rocketman

I remember "Indigenes" as one of the first war movies that I really felt was authentic but those were the days before I was really into the history of WWII.
IIRC, the movie made then French president Mitterand cry and soon after he implemented a law assuring war pensions for soldiers from former colonies which they previously were denied.
Outstanding mod @mjkerner - just tried the "dusty" version and will look at the other ones later on.

Just a wild guess here, but here goes: in the game we can see all enemy tank hits with hit decals, in the war only knocked out tanks left behind could be studied. Not all knocked out tanks were photographed and not all photographs remain to be studied. Perhaps a lot of tanks with gun barrel damage were salvaged and repaired? Are there records of what tank repairs were made, would be interesting in this matter. But perhaps there is a limitation in the engine for the kind of grazing shot a hit straight to the front would be. The incoming shell hits the barrel at a very shallow angle so maybe it doesn't take much for it to skim off the surface and continue. Perhaps the engine detects contact and penetration is calculated making the barrel susceptible to full penetrations?

Just a wild guess here, but here goes: in the game we can see all enemy tank hits with hit decals, in the war only knocked out tanks left behind could be studied. Not all knocked out tanks were photographed and not all photographs remain to be studied. Perhaps a lot of tanks with gun barrel damage were salvaged and repaired? Are there records of what tank repairs were made, would be interesting in this matter. But perhaps there is a limitation in the engine for the kind of grazing shot a hit straight to the front would be. The incoming shell hits the barrel at a very shallow angle so maybe it doesn't take much for it to skim off the surface and continue. Perhaps the engine detects contact and penetration is calculated making the barrel susceptible to full penetrations?

Just a wild guess here, but here goes: in the game we can see all enemy tank hits with hit decals, in the war only knocked out tanks left behind could be studied. Not all knocked out tanks were photographed and not all photographs remain to be studied. Perhaps a lot of tanks with gun barrel damage were salvaged and repaired? Are there records of what tank repairs were made, would be interesting in this matter. But perhaps there is a limitation in the engine for the kind of grazing shot a hit straight to the front would be. The incoming shell hits the barrel at a very shallow angle so maybe it doesn't take much for it to skim off the surface and continue. Perhaps the engine detects contact and penetration is calculated making the barrel susceptible to full penetrations?

I've got permission from BFCElvis to post about something a little to the side of this content.
Fixing the Hedgerow Bug
It's perhaps most prevalent in CMBN given the abundance of hedgerow maps/scenarios but applies across all titles for infantry behind hard cover. You may have noticed my Green troops in this battle have not been running away or into the streets towards the enemy during these firefights with the Soviet infantry.
This whole DAR has been using a version of the F&R beta that includes some tweaks to the TacAI to address infantry bolting from cover when coming under small arms fire. Infantry that come under small arms fire are more likely to seek cover and 'cower' rather than displace, even when pinned/rattled. Infantry are more likely to bolt when under attack from high explosives... (which let's face it makes sense. )
The changes I've noticed:
- It becomes very hard to dislodge infantry already set up in a building or behind a wall. Even when you lose LOS/LOF there's a good chance your opponent is still there. (I've joked it's going to take naval shells to dislodge Veteran troops).
- Getting the jump on the enemy while they are moving / before they are set up and ready to seek cover still causes morale to collapse very quickly. Case in point: like when most of my Pioneer platoon evaporated under SMG fire within 30 seconds.
- Infantry taking persistent casualties will still suffer morale damage over the long term. Like my Volkssturm surrendering after a solid five minutes of constant rifle fire back and forth.
- Expect longer drawn out firefights in urban and hedgerow maps. That also means watching those ammo counters more closely.
- High explosive and flame options just became a lot more valuable in urban combat. Close quarter AVRE or M12 GMC anyone?
 
Still being tested and subject to change but there are positive signs among the beta testers so far.
All for now.

