gunnergoz

They're either complaining about the state of this game or badgering BFC to find out when the next one is due out...It's a wonder that BFC still answers the forum posts.

No, we are saying that Shermans were our main tanks and they were present in numbers enough and were used with skill enough that they defeated the German tanks over time, in concert with combined arms and air power. The 155 stunt, if it happened, was as much a fluke as the M8 that took out a Tiger in the Ardennes with its 37mm peashooter. Individually, the Panther and Tiger were superior to the Sherman and it took numbers and better tactics to defeat them but no one was silly enough to deliberately go to face them with an unarmored SP artillery piece that wasn't designed for it.

Any tank is a death trap in the right/wrong circumstances, though some designs narrow the circumstances a bit. The Sherman got a bad rep in part because there were just so many of them in harms way and they were usually on the offensive, so they took a lot of fire and consequently a lot of losses. But the M4 had a lot of good points too, mostly to do with reliability and mobility, so if it was properly handled and the crew was a bit lucky too, they could and did hold their own. Where it shined was in the way US forces tended to use them as part of a combined arms team and as the Americans got better at it, the tank losses went down somewhat. As for the 155 SP you speak of, it was called the M12. About 74 are said to have been sent to the ETO along with their ammo carrier variant. That's about 5 SP battalions worth including spares. They were intended for indirect conventional artillery support of mobile forces but on occasion they were used as bunker busters...carefully, since the crew was very exposed in that there was almost no frontal armor above the hull.

I wish I had a penny for every WW2 memoir I read that remarked on the lethality and ubiquity of mortars.

Yes, this one's a keeper.

Which tells me that the engine is fully up to doing the Hurtgen campaign when someone gets around to it.

This topic was pretty much beat to death (again) most recently in this thread: http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=96073

Won't be long before the oceans are fished out and their ecosystem is blasted by current changes, salinity changes, temperature changes, etc. Not to mention invasions by imported species of algae and fish, etc and just plain pollution. Not so sure that colonizing the oceans is that attractive a prospect either, under those conditions. My money is on Mars and the moon if we can ever economically get there.

But I do think they can be located using the chain of command links on the HQ units. No so sure about detached scouts though. Anyone clarify this?

My 20" HP laptop has a dual core 2.10 Ghz processor, 4 GB RAM, an Nvidia 8800M GTS graphics with 512 MB VR and Vista HP...runs everything smoothly on Best, with shadows, the works. I'm also using two year old Nvidia drivers because they are the last for my PC and newer ones are unstable. Only real gripe is some scenarios take a long time to load...at least a minute or maybe two. Ditto with some game saves on large maps. Some game saves on the Huzzar map, for example, take almost a minute. I've loaded a lot of mods and wonder if they impact the load/save times.

If the CO standing on top of the turret is intentional, it is brilliant. Potentially suicidal, but brilliant. Probably happened more than once in the field too and a very human behavior, seeking a better vantage point. But so close to enemy units? That would take real balls. Has me wondering too if it is a fluke, because I have yet to see it.

I don't need cutting edge graphics to immerse myself in the game or even to suspend disbelief momentarily while watching a turn replay. But that's just me. What gets me drawn into the game is the way everything comes together. There are some imperfections in the way graphics handle collisions, but I do not expect or demand perfection in this area. Much more important to me that the portrayal feels and looks right overall. The terrain is more than adequately portrayed and the vehicle textures are superb...even interiors are depicted (WTF? I first said to myself when I saw that - I was bowled over.) Watch a German spahwagen moving towards you and you can even see the driver through his viewing slit and he is a 3D model which you can look past to see into the interior...talk about attention to detail. So yes, I'm far more happy than "bothered" by the game graphics.

Since specific soil and ground conditions (tree roots, rocks, water table, etc) affect the issue in real life, an element of randomness seems appropriate to me. Some bocage may yield quickly, some may be a tough nut to crack.

Lets just say we disagree on what those facts are and let it go at that. Good night Jon.

