Ranger33

I was actually looking at picking it up for full price the other day cause I just started reading The Hunt for Red October and wanted some sub action, glad I waited for a sale. I have SH3 but I've played it to death. Be sure to check out the mods for SH5, they take the game to whole new level from what I've seen. On that same site, Driver: San Francisco is $1 tomorrow, heard good things about it and they are pretty much giving it away.

Interesting, would like to see some further investigation. It rarely happens, but I still sometimes get the situation where an infantry squad stares out into a street, thinking it's empty, when in reality a tank has been sitting there for several seconds and has already spotted them.

Pretty sure any single living soldier counts, even if he is broken, leaderless, exhausted, and out of ammo, one man counts the same as a battalion of infantry when it comes to occupy objectives. A rather rigid and less than ideal system IMO.

I used to always play RT, but the last few months I've switched to turn-based for anything bigger than 2-3 platoons. The problem for me is that you can only focus on one group at a time, and have to choose between blindly sending other men forward, or having most of your force sitting idle which wastes tons of time.Plus WEGO is great for all the other reasons stated above. RT would be better if it had more feedback. Panzer Command: Ostfront is excellent in this regard (heresy!) with it's minimap and event log (which you can click to go directly to the action). I also really like the slow-mo kill shots

This forum certainly has more than it's fair share of weird conversations. Anyway, very cool pictures!

Was wondering if anyone else would point that out. I was planning on sticking a nice CMFI box up on the shelf by my CMSF and CMBN cases (with East Front, CMSF2, etc in the future). I guess a man could have worse problems.

My thoughts exactly. The briefing suggests a rapid armored attack across wide open terrain, my CMSF senses began tingling immediately. You just don't do that sort of thing, especially when the scenario author suggests it. Also, your points about being aggressive and commiting to an attack are spot on. It can be the difference between breaking a defense wide open or settling in for a war of attrition, which the defender usually wins. Of course, the trick is knowing the right place and time to commit

It's entirely dependent on the scenario really. Overall I would say CMFI requires more mobile attacks than CMBN, just due to the open nature of the terrain. If you are winning scenarios and not taking excess casualties (usually one of the mission objectives), then you aren't doing anything wrong. I find that I use much more of the available time when playing RT than WeGo. A great example is the second mission in the Italian campaign. First time around I tried to do a slow, steady combined arms attack with infantry leading the way and tanks in support. This didn't work at all as the Americans have a ton of direct LOS mortars and MGs ready as soon as you cross over the first ridge. Moving slowly would only result in massive losses. (**spoilers**) I found the best solution for that scenario was to follow the briefing advice and launch a direct armored assault. The only (well, mostly) danger to your tanks is mortar fire, so basically you just roll them rapidly across the map, pausing briefly to fire, and you can win the scenario in 20 minutes, without losing a single man.

Radeon HD 5770 here, looking really good with the new shaders. I was already seeing a massive improvement over CMBN, but with the hotfix the shadows have really been cleaned up and I didn't see any of the minor oddities (bits of misplaced shadows on some models) that I was with CMFI 1.00 There is still a bit of the wavy lines on certain sides of buildings, but other than that everything looks to be working as intended.

I actually didn't get any activations at all after downloading the game Sent to helpdesk and it was resolved within 45 minutes. They said that the activations had been made from my IP address, 4 activations at different times before I had even downloaded the game :confused:. I have no idea what the deal was but the problem was quickly solved. I'm not sure if they work this late into the weekend though, you might have to wait until Monday.

Go left with the main body of your force, then around back to the village. If you try to advance beyond the trenches with just infantry you will get wrecked by the counter-attack. Send maybe 2 platoons and some tanks along the road on your right flank and they can fight through most of that first village (at least on my playthrough). I also used a large opening barrage to wipe out those 88's, otherwise I wouldn't recommend venturing to the far end of the map. I didn't "win" this mission so much as I sprawled my force all over the map and somehow killed more Germans than men I lost.

