TheVulture

IIRC they have also mentioned in the past that they are wary of adding in (easily codable) toggles like this to avoid splintering the multiplayer community. Put in a toggle, and some people will play with it always on, some always off, and some don't much care either way. But the always on and always off groups don't get to play each other. Which lessens the size of the multiplayer community, and do so again for each toggle that you add in. Put in enough options, and people will have a hard time finding people willing to play the settings they want, which hurts the MP viability of the game. Plus it can screw up the balance of scenarios. Not bogging so much - I doubt there are very many scenarios that depend greatly on bogging rates. But, if you are willing in principle to make various 'preference' features optional, you will find some that hurt some scenarios. (WeGo / Real time already does this to some extent - some scenarios work much better in one or the other, since the advantages the player has in either can vary). You may disagree with where the upsides and downsides balance out. The point is merely that it isn't a case of 'just put this toggle in - there are no possible negative consequences'.

True, but CM isn't simulating road marches. By which I mean that vehicles are (I assume) meant to be driving in combat conditions, where you are more interested in getting from A to B alive and as fast as possible, rather than in a way consistent with mechanical longevity. Drivers who are worried about dying and rather scared are probably a little tougher on vehicles than drivers moving 100 miles forwards to near the front lines. Driving down a road in CM isn't merely driving down a road - it is driving down a road in a combat situation. Pootling 100 miles along a good road is a long way outside what CM is meant to be simulating, and so, unsurprisingly, it doesn't do a very good job of simulating it. More simply, breakdown & immobilisation rates on non-combat road marches have little to do with breakdown and immobilisation rates in tactical combat situations (particularly ones like CM scenarios where you know damn well that there is something out there that can kill your tank).

How do you button up a Jackal, exactly?

Indirect or artillery fire to out of LoS spots looks like being one of those marginal things. There are times it should obviously be possible, and (like area fire / god problem) times it will be extremely gamey. The current system makes it possible to hit out of LoS areas with area fire, as long as you can spot two points such that the target line / circle covers the out of LoS section. The penalty you pay is that you usually have to make the target area cover stuff you don't care about hitting, so the barrage is less effective. With a normal targetting weapon (where you target an action spot, rather than an area) like the Brit mortar that isn't going to be an option. At the same time, allowing indiscriminate out of LoS firing isn't really ideal either - you can spot enemy with one unit, spend five minutes figuring exactly where they are on the map, and then hit that precise spot very reliably with impunity for the mortar. Maybe allow non-LoS mortar shots, but either (a) make the spread of the shots much larger, ( apply a random offset of the target position from where you intended (and maybe shift it every 30 seconds to stop players sticking with the 'right' answer when they get lucky, or © some combination of both. Or only allow shots at action spots within 20 meters of an action spot that is in LoS of the mortar. Not allowing indirect fire at all is certainly the easiest solution though, so once again, it depends on how much time is available for the coding, what other priorities are, and what unintended consequences lurk around for allowing indirect fire in one form or another.

To answer my own question, I'd guess it's a spartan APC.

Woot! Got to love on-map 50mm mortars. What's the vehicle on the right in screenshot no. 8? I don't recognise it (and it seems to have been rammed from the side judging by its slat armour )

Ansar al Islam was hardly there with Saddam's permission. It was supported by Iran. Their leader, Mullah Krekar, said Saddam Hussein was his sworn enemy. It was in an area that Saddam had less control over anyway, being in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region / northern no fly zone. (Saddam may have been willing to not interfere in the group's establishment at first since they were also hostile to the Kurdish leadership and caused the PUK some problems, which he can't have lost any sleep over). The Senate Report on Pre-war Intelligence said "[saddam] was aware of Ansar al-Islam and al-Qa'ida presence in northeastern Iraq, but the groups' presence was considered a threat to the regime and the Iraqi government attempted intelligence collection operations against them. The DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] stated that information from senior Ansar al-Islam detainees revealed that the group viewed Saddam's regime as apostate, and denied any relationship with it." And that was one the 'best' pieces of evidence the Bush administration was airing as conclusive proof of Saddam's supposed links with AQ.

