Erwin

At various times I have seen an IFV use its missile vs a building, its gun vs a building, and its MG vs a building - no idea what made it decide either. Altho' I think that a damaged building may persuade the AI use the MG. But, it's very important to remember that when assaulting a building with inf, a TARGET LIGHT command vs a building will make the IFV use its gun (possibly its missile) and that will almost certainly kill a bunch of your own guys. The AI does not recognize friendlies nor does it care about blowing them up.

Yes, that is really the deciding factor. FWIW I find myself being economical with ammo as am used to playing campaigns where ammo and force conservation can be very important. IIRC there are some scenarios that penalize one if one uses more than a certain % of your ammo.

In the game it is confusing and the reasons have never been explained why sometimes an IFV will use its missile or its cannon - especially when firing at buildings. Even if one orders TARGET LIGHT at a building cos one's inf is assaulting, the IFV will still use its cannon rather than its MG (resulting in lots of friendly fire casualties). I get the impression that when the building damaged enough then the IFV may use its MG when ordered to TARGET LIGHT. It's all a mystery.

Don't worry. Once one becomes more experienced one never makes that mistake!

In the game, I rarely allow my AK rifles to fire at more than 250m arc. The Reds rarely have as much ammo as the WAllies (the US certainly) and since accuracy goes down, more than 250m I figure one should be using heavier weapons like the ubiquitous BMPs.

Even more so re China.

My CM2 experience with Warriors is that it takes a platoon of Warriors firing for a couple of minutes to equal less than a minute of a single Bradley or BMP firing. And as for the BTR 4E, it probably fires more 30mm in 15 seconds than a platoon of Warriors does in over a minute. In fact the problem in CM2 with the 4E is that one really only needs 5 seconds of fire as one can exhaust its ammo in a little over a minute of firing(!) Be nice to have a 5 second option rather than the 15 sec minimum. A workaround is to fire the BTR 4E with a 5 second pause before moving to another waypoint

There have been some very good recon scenarios (I forget which now) but possibly most folks like blowing things up rather than sneaking around where the object is to gather intel. "HIghland Games" campaign features a "sneak around" recon mission (of an airfield) and the intel gathered helps during the next mission when one has to assault it.

What is confusing is that one can have what appears to be identical situations, same vehicle, same crew and passengers, and one can unbutton and the other cannot.

This has been requested several times. One one hand it's great to finally execute that brilliant plan and see it to completion b4 the game ends. On the other hand the designer programs the enemy AI to the scenario length so, during any extra time, the enemy AI has basically gone to sleep and will not be programmed to do anything. I like scenarios that give a variable time ending, so one may get an extra 5, 10 more minutes.

To add the the crewing issue re "opening up". One can have a 3-man (Sagger) ATGM team in one BMP2 and one can "open up" as expected. Another identical BMP2 with a 3-man (Saxon) ATGM team has the "open up" button greyed out, so one cannot open up. The only difference is that the latter BMP2 vehicle is assigned to a scout unit. Otherwise, the BMP's are identical.

Am happy to have the replacements.

Re vehicle replacements: FWIW I lost both recon vehicles in Mission 1, but they seem to both be back for Mission 3. Maybe there would have been 4 recon BMP's in Mission 3 had I not lost 2 in Mission 1? I had no recon vehicles in Mission 2. But, I did not lose any recon passengers in Mission 1, so one would have expected them to appear on foot in later missions if the vehicles were not replaced. My dilemma is whether to carry on and see what happens or redo. Ideally one should not engage the early blocking forces at all since they are not objectives to be captured. Alternative

Note: Some of the items are only pertinent to modern titles and other items are relevant to all titles. Re CMSF2 (so far):1) Spotting issues. A two man scout team with no binoculars can spot enemy units at close to 3,000 meters much better than an FO (with super dooper optics tech) or an HQ with binocs. Folks have opined that it's because one of the riflemen has a "Thermal Imager" attached to his rifle and that is why they spot so well. However, if that is accurately simulated in CM2 then why don't all RL units have thermal imagers and scrap the expensive and heavy laser designators a

It makes one realize how seldom, if ever, do we get to simulate RL tactics like that in the game. I can't recall ever having 4 ATG's in any CM2 scenario. I think we may have seen that more in CM1 as we were able to have Regimental-sized forces on each side.