A Canadian Cat

I re-read Steve's post and I do not think he committed to including this feature in CMRT. Having said that, BFC does have a program where by improvements in the engine are added to the older games after new features are released. For example when CMFI came out there were engine changes that were ported back to CMBN and are available as the 2.0 upgrade for CMBN. They have already said they will be doing that in the future. Which means when that feature does arrive it will most likely make its way back into the older games too.

Here is the thing: I almost never play against the AI - so close I could have written *never play against the AI* and I would have only been slightly wrong (although to be fair I am going through a phase where I am playing against the AI now but not Quick battles). There are lots of people on this forum that are like me an only play against humans (note I did not say *all* so please don't jump on me:-). So, lot of us have never seen what you are experiencing. Therefore we are not talking about it We have been told that most of the customer base plays against the AI so what you are experiencing is entirely relevant just no something the majority of posters are experiencing. Which is probably an indication that this is not an always happens problem. Given that lots of official testers read this forum, heck the guy that is responsible for the QB maps reads and contributes here, Here is my suggestion: Fire up a QB take note of everything you set and what map is used. Save a turn when it first starts. Make sure you hit the problem you are talking about save another turn showing that. Grab an incriminating screen shot and post that that info to this thread. There is a good chance someone will play around and figure out what is up. Probably will not be me though :cool:

Sounds frustrating. Here is what you need to be aware of: the AI does nothing but fight in place on its own. A quick battle map needs initial setup locations for the AI controlled troops and it needs an AI plan to move the AI controlled units from their setup areas to objectives or attack you. The QB maps that came with the game are supposed to have those ready to go. Additional maps may or may not have the necessary plans - the author will hopefully say one way or another. Since you are not specific about map, settings etc no one here can tell you more than that intro information.

Perhaps I did not phrase that well. Interesting that of all the things posted that is the part of these posts you want to respond to? OK clearly you are just trolling (you might be an old troll and you might be an experienced troll but still a troll) and I will no longer bother. Yeah, I should followed @LukeFF instinct.

That defect was fixed long ago. I have in the latest CMBN and CMFI got my arty *back* after a while. The battery will no longer keep shooting spotting rounds in the vein hope that the FO will answer. At some point the battery will just cancel the mission themselves.

LOL yeah his tone was a bit combative and silly but I'll give him chance and see if he really wants to learn how to play the game.

Spotting is going to be an issue that causes disagreement for sure. The method is so much better in CM2 than it was in CM1. Borg spotting in CM1: come on you have to admit that was pretty bad. The thing is the spotting in CM2 is very different and sometimes things happen that you say "no way" but in reality not everyone spots perfectly, not everyone spots things at the same time, not everyone is looking in the right direction a the right moment. People get surprised. When those odd things happen just chalk them up to surprise. BFC fixes problems when they are found. Finding them is tricky because you have to do some work to sus out where the issue is. BTW just saying that some jeep some where sometime spotted and AT gun when you did not think it should does not count as a bug report. So many changes have been made around spotting. AT guns are harder to spot, tanks see much less than they used to etc. etc. So, this is clearly a bug. And I can tell you that it is one that I have not seen for a long time. In the 1.x version there were issues with team members wondering and mostly that was only annoying. But as you note when they were supposed to load into a truck it went from annoying to bad. I can tell you this one has been fixed. I have not see it in a long long time. This has been my experience too. Even the bug mentioned did not happen frequently and I moved people by truck and half track often.

That is pretty much my list of uses for the tool. You even have it in order of most common to least common - for me any way. In fact those last two might not even happen in many games.

Some worthwhile points and ideas. I have a question though: You have mentioned this before and recently I was playing a rather large scenario - a battalion of infantry. I have them moving through the woods right now and they are pretty close together company following company following company on a 400-500m front. That is one hell of a rats nest of movement order lines. That got me thinking if your suggestion would actually be a good thing or not. I did not play CM1 much so I have no experience with large numbers of units and this feature. Did you ever have a problem of finding the right line to click on?

