[read this report from 1944 (german sized robot tanks)]

i googled about the german retreat from france and found this.

http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/17917102

maybe i was naive but i did not know that newspapers from this time brought so detailed information about the war.

best thing is the part about german sherman sized robo tanks and smoke shells which are used to supply encircled troops.

[Commonwealth Uniforms]

@imolestcats maybe you could try to remake the ija uniforms and faces for 2.0

[suggestion - pop up messages during scenario and please change briefing-style]

increasing letter count in the reinforcement messages would be the first step and i guess it would be very easy to change

[suggestion - pop up messages during scenario and please change briefing-style]

two thing which i want to see in this game are those mentioned in the headline. it would be great to give the player additional orders during the course of battle. there is already such a system in place - when you capture touch objectives you get a message. so there is already kind of a trigger system with messages. would be great if a scenario designer could make use of it.

the second point would be a different mission briefing interface. i am really turned of by the wall of text most briefings are. some pictures in between would be nice. i do not know how briefing documents looked like during ww2 but maybe a folder where you can browse through text and images would look good. maybe something like this one:

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y196/allenjb42/KosovoBriefing.jpg

it would be even better if everyone could customize the briefing maybe with html

[Burning buildings]

i am looking forward to plan my tactics with wind direction in mind: how can i burn down this enemy held village without getting my troops exposed. shall i ignite the forest in the west or is the wheat field north of the town the better choice

[Does anyone have a backup of CMBN.exe?]

i think you have to send them an email. i heard that they charge a small fee for redownloads

[toggle setup zone or setup zone mod?]

is there a way to toggle setup zones. they hurt my eyes and especially in low light conditions it makes it hard to study the terrain. or maybe there is a mod which makes setup zones more transparent?

[What we will see the next?]

I doubt we will see anything on a Friday...

why not showing a screenshot on friday. or tell us about fire or triggers or cm campaigns or ...

[What we will see the next?]

so will we see something today?

[Can an Artillery barrage clear a minefield in open ground]

I had an funny incident. 2nd mission courage and fortitude there is a barbed wire in front of a bridge. my pioneers found and marked mines there. So I could not blast the wire without risking casualties. I decided my Sherman should breach a hole in the barbed wire with HE. Ok the Sherman could not harm the wire but after a few shots the mine marker changed from yellow to green.

So I thought I could blast the wire with the pioneers. But I thought wrong. Half of the team went WIA after they blasted the wire.

[what do you think. is spotting of fortifications to easy?]

I tried to replicate your test, but on a map with heavy undergrowth & trees, none of my troops can spot any trenches until they are within 30 meters.

I presume your map has the forest undergrowth, but no trees? That would explain the spotting distances.

ok i thought maybe you are right and my test was a bit artificial. so i put the trenches in a treeline. the distance in the first minute was about 600 meters. They could not spot the trenches. so i let the us troops run 100 meters. after they reached their destination they could spot not all but maybe half of the trenches.

[what do you think. is spotting of fortifications to easy?]

Doesn't matter because you can see the berms. But yeah, fortifications that are not in LOS at all won't be spotted.

I think the question is how quickly should fortifications that are within LOS but partially obscured or placed in tiles that should should provide good concealment be seen, especially given that the 3D size of the fortifications significantly exceeds what would be typical in the real world.

There is also the issue that was highlighted in the Omaha save posted, which appears to be a situational bug of some sort that complicates the question.

btw this bug was also noticeable in the second mission of courage and fortitude

i think foxhole spotting is quite ok now - maybe terrain should have more influence on visibility

what worries me more is trench spotting as shown in my first screenshot

[What we will see the next?]

I think we are ready for it....;-D

I agree!

