Tuomio

I really wouldnt expect PSU to kill your GF cards. The most prominent feature of PSU failure is sudden boots/memory bluescreens getting increasingly frequent. If you want to check your PSU health, you have to open it and look at the capacitors. If they show any signs of internal pressure, you either have to replace the capacitors or buy better PSU.

As with your previous releases, i expect this to be fantastic and well laid out campaing. I will settle at nothing less.. I wish the BFC would repackage the best scenarios/campaings to their patches.

The worst part of training simulation is, that the student might even enjoy or look forward to the upcoming classes. High spirits will undermine your position in higher hierarchy, because you are no longed feared but enjoyed. Army is like the police game good cop bad cop, where the good cop is ******* at the best. Stockholm syndrome comes to my mind. Lower command = tactical level, higher command = strategical level. Not that many strategical aspects in CM. I would imagine best value at co-op play at company level with the relative intel that is offered by the new CM2 engine (is there any other simulation with such capability out there?). CMSF is a tactical simulation which is capable of providing very high quality of atmosphere. IMO the moment you truly care if the immaterial pixels get deleted by arithmetical operations , is precious if you are trying to bring that experience to the real world.

I just played it trough with 1.11 and altough the troop quantities were greater than before, after i got inside the town things were back as usual. Ai is much better now at preserving its vehicles and enemy seems to be much more agile in finding cover. Timetable is still good, altough i would like to see if pursuers would come just a minute or two sooner than currently. It is definetly possible to keep the town almost intact the 1.11 seemed to cut air support delay by 2-minutes and helos can arrive as soon as 3 minutes! Tactics advice: 1. Find a place for the observer, where he will not draw any enemy fire and use cover arc order to limit the engagement ranges. If your observer is killed, you can as well restart. You have to defend your observer. 2. Keep all of the air support, that is building up during the mission, busy constantly. If you sense an attack, you have to foil it well before it reaches the town. Keep pounding the attack routes. 3. Move the insurgent in the holding cells as it has the best possible cover available. 4. Create defence perimeter in the town center. 5. Utilize the snipers to their full extent, .50 cal sniper can engage vehicles.

Tried with 1.11. Noticed that enemy troops quantities have increased dramatically, i have serious trouble over getting my hummers in. As if the Wire IED troops have changed to huge combatants or something like that. This scenario is a masterpiece as it really puts you in command of modern army troops. Not only do you have complex (and very powerful) arsenal, but your orders are also 3-dimensional. I would really like more restrictions on using the firepower on the city itself. Blow up couple of blocks and you should get a really nasty penalty. Too many scenarios/campaings done for CMSF are human-wave attacks from blue side when it really should be opposite of that. I often find myself figuring, why am i getting third wave of reinforcements when i already have 3 tank platoons and thousand fold troopers left.

First problems: Humvees can and do quite often get bogged up right after startup. Humvees button up from first sign of distress.

The second mission is self evident if you look at the map. Only one possible route to advance, which is impassable for vehicles = dismount. Unless you want to simulate the effect of unarmored troops running into heavy ambush (which might have appeal without the casualty restrictions), you are not going to drive anywhere. In the context of this campaing, the second and last mission are weird, because you'll be entering enemy ambush when there should be none and if there would, you would avoid them like a plague. Thats why you should forget the briefings and role-playing during those missions.

Very good campaing, this scale is spot on with realtime play. I suggest everybody to try and play with single save per mission, its very doable because you are not engaging a crack paras with overhelming odds like seems to be the norm with other campaings. Tactic suggestions: Keep engagement distances long. Under 100 meters you will start to suffer casualties which is definetly no no. If you spot an enemy location, area fire it with all you got until you can be certain that they are dead (this is how they do it in RL also). Use your SMAW troopers, its better to survive with empty clip than die with full one. Keep your MG troopers deployed at spots where they have good coverage. They seem to be quite good at killing identified targets, rather than area-firing.

Make that Single Core processor. They usually run at much higher speeds than multi-core, but it can bad investment because evey other game and application out there will benefit from the multiple cores. BFC will eventually have to utilize the extra cores, it is clear that CPU developement will only expand sideways from now on, the vertical speed has stalled. My FPS dropped significantly (or the scenarios got bigger, who knows), after i bought a brand new computer with all bells and whistles attached, replacing 3-year old system. Reason is, that the 4xCPU:s actually run at the same speed than the previous version and the benefits of new video card were lost in the higher resolutions needed for 24" panel. Best rig for CMSF might very well be aging Intel based system, overclocked to heavens with new and good cooling system.