Welcome the forum. Huzzar! was one of the first scenarios I played against a live opponent and it still ranks towards the top of my most fun list. That is the kind of additional info that needs to be teased out of yucky situations like this. Target arcs can be like holding a knife by the wrong end - they cut you instead. I have more to say about target arcs and my experience later. There are quite a few long discussions about LOS issues. To learn about how the game works (sady using a game limitation as an example) check this thread out: http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=112956 specifically post #36 where Steve from BFC gets into the discussion. A lot of what he talks about will resonate with the work you described. Also don't forget that there is more to spotting than just having LOS to the area in question. Someone has to actually see the thing that is in that location. It is a big world out there and we don't always look at the right spot at the right time to see everything. Or one person notices something important a few seconds before another. The important thing to know about cover arcs is they are not instructing the unit to "only look here" they are instructing the unit to "only fire here". Our instinct tells us that they should give is a spotting advantage to only be scanning in a small area but target arc commands *do not do that*. They are firing arcs only. This is why I no longer use them except for a few special circumstances. When I will use them: To keep scouts from shooting - short 20-40m circular arcs Keep AT assets from shooting at infantry - again circular only but covering the whole map or out to their effective range To have units look to their side - similarly 180 deg arcs covering the whole map to one side as a unit is moving making sure it is cleared at the end Have immobilized vehicles cover some part of the map they are not facing - again 180 deg extended to cover the whole map And occasionally to setup an ambush - but again only circular cover arcs will be used if I want to prevent firing until the enemy is close The last thing you want is to have the enemy come to a spot just outside the arc. On the subject of survival instinct you have a point. And it might be even more counter intuitive given that the more experienced a unit is the more likely they will obey your fire restrictions and the less likely they will deviate from your orders and save its own neck. For example I had a Panther once that had a Crack crew. I ordered them to fire on a building that had known enemy inside it. A few moments in to the next turn a Royal Tiger showed up to the Panther's left. Those brave tankers held true to the order I gave them - they new it was vital to take out that building ignoring their own safety for the greater good. Oh man that was soooo not what I really wanted, but it was what I told them to do. They died. Now I really love the Target briefly command. That way they could have got a few rounds on the building target and then been free react to anything that showed up unexpectedly. They might have survived.

Not only is the time it take for a crew to bail variable but the tank that is doing the shooting will only know the enemy tanks is dead when it can observe that it is. Witness this thread: http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=110416 where I thought there was a bug because my Sherman could not kill a PzIV. In fact it turns out that the PzIV was dead after the second hit but because of the heavy forest the Sherman crew did not know that and kept shooting. In this case 6 more times - Yikes.

Good questions - I only have one answer. I seem to recall reading something about this at one point but cannot find it. You could fire up the scenario editor and conduct a test. It covers the action square it is in. No idea. Interesting experiment would be to setup a scenario run it and see where the explosions are. Run it again and see where the explosions are - if they are different could mean the setup randomly at the start. Then start it and save an in progress turn and start from that save to see where the explosions are and see if they are the same - if they are different then it is probably random at the point of contact. I doubt I'll have time to do any of this any time soon. Let us know if you do.

Really, really! So, you think that one post by an expert in real life should what, cause all of BFC staff to drop everything and scramble around looking for defects? I am sorry but what I wrote was certainly not meant as shouting down and @womble's post was probably even more helpful than mine. Both posts seem pretty respectful to me. I certainly meant no disrespect. The fact is that nothing is going to get treated as a defect without clearly answering lots of questions and showing examples, saved games and tests. My suggestion is loose the chip and help the guy figure out what went side ways - or if it is just a case of bad stuff happens.

So putting the binos up to look through is not an indication of anything other than what animation was running at that moment. If you select the infantry is the Sherman visible? This kind of encounter usually goes really badly for Shermans but hey not always. Why The Face? I got nothing - but sometimes spotting does not go like you expect it in real life either. If you think there is a bug may I suggest reproducing it and running the situation a bunch of times to see what happens. Yeah, me to but honestly that is very often *the* answer to questions like this. Stuff happens and sometimes it sucks for you.

Three hours of videos to watch. When am I going to sleep

It was wild - especially the ending. I am usually the person in the room that poo poos pulling the goalie since is so often ends in disaster (not I get it you only do it when you are going to loose anyway). I will probably never get to say that again with out my Wife and kids reminding me of that ending. Tough loss for the US women for sure.

