pawter

Well it doen't seem anyone has any solutions to offer. Instead of testing a solo QB as intended, I recovered some game files from my recycle bin where H2HH had moved them and closely watched the turn where the troops mounted the truck. There was no 'overstack' involved; exactly 20 were told to embark. As per experience with infantry the greyed-out drifting icons are caused by two individual troopers who took it into their heads to dash off randomly rather than sequentially climb on board. The resultant drifting icons are in consequence a form of weighted mean of the positions of all the troops in each particular squad. I've seen this bug before for footsloggers, it is just this time where transport is involved it destroys the useability of both the troops and the vehicle.

c3k OK I'll ask my opponent. It's the first time I've played him so we'll just have to see how trusting he is. I am very interested in the overload explanation. I normally just tell teams to get on transport and rely on the AI to tell me if it could accomodate the intended troops or not. I think I did overload the truck and in the next turn the number of green circles was significantly understated. I am going to test this with a hotseat setup.

I noted this abnormal behaviour a couple of times in the past but was only playing against the machine so it didn't bother me as I could abort the game if it really mattered. But now I'm stuck with it in a real game against a human opponent so I'd like to learn a solution, if there is one. I am US in a CMBN QB in which I bought a 2.5 ton truck. Soon after starting I told platoon of HMGs and their officer to get in. Next turn a couple of the floating icons were greyed out and starting to drift off from over the truck to nowhere in particular. This drifting greyed icon behaviour I've seen on other aberant occasions relating to mostly intact infantry squads, but doesn't interest me here. Problem is that in the next turn to try remediate the situation I told everybody to dismount but the two problem teams did not, then I told everyone (including the driver) to get back in; same problem but now the truck continues to be shown as unoccupied and is incapable of movement. After trying a few iterations of this with minor changes I've sent the 2 sound HMGs at a run forward to try catch up with the advance. Now I've tried telling the driver, left behind, to fire upon the action point occupied by the abandoned truck to try coerce the 2 teams whose greyed icons have drifted off to a stable 150meters away, but whose pictured troop bodies are shown sitting immovably in the back of the truck. My goal was to get them all off the truck so I can reman it with the driver and move it forward as it is my only ammo resupply. Eventually he threw a grenade which killed a couple of machine gunners but at least forced that team to disembark, but the officer team being unharmed have sat tight. Now, a couple of turns later, the HMG are not panicked, their (still greyed icon has returned) to float over them but there are no orders shown available for them to move, shoot or do anything including retreat. Any thoughts anybody?

"... Stuart tanks, with three .30 cal. machine guns and 37mm cannon with an anti-personnel buck-shot load, were more feared by the infantry than the Sherman's." http://www.3ad.com/history/wwll/memoirs.pages/pierro.htm

Arm505 your profile doesn't list an email address so I'll have to add to the congestion of the forum to reply directly to your question. No my Intel Integrated Graphics doesn't cause blocks over text in menus etc. However all my text is blurred and unclear but readable if you squint your left eye. The answers to my original questions 1 & 2 match my later experience however NOT question 3. When ordering a unit to target a building when it is not occupied by a spotted enemy getting the target line to attach is impossible 95% of the time. Instead the line attaches to the nearest "action spot" and the rounds visibly fall there, short of the building. The walls of buildings block LOS to the "action spot" within it. I hope this behaviour is due to my suboptimal graphics chip as it is as frustrating as hell and I'm sure there would already be a torrent of complaints from players. I am due to get another desktop soon so hopefully this won't continue to spoil the game.

When occupied by a forward observer or other spotter there is no reduction in time till fall of shells (at least when the fire is first requested). Is the improvement in accuracy?

I've just started to try the demo on my laptop which is a few years old and unfortunately also has an Intel Intergrated Graphics chip. I'm also unfamiliar with CMSF and have moved more or less straight from CMAK to CMBN. I'm trying to understand whether the behaviour of tanks I'm observing is due to the game system or to the incapacity of my machine (dual core 2.2Ghz, 2GB RAM). 1) it appears that when I issue movement orders they must 'snap' onto some underlying grid so that unlike CMAK where I can move vehicles (minimum space between them being allowed) to the exact position I wish, with CMBN they move approximately to half a dozen metres of it. 2) ditto for area targeting. Unless targeting an identified enemy unit it isn't possible to target an exact point of ground; when the target line is assigned it appears to 'snap' onto the nearest node of the underlying grid which is usually about 10 metres away. 3) it is often (95% ocurrence) imposible to order a tank to target a vertical surface eg. an unoccupied building or a hedge or wall. If these behaviours are an artifact of the system I'm sure they would've been discussed before, but as I've failed to find a thread I'm hopeful it is just my inadequate machine.