Steve: sounds like afternoon delight, which also provided my #&%! moment. A t-62 sitting at the edge of some trees, watching a break in the wall. I roll an Abrams up on the other side of the wall, covered arc in the right direction. It spots the enemy tank first, and gets a shot off. No reaction from the t-62 - I wonder if it is dead. Second shot for good measure also a direct hit to the front. Then the t-62's turret starts to turn - it isn't dead and has finally spotted me. It fires - kills the Abrams dead first hit. Arse. So I send a second Abrams in to do the job, and this one gets to use the bow of the first one as extra cover. It duly rolls up, fires its first shot. Direct hit. No result - the t-62 is still there and returns fire, hitting the first tank again. Another M1 round, another hit, another case of no visible damage. Finally, on the fifth hit the t-62 explodes. Damn thing survived 4 rounds at 50 meters from an M1 - not a bad showing for a very old tank. The Abrams then moseys on to another gap in the wall and kills another t-62 with one shot to the side. No great surprise there. And on through the wall, to engage the last t-62 from behind. I also send an LAV around the front with a 30 second pause (this is WeGo), figuring the t-62 will be dead by then, so the LAV can nip out and give some distressed infantry a bit of covering fire. Turn starts. M1 rolls fowards, sees its target, takes aim, fires. Direct hit at 40 m range on the rear armour of a t-62 (I am directly behind this tank). It starts to move forwards. Second shot, giving a hit on the rear turret armour, fairly central also fails to do anything. The t-62 moves in to the open, just as the LAV innocently comes to a halt almost directly in front of it. Oh crap. The turret starts to turn, and BANG, the Abrams barely gets off its third shot in time and finally kills the t-62. So one t-62 took 5 hits from the front to kill, and another took 3 from directly behind to kill. That's two pretty freakish results right there. Is the Abrams APFSDS round much less effective at very short ranges for some reason (sabot casing not detatched?) The mission is still bugged in 1.11 BTW - I killed every red unit on the map, and the game wouldn't end. When I ceased-fire there were indeed absolutely no living red forces anywhere. I got a total defeat - others have reported getting total defeats with the same situation and a whole 3 or 4 blue WIA. It has no effect on the campaign, since you go on the next scenario regardless, but it looks like the only way to avoid a Total Defeat as blue is to have exactly no casualties at all...

Abso-fragging-lutely. And I didn't give a fig for the east front a few short years ago. Heard about the CM games, bought CMBB as the latest release, and was converted to an eastern front fan by the end of my 2nd mission ('Gefechtsaufklaerung' and 'Cracking the Egg' if anyone is keeping score) I was hooked, and had pretty much no interest in CMBO or CMAK after that (despite having no Brits in CMBB to play with). (And for reasons that I won't go in to, I bought CMBB twice, and also a bundle of all three games, so I actually bought CMBB three times in total - do I get a free copy of the Bagration game for that <innocent look>) Why don't market forces work in my favour dammit! I'm one of those guys who, when I find a restaurant I like, has essentially cursed it in to going out of business within twelve months. I must have minority tastes or something. Still, I'm pretty sure I'll by every BFC game and module, so I'm part of the demographic that Steve et al are gleefully sucking all the blood out of (and perversely, thanking them for it).

You see the M240 on its bipod when the gunner is firing from a prone position, undeployed. I suspect that it just uses the normal firing anim when the soldier is standing, such as pausing for a shot on the move. To have them using the bipod from in a building or behind a low wall would require another specific anim for that, which is a relatively large use of development time for a pretty minor issue.

It's one of those inexplicable, long running forum features (has it hit its tenth anniversary yet?), where people seem to try and be creatively insulting to each other. Can't say I've ever seen the point. :S

Well there are mods for smoke, flames, tracers, muzzle flashes etc already. You can't change the actual model animations, but texture animations are moddable. (And explosions are done as texture animations, so you should be able to mod them. No idea on any of the technical details though).

It will take a while to show up - after you upload a file it gets checked over before being put up for download.

Not been able to find it in the repository, so I've uploaded my zip file of it into the base game campaigns section (IN_SEARCH_OF_A_GHOST.ZIP)

Not checked if it has been put in the repository yet. But it might not be as a campaign file anyway; the original download from CMMODS was a zip, since it comes along with a pdf of documents and maps to add a bit of background and atmosphere. So it may well be in as a .zip file in the repository (and I don't know which bit you'd have to look in to find it).

Webwing's "To Find a Ghost" campaign is well worth a shot. Don't be put off by it being a campaign - just use the first few scenarios for training if you must. It's infantry only (from the US side) and so gives a pretty good feel for how to use infantry in the game, and the scenarios are fairly small so you don't get overwhelmed. Trident valley is dead easy (US heavy mech company vs Syrian mech company - US side has about twice as many men and vehicles, and the Bradleys chew up everything in their path anyway) but is a forgiving way to learn how to use infantry with AFVs. If you want to make life a little harder, go in to the editor and make the US force a Stryker mounted company instead. If you want to make it much, much harder, try it from the Syrian side. Bonus points if you take out two or more Bradleys Al Huqf is a fairly simple, small scenario for the joys of MOUT (if I remember correctly), as is Small Town ME Redux (from the repository). I seem to remember enjoying "Cry Havoc" a lot too as a combined arms whirl. The first campaign mission is pretty easy too, and eases you in to combined arms. QBs are erratic in my experience. There are plenty of good user-made scenarios around that are more worthwhile.

It varies wildly with the t-72 variant. The base ones are very much doomed. The t-72 M1V (covered in reactive armour) will usually survive the first hit from an Abrams (last 2 scenarios I've played have featured 15 of those, and only one died on the first hit). The flip side is that they're not likely to kill an Abrams depsite the better survivability (I didn't lose any of my tanks in taking out those 15 t-72 M1Vs). The t-72 M1V (2001) and t-71 M1V TURMS are further upgrades again, with better guns, upgraded ERA and better accuracy. The TURMS model isn't quite a match for the Abrams one on one, but it quite able to kill them if well used. You'd be doing pretty well to kill 7 TURMS variants with one M1 in 2 minutes I think.

