Ranger33

^^ The biggest issue to me is that only the PIAT can be fired from buildings. German and American troops have little to no defense against tanks in urban combat, when it should be the other way around. Sure, they can run out into the street with bazooka and hope for the best, or hide behind a corner and wait, but both of these strategies rely on luck as much as anything. CMSF handled MOUT extremely well in my experience, with the big difference being that it was suicidal to move tanks and other armored vehicles into urban areas without an infantry screen. What would it hurt to abstract in that the infantry knocked holes in the wall, opened the doors/windows, and whatever else it took to fire an AT weapon from within a building.

It is fixed, but we have to wait until the next patch, which will be arriving "probably before the next module"

There is a no wire version of the campaign in the repository so you can pick that up and skip the hassle.

Wasn't there a Soviet submarine captain who did something like that as well? It seems the only people eager to end the world were politicians trying to get votes. The guys with their fingers on the switches weren't quite as excited about wiping out humanity. Here he is, Vasiliy Arkhipov

Well, I was referring more to the general strategy gaming population, not people are already playing strategic level wargames. For most of them, a game like Men of War is the height of realism.

Company of Heroes 2 coming out next year is going to be set entirely on the Eastern front, so I would expect it's popularity to rise among among strategy gamers. I think there is more interest now than when CMBB came out, if only because people are tired of fighting the same Western front battles over and over. Also, games like Men of War and Call of Duty have often ventured there over the last few years. There's also Red Orchestra, and that new mod/game for ARMA 2 that is entirely on the Ostfront. So, now that I think about it, Germany vs USSR is probably more popular now than it has ever been.

After the tutorial campaigns (which require you to read along in the manual, just in case you didn't know) I would highly recommend downloading the campaign called Devil's Descent. It really eases you into things with a small number of troops, but a decent challenge. Stay clear of Courage and Fortitude. The second mission (or third, can't remember) is absolutely brutal, even if you know exactly what you are doing.

@slysniper I think you are missing out on CMSF. As was mentioned earlier in this thread, there are a lot of scenarios where you are on a more equal playing field with the Syrians, especially in the Brit and NATO modules. Then there are user made campaigns like TF Panther where you are commanding US Airborne infantry with nothing more than Humvees in support (for as far I have reached in it anyway). There are also several Red vs Red campaigns and scenarios that are maybe the best of all. Also, you can mod things to color the terrain just a bit, or make it full on European. It isn't all desert anyway. You might want to try the updated demo, it has at least one scenario from each module so you can get a taste of how much variety there is.

I'm playing the Road to Montebourg campaign and I had all 3 members of a platoon HQ get knocked out by a mortar spotting round (talk about your freak events). Next time that platoon appeared they had no HQ at all.

Have you played the modules or user made campaigns? TF Thunder is essentially "easy mode" compared to them. You often have to get up close and personal since you can't just level an entire village due to ROE. Also, when your entire company(+) force has one Javelin team, taking on Syrian APCs and tanks becomes a lot more tactical.

Company of Heroes is an RTS, not really comparable to RO. That said, I probably logged more hours in RO/Darkest Hour than any other game in the last decade, so much fun. The new game using the ARMA engine looks like it could really be awesome. Fighting WW2 at that realistic scale will be amazing, and the multiplayer should be a lot more accessible than regular ArmA I would think.

Oh BFC, hiding little nuggets like this in reviews written in French. Time for even more wild speculation! That is interesting, maybe they were talking about CM Touch? I wouldn't think that they would announce CMSF2 or anything else in a new engine before they even finish CMBN. Unless the Bulge game will also be in the new engine. Then I guess the question becomes, is this "new development engine" a totally new CMx3, or more like CMx2.5 (aka the promised UI and editor overhaul + some other improvements)? Perhaps something got lost in translation. This just makes the wait for the big announcement even worse. :cool:

Announcement Article CoH has nothing on CM in terms of realism, but the first game is still a sight to behold with the fluid animations, intense gameplay, and the way every map would be absolutely wrecked by the end of a battle. I was never quite good enough to win online matches, but I still had a blast with it. Looks like they are going for slightly more realism, with more fog of war, better line of sight, and a more advanced cover system. And, oh yes, it has snow physics and flamethrowers!

Would love to see this as well, but it's a pretty big leap to add it to the game. I think the issue is best addressed with campaigns like Engel, where you have a small-medium sized force that is distinct and grows (or shrinks) over the course of the campaign. It feels a lot more personal than the CMBN campaigns which were well put together, but consisted mostly of "E and F Company attack village" followed by "D Company attacks farm" and then "E and F Company of an entirely different battalion attack some other village". You can never get connected because you are constantly switching between different units. I would also like to see a few more like Devil's Descent, where you occasionally get to make choices about what to do.

