metalbrew

i got an stryker stuck in rubble with that methode, than i stoped using it it wasnt knocked out or immobile, wasnt fired upon or anything, it just sat in the rubble and canceled all its waypoint orders when hitting the GO button, no forward no reverse. i tried 5 or 6 rounds to get it out, than i gave up.</font>

On linear and area attack, no. With point attack, they seem to take down buildings really quickly. </font>

I've finished the campaign. I played WeGo on Elite level. Move Strykers with the slow command 99% of the time. I use fast movement for moving over ground I've already cleared. Use the smoke launchers a lot. You see fine through the smoke due to IR optics. Moving slow means better spotting, the Strykers have superb optics and imagers as long as you move slowly. Keep the 40mm Strykers near the front of your movement. The M2 Bradleys are good up front too. The 40mm and 25mm respectively eat infantry alive as well as being able to handle vehicles, AFV, and some armor (with the M2s TOW). Only dismount infantry when absolutely necessary, such as AT roles or when you're faced with an ambush in a city. I think I could win the campaign without infantry (just the Stryker vehicles) if it weren't for the few places I needed to take out armor without M1s. Even in ambushes, it's often easier to retreat and retake the ground by moving slowly and grinding down the enemy than letting your own troops take the brunt of the enemy gunfire. If you need to dismount, reverse your vehicle into the building and then disembark, don't use doors or worry about breaching walls. With the rear of the vehicle in the building the rear gate comes down inside the building already. Yes this is gamey but I don't care, if I have to live with insanely stupid pathfinding this is my temporary fix. Destroy any building with more than a single unit inside. Artillery or Stryker MGS works well. M1s are the quickest knock down punch in terms of in-game time. Apaches don't take down buildings very well, even with heavy ordinance. A-10s knock buildings flat with medium ordinance. I think I finished with around ~35 friendly KIAs and ~100 WIAs for the entire campaign. Hard and cold tactics win with less losses. I'm especially surprised at how little I needed to dismount infantry.

If you had AT4s and weren't indoors, they should have fired the AT4 instead. I believe the Javelins are modeled in the game to be fairly inaccurate under 150m as well, I see a lot more misses at close range.

You can't un-acquire the weapon. Battlefront has said as much and also said they are unsure there should be an un-acquire command but they're kicking the idea around. BTW, when your squad has Javelins it moves slower and tires quicker. FYI.

After playing 20 or so quick battles, I still haven't been given any unconventional specialists like spies, IEDs, or VBIEDs. I've played with the Syrians as defenders, attackers and a couple of meeting engagements. Is this a design decision or a bug I'm seeing?

To a backwoods yokel, I'm sure this is funny. It's like that one time the teacher said Uranus. If you had half an education you would know ArsGeek would mean "The Art of Geek" in Latin, assuming the Romans knew what a geek was. You stepped on your lower lip in the whole "who is Troy Goodfellow" debacle. Gee, I wonder who that guy is? You again stepped on your lip in the absurd "interview" you hosted with Steve Grammont. I halfway expected you to propose marriage. In that same interview, you couldn't even properly pronounce "Les Grognards" even though you think you're a grog. You are the ultimate fanboi. Give it a rest. The game is a mess and "King's New Clothes" routine has gotten pretty old.

I'd be OK with that. For now, under these rules, I'm leaving everywhere I visit looking like a smoking crater though.

I don't believe the Syrians have any BMP-3s.

Infantry stop at each waypoint for a bit of time. While setting a waypoint directly by each door you want them to use may help a bit with pathfinding your units often end up paying a steep price for stopping in the open. Regarding pathfinding, the waypoint itself seems to be the only hard-fast thing units care about. The line between waypoints doesn't seem to have any effect on the path. It seems obvious to state that but after you watch vehicles drive 1000m around a large wall instead of driving through the breach the obvious becomes something to no longer take for granted.

Again in another battle in the campaign: the enemy surrenders and I don't get full credit for securing objectives. How can their surrender not award me full control of the entire battlefield? It makes battles become a race to get into an objective before the enemy decides to surrender. It's a bit gamey that a defeated enemy can prevent a total defeat by surrendering.

On the 3rd battle of the campaign a Syrian AT-3 team blew itself up. I don't know the full details due to fog of war but off in the distance I saw a large explosion and when I got closer I realized it had been an AT team fumbling around in a trench.

This is a really good weapon. I think the game uses it unrealistically though, weapon teams are firing it while inside buildings. I believe the backblast overpressure would kill everyone in the room. Then again, they're an a PITA so maybe I just want them to come out into the open where I have a chance to kill them before they kill me.

I keep hearing about this corner problem with Arcs. The Arc in my experience only tells the unit where to look, not how far to fire. So as long as some kind of arc is pointing towards the corner of the map, it is covered - the yellow bit doesn't have to be covering it. That's what I've found so far with arcs, anyway, but I don't normally have battles in the corners... TM </font>

I think these ideas are all little things that would improve the game. When the realtime phase is over, it'd be nice if I could clear the "Now you can watch the replay" dialog by hitting the spacebar or enter. When reenforcements arrive, how about a dialog popping up that says "Reenforcements have arrived" and clicking OK (or hitting spacebar or enter) to continue. The current notification is very easy to miss, especially since the camera tends to be pointed away from the setup zones. It's pretty hard to keep track of casualties without clicking or looking very closely at each unit during battle. I've thought of a few ways to make casualties more prominent. Changing the unit icon in someway, for instance a circle around a squad icon with 9 segments (or how ever many actual soldiers are in the unit) representing the info shown on the squad screen, green for fine, yellow for wounded, red for out of action. That would allow for quick visual reference of squad health and during battle you'd see the changing color of the circle and easily see that unit was taking casualties. Even making the Red Cross icon bigger and more prominent would help. Some kind of rolling list or commander's status screen would help too. Basically I'm saying make it easier to get the info and don't require every unit to be clicked on to see their health status. The AK-47 sounds aren't very AK-like. The sound in the game is very clacky and almost sounds like a Mk19 going off. At least it's distinctive but many of the other sounds in the game are more convincingly done.

