womble

Engineers can spot minefields faster than ordinary troops if they're left immediately adjacent to them for a little while; they won't see a minefield they've entered any quicker than the mines will "see" them...

Best use for engineers is changing the battlefield. Blowing tunnels through buildings, knocking down walls to allow you to bypass buildings, or generate firing opportunities. They're a bit like a reverse smoke screen... If you have plenty of demo charges, they make clearing enemy out of buildings a lot easier. Any blank wall, including party walls is a huge vulnerability for the defenders.

It's PBEM. Even if a battalion-plus game takes an hour for some turns, that's hardly a life-eating commitment at a turn every day or two.

Personally, I'd rather it was ditched entirely for the WW2 titles. The times a JABO appeared over an actual engagement and hit anything useful are so few and far between, they're not worth considering. The development time would be better spent elsewhere.

It's also worth pointing out that the tool exists to do that handholding, up to the point of losing control of the element entirely, in the shape of the "Evade" command.

No. Not "always". Troops on immediately adjacent floors will have a better chance of spotting you. Troops further away than that probably won't. But "never" and "always" are dangerous assumptions.
Assuming you're using breaching charges to move from an adjacent building's equal floor, the same applies as above. Note, however, that just because a Breach move can be plotted between two apparently-adjacent floors, and the explosion will make a hole big enough to drive a small vehicle through, if there is any difference at all in the ground elevation beneath the two buildings, you will not be able to move through the breach, and will head to the ground floor, outside and back in through any convenient entrance. Again, this is true at all levels.

Are you thinking it's too big? The first thing I reckon you should do for MOUT is to split your squads into their fireteams. Having an entire squad on a single floor can present a very dense target cross section. There's a good article over in the SF tactics forum on clearing buildings "Fast and Agile" that is relevant to all the CMx2 titles.

No, the only way to divest yourself of equipment is to fire it at the enemy or terrain.

Most of the modern AFVs spot better buttoned up. But some of them have equipment that needs reloading by an unbuttoned crew. At least, that's what I gather from prior posts.

No, the only way to divest yourself of equipment is to fire it at the enemy or terrain.

Most of the modern AFVs spot better buttoned up. But some of them have equipment that needs reloading by an unbuttoned crew. At least, that's what I gather from prior posts.

Nope. All fully compatible between Windows and Mac in the PBEM world.

There may well be technical hurdles, but BFC wants to keep things historical, and in-house, so they aren't going to address those obstacles, even if they could be overcome.

C21st tanks see out better, across a wider spectrum than WW2 tanks did. Infantry in the WW2 titles is deadly to tanks in the environments where it should be, when it's properly employed; tanks in urban and forested terrain without infantry escort are pretty much dead meat. If you're just coming to CMx2 with the Black Sea release, you have a twofold disconnect to overcome: the way things work in CMx2 vs how they used to work in x1, combined with the massive difference that the modern environment makes. Even transferring x1 to x2 in the same time period throws a lot of experienced players. Javelin ATGM will ruin any MBT's day from ranges far exceeding and with much greater certainty than the capabilities of Shreck or Zook. The proliferation of one-shot MANPAT is way past what you see in WW2. MBTs are a lot better protected against such weapons this decade than they were two decades ago, though. So it might well be that the infantry's role has changed, and nowadays you have to swarm the ADS and reactive armour blocks with myriad sparkling RPG hits, rather than having a single well-flung PanzerWurfMine or serene Rifle Grenade suffice.
Battlefield dynamics change; embrace the fact that the simulation has the fidelity to reflect differences. And it's probably a mistake to assume that the old game was more accurate/true-to-life, either; I expect BFC know a lot more about the period now than they did 15 years ago.

