landser

Download and install a program to unpack it. I use 7-Zip https://www.7-zip.org/

Hunt is more like move to contact now. In CMx1 if I recall correctly, a hunt order didn't cancel. If the tank encountered an enemy and knocked it out, it would then continue on it's hunt movement.

I'm fairly new to SF2, and I've seen this once, I imagine mostly due to keeping the vehicles away from enemy infantry, and perhaps partly due to just not noticing other times it may have happened. It was during the airfield mission in Task Force Thunder. I had broken in to the complex through a wall near the barracks, and as my Strykers with mounts entered and encountered EI at close range, two grunts in the back popped up and let loose, killing the enemy, at which point they dropped back down and closed the hatches. It was all 'TacAI'. Not selecting the wrong icon. It was pretty cool as I didn't know it was possible until then. In this case the troops in the Stryker took no return fire, but they do appear quite vulnerable when standing in the back. A 'batten-down' sort of command could prevent these unnecessary casualties.

One shot, 1/3 kill is the sniper's motto isn't it? Interesting info, thanks for the report.

+1 and sums up my thoughts succinctly and I've said here before that I would always play Iron if the on-call times were detached from the skill level setting. I hope that CMx3 goes this route. But still, I play on higher levels sometimes because I like how the spotting works. But in the largest scenarios and campaigns I tend to bump it down. A campaign like Devil's Descent though is always played on Iron. Right, these aren't difficulty levels in the traditional sense, and in some ways it's more difficult at the lower settings, especially when you're attacking, because as Bulletpoint said, the enemy can drop his fire missions more quickly, more reactively, and increasing the odds your men get caught in it.

Shocked I tell ya. That didn't take long

I'd be shocked if every CM'er hadn't fallen afoul of this. I sure have.

Hey mate, did you ever get this squared away? I don't like to see posts like this go unanswered, but I don't have much advice. I suggest submitting a ticket at the help desk, they should be able to help. My first reaction was you're playing the demo, but you'd have at least the demo scenarios show. In my experience, most problems like this are linked to the install process, and frankly it's a bit archaic. But that's Combat Mission. For example one mistake I see often is folks attempting to install the game from the compressed downloaded files. Be sure to unpack them first before running the setup. Could have no bearing on your issues, but one thing to look for. I hope you've gotten it sorted, I see it's been nine days since you posted. Good luck and welcome to the forum.

Thanks mate, I grabbed it and installed it. It seems no one is quite sure if the updated versions of these campaigns are included in current downloads of the full game The download link in the OP does not work, but the one posted by Elvis three posts above does. Maybe replace it in the OP? When you hover your mouse over a link, the link appears in the lower left of the browser, and based on that the two links appear different.

A friend asked me the same thing recently, and what I told him was if you want to play mostly head to head, get Black Sea. If single player, get SF2. Both games are good for either type of play though. In Black Sea the combatants are more evenly matched than SF2. Black Sea is also the most modern from a tech point of view. SF2 has lots of content, which is great for the player mostly battling the AI. Head to head players are more likely to use quick battles to arrange a good match, and the force balance is more important. SF1 content works fine in SF2 even if it hasn't been updated to take advantage of the changes or additions. So the entire library of Shock Force user made scenarios and campaigns can be played in SF2. Ideally, you'd get both, but if only one then it's a good guideline I think. I feel compelled to say again that both games are good for all types of play, but I do think they're a little better suited leaning one way or the other, given the forces on hand and the content that's been generated. Shock Force had a seven year head start after all.

I grabbed the German campaign and the Marines from that link. Is the Marine campaign updated or different from the one included with SF2? Each of the downloads contains a MacOSX folder containing a 1kb .cam file. What is that? I mean, I know what system it's for, but why 1kb? What is it?

This one you just posted works. Get it while it's hot boys!

PM inbound Just tried with IE and same result Elvis, is this updated campaign included in current SF2 full game downloads? If so I have it as I just purchased it a couple weeks back.

Invalid link for me.