I've used this a few times too and it works well. For now cover arcs can't be deployed off the edge of the map (which means dead spots in corners) and unarmed units (like HMMWVs or the Syrian jeeps) don't have any targeting commands in their menu - so no LoS checking at all for these units.

I don't get accurate information on which of my units has spotted an enemy by clicking on the enemy's floating icon. I know that is how it's supposed to function but in practice it's not happening consistently and therefore I end up clicking each one of my units until I find the one that's spotted this unit. An example: I'm fighting on some arbitrary map and an AT team icon pops up. I consider AT teams and infantry with AT assets to be my highest priority targets so I want to micromanage attacking this unit. I click on the enemy unit and let's pretend 5 of my Strykers remain in highlighted blue while the rest grey out. The theory is that these 5 units all 'see' this enemy. In practice though I find that by clicking on all 5 units perhaps only 1 or 2 of them see the enemy. What I believe is happening is when I'm clicking on the enemy unit I'm seeing how many of my units that enemy has spotted. It should be the other way around according to the manual, clicking on the enemy should display how many of my units can see this unit but in practice it shows me how many of my units the enemy can see. That's tough to explain and I didn't do the greatest job. I hope the point was made regardless. Oh, and BTW I like the CMx1 contact lines. Yellow lines were potential targets and the red line was the target that unit was currently engaging. Since I think the CM:SF spotting is still bugged I won't comment on which is better, we'll see how it goes once it's behaving like the manual says it should.

Back an infantry vehicle up to a wall, issue a command to disembark, watch as the rear gate comes down and your troops exit the vehicle on the opposite side of the wall. No breaching needed.

Being inside buildings is only marginally safer than being in the open. There's no concept of hunker down and seek cover inside buildings, even with the 'hide' command and very short cover arcs units are easily spotted in buildings. Small arms fire easily perforates heavy buildings (this seems to be a big bug actually, we'll see where this stands after the next round of patches) and human players will area fire the building to the ground. It's safer to stay in the AFV and pummel the enemy from afar with little risk to yourself.

Anywhere an RPG is hiding they'll be infantry hiding too. Your squad is dead either way, inside or outside the box. I've completed 4 missions of the Campaign with 5 dead and 10 wounded. Creeping vehicles seems a ton safer than wandering around. Flatten every building with more than 1 unit inside and spend 2-3 turns raking buildings with single units before moving forward.

I'm not really finding great reasons to dismount. I've played 4 missions in the Campaign, all of the included battles, and some quick battles with friends. 99% of the time I creep my vehicles in close and rake the enemy until I can move a bit closer. Infantry is a target in CM:SF and it's not been very useful to dismount. The exception has been standoff Javelin attacks. Other that AT missions, I haven't found a fight that compelled me to hop out of the metal boxes. Thoughts?

Well, I don't really think it's been like that for me. There are times when I've seen a unit in a building and had another unit (with a considerable weapon) fire at that location. The MGS is good for unspotted fire as is the Mk19. The ultimate weapon would be artillery which is almost always used via Borg spotting and we don't really even think about it like that. I'm reticent to use my M1s for area fire because if the battle designer gave them to me, it's always been because T-72s are roaming the map, if my M1 is busy area firing at a squad that's the exact moment the T-72 will pop out and kill 4 Strykers. Smaller arms (including the 12.7mm guns) really aren't worth the ammo to area fire without a relative spot, at least from my observations.

The LoS tool from CMx1 is gone. Now the preferred way is to use the targeting tool. While a bit buggy at times (like on reverse slopes) it works OK. If you have an unarmed unit, such as a Recon HMMWV, you can't use the targeting tool though. In that situation you're out of luck, it's simply not an available option in the menu. "No LoS planning for you". I thought the situation was dripping irony though, here I had a Recon unit that was unable to do Recon... [ August 01, 2007, 03:13 AM: Message edited by: metalbrew ]

I think the new system is pretty good when all things are taken into account. I really only play Elite level so that's what I'm basing my opinion on. The unit identification is way too accurate. Once a unit is spotted I can tell the complete composition of the unit and most importantly whether or not the RPG gunner is dead. If the RPG gunner is down I can roll up to the unit and rake them at close range. Regarding spotting in general I miss the contact lines from CMx1. It's tedious to check 15 units to see which unit is the unit with eyes on the bad guy. The contact lines were an easy way to get the same info without spending 1 minute free clicking around the map.

I noticed a behavior that I thought I'd share. I was messing around in the editor and created a Bradley vs. T-72 fight. When the Bradleys were moving they always died first. When the Brads were stationary, they won the fight 3/4 of the time. When the T-72s were moving and the M2s stationary, the Brads won 9 out of 10 times. I came to the conclusion that either the fire control of the Brads can't outperform the fire control of the T-72 or the dust plumes getting kicked up by the moving Bradleys gave the T-72s a very quick spot. The optics and fire control on the M2s are really sweet, so I'm leaning towards the dust plumes being too much of a giveaway.