Paper Tiger

The soldier spotting height is not drawn from their midrift. If the soldiers are lying prone on level 21 terrain then their LOS is drawn from level 21. If they are kneeling in the same terrain it is drawn from level 22, standing, level 23. I expect that a vehicle crew spotting from a tank's turret would be terrain +3 or level 24 in the above example. In effect, that is where their head is with respect to the terrain level.

No problem at all. I'm absolutely delighted that you have finally seen the light and have openly declared yourself to be a fan of CM:SF. So much so in fact that you are sincerely seeking people to play online against. What a radical conversion! Why, do you know, you could even post here in this forum to find one for starters. welcome aboard mate

And once again, the straw phantom menace is hoisted up by pitchfork, the fires lit, and rationality drowned out by the cultish chantings of "we know better and how dare you say otherwise." Well, knock me over with a feather! I appear to have completely misinterpreted your earlier post and slighted you when you were posting here with the genuine intention to seek out opponents to play this game online, you poor sensitive soul. Well, my hearty and sincere apologies to you dear fellow. Now, off you go and sign up for a game or two then like a good chap. I am really looking forward to hearing how you get on. cheers! PT

I'm glad to hear it turned up. I lost most of my CM:SF scenario stuff when my computer crashed a few months back. I enjoyed playing that one and I wouldn't mind giving it another spin.

I bet most of us have spent thousands of dollars already on this hobby (including all the other stuff that goes with it like action dolls, books and reenactment equipment) and surely enough to make most 'normal' people weep... completely off topic but this made me laugh because I remember when I joined the school wargaming club way back when I was sixteen. One of my non-wargaming friends asked me how much money I was going to spend on buying the models etc. I innocently told him about a fiver and instantly became a laughing stock... "PT's going to spend a fiver on toy sojers!" It probably put off a certain young girl I was very fond of at that time too. But it was still a wonderful summer...

While I would love to be able to strip everything, including flavour objects, out of a CM:Normandy map and open it up in the CM:Bulge editor, I suspect that it will be the new terrain tiles that will prevent this from being easily doable. Obviously CM:SF maps will be completely different from CM:Normandy maps so nobody's expecting to be able to do this. But there will be SNOW in CM:Bulge and that will probably be a new terrain tile. And bare trees. What I'm hoping for are CORE UNITS for a campaign that can span two or more titles. When you finish the CM:Normandy campaign it could create a file that could be used by the next title.

<sigh> the sooner you guys get your hands on this new module, the better

It's my understanding that if a bullet intersects the soldier's 3d mesh in the 3d world, the soldier is "hit". A bit like real life then I know, that's not the point you're making. If that is true, then kneeling soldiers are perhaps twice as exposed, more or less, than prone soldiers. If the soldiers need to be kneeling to fire it would seem they are more exposed than they ought to be. It's still a LOS problem because in your screenshot and in post #3, they need to be kneeling to see more than 10m and therefore need to be more exposed than if they were hugging the ground. To fire, they need to be see their targets. I think there's a bug if they don't occassionally poke their heads up to spot because that would allow them to see that an enemy unit has entered their covered arc and execute their ambush. Otherwise, we might just be bumping into one of the game's abstractions.

The LOS 'problem' is a result of ELOS. Irrespective of where their eyes appear to be in the game, for LOS purposes prone troops are at the same level as the ground they're in, kneeling troops one level higher, standing two levels higher. This does tend to make it difficult for prone troops to spot enemy movements and ambush them as they can't see them. What you want is a tweak to the TAC AI to enable hiding units occassionally to take peaks, one unit shifts to 'Kneel' for a few seconds and then goes prone again. Funnily enough, I thought that the v1.10 patch enabled this behaviour. I remember seeing Mark Ezra's video entry for the Marines module that showed US Marines poking their heads up above a wall and then ducking down again. It looked a bit weird at first until I realised what they were doing. So do the units in this test poke their heads up for a peak from time to time or are we just taking a 'snapshot' of the situation and judging the game behaviour from there? If they don't maybe we'll have to report this as a bug.