And he agrees as well:

picture by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kj-an/

[what do you think. is spotting of fortifications to easy?]

here you are:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/66690360/Bloody%20Omaha%20commandphase.bts

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/66690360/Bloody%20Omaha2.btt (scenario saved with 2.0)

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/66690360/Bloody%20Omaha1-1.btt (original scenario)

[what do you think. is spotting of fortifications to easy?]

here is another situation:

Bloody Omaha Map created with 1.x opened and saved in scenario editor with 2.0

1 second after the tanks arrived all fortifications in LOS appeared.

here you can watch the turn:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/66690360/Bloody%20Omaha%20spotting.bts

and here is a screenshot (the foxhole is on forest tile and behind the hedge there are trenches):

[what do you think. is spotting of fortifications to easy?]

ok did the same test with trenches and they are spotted from great distances regardless of terrain. i even put the spotting units on the same height level as the trenches here you can see the result after one minute in heavy forest:

[anyone up for a pbem now]

i would prefer someone who could finish a game in one or two days. so if someone has playing time today please send me a pm . My version is CW 2.0

realtime would be ok as well but i do not know if it will work

[What we will see the next?]

thank you for this update - and now give us some screenshots (please)

[what do you think. is spotting of fortifications to easy?]

It's not clear to me from this post what the different to 1.x is.

I have to confess my post is a bit confusing. i did not compare it to 1.x and i do not know if they changed anything but the results i got during testing were a bit strange. I try to write it in a more structured way:

in my test i placed several foxholes on a map. Then i took a US-Rifle-Platoon and put them on a slightly elevated position (22). Then i did several test without any germans where i changed the ground type of the map. In another test the US Platoon moved towards the foxhole. My result:

unmanned foxhole (at any groundtype including pavement) - only spotable from about 100 meters

Then i repeated the test but placed german troops inside the foxholes and let them hide. result:

manned foxhole at pavement tile - units hiding inside and foxholes are spotted easily distance to spotter increases spotting-time. unit is spotted first then foxhole

manned foxhole at heavy forest tile - foxhole spotable from about 100 meters hiding units inside are spotted from about 75meters

So my conclusion is that foxhole spotting is not influenced by terrain type.

What worries me is that in the Courage and Fortitude Scenario (played with 2.0) foxhole spotting did not match with my tests because after several minutes my troops could see every foxhole on the map.

So I think there could be a bug.

[what do you think. is spotting of fortifications to easy?]

Kinda hard to dig a foxhole on pavement.

yes this is what i thought but if you put an empty foxhole on pavement, then it is not easier to spot than a foxhole on a forest tile

[what do you think. is spotting of fortifications to easy?]

after doing some testing with 2.0 made test maps i got strange results:

foxholes in 2.0 are only spotable from about 100 meters away no matter if they are in heavy woods or on pavement.

foxholes do not give much concealment. for example: if the foxholes are on pavement the units inside will be spotted first and then the foxhole. if they are on heavy woods foxhole will be spotted first (so heavy wood foxhole spotting about 100 meters away unit spotting about 75 meters away - (empty) pavement foxhole spotting about 100 meters - units inside pavement foxhole about 300 meters and more)

my experience with the old courage and fortitude scenario played in 2.0 did not match with my tests

[what do you think. is spotting of fortifications to easy?]

just played the second mission of courage and fortitude and after a few turns i could see all the foxholes at the map. even those behind stone walls. it only took some more turns to spot the trenches placed at forest tiles.

i think they should be harder to spot otherwise it does not make much sense to use them for the defenders.

[Request help with Imperial Japanese Army Mod]

i think with 2.0 uniform mods are messed up

[Full replay some thoughts]

There are half a dozen more efficient ways of doing this. Having 120 turns of a 2 hour battle loaded all at once would kill pretty much any machine, I'd imagine.

i am almost sure you are right but if we could get just 10 minutes of nonstop replay it would be great.

i am wondering if the replay files and the command phase files are different

[Full replay some thoughts]

i do not know if this would be possible but i had this idea some days ago so:

to get a full replay i have to save turn after turn in the replay phase. and if i want to watch it i would have to open one file after the other. so my question is would it be possible to combine all this saved files. the file size would be huge but hd movie files are huge as well so this would not be a problem for me. maybe loading times would be very very long but i think it would be worth to wait half an hour or longer. maybe ram would be a problem.

so what do you think? would it be possible to make such a tool (for bf)?