A Canadian Cat

Actually that would be really nice. To make that work you would need a larger area target radius than currently. 200m is pretty tight for "hunt for the enemy" type setups. Excellent.

Also be aware that pilots will sometimes attack outside their area. If they spot something really juicy to shoot at just outside their area they might attack it. Be extra careful about friendlies near CAS area target ring.

I really like that idea @Vinnart. It is fairly straight forward. I would like to be able to give a unit normal movement way points before the follow commands. In your example all three tanks have a clear approach to the ditch. But image if Charlie were on the road you might want to specify how to get to the entrance to the ditch. After all the game does some odd stuff with pathing if you just drop a way point a long way from a unit. With your proposal I would suspect that the follow command would fit nicely into the command stacking mechanism we already have.

Sure, good points. No matter where you put the line it will have an arbitrary feel for some situation. I agree. I also actually agree that it is better not to have command delays at all. However: if it were to come back (which I don't actually think it will) something needs to be done to allow emergency maneuvering. I was just throwing out a suggestion. I actually think the "free inside a radius" would be the best way to do it - but again still worse than leaving command delays out entirely. I just remember from my CM1 days that long delays for simple driving out of danger and borg spotting were really really really annoying.

OK fair enough. I have not looked at the math involved in the points. I suppose this points to another often requested feature - to allow setting the points for a QB yourself.

No and honestly 50m is probably to far. I would, however, run a short distance in a trench to place with overhead protection while under a barrage. What I am after is the ability to allow a crew to un-man a gun and move to say a wooden bunker some where close by in the trench defensive system. I believe this is totally reasonable. The above is the crux of the matter. Do you agree that it was normal procedure in a trench work system that gun crews would have a prepared location to seek cover? It kind of sounds like you reject that totally so I am just checking. Not by me - I totally get what you are saying. My crazy proposal for auto abandoning guns (and BTW I meant the game code would do it automatically not that the player could decide later) was to find some way to allow simulating the realistic "crew moves to a prepared location" without allowing silly "leave the gun and retreat with other forces and then come back later to operate the gun again later" that would clearly be totally off.

That problem was my biggest beef with command delays. Remember we are playing the role of all the officers and NCOs from the tank commander on up. So, it is crazy for the tank commander to have to wait 30s to get his tank our of LOS of an enemy tank. I really like your idea of having a free command. There could still be issues with that but it would be better. Perhaps any number of commands within 100m could be free and after that the delay kicks in. I have a situation currently where a troop of three Stuarts zoomed down a road at full speed and ran right into a Tiger. And I mean ran into. The first Stuart stopped right in front of the Tiger. The Tiger got two of them on the first turn. Now my orders for the Stuart could not be as simple as one way point to get out of trouble - not with the current pathing algorithms. I needed four to get him a wall and bocage between him and the Tiger. I still do not know how this will turn out. I like this idea actually. I thought that command delays would just not be possible because of this problem and personally I would rather not have them and suffer this kind of problem. Yours is an interesting approach and could work to get the best of both worlds. Personally I like the idea of a free radius since it simulates the difference between just maneuvering your vehicle around obstacles vs planning to go to the next field or over the next hill. That free radius would have to be calculated so it was better to pay the command delay than to wait for the remaining commands to execute before adding more inside the free radius. So perhaps 100m is too big. Nice - I wonder if Steve has considered something like this.

50m is not even 20s away at a jog. I call 50m close. Granted most prepared positions would have shelter much closer than that. Being able to move a crew few meters away is all people are asking for. We can already abandon guns when they are going to be overrun. To prevent gameiness, like always dismounting a gun and never abandoning it (even when your position is being overrun) just in case you can get back to it later in the battle, the game could automatically abandon the gun if the crew moved more than some small number of meters away.

I agree 100% being able to move to cover and then re-man the gun would be an excellent game addition. +1 to that. I hope that BFC get down that far on their to do list. No one is talking about abandoning a gun - which you can do now if you need to. We just want more realistic ability to protect the crews.

Or fight a size smaller battle with the attacker given a force bump. Then you only run into trouble if you want to go smaller than Tiny.

