Kat Johnston

That Wallace and Gromit clip is brilliant.

Well shucks. Now I've failed the first two missions of the Canadian campaign, so I'm outta that one as well. Third time lucky!

Well, I started off with the Dutch campaign... got through the first mission without any trouble, got mauled on the second and lost the third, so that's that. Liking it so far!

I bought APK on the strength of that article, it's good - looking forward to future titles.

I keep reading the thread title and thinking "first floor? long way to jump..." Anyone know whether Syria follows European or US convention on floor names?

When you have them, Javelin CLUs are good for spotters. Dismounting Scimitar crews can be useful sometimes... obviously not doing much good in this case though. The Warrior FO vehicles with the big mast don't have any advantage to sight (just better coms), like they probably should - same apparently for similar stuff in the NATO module. AIUI each vehicle traces LOS from some centre point only. Unbuttoning vehicles is an excellent way to determine where the nearest SVD equipped enemy is. And as before I don't think it alters where the LOS is traced from, so while having a tank commander stick his head out the top may give a better chance to see things, it doesn't increase the area in which they'll be seen. If you give a plane or helicopter an area target it'll pick out and attack enemies within the area, even if your pixeltruppen can't see them, so you can sometimes pick up on where enemy units are that way. Um, not sure what else. It does feel a bit myopic sometimes.

Yah, mine runs alright on Vista 64bit, it's compatible with Vista; I'm working my way through the original campaign at the moment to see what happens with Night Stalkers now that the other persistent bug I was having (the CTD texture size one) seems to be under control. I doubt they're linked, but we'll see.

I'd guess cost was a major consideration as well. Expensive just to keep that many troops in theatre, plus the equipment loss and the soviet economy was in bad shape at the time anyway.

CM:TNTTE (Today Normandy, Tomorrow the East?)

Phil - I think it may be the texture detail setting, mine (neither CM:A nor CM:SF) hasn't crashed on me since I set that to minimum - I've got other details turned up high. I suspect it's something like if it loads to much into texture memory it crashes, and that turning them down low doesn't fix the problem but just makes it unlikely to occur. It's gonna crash now just to spite me, I know.

Yeah, I get that with mine (which is on 1.21); I've gotten past it before (think I surrendered the scenario just before it would normally have ended) but never reliably. My suspicion is that it's something to do with the Paradox version of the game, but I'm not going to buy a download version just to test that theory. I'm supposing NATO will patch to 1.22, so fingers crossed.

That's really useful, thanks for that link.

Yes, I won many of the scenarios on my first playthrough - more on the second campaign than on the first (played on Elite; overall, I managed a draw followed by a minor win). It did seem like the victory conditions were generally more arbitrary and stacked against the player than in base CM:SF. I found it useful to consider the scenario objectives as almost completely secondary to force preservation, and to treat the deployment zones in most cases as "places from which my pixeltruppen will immediately move away from to find somewhere more useful" - which might help you in that fourth mission if it's the one I think it is.

I'm getting a load of these, using a 460. Have tried different drivers. It seems to happen much more frequently on certain maps, but I can't pin down any common factor.

I'm getting CTDs every five to ten minutes or so on some maps. Other than that, it's fine. ^^

I wasn't using Emergency, but I've just thought of what it might have been - the attack direction of the helicopter may have put the hill where the trench was "in the way" of a strike on the target on the *cough* other side of the hill. I vaguely remember seeing that happen in base CM:SF - guess it's more likely with the more mountainous terrain in CM:A and something to watch out for with the air support. I blame the pixelpilot.

First ever Hind flies over and sprays cannon fire all over the place very impressively. Nice, I like that! Second Hind flies over and lines up rockets perfectly down Soviet forward trench "safely" outside the target area...

I've been using the dismount-the-crew and have them scout ahead tactic with Scimitars - you can use the Scimitar as a light, fast taxi, zoom up behind a building or hill, and have the crew Hunt their way upstairs or up to the crest - it's quite effective. Beyond that I just tend to have them sat in one place suppressing buildings at long range with their cannons and/or MGs.

Gotcha. Come to think of it I suppose adding slat armour is more likely to make a heavily armoured vehicle survive intact than a lighter one (as in geometrically more and not just additive), hadn't thought of that.

Would it make any difference? ^^ (edit) Seriously, I've not yet seen a slat-armoured Scimitar survive a hit from anything larger than a machine gun.

(Obligatory SPOILER warning) I've just had a go at this one and managed a Minor Defeat (4KIA, 4WIA, and 2 land rovers, almost all in the last five minutes); I decided to take things very, very slowly from the start, and so didn't succeed in capturing any objectives. I tried a broad advance, one platoon left right and centre, but was checked on right and centre and only managed to cross the river on the left with one platoon and some misc support. When I tried to use those to take the objective over there one platoon got shot up and some nasty person hit a land rover with a heavy machine gun. I'd had the Apaches and GMGs and whatnot lathering the buildings there but obviously not enough. What worked for me was moving everyone forward to the big row of sheds once I knew it was clear (took me ages to find that out ^^) and dismounting most of the landrovers, moved one sniper and the mortar observer forward on the left, moved the other sniper and TAC guy onto the shed roofs, set the GMGs up by the sheds and blew the crap out of everything that looked dangerous with air and grenades. However once I tried pushing the two platoons I had over there forwards, I ran into bad guys in some of the smaller buildings and couldn't get them out, even with flanking fire from over by the other bridge. So that was as far as I got on the right and centre. One thing I noticed - my dismounted GMG guys reached a point where they wouldn't pick up any more grenade ammo when I sent them back to the truck, even though there was plenty (couple of hundred rounds I think) left. Is only some of the ammo portable?

You could have a three-way toggle, perhaps, instead of a two-way toggle: "Closed" "Open if you think you need to" and "Always Open" would give the best of both worlds.

I think it's mostly snipers, ATGM teams and command squads who get them - the ordinary rifle platoons just have binoculars.

I'd like to see something like that where the "extra" objectives weren't set in stone - they might or might not happen during the course of a mission - that would give better replay value. It'd be interesting if you were suddenly told that hill such-and-such was now an essential objective - and next time you did the mission you found you had to do something else entirely.

Not quite the same thing, but I was testing some CR2s against T72s at long range, and I watched as one of the Challenger crew stuck his head out the top - and the tank was hit by three shells in the space of about five seconds. The crewman was completely unharmed, despite being shrouded in fire - so they must know it's safe.