A Canadian Cat

No I believe this is the intended behaviour - not intuitive (from a UI perspective) but intended. When the battery crew are loading the gun for a fire mission they "assemble" the charge and round to reach the target. The listed smoke round count is the number of rounds they can turn into smoke. The listed HE rounds is the count of the number of charges and HE they have. So, the smoke rounds are not totally separate from the HE. If you want to use the smoke rounds then you need to have that number of HE rounds available. This does not hold for tank smoke rounds - they really are separate.

Actually it sounds like your platoon was out of C2 with the company but the company was in C2 with the regiment. The green and red dots on the chain of command represent the C2 status of each level. So for the platoon's info to get to the regiment all the dots need to be green.

You will likely find this thread interesting: http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=109932 I too started with the rail station but managed only a draw (felt like a loss). My second try was to take the farm first. Here is the thing, you need to suppress or block the fire teams in the rail station and the fire team in the farm in order to make it up the hill. So, what I did was drop the mortar shells on the rail station - not a heavy barrage you want it to last a while. Then I smoked the farm house itself. Then head up the hill and take you lumps. Leapfrogging with alternating fire teams shooting up the farm defenders as you go. Once you fight you way into the farm rest and regroup and spend some ammo firing at the rail station before you send a couple of teams back down the hill. I did not manage to do as well as some in the above thread but the Kiwis did prevail.

^^^^ Glad you are having fun

That's a HEAT round. HESH is a different beast.

Firing from as far away as possible (as @womble says out past 300m the rifle men stop firing). If that is not possible I find that they do not get too much return fire if there are other infantry, of yours, in front of them. If that is not possible I just let them go.

Sounds even more dramatic - looking forward to pics if you can sort out your troubles.

Indeed, war is complex. I would argue two things - we would need all the young to become wise simultaneously because if one side is willing to go to war you need to be as well. Not that it does not piss me off when a powerful few decide others should go fight to make them more powerful. So, really we should be wishing to make those powerful few wise (or kick their asses out of their places of power:-). Wait, that might involve fighting and sacrifice - again. Hummm back around we come with our argument.

Very cool. The project was amazing and to think of the planning and effort involved. It is as mind boggling as the invasion itself. Without that engineering work the Allies could not have sustained the beach heads and the move inland.

Kinda like this: Oh man that is an even better story. I think you have us beat there.

LOL agreed I love hearing that one too. I have to say "I can't do this" is right up there as well.

I make sure my kids don't forget either. We talk about this kind of topic frequently (wide ranging from 1812 to modern day where ever the discussion leads). My son shocked me last year when he picked the Mulberry docks as a project for his history class. I don't even remember talking about those - although I might have. Clearly he was listening. We both learned a lot too.

Agreed, gives you a small sense of the cost - if you take the time to think about it. Certainly much better that those role playing twitch games where you come back from the dead over and over. In those games the value of your "life" is very low.

Yeah, smoke I keep forgetting that some squads can do their own smoke. Distraction is good - I use that a *lot*. Note to self: watch for smoke capability in the infantry squads. Smoke, distraction and crawling - watch out enemy tanks

Yeah, with that kick ass machine - something seems wrong there...

I have been using Target Briefly for this: if I want to specify a target but I do not want the tank to fixate on that one thing for the whole minute - in case something unexpected happens.

It is never a good idea for your FO's to have a spot of tea together on the battlefield. Tell them they have to wait until they are in the rear before the socialize.

+1 to that. Come on you guys are you men or kids? I usually play head to head with the occasional QB to try out an idea or equipment and the odd campaign (never finished one against the AI - b o r i n g). If I get pasted by a mistake I take it in stride and either adjust plans to compensate or adjust goals to reflect the new reality.

This IMO is one area urban fighting shows problems. I am glad to hear that crawling has given you better success I will try that in the future. The most common thing that I have seen is some variation of the infantry are spotted quickly by the tank and killed no matter how close / far they are from the tank. I have had guys right behind the tank - which was facing the other way - get gunned down after the turret turns 180. I was surprised they were even spotted. Having your guys sit in the middle of the road where the tank used to be proceed to get gunned down is the other variation of this. In this case it is because the order you want to give is "close assault that tank" but the only order you can give is "move to that action square". I would like to see some way of ordering a close assault of a tank. That way if the tank moved just a short distance your men would got to the right place and if the tank moved further - way down the street your men could just forget it and get back in cover. I have seen quite a few tanks get KO'ed this way too so it is not totally one sided.

Spot on. Pretty much ever game I have played I am aware that I have gone further than a real force commander would go (or indeed the squads themselves would go). But it is fun and I do it anyway because it is a game. One thing that I would like to do to reduce our tendency to push to far is have the ability to play campaign's head to head via PBEM*. I think that would allow the creation of campaigns where pushing your troops too far would be a bad thing for your long term success. The fact that you, as a commander, know you and your troops must fight another day would put a natural damper on you willingness to sacrifice them. * I realize that there is some support for head to head play but I (and my regular play partners) really cannot play anything other than PBEM when it comes to head to head play.

Well I am not sure if this is a glaring hole but we already have multiple types of fortifications: sandbag walls, fox holes, trenches, wire etc. So I am not sure how adding fortifying buildings and barricades would be prevented by the current system - they just aren't there at the moment. Or are you saying you don't buy fortifications because of the setup experience where you have to think a head and purchase the right amount of each type? I am not sure if redoing the system of purchasing fortifications really buys us end users much. It certainly would require significant programming effort. I would rather BFC add barricades and building fortifications to their current list. Even that would be far from free.

^^^^^ Well they spot my guys approaching from the side and rear pretty easily in game. It sure seems like they have windows on the side

Fire mission behaviour and wait times are the same for Warrior, Elite and Iron. Elite is the same as Warrior but removes specialized unit icons from the enemy (which is good because how would your guys know that guy the can see between the trees is a AT Gun amo bearer? Iron is the same for Elite but it adds FOW visibility to your units. If you select one of your own units you will see only friendly units visible to the selected unit and contact icons for your friendly forces that are near by. If you have none of your units selected then you can see all your units. Try Elite it makes figuring out the enemy force composition more difficult.

Yep, I like the *idea* but find too muck clicking needs to happen and extra turn views are needed. I continue to always have an iron game going. I am getting used to it. I would never reject a game based on iron (and I would reject playing a game on Veteran). But iron is not my first choice.

Drones are now used to "scout" ahead of your forces as well. So troops know if there are enemies on the other side of the wall, ditch, hill etc. before they even get into a position to get their own eyes on the area. Makes it easier to find the enemy if you know more or less where to look.