I'm not sure that LoS to the spotting rounds, wherever they happen to fall (as opposed to LoS to the target) matters. Maybe it does - it is a possibility. I believe you need LoS to the target area while the spotting rounds are falling, rather than LoS to the round points themselves, but I can't claim any evidence to back that up. In CMx1 I think breaking LoS to the target point at any time before the mission started would mess up the accuracy, even if you lost LoS and regained it before the spotting rounds started. In CMx2 you can lose LoS as long as you regain a view of the target area before spotting starts.

Possibly a case of the FO not being able to see the spotting rounds / losing LoS to the target for a while? I've managed to get an enemy artillery mission (PBEM game) to land way off map by finding his FO and shooting the hell out of him - which is one way of doing it (the first spotting rounds were on target too, but after the FO died it all went a bit pear-shaped).

Noticed this quirk in debouche to distaster. When a vehicle is destroyed, its crew continue to follow the same AI plan as when they still had a vehicle. In this scenario this meant that while most of the AI infantry were pulling back to defend the objective, the tanks were moving forwards to enagage me. And when crews survived their tank getting destroyed, they continued the charge forwards on foot, rushing forwards out of cover into the open to get slaughtered. Certainly not a game breaker, but a suggestion (for the loooong list) that maybe vehicle crews, when their vehicle is toast, should adopt the AI plan of the nearest non-vehicle crew infantry unit? (Assuming that is something easy to code...)

True, but it is pretty user hostile already just with LoS / hull down positions, and can take a fair amount of trial and error to find a good spot. Throw in elevation limits, and it becomes even worse. If you are checking LoS to a single point, fair enough. But if you want to know what areas are in your blind spot from a given point it gets a lot more time consuming. Anyway, maybe we're all playing the game differently. I've never yet had reason to have a tank fire at more than 30 degrees - my tanks don't go anywhere near buildings until the infantry have wandered through them first. They certainly don't go around parking underneath 8 story buildings that might have RPGs on the roof :S

Can't currently hadle them - I was mostly pointing out that putting something like that in isn't just a question is putting the elevation limits in, there is also other work that has to be done (such as how the AI handles it) that turn it from a trivial job to one that will take an appreciable amount of time. I dare say the AI could learn to handle it, but it still takes time to code and debug. I'm tempted to suggest that it explodes... or ignores it if the 'threat' can't harm it BTW do minimum range for tank main guns apply for APFSDS rounds too? I can see it for HE-related rounds where the round doesn't arm until X meters out of the barrel, but a solid kump of metal doesn't need to arm (and I don't imagine that the sabot casing not being fully separated would be much of a problem either). And the MG having a minimum range?? What's with that?

Imposing the restriction no doubt would be pretty trivial. But there's always more to it than that when making games. Firstly, you'd really want to find some way of making that information available to the user in a relevant way. Just saying in a manual that the maximum elevation of the main gun on such and such a tank is 37 degrees and imposing that in game, doesn't really cut it. The first thing you would see would be many 'bug' reports of situations where the tank has a clear LoS to a target but can't target it and the user hasn't noticed that they've run up against the elevation limit. And the same limit doesn't apply to some of the MGs on the tank. There is also the issue of plotting future moves and having no easy way of telling whether from point X the main gun can fire at target Y. Many of the same issues crop up for hull down positioning too, which maybe illustrates that there is more to it than simply slapping the limits on. And look how often people complain about the difficulty of finding hull-down positions, particuarly in WeGo. But the biggie is the AI also has to know about it. It can't stick its tank somewhere and open fire - it has to also take into account how the elevation limits affect its effective field of fire too (and this becomes much more of an issue when a vehicle is sideways on a slope). None of these are insurmountable I suspect. But designing a smooth interface and making the AI aware of the limits both take time, turning it from a 10 minute 'code the limits' job to possibly a several day effort. Which means it has to fight with all the other stuff on the wish list for a slot in the schedule, and I dare say we could think of a year's worth of stuff we'd like to see in before this was addressed, given how often it actually comes in to play.

Just wanted to write a quick 'thank you' to whoever designed this scenario in the marines module. I've finally finished the damn thing after a few weeks (only really get to play in my lunch break at work, so it's taken a while) and had an absolute blast, despite being penalised for destroying civilian buildings by the simple expedient of trashing a whole company of BMPs next to them and the secondary explosions wrecking the buildings As it happens, I got a nice bonus out of this scenario that will help in the next one (where the briefing specifically metions that I have a lack of AT weaponry). One of my javelin teams happened to get themselves killed. Sent the old recon HQ unit over to play medic, and one of them had the sense to grab the javelin command unit, so I sent them on a tour of nearby AAVs to grab a few missiles as well. The other part of the recon unit (and that whole recon platoon has taken a hammering in the mountain sections of the campaign) was likewise running around in recon mode at the end of the scenario and ended up with a 3 man squad with 2 M32 grenade launchers for added benefit. And all these nice toys turned up at the start of the next scenario too Damn well equipped recon platoon...