Its a very welcoming and informal group if you want to check it out. Ha ha. I don't think [hirr] Leto is trying to find opponents to play this game against. I think it's more likely that he's trying to say that huge numbers of CMx1 fans have turned their backs on BFC and don't support CM:SF...again!

I think it's pretty obvious that you will get a much more balanced action if you take 1 WW2 US Infantry company with artillery support and square them off against 1 German Infantry company with artillery support than if you do the same with modern US and Syrian forces. This is without resorting to penalising the US side for taking 1-2% casualties in that mission regardless of how realistic a condition that might be. I believe it's that kind of balance Chad is missing. Most folks really like the infantry v infantry actions. With regards to the tank match ups, if you keep Tigers out of the tank battles in CM:Normandy against the US (and you should most of the time), the tanks actions should be quite well balanced too.

It's funny how people start posting about these things before the release of a major new patch. It's the shell holes that move around and not the flavour objects. I'll leave it for somebody 'official' to say more about it...

The Syrians, a worthy foe? I guess it depends on the kind of missions you enjoy playing. If you like fighting in the cities, then yes, they are very, very capable opponents indeed. The Syrian Airborne and Special Forces in particular are extremely lethal when encountered in MOUT scenarios, or in any other scenario with very closed terrain. Hell, even low grade Reserve Syrian Infantry units can put up a seriously good fight in a MOUT mission against the US side. I bought CM:BO and CM:BB when they first came out and up until sometime last year, I was still playing CM:BB on my laptop. I didn't play city fight stuff very often as my real 'turn on' was combat in open rural terrain, on farms with small hills and groves. Tanks and mech infantry meeting engagements. The forces in WW2 are potentially much better balanced for these kinds of missions there was nothing on either side that the other needed a fluke shot to kill. (please note that I have emboldened potentially as I know that it's easily possible to create horribly unbalanced missions with these forces as well) US vs Syria in the open is not potentially balanced. (Again, note the bold US, I suspect people will find UK vs Syria a tad less unbalanced in Blue's favour) To make these 'open' engagements fun and challenging for Blue, you usually have to severely nerf the Blue side by taking all their air support or artillery assets away from them or by making the Blue troops Green and pitting them against Crack/Elite Syrians in T-72 TURMS/T-90s. (Nat Guard v Rep Guard) It's obvious from my sig that I've got around this imbalance by playing Red v Red but it's not the way the game was designed to be played. While it's possible to play it this way, you miss some good stuff as the Syrians have no air support at all. Neither do they have dedicated artillery spotter/Tac Air Party voice acting. (Not that I'd be able to understand what they were saying but they could just have some Syrian guy phoning to order a kebab instead and that would keep me happy.) Once you've played the game as Blue, these little details are sorely missing from the game experience when you play it as Red. (And not to mention how l-o-n-g it takes their artillery to come in after you call it in compared to Blue.) So, if you're happy to play MOUT missons (and OIF was pretty much all MOUT so that's not an unrealistic proposition with NATO armies fighting Arab opponents), then Syria is very capable indeed. They may even be the very best that the Arabs have to offer but I'm no expert. If you want to fight out in the open, then they're not so capable. So why do we have it? As you said, BFC wanted to take a break from doing WW2 stuff for a while. And, they wanted to make sure that their new game engine was capable of doing Modern Era stuff as it would be much easier for them to them turn stuff off (ATGMs for example) or dumb things down (weapons lethality) for WW2 games made with the same engine. Since the v1.11 patch, this game engine is extremely capable of doing modern era combat at this level. And as the CM:Afghanistan game being developed in Russia shows, it is also capable of doing more 'fringe' stuff so it's not impossible that people will eventually get to 'do' Vietnam, Korea or Arab/Isreali war stuff in the not too distant future either. I know that I'm very excited about playing WW2 games using this game engine but I also know that I will not abandon Shock Force after WW2 comes out as I've grown to LOVE modern era combat. In fact, I am looking forward to their Modern Era combat Title with NATO vs Russia/Chinese stuff in it even more than WW2 (well, maybe not CM:Bagration but that's still a LONG way off)

This Mega Tile concept is very, very exciting. Designing detailed maps is often an enormous amount of work/fun. I love the idea of creating 20-30 very highly detailed tiles for QBs in the future.