There you go again. If it ain't your way, its the highway.

Steve and his team have put 12 years of their lives into this game and its predecessors. If they tell me that something is hard to code, I believe them. Their posting code online to prove it so would not do me any good, since codes all greek to me. What matters to me is that they persist in trying to make this the best possible simulation that is still fun to play and they have not sold out to some mainstream corporation that would have dumped it or turned it into "Sexy Shooting Lobsters from Mars do Normandy." They are geeks about the topic and the period and I trust them to be doing their level best to replicate history as much as is humanly and technologically feasible. I don't mind people pointing out flaws they perceive but it rankles me when people say that something should be easy to fix when they really have no idea.

Jon, you don't need to be an @ss to make your point. It won't change my mind. Can you not simply be civil instead of turning snide when someone disagrees with you?

The main benefit I find in arcs is to limit the range at which the unit will engage the enemy, thus keeping it concealed as long as possible. This is especially useful for HQ's and moving mortar squads which you don't want getting into firefights with some enemy unit on the next hill that hasn't spotted them yet. As far as the covered arc helping to "focus" a units attention in a given direction, my experience is spotty, so much so that I find it more efficient to let units pick their own targets most of the time rather than risk defining an arc only to find an enemy unit just outside the arc getting the drop on my guys, who are basically suffering from tunnel vision thanks to the cover arc command. The best ambushes, I find, are those where I simply site the ambusher in the best possible spot and point him in the most likely direction of fire, then let the unit act on its own initiative. Though he will open up on any target he sees, the game leads with armor often enough that this is what will be under the crosshairs first. Not always, but many times. It would be nice to specify whether the preferred ambush target is to be infantry or armor though, that I agree with. It would permit us to optimize the ambush for the ambusher, so to speak. By the way on ambush sites, I find it best to not give the ambusher a lot of choices about where to shoot. If you site them carefully between buildings or bocage or whatever, their field of view will be automatically restricted to a narrow arc by definition. This aids in concealment and also focuses the unit safely. Putting a would-be ambusher out where he can be seen from multiple possible enemy approach angles is just asking to be shellacked. He needs to be placed where he is more likely to see the enemy first and not vice versa.

It seems to me that the passengers will operate any available MG's under fire orders or to return fire. If the vehicle is stopped and the driver is alone in it, I don't believe he will leave the driver's seat to fire the weapons. If they do, I've not seen it yet.

What I want is something more than an approximation. Artillery can already fire at a defined circular target area or alternately within a defined target line. HMG's should be able to do something much the same. Is that so unreasonable?

I think the beef with MG's as portrayed in the game is that they can only fire on point targets, not true area targets. The bullets may cluster around the aim point and cover a bit of ground in the process, but it is not like traditional grazing fire or a defined beaten zone as I understand it. If HMG's in particular were allowed to be targeted like artillery and mortars already are, with pre-defined circular target areas or along specified target lines, it would go a long way in my mind towards addressing this.

Panthers are still bad enough, their long 75 was a real Sherman killer, even at range.

Some of it depends upon mortar fuzing. A superquick fuze will not bury itself into the ground and will explode almost immediately upon contact, so more of its shrapnel will fly out horizontally than if it buried itself and then exploded. The superquick fuze is what the US 60mm and 81mm mortars used for the most part. Of course, if its raining and thus muddy or there's snow or sand, some of these factors can also affect the fuze's performance.

Sniping at individuals with AP is a bit weird, but plausible. My 37mm peashooter armed AFV's seem to love doing it and inevitably knock down whomever they are aiming for, saving their HE for groups or crawling targets. But killing more than one enemy with an AP round (unless the two men were standing one in front of the other) just seems inappropriate, assuming that is what is happening. Needs more data before I believe its a real problem, though...with all due respect to the OP.

Huzzar's map is so complex it really pushes the old video card. Wouldn't surprise me if you gave your video card a migraine from those photos.