Good post, I know what you mean about medieval cavalry, and I've done the same, but not in this campaign. I didn't take too many risks really in this one. I sent the main effort on the right to clear the town starting with W. A full company of infantry, plus most of my armor. The other company worked themselves through the woods to the left, finding nothing, then I worked them through a ditch to reach a copse of wood, which in turn lead to the ditch the AT guns were in. The cannister greeting convinced me it was a bad job and I left them alone and never got my armor anywhere near the crossroads objective, and the second company was now sorta stuck and didn't do much afterwards. After clearing W, I then moved in to Stary Jankow but ran out of time and scored a minor.

Thanks Ithikial, I see. The link for the updated German campaign in the pinned threads at the top of this forum does not work for me (invalid link). Anywhere else to grab it? I don't see it at SD III. The link to Khabour Trail updated version works.

Great work, I managed only a minor victory and was not close to enemy surrender. That's a tough one to get a total, so you did very well, and like you said you have plenty of tanks and now your final battle is a little more manageable. Yeah that's it Was the AT gun you speak of in a ditch? Hope you find the time for the final one, as you've come this far.

But what if you have six lead tanks, spread over 2 or 3 kilometers of front? Assuming we watch so many replays in order to game the game or secure some sort of nefarious advantage is missing the mark in my view, and certainly for me. Matter of fact, uncertainty is one of the appealing facets of Combat Mission for me. The 'everything's a Tiger!' sort of vagueness is not something I want to lose through excessive scrutiny. Like Repsol alluded to, it mainly stems from the fact that Combat Mission lacks a reporting system. I get no indication of a unit coming under fire, or identifying an enemy position unless their icon flashes or a hit text pops up or that's the spot I am watching at the time. So I watch multiple replays to see what each group did and saw during the action phase. And as mentioned, I also watch replays for the cinematic value, I mean it''s fun watching your incoming massed tank fire from the enemy's point of view. Some time ago I pondered what CM would be like with a radio net. Imagine that each platoon leader reported to higher headquarters what it was doing "Echo 2-1, have reached final waypoint' or contact 'Echo 2-1, contact right, 200m, tank' or casualties 'Echo 2-1, have a man down, pinned by enemy fire from the front'. Of course I can hardly imagine a way to have all of this be manageable for the player in large scenarios, at least audibly (a text system would work). But short of a reporting system, replays are the next best thing to maintain a proper situational awareness on the battlefield. In some ways I admire the folks that can play Combat Mission in real-time. I'd reckon that real-time is the most difficult way to play the game. On the other hand, real-time with pause is the easiest, as consequence is minimized. WEGO players must live with their choices, tactical re-loads notwithstanding. But at a base level, real-time eschews much of what makes Combat Mission such a wonderful war game for me, the action and consequence of WEGO and the ability to watch the action from any angle as often as I like.

I considered doing just that, but wondered, if it didn't overwrite, could I end up with two copies of a campaign that share the same name and have no ability to know which is the updated one in the selection screen? I can just rename it before installing it I suppose to avoid that. I can work this out, but thought someone would know whether these were included in current downloads of SF2. Ithikial, how did you determine the dates for each mission for your spreadsheet? If each mission has a a date in the briefing I must skim right over that. Task Force Thunder is an interesting campaign, and I'm glad I gave it a go. It's a mixed bag for me, but as my first Shock Force campaign it's new and novel and I'm having fun with it. I'm about 13 missions in to it, and whilst there have been two or three missions I did not like, there have been more that I really liked and a few somewhere in the middle. The maps are nicely done, but too small in my opinion. It's too focused for me on the Strykers, only a few battles have featured M1s and fewer still, Bradleys, which are one of my favorite armored vehicles ever. But I understand that the Shock Force game concept was centered on the Stryker Brigades so it makes perfect sense that the accompanying campaign would showcase this. I reckon I'm just a few missions from completion, and I'll add it to my campaign reviews thread over at SimHQ when done If anyone's interested, you can read my thoughts on various CM campaigns here Campaign reviews at SimHQ Please be aware that it is nothing but spoilers, so proceed with caution if you prefer to play campaigns without advanced knowledge of them. And I do not own all CM titles, so there's plenty missing, but it's growing, and with my purchase of SF2 another gap is filled.

