[CM:N Safe to say 2011?]

Presumably your best bet would be post-war interviews with German gunners explaining what they were aiming at.

[UAV's]

I'm not a fan of implementing local UAVs unless you're going to go all 'future war' and set the whole thing in a fictional USA-China land conflict.

Blue gets enough advantages without real time top down monitoring of all human movement and vehicles.

[Downloaded demo,now what?]

It is the curse of all wargames that the level of detail and effort put into accuracy and simulation is offset by the utter lack of tutorial, information about how the game actually works and interface.

The weird thing is that it isn't even a resources issue: the interface is marred by some really appalling design decisions (looking at you, fire support tab!) that really defy explanation.

We come back because it's not like there are any alternatives of course.

[What should I play first?]

You say all this, but then you get in the Marines campaign missions like 'debouche to disaster' which are difficult by virtue of the horrible 'your reinforcements spawn in the field of fire of multiple Syrian rocket units' issue. (which is a general problem that the engine has always had with 'well I did better than expected and advanced to the edge of the map and then there was SUDDENLY TANKS').

[Sorry, more CM:Normandy questions...]

You've just described most of my battles.

Oh snap!

I was actually hoping to see a "to the Shores of Tripoli" style scenario thrown in though. And I think there is a degree of replayability there. Throw the Allied forces onto the beach and chew them up with ordinance. You rush the defenders and wipe them out.

But that's just the opening of the scenario. From the beach you have to organise what you have left into some form of coherent force and push on to take objective/village/hill x beyond the beach. That's where the tactics come in and the randomness of what you have available at this point effects how you can go about it.

I think that makes an interesting scenario in and of itself and as a good the opener to a campaign because you can:

a) give the Allied player enough forces so that as long as he's vaguely competent he'll always win; and

use the mass of defending firepower to 'train' consumate save-scummers like me into accepting that they are going to lose soldiers no matter what.

[Sorry, more CM:Normandy questions...]

This is top of mind for you? There are 1.4 million fields in Normandy, but all you really care about is being able to model the 12 that had gliders land in them?

There are also a lot of beaches in Normandy but I only care about modelling a few of them.

[CM:N - the simple things request thread]

actually having played CMSF for the first time on 2 years again moveable/amendable way-points would be helpful.

also miss the ability to place squads at an exact location i.e forced to deploy in a square / grid. Completely understand this must be limited to the game engine though , just kind of awkward coming form CMx1.

Takes a bit of getting use to but over all i have to agree is a cracking engine once patched.

You say that, but in CMx1 all you were doing was designating a point around which the representation of your squad existed in a kind of quantum electron cloud state.

You have more control now over the positioning of your squad than you did back then.

[Artillery]

It would be lovely if when I selected an area mission my FO directed artillery onto the targets he can see in that area much as a AIR observer will.

Also if he would make corrections for a moving target.

[Tactical employment of rifles/carbines in Normandy]

Mark Hastings makes the obvious point in that even if the work in combat was done by about 10% of the soldiers, the other 90% need to be there to soak up enemy fire so that the 'gutful' guys can do their thing.

Can you model this in CMx2? Um... possibly, given that the aggressive guys are usually going to be located in the same squad and you can fiddle with stats fairly easily that way however the rest of the game doesn't really model well the kind of things that result in these people making a difference.

At least, not unless you want to adopt a plethora of changes along the lines of '90% of units cannot be issued target orders only 'face' orders' and so on. But then your game stops being a game and starts being a procedurally generated video.

If you want the 'gutful men' experience go buy Men of War. Actually go buy Men of War anyway, it's a great game. But if you want Company Level command then you have to start averaging things out.

[CAS in CM:N]

To be noted;in some cases the bombers were flying along with the advance guard,being thus able to answer to the situation within minutes.

None of that changes the fact that that in Normandy the Allies didn't do this and the Germans couldn't do it.

[Operation Night Stalker]

Yeah I know, I did run a search and apparently there is no fix.

So since the last time someone asked is there any fix for the fact that winning this mission causes the game to crash on attempting to load the next or is this path of the campaign permamently blocked? Any plans to ever fix this? Is the vanilla campaign of Shock Force destined to forever be a reminder of how terrible and broken the game was on release?

(Loving Marines and Brits by the way, I would just quite like to be able to play through US army. Hell I'd settle for someone just editing the campaign file to cut out the level that's causing the crash. Or telling me how).