ZPB II

Just wanted to drop by and say that I'm a fan of your work although Ramadi didn't run on my poor laptop and I would need to reset my CMSF keys to be able to play it again. That map was wild, I don't know what word to use to describe this one.

Nah, just mount your scouts in a Fiat Truck and hey presto, no guns anymore! (A nasty bug that has happened a few times in TCP/IP play)

If you hold down shift while making the arc it will be a perfect circle. It is a very useful command.

Quite the fascinating coincidence. :confused: Take a wild guess what happened on the first turn in a QB where I bought a Grille for the first time.

War truly is hell. Thanks for the link.

Thanks for the link! I'm glad to know I'm using them realistically!

I think the prize should rather be something new and exciting that is a break from everyday life. Like a Weasel ride!

I guess this is what happens when you have a game with so many random elements that it resembles real life in surprising ways. I'm happy that the games I play are full of moments where I take unseen fire from hidden ATGs, MGs, tanks and snipers for turn after turn while I'm trying to decipher where the enemy is. If that makes me a fanboy, so be it. Atleast I'm having a lot of fun.

I don't know if it's placebo or what, but generally I'm very happy with how my dudes perform. I also think the animations have been tweaked a bit, not sure. I haven't been able to go back to 1.0 to verify my instinct, Sicily took me by surprise! I did some storming with assault engineers and the whole close-range-firefight-blowing-stuff-up-with-satchels thing seemed to flow better. I feel that I'm seeing less casualties from artillery or direct fire due to pixeldudes taking cover at more appropriate moments in time. No hard data, just how I feel about 2.0.

The Guastatori are, to the best of my knowledge, some sort of elite assault engineers and they seem to have the best equipment. A platoon comes with an LMG team, a mortar and a generous sprinkling of SMGs. The MAB38 is the Beretta 9mm SMG, apparently the finest single piece in the Italian inventory. It's rare but when it goes blakablakablatblat you better duck! And, oh sweet, a wild Grille appears! That 150mm is beastly. (I'm trying to find information on the Guastatori but everything is in Italian and Google Translate leaves behind a garbled mess. But it seems they were pretty hardcore.)

I don't remember what Italian formation included this and that, but a lot of the companies I've bought in QBs have included some kind of recon platoon. They're always the ones who get shot first in my games. Some recon teams are, uh, 6-man and the typical one is 3-man. I think. Would need to doublecheck to be sure. There's also the infamous "Replacement Platoon" in some companies. I haven't found out their specific purpose yet but their name has led me to use them as a forlorn hope detachment.

I would hazard a guess that this test might be affected by computing power. Some games act funky when they run at full load.

I had heard of tanks carrying MP44s for protection and then I had heard about this: http://www.axishistory.com/index.php?id=4685 But the driver shooting the Mp44 was novel. Learn something new every day.

I do play against humans, it's just that TCP/IP is still quite laggy and PBEM can be excruciatingly slow. But playing hotseat vastly improved my perception of how spotting works, when I should expect to spot enemies, what areas I can assume are safe from unspotted enemies, how sound contacts work etc.

I have been playing some small combined arms quick battles in hotseat mode against myself. The more I play them the more I learn about how the spotting in this game works. I am convinced that most of the time it feels right. I haven't been keeping any statistics about spotting, but damn, it's really hard to beat yourself. It's a lot of fun and unsurprisingly usually ends up in a draw with a lot of dead pixeltruppen. I highly recommend it if you want to improve your playing skills!

The T-30 and M3 GMC are rather vulnerable to small arms. I had my brave Italian Guastatori (my current favorite formation, the MAB38 rules) storm several of them in an intense wooded town battle, albeit at a noticeable cost in manpower. I want to know what the company commander told his men before he sent them sprinting in different directions trying to spread his men so they make harder targets. Half the men in the company ended up dead, but that's a whole different story about some dug-in paratroopers. I've also lost more crewmen than I care to count when I place them at what I think is a safe distance when playing US. The M3 GMC has the Soixante-Quinze which is clear and present danger for all lesser German armor. I just noticed the T30 carries WP rounds. I'm interested in testing these against a Tiger. EDIT: Ran some really quick tests, couldn't get the WP to get the crew to bail, but caused only system damage and suppression. Hard to get direct hits since you can only area target smoke. 75mm HEAT is very effective against the Tiger, but only from the sides. From the rear the engine block absorbs most of the energy. You will immobilize the Tiger immediately, but fail to cause significant damage to the crew compartment before the turret swivels around. From the side the HEAT is devastating if it hits.

I could give it a go when I get some free time. I'm not sure about the voice-over though, my verbal English is quite rusty. But the last time I spoke English I did score so it's not completely hopeless! Maybe if I do some kind of over-exaggerated accent. If there's no educational value, atleast there can be comedic value. I will need to do some testing with FRAPs running and see how it impacts my FPS and how it looks in general. My rig is ancient. I've been planning to start doing Let's Plays and some CM machinima anyway.

