Erik Springelkamp

After you choose the placement in 8 metre increments, the tac AI will finetune your choice and will generally find a very good spot. And I want a pony, by the way :-)

Area fire is always spread around the whole action point from a single unit, and yes, splitting into fire teams is a good way to get more target orders. When a unit fires independently - ie driven by the tac AI, individual soldiers will fire at different targets when they present themselves. I can be that some soldiers of a unit have LOS/LOF to one target and not to another, and other soldiers in the same team the other way around.

But it would look so ugly. This is where Iron Mode shines by the way: when you click on a unit, you have a complete picture of its situational awareness. From the point of view of a leader you don't even see units that are out of command, and in general with a unit selected, you only see friendly units that the selected unit is aware of. The effect is complete during replay, and less severe during the orders phase (in WEGO that is).

I have seen that happen with my previous, not very good, onboard, graphical card. Somehow the layer for the setup area (blue) or objective area (green) extended and showed up where it wasn't supposed to be in certain angles of view.

The AI can fire at suspicious places (helped by a hint from the scenario designer), as you may do.

That is not such an all-important factor. It doesn't influence fire power, and the C2 effects work for the AI as well.

When it came from the bridge, it made a backwards 270 degree turn instead of just turning right 90 degrees. That I corrected halfway the procedure, just before it was going to run into the bridge walls. Next turn it was driving slowly into the water, while I ordered it to move parallel:it had changed its movement direction 10 degrees to the right. It actually drove for quite a while through the water ditch.

Well, the tank did cross using the bridge, but afterwards it was thoroughly disturbed. Strange behaviour.

I had something similar with a Sherman in the tutorial game. I sent it over the bridge to the farm - after the farm was conquered, and it started to behave strange just over the bridge. I ordered it to move along the water ditch, but it decided to slowly drive into the ditch, with a very small angle. It even managed to climb onto the ground on the other side of the ditch, but then it didn't want to move any more. No damage was visible, no visible effort to get out of mud or something. It was still shooting though.

And you should keep your demo copy installed to recruit new players, who only use the demo, and thus cannot play against a regular copy.

And in general, the AI plan is written with the time constraint in mind. It makes the probable advance times of the attacking force a bit predictable, so counter attacks can be scripted. If the time of the scenario changes drastically, the AI plan would have a larger probability to become ineffective. More specific triggers for AI actions than the clock would improve this situation, but that is for the future.

shift-T is just capital T, and the letter hotkeys are not case sensitive, so shift-T will mean the same as lowercase T.

And the other side will do the same reasoning, and shift his defence to counter your attack strategy. Then we enter game theory, which requires certain decision to be randomly chosen, at which point good recon becomes essential again.

You cannot replace specialized crews (tank crews, AT crews, etc). Passengers and drivers of general vehicles (jeeps etc) can be arbitrary units.

Use another type of mouse?

Yes, it can be very different in different conditions. In CMA I was recently complaining that the AI opened up much too early with its RPG, so spoiling any decent chance of a to hit, and the next weekend some Mujahiddeen were placing hit after hit on my vehicles with RPG's from a mountain top 800 metres away.

The type of movement is show by the colour of the line. Target, facing, or covered arc is shown by its own symbol on the waypoint. Hide status, or vehicle open up, can be seen on the button in the orders panel, whether it is depressed or not. You might have to select the correct panel, but if it was your last order, the right one is selected.

ATGM teams behave OK, they generally only open up on vehicles. Also, I never had problems with Allied AT teams with Javelins. The Syrian units with RPG's is another story however.

I use Server 2003 as an operating system, and ATI doesn't support that (no wonder, who would want an advanced graphical card in his server, but me). So I had to attach the (XP) drivers to the device by hand, and now I don't have an ATI control centre. Fortunately, the default settings prove to be perfect for CMx2, and I cannot worry about what setting I should apply :-)

I needed that shadow in the Syrian desert with that single building over there, but I can probably do without it in Normandy :-)

I didn't see any bad behaviour by the AT gun yet, so it will probably turn out OK.

I think they just added the textures that are used in the missions, so the missions itself should be fine.

You cannot save the work you do, so you better not invest any serious work, other then playing around a bit (and a lot of textures are missing, those that are not used in one of the scenarios)

It seems not all textures are present in the editor, in order to save bytes in the demo. The editor is just there to get a general feel, I think, not to create masterpieces (which would be a waste anyway, because you cannot save it).

The different levels are not really the same as easy .. hard. Playing in Iron mode even has some advantages, as you can see a unit's situational awareness at a glance when you select him. Maintaining communications is a bit harder, medical aid takes a bit longer, but the enemy doesn't shoot better or something. The actual fighting is the same.