Paper Tiger

Yup. That would do it for sure. Just devise, add and test code that will do all that. Now, how are you going to convince Charles that this is more important than all the other jobs on his to do list?

Absolutely. But that's beyond all of our control. Let's just say that he's a very, very busy man at the moment.

All that's really required for the Bagration title is the Russian kit as the German kit has already been done, at least up until late 1944. I'd expect the Bagration title to cover the fighting up until about September with the modules taking it further to the end of the war. With the 1943 German kit making an appearance in CMFI you might argue that work is also ongoing on the 1943 East title title as well.

Considering that people are still waiting for the Barbed Wire fix to make its appearance for the CMBN module, I can understand why folks would be a bit disappointed that something didn't get fixed in the first patch. It might be months before there is a second CMFI patch and so I understand your frustration. With regards to the MG issue, I don't think that there is a quick fix for this. It will require the way MGs currently fire at infantry targets to be overhauled and that will mean a LOT of time coding and even more time testing the changes. MGs and other small arms don't go <boom> and so don't cause suppression unless the bullets actually hit someone. Explosions on the other hand have been coded into the game to have an area effect and will suppress any unit, friend or foe alike based on the size of the blast and the unit's proximity to the blast.

This is probably one of the reasons why this behaviour got missed for so long. We just don't do it when we play because we know that it's wrong. But now we can see that charging a MG frontally is one of the best things you can do because it will fire most of its rounds somewhere else, at least when the ranges are 300m+. Charging laterally in front of MG team gets your guys killed a whole lot faster though.

Agreed. However, it would be foolish of me to speculate that it might come in time for Arnhem . TBH, I'd say the focus is more likely to be on getting Arnhem finished than on addressing the existing issues with urban combat so I'm not going to hold my breath. Version 3 sounds more realistic to me too.

I think the Tac AI will get tweaked at some point in the future so that it is better able to handle city fighting. There hasn't been much of it in the WW2 CMx2 titles so far but I expect there will be a greater need for improved behaviour for the East Front title which will necessarily cover the Battle for Berlin. So there's hope. But I doubt you'll see any changes for a while yet

Not shocking at all. I think they've got the mortars modelled accurately enough. What is out of kilter is the way the TacAI moves its units and reacts to mortar/artillery fire. I think some fudging of the lethality of mortars is required to offset the Tac AI's inability to react appropriately. This has already been done for tanks firing on the move. Because the Tac AI can't perform short halt -fire, we have overly accurate firing while on the move to simulate the short halt. I'd be happy if mortars or artillery suppressed more but killed less. More suppression and reduced lethality. Maybe even link lethality to the target unit's experience. The higher the experience the greater and more rapid the suppression will be while Green and Conscripts get killed more frequently. I doubt that this will happen though.

More like a loaf of truth CMFI is the newest title so naturally it's going to get fixed up first.

There's no doubt that creating content with the CMx2 scenario editor is more work than with the old CMx1 one but I don't believe that that is the reason why you're seeing so little third party content being generated. Neither do I think that it's a case of over-ambition on the designers' part. I think it's because this community has raised the bar too high and has become far too critical in a negative, and sometimes even nasty way. Either that or new work is ignored and thedesigner gets no feedback. You guys need to encourage and nurture new talent by providing positive encouragement and feedback. You're not paying for their work so there's no reason to be negative.

To the best of my knowledge, I am the only Beta Tester who plays the game exclusively against an AI opponent.

Badger73 Your AAR is a perfect example of what most of us would like to see. Bravo. Hopefully others will follow your lead and we'll inspire folks to produce more stuff for the Repository.

The dartboard will do. And it would probably be therapeutic for you too:D You don't have to be a grog to post your experiences playing a mission. Just what happened is plenty. Feedback can be posted in an existing thread either here or in the scenario and mods board. Some folks start up a thread when they post something at the Repository just for this. And while it's very nice to get feedback on the content that shipped with the disk, I'm more concerned about providing feedback to the Repository posters.

So you've just downloaded somebody's work from the Repository, fired it up and played it through. Now what are you going to do? For most of you, the answer to that question seems to be 'nothing'. For you guys, I have nothing to say. However, there may be others who want to provide feedback but don't feel competent enough to say anything. Or you thought that the scenario played out fine and you don't have any recommendations to improve it. For you guys, here are a few pointers. First, is the mission you're playing under development? Still a work in progress? If it is, the designer is really looking for critical feedback on his mission. He needs to know what improvements you'd recommend and he'd appreciate all the help he can get. This is beta-testing a mission and the feedback can be quite negative when necessary as it helps the designer to improve. However, quite a few of us upload missions to the Repository that are already playtested. We're not nearly so interested in critical feedback as we are (well, me at least) in hearing what you did during the mission. I'd like to read an AAR of your experience. What was your plan? What happened? What was the outcome? Things like that really matter. Screenshots are a bonus but are not necessary. Just a few lines of text are enough to keep me happy. Here is an example of what I'd like to see. 'At set-up I noticed that there was a forest on the right between me and the objective and large open spaces to the left. Figuring that the enemy would have some units in that forest I decided to plaster it with my artillery at the start of the mission. The entire company was positioned to attack the forest as soon as the barrage lifted. As soon as the fire mission was in full swing I gave my forces the order to advance. Upon entering the forest, I discovered that there had been no enemy units in the forest and that enemy artillery was now zeroing in on my boys positioned there. That resulted in a lot of casualties and I was unable to get my force into sufficient order to perform the assault on the objective.' Reading that, I would know that you got AI plan 3 (the abandoned forest set-up) with the TRPS in the forest. That one's a trap. :cool: I get to know that my trap worked. Then the next time you play the mission you find that the enemy does indeed occupy that forest at the start of the mission and your artillery barrage produced results, etc. Or that you neglected to bombard it at the start of the mission and got pummelled, etc. So, next time you play something, why not take a few minutes just to type up your experience with it to keep the community's most valuable asset, the content designers (missions or modders), happy? Doing so would result in more content coming your way as well as a few interesting discussions to boot. It's just Win all across the board. Nobody loses. Think about it. Being polite might actually get you more free content to play

