Ryujin

About the time limits, it'd be nice if there was a "time objective" or time modifier to certain objectives. So in this way you could make elements time sensitive without the battle ending because you ran out of time 10 minutes away from capturing your objective (which seem kind of silly, completely failing because you were a little late). The scenario designer can then say that the objective should be captured in 50 minutes (for max points) with you having until 90 minutes before you lose all points for the time objective (as they tick down every minute after the target time), while keeping the scenario at 2 hours or such. It also let the designer appropriately weight the value of taking an objective on time and how quickly the objective value will lose points for every minute past the target time. So you can have a pretty hard deadline or a more forgiving "sooner is better" objective.

with most of the FIST-Vs, spotting rounds are optional, you can usual call "emergency" and get good first round fire for effect.

to be clear, do you hear him radio for fire for effect every turn? Or did he call fire for effect once and then spotting rounds kept falling for several turns? Light is a very low rate of fire. If it's only one or two tubes firing it can look like spotting rounds. That may be what your seeing if he only called FFE once. You can also check in the status of the guns to see if they're spotting or firing for effect.

I'm sure you can hit a 200m target with a SMG, just that it wouldn't be very effective. Your talking about a bullet drop of multiple feet, plenty of wind drift, and steep arc. At 200m it'd be a pain to adjust for the drop in combat, not sitting on the range setting up for a known distance target. The sights on most SMGs are not going to help either. So I'd say the usually quoted effective ranges make sense. Getting pistol rounds past 100m is just not that effective. Some quick internet calculating ( http://www.handloads.org/calc/index.html ) says: M1 Thompson 230 grain .45 @935 fps 100 yards: Drop = 21.95 inches / Wind drift @10mph = 3.11in 200 yards: Drop = 91.7 in / Wind drift @10mph = 10.87 in (big and slow, 7 feet of drop at 200y. I'd bet you probably wouldn't be able to see the target with the nonadjustable sights pointed so high up) MP-40 124 grain .355 @1,247fps 100 yards: Drop = 13.72 in / Wind drift @10mph = 5.47 in (not too bad at 100y) 200 yards: Drop = 61.14 in / Wind drift @10mph = 18.34 in (bit faster, but still 5 feet of drop at 200)

I think it can be rested on windows, walls, bocage, etc. The recoil doesn't seem much different between firing from resting on an object and firing prone with the bipod. Where as the few times I've seen MGs truly shoulder fired, seemed they were anti-aircraft guns.

Manner of disembarking doesn't matter. What matters is the state of the vehicle and the crew. They won't mount a destroyed vehicle as mentioned and they as long as they aren't panicked, you can get them back in. Also worth noting, with complex vehicles like tanks, crews can only remount their own vehicles.

If I recall correctly, radios don't work when a unit is moving (last time I checked was in CMSF though). However, the setup time when they stop again should be very, very short. If they weren't moving or panicked and no one important to calling in fire were casualties, then it sounds like a bug of some sort, as the FO/BN commander should have access to everything.

By marking, I believe the OP is talking about the engineer only command that neutralizes the mine fields. While you will get a red sign when you encounter a minefield, it isn't "marked", just known. When you mark a minefield, the sign will go from red to yellow to green, showing the approximate amount of mines that are marked in that field, green being pretty much safe to cross. Something that you may find useful when trying to order distant engineers to mark mines, is that you can give a movement order near the mines, then the mark mines order off that waypoint.

I did some more messing around and even the regular snipers can score 700m hits, often within the first 2 or 3 shots (I used squads walking towards the sniper). A few times he'd even get first round 700m hits. The crack/elite snipers are better, but even a regular sniper can often put a round somewhere on an standing guy at that range. Test map was just 800m of empty with a sniper on one end and a couple walking squads on the other. I also noticed the cowering guys got a lot of abstracted cover, saw a few rounds go through them without doing damage. I haven't noticed anything that seemed off yet, except maybe the snipers being too eager to take low probability of hit shots.

Marksmen/snipers get no accuracy bonus over regular riflemen (I'd assume there is some spotting bonus or such inherent in having the scoped rifle). Experience level makes a huge difference. Some green or conscript guy with a scoped rifle is worse than a veteran guy with a regular rifle. If you can't shoot straight in the first place, throwing a scope on the rifle won't do much. If you want better accuracy, you'll need to bump up the skill level and get an actually trained marksman, not some guy with a scope. I did a test with a crack sniper, he spotted an enemy HQ and rifle squad advancing towards him at 260m (just the test range I picked, might try it farther sometime), dropped a guy in the squad with the first shot, then the platoon leader with a pretty quick follow up shot. Once they went to ground and eventually tried to return fire it took a lot more shots for him to inflict casualties, but he got them pretty well pinned and started slowly picking them off in the open. In the few times I ran this, the first shot accuracy on exposed targets was impressive (for CMN at 260m), as was his ability to regularly pick out the platoon leader, usually he was one of the first to get hit (he'd also often hit the MG42 gunner first). So for best results: -High experience level -Not suppressed -Element of surprise (ideally standing/kneeling targets, not guys hiding)

I don't think anyone is asking for under fire track repair (at least I'm not). What about not under fire track repair?

On the other hand, "no track repair under any circumstances" is a bit too simplistic for me. The game has a very detailed armor model and the tracks are displayed as a separate sub system and you'll notice that the hit messages on tanks are detailed enough to distinguish between wheels and tracks. It appears that they are a quite separate component. In addition I'm sure a "totally wrecked" state could be added to the tracks, but in most cases I doubt the damage would be that severe. I'd geusstimate that in most cases it'd be repairable within the scope of a CM scenario, short of some unusually major damage. It'd be odd to throw the option completely out the window solely on what seem to be outlier situations which could probably be addressed. It seems more likely it could be repaired than not.

