molotov_billy

It could be that some of your men had LOS, while the guy with the actual launcher did not.

I separate them into anti-tank teams and they very reliable fire their javelins at area targets. Are you sure that your guys have javelins, and it's not the AT4 graphic that you're looking at? If you're using full squads, maybe the anti-tank guy was a casualty?

yeah, lame scenario tricks. oops, 5 T-62 tanks popped out right in front of us. just didnt see them coming over those vast desert plains. anyway, save often. keep in mind that you can target individual vehicles with your apaches - even the 30mm will eventually make the T-62's bail after a few passes. A single pass will at least immobilize them.

Fun scenario. The LOS/LOF bugs made the berm all but useless to the red forces, though. They were spotted pretty quickly, and blue was able to see and shoot straight through the 6 foot tall berm. Oh well.

Issue a move order onto a vehicle to get them to re-mount.

It's broken.

Hims Homes is the second to last scenario. I found out that Street Sweepers was actually the last scenario - I cease-fire'd after 20 minutes in and it gave me the campaign debrief.

Complaining about complainers.. I wonder what that makes you? Bradley Dick, King of the Dicks?

BFC said to expect them at the same rate that 1.02 was turned out. So, two weeks total per patch. It's an ambitious schedule, but would be cool if it works out that way.

M1A3?

Also, check out the hints & tactics forum. It might be covered already. There's also a ton of general info.

First mission in the 'battles' or first mission in the campaign?

The Louch - fantastic scenario! I really enjoyed this one. I've played through the entire campaign, and I have to say, this is the first time that I really had to carefully use combined arms tactics to achieve even a "tactical victory." I had to dismount my infantry, use MG's for overwatch, use the BTR's for support, use mortars for supression, etc etc. Perfect size, too - I play in RT and it was great to not have to pause every 10 seconds to manage multiple companies. Anyway - more more more!

Airport mission was fun, everything else was a snoozer. And yes, the only "challenge" provided came in the form of silly scenario tricks - tanks spawning at the edge of the map that would have been spotted from a mile away, etc etc. I played the red on red chechnya user-created scenario that was recently posted - and that was the first really enjoyable scenario I've played so far, other than the airport mission. Give it a try if you're bored.

It generally has to do with a unit's facing, at least for vehicles. Give them a face order before popping smoke, and it generally gives good results. But yes, for infantry units, "smoke" should act just like the target command, obviously with a limited throwing range.

panzermartin, I noticed the same type of stuff in "Strength and Faith." Really poor pathfinding. Could not get BMP's to move down a perfectly clear, straight road. They preferred to take tours around half the city, and of course got shot up if I wasn't babysitting them.

You don't have to delete sections, and you don't have to have something assigned to everything. What was breaking it for me was when I deleted things under the "<F>" function. ONLY DELETE ENTRIES FOR <E>, NOTHING ELSE! and it will work.

Pause/save, I know. Have you guys actually played the scenario? I literally have to pause about every 10 seconds to check on units, unless the vast majority are just sitting still. I suppose my point was that the scale of it is just a bit much, given the game's feature set. That's all. My savegame is about 20 minutes into it, I'm sure I could eventually clear it, but I'd rather just spend my limited gaming time playing scenarios that are appropriate in scale.

Yeah, I just can't get myself to take the time and do it. WeGo has been pretty frustrating for me in SF, and I can't imagine how long it would take me to finish 100+ turns at battallion level.

Might want to try this one as red vs red, same units on both sides.

So this game was advertised as a company level simulation, and I can understand why - especially in realtime, even pausible, things can become pretty hectic. So I wonder why this 2 hour beast was included as part of the campaign - Street Sweepers, where I have to control an entire stryker battalion, plus a scout company, plus supporting elements, all coming in at different angles in an urban environment. It's just too much! It doesn't bother me except that it's part of the campaign, and I have to get through it in order to finish. I've had a couple of tries at it, and for me it's absolutely hopeless - I can't watch more than a single platoon at once, especially considering that everything is spread throughout the entire map. It just seems a bit unrealistic when the majority of my units are sitting around waiting for orders while I babysit one platoon at a time. I'm sure it's a great scenario, but unfortunately I think it's going to be my stopping point in the campaign. Don't think I'll be able to get through this one.

Strange that you should mention this, I'm seeing the very same behavior in Shock Force - in fact relying on it to finish missions. Either walls are not being modeled correctly, or all small arms penetrate everything they hit, or there actually is an amount of abstraction going on - because it's the norm for entire squads to be wiped out by small arms alone, from inside structures. Even when firing indirectly at a building section - where every bullet is visually hitting the center of the wall, not dispersed - entire squads are wiped out. This goes back to what JasonC said about only modeling half of the story - so what if you simulate the arc of every bullet, if on the flipside your 1:1 troops suicidally cling to the windows and walls in all situations, never taking cover - and when they do make their cowering animation, bullets are passing through walls to kill them, anyway. I can clear out any urban terrain in shock force with small arms alone, without ever using high explosive or entering an enemy occupied building - and to the last man. Review your final map situation at the end of these scenarios - their's nothing left. No broken half-squads hiding in the middle of a house, or avoiding contact all-together. Each soldier is up and firing nearly the entire time, during every contact with the enemy, until they are dead, or until there are no more targets. Doesn't work that way in reality. Sure, 1;1 works in theory, if you model all of the relevant systems. But because of time constraints or processor speeds, only weapon systems are accurately modeled - oh, and the vision obscuring effects of dust, of course. The result, in SF, is a broken one. Who's saying that we should go back to three man point representations of squads? Nobody, I hope. But it certainly is true that SF will not be a valid simulation until these issues are worked out.

Though I wouldn't say that I can't stand it, especially Conquest of the Aegean, I do agree on the points in which it's lacking. It's a such a shame, too, because in terms of depth and realism it's absolutely lightyears ahead of anything else I've ever seen. It's the only game to come close to matching the experiences portrayed in operational level books that I've read. It exposes the same problem sets that real commanders faced on the ground. Unfortunately, like you said, player interaction just isn't there. A single set of commands at the beginning of an operation can be carried out by your computer subordinates without so much as a further mouse click. Sure, it's interesting to see how things play out - but I'm not the one doing it. Further player interaction is actually punished by the realistic orders delay - there is no real way to adapt to the changing situation. I'll buy every one of their games to support what they're doing, but I've been finding that I play them for no more than a few weeks before I move on.

Fantastic review. Good points all around, similar to the eurogamer piece - mirrored my feelings exactly on the first couple of playthroughs. I really do hope this kind of stuff improves beyond just bug fixes and tweaks here and there.

I'm getting the same thing as the original poster, and this isn't what's happening. I've had this with multiple squads, none of which have been out of contact, or supressed. It looks like I can only get them to respond to very short leaps - moving one floor down per order, or 20 feet away. Anything further away, and the movement order just gets cancelled. Even when they do "move", some of the guys in the squad don't move at all. Definately a bug.