ZPB II

In the NTC 1979 scenario, your US tanks have a weaker gun and weaker armor, but have better spotting and better comms. Instead of trying to match guns with plates, seek out to leverage C&C to outspot and outmanouver your opponent. If you try to trade by sheer volume at long range, it will be statistically unfavorable. Ideally whenever an enemy tank crests or approaches in a narrow, several of your tanks will be engaging a single target with volume, or get a good ambush shot. Some simple rules: at any feasible range at any aspect any US tank is in mortal danger and can blow up at any second from an unseen ATGM or sabot. Soviet big guns and ATGMs will kill. Generally you can only afford to favorably trade at long range if you can leverage mobile TOW assets in good cover, they're incredibly accurate and deadly at extreme ranges. Otherwise, the Soviet heavy turret front advantage with T-64/72/80 vs. lots of your common penetrators will show, the 105mm gun on US tanks kind of sucks and there was a panic to replace it with 120mm. You should always be trying to outmanouver instead of outgun. Soviet ATGMs will, when properly utilized, absolutely mess up your tanks at long range. I've had great success taking out all US kit in CW with AT-3/4/5/6. I highly recommend leveraging all the mobile TOW platforms (infantry TOWs are too cumbersome, the crew will get suppressed when guiding and destroyed soon after.) The TOW is the premier long range antitank sniping tool in CW. The optics mean it spots amazingly well, it's incredibly accurate and it's rare to see anything survive a hit. It will enable you to reach out and touch things you want removed. I've had tremendous success with even the measly TOW jeep, it is so damn good as a mobile flanker in meeting engagements and other situations where you control the info space. When that tiny jeep peeks out from the bushes, it will routinely outspot especially buttoned up Soviet heavies and proceed to oneshot them while reversing away from danger. Unfortunately it seems like it's bugged and not available as single vehicle purchase in QB, only in formations. (OPFOR BRDM AT-3/AT-5s are also a favorite of mine when used similarly) The hammerhead M113 is amazingly good at trading with tanks when the range is 3km+ As always, you want to have a light infantry screen enabling all your battlefield actions. Try to maintain good comms between your tanks, tank hunters, recon elements and their HQs so your dudes will win the spotting game. Consistently winning in CM is all about thinking in terms of command and communication. The better you facilitate your Command & Control the more often you will outspot your enemy leading to outgun & outmanouver outcomes. One of the reasons I like CW so much is that a lot of kit that was rather useless previously, mainly recon stuff like BRDMs and Jeeps are quite useful now and I always buy some in QBs.

I'm guessing Self-forging Fragment.

What experience level infantry? I've been having opposite experiences, cursing at my low experience troops hitting the ground and stopping hunting when a stray round passes by.

Down the barrel and into the breech?

Well, that is rather hilarious. Wasn't very high on the checklist. Yeah, CM won't start at all without a sound device. You'll get a "DirectSound failed to initialize" error. If nothing is plugged into the audio connectors, Windows considers those audio devices inactive. When CM invokes DirectSound and DirectSound wants to communicate with audio devices to set everything up when the game starts, it cannot do so properly since they are inactive. DirectSound decides that's not cool and throws an exception.

People who call PBEM outdated aren't futuristic, and are actually the true luddites. If and when WW3 comes, the internet will be one of the first things to go. A pigeon or a runner or a drone or maybe even a well-trained cat will deliver my PBEM turns. It's going to be a bit more laborious exchanging TCP/IP packets that way. Gonna take a while to get somekind of semaphore up and even then the latency and packet loss are going to be ghastly.

Switching the integrated GPU off manually may cause issues. I would first try re-enabling the Intel graphics and updating their driver and other OEM drivers, the switching between different GPUs is AFAIK handled by them, then updating the Nvidia GPU drivers, overriding 3D settings in Nvidia control panel to force the game to run via the Nvidia GPU. Also have a look at the power management settings of the laptop, the laptop might be operating in power saving mode (they usually do) and not realize it should be giving the Nvidia GPU full power when CM is started.

I know this comment will sound just like pedantic pontification and not be very useful, but there isn't that much technical difference between malware and legit software. The main difference comes from intent and malice. Like, a certain antivirus software was supposed to protect one's data and it turned out they were the ones selling your data. Even a cleaning software recommended in this thread has been accused of collecting and selling data. If you want to get rid of all, depending on point of view, parasitically functioning software on your computer the list of usable legit software will be rather small. It's a somewhat laborous task to try to keep a computer clean while routinely using proprietary software. Saying "build your own tools" is a ludicrous proposition and it's not an answer to the problem, but the fact that it comes up sort of highlights the required effort necessary to attempt to stay clean and pure in this world we've built.

Not an expert, but it's only relatively safe if you're riding on top of the vehicle. In a fording vehicle, the geometry of the situation is a bit more stable, usually if something goes wrong the vehicle dynamics don't change as rapidly. There's still the issue of water but atleast the vehicle isn't sideways or upside down, making exiting easier. Whereas, if something goes wrong in a swimming vehicle it can look something like the linked picture. Everything happened in the span of a few seconds, people riding on the deck reported that one moment the vehicle was swimming on the surface, and in 2-3 seconds it was gone. A common sentiment was "the BTR literally vanished from underneath us." None of the crew and passengers inside made it out alive. A bit like how it was extremely hard to bail out of a spinning bomber, you're just tumbling around inside the machine, disoriented and hitting against sharp angular surfaces. https://is.mediadelivery.fi/img/1440/2972d134ecf8326d832bc3dd12693072.jpg.webp (the human for scale looks a bit wonky when it's placed right next to a zoomed in view of the vehicle)

To be a tank crewman is to embrace insanity, so while swimming with a tank is certainly more insane than tanking on dry land, it's probably not as bad for a tanker's anxiety level as one might expect since they've already suppressed their self-preservation instincts to such great degree. Joking aside, when a BTR-60 sunk to the bottom of a lake during a water crossing in 1991 and took with it 7 young men there were rumours that some of the dead had their fingernails torn off as they had tried to claw their way out of the pitch black steel coffin as it sank into the depths.