I have long wanted to make a menu screen mod for FI but have lacked a reasonably good colorized photo to do one from. Finally found one that I felt sums up the Italian campaign pretty much and added medals for the Italian/NA/Victory in Italy campaign for various Allied countries.
For now it can be downloaded from the link below, but could @Bootie please add it to CMMODS

https://www.dropbox.com/s/l7m8z3e4gj78qcj/splash background.bmp?dl=0

I have witnessed several times how spotting in CM can be a bit off what one could expect. But most of the time there is some kind of rationale for what occurs, like terrain, trees, buildings etc that makes it understandable, given that it is a game after all. But this one is just too much. Granted the scenario is in foggy/rain conditions but still.
I had a HQ with a panzerfaust waiting behind a building for a Stuart to pass it, knowing it was around for several turns and having sound contact with it. Finally the Stuart moved forward at a slow pace at a distance of about 20 m and yet my HQ just sat there, not even moving around to spot something they at least must have heard. But no. The Stuart slowly turned toward my men and gradually swung its turret around. This whole process took about 25 sec in which my guys just sat there. Finally, they pulled out their panzerfaust and at that exact moment got gunned down. It was as if the Stuart spotted them only when they became an apparent threat.

View from the Stuart.

My blind and deaf men. Note that they are not rattled. Veteran....

I will hang on to a save if anyone wants to have a peek at it.

And yet, in the same battle, infantry spot infantry that hasn't fired at distances of +200 m. So if the fog in this battle is as bad as not spotting that Stuart, no fighting would have taken place at all so far. And it would be an unplayable and boring scenario. It isn't. Quite fun, despite this oddity.

That there is pretty much the wet dream of this entire community. Who knows, maybe they are secretly working on an entirely new engine all along and one day we will be pleasantly surprised.

And by that time, wasn't Caen more or less one big pile of rubble anyway?

Too me they look too rounded and not much like I imagine a brick wall crumbling would look like. Maybe still a beta texture?

Now you can shoot the messenger and eat him or her! 

I follow a gamers Youtube channel called Gameranx and they have 5.7 million subscribers. They put up a top 10 most historically accurate games list and it was pretty much the usual suspects, big games and so on. As I was watching it I was cursing to myself why these channels never do wargames in a serious fashion, but guess what? Wait for it ....
... and yeah, 5.7 million people might get exposed to a REAL game series 😃

Steve, you might already know this if you study Sweden closely but others might not. One reason for our approach to the pandemic is not only by design, but one of necessity. Freedom of moving around may not be restricted in peacetime by law which is part of our constitution. So a declaration of a state of emergency would still not result in people being arrested for violating it. So they use strong recommendations in the hope that people will follow them. Most do. Some don't. And sure, mistakes have been made, primarily a failure to protect nursing homes and long term care facilities. In a way I think it is almost futile to compare countries in the search for "who has handled the crisis the best" or "which strategy works best". I one wants to isolate that factor/variable, there are a myriad of other factors/variables that differentiate countries from each other, and that are dynamic over time - that comparisons are never on equal terms. Furthermore, looking at daily new cases is simply a factor of how much testing is done. We lag behind and has so far mostly tested within the health care sector. In my mind the best way to measure what is going on is to compare number of daily deaths with the seasonal average, like in the WaPo article linked above in an earlier post. In Sweden the public number of deaths are (as far as possible) both in-hospital and out of hospital deaths, something many countries/regions don't. We try to validate the estimated number of Covid-19 related deaths in this fashion and it is pretty accurate. But in the end, the final evaluation of how countries have dealt with this will probably have to wait for a couple of years. And even as tragic as number of deaths are, there a many adverse effects of the pandemic that will take a heavy toll on us all. My biggest fear now is that health care workers can't go on working in these conditions much longer and start to burn out, get depressed, suffer PTSD and such. And when the health care system fails I sure hope there is a vaccine to save us.

