Kat Johnston

I gather there's some slight difference between US model and UK model Javelin missiles, anyone know what it is, and if it has any in-game effect? And does taking a CLU out of a Stryker help a squad with spotting?

Yeah, the direct fire is simulated in-game and can be very effective against infantry in buildings. I'm not sure whether it's a "gamey" thing to do or not. I tend to use an awful lot of munitions in CM:SF.

I certainly care a lot more about casualties in CM:SF than in the previous CM games. I'm not sure how much of it is down to 1:1 modelling though, for me it's more down to the expectation that Blue "should" incur minimal casualties. I do find it quite painful watching AI-controlled troops assault suicidally (except for "unconventional" troops, couldn't care less about them.) It's the only thing that bugs me about the AI, that it sometimes keeps sending squads one after the other into an area where they're getting murdered. Especially when they're Blue.

You're correct, US spending is enormous. But the US forces are also many times larger than British forces, so the disparity in equipment quality is not necessarily as great as the disparity in spending level. On a per-soldier basis, British military spending is very high; not as high as the US, but higher than just about everywhere else. Whether it's high enough is obviously in the capable hands of Mr. Brown. Not saying that the US kit isn't better, it is, at least for medium vehicles and anti-tank weaponry, and for the general amount of support kicking around. I'd like to wave a flag for the Challenger, but then I'd also love to know why noone wants to buy 'em...

I got's to know - AT-14 vs CR2 front armour, who won?

I use Vista 64 Home Premium thingummy, works fine here. Well, no, it doesn't, it crashes on the first campaign, but I don't think that's Vista related; scenarios and QBs are fine.

I'm very pleased to read this. If the tiles are small enough, I'd say you could call it a random map generator (UFO/XCOM springs to mind as an example of this being done well; it really helps for replayability).

Definitely. There's a balance between "preserving your forces" and "completing mission objectives" and it's very much more on the former than the latter when playing as Blue. If completing an objective is likely to cost any more than a handful of casualties then sit back and suppress the hell out of the neighbourhood first as the guys said above! One vital tip - your AFVs usually contain several anti-tank weapons (and scads of grenades and other ammunition). Javelins are far and away the best mobile infantry anti-tank weapon, but your Jav. teams usually only carry a couple of missiles - send them back for more when they run out. When it comes to suppressing stuff with overwhelming firepower... 40mm is great like they said; you can really mess up buildings with enough of it and your Mk 19s can plaster them from a long way away. Mortar fire is rarely powerful enough to disable armour, but can also mess up buildings and is nasty against exposed infantry. Heavy artillery fire against buildings (as a point target) will trash them. It also does a good job on stationary or immobilised armour. Planes and helicopters carry a mix of weaponry, generally a "heavy" strike will be missiles or very heavy bombs (the sort that destroy a building in a single strike), "light" strikes will involve cannon. Cannon fire is generally ineffective against tanks, even old ones. Your more ordinary option is just to tell a squad or vehicle to fire at the area in question. Tank HE rounds are devastating to infantry in buildings (very much to be watched out for as Blue), and light cannon or machine gun fire will make anyone keep their heads down. Oh, (and I know it's obvious) but your dedicated FIST guys, if you have them, are generally much faster at calling in strikes than Joe Grunt. Whoever calls in a strike should have a decent line of sight to the target area and preferably not be involved in fighting themselves! And "emergency" fire doesn't bother with ranging shots AFAIK so is very dangerous to use.

You hear "Pooh" and don't immediately think of the bear.

Even when you do have transports, the AAVs and trucks are very thin skinned and the LAVs don't have a lot of space. I'd say yes, expect to move on foot unless you're absolutely certain the area is safe. Splitting the large Marine squads up into teams, or moving them on "Assault" orders, can be very useful for moving them safely.

I just played that one for the first time (now all the campaign works for me with 1.11!) and found it really tricky. Too much going on for real-time play! Very good scenario though. *obligatory spoiler warning* Among the many Abrams that ended up wrecked, two were destroyed by frontal fire from T-90s; then there was another one that I watched take a load of hits from tanks and missiles and was only m-killed, which was impressive; it spent the whole battle as prime target, and probably saved a lot of other vehicles just by being there. I won in the end, and it even called it a major victory despite 100 Blue KIA... ouch.

I'm playing the Marines campaign and the 1.11 patch seems to have fixed some problems I was having with it (the second mission and the TIGER/EAGLE thing not working; hopefully it's fixed the crash after Pooh too!). Also the AI of the troops seems generally improved and the new targeting system (with units continuing to fire at targets that are only intermittently visible) is very welcome. Good going from BF, definitely.

