Sabot3

Thanks Moon. That appears to have fixed the problem.

Hi Folks. I have the vanilla version of CMSF loaded which I purchased directly from Battlefront via download; no Marines and no mods. I had patched to V1.10 and was running the game with no difficulty. I downloaded the Battlefront V1.11 patch last night, which seemed to go without a hitch. When I went to run the game I received a message box with the following info: CM Shock Force.exe - Application Error. The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005). Check on Okay to terminate the application. I ran the patch again with the same results. I rebooted the computer and received the same results. I have an AMD 64 3500+ with a Nvidia 6800 GS video card and Windows XP. Any help that you could offer to resolve this problem would be appreciated. Happy New Year in advance. Sabot3

Time between outgoing rounds depends on other factors as well: 1) Assessing fall of shot through muzzle blast, obscuration from dust, smoke etc. Dealing with platform rock ... Then depending on the gunnery technique being used, either the gunner or commander must give a correction, apply it to the sight and re-lay the sight on the target which may or may not be moving. Does the commander have to move from one sight to another or put his head out of the turret before ordering the gunner to fire? Is the crew commander playing the role of commander and gunner as well which is even worse! These factors impose a time delay and slow down the practical rate of fire. 2) Access to the ammo. Is the ammo stored in an easy to access location and is it stored base first in order for the loader to be able to grab it easily. Does the round have to be manouvered around in the turret at all in order to fit it into the breach. How heavy is the ammo? Does the turret have a "Ready Rack" where a number of rounds can be stored for very easy access? It's quite possible for the loader to have that round in the breach and ready to go for quite a few seconds before the crew commander and gunner are ready to re-engage. While tanks may be theoretically capable of pumping out 12 rounds a minute, WWII tank crews would have been dealing with a host of issues that would made a maximum of half that rate of fire ambitious if it were to be in any way accurate. While I agree with the comment about ATG crews having more room to work in and how that would contribute to a higher rate of fire they are also working with some more severe disadvantages that would slow down their rate of fire. As their muzzles are normally closer to the ground when they fire, they tend to create more obscuration from dust, dirt, snow etc. This means that the crew often takes longer to determine fall of shot and to determine a correction. Unless ATGs are very well dug in with spades extended, platform rock tends to be greater than on a tank where the gun is mounted on many tons of steel. This results in the ATG sight picture often moving off the target and the gunner having to re-lay the appropriate portion of the graticle pattern back on the target. It shouldn't take long but all of these actions take some time and the effect is cumulative. If you want to have realistic ROF's for the game, go to an appropriate WWII simulation and see how long it takes you to deal with these affects and fire the next round accurately. Then imagine that you are tired, dirty, and scared. Do you still think that a ROF of 12 - 15 rounds per minute on a WWII tank or ATG is realistic? If I was King for a Day I would give Elite crews a max ROF of 8 RPM and Green crews 4 RPM. The other quality levels would be spread out in between. When fighting in desert or very dusty conditions I would cut this in half in order to simulate the effects of obscuration from dust and sand thrown up by the muzzle blast. Sabot3

Unfortunately 1.21 has brought a degradation in overall performance in the game for me. Even after having dialed back some of my settings, the lag is often so bad that driving in anything but open terrain is a death sentence. It seems like the Windows users have suffered the most from this most recent patch. Hopefully this can be rectified soon.

Intersection Points I would like to be able to place Target Reference and Grid Intersection Points on the map in order to make it easier to make reference to specific areas when communicating with the other members of the team. Specifically I would like the ability to place a variable size cross symbol on the map and the ability to label it with a number/letter combination. Minefield Marking It would be advantageous from time to time to be able to indicate minefields. A transparent box with some small circles in it that could be sized as necessary with a click and drag action would do the trick. I'm sure the same book from which you extracted the other military symbols would provide you with a number of useful examples.

From Sabot3. I like the Hermes' stealth capability as it forces me to maintain situational awareness on the battlefield or risk getting a load of 20mm in the rear or flanks. I notice that I'm becoming far, far too reliant on the little red icons to tell me where the enemy is at any given moment. If I was going to make a recommendation it would be that an option be available whereby the enemy icons only appear when 1) the enemy unit is under observation by yourself, one of your team or a sensor 2) battle damage (direct or indirect fire) has damaged it's capability to resist detection. I have seen too many excellent hull down positions of both my own and my opponents blown as a result of a little red icon telling them or myself exactly where to look. There should be a reward for picking a good hull down position with good background cover etc, especially for the Apollo 120's and the ATGM carriers. With the current system you are spotted as soon as any part of the vehicle becomes visible or at thats how it appears to me. Another element that could be added to assist in making this aspect more realistic is to add more significant muzzle flash to the current muzzle obscuration effects. While a unit may be harder to detect without icons while stationary in a good hull down position, the moment it (particularly a tank )opens fire, the muzzle blast should be very, very visible. ATGM's would be less so. Sabot3

From Sabot3. Great games and great AARs! If I had flipped over on that ridgeline one more time while chasing ThePhantom or Schmelz I would have flung my monitor out the window :eek: I also ended up spending a lot of my time up there waltzing with Stonewall who continually appeared to pick the same drop areas as myself! From my perspective the games brought out one major point and that is that one of the attacking players must be assigned responsibility for securing the Drop Zone or Assembly Area. Stonewall and others were continually dropping in and hitting us from the rear which can quickly devestate an attack or force the attackers to lose momentum as they must turn around and sort out the trouble behind them. I think that one player could handle the jobs of rear security (maintain jammers and AA turrets on and around the DZ), Mercury artillery support when required and possibly, depending on the pace, some additional mortar fire. It was the most fun that I've had in Drop Team to date. Sabot3

From Sabot3. I'm in. Just give me a time and some targets.