The problem right now is that sometimes you can't bring all that firepower to bear, because the action spots don't line up how you want them to. So you end up with one section of the squad looking over a ridge, but the others can't see anything, and you can't micromanage their positions without splitting them. It doesn't happen that often, but it's frustrating when it does. It's certainly not a game breaker or anything, just annoying.

Oh boy, I get to say it: It's been like this since CMSF

Phil, just in case you didn't see my thread from the other day, I have an ATI card (HD 5770) and the new shaders make the shadows much, MUCH better than they were in CMBN. I am getting the issue discussed in this thread, but for me it's an improvement . The vehicle shadows in particular were totally broken for me in CMBN, with shadows being cast on both sides of everything and other weirdness. So, progress is being made, you guys will get it there eventually.

Is this intentional? I noticed in the first mission of the German campaign that the MG assistants appear to be only armed with a pistol. This is also the case in regular MG teams and some squads, but not all. For example, the MG assistant in the armored Aufklarung teams has a rifle, but in the motorized teams he does not. Going back to CMBN, all of them have rifles, though they generally don't use them, which is what you would expect. Did the Germans at this time normally do that? Even if it was the theoretical doctrine, I would find it hard to believe that they would go into combat without a rifle. Maybe in a fortified position, but not on the move. I didn't go through every unit in each game, but from what I saw the Americans/British/Italians/etc all have rifles. I will yield the floor to grognard wisdom on this one.

Yeah, it's annoying and makes about as much sense as not letting Syrian regular army troops split in CMSF. I get that this is supposed to represent a lack of training, poor leadership, etc. but the blanket approach isn't really fair or, arguably, realistic. In my mind that limitation should be applied based on the experience level of the squad and not nationality. Maybe Italian squads need to be Veteran level to do it, while German/Allies only need to be Regulars? That would seem fair to me and take training doctrines into account versus combat experience. I'm guessing the same issue will pop up on the Eastern front with Soviet infantry, maybe something to consider then. This is one of those fun vs realism things that should lean towards fun. If only to avoid the frustration of having 10 guys trying to look through two windows, and then watching half your squad get taken out by a single HE round.

Welcome to the club! After your first taste of CMx2 (the newer Combat Mission games) you won't be satisfied with any other strategy games. Feel free to post any questions here, because you will almost certainly have some.

Trying out the Italian campaign first. It's such breath of fresh air to be fighting my way across hilly but cover strewn maps instead of hedgerow after hedgerow. Combining that with the Italians lack of heavy firepower really makes for different sort of experience than anything in CMBN. Absolutely loving everything so far, can't wait to revisit CMBN with the upgrade. On the matter of HQ's, it is a bit confusing but if you played some of the British scenarios in CMSF it will come a bit easier, they have excess numbers of HQ's and section leaders in any given company as well.

There are still black squares for FOW bunkers... Back to the drawing board

Some of the files have been moved around to your "My Documents" folder due to Windows 8 or whatever, that's probably where it is now. However, there's no need as you can now edit the hotkeys from within the options menu.

With CMSF and CMBN my shadows looked terrible, very similar to this post. From my reading through posts it seems this is primarily a problem with some ATI cards like I have. However, with the new shaders these problems seem to have been solved. If you turn the shaders off it goes right back to the super dark and jacked up shadows, if you're feeling nostalgic . The shadows still have a few quirks here and there, but after playing a couple scenarios I can happily report that this will be the first CMx2 game that I can play with the shadows turned on! I'm looking forward to the 2.0 Upgrade for CMBN even more now, just so I can finally turn shadows on. General performance also seems to be improved a few notches, on most of the maps I've tried the game runs perfectly smooth no matter where the camera is or how much action is going on.

I think the keys are bugged for some people. I got a message that I had no activations remaining on my first ever attempt to play the game. So I tried the manual activation and had the same problem as you, no magic number on the page where it is supposed to appear. Sent a ticket.

Anyone care to comment on graphics/performance improvements? The screenshots have looked really good, I can't wait to see it all in motion.

Yeah, but the house, the car, and the dog all get to moving pretty fast as well.

Eh, my connection is pretty mediocre where I am (60-70 kb/s) so it doesn't really matter how many people are downloading. I'll just live vicariously through you guys for a few hours.