Here is an interesting article discussing if the identified mutations to the virus make up new strains or not and if they have different characteristics when it comes to transmission rate, lethality etc.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/05/coronavirus-strains-transmissible/611239/
 

Steve, you might already know this if you study Sweden closely but others might not. One reason for our approach to the pandemic is not only by design, but one of necessity. Freedom of moving around may not be restricted in peacetime by law which is part of our constitution. So a declaration of a state of emergency would still not result in people being arrested for violating it. So they use strong recommendations in the hope that people will follow them. Most do. Some don't. And sure, mistakes have been made, primarily a failure to protect nursing homes and long term care facilities. In a way I think it is almost futile to compare countries in the search for "who has handled the crisis the best" or "which strategy works best". I one wants to isolate that factor/variable, there are a myriad of other factors/variables that differentiate countries from each other, and that are dynamic over time - that comparisons are never on equal terms. Furthermore, looking at daily new cases is simply a factor of how much testing is done. We lag behind and has so far mostly tested within the health care sector. In my mind the best way to measure what is going on is to compare number of daily deaths with the seasonal average, like in the WaPo article linked above in an earlier post. In Sweden the public number of deaths are (as far as possible) both in-hospital and out of hospital deaths, something many countries/regions don't. We try to validate the estimated number of Covid-19 related deaths in this fashion and it is pretty accurate. But in the end, the final evaluation of how countries have dealt with this will probably have to wait for a couple of years. And even as tragic as number of deaths are, there a many adverse effects of the pandemic that will take a heavy toll on us all. My biggest fear now is that health care workers can't go on working in these conditions much longer and start to burn out, get depressed, suffer PTSD and such. And when the health care system fails I sure hope there is a vaccine to save us.

I follow a gamers Youtube channel called Gameranx and they have 5.7 million subscribers. They put up a top 10 most historically accurate games list and it was pretty much the usual suspects, big games and so on. As I was watching it I was cursing to myself why these channels never do wargames in a serious fashion, but guess what? Wait for it ....
... and yeah, 5.7 million people might get exposed to a REAL game series 😃

I follow a gamers Youtube channel called Gameranx and they have 5.7 million subscribers. They put up a top 10 most historically accurate games list and it was pretty much the usual suspects, big games and so on. As I was watching it I was cursing to myself why these channels never do wargames in a serious fashion, but guess what? Wait for it ....
... and yeah, 5.7 million people might get exposed to a REAL game series 😃

I follow a gamers Youtube channel called Gameranx and they have 5.7 million subscribers. They put up a top 10 most historically accurate games list and it was pretty much the usual suspects, big games and so on. As I was watching it I was cursing to myself why these channels never do wargames in a serious fashion, but guess what? Wait for it ....
... and yeah, 5.7 million people might get exposed to a REAL game series 😃

The closest I have is II Batallion from Fallschirmjäger-Regiment 9 commanded by Major Siegfried Taubert. Maybe the Stoumont battle in the Peiper campaign can provide some answers too?

I follow a gamers Youtube channel called Gameranx and they have 5.7 million subscribers. They put up a top 10 most historically accurate games list and it was pretty much the usual suspects, big games and so on. As I was watching it I was cursing to myself why these channels never do wargames in a serious fashion, but guess what? Wait for it ....
... and yeah, 5.7 million people might get exposed to a REAL game series 😃

I follow a gamers Youtube channel called Gameranx and they have 5.7 million subscribers. They put up a top 10 most historically accurate games list and it was pretty much the usual suspects, big games and so on. As I was watching it I was cursing to myself why these channels never do wargames in a serious fashion, but guess what? Wait for it ....
... and yeah, 5.7 million people might get exposed to a REAL game series 😃

I follow a gamers Youtube channel called Gameranx and they have 5.7 million subscribers. They put up a top 10 most historically accurate games list and it was pretty much the usual suspects, big games and so on. As I was watching it I was cursing to myself why these channels never do wargames in a serious fashion, but guess what? Wait for it ....
... and yeah, 5.7 million people might get exposed to a REAL game series 😃

I follow a gamers Youtube channel called Gameranx and they have 5.7 million subscribers. They put up a top 10 most historically accurate games list and it was pretty much the usual suspects, big games and so on. As I was watching it I was cursing to myself why these channels never do wargames in a serious fashion, but guess what? Wait for it ....
... and yeah, 5.7 million people might get exposed to a REAL game series 😃