Gunslingr3

I've seen infantry 'turn off' the hold fire and hold position commands in less than a minute. Bug or feature?

I've seen the same thing. Apparently it's a bug where the tank is being instructed to target the track or hull, but that shot is obstructed and it doesn't default to what it can see (turret). This is supposed to be fixed in the patch. I have to admit, I'm not sure how to specify what area on a tank to aim for. I see where the manual says it will be indicated, but I don't understand how to specify it myself.

This issue is definitely my biggest problem with the game. At this point I feel like it's more the computer playing the game against itself and I occassionally interfere on one side. I routinely have to babysit units that I've told to hold position and hold fire. Last night I tried the beginning German scenario again. I moved my platoon of Czech 35s and 38s to a small ridge on the right hand side of the map, remaining on the reverse slope to wait for infantry to come up and scout. I positioned my four infantry squads across the map - one of the left wing, one in the center, two on the right (spread out like this honestly to make it easire to avoid God's artillery). As I'm waiting for the squads on the right to reach the tree line by the road behind the tanks I hear a machine gun going off. I spin the view and see that my center squad that should be hiding in the bushes prone, holding fire and position, have decided to proceed with a lone head on assault of the enemy trenches. I give them orders to move back to their original position, and lose three men. Suddenly I hear tank guns. I swing the view back, one of the tanks has decided he's going to crest the ridge, go down the other side, and start trying to engage whatever he can. The multitude of AT guns open up on his dumb ass and he loses a track and his main gun while I'm trying to back him behind the ridge. I suspect he lost his track because when I gave him the order to retreat and clicked to make a green arrow directly behind him and on the reverse slope he elected to rotate 180' and present his rear armor to the AT guns. I stopped him twice (about 20'-30' into the rotation), rotated back, and gave a new retreat order. Sometimes this works, and the tank backs up, but I've seen the behaviour I described at least 1/3 of the time. Instead of 'retreat' can we maybe have a 'reverse'? It would really cut down on the side shots my tanks keep asking for. Anyway, I have to stop focusing on him for a moment because now the other tanks are firing up and trying to cross the hill in contradiction to orders. I manage to get them stopped and hear machine guns cranking up again. Not the center! I look and instead it's the left wing that is led by John Rambo. They've decided without armor, or even a squad to provide covering fire, that they're going to find out what all the fuss is about. Babysitting this squad back into position I hear tank fire again. Dammit! This guy I manage to catch before he entirely crests the hill, but I realize it's now my duty to constantly pause the game and re-issue hold orders to everyone. This is killing the enjoyment of the game. I would like to make a small suggestion. In the Take Command Civil War games each unit had a button that let you 'Take Command' of the unit, which disabled most of the friendly tactical AI routines that are bedeviling me in this game. They would turn to face a threat that was firing on them, but they wouldn't go wondering off without your knowledge getting slaughtered and unravelling the best laid plans of hamstertruppen and men. I like this game, it has loads of promise, but I hope this idea can be taken into consideration and perhaps in some way implemented, because I find fighting my own troops more difficult than the enemy.

I haven't witnessed that. I've had enemy tanks crest a ridge 50m away on my flank and neither my unit nor the AI were aiming at one another until after they could have spotted. In fact, I've dealt with the opposite problem. Tanks will lose sight of an enemy unit in front of them and seem to lose all awareness of the remaining threat. The result is my tank usually starts turning away from the unseen (but still there and still menacing!) threat that broke line of sight looking to line up another target. Here I think some tweaking of player unit AI can fix this. Make the hold position command actually meaningful. Perhaps only let the friendly unit AI override the hold position command for hull facing in the event they take fire from the flanks. Too often I find myself 'babysitting' the tanks so they'll face the axis of the threat instead of getting distracted by whatever is within LOS. Failure to do so usually leads to side and rear shots on my AFVs. Ummm, what did you used to think AI was? I think it's established that the hiding value of infantry (and consequently I presume the accuracy of fire directed at them) are going to be adjusted by the first patch. That should affect the 'bot' aspect. With respect to 'scripts', that's what AI is. You get a glimpse of how staggering a challenge it is to code AI when you take a peep at the options and start to realize how they have to be treed and nested in order to provide a responsive, plausible, and tactically challenging opponent. In my opinion the biggest knock I have for the game so far is the manner in which the missions were scripted. It does seem that the main tactic of the AI is weight of numbers. That's more an indictment of the mission's design than the game's. I think with some user community input this game can shine, and I'm looking forward to MP when a few quirks in the activity of friendly unit AI is addressed.

I noticed frame rate suffering when there were lots of units. I tried turning down several different settings (draw distance for trees, various detail levels, etc.). Until I turned off shadows I didn't notice much improvement. Turning off shadows allowed me to turn most things back to max. 3 Ghz Intel 2 GB RAM Geforce 7600 GS

I have XP. Reinstalled .NET 2.0 and repatched and now it runs. thanks!

