Broadsword56

Besides, the new CMBN is going to look so awesome that you'll want to see everything as it unfolds!

I particularly like little pastoral touches like ambient noise of the flies and locusts buzzing occasionally in the pastures (or around corpses). Ambient bird sounds are great -- but often in games they're overdone. Once a battle starts, birds would fly off and not be sitting around chirping on a battlefield. Would be nice if we could have some of those.

Will there be (or are there already) any "for dummies" guides or tutorials to AI scripting, for those of us who might want to venture into CMBN scenario-making?

Well, I got it from Steam yesterday and it's uplayable for me, too -- only for technical reasons (constant game freezes make play impossible). But now that I've read your post, I know I must not be missing much (except my $30). I just wanted some Normandy action to tide me over until CMBN comes out sometime this year. Oh well...

Yes, the minefields are an abstraction exactly as Nic described (I created one for my El Guettar map in TOW2 Africa). But, if it's any consolation -- in the time frame represented by the battles in this game, there wouldn't have been time to really clear minefields, so attacking units would most likely blunder into them or, once the mines were detected, try to skirt them. Any well-planned minefield is always covered by lots of MGs, mortars and maybe even artillery, so they serve to channel the attacker into other areas.

In TOW2 Africa, it was a major challenge just to keep American units from suppression and panic at the first shot -- the command units seemed to help a bit (but in that campaign the leaders were as green as their troops). Appropriate that the Soviets in Kursk should be more battle hardened and slower to panic.

I can't stand it! You guys are killing us with these reports -- must...have..game..now.

If you play this scenario, you'll see some interesting things I scripted in: * An awesome initial German artillery and air preparation - fun just to sit back and watch it roll in. * A mobile German armored spearhead where the halftracks towing guns actually stop, the crews exit, they unlimber the guns and begin firing in support. * A working US minefield belt just E of the wadi. *Good defensive positions for the American infantry -- although it's still a big challenge to keep the infantry alive. A piece of advice: The 10th Panzer does not want to stop and fight you; they're racing to exit the map and hit an objective way off to the NW. You don't defeat them by destroying every unit -- all you have to do to win is keep them from getting through (thus saving the rest of Patton's army). Tactical advice: Your tank destroyers are precious, and the only thing you really have to stop the enemy. Use "shoot and scoot" tactics for your tank destroyers so they pop up, take a shot or two, and duck behind hills to new positions. It will take a lot of clicking, but a stationery unit will quickly get destroyed. As long as you have working TDs to fight with, you've got a chance.

I just noticed this helpful post on the Repository comments -- try these "for dummies" instructions to install El Guettar -- and please let us know if they work! -- Aleksei 2010-05-01 11:51:10 Special for Dummies! Just copy folder "africa_el_guettar_23mar43" from archive into the |||||"||m||a||p|||||||"" folder in your TOW2-Afrika'1943 game folder. Also you may delete 5 temporarry files in the folder "africa_el_guettar_23mar43":quickloadhf.bin quickloadroughtree.bin quickloadtriangulation.bin pfsmap.bin pfswatermap.bin That's all!

I made the El Guettar map and scenario, and I just wanted to apologize to those who have tried to download and play it, but weren't able to install it. It played great on my own computer. I thought I uploaded everything necessary for others to play it, but the instructions available on what files were required to make a TOW2 user scenario run, and how to upload it, were sketchy. Something must have gone wrong or gotten left out. If anyone has every succeeded in playing El Guettar, please post and tell everyone how you managed it.

Just look at these posts -- you see how much atmosphere a little thing like a name adds to this game? It gets your imagination going, and pretty soon your little guys aren't just pixeltruppen anymore. It's really pretty common now to have named soldiers -- Achtung Panzer:Kharkov has them, so did Theatre of War II (although something was lost in translation when the Russian designers did it -- the minimized GUI showed the soldier's first name rather than last name, so the titles looked kind of silly... "Sniper Tom, Sgt. Roger, etc."

Yes, agree this is an important control to have. The Theatre of War series, for all its other faults, does a good job of coordinating tanks and infantry. If you tell a tank unit to support an infantry unit, then give the infantry a move order, the tanks automatically regulate their speed and stop/starts to keep pace with the dismounts (of course, in TOW games the infantry are all doomed anyway, so it's not much help in the long run!)

OK, I just thought that since every soldier is now represented, it might be also possible to know who they are. Also, some UIs use a little "expand" + sign on the corner of a box that lets the player see deeper info, so I imagined something like that could become a flyout roster of the men in a unit, without fatiguing the eye or giving players more data than they care to see at the moment.

Just wondering -- forgive me if this has been answered elsewhere. But in CM:BN will individual soldiers have names, in addition to just their unit having the unit leader's name? I find it helps with immersion and makes me protect soldiers' lives more when they have names.

Here's a good AAR from the US Army Command & General Staff College on hedgerow tactics in Normandy for the Allies, with diagrams of some successful tactics: http://www.cgsc.edu/carl/resources/csi/doubler/doubler.asp#f2