A Canadian Cat

Suuuuurrrrrrre - true enough - but with a cover armor arc I do not have to roll the dice that the attacking armor support will not enter the kill zone at the beginning of the turn. Don't get me wrong. I am willing to roll the dice for an ambush like this. Personally, I will not roll the dice on my country's constitution but for an ambush in a game I'll roll the dice:) Right now IMHO the right thing to do is give the Stug a short arc and clear the target when armor enters the kill zone. It is the only way to prevent your ambush from being triggered by infantry. I actually try to set my ambush with a combination of MGs and AT assets. The AT assets get "hold your fire cover arcs" and the MGs are weapons free for the kill zone. I do this so that the infantry screen will come under MG fire which will in turn encourage the attacker to move up his armor support to deal with the MG threat. So far all that dice rolling has come out in my favour most of the time. Once we get armor cover arcs then I can set the whole ambush up to work just like I want with no risk that the enemy armor will show up just as the turn starts and cause me trouble.

Oh, man that's it we will not get the game this week:)

Shhhhhhh! if you say it out loud it will not work.

And there in lies the problem. With the 25m cover arch the Stug would most likely ignore both the infantry and the tank and *not* fire. Even if it gets fired upon it will still likely ignore the enemy outside the cover arc. It is true it will not ignore it forever or in all circumstances and it will depend on the training and morale of the tank crew. Bottom line though is as a SOP the cover arch is to be respected and if there is nothing in the arc no shooting. And in a WEGO turn this causes a problem because if you want to hold your fire against the infantry you have to have a short arc. But that also means you will not shoot at the tank that comes around the corner either. So your ambushing Stug needs to stay hidden for a whole minute before it can respond. Then you can clear the cover arc and choose your target. The advantage of having an amour cover arc is that you can set the ambush and watch the infantry come down the road and wait to fire on any following tank. If the infantry start getting too close you an clear the target and let the Stug shoot HE at the infantry.

Thanks - yes I ended up with a total victory. OK wow that is impressive. I lost a pile of stuff and my troops were in poor shape morale wise. In fact when I took the town I was unable to muster any effective force to send to help take the farm. I only ended up with the farm objective as well because opponent's forces were in worse shape than I thought. Funny thing is after watching the way my opponent played and the forces he had at his disposal I was thinking this should be very winnable by the Germans. My opponent showed a lack of caution when using his Panthers and I took advantage. I think that if he had used his StugIIIs to protect the Panther's flanks and was not so aggressive with the Panthers I would have had a much harder time. Huzzar! is my favorite scenario too. I really like how it was constructed with scouting built into the scenario and the map well it is amazing. As for the engine / game - I agree. Simply amazing work. There are things that I would like to see added and a few things that I would like to see addressed. In fact while taking the town in this scenario I ran into my biggest issue with how things work. I need to consolidate my thoughts and evidence and start a new thread on the subject. But as you said the game is great and none of this is show stopper stuff IMHO.

Wow that is close - who came out on top of that encounter?

I am sure that triggers could be used to create a mess and a disaster:) But they could also be used for good. Consider the OP's example. Instead of the AI guessing on a right flank attack they could instead have defenders left centre and right and hold a mobile reserve. Once the attack starts and the defenders start taking casualties (or similar trigger) the mobile reserve could react to that and move into position to defend against the attacker.

Agreed that we should enjoy what we have. And I do - very much. It is just at the end of some aniolation games I am left wondering about when a real commander would have backed off. I hope some day to try my hand at scenario design. I am curious if the current game's scoring can be used to encourage more realistic behaviour on the part of us commanders:)

Yeah I should have turned off the objective highlighting.

The tank crews company CO did pretty well to - but they are veterans so I expect it from them:)

I just finished Huzzar! and wanted to cheer on my favorite green tank crew. These guys were amazing. After loosing their platoon leader on first contact and the other two tanks shortly there after this crew proceeded to calmly follow my flanking order maneuver and take out all four StugIIIs that had shredded his platoon. Then this crew helped his supporting infantry screen take out a Panther. Hip hip hooray Hip hip hooray Hip hip hooray! the details: See green troops can be effective. I made sure they always had infantry support and they moved carefully around the bocage to get side shots on the StugIIIs. One of their support platoon's AT teams did pretty well them selves. After another squad's AT team immobilized the Panther (at the cost of their own lives) these guys flanked it and destroyed it. This was before they were broken and relegated to sentry duty.