C21st tanks see out better, across a wider spectrum than WW2 tanks did. Infantry in the WW2 titles is deadly to tanks in the environments where it should be, when it's properly employed; tanks in urban and forested terrain without infantry escort are pretty much dead meat. If you're just coming to CMx2 with the Black Sea release, you have a twofold disconnect to overcome: the way things work in CMx2 vs how they used to work in x1, combined with the massive difference that the modern environment makes. Even transferring x1 to x2 in the same time period throws a lot of experienced players. Javelin ATGM will ruin any MBT's day from ranges far exceeding and with much greater certainty than the capabilities of Shreck or Zook. The proliferation of one-shot MANPAT is way past what you see in WW2. MBTs are a lot better protected against such weapons this decade than they were two decades ago, though. So it might well be that the infantry's role has changed, and nowadays you have to swarm the ADS and reactive armour blocks with myriad sparkling RPG hits, rather than having a single well-flung PanzerWurfMine or serene Rifle Grenade suffice.
Battlefield dynamics change; embrace the fact that the simulation has the fidelity to reflect differences. And it's probably a mistake to assume that the old game was more accurate/true-to-life, either; I expect BFC know a lot more about the period now than they did 15 years ago.

UI before graphics, please. Graphics has had one big hug (bump mapping, arrived with v2) and some tweaks for performance since BN, and I'm sure that is an iterative process that will continue.

UI before graphics, please. Graphics has had one big hug (bump mapping, arrived with v2) and some tweaks for performance since BN, and I'm sure that is an iterative process that will continue.

Your best chance of having a save game be compatible across versions is if you save it during the Orders phase.

Tooltips on everything. And a toggle to turn them all off. A user-customisable UI, in colour, element location. The ability to remap all hotkeys. All of them, not just A-z and punctuation. Arrow keys, Del, Home, Pageup. Function keys. Feedback in the hotkey mapping screen to both inform you when you re-use something already assigned, and (if there are any reserved functions left in) to tell you when the key you choose already has something assigned that will remain assigned (I'm looking at you, arrow keys). Scroll bars. Basic editor functions (next/prev word, forward and back arrows, click to place, shift-selects) in text entry boxes. Double-click functionality in the game menus. The option for a confirmation dialog on pushing the BRB, settable for solo and hvh play styles. Not having a "are you sure; changes will be lost" dialog, when you've done nothing (edited no fields, modified no map elements, issued no orders) since you last saved a game or a scenario and try and exit it. If you have made changes since the last save, the option to save when you exit, rather than cancel and go save. Toggles for all the view control modes so you can turn off the ones you hate. Edge scrolling is my particular bugbear, but I'm sure there are people who would rather the screen didn't rotate when they hold their RMB and move the cursor, for example. Unit groups that persist past saves and reloads. The ability to return expendables to vehicles/ammo caches. This is part UI (you'd have to have a "2-sided" inventory management screen) and part record-keeping (there would have to be ways of adding things a unit didn't originally carry). View heights corresponding exactly to the view from the selected unit. Possibly even sub-selectable to the various different views from each of a unit's set of eyeballs. Many of these could be grouped under "basic functionaliy present in all professional software since about Windows 3.11".
And that's just a list off the top of my head.

It has always been the case, and has been averred in every thread where people have asked "What use is the XO". It's even in the manual, IIRC. Lovely graphics illustration to make more people aware though.

Naturally. Murphy always takes his pound of flesh. Had you chosen the forest path, the town would have been a ghost town...

No. You're the first person ever to notice this. Sheesh.
The inventory system is pretty rough-and-ready. You can snag (in RT play) a full squad load of ammo in seconds. You don't have to worry whether that ammo is in belts, saddle magazines, AR magazines or loose boxed rounds. When platoon elements are sharing ammo, it happens perfectly on-demand with no worry about fumbling the pass-off.

By the same token: you have to get the whole squad into a vehicle to resupply; it takes the passage of 2 orders phases to grab a single magazine or box of ammo in WeGo; you can't give ammo back to the store; you have to click Acquire between each grab of a fixed set of options (which sometimes aren't very suitable), rather than putting numbers in boxes for how many rounds of each type you want; you can't share supplies between elements that don't share an immediate HQ; there are no grenades or mortar bombs in "Supply Platoons".

It's what we've got, and we keep asking for something better. BFC don't seem very interested; I can see that optimising loads could be considered not a major part of the game that warrants a large expenditure of programming time, though I don't agree. Maybe one day we'll get a proper inventory system. But Ah amn't holdin' ma breth.

