Ranger33

It's all here They will offer the original at a discount for awhile, or you can buy it already upgraded. He mentions that Market Garden will require the update, I hope there will be an option to bundle it with the 2.0 upgrade and save a few bucks. Anyone want to wildly speculate on how much the upgrades will cost? I'm guessing $15, and if you bundle with MG you get $5 off.

You should definitely check out the demo. The game was total garbage on release, I don't think I visited the BF website for a year or two after getting frustrated with it, but then I came back randomly one day and tried the demos for CMA and CMSF, discovered that the engine had been massively improved and immediately bought the CMSF modules and CMA. Now it's one of my favorite games ever.

Two main factors: Do you want the upgraded features now or later? Do you prefer Normandy or Sicily? I guess something else to consider would be that there are already tons of scenarios and mods available for CMBN, with CMFI they would take a while to get the ball rolling. Just to throw a curveball in there: You can get CMSF and all the modules for the same price. This is far and away the most bang for your buck. There are at least 20 campaigns out there and dozens of quality scenarios, and you get to play with a massive variety of soldiers and vehicles. It really is a gem of a game.

Pre-order and regular downloads always become available at the same time (I think). The only difference is that pre-orders get an early email. Then some clueless soul always goes and posts about it on the forum, despite the suggestion in the email not to.

My thoughts exactly, the camo schemes look great. However there will always be room for mods, that video suffered from a severe lack of Vein's tracers and other effects.

I should have pointed this out, that picture isn't from my system, I took it from a thread on the shadows in the Tech forum. However, it is exactly the same as what I experience on my PC. For the record, my system is fairly high-end, two HD 5770s in Crossfire, 16GB RAM, i-7 Quad Core, can run Crysis almost maxed out at 1920x1080 with no framerate drops, yadda yadda. From the comments I've seen it seems to be a problem with ATI cards more so than Nvidia. Lucky me I just got a new laptop with a not great but at least not integrated Nvidia card, so maybe I can just switch my CM gaming over to that. Regardless, I'm off to pre-order CMFI as soon as I get home!

This is probably the best surprise among many today. It will give CMBN a much longer lifespan.

Was wondering this as well. If all the games are running on the same engine version, whats to stop taking the next step and combining them all together? Maybe we will see something like that in a few years. At the very least it would very nice to have some kind of launcher that lets you switch between games without needing to exit back to the desktop. At this rate I will have a dozen icons on my desktop before long.

Excellent news! My only concern when looking at the feature list of CMFI (new acronyms, yay!) was how they would never make it into CMBN. This new system will be great, especially with all the new base games on the schedule. Too bad about CMSF and CMA but understandable.

So are you saying that all three of these will be released in the next year or so? Because...yeah...that would awesome.

This all sounds too good to be true! I'm still confused though, but happy about it!

All I want out of the shadows is that they don't do things like this. Mine have been like that since CMSF and I've had to turn them off, which sucks, since sometimes they look really good. Apparently not everyone has this problem, and some have only had it since CW, but there has been no word on causes/fixes.

The big announcement has slipped in behind the lines of the refresh monkeys.

I think this hits the nail on the head. In real life they would be able to share that burden with others or stockpile it on the ground somewhere and haul it up as needed. We have to consider that CMBN scenarios tend to play out much, much faster than they did in real life, so there isn't as much opportunity to send guys back and forth with extra ammo.

Not sure how to interpret your but I'd call that a great offer for anyone interested in realistic tactical WW2 games. I would say that CMBN is probably the better game overall, but AP offers many of the features that people pine for around here. Strategic metagame, much more immersive map scale, infantry that move in a realistic manner, better eye candy, AI that can think on it's feet, Eastern Front, and a few other odds and ends (like patching more than once a year). The UI is indeed pretty bad, but CMx2 isn't winning any awards in that department either.

I think the main thing the CW module brings is much higher quality scenarios. A lot of the stock scenarios from CMBN base were always "Attack through bocage and capture some little town" over and over and over. Not to mention the rampant use of brick wall hedgerows with few gaps and no way to blast through them. In CW the maps are much more interesting I think, with more complex objectives. The Engel campaign highlights this, every mission is radically different. One will notice the same with CMSF. The original stock scenarios are pretty dull compared to the stuff created later. (No offense to any scenario creators intended here)

First off, there aren't nearly as many calculations going on in the background of Wargame. Not to say it's a "simple" game, but relative to CMBN there isn't nearly as much going on under the hood. Secondly, CMBN isn't very well optimized compared to Wargame, and seems to have some sort of bottleneck. *shrug* If they had more funds, more coders, more everything, it would be better, but it is what it is. You are comparing a high-budget game where the smooth engine is probably it's best feature, versus a low-budget game where the graphics engine is basically functional enough to work and everything else (ballistics, LOS, etc) is the focus.

This is just another of their cruel jokes, like the half a decade long absence of a Delete button on the saved games screen. They probably have an over/under on how many days it will take for someone to write a 5 paragraph long "I've had it with this and I'm leaving forever" post.

Hmm, I never have a problem seeing on night maps, and my monitor has the brightness turned down quite a bit. Do you guys have problems like that in other games? I have a Radeon 5770 and an LED monitor, just for comparison.

Could you maybe post a picture of the map? I finished that campaign a few weeks ago but I can't remember which scenario you are talking about exactly.

Just think about it in terms of real life. An infantry leader on the ground doesn't have a bird's eye view of the battlefield, he can only see what he has LOS to, so he has to get up close to be able to direct mortar fire in. Use the target command to do area fire on the known enemy positions, even if you can't actually see them. The bocage is essentially a wall, so you can't see through it until you get right up against it.

I'm only on the second scenario so far, but I really enjoyed the first one. Easily my favorite of the beach landing scenarios I've played so far. I guess my guys were a bit luckier than others, as I *only* had about 300 casualties. I think the biggest factor was that my Rangers got off the beach mostly intact, which allowed me to easily take the positions on the right.

I think the weakest area of CM graphics is the animations, they are just so slow and stiff. I know it's mostly a question of budget, but I would like to see a bit more focus there. Having squad leaders do hand signals, soldiers diving to the ground when under fire, leaning around corners, blind firing at times, Germans running with their rifle in one hand, and so on. Company of Heroes (bigger budget, I know) does an amazing job in this regard, and it really adds to the experience.

Soldat by Siegfried Knappe is pretty good and mostly about the Eastern Front. As he moves up in ranks there is less "action" but it is interesting all the same. At the end he is commanding one of the last active German units in the Battle for Berlin, which makes for very good reading. Infantry Aces is an extremely entertaining read where most of the book is on the Eastern Front. There is stuff in here that would be too unbelievable to put in a movie. I can't vouch for it all being 100% true, but the soldiers discussed were awarded medals for their actions and most survived the war. If you are looking for something more at the strategic level I don't know, I too would be interested in such a thing if it isn't too dry.

A tweak would certainly be reasonable I think. I live on a farm and deal with that sort of wire on a regular basis. It is only strong enough to jam an axle if a lot of it gets wrapped around something in one spot. In most cases the wire just snaps. We have tractors/plows/etc that get wire wrapped in multiple spots and they just roll along like it isn't there. Its something that in theory could certainly happen, but 99/100 times the tank would roll right over that three wire fence like it wasn't there. Edit: Just to clarify, we don't make a habit of running over fences, there's usually loose wire here and there from old fences that can be problematic.