You know,... track damage is separate from engine damage in game. While it will show immobilized, if you look at the subsystem page for a vehicle, it will tell you if it's from track or the engine being totaled. All I'm asking for is mending tracks. Not rebuilding or fixing the engine, not pulling tigers out of the mud over 3 hours. Just the tracks, sheesh .

As far as dragging vehicles out of thick mud, that may be be beyond CMN's scope, unless different weight classes and degrees of "stuck-ness" were modeled on how muddy the ground is. Probably too much micromanagement and such. However, I think being able to repair tracks would be doable. Under fire is the key phrase, often you can end up with tanks not under fire, but with a thrown/damaged track and an hour to fix them while they're sitting in a pretty safe spot. If the dismounted crew came under any fire, the process could of course stop.

In addition they also have more organic goodies to the rifle squads/platoons. 2x Thompsons and a light .30 cal instead of a BAR in the rifle squads and a 60mm mortar organic to each platoon. But the platoons are smaller and they lack any heavier weapons in the company. They're handy in up close bocage combat with the extra automatic firepower and breaching charges. Glider infantry are pretty close to the regular infantry on the other hand.

Their effectiveness varies widely with the unit experience level/suppression, but mostly you just let them do their thing, putting down a little more accurate fire as part of an overwatch team. If you have an above average skill (like veteran) and unsuppressed team, they seem like they can be pretty accurate. In that case give the team with marksman the longest sector to cover or use them for harassing fire/engaging guys in cover. Since sniper's don't get any special bonuses, a marksman and sniper of the same skill level should be about the same accuracy wise (to provide some frame of reference if you've used the snipers).

Currently BFC do not support editing code/models. The .mdr/.mds is a pretty non-standard format too, most likely you'd need to write your own plugin/converter to open any of those. Seems like an inhouse BFC format or something very obscure, I've never seen that format before. Most likely they are pretty standard UV mapped models, I'd be amazed if it had any oddities like the .ini mentioned above. If you know what you're doing, you may have some luck with a hex editor and hunting through the German soldier model for a relevant string doing the call for the offending model and hope the calls are separate for the different spots on the model. Then redirect it to a duplicate empty/transparent model. That is of course if BFC wrote the relevant bits it in such a way that you can achieve what you want only by manipulating strings. So the hex editing thing may or (more likely) may not work.

BF never added canister to CMSF and I'd bet it's low on the list for CMN, mostly because all those pellets need to be tracked with ballistics. It'll put out 122 simultaneous physics objects per shot, which is probably more than the number of rounds in the air at any one time in many CMN fire fights. A platoon firing these is going to be pretty heavy and i don't think this area is super optimized, the GAU-8 on the A-10 in CMSF could slow some weaker PCs if I remember correctly.

I was fiddling about trying to get my engineers to chuck a satchel charge onto a concrete bunker and i tried "blast" just for kicks. And it actually blasted the bunker! Blast command behind bunker = ka-blamo, didn't know you could do that... maybe I missed something and it changed since CMSF. Does it work on anything else?

Doing drive-bys in halftracks. I hadn't expected any Germans there as it said "meeting engagement" and thought I'd be clever and rush in. The result was complete chaos with halftracks, German trucks, and infantry running every which way as my guys drove head-first into a motorized platoon. Amazingly, the super aggressive use of the halftracks worked extremely well (granted, AT was sparse and I was fighting AI), especially when they had and supporting base of fire. Within 17 minutes the entire German force surrendered.

They don't, because they AI is not a good judge of context. The AI would read the situation wrong a lot and players would be left cursing as their AI refused sensible orders. Not to mention it would have to be able to recognize desperate or unusual situations too. The TACAI just can't read the overall situation that well and so it isn't trusted with anything beyond small scale things like fleeing to cover or such and even then you can get odd results (I had a tank "retreat" 100m down the main road into an enemy town after taking contact on a flank). But it's excusable in those situations as the unit is considered panicked, so some occasional crazyness is ok.

At very least it would be nice if they would at least pick up personal weapons from downed friendlies if very low or out of ammo (i think they just pick up the ammo/major weapon systems atm). In the band of brothers scenario I had a similar issue where I had a guy running around with an empty thompson and a load of ammo for a M1, but he wouldn't pick em up when doing buddy aid. Yelling at your guys under fire to pick up the German guns is bad enough, but having M1s laying at their feet is just too much . So at least friendly guns please! I don't see where there would be any issue if they were out of ammo. You could have them sling their original weapon like they do when picking up other weapons and switch back when they get the proper ammo (so you'd get your SMGs back if you could find .45).

Clearly Airborne infantry....

I think fanatical units also need more serious wounds to become incapacitated, as opposed to unmotivated troops who stub their toe and call it a day. It seemed to be that way in CMSF where fanatical insurgents would still be alive and fighting even when the building was collapsing around them and just have "yellow" wounds. I had some keeping fighting through enough small arms/.50 fire that the building fell apart just from the 20 minutes of sustained fire and the survivors just withdrew to another part of the modular building and kept putting up a fight. I don't know if it's really realistic for ww2, but just cranking the motivation and not the skill, can make for some cheaper good defenders. Not particularly skilled, but they'll hold their ground through just about anything and are a serious pain to suppress/dislodge with anything other than ridiculous amounts of high explosives.

It seems the best thing is to mix AP mines and wire if you want to seal off an area. Mines can plug the gaps in the wire, like by buildings. Expensive though.