Brille

Well Shady seems to have solved the problem in all his titles. And we are now starting a CMBS match at the latest version without a problem so far. Read this post from Wolfgang 500 maybe it can help you too:

If the team shoots it properly you should see the PIAT in the hands of the soldier and you should see an explosion or projectile of course if they do. In the picture you see it on the back of the soldier and in the "equipment panel" there is also his rifle equipped. So they aren´t shooting the PIAT or don´t tend to shoot it in this moment. Though I do not know how eager they are to use the PIAT (or any weapon in general) in their pinned state. At least they have all of their 6 round available so they didn´t shot once with it. At least if you haven´t picked up extra round from Bren carriers or so.

I guess the railway station is made out of bricks ? Then the PIAT will have a hard time tearing a wall down...at least on it´s own. However it can supress and kill it´s occupants. I wouldn´t say it does it very effectively but if you need that extra firepower for a strong point I would probably go for it. Though you might want to save it´s ammo if you expect enemy armor around. If you give them a target order they should use the PIAT too. Maybe use a "target briefly" command for 15 or 30 seconds, so they don´t use up all their ammo for one position. To add to all of this: All the Combat Missions have a simple to understand scenario editor. I´m not a scenario or mapmaker but I regularily use it to make some shooting ranges. So I can test what weapon penetrates what or what damage I can expect on certain ranges and so forth. Here you could test how many rounds a PIAT would take to demolish a brick/clay/wooden wall of a house or what damage it can make on the inside or how reliable it is to hit oncertain distances. I like the PIAT very much and I would say it is my favorite man portable AT weapon in the WW2 games. It might lack the penetration of a Panzerschreck but it can be fired indoors without negative effects. And it is stealthy enough to get some shots of without turning to public enemy no.1 to all opposing troops in the vicinity due to the far less smoke buildup.

Well I must contradict Holman at least partially. Where the "Pause" and "Cancel" button may be more comfortable for realtime players, the evade button is very useful for WEGO players to as they don´t have anything like it. It is a bit of a shame that this button is not praised as it should be. I have tested it recently and it also surprised me that it actually has the stated effects as I thought otherwise for a long time.

For the evade-button you probably should know that it is not just an automated "fast" command. As I´ve learnt recently it is more of a withdraw option that overwrites certain morale effects. For example your troops are pinned. You can give them orders but as long as they are in this status they most likely will not obey them until they go to normal again. If you now press the evade button instead your squad will get up (some soldiers need more time than others) and move to the position that order is set to even though they are still listed as pinned beforehand. This is more of a last resort option and will most likely get you some casualties. But it is better than loosing the whole squad due to rising enemy firepower or a flanking party that crushes it with ease. Note that this option will not work properly in buildings. On a ground floor it seems not to be able to activate entirely and on upper floors it is faulty most of the time in my experience. This may be on purpose by BFC to eliminate a worse TAC AI behavior as someone stated. Just so you know.

Mounted assault (Close) Encounter in the dark Just as he was about to throw a frag grenade, the rifleman got hit. This were some bad news for his leader cowering next to him. A halftrack formation gets blown to bits by one well positioned US 57mm AT gun. Remember: Enemy artillery can be your worst enemy but can provide good cover too. Without the previously created crater of the enemy artillery, this fire team would have been blown to bits. "Herr Leutnant...wouldn´t it be wiser to spread the weapons of our fallen comrades around the squads ? They all just have those old bolt action rifles and...." "God damn it, Feldwebel Heinrich ! When I say that you give the sniper rifle to the machine gunner, I mean it. Don´t you dare question my leadership !" Advance through the smoke. A bit of posing for the Wochenschau. "Hans, you said we should go the right path but I haven´t seen no friend nor foe for hours. Where is the front ?" "Shut up Klaus and let me think !"

Thank you ! Those were normal quick battles. Though my brits had some self made restrictions at least for the second battle. My opponent on the italian side could choose anything he wanted but my brits only had scout forces at their disposal. That means no Shermans or Stuarts, only scout cars and the like. This way it made the battle much more difficult for the brits. In the first battle we didn´t made this restrictions and I got myself a Sherman (the first 2 pictures). He alone took out a companies worth of forces and could not be defeated by any attempt of the italians.

