Ryujin

I'd say it seems tanks are generally much more powerful relative to infantry than in modern combat. With infantry AT being basically limited to spitting distance outside of big heavy AT guns, infantry will be much, much more vulnerable to AFVs, especially on the offensive. In modern combat infantry can be extremely dangerous to tanks with stuff like Panzerfaust-3s, RPG-29s, or even javelins at the squad/platoon level (which are a danger to most MBTs head on, at respectable ranges). Bocage or urban terrain offers the infantry some chances to get in close, but outside of that getting within 50m of a tank sounds pretty tricky. As for the MG42 being a liability, I can certainly see that if you're used to modern squads with LMGs and assault rifles that quick to use and everyone has one. In modern combat, usually your volume of rifle fire and LMGs, not the bigger MGs, was both your suppressive fire and your run and gun element. The MMGs were just extras for those longer range targets using the tripod or to cover something to free up a rifle squad. With WW2 squads having a much poorer selection of weapons (bolt action rifles!), it'll certainly shift the tactics for the Germans, especially since your volume of fire usually hinges on one guy and him not getting shot or cowering. So if your squad can't get that MG42 into action, you're in trouble, and it is a risk from that perspective. So you don't have the flexibility of a modern squad. I assume there are squads that do fill the "run 'n gun" attack role for the Germans? More SMGs and such? Or would you usually have to make do with bolt action rifles and MMGs?

I think it needs less reliance on keys, flight sim levels of button mapping are just not intuitive. Perhaps a radial menu instead of the space bar list and more context sensitive commands. i.e. holding down the mouse after clicking somewhere would give you a radial menu. click and hold on ground and the radial menu has all the movement options. click and hold on a enemy unit and it's target commands click and hold on your selected unit (or when selecting it) and you get administrative/special. If you hit T for target and click drag on the ground, it would give you a target arc. Stuff like that could avoid having to memorize what every button on the keyboard does and instead just focus on the commands you need in that context.

The AI is way ahead of you

AI did nothing suicidal? You're talking about AAR2? Where the German attack consisted of what looked like a pair of platoon+ sized human waves across open ground? It was a massacre despite 40% advantage in numbers, as it should be. They eventually got fire superiority, but for much of the battle was a shooting gallery for the Americans until the Germans over ran them due to having more than enough bullet sponges and MG42s to throw at them. For human waves, I'd say 32% is reasonable enough.

I'd just like to see proper mine clearing/laying on a small scale (even just surface laid mines). No more finding mines only by stepping on them please. The ability to use the blast command on anything would be handy too (open ground to make cover, barbed wire, tank obstacles, bridges, etc). Outside of demolition/mines, it seems anything else would be used too little and take too long. So engineers will probably still feel oddly useless like recon troops. For bridges I'd imagine some sort of bridge laying engineering vehicle would make more sense in the CM scale that the dismounted engineers making anything. Not sure how common anything like that was in ww2 though.

Maybe make any sort of tactical map an option? Or even a hot key to quickly bring it up full screen? I could see it being worth that effort. Even for a large WEGO scenario to save some time spent checking up on every unit. And yeah, you're right, I'm a Steel Beasts Pro PE owner myself, so that was just a odd turn of phrase by me, I was thinking about SB1 at the time for some reason or other.

Keep in mind as mentioned before, CM models engagements where both sides are willing to put up a serious fight. In many cases the situation didn't warrant an all out slugfest for one side or the other and they'd pull back, which is why historical numbers would probably be pretty low compared to what you see in CM. It also depends on how you take "fight effectively". They may keep fighting after a few causalities, but with poorly aimed fire. However, the key point is it's probably going to be a lot higher than 15% in most cases given the nature of CM. Easily 60% before they break I'd think.

Ok, so you mean the C2 doesn't effect the player, only which units can put messages in the bar. Sorry if I misread that first post, a bit obvious in hind sight. In which case it would be handy if messages could be passed up, i.e. any unit without a radio but in C2 to a unit that does have one.

Yeah, that was a great feature in steel beasts when playing it as an RTS. Let you keep track of the battle without having to carefully watch every unit to see if their status changed. Had voiced audio too so you didn't have to watch the message box. Would be very handy for real time players. Though if you factor in C2... just what unit is the player? In my opinion you seem to play every leader, so in theory C2 limits on these messages would be a bit odd. Or least make it as an option separate from difficulty for people who want to try and play from just the company commanders perspective or whatever.

A lot of people seem to think recon involves driving towards the enemy until someone explodes. While, yes, that works in a fashion, it's not going to make you too popular with what's left of your recon element. First thing to keep in mind is recon vehicles aren't really that effective within the scope of CMSF battles (their job was done long before the battle started). They got you that info that the enemy is just on the other side of this village or whatever (not to mention some like the M707 at least feel undermodeled). The maps are simply way too small to use recon vehicles properly. What you have in CMSF will be almost always dismounted up close recon and probing the enemy position. Lots of crawling and holding in position observing. Takes a lot of time and if everything goes right, recon should not be causing you to take casualties. However, with the very short time limits in scenarios, especially for real time players, you have to do recon sparingly and pick what you take time to recon carefully. The rest can be a mix of area/arty fire on suspected positions and having your infantry moving up looking to take out AT. Your tanks can still support your infantry by doing very fast pop up attacks on spotted targets. It becomes a very delicate rock, paper, scissors, situation where your infantry move up hitting AT, avoiding other threats and your AFVs pop up hitting other threats, avoiding AT. Then throw in loads of area fire on anything that looks at you funny. At least that's how I do it.