From Sabot3 "HERE" Just need a time and some targets

I played WWII Online for almost 4 years and we could always tell when we had a BF1942 and HALO visitor on our hands. They automatically started whining about how slow the tanks were, that they blew up too easily, that the infantry moved too slowly and couldn't jump onto roof tops and there were no scopes for rifles etc, etc. Fortunately there was a "Block" command for the chat box and you knew that they would go away soon; only after having depleted our supply of equipment. Those of us who enjoyed the game, did so for the very aspects that they disliked. As indicated by many of the folks above, Drop Team isn't perfect but I ceased looking for perfection a long time ago. I have fun when I'm playing it and although it hasn't attracted a huge number of players yet, I've found the average level of maturity and hospitality of the folks who do play to be a cut far above the smack talking wankers who I encounter in other games. That on it's own is worth a lot. This reviewer didn't find what he was looking for. Too bad; hopefully the game will continue to develop and grow and we will see more players and improved reviews. Sabot3

I think that the graphics have great potential if the players who are in game at the time wish to use them. It still comes down to that desire to be organized rather than to simply roll around and shoot. The various line symbols indicating a variety of tactical movement may be a bit much. Even in actual military staff work they tend to be surplus. Give me the ability to throw some goose eggs, some curved or straight lines and crosses for target reference points on the map and I've got all the tools that I need. As for voice comms, if used properly they can make all the difference in the world in my opinion. They put a person with a personality at the other end of the line. My only problem with voice comms (TeamSpeak and Ventrillo) as I have experienced them being used in other online games such as WWII Online and Eve is that it takes a bit of personal discipline to use them effectively. If everyone on your team tries to speak at once or you have someone or some people who have the constant desire to talk, then you may as well be typing.

The planning tools mentioned above by Poesel71 would certainly help a team get their act together more quickly, provided that they wished to do so. It would also help make in-game communication more precise. The ability to form mixed and same type equipment platoons. I've been trying to get Hermes to escort tanks and other vehicles and without this option it can be a chore. I like Dark's idea about phasing in the reinforcements. It would also help prevent the bots from squandering all the resources in one mad rush. I've thought over a lot of these issues and compared them with my experience in other online games. I believe that one of our major problems at the moment that is leading to a lot of player frustration is the low numbers on-line. You need a certain number of players to make an attack or defence work effectively. You need someone handling direct fire, indirect fire, air defence, security of the Drop Zone, bot wrangling, cut-off of enemy reinforcements, etc. When just two players who don't normally play on the same team are trying to do this all together with 4 minutes prep time it can lead to a lot of frustration. The defence has equal challenges. Improving bot wrangling will only go so far to make up for the lack of players online at any one time. I think a lot of these problems will remain until we start to see at least 4 people per team playing together as a team on a regular basis. In addition there is still too much reliance on typing even though we have a voice capability in game. I hate "death by typing" and it happens far too often. Effective voice comms help to improve teamwork and fun immensely. More players and formed teams will hopefully encourage greater use of voice comms. I keep reminding myself that this game is still very young and this type of balancing is to be expected and I'm very happy to see the efforts made by the design team to do use player input to do so.

My in-game name is Sabot3. I just finished playing "Bloody Iwo" along side bboyle. I think that if I stick cotton balls in my ears it may stop them from both ringing and bleeding as a result of the constant concussion of mortar explosions around my vehicle :eek: Hopefully the sudden jerking motions of my computer screen is only an aftermath of what my sight picture looked like as I was pounded by indirect fire! After finally moving out of my hull down position and onto the objective to try to regain points, I felt like I was driving onto a weird combination of lunar landscape and the Somme. There were craters there that you could stack a platoon of Thor's in and still have room for a Galaxy. Are we using kinetic strikes from orbit? I'm all for giving the bots a bit more accuracy with those mortars but I think that you might have over done it!! Great work so far guys although server connectivity after this last patch seems a bit upgefarked, if you don't mind me using technical terms. Keep those improvements coming! Sabot3

My in-game name is Sabot3. I'm normally on between 7-10 PM EST.

Team play certainly makes all the difference in the world, especially when you are on TS or Ventrillo or such. Lone wolfing tends to lead to a lot of bad tactics and after trying to juggle all the tasks yourself and often failing, I find that I tend to get into the mode of just shooting things so that I can at least get some enjoyment from the scenario. I worked with one fellow on one scenario where we worked as a Paladin / infantry team and it was great to see how well it worked. Improvements to bot wrangling would be a great help but in the end team play will make or break the game.