Aftermath of heavy fighting. Sneeking up on a stuck AB41 Scoutcar. No Prisoners ! A Semovente about to get blown by a PIAT. Same with this scoutcar... German storm up a ridgeline, occupied by brazilians. Heavy trench fighting in the process.

After the war on syria was almost over the coalition soldiers had some spare time... It just so happens that a US general makes a fateful assumption: He claims the US makes the best beer in the world. A blasphemy the german Taskforce can not get through unpunished: War it is ! A last stand of a USMC squad after a failed advance. Covering fire ! Death from above. A Panzerfaust claims a few casualties but the rest of the marines are holding on. Shoot & Scoot with the only supporting Abrams. The hunter and the prey. Advance under heavy covering fire. "LAW and order" It´s a damn Tiger errr Leopard ! Locked on ! This Leo took 3 ! Javelins to be finally destroyed. After this incident the british claim that they don´t understand a war about such a silly topic. Everyone knows that Guinness beats them all. Well we know where that goes....

A clash between Panzer IV and Churchills got very bloody for both sides: Advancing through the hedgerows... Which is pretty dangerous. But there will always be a light at the end of the tunnel. Even if it meant that the light is actually a muzzle flash of a 88mm tank canon. This Tiger got stuck in the wet ground...but unfortunately it was right at my avenue of approach... When desperate enough even a ****ty outhouse can be a hiding spot from those damn tanks. The die hard german squadleader.

So hostilities can continue.... Excellent!

@IICptMillerII : Love your pictures. This focusing effect makes me feel like looking at some good ww2 model diorama.

Man versus beast. Tiger hunting Let´s just say he had a bad day... "Hey Hans ! Do you think their snipers saw us ?" "Nah, we are fine Klaus. By the way are those some new ventilation holes in your panzerfaust ?"

Well but since CM decides to actually switch positions inside a tank it surely could do it as realistical as it could in this situation. In Cmx1 you often got the state "shocked" if one crewmember got hit, which often was the commander, looking out his cupola. This left the tank motionless for a few seconds before he either fired back or hit the reverse. That felt at least more realistic indeed. I had this instance with a tank gunner: He got shot (and luckily only him), was replaced immediately and the replacement fired back in the same second on the threat that caused that one casualty. He didn't hit due to panic and the rumbling of the tank as he drew backwards but loosing crewmember feel less impactful in this situations, as rare as they be. A somewhat similar occasion is with heavy weapons teams, especially with German hmg. If the gunner is hit, the weapon automatically and instantly transitions to the next dude in the team. And yeah I understand it that it would be the priority for all the team members to retrieve the weapon but it could be with a little few "shock" seconds ("oh no Karl got hit! Wait, better get the gun working again! " in a abstracted fashion) This way however I had one very odd occasion in a battle: In a night brawl my us forces stumbled upon an oddly spread out (semi deployed) hmg team. They started shooting, and quickly hit the machine gunner. But the MG warped instantly to the next guy 10m away and in another direction to my us squad. He shot immediately and hit a few guys, before got taken out. But again the MG warped to the next one in another direction and as his buddy before him he started shooting as well. I got pretty much the same situation with another HMG team in the same battle, which felt like a mad "whack the mole" game of some sort. I'm not really complaining and I canceled it of as engine limitations. It was quite entertaining though.

