Ithikial_AU

No. The number of door's and windows provide access points for pixeltruppen to view and fire from for that side of a building. Doors have the added benefit of building access. When there is only one window you'll probably see your troops limited by the amount of fire they can put out or will clump together to use the opening to lay down fire - increasing risk of a HE shell or RPG doing more casualties the other way. Blown out walls improve LOS/LOF and reduce cover and concealment. Cases where troops ignore certain windows could be a reflection of angles and LOS calculations of where the target is situated relative to the shooter. Just because there is a window, doesn't mean it has LOS/LOF solution to a target. My three gripes with modular buildings are: - Targeting a building for area fire relies on being able to see the centre of the relevant floor even when you can see a corner or partial part of the wall. - Can't remove floors to create open internal spaces within larger module buildings such as simulating giant factory floors or auditoriums. - Can't create archways/bridges between buildings to allow vehicles to drive under into a courtyard or similar. (Yeah this one is a bit more bespoke).

"The Battle of Tukums" campaign update relates solely on the first mission. Changes make the mission a touch easier by reducing some Soviet forces on the map and making the briefing clearer that there are reserve forces for your side. The player will still need to be aggressive and you their vehicles a bit unorthodox manner to push through. The forces in this first mission are not heavily relied upon for success in follow on missions.

I mentioned about 1,500 pages ago in this thread about whether the West has strong enough supply chains to maintain a long drawn out conflict on a wide frontage 1,000 kms(+). I still hold those concerns with what I'm seeing in Ukraine. Even with all that Western kit that has been donated, the Ukrainian offensive appears to be only making marginal gains here and there. Happy to be proven wrong in the coming days but still appears to be a stalemate. The West probably still expects modern wars to be short sharp affairs or against an opponent that is completely outclassed by all our toys. This war has probably thrown that perception out of the window. If the West has to go into direct conflict for a prolonged period with an adversary that probably won't back down after a defeat or two then it gets interesting. I admire the massive reforms that economies and the people had to endure in the 1940's. Switching over civilian factories to producing goods for the war effort effectively overnight. Needing to do that again in the 2020's I wonder what the result would be? "What do you mean I can't have my annual update to my iPhone?" Hopefully there are some smart cookies trying to work out how to adapt to taking part in a wide scale prolonged conflict if the need arises. @kevinkin - Aiming for perfection in equipment(?) is one thing but that alone won't win wars. I'd rather have a fully equipped and working battalion of Shermans than a comparative handful of Panthers with most back in the repair depot. Even today, an M1 Abrams can't be everywhere if you need to maintain a front the size of a country/continent. I'd imagine they also aren't quick to manufacture if the need arises/replace losses. The US Army wasn't perfect heading to war in 1941 but it got the job done in less than four years because it worked out what it needed and what was realistic to support overseas. It got the logistics chains more or less right.

Quick and dodgy chart from OECD data. Graduate numbers for the field of education of Engineering, Manufacturing and Construction by source. Problem for most advanced economies that focuses on the importance of the University degree. Seems post GFC the US tends towards more College engineers to design stuff than the tradies to actually fix it when it goes wrong. Australia, we've had that problem stretching back to my generation at least. Likely partially due to Govt funded cheap loans for University level education. But also parent / student bias plays a big part in career decision making here. With the graph, I think the numbers are denominations of tens. So spread roughly 200,000 or 2,000,000 graduates per year across all 50 states across those three industries... probably why getting a mechanic is a touch tough at the moment. https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=EDU_GRAD_FIELD

Also check for sub-system damage. Given the gun sticks out on top of the vehicle it's prone to being damaged if the halftrack takes some sustained fire. Something may have knocked it out when you weren't looking.

I've got to have a guess at Ranville and south towards Colombelles. Shot in the dark though...

I remember tweaking and lengthening the tracers quite a few years ago now. I use them across all my CM2 titles. Trying to avoid the default laser beam look while some of the other mods made them far to small to be useful to inform the player of what is going on. Realism is fine and all but this is a game and I want to know what's going on and who is shooting who. The addition of a hard coded "night" modtag meant you can swap out any texture you want to show up at night and it will show up in all appropriate scenarios without any messing around in the editor. Also have different faces in my install with NATO forces running around with black face paint / balaclavas etc. Just a cosmetic touch. Back to tracers. I tweaked the tracer to be a bit brighter and longer as you'd expect them to pop out a bit more in darkness compared to daylight. If you don't like it, no hard feelings, just delete the tracer folder from your mod folder. Or just the ones with "[night]" in the file name.

I'll provide bones if and when permitted to.

That could be on me as other projects cropped up but there definitely is a MS Word copy floating around somewhere. Whether it makes the public patches or not is not up to me.

Full write up on the step by step process of a campaign in CM2 era games. The individual scenarios can only have a binary win/lose outcome but the final campaign outcome can be either left to the game to work out based on victory point allocations across the campaign (very tough to nail down as a designer for a desired outcome), or via a preset value in the campaign script by the designer.

Check your PMs.

Yes. All scenarios in the BP are built off the latest version of the game.

It's usually good to keep the player forces in their initial deployment positions or zones and not moving when testing to check when the AI plan will definitely make contact with the player even if they are very conservative and barely move their forces. Also flags possible problems with first turn spots and LOF. Unless that is intended.

I've already fixed it. Just need to make sure something is workable for the other titles in case those one switch over to a new animation system.

Short for thank you.

Ta. I may nick that file and add it to the pack. Once other fixes are done on my end I'll send to Bootie for the CMMODSIV.

