Erik Springelkamp

Yes, they will show the casualties during the whole game.

I have also seen in the mean time, that communication can be interrupted when the HQ is busy. I have seen movement as interrupting, giving medical aid, but also being under stress by being fired at sporadically. Fortunately those Russian HQ's are only two men in size, so you can generally keep them out of the firing line without losing too much fire power (but snipers, even if they miss, can still be a problem, very realistic I suppose). But for the Syrians and the Dutch in CMSF (and probably Germans and Canadians as well), the HQ's are integrated in a section with considerable fire power, so I am curious about the various effects of stress on the C2 state of those platoons.

That is as designed in this mode. For the numeric pad I think you have to be in numlock mode (or the opposite, but the setting has effect). However, you can customise your hotkeys with the hotkeys.txt file. Search the forum a bit and you will find everything you need.

Covered arc. They won't fire outside a covered arc if you give them one (unless they feel very threatened). If you don't want to fire them anywhere, you can give them a 360 degree arc by using the shift key while using the command.

I trust Battlefront has a good guess what bandwidth will be needed, and today there are good solutions to guarantee the availability of that bandwidth. I always had good download speeds for CMSF products, and I downloaded most of them within hours of release. I am afraid you will have to look for something else to worry about.

There is also the complication that soldiers can be moved around between teams, so, in which team will the casualty be shown? Probably solvable, but it shows that nothing is simple.

Well, I did that, and the HQ is in radio contact even when its entire platoon has moved over the horizon. And its units are in communication with the HQ. So the HQ's radio-operator has a portable radio.

But here another platoon HQ is not in C2, although it is just as close to one of its own vehicles. But here the Commander is acting as a medic, so maybe that interrupts his communications, like when a HQ is moving, it is out of communications. (Sorry for the wide picture, but otherwise the fine print cannot be read)

This is a typical position. And notice the radio on the back of the operator in the weapons-team icon.

I like the Fennek as a recon vehicle. It has a separate driver and two man team, so you can quickly leave the vehicle to peek over a ridge, and re-enter the vehicle without losing a turn boarding. Plus they have very good sensors, so they often warn about the presence of enemy units in time. The only slight bug in the system is that often the passengers notice enemy presence with these sensors, but the driver is not notified and drives on, even when on a hunt command. In real life these passenger observers would immediately tell the driver to stop or retreat.

In these mini-scenarios you don't save, you just start all over again, as the decisive action occurs in the first few turns. And to be fair, it is mentioned in the briefing that you probably will have to try a few times.

One could argue that there is a lot more heritage from the Netherlands. The British Empire could only take off after the transfer of international banking - and all the entourage with it - from Holland to London, and the constitution of a modern rational state by King William of Orange. (But then: that same international banking system had moved from Antwerp to Holland a century before, and it had arrived in Antwerp through Brughes from Northern Italy and ultimately the Islamic countries with the invention of double book-keeping and the balance). And I could mention New Amsterdam as important impulse for the American society. At least the Afrikaners kept the Dutch language - albeit in just as much Flemish as Hollandish roots. But, in CM Normandy there will be no South African troops. We would have to wait for a Mediterranean module before they appear in the game, isn't it? I am afraid we will see units of the Dutch SS before we will see South Africans or the Irene Brigade.

A fictional war, maybe, but the hardware in this game appears so often in the news today, that I am glad to have experienced what it is capable of. In that respect I find CMSF much more real than the historical context of WWII. (and of course no other game presents the Dutch Army).

In the mean time, I played a mountain scenario, where the enemy hit several of my vehicles with RPG's from a mountain side at about 800 metres distance. I never saw that precision before. Maybe the quality of these tribesmen was excellent?

No, he is not. But playing further I discovered that the HQ unit consists of two members, the commander and the radio-operator, and the radio-operator has a radio in his speciality icon. I guess that represents the radio, instead of it being shown in the inventory like in CMSF.

It took me 4 trials to get it right.

A dismounted mech platoon (BMP-1 early) shows the platoon commander in C2 with its company HQ by means of radio. Yet the platoon HQ doesn't show a radio in its inventory. The platoon vehicles also show C2 via radio. The platoon infantry shows C2 by voice and sight. Does the platoon HQ have a radio that is not shown in the inventory, or is there a C2 voice link from the HQ to a vehicle with a radio?

Very nice campaign, but you have to treat it with surgical precision. Any slight error of judgement is fatal. Sometimes I like to play scenarios where you have a margin of error, just to get thoroughly acquainted with all the different units in the game. Quick battles provide those kind of experience, generally even with 50% less troops on you own side. And then once in a while I play a very competitive scenario where you are presented with a huge challenge. But not every battle. Maybe I am just lazy, but in the course of a historical campaign the majority of engagements are not really balanced, but still serve to make the unit into an oiled fighting machine.

I can enlarge my browser window if I need to, but normally I keep it at a width of about 1000 pixels, otherwise the text lines in for instance this forum become unpractically long.

Can you elaborate a bit about that? Blaming others after the fact has always been part of military history written from a national perspective, so I am always a bit suspicious about it.

Then you should definitely look at Roman paganism.

Even if the mousewheel worked like that in every browser (it doesn't for me in Firefox for your page) it means that you have to move the page back and forth to just read a paragraph. And many people keep their browser width moderate, because text is easier to read on lines that are not too wide.

Maybe, if Jesus doesn't appear tomorrow?

Slightly off-topic here, but what determines the duration in of the battle in CMA? Is it the map, or is it generated? If it is the map, I could adapt this particular map (if I can find it). But if it is the map, then why did the designer allow so little time? In real life, who would give an order to take control of a city in half an hour? Maybe if one didn't expect any real resistance, but in the quick battle you know there will be a sizeable force.

This afternoon I started a quick battle in CMA that looked very promising: capture the centre of a small city on the far side of the map with a mech company, but the time for the battle was only 30 minutes, while I would have to work my way through at least four streets of large compound buildings, after an approach over open country. As city fighting takes its time - especially with the compounds, when you don't want to take terrible risks, I have rejected that battle. So, can you chose the duration of a battle in the new quick battle generator?