Oh, and the other thing you better get right first time, including in the setup phase is artillery calls. If you decide you don't want it, all you can do is tell the mission to Cease Fire, once you've hit "Confirm". Bail out and Dismount are "make sure you really want to" commands that can't be undone in the general run of play.

No. You're the first person ever to notice this. Sheesh.
The inventory system is pretty rough-and-ready. You can snag (in RT play) a full squad load of ammo in seconds. You don't have to worry whether that ammo is in belts, saddle magazines, AR magazines or loose boxed rounds. When platoon elements are sharing ammo, it happens perfectly on-demand with no worry about fumbling the pass-off.

By the same token: you have to get the whole squad into a vehicle to resupply; it takes the passage of 2 orders phases to grab a single magazine or box of ammo in WeGo; you can't give ammo back to the store; you have to click Acquire between each grab of a fixed set of options (which sometimes aren't very suitable), rather than putting numbers in boxes for how many rounds of each type you want; you can't share supplies between elements that don't share an immediate HQ; there are no grenades or mortar bombs in "Supply Platoons".

It's what we've got, and we keep asking for something better. BFC don't seem very interested; I can see that optimising loads could be considered not a major part of the game that warrants a large expenditure of programming time, though I don't agree. Maybe one day we'll get a proper inventory system. But Ah amn't holdin' ma breth.

Oh, and the other thing you better get right first time, including in the setup phase is artillery calls. If you decide you don't want it, all you can do is tell the mission to Cease Fire, once you've hit "Confirm". Bail out and Dismount are "make sure you really want to" commands that can't be undone in the general run of play.

Another thing that will stymie you is trees in the bocage. Short tree trunks don't show up in "Tree trunks only" mode. I find that a tree in the centre of the AS will prevent a vehicle from getting any LOF through the hedge. Further, bocage on the diagonal is more restrictive of target angle than orthoganally-placed hedgerow.

Another thing that will stymie you is trees in the bocage. Short tree trunks don't show up in "Tree trunks only" mode. I find that a tree in the centre of the AS will prevent a vehicle from getting any LOF through the hedge. Further, bocage on the diagonal is more restrictive of target angle than orthoganally-placed hedgerow.

Yeah, it's Tab, same for the enemy as it is for your forces. Only works if there's a breathing component to what you've clicked on, though. A dismounted but still functional vehicle won't let you Tab to it.

Interesting. I'm really not sure from that what your position on the matter is...
Personally, I think it's an argument for Charles and Phil making a map converter and putting it on the Repository. That way, the value of their new families to people who already own other families is increased: they don't have to wait for someone to make the map available on the Repository, if they fancy rolling their Abrams across their favourite bit of the Normandy countryside (with Ukrainian houses...), they can just roll the converter, plonk some buildings in to replace the mismatches and Robert's your auntie's live-in lover.

Maps, once the game is out, have always been in the public domain, and that's why scenario packs don't sound like they'd make BFC any money, as they lack any way of preventing freeloading. New maps are always very welcome, and would be as valuable a part of the product that BFC sells, to the person buying it, as they have ever been, even if all other Families' maps were potentially only half an hour away from being usable in the new Family. BFC could even batch-run the converter and include all the old maps in the product that introduces the map-converter, with that half-hour's work done on each. That might let them provide fewer new maps in that one product, and possibly future ones without too much aggro from the user base. But "300 new maps" is a bragging point that will sell games to the RT section of the community that's actually had time to play all the existing maps

I think there is a basic assumption built into the model that platoon elements will be operating in relatively close proximity, and will therefore be quickly aware that their bunkhouse mates are getting horribly slaughtered. Sometimes we stretch that model beyond its design parameters. Hopefully, BFC will revise those assumptions as time goes on and they have time to refine the model.

In the WW2 products, teams that start out heavily laden (like gun ammo bearers) can be unable to go faster than Move. But I haven't had a team that uses Acquire lose any movement modes, that I've noticed, even when the Acquire command wouldn't let me take any more bullets or bombs. Though I quite possibly haven't even tried to use Fast with such a team until they've expended some of that load.