Indeed, anyone can write a review on how they feel about things. Say, go to the cinema to watch an art film and complain about the Polish dialogue and the lack of oneliners, helicopters, car chases, tits & explosions. Wait, scratch that, a lot of art films prominently feature tits. But that's not exactly a review. It's an opinion. The truly good reviewers worth following are able to place things in context. They are able to see what a product is designed to do, who it is for and criticize accordingly. The rounding up statements are good, but they feel a bit disjointed from the article in general. (I would say tactical instead of strategic but) "Satisfying strategic gameplay that lacks some feature polish common in contemporary titles: 6/8" "Buy it if you like the genre"

I know I'm going to sound like a foaming fanboi writing this, but... Maybe it's because I don't play competitively, simply to have fun, but bugs like this make the game feel more chaotic and thus makes it feel more alive. I can imagine the crew freewheeling a Pak downhill and losing control only to have it crash and get stuck in a most inconvenient spot. Or a crewman fumbles with a bolt and messes up the mechanism. Luckily I haven't been near a war but I did my military service and we had all kinds of funky-crunky stuff happen on weekly basis that would have probably caused us to lose a battle. Drag racing CVs so the turbos blow. A rear-end collision. Wrapping the cannon around a particularly sturdy pine tree. Fumbling on the deck with an MG and breaking the driver's prism with it. Leaving an unguarded pile of machine guns, LAWs, mines and plastic explosives next to a civilian road. Or maybe your squaddie jumps into the trench behind you with his finger on the trigger and pumps a few 7.62s into a log next to you. Stuff like that happens occasionally. But yeah, bugs should be fixed. EDIT: I would also like to mention that the things I write are mere figments of a feverish imagination that never happened and only serve the purpose of making me look cool on the Internet.

I do love a review which features a sentence such as "The menu music is generic." I don't find clipping problematic at all. Like Steve said, it happens in all games. You even get to see clipping in the latest and greatest Call of Duty. Heck, you even see metric boatloads of clipping in the most expensive video game of all time, Star Wars: The Old Republic. An estimated 150-200 million dollars didn't get rid of clipping, so expecting a 5-man outfit to do it is...well...I'm not going to comment on it more. Other than saying that SWTOR had extremely lackluster animations when you take the budget into account. The reviewer also doesn't know what monochrome means or he has a corrupted installation of the game. The other of his pet peeves...Camera controls. I simply don't get it. CM has pretty much the best camera control of any game I've played. It has so much control. I absolutely loathe the camera scheme of Total War games and the like. It glides way too much, lacks precision and is too restricted. In CMx2, I can be anywhere on the map at an angle and altitude of my preference in a split second. Control-click somewhere and use V to rotate the camera 180 degrees and use the mouse to do the rest. Simple, accurate and fluid. This is coming from a gamer for life. I've played so many RTS games that I like to think that I know what I'm talking about. Maybe I should record a video of me playing just to showcase how fast and flexible the camera can be, since almost all Youtube videos of people playing CMx2 have me screaming "Waddafaaak, it's like watching a humpback whale parallel park an articulated lorry!" I do agree that it is not easy to learn the ropes, but once you do... I don't mean to sound too harsh but some adjustment of expectations might be called for.

That typeface. Please burn it. Otherwise I approve of your post. In my opinion, this is the best Combat Mission ever. About the MPs...I guess it has something to do with the fact that most of the action takes place at long range and pistol ammunition is kind of scarce and gets used up really fast. But not replacing a pistol with a machine pistol does sound very wrong. Then again, the assistant gunner needs his hands free. And a battalion commander probably has other stuff to do with his hands than tote an SMG. But having one slung on your back is a good life insurance policy on the battlefield. Might be a bug.

The thing is, ammo restocking is not a very fast process. You have a limited amount of clips or magazines and filling them with cartridges is tedious. You can stock up a squad with thousands of rounds of ammo in the blink of an eye in RT mode. Also, ammunition is very heavy. Carrying lots of rounds tires squads in CMx2 but in my opinion it should be more pronounced. Go climb a hill while carrying hundreds of rounds of rifle ammo in addition to all the other stuff. There's a reason why 5.56 and 5.45 came to be. This whole discussion brought some memories. It sucks to fill the belt of a PKM. It sucks tremendously. 7.62x54 rounds and the belts for them apparently didn't have very strict manufacturing tolerances. So you constantly end up with rounds that either slip out of the belt or won't go in unless you exert tremendous force. A very slow process. Especially when it's -25C and you have to take the gloves off to retain dexterity. But the food was warm and nobody was shooting at us and we got to eat donuts back in base. So I'm not really complaining. They were really good donuts.

Seems strange. I had something similar happen to me in a TCP/IP game. I mounted an Italian 3-man scout team on a Fiat truck. I dismounted the men after driving some few hundred meters on normal ground and they had lost their weapons. The UI showed the had no weapons and the 3d model was gone. It was a rought battle for those guys. I ordered them to grab weapons from dead guys lying in the open while under fire.

I would love for the host to have an option to toggle a trusted pause feature. This enables a pause whenever either player wants it. There could be a box where the host can set a cooldown timer for pausing so it wouldn't be abused.

I haven't come across such an issue. Do elaborate?