Childress

Not to my recollection. The moaning on the forums was incessant. But I believe Battlefront was right in bring cherry picking back into the game. The demand for it was too high.

The problem with 'buying' units is that as time goes on and the process gets subjected to intense cost/benefit analysis by 1000's of players the wheat tends to get separated from the chaff. It becomes common knowledge which ones are under priced or over priced. Achieving perfect fairness is a Sisyphean task for the developers. In CMBB these were Stugs which offered the best perceived value. SMG infantry, iirc, in CMBO. After a while those units were ubiquitous to the point of stupification in every PBEM game and represented a sound argument against the cherry picking concept. But the squeaky wheels got their wish this time around.

You gather the the Assault command exists as a shorthand command for the hectic environment of RT. Or as a simple tool for the AI which doesn't break down its squads. (I think)

Did you turn on AA? It seems to give the game a less saturated, more natural look. But it brought my PC down to a walk from a sprint.

Is there in-game penalty in bringing down buildings? I was playing Barkmann's Corner as les Boches, but was thinking about how the first thing I do in a PBEM would be to collapse all the chateaux with area afire. I'm sure it wasn't uncommon but one guesses there were some inhibitions and/or guidelines present. If not among the beastly Germs, at least for the Allies. Whatever your feelings about the French.

I glimpsed some pix of her in the National Enquirer while standing in line at the market. From a decade old a bikini shot, you'd say she was never a beauty but did exude a good-natured bosomy appeal. A precise physical opposite of Maria. Which, one supposes, was the point.

A formerly dense clump of trees near the end of a rocket barrage:

Three quarters of the random QBs I've fired up have featured rain. And I just experienced a 'Tiny' one where the U.S. side was given four batteries of rocket artillery. The Germans surrendered on Turn 3, their force virtually wiped out. I'm sure BFC will attend to these anomalies.

Are you sure? Some of those trees are pretty beefy. Not like those wispy palms in CMSF.

Agree about the eyesore part. But they seem easy to place, in a strictly linear fashion. Problem is the tranches/foxholes can't be rotated- unless I'm missing something. Maybe in the scenario editor. I recall that BFC faced some kind of programming stumbling block in rendering these.

These stats reflect, imo, continuous shelling along a front over time, not a hot engagement where, one guesses, the bullet lethality percentage goes up and the mortar, mine and shell percentgage declines.

Yes, it is. Apart from the graphical renderings of trenches and foxholes which are bit of an eyesore, imo. I understand there were programming reasons for depicting them above ground, but the game deserves better.

Haha. Love the analogy! Good post.

One cannot have a balanced game, in terms of roughly equal chances to win, in an attack/defend scenario? And size has nothing to do with it. Or do you mean by balanced that each side has the same potential for maneuver? Granted, it happened that on rare occasions precisely equivalent forces met on the battlefield. But neither side KNEW it. They assumed they were in a defensive or offensive posture. That's why 'Meeting Engagement's in Combat Mission play out in such an exceedingly odd way. I found it curious that people will fork over $60 on a combat simulator, spend days debating the penetration values of a 75 versus an 88 or the bogging probabilities of a Matilda then sit down and play such an intrinsically improbable scenario. Not that they can't be fun, of course. I had an opponent in CMAK/CMBB who would only do MEs. At the end he was proposing mirrored maps. 'To be fair'.

Not sure re the realism of QBs in general but many, including, iirc, Steve, find that 'Meeting Engagements' are inherently unrealistic. Equal forces colliding and KNOWING that they're equal may sound cool but it's something not found in nature. Kind of like unicorns. An odd phenomenon: in my days of playing CM1 pbem I recall that there were two non-communicating camps; those who played almost exclusively MEs and those who didn't. MEs have a strong constituency.

Or saturated....

The scenarios have made a quantum leap in quality over the past two years. My problem is impatience. Modern warfare, with its increased lethality, is much more punitive and unforgiving than WW2 battles so a tiny error in placement can ruin your day. It takes a different, maybe even anal-retentive, mind set. An option to advance in a campaign after a defeat might be cool idea but at some expense to the ultimate score. Might be difficult to implement, tho. As far as difficulty goes, I feel that most battles worth depicting in a game result from an error in enemy force assessment or unexpected events. A challenging or evenly matched battle results from error.

I too would love a "follow command" for both vehicles and infantry (preferably both a "follow in column at 1 action spot interval" and "follow in line abreast - left/right") However, I gather from previous threads on this topic that getting units to vary their movement route from a straight "point to point" beeline is not as simple as it sounds programming-wise. Also, I believe that such solutions would be computationally "expensive" -- having each moving unit scanning dynamically for the next road tile or locating its designated "follow me" unit... kind of like a whole new set of LOS checks. Exactly right. I think Battlefront is correct to avoid implementing this desideratum. Too much work for the pay-off. Sure it would be (somewhat) useful but the battle starts, as a rule, when the transports stop and the maneuvering begins. It's not CM:Convoy. Also, with the recent patches, the vehicles do a pretty good job with road pathfinding, IMO.

Anyone notice a difference among the fitness levels? On QUICK, say between 0 and +1, they seem to peter out at exactly the same distance. Also, troops using MOVE maintain their preparedness at 'Rested' eternally (apparently). Maybe this gives them a greater advantage than we realize.

Wrong thread.

If true, that's a positive for the infantry component. What we want are interesting trade-offs and a hierarchy of meaningful choices. Less significant is whether fatigue kicks in realistically at X sppeed, X meters travelled and X degrees centigrade.

Agreed, Wiggum (or is it Chief Wiggum?). This needs to be addressed. Either make QUICK more tiring or FAST, well, faster. A propos of the MOVE command: this one could be useful within the game if a *major* spotting advantage accrued to it. The manual is vague on the subject, mentioning better situational 'awareness'.

And under under fire? And in the desert? And how do you rationalize the fact that in CMSF a squad in FAST mode will arrive at the 400m mark utterly spent and the QUICK guys arrive 3 seconds later as fresh as if they just made a trip to the refrigerador? CM1's movement modes had, IIRC, meaningful, graduated trade-offs. You used each one of them. This represents the kind of smart programming that makes a game engrossing. More so than tracking the trajectory of every single bullet, IMO.

Same here. I question whether the fittest member of this forum could do 400m at a brisk jog in full kit- forget the heavy weapons- and in 115 degree heat without serious repercussions on his intermediate term capabilities.

OK, but in most situations FAST fails the cost/benefit test. You get a (very) short burst of speed off the line compared to QUICK at the expense of *vastly* higher fatigue accrual and loss of situational awareness. Over a distance FAST defaults to QUICK anyway and the troopers cover a roughly equal amount of territory- but the FAST dudes are Exhausted. SLOW is very punitive in terms of fatigue but at least you get STEALTH. You get the feeling that the effects of speed, ambient temperature and weapon load are muted, or nearly non-existent, when using QUICK and the visual differences with FAST, which I picture more as an intense 40 yard dash than a sprint, appear barely perceptible.