SlowMotion

The Ukraine war has rather vindicated the bogging model, actually. At certain times of the year you just don't want go on a drive through the countryside. In the game go to the menu and look at 'Conditions'. If terrain is labeled as 'muddy' you're in for a hard time. If its labeled 'wet' you're in for a slightly less hard time. I've learned to aim for safer patches of ground - hopping from hard ground tiles to rocky ground tiles. I made a flooded 'muddy' ground map for CMFB module. But the flooded road has gravel tiles beneath it so bogging is rare if you stick to the road.

Things have already changed.  The modern CM2 games demonstrate that long range ATGM's dominate the battlefield and tanks are now very vulnerable vs a peer enemy.  The lack of usefulness of the Abrams and Leopards in Ukraine is a great demo. 
Secondly, we have drone warfare which is just getting started.  Imagine hundreds, even thousands of drones doing an assault - and driven by AI to independently and intelligently target enemy units.
Thirdly, we are in the era of increasingly effective cyberwar and the ability of enemies to devastate the "soft underbelly" heartland causing power, food and water shortages for civilian populations as well as disrupting the financial basis of a society.

A shame that the DLC is scrapped, but for very understandable reasons.

I think the main appeal of CMBS was the near peer/ near future setting where we could get a taste of how modern wars, or wars in the near future would be fought. The trouble with it is that potential options for a near future/near peer setting also tend to be conflicts that might very well happen in reality.

Additionally, the conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated that a lot of the original assumptions about modern war were incorrect, drones, loitering munitions, tactical ballistic missiles, mines, artillery, mines delivered through artillery, electronic warfare, guerilla style tactics, field improvisation (strapping everything to a MT-LB) and improvised vehicle armor all play a larger role than most people expected. While this might not be applicable to every country, I think quite a lot of it is.

Hopefully a CM3 would be designed to fully accommodate for the advancements in modern warfare.

I still want a CM game set in a near peer/ near future setting, but perhaps the next "modern" game could either use a fictional setting like in the ARMA series, or one that is extremely unlikely to happen such as China vs EU, Russia vs China, EU vs USA etc to avoid a repeat of CMBS.

Regarding the current war in Ukraine- You do all know there is a thread that is now 100s of pages long discussing it in the Black Sea forums. Can we not digress into discussing the war itself here in this thread please?

CMFB is regular price

Incredibly disappointing. 
 
Not even a chance of getting some bits and bobs as a vehicle or battle pack?

Thanks for answering me so clearly on this one! However, this is devastating news. CMBS is my favourite CM game but it always lacked a bit variety. I can understand your decision but this makes me incredibly sad.
As for Slitherine/Matrix, they are soon releasing Broken Arrow. A game that features the realistic destruction of entire building blocks via rocket strikes, painstaking detail when it comes to authenticity of units and overall a very smiliar landscape to Eastern European countries. I don't really see them squirming there. Maybe because that game could be their first mainstream hit?
And personally, I've never understood why contemporary conflicts are taboo while it is completely fine to have SS Todeskopf troops in your fun wargame or bomb the Vietcong without any notion of all the civilian casualties. I probably know all the arguments why this war is okay to depict but not that one. And I can even comprehend most of them. But Wargames are not some casual fun games. They are - more often than not - simulators and show us the workings of modern equipment and tactics. And, at least for me, they even have an anti-war element to them, much more than most of so called anti-war movies. And in that regard, they transcend the regular piety rules that apply for entertainment media.
Anyways. It is great to hear that there is enthusiasm for other modern settings from your side. I do know that it's not gonna be a game featuring the IDF though.

I would just like to see an expanded ToE. A simple patch that adds modern weapons would be nice. Breathe life back into the game without the risk of being called out as profiteering from the war. Everyone gets to simulate (to an extent) what’s going on over there with little to no risk to BFC.
 
Players could create the maps and scenarios and upload them to FGM. A compromise that might just leave everyone happy and dying for this damn war to be over. Then BFC could release somefink with proper drone warfare and minefields and such. 

It's because russia is losing and the war may not be over before the end of 2024. It won't look good to release a game about the war in Ukraine as the war will still be going on.... 
I  am pro-Ukrainian just calling it like I see it.
 
I hope I am wrong and this is all over soon and in a positive way for the Ukrainian people

Out of curiosity, when was the last time any there was any meaningful change/update to the game rules or fundamental features?
Not a battle pack or a module with some new units, but the kind of changes people have now been requesting for 37 pages in this thread. Which is far from the first feature request thread.
The last time I can remember new features were added were in CMFB (2016), when flamethrowers and mortar halftracks were added.
Both awkwardly and buggily implemented, but at least they were new capabilities.
There was also a patch around the same time that added some new features to the editor, such as a retreat mechanic and an area fire order for the AI. But that was still eight years ago.

