Kat Johnston

Been playing the Dutch campaign and noticed how the CV90s were generally effective against the Syrian gear - so I tried a firing range scenario facing them off against other IFVs at 1000m. They reliably beat everything, from Bradleys to BMP-3s with little loss. Their front armour (at least) seems tough against autocannon fire of other IFVs and their opponents simply don't have the time to hit them with an ATGM before vanishing in a haze of 35mm. Their spotting and aiming is good. They also seem as likely to survive fire from tank cannons as any other good IFV and I've seen them knock out Syrian tanks (good T72s, no less) frontally :cool: with their autocannon at close ranges... all very impressive. Anyone share the love for these in the game? If they only had a cloaking device, they'd be perfect...

Canadian truck according to Wiki.

Priorities!

There are three Axis AI plans for it on mine - maybe the file is corrupt or something? On mine the file is 209,117 bytes.

If it's the mission I'm thinking of (everything with Normandy-inspired codenames, it's like they wanted to be playing something else that wasn't around... ), the pump station and power station are "preserve" objectives - at least, in the briefing it says they are - and so mustn't be heavily damaged or you won't get the points for them. If you'd "destroyed them in order to save them" that might explain it. Though ISTR hitting guys on the roof with Javelins and still getting the capture. ^^

For me, a big part of the "draw" of CM is the option to hit the "random" buttons and end up with some improbable quick battle - so I at least would buy pretty much any expansion (if they were of a similar size and released at similar intervals to the ones we've had) just because of that. Not so fussed about what particular forces would be involved.

Effectively, the Panther glacis is bulletproof under normal circumstances vs the lighter Sherman guns and the Panther turret front is very tough*. The Panther side armour is vulnerable to the lighter Sherman guns. By comparison, the ordinary Sherman is always vulnerable under normal circumstances vs the Panther's gun - though that's not to say that the Sherman's armour was weak - it was respectable - but that the Panther's gun was powerful. A Jumbo Sherman - not in game at present - would be more or less the same ratio as a Panther. Tiger I had a more balanced distribution of armour between front and sides. But yes, in general terms shooting at the side of any AFV is a better idea than shooting at the front - for this particular point in time, "shoot at the side of a Panther" is the most useful expression of that, but it's not unique. *still don't wanna get shot!

I do a few things to make CM:BN easier for myself. I trade flexibility for convenience. This is assuming playing as US, an attacking mission, and not much enemy armour: 1) Before the mission starts I use almost all the indirect fire assets available, including all the "on-map" stuff. Every mortar, every cannon. If there is a village or town where enemy might be, I use very large area circles on "harass" for maximum duration. If there are suspicious hedges in front of me, I use linear bombardments slightly behind them on "harass" for maximum duration. The advantage of doing this is that the bombardments are usually accurate, harassing fire lasts a long time and I don't have to think about what to do with all those ****ing mortar sections. 2) I only advance with "ordinary" infantry platoons, ones with three "ordinary" squads in them. As much as possible I ignore the other assets in the platoon - bazookas, MG sections - until they're actually needed. Generally I keep one platoon per field; one squad on the left, one in the centre, one on the right, command squad slightly behind the centre. I ignore the "complicated" weapons platoons and try to keep them safely out of the way until needed, unless I can spot good places to set up MGs. The advantage of this is that I don't have to think about what to do with all those ****ing MG and bazooka sections until I have to. 3) If the advance hits anything hard, I bring up the MGs and bazookas. I point MG teams at anywhere bad guys have been seen and tell them to shoot. A lot. I try to move tanks up behind the infantry. I try to make sure that my tank can see (and be seen by) ONLY a) friendlies and the place I want it to be shooting at, and to make sure that the tank is shooting at that place as soon as it comes in sight. The advantage of this is that I don't have to worry so much about moving my tanks independently and about all the many many things that make them dead because they always have a line of good solid bodies in front of their thin thin armour. I usually beat the AI with small loss - not claiming any special skill as I don't play HTH! - and of course in practice I do more complicated "proper" tactics but I work from pretty basic basics and hopefully they may be useful to someone new to the game as they are to me.

RT only here - when CM:SF came out I found RT jarring at first but now I much prefer it. Except for the lack of rewind.

Razorback Ridge ended my first playthrough of that campaign and for that reason; the areas where my troops entered were being constantly hit with arty and there was nowhere (safe) to move them to. As happened with the bridge mission, I went from "oh crap, one of my squads got hit" to "argh, what the heck, why do they keep appearing on the map directly under a barrage, are they stupid, why are so many men crowding into such little space when it's under heavy fire?" to "oh, alright then, die, see if I care." As I don't reload or restart missions on first playthrough, that was the end of that. It's not even as if I particularly *wanted* to have all those extra guys turn up, the ones already in place were doing alright. Don't get me wrong - I liked the map, just think it could do with being a wee bit bigger. Fingers crossed for the first patch 'cause some of the CM:SF maps grew a little bit over time!

Perhaps you could have trees near soldiers display only their trunks? Like the existing "trunks near camera" thing.

Armour level is one thing, weapon data is a bit harder to come by; and as Bastables says, it'd be nice to know the figures the game is using. Though in response to the OP (now I've looked ), a lot of it is in the manual. Everything you (n)ever wanted to know about the armour differences between a dozen models of Sherman and Panzer IV, yuck.

