Fetchez la Vache

Same deal as snake_eye. Player (allied) icons sitting high and pretty all the time. German contact icons seems to start high when activated during the movement phase but drop low at the end of the move and stay low during the orders phase. Playing WEGO obviously.

Good idea. I must admit my old CMx1 sk1llz have eroded somewhat do to lack of use. :-)

Yup. I would love some more options for suppressive fire. It's hard to properly lay such fire across a front using WEGO.

I keep telling myself this is ASL with hexes. :-) At the end of the day I want a tactical game I can play while hovering 50-100m above the battlefield (read: board). So some level of abstraction is required and so far the demo is showing me this is done pretty well. It's just the visuals are 'fooling' me into thinking this is different type of game (Men at War, ToW, CoH, etc) where I am used to a different movement/positioning system. I think that's why CMBN currently feels a bit weird at the moment. As opposed to board games, the best thing with CM is that once I make my orders I can zoom in to watch them being executed (yes, I am a WEGO player). For this aspect the 1:1 representation is a fantastic step forward.

Don't have to be ugly - could be toggled on/off. Anyway, personally I'm not too bothered. It's meaning that I'm keeping my platoons together a lot more than I would probably otherwise do. Which is probably more realistic irl I guess. And that is something I'm getting a lot more with CMBN c.f. CMBO - playing this new game I feel I am doing things more realistically, which is a nice feeling.

I am also having trouble with the "action points" and I think the same level of frustration as the OP. I encountered it the first 5mins of botting up the demo and playing the Crossroads tutorial - why did my movement orders 'snap' to the middle of the road when I was clearly clicking on the gassy verge? I understand why now, but I'm finding it somewhat 'jarring'... Saying that, I simply don't want a game where I have to precisely place every soldier since I simply wouldn't be able to properly handle any forces larger than a platoon. So there needs to be a compromise. For me I'd love to see a system along the lines of Men at War where movement commands can be snapped to specific unit stances at places of cover. So you could have more control of (for eg) which side of a bocage you wanted your soldiers to take cover behind. CMBN does do that already up to a point but it's not as transparent how your men will position after the movement order. I also find it wierd setting a target point exactly on the place where I saw that PaK only to have the final target offset to the nearest "action point". Again, 'jarring'. But I am getting used to things already so in another few weeks I'm sure I would re-read this post and wonder what I was talking about back then. :-)

I agree with Guachi, C&C lines al la CMx1 would still be very useful though. There's loads of info for each unit but it would be cool to get a C&C overview with less clicking on individual units.

I guess it's because those hedgerows are meant to represent those found in farmland in Northern Europe, or at least before Agri-combines bulldozed them in the name of efficiency. These would have been old, established, hedgerows made up of intertwined woody shrubs (e.g. hazel) which have been trimmed and controlled over the years to form strong barriers to prevent large farm animals breaking through. And soldiers. These are not ornamental leafy bushes. Making such hedgerows is a dying skill nowadays. :-( There are still quite a few 1.5m hedgerows left in South Dorset, where my family comes from. I can tell you that I would have trouble breaking through some of those without the aid of a chainsaw. You wouldn't be able to simply push through, they are solid walls of wood. However I think it would be possible to "jump" over them with the help of a leg-up from a couple of mates, although you'd pretty scratched up in the process. I personally find it perfectly understandable that they are modeled this way in-game.

The manual I got in the Mac demo doesn't have that. ???

I have drip dry curtains.

I am being such a twazzock tonight. I thought the wind in the tutorial was coming from the wrong direction, as given in the conditions. It is correct. It's just me being unable to read the compass! :-D

It's a happy and safe cave though. In a better part of town. With a view.

And I can happily report that a 4 year old Mac Pro (albeit with a video card upgrade 2 years ago) can still handle anything which is happy with only 512Mb VRAM. The only time I have problems is if I have VM Fusion running since it grabs a fair chunk of CPU for that horrible Windows OS I have to occasionally boot up - but not for CMBN, HA!!! Still, a 27" i7 iMac with one of those fancy Thunderbolt things with a tower of external drives does look very tempting...

Okay, this is embarrassing. I forgot it's Cmd-Tab for swap applications in OS X. My excuse is a combination of using Win7 at work and always using the "expose" function on the Mac. I was fooled by on screen prompt in CMBN to use Alt-Tab. I r tard. So swapping apps works fine and I can browse to my hearts content. Expose and Spaces don't particularly like CMBN though. You have to hit the Dock icon to bring it back up. I'm not complaining, just reporting. :-)

Well I must admit to being a wee bit nervous about running this on my 4 year old Mac Pro. But currently running at 1600x1200 with everything turned up. So no need for that i7 iMac just yet... although fingers crossed for bigger maps. I'll stop looking for the windowed option. :-) However should I be able to alt-tab to other applications whilst running the demo/game? I can't seem to be able to do this. Pity because I was hoping to be able to have the manual there on my other screen ready to be flipped through... I would like to thank you Phil for helping put CMBN back to the true home of Combat Mission. :-)

Demo d/l from DaveyJJ's server and installed without issues. Have taken it for a 30min spin and no issues to report. Can't get my head around the camera controls but I'm so used to "free rotate whilst pressing the middle mouse key" that I'm simply having age-related learning difficulties. One question: is there anyway of running the game in windowed mode? (If there isn't then I would really like to see this feature, pretty please.)

It's a new game with new players. Part of the fun will be discussing everything again.

Thank you mate, that is a great gesture. I'm d/l from your server - it's the got the best speed for me. (80KB/s for 2hrs, since I am not blessed with good connections here.)

Steam had Men of War: Team Assault on 66% off last week. Keeping me busy in the evenings. It's not as good as the last two Men of War games though. Bleah.

As you alluded to MickeyD, Wikipedia is "corrupting" online searches. For various things I often find that multiple websites contain phrasing with the exact same wording as used in Wikipedia. Wikipedia becomes the de-facto 'truth' by shear weight of repetitions. :-/ "Yes, we're all individuals!"

When I saw that the Thompson had 50m effective range on Marco's mod, I did some online checking. I can't help but notice that the CMBN data on the M1 and M3 are the same as the Wikipedia entries. I don't trust Wikipedia. ;-)

Yeah but Royal Mail will charge you 8 quid for a handling fee on top of the VAT charge. So total extra to paid is going to be 7.4+8 = 15.4 pounds. So Brits are going to be paying an equivalent of an extra 40% surcharge on their copies of CMBN. Rip-off Britain.

*cough* Work. *cough*

How about BF charge only for the download option? They could then send the DVD as a free "gift" to their customers and thus we could avoid customs duty. :-p Would incur extra cost, since all parcels would have to confirm to "gift wrapping specification" and be badly hand-wrapped in a combination of newspaper and bin-liner so are practically falling apart by the time they arrive. At least that's what my in-laws seem to do...

20% VAT and PO handling fees? Baaa. Gideon and (semi) private companies milk the sheeple. I like the way customs works here. Go to post office, have a chat with the chap and maybe a quick cup of tea, pay nothing except 50p (equiv.) handling fee no matter the size/cost. Everytime I go back to the UK I wonder what happened to the country of my birth...