A Canadian Cat

Interesting. We have had a few people post about moving from the WW2 games to CMBS and having trouble with the transition. Honestly I have not thought alot about this but of the top of my head I think there are three main differences: reaction time, survive-ability and crew awareness. In the modern area AFVs have faster reaction times and better situation awareness. Troops and AFVs have higher toughness but of course weapons are more leather too. What I am referring to under the heading of survive-ability is that in the WW2 titles sending tanks ahead without an infantry screen is very hard on your tanks but in the modern game it is very hard on your infantry. So my advice on the transition is to go slower - takes longer for crews to spot the enemy and react to them. And lead with your infantry - your tanks need an infantry screen and your half tracks are not up to taking any fire and need to be much further back.

Anyone in the command seat helps. @antaress73 showed that an HQ was better. Those specific variations are untested. Those are interesting questions though.

That is what I do - break off a scout team from the squad and they get to ride everywhere. Yeah that should work to. I would personally recommend making sure that the scout team you are planning to use is in the same platoon as the BMP they are going to be "commanding". No, I have no special knowledge that this is important in some way I would just do it that way .

Actually not quite. Surrendering does not automatically give your opponent a total victory. It does give them all the points for occupy objectives and unit objectives. But it does not nullify any points you may have earned for touch, observe and unit objectives etc. So, while frequently if your opponent gets all their occupy and unit objectives they will earn a total victory it is not a guarantee.

There is no automatic surrender in PBEM games. You can continue to play turn with all your men casualties. It's pretty boring but the game still let's you play the turns.

Drm is not going away. I wish it would too but it's not. You can find threads where people complain that the game is a terrible nightmare to play. You know that is not true. If you read the support forums here you will see that all drm issues have been resolved. If you are unlucky enough to hit a problem their support team will fix it. Also what do you mean by the same drm? The one they are using now is not the same as the one from the CM1x games. It is not even the same from Shock Force.

In the WW2 titles FO units can call call artillery, mortars and air support. HQ units can call all mortars and most artillery (some bigger calibre need FOs). The calling HQ or FO unit needs to have the LOS to the target. So, with the HQ selected use the support panel to call the mortar fire (see the section "Artillery and Air Support" in the CM Engine Manual v3.01 pp 66. On map mortars can also fire directly themselves if they have LOS to the target. For the US 60mm mortars it is a very useful way to use them.

That looks cool. I took a stab at this a while back check out this post and the one after:

It took me a while before I LOL

Getting the elevation is the main thing I use Google Earth for. For example the Lanzerath ridge map was made using GE for the elevation. I used some areal photos to confirm that the main roads and forests were more or less unchanged which gave me confidence that no one had reworked the landscape too much. So, I used a GE map for the elevation along with the road network and forest boundaries adjusted using the areal photos. Then used the areal photos combined with street view to place the buildings. As @sburke said some of the buildings are clearly pretty much the same. The goal is absolutely to get a map that looks like it did in 1944.

Oops I stand corrected then. As your tests showed, with 50HE hits and the houses still standing (yikes), your impression of the amount of HE used was much closer than my thoughts on the matter. Humm that seems off. There is not supposed to be anything special about the type of game with regard to how the fire support settings are handled. The only differences is that during setup you can setup a mission anywhere on the map while once the game starts you can only request a mission that your spotter has LOS for.

Interesting. I like what @akd suggested but my method is some what different. I tab right to the unit in the building I am trying to get to fire. Then I use the mouse scroll button to move the camera directly up in the building until I can see the floor above. By see the floor mean literally see the floor of the next story in the building. Then I target and place the target right in front of the camera which is directly above the unit on the floor above. Seems to work for me.

Thanks @sttp that feels like it explains things pretty well.

Any new maps would be uploaded to the scenario depot (http://www.thefewgoodmen.com/tsd3/category/cm-final-blitzkrieg/cm-final-blitzkrieg-maps/). There is only one there right now and none are ported from the older games. However the game also ships with master maps that cover plenty of known places. Perhaps one of them covers what you want: http://www.combatmission.lesliesoftware.com/FinalBlitzkrieg/Maps/index.html

I am sure the way it is is intentional. As you see some people think its not quite right. I have no real idea but in general the bigger the building the more it will take to bring it down. The skin of the building is not really a factor though even though you could reasonably think that the same building with brick would be harder to destroy than one that looked like it was made of wood but that is not the case. How many Shermans were firing? They can only get 3-4 shots away each turn so multiple buildings and 20HE hits per building in two turns would be five Sherman tanks per building. Could be but I'm going to guess there were quite a bit fewer HE hits per building Yeah that is not how it works. When you have passengers in a vehicle their move orders only happen once the vehicle stops and has no more move orders. This is so that a convoy of vehicles can be given pause orders to control the convoy and not have troops dismounting along the road. With mounting and dismount of passengers you can: Set a pause at the beginning of a vehicle move and order passengers to embark into the vehicle. As long as the passengers start loading before the pause runs out the vehicle will wait for them to load and the proceed along its move orders. For a vehicle with no move orders give the passengers a dismount order and then give both the vehicle and the passengers move orders and the vehicle will wait until they passengers dismount before both move off on their move orders. I hear it is also supposed to be possible to have a vehicle have some move orders and a pause at one way point followed by more move orders and have passengers who are near the way point with the pause be given an embark order and the vehicle will allow the passengers to load at that way point with the pause and continue on only after the passengers are loaded. Personally I have had options 3 go terribly wrong so I usually just stick with options 1 or 2. This I don't quite follow this question: there is nothing in the game that prevents assigning artillery to barrages during the setup for any side in any game.