Somebody - I forget who - had a very interesting spreadsheet with armour and penetration values for CM:SF units on it. I'm not sure how they obtained the figures, but there wasn't anything on there that I disagreed with. I'd love to see something similar but so far my tactic for CM:BN is a straightforward "don't trust the front armour of anything other than a big cat, don't trust the side or rear armour of anything, don't trust any armour against shaped charges." You could set up test scenarios using the editor if there's a particular matchup you wanna investigate.

They should just stay wherever they are and hide - I think it should be simple enough to have a flag which says "bailed out crew - ignore all AI plan move orders for this unit."

On the general topic of Panther vs Sherman, one of my Panthers was immobilised at the top of the hill from a hit by a Sherman across the map and its 75mm cannon was destroyed a minute or two later. It stayed there for the rest of the game under continuous fire from Shermans and M10s (well, usually only one at a time) - its optics and radio were destroyed, but apart from that it just sat there with rounds bouncing off it for forty minutes. I was impressed the crew didn't bail, particularly as the other Panther was destroyed next to them and they ended up surrounded by burning Marders.

It's certainly the case in CM:SF that tall buildings can lose upper levels without totally collapsing - I expect it's the same in CM:BN.

Played, enjoyed - if this is any use: as Red I moved the observer to Hill 806, deployed the ATGM guys on a small rise near their start position, then cautiously moved the recon guys forward and used mortars on anyone visible. Tried to advance the infantry platoons up the centre and got smacked so shunted everyone still moving over to Hill 806 (including the tanks) and advanced up the right before heading round to the mosque. This was very effective as most of the heavy antitank stuff had been destroyed and the tanks could easily suppress anyone who stuck their head out. Moved infantry up behind the tanks to take the mosque and would then have moved on to the rebel HQ on the left (had about 25 minutes remaining) but they surrendered. My force took heavy casualties from the planes but it was mostly the armoured transports they hit (and one tank which was immobilised by an antitank grenade) - I dismounted the infantry and ran them for cover when the planes were overhead, then mounted them up again to follow the tanks when the planes were gone. I should probably have dismounted the crews as well!

Yes, that would be a good feature.

"Damnit, Audie Murphy was modelled correctly back in CM:BO!" Burning houses would be nice to see though.

The game which is my mental yardstick for all games of this type is for the Archimedes. For its time, those were ****-hot 3d graphics. The linked video is of the arcade mode only, but the strategy mode featured two sides with up to 16 tanks on each side (chosen from a variable "budget"), a map on which orders could be given, objectives, status and contact reports, (simple) damage to individual systems, variable armour on front, sides and rear, artillery and spotter planes and a vaguely accurate modelling of tank characteristics. Oh, and destructible scenery and buildings. When controlling an individual tank you had to manage tracks and turret facing/elevation at once, which is an interesting feat on a keyboard. It was better with one person doing the driving and another the shooting! Firing rates of the tanks were greatly increased (to a shot every few seconds) to make it more gamey and range of engagements was greatly decreased as the field of view was limited to only a hundred metres or so. The maps were about, I dunno, maybe two square kilometres. You could play as either the Germans (Panzer III, Panther, Tiger, King Tiger), British/US (Chaffee, Firefly, M36, Pershing) or Russians (T34/76, KV1s, KV85, IS2.) Eclectic, and it didn't let you play British/US vs Russian. Its sequel was a game called Campaign, for the PC, which was more advanced and much more detailed, but I didn't find it as playable.

"And will he ever stop talking!"

Next you'll be wanting all that tedious stuff like cost, reliability and fitness for purpose taken into account!

"Hold until relieved..."

I'm a reasonably experienced player and started with the Dutch and Canadian campaigns - I did really badly, crashed out on the 3rd and 2nd missions respectively. I've found the German campaign much easier - though not easy - so far! For your armour, the only thing you can rely on is that your Leo 2s have a good chance of surviving tank fire, autocannon fire and older ATGMs / RPGs over the frontal arc only, and a chance (had a pretty good survival rate from RPG29 and AT14 hits, but it's not a chance you should willingly take) of surviving newer ATGM and RPG fire over the frontal arc. Don't ever expose them to flank fire. Whichever IFVs and APCs you are using can't be expected to survive anything heavier than HMG fire (sometimes not even that) - again, in practice, most of them will stand up to autocannon fire for a little while and sometimes they'll survive RPG hits, but it's not a chance you should take. Try to put your armoured vehicles in positions where they have a line of sight to whatever you want them to shoot at, and preferably line of sight to nowhere else the enemy are likely to be. You can use buildings and other terrain to cover the flanks of the vehicles. If one of your vehicles is hit by anything heavy and survives the attack, move it to shelter immediately, don't treat the survival as proof that it's okay where it is.

I managed the first mission reasonably well (1 KIA and 1 of those scout vehicles trashed) but got mauled on the second (12 KIA, lots wounded, 2 Leopards and 2 CVwhatsits lost 8( ) and wasn't able to recover with the third - had few casualties but wasn't aggressive enough to score enough points to keep me in - I took the terrain objectives and thought I'd eliminated the enemy forces en route but obviously not. I'll probably do better next attempt as I get more used to the forces. (playing on Elite, realtime, no cheaty reloading!)