TheVulture

***** SPOILERS******* As others have said, one option is to replay the earlier mission and put more emphasis on keeping your troops alive. Heavy casualties in earlier missions might make some of the later mission nigh-on impossible. On that mission, I played for time, from an earlier attempt in a previous patch where I did much the same as you - tried to pin down the Syrians at distance, and got chewed up by the BMPs (and tanks when they turn up). Second attempt I stayed a fair way back so that only the far side of the valley was visible, and all the valley itself was a blind spot. Keep the troops spread out there in split squads with short cover arcs, and when a Syrian squad comes over the crest, they run in to fire by 2-3 squads and go nowhere. The LAWs are not much use at range, but lethal against BMPs that come rolling over the near crest at 100 meter ranges or less. The AT SMAW weapons are a bit more reliable, but not accurate enough to reliably hit something on the far side of the valley. Again, they can smash a BMP at short range, or take out a T-72 on a flank shot - with added luck. So my main idea was a closed defence - anything getting close runs into something capable of killing it quite easily, and the defenders avoid their main threat of being chewed up and spat out by enemy APC fire from across the map. Once your reinforcements show up you have a javelin team that can deal with the tougher nuts to crack, and then once they are gone the AAVs are quite capable of winning head-to-head against the BMPs, so you can go on the offensive. But at first, just try to buy time, stay hidden, and only open up at short range targets, and see how that works out for you.

The smoke from burning vehicles also moves with the wind, and disperses over time (as it rises up). But, just as in the real world, smoke from a hot fire tends to go up very fast too, driven by the updraft from the heat generated by the fire. While smoke from arty missions etc. have no such updraft driving them up (and obviously are meant to stay at ground level to make them useful).

Out of curiosity, comparing tactical level performance, why does the Panther (44.8 tons) get compared to the t-34 (32 tons) rather than the more equivalent IS-2 (46 tons)? (including the IS-3 as a essentially an IS-2 variant).

Forgot to add the second half of the playstyle point - I am a rather cautious, risk averse player who puts a great deal of store in gathering intelligence, and keeping the enemy unaware of my position. Sneaking around ambushes and outmaneouvering them is something I do moderately well. Conversely, I really suck at pitched battles and wide open terrain (not least, I keep forgetting about using smoke ). And I can well imagine that someone who finds those kinds of battles intuitively easy to run would have a harder time in this kind of mission. (Credit to the scenario designer though - nice to see someone using height well in a map).

Curiously, I've only just finished this mission too. I'd have to say that I found it fairly easy too, but what you find easy or hard is to some extent a matter of play style. The Syrian airborne positions aren't simple nuts to crack, but I got through with only 9 dead and 2 vehicles toasted. I may have had some luck too (LAV survived a full frontal RPG, and I saw a few close misses from ATGMs and recoilless rifles too). My personal approach was split squads, keeping vehicles safely out of sight. Advance on enemy positions in a pretty wide pattern (one squad, split into teams, plus the fighter team, and an MG team, spread over 100-150 meters. Get enough shooters and mortar fun to suppress the ATGM / recoilless teams, and then rush up an LAV and AAV to hit them while they are down. Plus RPGs and recoilless rounds can't take out half a dozen men when there are only 4 in any one location. Use hunt commands to go over crests so when they take fire they can drop down and completely break LOS while letting you know where the enemy is, so yuo can maneouver other guys into position to suppress. I find marine platoons have so much firepower, particularly with an AAV per squad, that I tend to split them and use them much like I would a CMx1 company

Maybe it's just me, but that immediately makes me wonder what happens if you have a reinforcement zone that is entirely on/in buildings, and have some tanks arrive there. Do they turn up on the roof tops? May have to go test that at lunchtime...

There are lots of different random contour generating algorithms. Fractal ones are one option, but there are plenty of other ways to go about it, and different algorithms tend to produce different feels of landscape. Some are very good at mountainous features, others are very good at a kind of 'rolling hills' style. I coded one recently that tended to produce generally flat landscape with very roughly linear raised and lowered features, which actually did a reasonably good impression of British farmland (depending on the z-scale obviously), and often gave nice, tacically interesting maps with covered areas and important ridges for controlling large areas of the battlefield. I'd love it if we got the ability to import at least contour maps. In an even better world, it'd be nice to be able to import full maps, but that would obviously require BFC coding up some long-hand uncompressed data format that we could generate independently, which would be read in and converted into the internal version. I'm not expecting that though - within weeks of it going live, people will have produce QB generators based on it, and I imagine that the improved QB functionality of the next release is going to generate at least some of the sales desirability, and they might not want to undercut that with user-provided free versions...