Quick to building should be like normal drill when entering buildings in hotspots: 1. Position team. (say, requirement = half of the full team at their designated spots.) TIME = 0 seconds to infinity. 2. Frag or two in, wait for the blast. TIME = 5 Seconds (fuze) to 7 seconds. 2. few guys enter, others cover & overwatch. TIME = 2 to 4 Seconds 3. Frag or two further back, all others enter and search for hostiles. TIME = same as point 2. 4. IF hostiles are spotted, the team will FRAG until enemy is dead or frags run out. So, the rest of squad can move in at 12 seconds MINIMUM. Considering the time lapse of CMSF, this would be 6 seconds game time. So building assault in a nutshell, frags&flashbangs and a lot of them. Always. Sole purpose of the team entering the building is to first secure the perimeter and only after that to start looking other objectives. Only exceptions i could think of is, that if the team comes under fire when standing outside of the building, they would FAST inside the building and then start to figure out the mess they're in. IMO this is the way it is working currently and in all situations now.

Now that the chain of command has more depth to it than On/Off, it would be nice to see the command lines just like in CMx1 series.

If your tank starts to attract artillery fire, you have probably stayed in one place too long. Static tanks belong to the 40:s, best way for tank to be effective is to hit hard and shift positions. The guy who is calling the fire will be calling your position to all possible anti-tank assets too. If you would have a 10x10km scenario, the tanks would not be rolling with infarantry and thus remain very stealthy and worthless artillery targets. This is not what we have because of the hardware limitations.

How about the antimaterial capabilities of 50.cal sniper team? Havent been able to disable a single vehicle in this game by using the barrett teams, altough i have tried numerous times. The bullets just ping off the armour which should not be the case unless shooting at high angle.

Yes i have noticed dramatic drop in the Javelin reliability. Often both of the fire teams shots either hit close to the target or simply go off the map. I take extra care about my Jav teams, so they always have good visual on the contact and are not getting fired at.

See-trough is not a problem, its the see-trough-just-the-concrete-not-the-body-behind-it which is a problem. If there is emission coming trough the concrete, then you could detect it. If not, you are shafted. Human body mass posesses no particularly interesting properties, when it comes down to physics. Most outstanding property of functioning human being is the generation of heat and there are vast quantities of military applications, which could utilize this particular property and increase their effiency by 10-fold. We are just not there yet. Anti-grav i can handle, see-trough is past sci-fi.

Radar technology is very different from the normal camera sensors. Camera is a passive device, while radar is active. Radar devices are extremely complicated. I dont think there is any airborne 3d radar capability existing and probably will not be for a while, as the need for such is nonexistent. Military papers will bloat and misinform, because they are used for propaganda purposes, take them with a grain of salt.

Engineers can mark KNOWN minefields. Their posture will switch to prone and after few minutes, the minefield flag will change colour from green to yellow (im not absolutely sure of the color). After this, you can probably pass without injuries with Move order (or slow even). Minefields are mainly strategic assets. They are used to channel enemy attacks or delay it (in strategical timescales) and are very effective for that purpose. If you see a minefield, either use another route, use transports or suck up the casualties.

Steve, in the end, IMO, 50% of the gaming experience comes from well designed map. Heck, if you count in the AI plan quality 80% is more like it. Well laid out map requires a lot of finetuning and it is where the editor does not have a lot of shiny moments. It just may be that there is a key to this lock, TXT editor might not be such a bad idea.. I code a lot for embedded systems and i know how difficult it is to make a working GUI. Solution might be importable terrain file. This means some of the more static 2D stuff (some of them have been as is from the CMBO days) which could be produced by ALTERNATIVE 3rd party editors. 2d-editor can be much more easily coded in enviroments like Visual Basic Express. Many of the feature requests are such that they have no link with the actual map data or hard-coded features, just typical interface related shortcuts. Many of which come naturally with Form-like approach. I know what you are thinking now Steve, but it necessarily doesen't have to consume your precious time too much. All that would be needed is a backdoor for external data and not all of it should be done right away. NO tampering with the actual map file. Say, terrain elevation for starters? If you have any interest, you can PM me, i could gladly devote portion of my time by looking into this possibility. Maybe for doing a tech demo for you..

