it is. Use complex passwords; not 12345678. Don't use the same password for every site; especially banks, your IRA, sites with your credit card like Amazon and Steam. I manage our computers here, and used to do this at the corporate level professionally. Your greatest risk if you follow the above is not your personal PC, but some company that has you in their database getting hacked and coughing up 10,000,000 credit card numbers to the Dark Web.

Ha ha ha! I would have to learn how to use the scenario editor to do that. I used to quickly throw together test scenarios in CMx1 to test stuff. But I don't even know the basics of the CMx2 scenario editor. At the moment, I am reading pages of stuff to understand my Christmas presents. Really, there are so many variables I did not consider. Army (these were CMBN GIs) Ground conditions Terrain Temperature Fitness Experience --- Mainly, I was not trying to uncover any great underlying truths of the CM universe. (We already know that when stacked against a wall CM squads exhibit "quantum tunneling". At least, one or two idiots always end up on the wrong side of the wall.) I was just looking at creating a basic yardstick for myself by which to pace scenarios. --- HAPPY NEW YEARS from 台灣, 中國 (Taiwan, China!).

2 man squad split

Vielen Dank!

So, are they now useless with smart bombs, cruise missiles, and bunker busters (let's take nukes off the table and they kind of change the game)?

* SLOW best used for the final set up of observation or an anti-tank weapon by infantry.

I watched it. Although scary, not at all surprising for anyone with a sense of history. The cannon and gunpowder removed castles and forts from the landscape. Only the Romans would have been impressed with 7" of concrete as they invented the stuff, but did not know rebar. And so, I would take a tank any day. At least, if the odds don't look good, you can hope to withdraw and fight another day.

BTW, with many games, players have created font mods which boost the size/thickness of fonts. This has been known to help, but it is very game dependent. In particular, it depends on how much spare space the developers have left in the game art so that larger fonts don't overrun their fields. Another problem you are going to have is small control areas to click. I have suffer from neurological issues which result in tremors/twitches. I have a keyboard/mouse with many, many programmable keys. Even when a game does not have a hot key for something, you can make your own by programming mouse clicks to particular controls and binding them to keys. This is easily done with www.winbatch.com and www.autohotkey.com ... the same thing could be done for UI controls like the CM VCR which is too small at 4K. The code looks like this (I wrote this this morning to create a time stamping quick save key for HOI4): QuickSave.wbt (www.winbatch.com): MousePos=MouseInfo(2); screen relative SpaceIndex=StrScan(MousePos, " ", 1, @FWDSCAN) XVal=StrSub(MousePos, 1, SpaceIndex-1) YVal=StrSub(MousePos, SpaceIndex+1, -1) MouseMove(986, 17, "", "") MouseClick(@LClick, 0) MouseMove(497, 384, "", "") MouseClick(@LClick, 0) MouseMove(581, 716, "", "") MouseClick(@LClick, 0) Delay(1) Base=TimeYmdHms() NewBase1=StrSub(Base, 3, 17) NewBase2=StrReplace(NewBase1, ":", "") NewBase3=StrCat("-", NewBase2) SendKey(NewBase3) MouseMove(557, 750, "", "") MouseClick(@LClick, 0) Delay(2) WinActivate("Hearts of Iron IV") Beep() Delay(1) Beep() MouseMove(XVal,YVal,"","")

Somewhere the file must be documented. You do have one other choice. You can use something like www.ultramon.com which will allow you to create shortcuts to profiles/launch games. Thus, it changes the resolution and CM just runs full screen. No, you won't be changing resolution manually. CM will do it at each launch and it will flip back when you minimize it to the the desktop or exit the game. Interpolating is the process by which anything non-native is displayed. A CRT had no fixed pixels, just electron gun. An LCD has fixed pixels. When native, you got a 1:1 mapping. But when you go below native, an averaging process in performed to go from the memory map to the physical display image. It is either calculated by your monitor or video card. Usually, even the best interpolation will fall well short of the crispness of native. In am running 2 displays: 1 32" SONY TV 1080p (1900x1080) and 1 21" NEC Display (1600x1200). TVs are much better for games, because 1080p remains 1080p from 15" to 83"; the pixels just get larger. So, Total War, EU4, CM, and many more games look stunning on a 32" TV with no need for UI scaling. (I had covered this in another hardware thread.) Many years ago, with multi-sync CRTs developers supported art for the common resolutions like 800x600, 1024x768, 1600x1200 ... That got dropped with LCDs. In general the artwork is fixed, and only in the newest games due to 4K are we seeing scalable UIs. CMx2 is actually quite old already.

