Baneman

If I may suggest - allow Human force selection, but when on the selection screen, click the "Suggestion" button - that will give you a force you can then jigger with - saves a lot of time. If you don't like what's offered, you can always try again.

Just wanted to mention that although I am a regular forum reader ( not too often poster ), I was unaware that there was a possible HT/rubbled wall bug, so this thread has at the very least brought that to light. And it must be heartening for the OP to see that BF do respond positively to a possible bug report no matter how it's worded ( ok, I guess there are some wordings that wouldn't work )

Personally I'm hoping that the defensive properties of houses gets looked at. I'm tired of my men in houses getting mown down by enemies in the open. Negates the whole concept of "cover". It's weird when a garden wall provides more protection than a structure wall. I know the point has been made that the bullets from infantry weapons of the time could theoretically penetrate walls of some of the buildings ( isn't this why CMx1 had "Heavy" and "Light" building categories ? ) but nowhere have I read WWII accounts of street fighting where they simply hosed a building suspected of containing enemy troops with a convenient MG and wiped them out. As it stands now, I'm using the completely ahistorical tactic of waiting behind a building for the enemy to occupy it because then I can massacre them. Edit: +1 for the idea of making crews automatically "broken" or something similar to prevent their banzai charges.

Seems to have been around for a while In a current CMBB battle, a Russian truck has shrugged off the attentions of my tank's MG ( doesn't seem to want to fire HE at it ) for almost 2 turns now. It's funny really, considering how ...permeable... to bullets the houses are in CMBN, but not the soft-skinned vehicles.

And German vehicles are ridiculously tough - in a current battle, a German truck drove into the firing line of my .50 cal HMG. It took 3 bursts and reversed away, apparently still working !

Yes, I'm not too fussed about the LOS not always being LOF, but surely, an HMG team deploying the "item" in an AS should make an effort to put it where it can fire through the cover - ( even when helped with a Face command, they often place the actual HMG so far back from a bocage hedge that it cannot fire through - what's the bloody point then ? )

Thank you, I've just started using your version c, and already very impressed. Moving on to e now

Puzzled, of Edinburgh writes... - Denver, Colorado ?

I can't speak for the other game (APOS), but why not just d/l the free CMBN demo and have a go ? It's probably a bit higher level control than what you described, but the AI is decent and will certainly whip you before you've had some practice. I do, however, recommend trying PBEM against some of the good folks around here.

I remember this happening waaay back when I was playing the demo - a team advanced through some bocage and crossed a field to the next hedge ... but one guy never went through the gap. The next turn he did, but because the team ( not him ) were now taking fire, he crawled all the way to them ( took about 3 turns ) and caused the whole lot to be "Tired". I put it down to a random AI pathing glitch - not seen it happen again, so it is, at least, rare.

True, but waiting 30-odd seconds of a WEGO turn to issue the "shoot at the d**m infantry!" command would generate a lot less griping than the current situation

While I can accept that Battlefront can't add a "Cover Armor" arc to the existing game and it must needs wait for the next Engine, I still hope that they could introduce a workaround viz. tweaking the TacAI so that AT assets only fire on infantry when specifically ordered to by the player otherwise ignoring them and only targetting armour. This could alleviate much of the problem. Any thoughts ?

What would be good is if a gun were able to be pushed backwards by its crew. Right now if you want to move a gun 5m back from it's current position in order to hitch it to a tow vehicle ( for example ), the crew achingly slowly rotate it 180 degrees in order to move it those 5m, which can take 2 turns ! IRL, they would push it backwards in about 10 seconds flat.

+1 on this from me. Good ideas here, well presented.

I personally cannot see how it could be difficult to implement FoW in the GUI - after all, there must be code to get the specific information to the unit information part of the GUI - surely therefore, all that needs to be done is replace all and any information with the word "Infantry" or "Tank". Perhaps it could be restricted to Elite and Iron levels of difficulty, but it should certainly be doable.

You can get this to work although it's a little finicky ( so only really useful for us WeGoers ) - if you move your camera over the bocage and look back at your firing troops and then give the targetting command, a little moving around with the blue line and you will get a red targetting line through the bocage to your ( the enemy's ) side. Tricky to explain, but give it a go, it does work

I'd have to say that Houses, foxholes and trenches all seem to confer less cover than one would expect. Lying prone in the open seems to be a more survivable tactic than using these as "cover" - not least because troops appear to fire over their heads a lot - it's almost as if they expect the enemy to be kneeling or standing and aim accordingly. In trenches, foxholes and houses, they are kneeling or standing and die as a result.

Granted I don't have Engineers, but in a recent game, I moved 2 squads through a gap ( on Quick ). They then sat 1 Action Spot away for 3 -4 turns and saw nothing, but when I moved a 3rd squad through the same gap, it proved to be mined ( last guy in the group trod on one ). So mines are pretty hard to spot if you don't actually step on one. Engineers may get a bonus to spot them though ( one would hope ).

Heh, BF should code it so we can "Buddy-Aid" the gun and thus "pick it up" again if it's regarded as an Inf heavy weapon. This buddy aid could take 2-3 turns even. C'est la vie/guerre, guess we'll just have to live with it as implemented.

Yes, that's about the only way I can see at the moment, but it does have 2 serious drawbacks. a) It's a clumsy solution to determine something the player really should know - after all, the game-internals "knows" the answer so it should be possible to let us know in some way. ( Maybe a GUI thing - little green circles or red X's next to the artillery you're calling in - similar to the barrels-heat thing - you need more greens than reds or it's off target. ) If/When more than one barrage is falling ( yours or theirs ) and/or spotting rounds for other nearby fire ... how the heck are you going to know which impacts to check against ?

This would be good to know. I've also asked this in other threads, but still haven't seen a definitive answer : "How do we, the player, know if the Spotter sees the spotting rounds or not ?"

Disagree ( in part ). I'm a CMx1 player who skipped SF for the usual reason ( no interest past approx. Korea ) and I'm loving BN. Nevertheless, there are plenty of SF players posting that they would also like/have liked an Armour Only Arc for SF ( for example ) - so it's not that they're suddenly new issues, they just obviously haven't been a high priority. And I do agree that hankering for targetting lines or in-command lines is a waste of time.

Looking good, but it still pains me to see the rocking-horse tanks. ( more obvious at the higher speeds permitted by open terrain ). I'm not saying they shouldn't rock, just not that much. I really hope BF tone it down by 1/3 or 1/2.

This may be related to the age-old ( ie. in CMx1 you had it too ) problem whereby you can trace a targetting line right up to the front step of a building, but somehow the building itself is out-of-LoS. No idea how ( upside-down invisible-yet-los-blocking mountains hanging from the sky ? ) such a thing can happen, but it does. To be fair, I've seen much less of this in CMBN than in CMx1, but it does still sometimes occur.

I'm no expert, but although you're selecting "Veteran" which reflects their experience, you can also select their "Motivation" level - perhaps you're getting randomly assigned "Low" or "Poor" motivation which could explain their running-away behaviour.