Just noticed this. Nice to finally get feedback of sorts on this work. Thank you very much and I hope you're enjoying your games on them. Would you consider turning trees 'on' in the game for your screenshots? It would make the maps look a bit more interesting

To the best of my knowledge, it doesn't. There's a graphical circle of illumination for sure but units within that circle don't seem to get spotted any faster. However, I honestly can't say with certainty as I rarely play missions at night because there are no starshells. With CMSF, it wasn't really an issue as the Coalition forces were well stocked with nighttime vision goggles, etc.

I doubt that snow terrain is the real delay for winter but the lack of nighttime illumination and fire. I can't see any way that BFC can release a WW2 winter game without both of those features. The nights are very long in NWE in winter and there will have to be starshells and having burning wrecks illuminate units in close proximity. That's bound to be a huge amount of coding work, thus the reason why we're still stuck comfortably, or not, in the summer season and will be for quite some time to come. I suspect that East Front will kick off with a summer module but may sport fire as a new feature. I think nighttime illumination is much further off though, perhaps as late as 2014.

His upload count is presently at 34 which includes mods as well as scenarios. That's quite an output for someone who has such serious issues with the game and never misses an opportunity to run it down on the Internet. That's maybe a bit unkind. I suspect it's nothing more complicated than he loves the game itself but absolutely hates Steve, BFC and the Beta team that he was once a part of. I don't have any issues with the guy. He's never hurt me and so that's how I rationalise his otherwise, strange behaviour.

This game engine is not new at all. Some of us have been designing for the CMx2 engine for several years now, cutting our teeth on it with CMSF and moving on to CMBN and now CMFI. So why are we not seeing so much community-created content? Let's be honest. It's hard work to create a good CMx2 scenario. However, there seem to be a lot of folks who are willing to do this work and there are plenty of folks who are willing to help them and encourage them to do so. Just look at the responses to threads posted to ask questions about how to do this or that for proof of this. However, when these budding designers finally offer their work for free to this community, what happens? Well, almost nothing. They get a quick 'Thanks for doing this' from some folks and nothing from the rest and that's pretty much it. They get precious little in the way of encouragement from this community after their product is downloaded. Plenty before, mind you to encourage the poor sap to keep producing for free. 'Wow! That map looks awesome, dude!' 'Can't wait to get my hands on that map!' etc, etc. And, if you are 'lucky', you can look forward to getting your work dumped on by those who are not happy with how you designed it and how they expect you to design for them in the future. Let me tell you what I want after I post something at the Repository. I want to read AARs of your experiences playing the mission. I don't care how detailed the AAR is, or that it has lots of screenshots photoshopped to include battle plans etc, (although this is particularly gratifying to receive ) I just want to hear from you what you did and how you felt. I don't care about tips for improving the mission. It's made the way I want it to be, not you and I'm not designing for YOU. If you don't have any suggestions on how to improve it then write about your experience. What you did. How it worked. etc. I think more discussion of experiences playing content will enliven this community and take it away from the dull, dry groggery that predominates in the discussions here. Boring! The tools for this already exist here. You start a thread here or in the scenario discussion forum with the scenario's name in the title and type your feedback. Or you can add a post to an existing thread. See? It's not really a lot of work, is it?

FWIW, I have a lot of stuff that I have developed for my own use that I have no intention whatsoever of sharing because I know that it will be unappreciated. Not just QB conversions of most of my maps with their own PT scoring system or revised and improved versions of my favourite campaign missions but also stuff that you guys have never seen.

Remembering that I am just speculating here, I would hazard a guess that the next new title, i.e. not module, will sport the v3 engine just as FI sported the new v2 engine. Again, speculating, I would say that will be the East Front title and I very much hope that it will have AI triggers at the very least. I think the Bagration title will start in summer, eventually getting to winter in a much later module thus giving BFC lots of time to get the game environment ready for winter. At which point BFC will be talking about the Bulge title and possibly a winter module for CMFI.

I ran a further test this morning with the same parameters and the US squad was able to advance to within 400m of the MG unit taking only one casualty. At which point they started returning fire and killing one of the MG team, not the MG gunner. Of course, the MG team goit suppressed quite quickly. The exchange of fire went on for some time with no result for either side.

No save games appear to be necessary. I set up an identical test using CMBN German Grenadiers with a Regular, 0 Leadership MG42 team and it was EXACTLY like watching that video. Try it and see. Or I'll post it up myself.

As long as nobody asks for horses, who knows?

Oh dear God! I just watched the first video and that is truly appalling shooting! I will have to take a close look at this in CMBN 'cos I don't have FI.