On a tangentially related note (and not entirely serious) why not 'solve' the problem of co-ordinated movement the same as for co-ordinated fire? When you have a unit selected, you can only see the moves of units that have had chance to transmit that information through the C3 system, as with relative spotting. So you can co-ordinate with units close by since you can see their waypoints, but not with distant ones since you don't get to see theirs until some time later.

The problem is that the complexity of plans has precious little to do with the number of waypoints. Following a road (simple plan) in CMx1 could take a lot of waypoints. Moving 4 units in a platoon into correct positions relative to each other might only need 1 waypoint per unit but be conceptually much more complex (mutually supporting positions, timings etc.)

I'm in favour of leaving delays out - at least if it is like CMx1's per-waypoint basis. Delays based on quality of troops, morale status, suppression status and a sense of urgency make more sense. Infantry advancing caustiously and making contact with a tank don't need 20 seconds to organise themselves to get the hell into some cover. Units, supposedly on the attack, who have been sitting around in a house for 20 minutes with no sight of the enemy have probably had time to light a fag and grab a drink, and might take more time to get organised for movement. Probably a pipe-dream though. I don't know how plausible it is to track some kind of 'readiness' variable for a unit which gets modified by morale, suppression and quality.

Excellent (until I lose a platoon of tanks to it...). Does smoke FOW also apply to the vehicle Dust Radar ?

But I do wonder how much of that is psychological (and I agree entirely about how I actualyl play the game BTW). Being in/out of command is not actually that obvious form the UI. Thorw on the big red / black lines as in CMx1 and I wonder if people would start paying more attention since they would have a "this unit is not as combat effective as it should be" marker in a hard-to-ignore way on the screen. And it doesn't really affect whether you win a shoot-out in CMSF so much, as change how long it takes the US side to win slightly. The longer command ranges with US C3 equipment is another factor at work here too. But I do think sticking the command lines back in (CM is broken without it! You hear me!!!!) would make people more concerned about keeping the lines nice and red (although not as much as adding in command delays as well would).

Depends on the unit leader. Remember those +1/+2 leader modifiers. They were more important than the command delays IMHO, although unlike command delays you never get direct feedback on their use, so it is less obvious. IIRC out of command units were basically 'lead' by a leader with -2 modifiers everywhere in effect, and each +/- moved you one step up or down the conscript-green-regular-veteran-crack-elite chain (did I miss a level?). Wasn't so concerned about the stealth modifier for the most part, but the morale and combat ones had a massive effect on your squad firepower and staying power under fire. I assume the same system is in place to some extent in CM:SF (any chance of confirming that Steve?) although the firepower / routability discrepancy between the two sides is pretty large, so even out of command US troops seriously outgun Syrian troops in good command. (I just had a single marine LMG rout all 3 men of a Syrian ATGM from a range of 3-400m in two minutes, with no-one else firing at the unit. They were in pretty crappy cover though...). Such 'minor' advantages add will add up to a significant swing when you have more evenly balanced squads in CM:N, and a player who routinely ignores it will effectively have troops a few levels lower in quality than one who plays attention to it.

Dragging this discussion back up again (and I'm not entirely sure why - just musing in public I guess). I'm not sure why you'd need multiple copies of the entire terrain mesh in order for spottable trenches to work. Well, if you just had the mesh and nothing else, you would. But you have the basic map info, you know which tiles contain trenches, so you know which tiles you need to have multiple copies of. Namely just those with trenches (and probably some adjoining ones for e.g. trenches that cross diagonally between two tiles - presumably some parts of the other two tiles meeting at that corner need some adjustment too. It all then hinges on how easy it is to insert copy A or copy B of a given tile into the buffer stream. (Which, I admit, nay not be trivial, depending on how you are optimising the polygon draw order: may well not be tile by tile, and the fact that the trenchful and trenchless copies of the tiles will have greatly different numbers of polygons in them). Assuming it is possible to do that without a big performance hit, then the matter of determining which copy to draw is fairly trivial and low processor impact. For each tile affected by trench ambiguity, loop over enemy units and determine which have LoS to that tile (done from the pre-computed LoS maps). An even lower impact version (if a little more convoluted algorithmically) is to generate a list of which tiles can be seen by which units at the start, and just update it when a unit moves from one action spot to another. The main complication obviously comes from applying terrain deformations to both tiles, which depends on how the code for deforming stuff is handled. Ideally, it is possible to apply the deformation to both tiles when a shell explodes to make a crater. But (and that might be another big 'but') that's assuming that it is possible to add a crater to the trenchless tile depending on where the shell detonates in the trenchful tile (which may be e.g. at the bottom of the trench). And that other aspects of the crater won't cause discontinuities and glitches between the two versions of the tile (and the way the merge with the surrounding single-copy tiles which may also contain part of the crater). Obviously only the real (trenchful) copy is used in all game calculations - the copy is just inserted into the draw buffer depending on the spotting determination. It is the updating of both copies in response to explosions / terrain deforming that might throw up trouble. Thought?