Well, I had a look and I found ALL the original Perdition files. I don't have a copy of the compiled campaign and since I've currently got v1.20 installed, a new compilation wouldn't be playable. However, I also found my original v1.11 game folder with the old exe files so I guess I could revert to v1.11 and do a fresh compile.

I think you'll find the reason the BMPs in Group 2 didn't follow their plan is because they 'missed' the order. It became active before they arrived on the board. What does that mean? The BMP group arrives at T+20 right? That means that they will actually arrive on the map sometime around T+20:25 secs and so they should be given an order with an Exit After 00:20:30. The order becomes active after they have arrived and therefore they'll follow it. Try it and report back.

Hi there Neither Hasrabit or Perdition are currently available for downloading but there is a 'broken' version of the Dinas campaign at the Repository that might keep you happy for the short amount of time that you have left to wait for the Brits to arrive. When I say broken, you can only play the first 5 or 6 missions before the Depot mission dumps you out of the campaign. There are some quite good missions in there if you want some Red v Red action. The new version of Dinas is ready to go but you folks will need v1.20 to play it. Hasrabit should be ready some time soon after. I was going to overhaul it completely but that looks like it will be too much work as I expect to be doing a LOT of 'new' stuff in the very near future. As for Perdition, well it would have been perfect for you but I had a computer crash a few months ago and lost a LOT of stuff on my hard drive and these files were amongst them. I'm a pretty thorough guy though so I should have back-ups of them somewhere on a flash drive or CD here. I'll see if they're still around.

but many people have conjectured that it had to do with its inability to capture any more dollars for BFC, and thus the new module system So since you've both read and responded to Steve's lengthy post, we can both agree that this statement is preposterous. You've got it now, right? And, no, I didn't think you were trying to be relevant. You were just trying to ridicule my argument and thus dismiss it. I do actually have plenty of respect for your intelligence. It's obvious that you don't have any for mine. cheers! PT

As an examplie, if said people wanted to believe that a watermelon could be crushed by sheer numbers of educated and intelligent people piled upon it, your above statement would be falsified... making you look a little silly... well, silly-er. I guess it would too if your "example" bore any relevance whatsoever to my post. Looks like you didn't get it... Cheers! PT

Why they dropped it in CMx2 I can only guess, I seem to remember the reason BFC offered way back was that it had something to do with the new game engine's C2 model and certainly not the following preposterous statement... but many people have conjectured that it had to do with its inability to capture any more dollars for BFC, and thus the new module system. Hmm. Many intelligent and educated people believe really stupid things but sheer weight of numbers can never make them true.

Question : So, could we expect to see some additions in the next patch or so? Thanks Answer :Practice does help in this regard. The building types I'm constructing now are much more real-world believable than when I first touched the game. Getting the hang of doors in butting interior walls is particularly tricky. About variation. I just went in and counted 'em up. If you were to attempt every permution involving every building size, every floor count, every facade, every window arrangement, every window trim, every balcony type, every balcony window treatment, and every roof type you would easily pass sixty thousand building types! And that's not including butting multi-building complexes either So in other words 'No'. But nobody knows what the NATO module will have to offer.

heroku Who's your hero?

Okay, what about 'buttoned up'. BMPs suck at spotting when buttoned up.

Is this scenario taking place at night? BMPs suck at spotting in low/no light situations.

I've changed my mind. Battlefront should hire a head scenario guy, for the sole reason that he can then have the company title of "Scenario Pope". Then we'd have to be very careful when using the acronym currently used for 'File Transfer Protocol'.