After i had bought a new video card, Radeon 3870, upon launching the CMSF the splash screen corrupts the backround view for a while. There was no such events when i had Radeon X800 card. Today as i started the game, some of the graphical glitches (which normally are just coloured blocks) were portions from IMAGES that were cached durin SURFING on the internet! So, apparently with this video card, the backround of Battlefront.Com image gets tiled with data leftovers from GPU RAM.

Whooping 25$ "just for" new military branch. What would be the correct price then? 1$? Free?

More RAM. I find it hard to believe that 512mb vs 1Gb has no noticable difference. 512mb is the limit when you get XP running itself without extensive virtual memory usage. Launch a game on it and a lot of the variables will run from the hard drive. I have 64 2800+ with 2*2gb DDR in dual channel and do not experience any gameplay hindering performance stalls.

I have had very good succes assaulting buildings by using 1/3rd of platoon area firing the suspected enemy position, 1/3rd covering any possible visuals and the last third quicking into the building. The outcome has been stunning and consistent. I also take the best keyholed approach available, if not available i try to create keyholes with smokes or extra suppression if possible. Blasting trough walls is best option but requires a "quiet" spot where you can have the 10 second picnic. 2 Squads concentrating their fire can annihilate most of the opposition only with area fire, when ranges are < 100m. Often has the "running" squad entered into house to find everybody already dead. This is something that has not been previously effective, but situation has changed with the recent patches.

Hey, i am not even from USA, i was commenting on a more general scope. It's clearly becoming a trend to say, that military is obsolete, because it cannot get a power grip when facing hostile fanatical population. Military incapacitates hostiles, it does not try to preserve them or live amongst them. If military is too strong and police is too weak, it begs the question that somebody is trying to do something he should not be doing. If you want static, bogged down campaings, go dig up some old Cromwell tanks and water cooled machineguns, no need to invent the wheel again you know. The whole thing might give wrong impressions to the other thinly cultured nations nearby. They might think, that they have fighting chance, which of course is true if thick target as US army is used as a babysitter.

I don't think the actual war waging is much different than it has ever been. You just shoot until nobody shoots back, move on and repeat if necessary. Things that are left behind belong to some other entity. Death and destruction is the things that will always wait in there, for political hands-on approach. Personally i see the whole insurgency-against-military a hologram, which is generated to evade the tough underlying POLITICAL questions. The situation in Iraq is not the kind of which military can bring answers for. Maybe we don't event HAVE to answer all questions (as they might never end), world keeps on turning even if the mechanisms are not fully understood. The actual 30 days of Iraq war was excelent, non-hypochritical military action, which succeeded well (good preparation & excecution). It all should've ended there, pack the gear and get the hell out. I see the rest of it (military making love with the population) as pure political BS which has no reason to exist, other than to feed itself, bloat and eventually explode. Every penny in there is like blowing air into a balloon. Cultural salvation is a internal process and savage ("Thin") cultures will not get any better because they just are not there yet. World Wars saw collapse of many infrastructures, but when you have strong culture, it will rise from the ashesh out on its own. You can install homes, but you cant install self-esteem, pride and comfort-seeking, because those things run in family lines, are passed on from parent to a child. If one would start to train its military for proxy counter-insurgency tool, it would be like sharpening a hammer so you can cut bread with it. Crap in, crap out.

At the start, put every Bradley in fighting positions (That is, cover all angles from possible counterattacks), because you can't advance straight from the start. Then take one engineering squad and move it next to the CW wall. YOu have to keep tight overwatch and respond to all threats immidiately, so your engineering team won't get pinned. If you find out enemy location, destroy that location, or otherwise he will be stalling you later on. Blast a hole in the walls, big enough so bradleys can drive trough. Rest is basically normal city fighting. Buildings are aligned so, that you will have hard time supporting your troops with tanks. There is big, empty area between 2 compound groups, so use Bradley smoke to the fullest and try to prepare all moves well ahead (Any available artillery, TOW:s and what have you). If you gain control of the factory area, you can crush surrounding objectives easily, so don't worry about them too much. Do not expect to get out without formidable losses, this is meatgrinder with no quick-steps.