Move delays suffer from the same problems as area fire, in that the game can't tell between the extremes of a unit is moving because of co-ordination with other units it has no communication with, in response to something happening a mile a way, out of LOS, versus a unit moving in reponse to its immediate situation. Which is one reason I wasn't overly fond of the CMx1 delay system (although I don't think it was attempting to address the god problem of the player co-ordinating movements unrealistically). Low quality units could have a minute's worth of delays doing something very simply, like moving from A to B to break LoS to a tank that hasn't spotted them yet <pictures the NCO sitting everyone down in a circle and drawing a little map in the dirt with a stick to explain the move order...> (yeah, the withdraw order provided some workaround, but I almost never used it succesfully ) You certainly need to have adjustable waypoints if you are going to start putting move command delays back in. I much prefer the CMx2 system of not having command delays, for the exact same reasons that BFC are against area-fire penalties at the moment: it penalises some perfectly valid moves, whilst ultimately not preventing the main god-problem. Again, I gather it wasn't meant to address that so much as to simulate the delay between the unit leader saying 'move out' and everyone actually getting moving (I may be wrong), but I suppose there is then a case of making the delay also depend on how long a unit has been stationary.

Y'know moon, I have my doubts about how serious you are being

It calls in a team of worms who attack the designated point with bazookas? Yay! That's one of those annoyances that isn't game breaking, but I find at least once a game I can't get smoke where I want it and it is very frustrating.

After you enter your password, you have to email the file to your opponent. There is nothing else to do - no orders to give or any such thing.

That's normal CMSF behaviour. When a man routs, he simply disappears from the map (after the excalamtion mark shows). No coming back. Been that way since the start by design. Whether it will ever change back to the CMx1 version of routed men running off around the map, we'll have to wait and see.

Another rather long AAR of a PBEM between me and BigDork - lots of pictures and bad spelling to keep you entertained. Not strictly speaking finished yet, but close as damn it, and with the next patch out now, this 1.10 PBEM will probably be put on the shelf. Since one side is down to 1 man (vs about 25-30) it is a foregone conclusion anyway... Here's the link to the AAR. Enjoy, if you enjoy this sort of thing http://forums.mzocentral.net//index.php?showtopic=18737

Okay - maybe I need to poke my firefox installation and see if something there is borked.

Clicking on the patch download (CM:SF marines version) with a firefox browser doesn't start the download, just take you to an empty FTP directory. Got the patch with IE happily, but you might want to look at why firefox is barfing at it.

Thing is (as far as I am concerned) there are times where you do want your troops to avoid the covered route, or continue into an obvious danger zone - either as part of the plan or because you, as the player, have assessed the situation in a way the tacAI can not. You know the covered route is certainly mined, or you saw an enemy force that can only be moving to shut it off. You know that the unit that killed 20 odd men has had to reposition (or is temporarily blinded by smoke) and have a narrow window to get some men across the open ground. In short, since the tacAI is never going to make the right decision in all cases, or even most cases, for me this falls under the responsibility of the player. Yes, it would be nice (in theory - UI usability issues swept under the rug) to be able to nudge the tacAI to putting more or less emphasis on cover when pathfinding, or to set up its logic for reacting during a turn when bad things happen ('run like hell', 'stop and return fire', 'carry on regardless if you possibly can'). But these are things I can work around for the most part, or avoid by being more cautious / anticipating better. Whereas other items listed in the thread are more like "basic things I'd like to be able to do that there is simply no way to do right now". Of course, that's just my experience of the game. I continue to be surprised at the range of different playstyles people have, and what may regularly be a problem for one may simply never be an issue for another because of how they try to play the game. (For example, the air guard issue for Strykers never bothers me because I almost never have my guys in Strykers when they are likely to be taking fire - I tend to use infantry dismounted and keep the fragile Strykers well out of trouble until their support fire can be used from secure positions).

The ones that most frequently frustrate me when playing: 1) artillery - not knowing how many shells or what duration I have called in, and how many shells in total I have access to (or just what fraction of total stores I am using up with a mission). 2) smoke grenades - infantry not being able to aim them 3) moving into a room you know to be occupied. 'hunt' will probably get your guys stopped by some other contact before they even get in to the room (particularly if there are exploding vehicles nearby ) any other move will have them run in to the room and head for the far wall before turning around to engage the enemy. Which makes gamey area fire on a building your own men are in pretty much a necessity. There are others that interfere with trying to do reasonable things (control of what rare special weaponry is used, fighing around corners), but the above three seem to cause me to try and work around them in just about every game I play.

My memory is that this was about the TOW Humvee, not the Bradley. EDIT: Nope, I was wrong. The thread I was thinking of was this one: http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=83941 which is indeed about Stryker / LAV / Bradley TOW vehicles