One additional thing you should be aware of is that the LOS is determined by the soldiers in the unit. You will notice that they take up various positions in the action square (AS) they occupy. What they see will very much depend on where they end up. You have some control over where they go but not total control. Using the face command will cause them to love around a bit to look in the direction you ask. As an example if you have two small units in a building and you ask one to face North and the other the face South they will have virtually no LOS in the opposite directions.

My favorite way to play as well. My self and several others on this list play on the ladder at the blitz. Over there I am "A Canadian Cat" hope to see you there if you join up. Ian

As far as I can tell you have two choices. Target light will not use the mortar HE while Target will. Or you can split the squad so the guys with the mortar can get separate orders.

I thought WTF meant Why the Face

Indeed. BTW you can get rid of the pause notice from your screen shots by pausing using the <shift><ESC> key. The <ESC> key pauses and adding the <shift> key pauses without displaying the pause notice.

Ah, I see. Simply put - I have no idea. I could speculate that it could be because, for targeting to work, the gunner needs something to aim at. They have a process for a gunner to aim his gun but "he" needs something to aim at. To do what you want they would have to allow the gunner to aim at 10 degrees to his left and 5 degrees elevation along some targeting line that you placed out in space. Sounds a lot more difficult to do than to have a solid thing the gunner is aiming at.

I agree that the OP's issue is a serious issue. This crewed weapon LOS issue is a separate one thought. And while less serious than the building issue it is very irritating when it crops up too. In a nut shell to target you need to have a target. If you can see an enemy then you can target them. If not then to area fire you need to target the centre of an action square. This means that if you can spot an enemy in a building you can shoot at them and fire at the building your unit can see. But if you cannot see any enemy in the building then you must target the centre of the action square for area fire - which is often the centre of the building. However, as has been described, you often cannot see the centre of the action square because it is blocked by the building next door. This is where the silliness comes from. Some how we need the ability to target building faces and walls so that we can do sensible things like shoot at buildings down the street.

Yes, it is an extremely tough nut to crack. I am playing the same scenario and have lost a lot of my men. So far I have tried attacking and attacking and attacking again - no luck. So plan B is to stop attacking there and try a different place. I do not think that trying to force a win in one place is going to work. If you fail in one place go around the block an try there. That is starting to show results for me. I finally mortared a particularly well placed AT gun which than let me use some HTs for fire support (from a long way back to avoid those pesky PIATs). Once those HT mgs get going they do a pretty good job of suppressing. So, I lost the better part of two companies trying to crack a defense of a two block area. Once the AT gun was gone I was able to get suppressive fire on one side of the street - all five buildings at once. Then I leap frogged platoons into each building one at a time. The whole block took over 6 minutes to clear and one PzIII is down to less than 20AP rounds and no MG amo left. The upside is that from that row of buildings my guys were able to get LOF into the next block that where I also lost one of those companies. Feels like the defense is beginning to crack. But it will probably be just as nasty once I get to the next block.

Agreed , i was putting it out there as a workaround. And i do think it always works because like, @ Michael Emrys, i have not seen this defect because i always split teams when contact is imminent.

Sounds like the safer thing to do is split them into teams to keep them on the right side of the wall.

Ah, I suppose it is possible that there is a formation where the 2inch mortars don't have HE but so far I have only seen them with HE. Sometimes not much mind you. One thing to note is that as @nachinus says the motar amo does get pushed off the list in the UI sometimes. Also while it is true the 2inch mortars do not appear on the artillery call list (which is correct IMHO since it was for use by the squad not the company) they *can* hit targets out of view. If you position your mortar team so they can see an obsticle, say a line of bocage, they will be able to drop HE on the other side of the hedge.

Oops, see, I got it wrong. Or perhaps I will end up being right:) Time will tell.

I think Steve is having a good time watching us speculate. His Xmas gift to him self:D ^^^^^My personal guess based on:

Hee Hee for sure - those would be the punters right? What might work is trying scenarios to a pack by having those scenarios require one of the special units from the pack. If the pack has DRM and the scenarios depend on units from the pack they are good to go. Of course that is still not quite a scenario only pack but close.

That is for sure. Punters - I like that term. I hate DRM systems too but I do not see it going away ever - sigh:( There you have a good point for sure.