Tow/atgm vehicles are a difficult topic in Combat Mission if you want to shoot & scoot. In CM as long as you have a move order set, the Atgm will be deactivated. You can see it in the status panel of the vehicle too. The TOW launcher will be greyed out as long as you have some sort of movement order applied. Regardless if the unit is on Pause, it will not fire the atgm. Secondary/additional weapons will work though, if the vehicle has any (e.g. M2 Bradley). Realistically you can't fire most if not all tube launched Atgm on the move, so that's the way the game tries to portray this handicap,though it does it not perfectly. A work around would be that you give your vehicle a, for example, 30sec pause at the start of the turn, behind some cover and let it move to it's firing position. You should time it so that the crew has at least 10 seconds (or more) of spotting time in their new position at the end of the turn. In the next turn you can then decide if you want to move back/further or let the vehicle engage a spotted target. Usually the tac ai decides to back of and pop smoke (when available) on its own if they fired all their tubes and a threat is still present. Though that counts only for spotted threats of course. The only vehicles that can do a shoot and scoot with atgm are the ones that are able to barrel launch them, I believe. Bmp 3, T72, M60 A2 (Starship), to name a few.

I don't think that the usage of the roof MG gave away your tank. I believe that the big Flash and smoke of your firing Main gun gave your tank away. No serious: while firing a weapon in general makes someone notice your presence I guess it is rather a minor problem to the mg especially when something bigger was fired beforehand. Soviet tanks in this era rarely use this because they often have no remote controlled MG on the roof and the crew are often closed up so operating from the outside is out of the question too....most of the time though. I don't know if it is common military practice to fire heavy MG at tanks too but fact is that the tac ai in combat mission do exactly that if possible, regardless of the faction. And it surely can do some damage. Every subsystem on the outside can take damage if it got hit. This includes optics, smoke dischargers, roof mounted MG and anything else that is not armor protected. To the heavy artillery: (Very) Close hits have a chance to immobilize or destroy a tank, though the latter is more common to apc and ifv. If it hit directly on a tank, any other subsystem can be damaged or destroyed too, including the whole tank. But I would not call it a viable anti tank option if you ask me, at least not in that timeframe and without precision ammunition.

Well I´m not quite familiar with the ammount of equipment in british/commonwealth forces but I would guess it is somewhat the same reason why these only have binoculars for HQs or special teams and not for squad leaders (e.g.). Maybe they could not afford so many back then, maybe they thought it was enough or maybe it is just an oversight by Battlefront (doubt that a little), I honestly don´t know.

The left area you have marked on that picture is not for showing the equipment of the bren carrier. This area is preserved for icons to show you the kind of contact the crew has to it's superior leader. This can be: visual contact (close), visual contact (far), voice contact (shouting) or radio. I guess that the hq, that is linked to the carrier, has either his commander or Radio operator killed, is panicking, is hiding or is on the move even. Note that it also can happen that the radiolink turns off at random for a short time to simulate that the unit isn't always listening/operating the radio. So yes, bren carriers have a radio usually but it seems they cannot use it properly for the reasons I have given.

Well I made short tests of it and neither the BMP3, nor the BMP3M could withstand the 30mm APFSDS rounds of an BRM3 (simply put the scout version of the BMP3 minus the 100mm canon). So the BMP2 should do fine too. Another test I did in Shock Force 2 against the british Warrior (30mm APDS) and german Wiesel (20mm APDS) at around 300m. All hits were clean penetrations. Though I do not know if the syrian models are downgraded in armor. It is stated that the BMP3 is designed to withstand 30mm projectiles (front) but I guess that doesn´t include specialized subcaliber ammunition.

Well my experience is totally pro soviet in that regard. I had instances where american forces are as blind as them. In one a team of bmp smoked almost an entire platoon of M60 in a forest without those ever seeing them. In another an T80 platoon ambushed my M60 TTS platoon and almost wiped them out completely. Only my M901 and some close infantry attacks could stop them. So I cannot confirm those frustrations, only that I have them on both sides equally. The big game changer here however is the introduction of thermal imagers. So if the americans have those (and I suppose they did in your games, as you were talking about M1´s) you will have a hard time because they give them a huge leap in spotting ability. If you try a head on attack with a 1on1 you will often loose. The M60 TTS might not be able to penetrate (if you have an T64 or higher) but he will certainly damage your tank till he is an immobile steelbox, while the soviet tank only sees dust and smoke. So I say that soviet tanks are at least on par with their US counterparts in spotting ability BEFORE they get their thermal upgrades. Maybe try to adapt your tactics: Try to flank american tanks more, because their thermals are only looking forward or keep their commanders in the tanks and your commanders out and looking. Though that last one might be against soviet doctrine. And don´t go in for 1on1 engagements. Overwhelm the enemy and get local superiority. You see it now in Ukraine how the russians struggle because (at least partially) the lack of thermal imagers, while ukraine gets more and more of them. The exact same "problem" is there in CMSF2 and CMBS.