Usually it is an indication for other enemy units still around in close proximity.
I had the same instance recently with my germans in CMRT. Two of my soldiers were raising there hands and the soviets were standing so close that they could have given them a high five.
But one of my fireteams that was like 30m away kept them from totally giving into the soviets. Just as that fire team crawled further away and was out of sight, those 2 fellows finally started their long march to siberia.
So you need to clear the surroundings first to really get them. And always keeping an eye on those prisoners in spe...these bastards tend to pick up their weapons again if you keep them unchecked.

"Cumulative/organic" TRPs ought to be a thing: if you've called in fire missions during a mission, the FO should realistically be able to call for a "repeat" fire mission on the same coordinates as opposed to having to start all over again.
It would also be nice if TRPs could have some more visible icon in mission. In large missions such as the Neuhof defensive mission in the Cold War campaign, the TRPs are pretty much invisible on such a large map.
Ideally aircraft should also have an "adjust" option, instead of having to be sent back to a holding pattern again when the TACP should be able to simply say "ok, now bomb the treeline next to the village you just bombed".

So to keep this brief, I recently was encountering crashing issues with what I thought was due to Windows 11 and the TPM not behaving with my Ryzen 3700x cpu. I got around that and it led me to continue having occasional issues but now only when the computer was doing very little.
This led me to discover the CPPC or "collaborative processor performance control", or whatever it stands for.
There are settings to control this in your BIOS though the naming may vary depending on specific hardware/brand etc.

So anyway, this used to be known as "cool n quiet" or something and it basically allows your CPU to throttle the power (even on prefer max performance power mode) when it is idling or close to idling. 
There is also a setting that allows "preferred cores". 
Now, I am not an expert in this stuff but having disabled all of it I have seen my rig return to stability and just now I thought I would try out the ever heart-breaking "Bear in the Sun" mission from the CMCW US campaign.
If you have seen my previous posts around this you will know that I have had a hell of a time with stuttering during set up, beyond what you would expect or call reasonable. I'm talking 2 solid minutes of non-responsiveness etc. Real bad.
 
With this CPPC stuff all disabled, forcing my cpu to not go into a low power state when on a low load (which is what you find during deployment phase in CM i suspect), I was able to deploy and play some of the mission for testing and it never stuttered more than a couple of heart beats.
So if you are having the bother I have been, this may be another thing to consider if you are handy with the BIOS etc. If not then please don't go messing around in there as you could really upset your rig if you change the wrong settings. 
🫠

It would be great if one day the the game AI that plots turns could be taught by feeding it turn files of human players playing the game. So instead of doing things according to AI plans made in scenario editor, it would play the game by creating those plans by itself. 

And if dreaming this further maybe there could be different "AI players" that would play differently because they had been taught to play from different set of H2H games. People could choose which AI they would play against. Now that AI development is advancing fast I'm sure this kind of thing will become reality in some games some day, but I'm not sure if this will happen in CM series.

I don't think Battlefront has that kind of AI. The kind of AI that you feed training data to is called a neural network (because the data structures involved have a passing resemblance to a very basic understanding of how biological neurons work). A well designed neural network, fed a sufficient amount of training data, can do things like accurately identify hand-written letters, or guess which pictures are and are not pictures of bees. Very large neural networks, which are fed massive amounts of training data, are called deep-learning networks. Some well known deep-learning networks have gotten very good at specific tasks such as, in the case of chatGPT, convincingly mimicking human language.
A neural network would probably not be the most efficient way to create a good wargaming AI. A neural net can't think multiple steps into the future. It can only make the decision with the lowest cost at this particular moment ("cost" in this context refers to the mathematical punishment/reward system that was used to train the AI). That works just fine for things like chatGPT, since all it takes to convincingly mimic human language is to respond appropriately to the most recent prompt. No memory of past prompts nor anticipation of future prompts is required. But a good tactical AI needs to do more than just anticipate the immediate consequences of a decision. It needs to be able to think several steps into the future. It needs to be able to plan. Neural networks (as they exist today) can't plan*.
A better approach might be to do something like the General Staff: Black Powder AI. It analyzes the battlefield (using pre-programmed methods (if you watch the video the narrator mentions a spanning-tree algorithm used to calculate frontages), not training data), breaks the situation down into a series of logical statements, and then deduces which courses of action it should take. In the video I linked the General Staff AI was able to identify an exposed flank and assign a unit to conduct a flank attack. For something like Combat Mission the AI would, for example, need to have a concept of fire-superiority. It would need to recognize whether or not it had fire-superiority, and know not to attempt to advance without fire-superiority (that would stop a lot of AI lemming charges).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0K8DnS414o
*Which is not to say that neural nets don't have some really exciting possible applications. They can be trained to be extremely good at recognizing objects, so they are ideal for tasks such as spotting and identifying targets. And they will do that way faster than any human ever could. But they will have an error rate, and they will be stumped by any object that wasn't in their training data, so we'll still want a human in the loop to approve/disapprove targeting decisions for at least the next few years until all the kinks are worked out. You could also send such systems into areas that are known to contain no friendly or neutral targets, allowing it to engage targets without waiting for human approval.