So it would appear BFC have continued their practice of poor quality control over the grammar/spelling and integrity of the briefings for missions and worse; the logical coherence of the scenarios released with the game. Lack of such rudimentary version control over the easily visible aspects of the released product is so disappointing that I am surprised Battlefront haven't improved it. I write this opinion because I have a very high regard for the creators of the CM series which belies the sloppy hidden-from-view code implied by these obvious failings. They are so responsive to the views expressed in this forum which they have co-operatively forged it into a powerful tool for harvesting feedback to assist game development and guide bug fixes, that I can only assume an insufficient number of complaints bemoaning this failing.

I've had a few goes at the Busting The Bockage scenario which promises a truck at D+20 minutes ... but it doesn't arrive. Can anyone tell me what I'm missing?

LJFHutch: no I've not played CMx2. If it resolves this issue I will be pleased (though I infer from the other posts to this thread, insofar as they occasionally address the issue, it doesn't). Your description of your experience of the "73 Easting" battle so closely matches the recorded results speaks directly to the query I pose. I am glad to read it: I may be wrong. I hope so. I assume/hope that the creators of CM did a lot of reading of real life AARs and battalion histories etc. A lot more than I have ever done. And are not merely clever computer dweebs who have sucked us all into their virtual simulation, no more representative of the actual event than a John Wayne movie.

OK OK I am maybe not the single best player I’ve ever met. Merely competent which point is what I tried to start from: I’ve learned how to use this system effectively. Consistently people are posting comments regarding the cause I posit ie: perfect advanced map knowledge (maybe this is not the cause; several posts have suggested others). Repeatedly they fail to address the ahistoric (sp?) way it manifests itself. THE OVERCONCENTRATION OF ATTACKING FORCE. This is not a discretionary judgment call as regards what maps, aerial recon (you must be joking?), trustworthy & brave local knowledge etc is realistic. It is a black and white assessment of: do the battles produced by this game system accord with recorded history? If not then we are all refining our aptitude for a computer game. As meaningful as Total Annihilation or Doom or whatever young people play on their Iphones or suchlike disintermediated post-post-modern devices theseadays.

After drawing a posting from BFC (see bottom of page 8) I'm content. Steve is at least aware of the problem I posit. I take the technical limitations as he represents them. There is no way to resolve this problem. Pity. It diminishes the realism of a game I still enjoy, yet recognise doesn't mirror reality in this aspect.

On second thoughts Mord, given your Join Date .... do you not harbour fond remembrances of what life was like back in the day; when wild winds whipped through our flowing locks. When CMBO was the antidote to the logical & social impasse that advanced squad leader represented? Do not turn renegade to the pure and worthy impulse of that time. Though I expect this thread is destined to be submerged beneath the hitcount of the usual 10 second tap and send celebrity “Hi I’m here where are you?” I’m wittereing away …. do you still hear me. hello? But now I read that Blackcat curses me the name of troll on the grounds of my former past postings. Well I honestly cannot remember them much from so many years ago. I was probably drunk at the time and usually quite frantically involved with arranging IP assignations when not frigging myself for want of same. Life seemed freer and fine back then, though I’m sure you hoi polloi would fail to understand.

Skcx**** **** a brik Mord: Your post has alerted me that I posted an email to this forum and vice versa. But bugger it; rather than expunge it and leave your post hanging without a start and any other poor benighted souls who've followed this post thusfar in mid-limbo I'll leave it as stands. The sentiments I express, though private at the time of writing, I'm happy to leave stand in public. In this forum or many other, more much more arduous.

WARNING: this will take a long while to read. http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=95951 Apart from the purely aesthetic appreciation of those trolls who were unconvinced of my IQ, dog latin or size of my codpiece there were some valid points and opinions expressed I think. I am mulling them over. Though the initial frenzy seemed more related to the title of the thread and the desperate defensiveness of the advocates for CMSF ... surely as a professional advocate you must sense some tactical flaw belies their pleading? I hope this isn't a foretaste of what we can anticipate from CMBN and it's new acolytes. It seems to me it may be a manifestation of the doomsday dogmatism of some millennial cult on the verge of apotheosis rather than the vibrant collegiate contest of searching opinions I fondly remember from back in the days of CMBO yore. Jeez I've not had this much virtual fun since I spewed on my wife's grandmother!

