A Canadian Cat

I broke out my sanity test scenario to do some checking because @Armorgunner's comment about are we playing the same game had me concerned. This is not statistically significant checking just a few samples to see what's what. All tests involved 155 / 152mm artillery. Precision Shells You may recall at one point US precision was toned down and Russian precision was tuned up. The result is that, while at one time, three US precision shells was nearly guaranteed to KO a T90 and three Russian precision shells was not. The current result feels a bit different. T90 "hit" by three precision shells. One actually hit the others were just close. Not a huge amount of damage but immobilized - mission kill. At this point though I was a bit concerned that nothing else was damaged... Three Russian precision "hits". Similar to above one actual hit and two close by. Lots more damage - pretty much a mission kill. So I lined up a couple of fresh tanks... Three US precision "hits" this time no direct hits but all close. That's more nasty - pretty much a mission kill. Notice that for the first one the shells were on the long side and strike to the rear of the tank and did little damage to systems. The second strike landed its shells to the front of the vehicle and caused quite a bit of system damage. Coincidence - who knows I only ran four tests Three more Russian precision shells again lots of system damage, again shells landed on or to the front of the tank. Pretty much a mission kill. more...

Did you activate the battle pack with your key? If not - there is your solution. If you already did try again and then contact support if that didn't fix it. Use the activate modules link or .exe in the same directory where you game is installed.

I use FRAPS myself. Another possible choice is Nvida has a built in program with their drivers that allows this - I have no used it though.

Yes, you do. At the end of the game some number of unattended wounded become dead - which negatively effects your score a bit. Not only that but unattended wounded can be killed in the normal course of fighting. If your squad takes a couple of wounded casulties and later comes under mortar fire those wounded can sustain further wounds and become dead just like anyone else in your squad. But if they had been buddy aided and therefore removed they can no longer become KIA on the battle field. I think the score effect is pretty small but it is non zero. Combine that with the other great points about important resources, feel of the battle etc. It is important to how the game plays - for me at least.

This sounds like it could be a really interesting discussion. I like the advice from those first here - solid. Here is what I noticed as I played more and more: you can think of a large battle as a number of smaller actions. Clearly, you do need to maintain a big picture and execute your tactical leadership with the full context and all your forces working together at a higher level like @Combatintman and @nik mond pointed. What I noticed was that you start to see a pattern emerge of smaller actions playing out in different parts of the map. So, when I play a game with large forces I execute a larger tactical plan to allocate forces and coordinate them but as my men make contact I notice the different smaller actions. Then when I play a turn I typically spend a minute just watching everything at a high level. Watching my forces manoeuvre and seeing where new fights break out. Then I already know where the areas of action have been in previous turns so I have a set number of places where I zoom in and watch the minute from a much lower level. I do this multiple times adding new areas as needed and stopping in others. Then once I have essentially watched the equivalent of 2-5 smaller battles I hit the BRB and start planning, from the same perspective. So, looking at each smaller fight I spend time (as the Platoon commander(s)) and give good orders like I would for a smaller battle. Rinse and repeat for all the identified areas. Then (or back and forth) I think about the big picture and adjust the higher level plan by moving resources to support who needs it and slow or speed up the pace of my manoeuvring. In the end I am really playing a variable number of smaller engagements and I try to treat it as such so that ever unit gets the needed level of attention.

Totally agree - I"m going to apologize in advance for picking on you - but you and Steve gave a great example of a point I was making a few days about about version numbering. So Sorry @Erwin I mean no offence I am just taking this opportunity to point out a real life example of what I was talking about. This is a lovely example of why there is no winning formula for version numbering and naming. No matter what choice you make someone will read it wrong / backwards / misunderstand. Anyone who thinks they can devise a naming / versioning system that is simple and would give near 100% understanding is delusional. No hyperbole. I totally agree that you can devise a system that you and a few people in a room and understand 100% of the time the delusional part is thinking that the rest of the world will just get it. Not going to happen. Which is the correct way to make things better.... buuuuuttt there is always someone who will not read the notice. Surprise! We still do not have 100% understanding. At some point you have to just say, "Hey we did our best. We looked at what worked before and what didn't and tweaked things as best we can - time to move on to other problems and let support and the community cover the few confused people who are frankly just inevitable".

Yes LOL openGL is here to stay to support Mac. Changing to some other low level engine or rewriting it is way past a CM2x engine upgrade. Ditto with multi-thread support. Reset your expectations - CM2x is *never* going to use anything other than OpenGL and only support multi-threading at a peripheral level (its already there for some resource loading activities). In my not so humble and TOTALLY UNOFFICIAL OPINION

No I'm not My tests were with precision rounds and so between 1 - 3 direct or nearly direct hits. Any tank that was not destroyed was not very capable. It has been a while since I conducted that experiment - I'll have to try it again.

That is not the right place to contact BFC. Create a new support ticket here: Battlefront Help desk People keep finding that sales email and Steve keeps trying to get rid of it.

Right, and that has been my experience in CM too - lots of mission kill'ed tanks and the occasional dead one This is not my CM experience at all.

