TheVulture

Wrong. They've said elsewhere that you have to make the CMBB maps for a campaign by hand, and CMC converts those into the operational level map. I've not seen anything on how continuous the maps have to be - do height contours along adjoining edges have to be the same in both maps (easy in Mapping Mission) - or can you just churn out say 16 2km x 2km auto-generated CMBB maps and stitch them into a fairly haphazard CMC map?

Joining the thread late in the day... Things to keep: Turn based WEGO system For me it's the perfect mix of being able to make your plans in your own time, and set everything up, while still giving the exictement of seeing things evolve in real time The interface Obviously it will need changes and refinements to work with the new engine, but the basics of the current system, with waypoints, targets, cover arcs is very easy to use and flexible enough that I very rarely find myself unable to get a unit to do what I want. Things to change: Convoying Traffic management is a headache. Following a road should have low command delay overheads. Vehicles should be able to follow the one in front intelligently - queueing behind it without getting into the reverse/forwards traffic jam nightmare. AI scripting in scenarios Not full scripting, but the ability to tweak the AI's behaviour to make it fit in with what you want from the scenario. There are tools to do some of this - use of victory flags, reinforcement times and locations (to make the AI lead with infantry, for example), and various other tricks that scenario designers have come up with. But being able to inform the AI of key points to defend, which defenders should stay put, which should be ready to fall back, which are the counterattacking reserve force; all of these are useful tools that good designers could use to make scenarios significantly more challenging. Campaigns I suspect that anything even vaguely mentioning specifics would be wasted due to limitations imposed by the game engine design, but any kind of campaign is good in my book. Either the kind where you need to win a series of tactical fights to gain a strategic objective, or the kind where you have to keep your core of a battalion intact as it gains experience. Better terrain system More flexibility in laying out terrain, particularly with villages. The kind of closely packed streets and alleys you find in western europe simply can't be modelled with the current system that well.

Knifefight at Cecina

Knifefight at Cecina

Knifefight at Cecina

Perhaps he's limiting himself to scenarios he's played. And perhaps he's playing scenarios that have good historical reviews to have a better chance of finding one that he likes? People don't play scenarios in order to leave reviews. They play them to have fun. And once in a blue moon, they leave a review.

Having victory flags at all is hardly the heights of realism. Capturing the arbitraruly placed flag by the arbitrary time limit means you win, while being one minute late or twenty meters short means you lose. Victory in CM games is to a fair extent an artificial construction with a selection of arbitrary rules. It doesn't then seem so wrong for both players to know what the rules of the game are. Granted, those rules are hopefully used to create realistic situations, but that isn't always going to be the case. And in the case of dynamic flags, the difference between a 'victory' and a 'loss' (in game terms rather than reality) can be determined by the knowledge of dnyamic or static flags, as in Alsatian's example. Keeping the dynamic flags secret from the defender doesn't automatically add to the realism. Maybe it can, but it won't always. But ultimately, this is a game (which aims to be as accurate a simulation as it can be), and generally having both players playing to slightly different sets of artifical rules isn't going to give you any more realism than having both sides know that there are dynamic flags. It just leads to different 'game' (rather than 'real' tactical) decisions.

I was thinking it felt a lot like WarHawk's LAR. And somebody needs to find WH and chain him to a keyboard until he finally finishes that fight...

Bigduke6: Patr of the problem is that eyewitness accounts to just about anything are notoriously unreliable, even a few minutes after the events, never mind a few years. Memoirs of tank commanders, for all that they were there and had a vested interest in observing things accurately, are exactly the kind of thing that has been proven time and again to be capable of surprisingly large errors. Those data carry some weight, but are very far from being definitive proof. Which is why Rune (and others) presumably want to see some convincing physical data that isn't subject to unreliable memory or mistaken observation before committing to changes. Firing range data might not model battlefield reality perfectly, but it does give some idea of the ranges of what is physically possible. An AT gunner writing how his 45 mm gun could frontally penetrate a Tiger from a range of 1500 meters might well have been there, but if tests show that the gun can't even penetrate 30 mm of armour at that range then no-one is going to believe the account. Neither kind of data is definitive. Pretty much no data is ever definitive, on it's own. It's when data from several different avenues of approach all take you to the same place that you begin to have something concrete. When they disagree, you simply have uncertainty. You can't gain certainty by saying that one source is reliable and another isn't. The reality may be that you simply can't know. Good enough data just don't exist.

So presumably the sharpshooter can get his TC kills registered only if the tank is then taken out and some of the crew survive and bail out.

Are you using the European (CDV) version of the game? If so, you have to install the patch to the Combat Mission 3\Run directory (or some such thing), rather than just the Combat Mission 3 directory. Put it in the wrong place, and you get the Opendll error, in my experience (it certainly happened to me on win XP).