Sergei: instantly shared consistent with the rest of the game. It is not some abstract goal of "realism" in this respect that I'm finding fault with but rather the overconcentration of attacking forces. It is the overconcentrated execution of attacks I think is ahistorical. One of the causes for this I think is the advanced perfect knowledge of every 10 square metres of forest, the path of every river and road etc. Magpie Oz: thanks for your input, prompting me to step back from my argument. Of course the perfect map knowledge is actually to make manifest at the game commander level the on-the-ground process of discovery and common sense decision making of subordinate commanders and units. Then where does that leave us? Without having been directly observed the entire map, accurate to a few metres is available from the get go to an attacker (or ME participant). If this is one of the causes for the defect I describe then perhaps it truly is insoluble for this game system. My respect for the originators of CM is such that I presume this problem has been considered before and the best feasible result is what we’ve got. LukeFF: still missing the point my dear friend. Wait a while and it may come round again.

Sergei: or how about this? You do not tell the platoon to go over the hill into an unknown landscape until it has been scouted. It is scouted by a half squad or sniper who IS told to advance over the eastern shoulder of the hill until they make contact or reach a point a few metres beyond what is currently known. In the event that they end their move surrounded by impenetrable forrest through which they cannot see more than 30 odd metres. Repeat. Obviating the technical fault with this idea (and need for major game core rework) you drew attention to?

LukeFF et fils: that you are thoroughly convinced by a straw-man argument I never tried to propound serves only to demonstrate the worth of your 30 second tweet. What I proposed was that the way that attackers overconcentrate their forces to win is absurdly unreal. A possible cause I proposed was the advanced perfect map knowledge. Steiner14 suggested perfect foreknowledge of the balance of forces. Sergei: the conceptual fault you highlight in my suggestion is valid as a technical problem (perhaps insurmountable). In the real world I speculate a commander may tell a platoon lieutenant "Go over that hill on the eastern side, keeping within the tree cover then advance towards the village staying within the treeline and stop dead on contact and await further developments making sure to act in concert with other troops as they advance over/around the hill towards the village". Then (in the game) the next turn would reveal what the platoon had seen in it's movement and movement orders would be based on that. A knarly problem.

Other Means: I looked at FRANKO'S TRUE COMBAT RULES and they appear to address this issue from the perfect map knowledge angle. The drawback of course being they are only rules dependent on voluntary compliance and in the hurly burly of a game (especially an IP game) I’m sure I could guarantee an inadvertent keystroke which would ruin the entire effect and make the entire complex procedure redundant at one glance of a high level map. If these rules were introduced to the code I think it may be a lot of coding effort for some gain in realism at the cost of a significant decrease in playability. The game already has instant perfect knowledge of all units status, instant perfect order transmission etc for this reason I suspect. An on-screen ToE will be a great stand-alone improvement.

Steiner14: I agree with you wholeheratedly that by it’s admirably achieved concern for balanced, mutually playable/enjoyable games CMx1 may only cover a restrictive subset of WWII combat. I had worried over this point and forgotten it years ago as not being amenable to a feasible fix without entirely overhauling not just the victory criteria but QB map layout vis a vis flags & setup zones and also relative prices of varying units and much more I’m sure. It is I think a powerful explanatory variable for this phenomenon. I would rank it as important as the perfect advance knowledge of the map.

Fetchez la Vache: OK I concede the point that game commanders are not constrained by the horrors of real life consequences of being overly aggresive. But in my reading I've often been surprised just how aggresive real life commanders often were. Rather than just skulking around trying not attract attention to themselves from on high nor the enmity of their troops for being foolhardily vernturesome. OK scratch my comment regarding armor grouping, that is harder to sustain. I do not see how limiting elevation or camera position will answer solve the problem as it will still be possible to roll the camera forward over the entire map and discover it's layout perfectly including checking LOS from ground level of a point miles away behind a mountain or whatever. As regards technical limitations surely some such calculation is performed by the code already when deciding what enemy units to disclose or not. All I'm arguing for is that for an attacking player all that portion of the map not directly within the LOS of their units (or formerly was) should be blank and the player should have to rely on whatever written briefing & rough drawn sketch maps (this facility lacking) he is given at the start. From my reading commanders at this level very rarely had more. Often less.