I'm too analytical for my own good I think, but that's not true for me. I did sort of a quasi-AAR when I was playing that campaign and one thing I said was the turns were taking me about 15 minutes per. And if I consider 6 minutes was watching the replays, that left 9 for orders. So for me, replays comprise about one-third

Zero to ten? I don't know, too many factors I reckon. Intensity of the fight, number of points of contact, size of my force, how much stuff the bad guys are throwing my way, tracking down spotting rounds you heard but didn't see. As a rule of thumb it's probably once per platoon, as each tends to fight it's own little battle, plus some from the enemy point of view. I recently completed the Blunting the Spear campaign for Red Thunder. It's battalion-sized and I'd say I watched an average of six replays per turn, sometimes a few more, sometimes less. Before contact and as the battle winds down it's less, sometimes none and during the most intense action, more. Which leads to some interesting math... If I did indeed watch six replays per turn on average, I watched around 3,120 replays during the course of the campaign, which took me almost a month to complete. That's a lot of movies!

The only thing I think I know is that the numbers with decimal points, like the 133.5 along the bottom edge are point elevations in meters. How to interpolate the spaces between I don't know. I've used this key on occasion to help me make sense of things, but not sure it's much use here. https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/redatlas/TM30-548_1958.pdf I love maps, so will follow along and see where the thread leads and hopefully learn something. Good luck.

OK, I'll approach it from a different angle. Is there a way, in the selection screen, or in the initial general briefing, to identify the re-worked campaigns that were done after the release of SF2 so I can determine if these are included in recently purchased SF2 copies?

Not sure Bulletpoint, it's the training scenario in the demo. Terrain was forest/woods. Maybe it's just very hot? Good post MOS, and I think all of that is pretty clear, my curiosity is more nuanced though. Why did the rifle squad tire in 100m when the scout squad could move in the same manner, through similar terrain over a kilometer without dropping below Ready? Heat, fitness, load, terrain and movement type all play a part we would assume. My curiosity isn't about what causes fatigue, but more developing a feel for which causes how much of it. I know from experience that if you have a platoon and have one squad draw an extra 1000 rounds of ammo, it will tire before the other two squads. Is it absolute, that 10% more weight equals 10% more fatigue? Or is there more of a threshold sort of mechanic, where under a certain weight it has no/little effect, and over a certain amount there is a noticable effect? So really, it's not what causes fatigue that I am curious about, but more subtly, which does how much, to whom and when? Are scouts more resistant to it all things being equal for example? Does an additional 500 rounds of ammo carried cause exactly half the additional 'fatigue load' that 1000 rounds would? Honestly, it's all interwoven and I suspect that attempting to analyze it all is futile. It's a grey thing that isn't so easily distilled to black and white.

I'm burning right through Task Force Thunder, ten missions done and dusted. I wondered though if the version of of SF2 I bought has all the latest, most up to date versions of each stock campaign? If SF2 was purchased and downloaded in the past two weeks will it have all the latest versions, the ones re-worked after the main release of SF2? TFT is fun, although the small maps mean tactical freedom is limited. A good introduction for me anyway. I loved the Dar al Abid as Sul and Screen battles, hated the Objective Normandy mission, and the rest are shooting galleries Not certain how many missions remain. Depends on the outcome of each perhaps? I had a peek at the Task Force Panther campaign, maybe I'll give that a go next. Any recommendations for a second campaign? Ideally, I'd like more room for maneuver than TFT allows. That first battle from Forging Steel was just about right, and maybe I'll return to that one at some point. A version of that with the enemy skill reduced would be great, as they might actually get out of their own holes instead of needing to be dragged out kicking and screaming and shooting.