Erik Springelkamp

I have a story from April 1945, Groningen, where a Canadian soldier was setting up a LMG near the window of a house, when the lady of the house came into the room with a cup of thee for the soldier, but suggested they put a little cushion between the table and the MG, to prevent scratches on the surface.

There are target lines: tracers. They are multiple and of short duration, because that is what happens in CMx2.

Maybe he wants a different result?

It has been done, in copper:

So have I, and I made a whole hierarchy of subfolders where I store series of save games, so I don't clutter up the game. When I go back to a scenario, I just move the savegame back to the top folder and it becomes visible in the game again. So I rather have BF work on a real game feature than spending time on utilities that we can handle ourselves.

He must be using a terminal application from a real computer. (or they are just screenshots :-)

It's not always you who chooses. I have seen soldiers administering buddy aid while I ordered the section to move on, and one soldier would stay around for a while on his own.

Good point. During the fighting for my home town in 1945 for instance, there was not a single German tank, but the Canadians lost several Shermans, mostly from panzerfausts. One of them was hit right around the corner where I live, from the entrance of a house. Same thing happened several times: lead tank does a rush, around a corner, or over a bridge, gets hit by a panzerfaust, overwatch destroys the firer, and they had established a new foothold. Must have been a terrible job to do the rush.

So, it arrived, and I had to pay EURO 23,- duties and fee. As I was afraid. But now I have the manual, and I will start playing for real this weekend :-) Had been too busy on an emergency case at work, just between CM:BN release and now, colleague working on the critical path catching a serious illness :-(

I didn't receive mine yet, it was shipped the 22nd. I ordered relatively late, initially I thought electronic delivery would do, but several times I hesitated, lured by the idea of the collectible. And it only takes one weak moment to order it anyway :-) So far you are the first Dutch receiver who mentioned duties, but I am in the same city as you, so my expectation has become pessimistic :-(

In a principal discussion about realism of Combat Mission, one loses right at the start, because CM doesn't have a consistent perspective for the player. The player is a lot of different roles at the same time. So we have to live with the logical inconsistencies this produces, but we all seem to be able to do so and enjoy the game. Albeit for very different reasons. Some players play to win at all cost, playing it like a sport. Some players play it as a simulation, curious to see what happens in different situations. Both perspectives ask for different optimisations, but CM is some sort of middle ground.

Currently it takes a lot of computer work to save a complete state of the game, and it also costs a lot of computer work to restore a complete state of the game. And all the time the game is frozen. So you don't want all this work to be done for you automatically every turn, because it will make you wait for a long time. I am sure this aspect is also related to the problems of implementing WEGO TCP/IP and realtime replay, as the game will have to create a restore point in the state of the game, and fast. Not a trivial programming task.

Everyone comes back the moment you have no unit selected. When you select a unit, you only see what the unit is aware of. The description in the manual is not very clear, or not even quite correct.

I usually move around the battlefield at the lowest level to get a good feeling of the relative heights before I start making my plan. It is also a pleasant aesthetic experience with good maps.

Some map makers have used slightly different ground colours for different elevations. In a desert like grand canyon way this even looks good. I didn't study the different terrain tiles yet, but in CMSF you could play with green and yellow grass, and with yellow and red sand, dirt, etc. The colour didn't have any game effects.

For me benevolent monarchy implies that the monarch has power of government. In the UK that is not the case. (and given the mental abilities of the royal familie that is a rather good thing). It is one of the many constitutional monarchies with symbolic royal heads of state. (sorry to be so humourless)

Yes, I noticed that when I tried the same thing. I got two infantry platoons, and a mortar platoon, but they were all three independent, and the infantry HQ's didn't have a radio, so the mortar platoon was forced to walk along to near the frontline. With an overall Company HQ I could have probably used that HQ to call mortar support at the front, although I doubt that was a historical function of a Company Commander.

Can I have a pony, please, please?

Thanks for the reactions. I am just trying to understand the context of these CM battles better. And I realise that those second line assaults I have been seeing in BFTB would set in hours after the first assault, which is beyond the time scale of CMBN.

In Combat Mission the scale is company/battalion (you can take a few battalions, but that will take a lot of computing power). However, many large operations involved far larger formations, who were often closely cooperating during an offensive. In CM, we often have to attack over several phase lines, and attrition is usually felt by the time the attack reaches the second or even third phase line. In a large operation, wouldn't it be desirable to have the first wave take the first phase line, then bring up fresh troops to take the next obstacle, etc. This would lead to much lower % losses per unit (as is argued in other threads is historical). This occurred to me while I was playing a few scenarios of Highway to the Reich and Battle for the Bulge by Panther Games, where a company is a single counter, and successful attacks often involved an assault in successive lines.

I shouldn't worry about this, because I am quite happy with the graphics on my machine in general, but the question is nagging me for quite some time now: In the options screen you can enter your preference for model quality and texture quality. In game you can dynamically change the setting for the model quality, but not for the texture quality. However, whatever you choose, the game engine will fall back on quality when it lacks resources, and I heard that choosing quality too high can even give you worse quality than choosing modest to start with. I always have the setting on best/best even though I have a very modest processor, and I am happy with the ~15 FPS it gives me. Depending on map size and complexity, I can see the model and texture quality drop off with distance. When are people setting the base textures quality lower, and when will it actually improve your graphics?

I play WEGO as well, but saving at every turn takes too much time for me. (for a large scenario it can take about a minute). So I do it only once and a while, and then only in campaign scenarios, where a decent performance is needed to finish the campaign. In a stand alone scenario I rather break off and start again, or just accept that I have lost the battle.

I read it was dangerous for the crew when that gun moved violently inside the turret.

Saving a game is an expensive operation, that can take quite a while. You wouldn't like it if it would interrupt you while you were in the middle of a complicated order, because everything is frozen while the save is in operation.

Hmm, if you would implement this at the team/section level and not at the soldier's level, there would be no way the player would notice this, while the ammo sharing algorithm would be much easier. You would only have to take the individual into account when he fires, and when he leaves the team/section (split into teams or WIA/KIA), or joins the team/section when teams merge, or with buddy aid. Anyway, that is black box stuff.