Bigduke6 you seem to have missed my point. What I'm trying to get across is that the Germans actually got their people at the pointy end to use the combined arms breakthrough doctrine that made them so successful. How did they do that? A lot of it was very through leadership training and creation of an atmosphere at lower levels at least that encouraged people to use their initiative. This is how you take doctrine from the theoretical and turn it into something practical. As to how well NTC pertains to Afghanistan or a city in Iraq, I agree. If you want to see a better example of an training centre addressing those scenarios, visit JRTC in Ft.Polk. My point on the NTC's is that they provide a training environment where doctrine is forced to be applied in order to win (along with good basic soldier skills). Not only do the troops there meet a highly trained enemy who fights to win, they are set into scenarios that challenge them to use the doctrine and tactics that they have been taught and to continually fine tune it. "Blitzkreig" itself as a concept is less important to me than the fact that a country's armed forces was able to come up with a way to encourage their leaders and soldiers to master it. That in itself is no small feat.

You can write a thousand doctrine books based on the thoughts of a hundred great minds, it really doesn't matter if you can't do the following: 1) encourage your troops at all levels but particularly the leaders at battalion level and below to believe in that doctrine and to use it; and 2) create an atmosphere that encourages and rewards the use of that doctrine during training and operations. No matter what they did or didn't do, the Germans appear to have developed an understanding of their doctrine and a spirit of initiative in their commanders that percolated down through the ranks. That level of understanding and initiative came to the forefront once the battles turned fluid. German troops appear to have been generally less reliant on orders from higher command then their Allied brethern and it helped them take advantage of the opportunities inherent in a breakthough. There has been a ton of writing on this subject in professional military circles and I won't go into it here. If you want to replicate this effect in CM then you have to as a minimum, institute more complex command and control parameters and increase or decrease the reaction time to orders for troops of various nationalities. ... and then try to find an opponent to play anything other than German before late '42 or early '43 I think one of the best examples of the conversion of doctrine into reality is the way the US Forces force doctrine to be used, tested and further developed at the National Training Centres. Troops live doctrine, they make it work, they just don't talk about it. No matter what the German High Command thought, the soldiers on the ground, particularly the combat leaders understood the doctrine and had been trained to use it. They overcame the inertia from above.

Remind me to never share a secret with you. Your operational security sucks People can't see the map so I won't bore them with a lenghty description. The South and middle of the map has most of the flags and a lot of hills. It is the logical place to concentrate the defence. The North is open with scattered woods. My plan was fairly simple. I bought a Motorized rifle battalion which came with its own 82mm mortar Forward Observing Officer (FOO). I also bought 2 x 82mm FOO, 2 x 120mm FOO, 2 platoons of KV1 and 4 platoons of T34. Plan was to fix the centre of the map with 1 x inf company and 1 x company (-) of inf, the KV's which are slow and 3 x 82mm mortar FOO's. Probe the high ground to the South with a platoon to see what was there and grab a flag on the forward slope which I could easily defend. If something opened up from the Southern hills, pummel it with indirect fire. When I had the centre fixed, discovered the location of the bulk of his force, I would bring in the 4 platoons of T34 carrying a company of SMG inf and roll up the defence from North to South. I had a small recon force in the North (1 squad, 1 Company HQ and a 120mm FOO) to check out the Northern approach for the T34s. The infantry advance in the centre went far better than expected with virtually no forward defence. Same in the South. Started to pick up ATG's in the Centre, so I decided to commit the T34's in the North early so the centre group of inf and KV's didn't have to fight alone for too long. Thats where we were at before the OPFOR plan was delivered into my lap. Yes loose lips do sink ships. I expected to encounter some panzers and at least a couple of combat outposts forward; I was happy to encounter neither. When the forward infantry started to identify and kill ATGs, I was happy, less work for the arty. Its too early to tell how well the attack plan would have worked but it was going well up to this point. My perspective on the scenario so far.

Does your opponent ever read these Forums? If he does, it might not be a great idea going into this level of detail before the battle is over. It's sort of like letting him look over your shoulder while you play! I'd get those ATG's covered by some infantry as soon as possible and try to seperate any infantry he is carrying on his tanks from those tanks. Don't let them support each other! That's a bit of advice from a 29 year 10 month retiree from the Canadian Army who didn't go to RMC, did enjoy his time at the School and believes that tactics will beat the calculator time after time. Also don't you have better things to do at work than give me, I mean your opponent your plan I still can't believe that you keep track of how many times you have been beaten

Great reply by Jasonc. Another approach to use is to use smoke to break up the enemy's line of sight. The result is that your "concentrated" units hit individual or small groups of enemy who are isolated by the smoke effects and consequently not mutually supported by other squads or units. Getting accurate HE fire onto a reverse slope position is very difficult, however smoke ammo has at least some effect even if it isn't landing in exactly the right spot. Smoke is a very under utilized element of the game in my opinion. What they can't see, they can't shoot!