BTW: I would probably try to interpolate with the video card, as one would assume that it has the more powerful graphics hardware than your monitor. Of course, if your GPU is hitting the wall (which is usually not the case with CM), then it might be better to let the display do the calculations.

There is a file "display size.txt" in your data directory. Normally, it contains "0 0 0" for default resolution and refresh rate. I believe you can edit a resolution and refresh rate into it such as: 1920 1080 0; although I am not sure of the required format. Then, you would either set your display or your video card to interpolate the below native resolution. Ideally, if you would force the presentation to downscale to an even multiple such that pixels aren't really interpolated, but 4 pixels -> 1 pixel in order to maintain sharpness.

First, yes, the title is a pun. As this is foundational data, but it was also drawn from playing around in the CMBN first Basic Training Mission. I realized that one of my biggest problems is time and space. Like last night, I was playing a small scenario of 45 minutes with 5 spatial objectives. I realized I was running into trouble when the clock said +28m remaining and I had only completed objective #1. Too much cautious recon (night mission). So, I pulled out a Major Victory, but it required me for the rest of the scenario to double time it with split squads moving in leap frog bounding over watch. And I truly finished, right as the clock struck 0m. Thus, today, I decided to do something about my playing style. One YouTuber had said he plans based what it would take to just walk the map. Realizing that I had no concept of time and space, I decided to do some analysis which I will share here. I realize that most of you ubermensch, do much more rigorous data collection, but I think this should be sufficient to get me started. ********************************** ***** MOVEMENT (Scout/Squad) ***** ********************************** RESTED/FIT/REGULAR SCOUTS (MIXED/OPTIMAL CONDITIONS) Walk: 50M Quick: 120M Run: 140M (1t tired) Hunt: 40M Slow: 15M (2t tired) RESTED/FIT/REGULAR SQUAD (MIXED/OPTIMAL CONDITIONS) Quick: 80M (complete in 1 turn) (same final dispersion as assault) Assault: 50M [lead team] 0M [rear team] (for long assault) 20-25M (completes in 1 turn) (same final dispersion as assault) 100M (completes in 3 turns) (linear spacing is very much a function of the waypoint placement) (at 30M/min, it is slower movement than manual player bounds) --- * Squad movement standing seems 66% of scout movement. * If there is overwatch, and the enemy is suppressed. QUICK is probably your best way to cover ground. * HUNT is too slow to cover a map in most time frames, and is in the same class of commands as RUN and SLOW. * RUN is best used to sprint between cover to cover; especially as teams which find cover easier. * ASSAULT is probably a toss up between manual squad command and TACAI coordinated. An ASSAULT should probably be no more than 100M to avoid the squad from getting too spread out. Additional suppressing fire advised.

Animated soldier text. Gridded terrain. Ambient background sound without combat sounds. Anyone perhaps redone any of these? Thanks.

As I always keep the same drive partitioning: C - System D - User data E - Games and game data (I relocate off of C as necessary with junctions) --- New system: (1) Install game where you want to make sure registry, DLLs, and activations are taken care of. (2) Rename main game directory and data (just in case). (3) Copy old main game directory and data. This should recover mods, tweaks, and saved games. --- PLEASE NOTE: On my last round of WIN10 64 Pro upgrades from WIN7 64 Pro, I did 1 system build and two clones of it with AOMei Backer Upper. Then, used Driver Easy to catch up any drivers for WIN7 -> WIN10. Cloning was accurate, stable, and saved a tremendous amount of my time. If I am not changing OS in the future, then that is my plan for the next PC.

This is what I loved about CMx1; 6,000 scenarios and campaigns. Randomness is not the same thing as FOW. There is nothing like a scenario with expertly placed ATGs or a spoiling flank attack of reinforcements. A basic premise of combat simulation is "dead is dead". War is not a game of levels and achievements; just victory/defeat and survival.

I imagine planned barrages had a strong a psychological affect on those who witnessed them. It would me. Seeing the ground from a distance be torn apart by the hand of G*d, the concussions, noise, and shaking of the ground. Because a barrage is like a mine field, you never know when it will be your turn. Apparently, the Japanese learned to dig in and wait inland until the marines came ashore in the Pacific. But I suppose if you had not been through an island campaign before, watching this for 2-3 days from the transport ships, it would boost your morale. I think "shock and awe" wasn't really invented in the 90's.