Gotta agree with MT's comments. Infantry are almost completely fodder. If I try to position them in the provided trenches I can count on arty eliminating them before they're ever in range of enemy infantry. Even telling them to not fire and lay prone doesn't stop the arty from annihilating them. I've learned to position my infantry near the back end of the deployment zone with one or two 'magnets' in the trenches to try and attract the incoming rounds while the rest of the squad runs to hide in the trees on a reverse slope. If I don't use the magnets I am assured that rounds are incoming on my infantry wherever I'm placed them at the start of the scenario. I know to immediately pause the game after starting and scamper them to the rear. The scenarios are hard because you're usually put in a situation of serious imbalance that is only addressed by scenario triggered reinforcements that don't appear until enough of your starting units have been killed. I feel sometimes like I'm being punished because I manage to keep my troops alive. I would concur that beefing up the infantry role would help this game be more enjoyable. A problem I just had in the soviet scenario (Moscow is behind us). I achieved a hull down position with my T-34 and was trying to engage the swarm of German tanks. I know I was hull down because most of their shots would hit the dirt, but some would bounce off the turret or front hull. For some reason they could see through the foilage and strike me, but I couldn't get a LOS on any of them. My crew would complain they didn't have a clear shot at the three AFVs that were on the front slope of a hill in clear terrain. If anything, I'd hoped the tree on the hill I was hiding behind might cover me, not them. So I ordered my crew to run it over, and then resumed my hull down position. Still couldn't get off a shot while the enemy was peppering my tank and the ground around me. The gun wasn't damaged, and it was a while before they started getting wounded. They just kept reporting they couldn't see (icons for the three tanks shooting at them weren't faded out). I look forward to scenarios the user community puts out (having problems running the editor myself), and would like to try the game multiplayer (to hopefully get away from the Godly Spotter directing AI arty).

When I try to start the mission editor I get this error: this message pops twice then the Campaign Editor windows loads before I get this error: I have the latest drivers for my Geforce 7600GS and I installed the lastest directx9 package from MS (4.09.00000904) dxdiag tests run fine.

battlefront showed three links. One dead, one pay, and the other required registration and didn't want to play with firefox. Finally managed to get it.

I can't find this anywhere for download without paying a subscription. Anyone know where it can be found?

How can we forget? link

How many of them won't show up because the SecDef doesn't think they'll be needed?

Wow, that's about as gamey as it gets. Noticed any other game design exploits?

Last night, playing 1.06 as the Axis in '39 I had the USA jump in two turns before the Soviets. I rolled Poland, after which France invaded the Low Countries. This kicked U.S. desire for DOW back down to 0%. I then hit Denmark and Norway on successive turns. Once France fell the Italians were in and I turned them on Greece. Germany went with Sea Lion and just before taking Manchester the U.S. jumped in. Russia went Allied just after Spain elected to join the Axis. I let Italy take Yugoslavia once they joined the Allies. Bulgaria, Hungary, and Rumania stayed out of the conflict. Finland joined once I surrounded Leningrad, but even after the Russians surrendered the other Balkan powers sat out. Settings were for random entry, did they sit out because Italy took Yugoslavia?

What would happen if the U.S. didn't have a $300+ Billion per annum military empire stretched across the globe? Would Canada find us too tempting? Mexico? How would the military strength of this country that the Founders envisioned and protected fail to hold back these threats? You say: "There are persons who lack education," and you turn to the law. But the law is not, in itself, a torch of learning which shines its light abroad. The law extends over a society where some persons have knowledge and others do not; where some citizens need to learn, and others can teach. In this matter of education, the law has only two alternatives: It can permit this transaction of teaching-and-learning to operate freely and without the use of force, or it can force human wills in this matter by taking from some of them enough to pay the teachers who are appointed by government to instruct others, without charge. But in this second case, the law commits legal plunder by violating liberty and property." -Bastiat, "The Law" What makes you think companies would suddenly stop spending the billions they currently do on research? Do you think that research on subjects that people will only fund at the point of a gun are somehow superior? Why? You know this because...? Ad hominem. :confused: You're the first person to resort to this in this thread. I hope you're the last. Why would OPEC cut off their share (~40%) of contributions to the world oil market? Why have they in the past? The U.S. spends more on it's military than North America does on oil. If, in the absence of a U.S. Empire OPEC decided arbitrarily to double it's prices, what is the consequence? The other countries of the world, who produce more oil, would have greater incentive to increase their own production and take the OPEC customers. The higher prices would also encourage research in alternative fuels and power sources (without even a politician confiscating someone's earnings and ordering it be so!) just to reap the potential profits. You keep seeing how things are, and as result will be tomorrow, without seeing how they could be today, and would become tomorrow. Gunslinger