4 rounds in 30 seconds makes sense for rapid fire, especially with the small 105mm. A good loader on the M1 Abrams is supposed to be able to load a 120mm every 6 seconds for rapid fire (granted, the M1 is a probably bit more ergonomic for the loader, but still those 120mm are heavy). So I can believe a good Sherman loader could do a 105 every 7.5 secs.

Oh dear! They'd better go back and change Combat Mission: Normandy before it ships! God forbid they call it Combat Mission: Normandy without including every inch of Normandy! I'd hate to see them slight the contributions of all the square inches not modeled! False advertising I say! Seriously, this a non-issue. They called it Commonwealth because, well, it's got mostly Commonwealth stuff in it. Or countries that may have used Commonwealth equipment. It's Commonwealth themed. It in no way implies all of the Commonwealth is in it.

I'd bet a ton could be done to improve the look without adding much performance overhead. However with this being a proprietary engine from a small team aiming at lower end PCs (i.e. no support for multicores and such), any new functionality has to be added in and that sort of thing is pretty tricky. It then has to be optimized and tweaked (and performance is already a bit of an issue). To be honest many other games run bigger environments with more detail and more stuff than CMSF and look better. They're also made by big companies with a highly tuned engines built for high end PCs. It's not a trade off of scale or quantity in the case of CMBN/CMSF, but of development priorities and resources as far as I can tell. These companies have teams of programmers and artists several times the size of battlefront that just do graphics. Your just not going to see the same thing in CM unless that was the only aspect they worked on. With a big budget and team, I'm sure you could make CM:N look as good as Company of Heroes and probably run better than it does now. Given the team size I'm very impressed with what they have as a homemade engine. I have enough trouble making crappy graphics for school projects .

One question in general, do you actually get a discount for buying things in their proper formations (and then chopping off any bits you don't want) vs cherry picking? i.e. would a company of bazookas and snipers in halftracks be noticeably more expensive (in rarity or normal points?) for being complete TOE heresy vs a "proper" mechanized company? Is there any downside to rampantly cherry picking your force out of individual units vs just adding a bit to an existing formation?

I went back and looked at it, I didn't catch the little hit text on the M10! Never mind then .

Hahaha... hate to rain on your parade (or hopefully sarcasm), but there are no hit texts, those were added to the pictures later. Notice how it says "tank one" in the same font. Just descriptions from the AAR.

I'll second that accuracy isn't effected from what I've seen. The primary reason I use less guns/lighter barrage is for suppressing fire. This can be pretty handy with light mortars and such (or even bigger guns on occasion). For example 60mm won't do much to guys in good positions or buildings... but it will make a lot of loud noises and keep their heads down. In a recent scenario I used long duration, but light, 60mm fire on a couple of buildings to supplement my limited direct fire suppression at the time. It kept their heads down and let me maneuver in to assault.

Should be the same as CMSF. 1. As long as something isn't completely destroyed or knocked out and non panicked crew can get back in like CMSF from what I understand (it is the same engine and such). If an AT gun is simulated as a vehicle (which it probably is), they should be able to reman it. 2. You can't tunnel under the map with 75mm shells, but they should cause craters and blow up very close flavor objects like in CMSF, that's how it looked in the previews and such. Just about everything should be pretty similar to CMSF, it's not a new engine. Just polished up a bit.

Been playing through, excellent scenario and map! Nice change from the usual urban combat in CMSF.

To do this properly, you really need a topographical map (so you can give orders to location's you can't see), be locked to your CO only, and to play real time with first person controls (floating camera still gives you an advantage as you won't be prone hugging the dirt under fire with foliage getting in the way). You can do this in games like steel beasts/arma (especially if you have enough human players) and it's a whole other experience from CM. Notably you'll get a better sense of fog of war from ground level as having to hit the dirt/button up under fire can make it really hard to spot anything. As if it isn't hard enough to start with. Personally I don't think CM is the game to do this style of gameplay justice without completely rebuilding it from the ground up.

I think It may have been patched a bit. I've been using 60mm's to clean up rooftops in "preserve" objectives and it seems to be reasonably effective and this is the notoriously weak 60mm. I just make sure it's at least a heavy-short fire mission so it gets some decent saturation. I haven't noticed to many problems with arty vs buildings, but I think I tend to be a bit more liberal in the number of rounds per building to ensure it's pretty well flattened.

I had to use paypal to avoid some anti-fraud hiccups, even though I had entered 100% correct info. Was pretty straight forward and no registration like mentioned. Should fix it without any issues.

More like toasting of own forces, but CMSF was pretty easy on the backblast (since TACAI and abstracted building layout couldn't really handle it), so I imagine it'll be the same as CMSF, no effect.

Most weapons have their own sounds, only a handful shared sounds. So you can swap in your own sounds. Only issue was the playback quality wasn't the greatest (when I say put in a sound file with a sharp rifle crack, it tends to be a bit duller in CMSF). Not too bad though, stuff still sounds decent.

Sounds good! (Don't worry, I forget about and even recode stuff all the time. I document stuff, I just never read it )