There are generally multiple AI plans for all missions in CMBN, I couldn't say for sure about Devil's Descent though. I would think it would be easy to make variations since there are so few units involved, but at the same time the differences might be slight because the terrain is restricted by the small size of the maps.

I'm thinking early war. It would be roughly similar to CMSF -> CMA. Just tweak time backwards a bit, take out some of the newer vehicles, put in some of the older ones, and the infantry just need new skins/helmets and a few weapon models. Best of all, those old vehicles would still be right at home in any future titles, such as the rumored "Odds and Sods" module for CMBN, early part of Ostfront, and then of course very late war in German desperation scenarios.

Just for reference For soft vehicles, it isn't really a question of pushing, a Tiger wouldn't even notice that a Jeep was in the road. "What was that? A molehill?"

There is a very small window where the "wild" shots happen and match up visually. All I know is that it can happen, BFC would have to come in to explain it in detail. These shots are definitely more off target than your average missed shot, but the visual isn't 1:1 as far as I can tell. I'm not really that worried about it, but if someone really wanted to study it, they would have to capture a few examples in WeGo replays, but I don't have that kind of free time

@JonS I get what you are saying, but I think we are digging at details that aren't there if we get into debating how much the shot would be effected by accelerating. My guess is that the modeling is exactly the same for every single vehicle. Which is fine, I wouldn't want them to waste time programming stuff like that in minute detail. I guess the question is whether it is realistic that a crew would be so uncoordinated as to fire while hitting the brakes, resulting in a wild shot. Hence my comment that it would be cool if green crews did it but experienced ones didn't. @GAJ I noticed that sometimes the shot would be right on target, even if the gun was pointed up/down, so it isn't linked exactly to visual appearance of the model, as far as I can tell. Anyway, this thread has indeed descended into the realm of grognard madness. I'll just go back to playing the game

It works just like loading infantry. Select a movement command with the gun and mouse over the vehicle, if the arrow points down and is green you can load it, yellow means no. I'm pretty sure the gun moves to the vehicle like normal infantry.

I had no clue that's what the black smoke was. It always just seemed to appear randomly in larger battles, so I too thought it indicated fires or something. I knew there was IR blocking smoke, but didn't know that it actually looks different from regular smoke.

Someday, in the far future, there will be CMSF2, maybe. Pretty sure everyone and their dog would love to see Cold War gone hot, but I think they said it was going to be modern Georgia type thing. Kind of meh, but I guess Syria worked out in the end. Would pay money for a module that ties CMA and CMSF together, with maybe some older US and newer Russian formations to balance things out. It's one of those dreams that's so close, yet so far away.

Like I said, you can easily manipulate the game into doing this with any vehicle, including those in CMSF. Try it if you want. You can get even more extreme angles than the ones in my pics above. I think the first picture I posted is pretty conclusive, with the main gun hitting the dirt 50m from the tank and the MG fire going off into space a split-second apart. What other explanation could there be? I'm going to venture a guess here and say that every vehicle in CMx2 uses the same animation, with the same rocking angles, roughly the same stopping distance, and thus, the same results. I don't have data on the braking speed of various Sherman variants, and I highly doubt BFC has such numbers either, or that they would bother modeling it. I'm not saying the game is flawed because of this or anything, it's just something that is there. It would even be kind of cool if less experienced crews did this at times, but veterans didn't.

Okay, here is evidence that was asked for. It would have taken all day to get it timed perfectly for a WeGo turn, so I just did it in RT by playing around with the movement right before the gunner fired. This can happen in normal play, it's just a matter of the timing being right (i.e. the tank fires just as it rocks forward or back). It's very easy to do if you want to test it yourself, let the gunner aim at a target, then give move orders forward or back just before he fires. I'm not saying this is a big issue, since it rarely happens, but we might as well get the facts settled. It seems to be a very small window though, because sometimes the gun would be rocking up/down and the round would still be on target. Perhaps that little gap could be coded out, or make the tank unable to fire for that half a second. First off, we have the shot into the ground, I didn't pause in time, but a split second before, the nose of the tank was pointing down, you can look at where the smoke is to get an idea. Note the MG rounds flying into the sky around the pause text. Same here, the tank appears level but a split second before, the nose was pointing up. You can clearly see the round flying off into the sky at a 15-20 degree angle. For the record, this was at about 300m, clear weather, daytime. The only time it happened was when I deliberately tried to make it happen, I recorded a few dozen other shots either directly on target or slightly off while I was trying to make a WeGo example.

This has been brought up, and brought up, and brought up. No word on changes, no one knows if it will ever happen. On Kanonier Reichmann's point, I do sometimes see a tank fire a shot into the ground because of the rocking forward upon stopping. It happens rarely but it is possible. I might try to replicate it in a file later.