I actually read his post the other way around. I thought he was asking if the flame thrower team was *inside* the building can the fire at targets outside. Upon reading it again I see how you interpreted the other way. So, can they fire from inside to the outside? Through a window or door obviously.

Investigating this is near the top of my todo list. I have a couple of concerns - my gut says that I'll be able to make the case that troops should not flee from foxholes,trenches and buildings when under an artillery barrage but I am unsure how to make the case that they should not flee so quickly from just a normal ground assault. If you guys have ideas on that I'm all ears. Perhaps we don't really want to do that at all. BTW someone (sorry whomever you are for not crediting you) suggested adding a pause to your troops in their fortified positions so they don't move even if they want to. Select the team in question press the P key 10 times or just the pause quick command once. Now they will not move even if the feel the need. There are downsides to this - they don't ever flee even if the become shaken, they stick it out even more than before - but it can be useful for some teams.

Flame throwers are best used to burn stuff. Sorry I just couldn't resist They have a very short range so they are best if they stay a bit behind and are brought up to finish the job so to speak. If you are winning the firefight but in a dead lock bring up the flame throwers and break the dead lock. The are also really good when assaulting buildings - from the outside.... You know I have never tried firing one from inside to the outside so I actually don't know the answer to our other question.

Or after candy (or is it ice cream). That drives me nuts.

Nice list. I'd settle for some how figuring out how to reconcile the CMSF trenches with the new trenches and making all the old content "work" by making sure reasonable defaults are in place for any conflict. I tend to think that this will be a roaring success of all the old content remains at least playable to some extent. And only a partial success of old content doesn't work at all and people have to remake stuff. They have to bring IED's and spies to the new engine, reconcile changes to trenches and the removal of routing. Just doing all that plus testing and bug fixing is going to be a lot of work. I would honestly be surprised if they took on anything else. Plesently surprised but surprised.

No, there is no history of sales for thier games. The only deal with a price reduction are the bundle offers.

Sigh. It is a no win situation. Earlier when they just had a single version number and different people were confused by different things. And we had posts just like these. Now they separated the version numbers to clear things up and people are confused about the way it is now. Sorry to those confused, really I am. But I hope they don't change things again and just stuck with this. That is what I will advocate for behind the scenes and hope they don't change things again. The current versioning system is explainable and consistent. Changing again will break the consistent part I honestly I doubt it will make the explainable part any better. There will just be other people confused about something else. Version numbering is one of those things where there is always someone with a better idea. However if there is already an explainable and consistent system in place, don't spend time chacing the mythical perfect system because it will not actually make things better and therefore your efforts are better spent elsewhere.

Honestly I rarely pay attention to that. Whomever is in the lead gets to stay there. Perhaps I should

True but it is much clearer than before when they didn't call out the engine version at all and we had to remember which version of the game had what engine.

Oh good. Glad you are up and running then.

I managed a Tactical Victory but it felt worse that that. That was against a human. The plan I used was to attack along two points. I took a hit with some vehicles not making it to the right hand road (mud) but I made up for that when the main road force was stuck and pinned down getting flank shots from the other force along the right hand road. I managed to break a couple of deadlocks doing that. It was still a tough slog and I really felt like a draw rather than a win. But hey in the end we go by what the end screen says right

I use a mod that takes a different approach - its not a compass anymore. It's an eye with an arrow pointing at the directions. Saves my poor brain the confusion. It is part of this mod (check out the red and white view point image in the top left of the preview image): http://cmmodsiii.greenasjade.net/?p=1143 Inside the download for that mod is a .zip file called mb-sil-redgreen-black.zip which contains zmb-viewpoint.brz which has the mod.

Not a mistake. CMFI is version 2.00 with the v4 engine. The main page will list both the game version and the engine version.

It made headlines here because the psycho leader who beheaded two Canadians (and a German) citizen is said to have been killed: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/philippines-hall-ridsdel-alleged-ringleader-1.4066941

I think most of the time people have been good with doing that. I know I would be fine with that (not that my icon mods are really good candidates for what you are looking at doing). I think as you said being upfront with credit and what your work is based on is certainly the right thing to do. Honestly I actually don't think that once a free mod is shared with the community anyone can expect to totally control what happens to it next but for the sake of good relations you are probably wise to ask for permission though. A great example is @Kieme(ITA)'s work on modding Russian vehicles which are weathered versions of @BTR 's Russian vehicles: Between the two of them it is a pretty damn nice set of mods - I run with them. My suggestion for you is to create your mods with tags. Since mods use a simple file override mechanism if you replace the textures for Ukrainian Infantry then all Ukrainian infantry are effected by the mod. Which is fine if that is what you are trying to do. In your case it seems like you are trying to create some specialized mod sets. To make them easy to use I suggest you use tags so they don't replace the textures for the entire game but only for scenarios that use the given tag. That way you can create a specialized mod for Ukrainian Infantry with a tag and then someone can create a scenario to use them and your mod will work in their scenario but not override all Ukrainian Infantry.