Come one man - you captured an awesome game moment there. Don't be discouraged that your guys were on the receiving end of the hail storm it was cool. Think how that Stuart will look with hit decals added to the game. Like I always say to my kids if you can't have fun when you are loosing, then the game is not for you. So embrace the mayhem and figure out a way to get play back. Got any mortars?

Looks like it to me. There is a bit - mostly it is what you see is what you get but sometimes a shot gets made though tress that looks like it should not. In fact the light and heavy wood ground are probably the most abstracted. Some times I look at how they look in game and I think "how could any of those low scrubby things stop any bullets or block my LOS at all". If anything the additional abstracting is in favour of your tank staying hidden. Your example in one case seems like the hull mg is firing through the tree trunk so clearly things do not match up 100% with WISIG. But really though, if you play the game like it is totally WISIG and don't get distracted the odd time it is not you will be happy Nice animated GIF showing your hidden tank BTW

I have been burned before by tight arcs - my intended target ends up just outside the arc. Setting an armour arc is a good thing - keeps the tank focused on what it should be. What I tend to do is make the arch either circular or really wide. I make sure that the unit ends its move facing the direction of the threat and then have an armour cover arch that covers ever conceivable final location of the known threat or any possible nearby buddies. Just my 2 cents for any one worried about narrow cover arcs.

Pause just long enough to get a round away and then pull back - what I usually do in situations like this. Getting ready to position blame?

Oh, man no worries but thanks for the clarification makes much more sense.

LOL I am pretty sure someone joked about criticizing the hit decals before the game was even released. Because of that this thread made me laugh.

I am not sure what you think would happen if two people faced off one with a rapier and one with a sledge hammer but after watching a lot of fencing I suspect that in the majority of the cases the rapier holder would dance around tempting the the sledge hammer holder to swung, dodge the slow swing and them stab the guy in the heart and watch him bleed out unable to even pick up the sledge hammer again.

So, there was recently a very long and illuminating thread about hull down and an unexpected spotting out come - not at all related to your situation. From that, a couple of corner case defects were actually found in the game - again not relevant to your shooting situation but possibly to the spotting although I certainly cannot be sure but I suspect it would actually effect your Sherman's ability to spot the PzIVs but that is pure speculation on my part. Getting back to what is relevant for the purposes of spotting - as in how hard it is to see a hull down tank there is a discrete hull down state for the purpose of a hull down tank becoming spotted. That effects spotting only. There are some efficiencies built into the spotting part of the engine so our computers can actually spend time drawing stuff and making troops and vehicles move around . There is no such thing once the bullets start flying. Once the shooting starts it all comes down to what the gunner(s) can see an how well they aim and once they pull the trigger the round is tracked using physics. I know many of us come from a die roll, look up results background but that stuff does not apply here. Just toss that out of your head. I am not saying there is no randomness in the game but it is just in a different place. There are no results tables. Repeat after me "there are no results tables" . It is difficult to change ones mental model of what is going on and since we spent years rolling die and looking up tables for results we naturally try to apply that to this game. I have learned over the last few years that just does not work here. There is randomness in the Tac AI - between deciding which course of action to take. There is randomness in the spotting routines - the time it takes a unit to spot something will not always be the same. There is randomness in the choices the gunner makes when they are aiming. All this randomness will be effected by the pixel troops training, their leaders rating, their morale, their current threat state and on and on. So even here in the process of the Tac AI there are no lookup tables and results tables like we are used to. Once all that has happened and the gunner has made "his" best effort at aiming at what he sees and he pulls the trigger the round is tracked using physics and it hits what it hits at the angle it hits and does what it does. No results table, no look up, no modifier - chuck that mental model No, the game figures out who sees what and gunners aim at what they see. This is why, for a tank, you can get situations where the Tank commander can see an enemy but the gunner cannot. Heck sometimes the main gunner cannot see something but the hull MG gunner can and you will get MG rounds on target but not the main gun. Each person in the tank can see what they see and if they have a trigger to pull they can aim at a target and let rounds fly down range. Yep. Yep. Sure. Probably. As has been noted there is probably very little of the Sherman exposed and given that the Sherman is not moving or firing there is a very high likely hood that the PzIVs have not spotted your Sherman yet.

My bold. Wait if you use a hunt move forward and they spot something they will cancel the rest of your moves and never reverse back. Or did I misinterpret have something?