It seems that I’ve flushed out a few ad hominem trolls et amici for whom anything longer that a tweet is an affront. Most responses argue about the abstract “realism” of what I propose versus their view of what happened re: scouting before the battle started, whether by air or land. I agree entirely with Fetchez la Vache that schwerepunkt is an operational level concept however I was using it as a quick catch-all phrase to represent the overconcentration of force on battlefields of this scale without need to write an essay. What most responses fail to address is the consequence of this flaw. The test of whether it exists irrespective of it’s cause: ABSURDLY UNREALISTIC OVERCONCENTRATION OF UNITS AT THE POINT OF ATTACK WINS and at this scale of both space and time this doesn’t agree with the historic record. At the start of games I regularly concentrate an entire battalion of troops in 800 square metres. And they advance similarly concentrated. Ditto tanks in platoons operating in mutual support within 20 square metres. And this wins. Competent players, molded by the CMx1 game engine, use this tactic. I forgot to mention that I gave up on CMSF at the demo stage when first released, so if the CM series has addressed and resolved this issue then my query is at an end. Another matter largely missed by respondents is scale as regards time, not space. Take a ME for instance where units must rush to position. Or an attack where the attacker lacks time to even scratch out foxholes (2 or 3 feverish hours?) JonS I think touches on this when he suggests that local terrain FoW would make the first 25% of each game a matter of explorative probes but I don’t agree it would be largely irrelevant thereafter as original dispositions would often need to be radically altered thereafter. Raising the relative value of AC scouting and HTs as battlefield taxis which the current system fails to capture. PanzerMiller: I too have read descriptions of the defense mounted by Kurt Meyer and others between Caen and Falaise and that they were helped greatly by the intimate knowledge of the French countryside. This is the one reference to published history in this thread I’ve yet read and it serves to confirm me in my opinion. The local knowledge of these prepositioned defenders (inferior in just about every other respect) gave them a competitive advantage over attackers who had to fumble their way forward, “discovering” the landscape. And as regards aerial reconnaissance: has anyone positing it’s effectiveness on this scale seen many such photos? Produced after days, if not more, of analysis? Not hours and minutes leading up to a proposed attack. If you had you’d not seriously argue that they provided metre perfect cartography. I would contrast what they could provide as 'some knowledge' rather than 'perfect knowledge'. The briefings included in most scenarios are worthless cut and paste from wikipedia or somesuch other web authority giving a gloss on the general situation. Very rarely do they give any idea of the tactical situation reporting that a commander on the ground would require. Prior ground scouting may give a newly arrived commander intelligence along the lines of “Ok; 250 yards to the front there is a copse of trees dense enough to hide trenches perhaps and to the left at 150 yards running towards it there is a gully that may provide a covered advance route. But beyond the trees we’ve not yet penetrated for the above reason”, not metre perfect elevations, building positions, roads, bridges blown or otherwise etc etc.

Now that I've caught everyone's attention here is my gripe: I've been playing and thinking about this game on and off for a good while now, most recently as a member of a ladder (to find opponents, now that this forum is only a pale shadow of what is was back in the heyday of CMBO). My respect for the game is largely based on the way the results mimic what I've read in history books. After making allowances for abstractions and impossibilities like instant intelligence of what is happening to friendly troops all over the map etc to promote playability, at the end of (non-solitary) games when reviewing the sequence of events and their causes I usually feel I have gained a deeper understanding of my reading. But one aspect of the game I think could be changed without adversely impacting it's playabilility and enjoyability is to delimit the display of the map to that area directly in, or formerly so, the LOS of friendly forces unless they are prepositioned defenders. I am prompted to write this not by any abstract personal preference, but rather by my observation and analysis of my recent games. I judge myself a better than average player as I win more often than I loose and would like to believe this means I’ve increased my understanding of WWII battlefield tactics. Not merely that I have mastered the logic of a computer game system. The problem is, as I have improved over the years, in attack my troop dispositions and movements stretch the schwerpunktprinzip to absurd unrealism. Why? Because it usually wins. And I observe my better opponents do so too. I believe this is due to the lack of need for scouting to find out the lay of the land, and the consequent uncertainty as to which are the best avenues of advance and then attack. The instant knowledge of the exact layout of the map consequently causes battles to start and evolve thereafter in ways contrary to my reading where dispersion of forces until actively engaged in the attack is very important. ps. in any responses please don’t waste your time by pointing out that overcrowded troops are exposed to artillery, grouped AFVs to being decimated before they can spot/disable the AT gun firing on them etc. What I’m describing is still valid (and occurs repeatedly) even after a competent player takes measures to control these risks.

OK thanks. I understand my error now. I've already stripped his initial AC probes with other assets and we are in mid battle with tanks revealed & engaged. Nothing to do now but just keep them hidden from sight.

I'm playing a scenario involving large numbers of tanks (Pz IIIs, Crusaders, Cruisers) engaging at long range (1km) on a desert map with lots of small ridges. I am having a problem employing these HTs. Their guns are useless for engaging troops and yet they will not stand and fight anything on wheels (even old Mark VIb).