Well combat mission has a Tac ai for each unit that can come into play when it is threatened by any means. That can be by the mere presence of an enemy or by incoming fire. So it does nothing really "tactical" in a military sense more like an action of self preservation. (fleeing, ignore any orders, pop smoke, cower, surrender, fast depleting the MG Rambo style) The enemy ai, if you play singleplayer, is non existant I dare to say. At least it isn't implemented like in other strategic games. The scenario designer implements certain plans for the computer which it follows strictly (until bad things happen). Those plans can be more than just one for each mission and they can have so called trigger points on which the computer can react to a certain action of the Player. For example if the player has reached "point A" the CPU will send it's tanks to "point A" to counterattack. In short this means it can either be planned poorly or very good and so the "ai" might be very challenging or not. And there are lot of things that come to mind when you talk about flaws or improvements in combat mission. You better read about those in these forums here. There are a lot of topics that focus on these specifically. But I would say no Cmx2 installment has a game breaking flaw and for me it is still the best game series in the genre despite it's age.

Hahaha good find ! Putting multiple of these in it makes it formidable (light) tank hunter I guess. :D Should be working for the lend&lease american halftracks too...so there you have it. But maybe BFC did it on purpose to not be able to fire multiple mg from the halftracks. Just imagine putting multiple little mg teams in there... They would be very vulnerable yeah but the density of fire they could produce... It would be cool though if riding infantry, that happens to have an mg34 or mg42, would mount it at least on the aa mount at the back. And when they are leaving they take it off again.

Well even though tanks are used as some kind of cover in real life it might not be the brightest idea, especially on the modern battlefields with atgm and handheld rocket launchers around each corner... I remember that Otto Carius wrote in "Tiger im Schlamm" that he didn't like it at all that infantry walking behind and close to the tanks. And while it might have some cover protection surely, tanks/apc are bullet magnets of all kinds. So the infantry may receive a good portion of that lead too (missed shots, ricochets, (catastrophic) explosions) and might be in a far worse situation than going on their own. And yeah the book is from a German ww2 tank ace but it should translate to the modern battlefield with it's more accurate and deadlier ammunition without any issue.

Well most of the time my pbem end with a cease fire. When I'm on the loosing side I let my opponent know that I'm ready to negotiate but he is free to go for his desired objectives as long as he wants. Even when I'm on the winning side I sometimes offer my opponent a cease fire if he hasn't done so before me. If I see that I'll be the clear winner of that match I see no point in annihilate him to the last pixel trooper. But what I don't do (or at least very rarely) is surrender, since it distort the outcome of the game entirely. And by the way the game can sometimes turn very easily by some simple mistakes.

Well for me it is the completely different line up the soviets have. Yeah the western allies have lots of different stuff too but all in all most of those are derived from the general sherman model if you concern only tanks. The soviets have light SPG, medium, heavy SPG - and also light, medium and even heavy battletanks. Some of these can even rival the german heavies not just in armor but firepower too. Even the T34/85 can be a sturdy one if hit from odd angles. And even if penetrated those soviet machines seem to be a little bit more survivable than any other. And due to their large he charge in most of their ap rounds, the enemies armor is pretty much done for after one solid penetration. Another point are the small arms, especially soviet machine guns like the PPsH41. If you know that some of these MPi squads are lingering in a forest you might want to avoid the forest with the germans entirely...those are killers in close combat. Then there are the anti tank rifles: Despite that they are far less effective than a bazooka or Panzerschreck in their anti tank capability, I always liked those as sneaky halfrack and scoutcar killers. And as mentioned the maps are often far bigger so you can have some wider tank battles than in the other installments.