ClarkWGriswold

What color should white phosphorous smoke be, other than white? :confused:

I'm crossing my fingers that's the case. It's one of the very few things in this game that diminishes the sense of immersion and realism.

Glad to see the AAR is still going. I was beginning to think you had forgotten about us. It looks like that PzIV crew member is well on his way towards winning the Knight's Cross... without a tank!

Steve specifically said that both sides were treated the same now to prevent players from having an indestructible barrier for their vehicles to hide behind. Presumably, in CMBN, if you can shoot through your tank, so can the enemy. Blocking LOS in both directions doesn't make much sense. What if you have a taller vehicle (a PzIV) behind a shorter one (Stug)? What if the rear-most vehicle is higher in elevation than the front-most vehicle? In these cases should LOS still be blocked? Blocking line of sight just doesn't make sense. It's an imperfect solution, but it seems than making dead vehicles "ghosts" is the only way to get a level playing field and prevent gamey abuse of dead vehicles (other than fixing the issue outright, which it seems is more difficult than it would appear).

Totally agree with you. I'm still confused as to exactly how it works. I'm hoping Steve (or someone else) will definitively tell us how this works, but I think that LOF is not blocked by dead vehicles in CMBN.

I'm leaving for Japan for a two week business trip on Friday the 13th. So, you can pretty much bet that it's going to come out right about the time I'm boarding the plane.

I don't see how that's possible. The TacAI doesn't know what route it's going to take until after you click the red button to finish your command phase. At that point the AI has to pathfind from Point A to Point B. That could take 10 seconds or it could take a minute, depending on what is in the way, how far it has to go around an object, what the terrain is like, whether or not a unit bogs, etc. Way too many variables to know how long it will take before actually performing the action. The only way this could realistically happen is if you were shown exactly what the AI planned to do before the orders phase was over. But even this wouldn't be helpful a lot of the time because unplanned things happening on the battlefield is the nature of the game.

Steve made comments in one of the other threads (maybe one of the AAR threads?) saying that the LOF behavior for tanks has been changed from CMSF to CMBN. It was confusing and I'm still not sure of exactly how it works, but it apparently has been changed. I think tanks can shoot through dead vehicles now (friendly or enemy), but I'm not positive. Something about preventing the TacAI from pumping round after round into a dead enemy vehicle, trying to hit the one behind it. Smoking vehicles definitely block LOS though.

Yes, please! Personally, I'd really like to see more of an edited "wow your friends" video. But, understandably, that kind of video takes a lot of time to put together and edit versus an AAR.

Yeah. I think all the movie scenes of tanks mowing down saplings has really ruined people's expectations. A decent size tree is very, very tough to knock down (unless it's rotted or the ground is completely saturated). A car going 60+ mph and hitting a big tree will come to a dead stop instantly. That's a hell of a lot more force than even a heavy tank hitting at a few miles per hour. Heck, even going through bocage was too much for tanks without welding on special equipment.

According to the CMBN manual, when ordering an artillery/mortar strike you select both the number of tubes to use and the fire mission (rate of fire). I'm curious how these two variables effect the actual rate of fire that falls on the target. For example, how would 1 tube and heavy fire compare to 4 tubes and light fire? Is there some sort of rule of thumb as to how this works? Since 1 tube will overheat faster than 4 (at the same ROF), is there any reason to bother using 1 tube?

Pg. 101: "If a button is lit up Support available;" There should be an "is" in there.

Dunno if I'd call that good to hear. "Hey guys! It's ready early and we're releasing it today!" Now that would be good to hear.

Is there any way to change the directory that CMBN/CMSF saves and loads PBEM files to/from? It would be really great to set the default folder to my Dropbox/CMBN folder and not have to ever mess with copying files around.

Pg. 90: the "Pause" section suggests that each click of the Pause command adds 15 seconds. I was under the impression from the AARs that the Pause command had been changed to 5 seconds in CMBN?

I was exaggerating when I said 100MB, but compared to CMx1 the turn files are huge. CMBB takes an awful lot going on to get a PBEM file over 700KB. I remember seeing one thread here where the CMBN files were 2-10MB, with the average being somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-ish. If you're playing a 60 minute game, that's 300MB up- and down-stream. Not a biggie for most people, but anyone on satellite, modem, slow DSL (me), etc. is going to have plenty of time for coffee breaks between turns. That actually brings up a thought... what sort of bandwidth is required for real-time head to head play? I didn't see it mentioned in the manual, but I'm only up to page 90 or so. I also wonder what happens in a real-time game if your network slows below the required threshold.

But the artillery in CMBN is much more flexible. You've got point targets for mortars and area targets and firing lines for artillery. Being able to lay artillery along a treeline or down a long trench is awesome.

I betcha 360 is the highest resolution the original video was ever made in!

Nice! Newbies I've introduced to the CMBO/CMBB always seemed to get confused by the fact that some turns you'd watch and move and others you'd only watch.

Having never played CMx2, I wasn't aware this requirement had changed. I thought needing multiple transfers was pretty much required to prevent cheating or someone seeing the results and then changing their strategy?

The huge size of the PBEM files is a big down side for me, personally. One of the guys I play against lives in the boonies and gets his Internet access via satellite. 100MB turn files are going to suck. But, such is the cost of progress, and it's a small price to pay for tracking virtually every single round and simulating every surface of armed vehicles. I've actually convinced my CMBB buddies to setup Dropbox accounts so that we can more easily share PBEM files. Actually using email for "play by email" just isn't feasible with files this big, IMO. Maybe I'll have to start calling it PBDB instead.

Aside from the obvious eye candy, the thing I'm most looking forward to is the new objective system. The flags in CMx1 are the worst thing about the game, IMO. Most games end up being a "fight to the last man" scenario, with little regard for casualties as long as the flags are taken. Also, I've often "won" a game only to find out it was a draw because my opponent had a squad of men hiding in the woods 30 feet from the flag (while the rest of his force was nearly wiped out, and mine was well preserved). I think the new objectives will make games a LOT more interesting. You can have the Germans trying to hold a bridge, a crossroads, and a church while the Americans (unbeknownst to the Germans) only have to capture the bridge. You can require the taking of an objective while suffering less than X% casualties. Objectives can overlap without either side knowing what the other needs to accomplish. I definitely see this as the biggest difference as far as play style and game results is concerned. I'm also glad to be going back to the western front. I like CMBB well enough, but I have more of a connection to playing as/against the Americans. Of course, after two years of CMBN I'm probably going to be begging for T-34/85s and KVs to have a better chance against the big cats.

A bit disappointing that multi-core support is so far off (especially considering I'm looking at buying an 8 core machine next). But it seems as though multi-core support is not really mainstream for games right now - especially from small developers like BFC. I imagine that will change over the next few years though, as multi-cores become much more common. I'm curious, has anyone ever developed any sort of benchmark for CMSF/CMBN? If the CMx2 engine has a built-in way to measure frames per second (I think I saw something in the beta VAARs), a very complex replay file could make for a great way to compare different PC configurations.

Fine! Fine! "Rifles with anti-tank capability". There.

That was awesome. But I'm a bit jealous, as I was planning to do this right after the game came out. You stole my thunder!