Everything works now, and only stopped working for a while with the same symptom, game not starting at all. From my experience both as a gamer and a programmer, graphic related issues have a tendency to produce either visibly corrupt graphics or error messages that help tracking down the source of the issue. Direct3d/OpenGL/Vulkan all have rather well documented & tried and tested pipelines and error handling and it's much easier to inspect their interaction with both your hardware and OS whereas a proprietary licensing software is a black box in comparison. Installed CMFI vanilla 2.0, it worked just fine. Played other CM 4.0 titles, suddenly CMFI 2.0 stopped working and soon after neither CMSF2 4.0 or CMCW 4.0 wouldn't start either, fiddled around with licenser etc. and then it worked again. Then I upgraded to CMFI 4.0 and it worked perfectly also. I'm asking if OP has other CM games installed out of curiosity, since I had a similar symptom.

That's not true, apart from the (what I assume) licenser issue was solved the release version of CMFI worked just fine on my machine with the latest version of Win10. I played a few scenarios a week ago and then upgraded to 4.0.

Do you have other Combat Mission titles installed on the same computer and if so what versions and engine numbers? I ran into a problem with the exact symptom a few weeks ago after I installed CMFI Engine 2.0 on my computer that had other CM games using Engine 4.0. I'm not sure how relevant it is, but the more info available to solve a problem the better. The games wouldn't start, nothing would happen. Unfortunately I can't remember right now the exact process I used to fix the problem, but I'm guessing my problem was related to the third party licensing software and not CM itself. I just woke up so I need to start my brain.

Plenty of people manage to criticize the game without being passive-aggressive.

I'm trying to read between the lines here, is having arguments and criticism dismantled and countered point by point somehow painful to read so you want it to stop? People resort to the fanboy-card when they run out of things to say, which is why they are laughed at. Many people here have close ties with BFC, so having someone with vague knowledge on the subject walk in and start insulting people you know is annoying. This is very normal and rational human behaviour. Ignorance and arrogance isn't exactly beneficial. Hyperbole: 10 years ago this place didn't remind me of Tumblr. Not that it existed back then, fortunately.

Ah, the good old "throw money at the problem" approach. That works oh so well in IT, just ask any government organization. Anyway, BFC rarely replies to threads that are full of hyperbole construed by people who have a very limited grasp on the subject. If someone was actually interested in the subject he would probably educate himself and present himself in a constructive manner. What hyperbole? There are numerous examples in this thread, starting with the first post. Even your second post says "The complete lack of communication with the community maybe... "

Also, when comparing a high fidelity sim to mainstream games with regards to optimization...Mainstream games can take optimization shortcuts CMx2 can not. There is a reason why nobody does relative spotting. If you can name one game that uses relative spotting and has fluent loading times and optimization, I'd be interested. I'm guessing Arma3 wouldn't run very smooth if it used relative spotting.

Well, I haven't played GTOS but judging from the screenshots, I like CMx2's graphics better. GTOS graphics seem to be the kind that has plagued gaming for a long time...Way too much filtering and processing, everything has this "Made out of plastic Call Of Duty -esque" vibe. Even if CMx2 graphics are wee clunky, atleast they attempt to look realistic with the bright colours and lighting.

Based on my limited personal experience with explosives (antitank mines, plastic explosives, claymores) I think the effects of explosions are undermodeled in CM. I would assume 10+ kilograms of high explosives detonating on top of an IFV would at the very least cause extensive subsystem damage. This is necessary due to the nature of the game, ie. plentiful firepower focused on artificially limited maps. I have a feeling that direct artillery hits occur far more often in CM than they would in real life, simply because more firepower is amassed in a smaller area than would be likely and this firepower is controlled with an all-seeing-eye. I think it's a bit too easy to clear areas of infantry with a plentiful sprinkling of HE (in large part due to units not falling back and resuming positions after it's safe.) If this would be viable versus tanks too, I fear gameplay as a whole would suffer.

Quality of Life. Making stuff easier, more streamlined and informative.

Yeah, but it seems there is talk about engines and APIs interchangeably while they are not exactly the same thing. Direct3D renderer instead of OpenGL.

M&B does not have relative spotting. The AI and "spotting" (the last time I played it the AI always knew where each unit was, there was no spotting nor fog of war) calculations it does are featherweight in comparison. This discussion feels strange, apparently people want to ditch the features that make CM what it is only for it to look prettier? There are dozens of pretty looking strategy games out there with borg spotting AI. There are reasons why relative spotting is a unicorn. It's not like you can port the core features of an engine into another engine overnight, if at all. The engine in question might not even support them at all. I am not a programmer but I am familiar with the aneurysms programmers get when people draw parallels with different engines. Something akin to asking why can't this nuclear submarine perform the Pugachev's Cobra as well as this Sukhoi. Surely it is easy to make the submarine do it since the Sukhoi can too! Just add wings and stuff!

Reposting this link about the new turret: http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/2014armaments/Wed16537_LeFante.pdf

And I thought "To the Volga" is a monster scenario... :eek:

Just a while ago I was trying to find that particular thread. Shame that a lot of the pictures don't work anymore. Thanks though.