A Canadian Cat

Yeah, I split my squads the vast majority of the time but not every squad right at the beginning. I do it as needed when my guys are getting into contact. There are a few times when recombining them is my preferred way too. For example when hunting for stragglers. I have a battle going now where I have a platoon clearing an area of woods where I know there is only between 2 and 4 enemy soldiers. My squads are all combined just to keep management simpler for me. That way I don't have to worry about one team getting ahead of the rest of the squad for a portion of the battle I am not monitoring closely.

I have to remember to try that next time I am in that situation.

Sounds like that is a Good Thing. Your are supposed to be cautious with your soldiers and make every effort to see them survive to fight another day. That is one of the good things about campaigns.

My impression is that having the entire formation configured one way is because that is the official way it is done. By that I mean when the Russian army outfits a Battalion with vehicles they are all the same. The US would most likely do the same but the APS option in this game is, if I recall correctly, considered to be an installed in theatre upgrade so their formations are not uniform to account for some variability in which vehicles have been through the process. That is my impression anyway.

That seems like a good idea. There are still potential issues. For example on a road going as fast as possible vehicles would not be 8m apart. That is just too close. Then there is the question of what speed should be used - I suggest for vehicles it be the fastest speed for the slowest vehicle that is following. Most of the time I think of follow I think of convoy management which we have been talking about but I can also see people want to have infantry follow tanks into the fray. That changes things because now you do not want to go fast and you do want to stay close. Doing this would be really nice but I think there are a few things that we need to think more about. Lets think about use cases. Forget how or what the commands look like for a bit what do you want to use follow for? Here are two to get us started: Convoy management: I want a group of vehicles to follow a road one behind the other and get to a destination as fast as possible. Infantry and tank coordination: I want a squad of infantry to follow a tank across an open space. Infantry and tank coordination: I want a tank to follow a squad of infantry into the woods. Next question is what happens when all hell breaks loose? By that I mean contact is made with the enemy or they get shot at. Convoy management I would be OK with whatever happens now but with vehicles that are under the follow command following the lead of the vehicle in front of them. So if a lead vehicle comes under fire it would react as now (which might be keep going or might be cancel everything and back up towards some hear by trees. I would prefer that the following vehicles do the same. But having written that the decision to press on vs go off road might be better done on a vehicle by vehicle bases. Infantry and tank coordination I would prefer that we can specify that they keep moving or that they stop. If they are crossing some open space that I am expecting trouble it might be a Good Thing to keep going towards cover. On the other hand in the woods that would be a bad idea.

Thankfully, personally I don't inhabit many other forums precisely because this kind of thing gets out of hand. In fact the other two mailing lists I read regularly (yeah mailing list - one has been around in one form or another for close to 25 years) would not tolerate any of this latest flare up. It is that.

Well this problem was specific to the flavour object. If you have seen other problems by all means start a new thread with some screen shots, saved turns and attention to detail. Just make sure you have your expectations set: the vast majority of posts about spotting resolved to unrealistic expectations on the part of us gamers. By that I mean BFC is modelling not just the gear and the tech but also human nature. I am not aware of another game the does that. In fact many games do the opposite and tell you where the enemy is with 100% fidelity even though there is no possible way that information could be available. I am aware that people think that their troops in the game should be perfect pixel troops or that super awesome tech X should mean they have perfect spotting abilities but that is *not* how BFC wants it. So, as long as you are aware that imperfect spotting is designed into the game if you still think you have found a bug - cause they can be there - then bring it up. If you come at it with an open mind a willingness to listen to what experienced players tell you only good things can come out of it.

I don't remember the hidden by a tree thing but yeah there is a limitation around spotting of parts of vehicles. I'm not sure it it applies here. I am sure once Charles looks at it he will know if it is fixable or not.

I'll add that tid bit too the report but i already linked this thread. It is probably good that the vehicle inside the out house cannot see out. That at least prevents gamey ticks. Feel free to play around but I doubt that more information will be needed to work on the issue.

I believe that it is a flavour object and I have never seen or heard about something like this either.

OK so I have looked at the file and reported the bug. No smoke involved. At first I wondered if the destroyed building was the "cause" but moving around the hiding T34 with a dismounted crew saw the same issue. What I found was you can get a clear blue LOS line right up to the outhouse and next to it (even past it) with no problems. But as soon as you check the AS where the out house is you get a no light of sight message. I am forced to conclude that my first guess was right the T34 is in the outhouse pit and totally protected from view. LiveNoMore, thanks for the report and the files - that was an odd one for sure.

So while BFC was busy improving their game to remove borg spotting to make the game more life like the US army was busy bringing borg spotting to life. How's that for irony.

I wish to point out that BFC have a track record of releasing patches to fix bugs at no charge. I don't know any more than you guys about the battle pack but so far they have not released new content that was the only source for a fix to a bug. If I remember correctly sometimes the new module shipped with the bug fixes before the patch to the existing code was available but they have never made you buy a new module just to get a bug fix. Please note I am talking about bug fixes not new features or enhancements to existing features. Those we have had to pay for in upgrades.

And I recently discovered that you can set friend requests to needing approval too: In the same place as above you can click on My Settings and then the first tab My Profile Settings has an entry for Friends that lets you turn on "Allow me to approve members before they're added as a friend".

Sweet - I thought you had everything covered. Is there any vehicles left that have not received your touch?

I do not have anything associated with .btt files and my games work fine. The only time I actually open .btt files is when I have the game up and I either start a new battle or load it into the scenario editor. Neither of which requires OS file associations. What is not working for you?

?? Is that a joke. Well I'll take it that way Sometimes it is pretty obvious things are screwy. Sometimes it take a lot of testing to find out what is wrong. Sometimes its just screwy expectations from us war gamers. Mostly it is the latter.

Excellent - welcome to the club! Yeah, I have a similar problem in one I am working on too. The bigger one looks better - good call. One thing you can do is get your elevation from Google Earth. Read this: http://community.battlefront.com/topic/101573-google-earth-is-your-friend/ You are correct - no rotating after the fact.

LOL there are no below ground terrain features modelled in the game but the tank must be in the outhouse pit. No that's a bug. Do you have that saved game still? I'll PM you and we can get this logged.

Is this what you are trying to do?: (what I did was copy the url from the browser when viewing the video and then pasting it into the message and then manually editing the s out of https). If not then please just ignore me.

Wait, isn't that against me? No, you are not allowed

Indeed a good point, I have lost a few rifle grenades by not thinking carefully enough.

Yep. That sums it up. I have several regular players and some of them send me back a turn within hours of me sending mine - I simply cannot play fast enough. Others take days before they get back to me. As long as everyone is living up to expectations that they set out when things started everything is good. I hope everyone is fairly happy with me I cannot quite manage a turn a day - close but the weekends usually have me faltering and then trying to catch up. Over at theBlitz people usually say in their post the kind of turn rate they are able to churn out and some even make a certain turn rate a requirement. Makes it pretty easy to decide who to engage with and who not depending on your own circumstance.

An excellent tip and I do the same now too. Before doing that there were many occasions where my men would be taking fire and ducking and I would look around and finally figure out it was friendly fire because I forgot to call of the support teams after the assault was over. Oops.

There are not a lot of scenario designers there but plenty of players. And those are pretty quiet boards.