Yep. That's one of the two bigger things to fix. The other is the UI in game with the change to the big red button and play buttons. It's known but little time to get around to fixing this. Easiest way to fix the main menu is to detail the modded main menu and return to default for now. Mod is purely graphical, doesn't change anything like button sizes etc.

Agreed. It does mean there's more complexity and things to think about before pushing the button but it's never a full preventative measure. Countries will know they will lose out economically at different times based on the circumstances they are presented with, but they take courses of action anyway whether it is going to war or responding to pandemic. The question is where is that line and are there multiple lines depending on the assessed severity of an action and longer term ramifications. Historically and reinforced more recently with Ukraine, the open defiance of sovereign borders still appears to be a line most of the world won't tolerate and will do something in response regardless of economic and trade impact. That something may vary however. Side note: Who is Taiwan's biggest trading partner? China. China also exports a lot to Taiwan. Is this going to stop them possibly going to war if China decides it's in their interest to bring the wayward province 'back into line'? Wouldn't think so. One thing about markets is they tend to spring back after any market driven or political action downturn. Again... post pandemic. Money will find it's way into every crevice of an economy hunting value - even after wars. As for China and Vietnam... GMT's Next War: Vietnam is still a hex based wargame on my to do list.

It's always been questionable in my mind that some economists and commentators reckon that globalisation is a force that prevents war. It adds a layer to the decision making but trade as an absolute block on major powers not going into conflict due to economic loss? Seems like economic study/dark arts trying rationalise human decision making, that wealth is all that matters to everybody, especially at a time of violent crisis? If I cast my mind back to my Uni days about 20 years ago (I'm old now), you have three primary causes for conflict to break out: - Nationalism / Territorial - "I disagree with you owning that piece of land" - Ideological - "I disagree with the way you think and do things" - Ethnic - "I disagree with your religion, language, upbringing, race... I disagree with who you are." The idea was conflict in 19th and early 20th century was primarily driven by the first point. This switched over to ideological in the run up to WW2 and the Cold War. The post Cold War era has been focused more on Ethnic issues driving conflicts. Now they are generalisations and it's pretty easy to argue that for many conflicts there are more than one driver in play or one is in play while others are used as political smoke screen by political elites to justify entering a conflict. Not to mention outliers or the belligerent sides having different perceptions on what is driving the conflict. There was no reason not to think ethnic driven issues would continue to be the primary driver most conflict into the 2020's but I think the dangling of the idea of USA pullback/isolationism during the Trump years emboldened a bunch of other global players to start pushing against the west as the 'world cop' was potentially off the beat. Nationalism and Ideology (latter a smokescreen?) have been able to pop up again as a result. If we find ourselves in another 1939 situation but this time the world opts to let it happen because, "we want our trade numbers to stay strong", I think is a bigger cross against humanity and our political systems. The fallout of not responding to unwarranted aggression is also likely to have a bigger impact on global stability. Mark Twain may have been right all along... "The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog."

For info that is JuJu's UI mod and not the game/patch files. The mod needs to be updated but nothing functionally in the menu will stop working. I'll get around to that task at some point. No ETA. If you can't wait that long just go into the mod files and delete the main menu images and the game will go back to the default base game main menu. Interesting. Very low numbers, not to mention trying to get those weapons on the Eastern and Italian fronts as well. Is there a citing/reference for this text?

To echo what IanL has stated here, please note that it is slowly being chipped away at but I have a "real life" job to attend to that has it's own ups and downs. (Still trying to win Lotto and retire to a life of wargaming). I don't work for Battlefront but keep them in the loop with the status of the project. BP2 - Utah Beach was always going to be a release beyond CMBN coming to Steam. The big milestone was getting all the maps pretty much locked away before Christmas (70 sq km+ worth) except for the odd touch ups here and there while scenarios are being built. I'd imagine it would be similar to CMSF2's release on Steam where the whole game family came out at once, but @BFCElvis should be able to confirm what exactly comes out on Steam on the 28th of March.

I'm slowly collecting them as they go through re-prints. One of my armchair general goals after winning lotto and retiring early is to first get the hang of playing the system, but then play out a large multi-game war of this series. The new combined game rules as part of Supplement #4 will probably take this further. Sadly a lack of time is the big barrier, but also my local wargaming mates are more interested in miniatures rather than hex and counter systems. But yeah the rule system looks good. I'm guessing @Bil Hardenberger had the opportunity to try out combining the games?

Unsure what CMBN module has just been finished. If you mean sneak peaks at the new Battle Pack Utah Beach there was a separate bone post in the CMBN forum earlier in the year. Lots of pics. The Battlepack for Utah Beach is not completed and won't be released at the same time as CMBN on Steam. It was never the plan to hold up Steam releases for a small battlepack.

Come via Perth if you want get around those ridiculous toll roads. Will only add on another five minutes to the trip, give or take about 6 to 10 hours.

I had a Juvelize scenario going back in the day with a historical OOB. Panzer Brigade attacking up the road towards the town and only a cavalry group with bazookas and M8 HMC's in the way. Though M18 Hellcats do arrive as reserves to take on the wave of Panthers. The problem was the German infantry. They didn't have any transport and to speak of and relied riding on the back of the Panthers to get anywhere. CMBN doesn't have tank riders. The map also had to be this big to give the US side enough time to lay ambushes etc. The German infantry could never get across the map in time. Couldn't get the scenario to work. Just remember the Panzer Brigades in the Lorraine were the "2nd Wave" (you could argue 3rd wave but that's a longer story...), so they were organised around standard Panzer Battalion (panther) and Armoured Panzergrenadier lines. Sorry no fun toys like the Sd.Kfz. 251/21 with the Panzergrenadiers this time.