Another option (next to DL and conventional terrain analysis, as used in General Staff) is reinforcement learning. It has a more narrow application, but is easier to fit to a game like Combat Mission.
Here is an example, as shown at the ConnectionsUS 2020 on-line conference: 'Course of Action Generation with ML and a COTS Wargame', using the Flashpoint Campaigns game.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1C9nfWwwlsTMkNN-au6j5UrTfDMr9v4KF/view?usp=drive_link

Hi all,
Just wanted to say hello and I hope I get to play some PBEM against some of you when I get better.
I'm a huge history fan, and also a fan of Graviteam Tactics: Mius Front, but it never quite did what I wanted. Games like Gates of Hell: Ostfront, looked gorgeous but were tactically shallow experiences that in no way represented the battles I've read about in books. The closest I could get was warg ames like War in the East 2, which still were fairly abstract. 
I found out about these games a few weeks ago and...Well, with the Steam sale I've purchased CM:BS, CM:SF2 and CM:BN, plus all the respective DLCs. I've been wanting games like these for years. Can't wait to start building the hours. I've clocked up 30 hours in two weeks which, for me as a 37 year old with a job and girlfriend, is fairly extreme.
 
Cannot believe I didn't try them sooner. 
 
Nice to meet you all

Yes, I'm an old fart.
A "homemade WW2 picture" is nothing but a fake. I don't intend to go into that.

The switch between win7 and win10:
I hate win10 with a passion. 

1) only one side can see the end screen. The game is terminated one file too early.
2) frequent hangs or other conditions from which a game cannot be resumed, the game is lost. This could be fixed by leaving the PBEM files on the user's disk (they are already there, just don't delete them when done with a turn).
3) there was a phase where people using 1.03 were rejected from playing, PBEM++ saying they need 1.03. This was obviously a code update gone wrong server-side, then silently fixed. It should be communicated when the server side code gets updated, and it should be communicated when a problem is fixed.
4) cases of server down or otherwise not answering for users. There obviously is no monitoring of server status done by Matrix.
5) at least one case of a game disappearing before being finished. Also, the timeline when idle games are deleted is not communicated.
Not a bug, but it is annoying that the Matrix password is neither remembered nor does it support copy and paste. This forces the users into trivial passwords, which then in turn apply to their entire Matrixgames account, including game serials.

WeGo or NoGo...
One of the primary USPs for me is the 1 minute turn and infinite replays of the turn results. If it doesn't have that, it's not a competitor to CM, in my lexicon.

For me, WEGO is the only way to play. RT may as well not exist, as far as I'm concerned. A massive chunk of my enjoyment is in re-watching the turns unfold, finding the engaging little stories that play out. RT simply doesn't give anything like the same opportunity for watching situations develop and resolve.
I hate to miss anything, and even on a small/Tiny map, you will in RT.

WEGO and find a good human player.
 

While reading another discussion forum I discovered this Youtube video which visits the location of scenario Drive on the Dreijenseweg from Market Garden module.

https://youtu.be/A5TuMtTbzr0
There is another video at this same Youtube account which visits the real world place of scenario Counterattack at Son.

1.  The AI for quick battles is a known fault.  QBs are more for PBEM with human opponents.  I have been playing these games since the way back times and I don't think I've played more than 2 or 3 QBs with any engine.  I pretty much only play campaigns against the AI and scenarios PBEM.  I've never felt at a loss for content either.  Which brings me to...
2.  You're definitely not looking.  I have literally TONS of user made campaigns and scenarios for all the titles.  So many that I don't think I could play all of them in a lifetime.  Quick tip for you, find and download the "All in One" modpack for whatever title you are playing .  The have loads of user made scenarios and campaigns included right there in the modpack.  I feel like just for CMBN there must be over 100 scenarios, at least, and a few campaigns included in the modpack.  It's a must have.