I like CM:SF because it gives me an appreciation of what the various pieces of hardware kicking around in the news actually do in practice, so as to have some idea of the relative strengths of the people that are fighting. CM:SF seems to be one of very few games that are genuine simulations in that respect. I don't know whether CM:SF scenarios should include more penalty for causing incidental damage to the neighbourhood. It does seem like you're "getting away with it" a bit if you simply solve problems by pouring heavy fire into buildings left right and centre or call down heavy artillery over a large area of town, and there's no comeback if you decide "I don't like the look of that big mosque / hotel / whatever over there" and call in an airstrike before going anywhere near it... I guess it's a hard thing to model in a scenario, though. You'd need some kind of "lose points if this building is destroyed unless an enemy unit has been visible there to one of your units" flag for each building.

Were those specifically Syrian ammunition loads? And would it be especially difficult for the Syrians to change the loads if they wanted to? (That's not rhetorical, I don't know if the rounds go into different sized bins or something?)

You can use them with area fire in a pinch, but yeah, I agree, they're currently not much good at engaging enemy armour in the open. Given that a TOW ought to go for a couple of miles they probably ought to have a fair chance of spotting a tank at that distance. As you say, they can be quite effective at close range if they get the drop on enemy armour, like if they're behind a building waiting for something to drive past.

The mission where you start off with a small force of infantry deployed along one side of a valley, and there is a large Syrian counterattack from the other side - including a considerable amount of mech infantry, an artillery observer and tanks. You get a sizable reinforcement halfway through, including four AAVs and a Javelin team, but they appear in vulnerable positions. I'm having great difficulty getting through this mission without incurring heavy casualties, even though I now know pretty much what enemies will appear where. I don't have too much trouble with the mech infantry (as SMAWs and grenade fire can take out their transports and the Marine squads easily defeat them in a straight fight) but the tanks give me a real headache. Artillery fire is too slow to reliably target them, SMAWs and grenades pretty much bounce off them, and the Javelin team tends to get off one shot before being targetted by cannon fire. Plus they only have two missiles and need to pick up spares from an AAV, all of which appear in vulnerable spots. Any advice? I did manage a "total victory" last time, so-called, but lost about 20 odd Marines KIA and 2 AAVs destroyed, which seems very high.

That was certainly my suspicion, (for what it's worth), and the same for the raids inside Pakistan. A difficult game for the unfriendly friendly governments to play, and even harder for the US.

(edit) I'm not that John, but I'll have a go. (/edit) It really depends how "tight" the solid angle of the beam is. A directed beam is approximately similar to a bullet, a wide beam would be more like shot, and a completely undirected beam - ie a source radiating in all directions - does indeed go down directly as the cube of the distance from the source. An example of a directed beam would be a laser pointer, I guess; you don't see it from the side (unless it's going through thick smoke or something), you only see the reflections from the point it hits. As I understand it the greatest problems with DEWs at the moment are the size, weight and power requirements of the equipment.

Thank you! I never thought to just surrender - fortunately I had the game saved immediately prior to the end of the mission (having pretty much killed off all the defenders) so even "surrendering" wasn't too bitter a pill to swallow, and now I can play the rest of the campaign. Thanks everyone. (I don't feel keen on trawling through the Vista registry right this moment I'd probably break something)

np Normal Dude! It is at the loading bar, yes - it gets to 2% and then sticks there (I tried leaving it for half an hour or so just in case ). The music doesn't play, and if I alt-tab into Windows I see a message saying that the application has crashed. The event log says "Faulting application CM Shock Force.exe, version 0.0.0.0, time stamp 0x48c66b38, faulting module unknown, version 0.0.0.0, time stamp 0x00000000, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0xffffffff, process id 0xd60, application start time 0x01c92be27efdecd9." 0xc0000005 seems to indicate a memory access problem, but I would have thought that if the problem was a memory access error of some kind then it would occur more randomly, but the game works fine apart from that one mission. I'm confident there's no hardware problem with the memory.

There's a mission (eighth or ninth I think) in the vanilla CMSF campaign which requires you to clear out a series of buildings and a small village. I don't have any problems loading this mission, or saving within it, but every time I complete the mission the game hangs and will not load the next mission. I first encountered the problem with 1.08, and had hoped that the 1.10 patch might sort it, but no luck. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling both CMSF and the Marines module. Any suggestions on what might be going wrong? I'd really like to be able to finish the campaign some time! System stuff if it helps: I'm running Vista (64bit) HP with SP1, Intel Q9450, 8Gb, GeForce 9800GTX.

Israeli armour against irregulars would certainly make an interesting challenge, for either side.