Rokko

I'm playing the 1st Blunting the Spear mission and I have noticed, the number of PzF in the German platoons is very low, also there are none in the halftracks. IIRC this was different in the release version. Was this a deliberate choice in a patch or is it a bug?

I can't quite tell if the demotion is intentional, a typo or due to bad eyesight

I wonder how much APS will change armor warfare in the future. Would it be possible for APS to become so reliable and capable of also intercepting KE rounds that they might replace heavy armor completly and bring future MBTs in the same weight range as MRAPs (to protect them from small arms and IED)?

I think all of those have been requested before, but were I believe explicitly denied by BF for various reasons (unfortunately).

Yeah you are right. The only thing I really miss are the hit texts I think. Still it is a perfectly fine and playable game.

For me personally the answer is yes - my personal favorites are the modern stuff and WW2 Eastern Front. But since doing a remake of CMSF would obviously be a much simpler task than designing a new game from scratch, doing so and selling those at full or near full price (I'd pay either and it seems a lot of others would do as well) would probably also make sense business wise. At least that's my perception.

MANPADS, movable waypoints, armor arcs, target briefly, vehicle hit text, better UI, onmap mortars, greatly improved editor (performancewise and featurewise), greater small arms effectiveness, casualties stay in squad view, amphibious vehicles (USCM AAV!), improved foliage draw distance, larger maps, those are the things that more or less spontaneously came to my mind.

I can: http://community.battlefront.com/topic/117959-cm-maps-universal-translator-tool/

Can't comment on your brain capacities, but clearly your memory sucks http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/11056312/Russian-paratroopers-captured-in-Ukraine-accidentally-crossed-border.html

Well think this through: Shock Force wouldn't really be Shock Force if it wasn't set in the Middle East right? So since you pretty much are arguing against a asymmetrical warfare themed CM game, which means arguing against ever continuing Shock Force, because having a non-asymmetrical war set in the Mid East (with NATO involvement) seems pretty implausible. So if you don't care for AW thats fine, but don't spoil everybody else's fun Also, having a CMSF 2 set in more recent time or even in the future would probably just shift the balance even more towards the conventional force's side, with APS, platoon level drones, etc. What a large part of CMSF was about, was detecting and neutralizing hidden ATGM positions before they could cause harm. APS take a lot of the excitement out of that.

True, once the upgraded game + all of the original modules are ported there could be some new modules even, expanding the timeline or whatnot, maybe have it set after NATO leaves the country in 2014 or 2015 or so eventually and leaves a power vacuum behind. Sounds familiar?

I am afraid you might be correct, though I personally don't give a hoot about the Bulge game

Not being able to play CMBS at the moment I decided to reinstall good ol' Shock Force + modules and was promptly reminded what a great game that was. I also thought how much it could profit from the newest Combat Mission engine's many features. Is there any progress on that endeavour? I guess a remake would make sense, both from a business and from a game design viewpoint, I also wouldn't mind paying again for a new version of CMSF, maybe at a discounted price for people who already own CMSF.

When all else fails, check out greenasjade's: http://cmmods.greenasjade.net/mods/5162/details Works with all CM games except CMSF (and CMA I guess)

One issue I now remember having was my foot sloggers being tired or tiring all the time, which slowed me down further, because these unfit Ukrainians needed rest all time.

I am sure we will get that as soon as the repository is up. Hopefully the operational story guide as well

Have found that out myself, but thanks: http://community.battlefront.com/topic/117959-cm-maps-universal-translator-tool/ Black Sea is 0x0A

Agreed. The last CM titles have not exactly seen a flood of user-made scenarios. Anything that makes things easier for scenario designers should be appreciated by everyone involved. I still doubt there will be an official tool for converting scenarios. You could easily write such a tool yourself that does the byte change, but considering how easy it is to do this in a hexeditor, it would hardly be worth the effort. Also, since the map information is encoded in some way, it is not possible for the community to access information on houses and flavor objects and such in an automated manner. But that is not even required I think, the two scenarios I've tried both loaded just fine in the editor, although I didn't try 3D loading them. I even managed to get a CMBN scenario featuring high bocage into CMBS and it showed up just fine, even though there is no high bocage in CMBS by default. You don't even need to download and install a hex editor, there are online variants of such editors: http://hexed.it/ I attached an image showing the byte you want to change, just remember to delete all OOB beforehand.

Man I shouldn't post right after getting up. Got some things mixed up there. 2 Digits in Hex are one byte, so it actually is the 16th or 0x10th byte you need to manipulate.

I just tried it out and was able to open the CMRT scenario Gog and Magog in CMBS' editor without problems, I did only delete the OOBs beforehand. It wasn't the 10th byte I had to change, though, but the 34th (or 32nd if you are counting from zero). It is the first pair of numbers in the 2nd row, it was 08 and I changed it to 0A. So it's: 00 CMSF 02 CMA 04 CMBN 06 CMFI 08 CMRT 0A CMBS Correction: Its probably not the 32nd byte either but rather the 31st and 32nd byte together, unless BF wants to stop making CM games in the near future. Together they form the 16th hex value, or the 0x10 adress, which is where the number 10 comes from

So it's an increment of 2 for each game? So 0x04 would be CMBN, 0x06 CMFI and so forth?

They definately reused some CMRT maps in CMBS I have noticed. Scipio is the guy who found that out: http://community.battlefront.com/topic/116984-new-file-at-the-repository-ambush-2014-12-08/

Appearently you have to open the .btt file in a hex editor and change the 10th byte, which stands for the game (higher number means newer game), before you should delete all OOBs. Haven't tried it myself yet, though.

Thanks for giving notice.

Just finished this gem. Really great scenario everyone should play! I didn't look at the Designer Notes, but from the map style I assume this was made by George McEwan. The map is really a beauty to behold, especially the little town looks extremely credible, detailed and vivid. From the bus station, to all these little individual farms to the little culvert made from barrels and ditchlock elevations. Gameplay is also extremely gripping and had me constantly at the edge of my seat My only suggestion would be to increase the fixed time by 10 minutes (keeping some variable extra time), so you are not forced to overly rush at the end, even when playing in WeGo (which I did).