The previous through and through and through again shots have all involved multiple half tracks. This one is unique. A stuffed toy sounds good. I can imagine a line of stuffed tank toys being sold along side the angry birds:)

LOL - I agree playing the game we have is the best way to spend your time. That or watching trunk monkey videos. I think trunk monkeys are more useful than refresh monkeys.

I should have added that my friend and I agree that the only way to "make this better" is to have H2H campaigns. That way pushing your men to the breaking point would have real consequences for future battles and successfully breaking contact and withdrawing would have real positive effects on future battles. See wish list item 2) below:-)

+1 to that. A friend and I just finished Huzzar. My initial move to contact and flanking maneuver after the scouting phase was a disaster. I lost 3 tanks and two HT to bogging in a ford and three tanks to a Panther right after first contact. I am pretty sure IRL they would have pulled back at least to recover the bogged vehicles and try a new plan. I did pull back a bit and spend time getting some artillery to help out. Then I managed to break through one flank and the proceeded to rollup the rest of the defense. I am pretty sure IRL the Germans would have pulled back to fight another day. In the end my opponent had only a hand full of men left and no AFVs. OTOH we had loads of fun. What a great scenario. The initial scouting was interesting and with that sized map there were options on how to attack - just coming up with my plan was fun. Highly recommended.

I do the same. I often watch the turn from on high (level 5 or 6) to get an idea of where things are happening. Then I watch the turn zoomed in to level 2 or 3 in the areas where stuff is happening. When giving orders I focus on what each company's job is one at a time. You can even save the game and come back to a turn if it is taking too long. I find that a 4, 5 or 6 company game works really well when you think of the two or three avenues of advance one at a time. While initial setup and planning can take quite a while once the battle gets going you will find that you don't have to mess with the orders for everyone every turn. Very enjoyable!

Once you have FRAPS running: switch to or start CMBN adjust your camera to watch the action of interest pause the game when the turn is showing what you want to capture consider turning tress on fully, turning off floating icons, turning off hit text and deselecting units - depending on what you want to show us press the F10 key repeat as you wish Now FRAPS will have saved your captured screen images in the directory you can configure on that same tab where you saw that F10 was the hot key for screen capturing. Looking forward to seeing cool stuff...

LOL - What a mental image I had not really thought about how much effort that would actually be - and I am a software developer. Where I work have have a huge support department which essentially does just what you describe. I guess we will have to settle for that list - I look forward to seeing what is on it. I really appreciate that BTW - both the fix and the telling us about it. Twice now - wait three times:)

Brilliant! Glad to hear things are looking up.

That was just what I did when the first patch came out. I had two versions of game installed for a while. One without the patch applied and one with. One opponent did not want to try update our game to the patch so I just used the original copy to play those turns. One game failed to work after trying to upgrade so we played that game with the original game as well. One opponent and I successfully upgraded our game and I played those turns with my separate install of the game plus patch.

Thanks guys I will look into it.

I have an AMD Radeon HD 6770 that I picked up recently to improve my experience with the game. I am a photographer so my monitor is colour calibrated and I cannot mess with that. I am not a big gamer (I only play CMBN) so I have little experience tweaking settings on video cards. Is it possible to have settings that are only applied when running the game? I'll have to check my game settings but I do not recall settings in game that control colour or brightness. Now that I have the new card I have the game's model and texture settings maxed out.

Nice looking photo. The terrain looks good. I tired Aris's terrain mod but it was way to drab on my monitor. It kind of has a half desaturated look to it. But yours does not look like that at all. Anyone have a theory?

Correct and Yes. I wish at Elite level they would redact the squad / unit information. Heck I think they should remove all the info in the lower panel. However if they do that they have to make sure that things like AT guns get their own icon. While I agree that spotted enemy soldiers should have icons of just generic soldiers, if my guys spot the AT gun itself or the 81mm mortar itself then the icon needs to reflect that. It is not fair to me to see a generic infantry icon but the spotting soldiers can see an AT gun. That is why I try to play on Warrior level - because Elite level takes away information I should have (at gun icons) and leaves me with information I should not have (2nd squad B team).

Like Ranger33 suggests: set a short cover arc on your squad. Then issue their move order. At the end point place a face command. That way the cover arc will apply until the squad gets to the end of their move order and then the cover arc will change to a face command. Tada no one should start shooting early.