Correct. Bummer for you. Those images are excellent. I like the little inset graphics showing a mini version of what happened to the unit plus their disposition. Very cool.

Except Assad did not kill terrorists in the past. His regime was accused of sponsoring terrorists while he and his father before him were in power. Now that he has an armed resistance to fight he just labeled them terrorists since the was convenient. The fact that other sponsors of terrorists sent some guys to mess around in Syria just made his labeling almost believable. Assad is not a terrorist killer he is a terrorist sponsor.

Time traveling era blocks was pretty much the title of the bug I logged.

I hear ya. So many of the choices are bad. The thing is just trying to put things back the way they were may not even be possible and if it is it is just setting up another generation or two to live under a terrible regime only to probably end up in the same civil war later. Not that many other possible solutions are better. Except maybe... Actually that might be a good start. Except not to get rid of him but to make things better for the people of the region. Of course that will not be popular because really it is more than just Syria's borders that should be erased. And that of course will not be popular with several powerful players in the region. That is / was a big concern. The bottom line is this is really complex. The one thing I know is that bombing civilians is definitely not making things better for Syrias or their neighbours. Trying to control all the actors involved is basically not possible but we could at last stop killing non combatants indiscriminately and allow humanitarian groups to work. I don't pretend to have a solution for the rest. The only other thing I know is that outsiders dictating terms is probably not the best choice (by outsiders I mean, Europe, US, Russian, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the gulf states, Turkey etc) but that seems unlikely so I'll go with stop bombing civilians as a starting point.

Will do. I know the sounds are not baked in to the turn so rewinding changes things. Edited cause that sounded kinda harsh and it's not meant to be. Most of the time I don't really care but now and then something cool happens right when the voices are perfect and I wish I could record it but rewinding ends up spoiling it.

Yeah, lots of people were hoping that the London ophthalmologist would have a fresh take on rule. But no, sadly, that did not happen. It could partly be because even though one man runs the show there is a pretty big bureaucratic apparatus doing the heavy lifting and just changing the top is not enough. Or it could be that he was just as bad as his father. I think it is both. Syria has for decades run a very brutal regime that cracked down on decent at any turn. I would compare the Syrian secret police to the Stazi because they used similar techniques for spying on citizens and coercing people to inform on their friends family and neighbours. People who were suspected of various things disappeared in to a prison system that used torture to extract confessions to whatever the agency needed the "truth" to be etc. Yeah, respect might not be the right word. While it is true that authoritarian regimes tend to crack down on radical nuts, they treat anyone who steps even a little out of line the same way. Citizens under that kind of regime cannot even speak out against poorly run government programs, corruption, or even things as simple as work place safety violations because state apparatus views that as a threat to the state. So, just because religious conflicts between citizens was curtailed did not really mean he had any respect for those groups. His reaction to the protests was totally inline with the way he ran his government and many people say he turned out to be even more ruthless than his father. Yeah but it started out as citizens rising up and refusing to be shut up. It started with peaceful protests. Once things went hot the original Free Syrian army was made up of armed citizens and deserters from the Assad regime army (note there are actually a variety of militias in the mix in Syria too, many prominent regime figures and family members have their own private armed force too). Given the way things are in that area of the world the foreign fighters did not take long to arrive but those groups you mentioned were not there at the beginning. Then of course Assad stoked this and tried to make it the centre of his "fight". When Assad or the Russians talk about terrorists in Syria they don't exclusively mean the foreign fighters they include the citizens that rose up against Assad too. That's why when we see them bombing civilians they say, with a straight face, they are bombing terrorists. Assad views anyone who opposes his government as a terrorist.

Not directly. Maps can only be manually made in the map editor. What you can do is use the map editor overlay to get a picture of a satellite or topographic map on top of your map so you can paint the map following the features of the overlay map. Look at "Map Overlay" pp 86 of CM Engine Manual v3.01.pdf. Check this out for tips on using Google Earth to create a overlays for using in this manor:

That's how I feel as well. Mind you both vehicles do not last long if there are enemy AFVs around so it could be six of one half a dozen of another. But the BTR82A does spot better than the MTLB. If they both spend their time area firing in support of your troops then perhaps that difference does not matter. I can see that. Do those advantages play out in the game though? I have not ever tried both vehicles out head to head in those environments. Interesting thought the MTLB does have a lower profile for sure. I wonder if that observation would hold in testing... None of my opponents have done that Probably because they know that 30mm auto cannon is nasty - more guys become casulties when hit - I thought they were about the same as BTRs + hell yes, that 30mm auto cannon is awesome

Alright I cannot keep quiet any more I know you guys all know what you mean when you say splash screen - you are talking about the game's main screen where you pick from starting a new game, playing a saved game, working in the scenario editor etc but that's not a splash screen. I would call that the game's main screen or home screen. The splash screen is the small graphic that comes up before the game's main screen which in the case of BFC is that tank night fire image appears at about 700 pixels wide before the main screen shows up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splash_screen