MOSwas71331

The title says it all -- and even has a redundant question mark.

As I said, "The artillery display for the mortar platoon leader has three 81 mm mortars and shows them all ON the map but with one out of contact." If there's a battery of two mortars OFF the map and OUT of contact, when will the off-map battery be in contact? Must the German player check the artillery display each turn to discover when the off-map battery is available?

How many 81 mm mortars do the Germans have in the "Busting the Bocage" demo? The German briefing says the Germans have four 81 mm mortars. The artillery display for the mortar platoon leader has three 81 mm mortars and shows them all on the map but with one out of contact. I can only find two, both located near the mortar platoon leader. When I use the - and = keys to move from unit to unit, I can only find two mortar sections and two mortar ammo bearers.

I'm a sucker for then-and-now photos. I imagine it's frequently hard to identify the locations where the old pictures were taken. It'd be interesting to know how many (what percentage) of the 1944 snapshots couldn't be matched up with their original locations.

Rather than requiring repeated "bump" posts to keep this thread on the first page, why doesn't Battlefront just make this thread "sticky"? Many visitors new to the demo would benefit from watching this UTube video.

The ?-mark floaters do appear at the Veteran setting. I don't understand why NO information at the start is better than some information, but I agree that, when my units can see German units, they get a lot more info than they should realistically. When I watched the tutorial, I thought those ?-marks gave good info about where best to prep fire. Without them, you're prep firing blind. One way to cheat, though, is to save the set up and then cease fire. You can then find out where your favorite targets are [mine would be the AT guns and the HMGs]. When you reload the save, you can prep fire with the best chance of knocking out the German units you'd like. Rather than firing blind and possibly wasting mortar shells for no gain, I guess I'll have to accept the casualties as I advance radio equipped spotters to positions where they can adjust fire onto real Germans rather than phantoms.

Are there floating German ?-mark icons in the "Road to Berlin" demo? Such icons appeared frequently in the marnoldster's excellent tutorial, but I've never seen one when I play the demo on my iMac. [i've provided a link to that tutorial below.] I asked about these icons in the thread originally presenting the tutorial, and I've tried the suggestions given without success. Specifically, alt-I does toggle floating icons, and I always leave them on. [One suggestion was that there were more than two states for floating icons, and alt-I cycled through those states with one setting presumably giving those ?-marks. That was not my experience.] Has anyone seen the floating ?-mark icons in the free demo?

I've now checked six of the seven download links for the Mac version of the demo. I skipped ePrison (Germany) because I don't want a German language version of the manual. All six sites give the same v1.0 demo generated around 12 May, so I suspect the ?-mark floating icons and the set up prep fire capability only appear in the full version of CM:BN.

Why isn't my post count changing? #20 and #22 both show 51 posts

As GameFront's version matches what I already have, I'll try another download site to find a later version.

1. ctrl-I does toggle the icons. Except for testing the toggle capability, I've never turned the icons off. 2. At demo scenario start, the mortars do NOT set up instantly on the deploy command. Although nobody has told me I'm using a version of CM:BN which has been updated, nobody has told me I'm using the latest version available. I'll download CM:BN again and see for myself.

I'm playing version 1.0 of CM:BN which I downloaded on 11 May 2011. I've never turned off the floating icons, and I've never seen floating icons with question marks. The US mortar at the start of the scenario is not set up, and all the units which can control the mortar fire (all the units with radios and, of course, the mortar unit itself) show the mortar as not set up.

When I try the demo scenario, I don't see ANY German floating icons, and certainly no German floating icons with question marks for fleeting glimpses of units or short duration sound contacts with possibly inaccurate directions. In the video, there seemed at times to be as many as ten floating question mark icons on the map, and there were a few visible during the setup phase. Should I download the demo again to get those icons, or are those icons only a feature of the demo scenario in the full game? The US mortar on the map at the start is not setup, and it shows that way whether I select the mortar, the weapons platoon leader, or the other platoon leader. The two platoon leaders do have artillery selections, but the mortar is unavailable to both of them.

You're much more aggressive with your troops than I'd have been, but you certainly got the job done quickly. I was surprised you could fire as early as you did, as I thought you needed a line of sight to your targets and had to have your mortars set up. I'll have to restart the demo situation and examine my starting options more closely. In any event, I sure learned a lot from your video. Thanks a lot for all your effort. I did get confused a few times by your pronunciation of bocage sounding so much like blockage. I think the word is pronounced more like bow (as in bow tie) cah (as in the first syllable of cockatoo) ge (as in Age with the A silent).

Back in the late 1960s, a friend of mine in grad school at SUNY Buffalo regularly used to page Martin Bormann to meet someone at the student activity center reception desk. The announcer never understood why nobody showed up. The few people who recognized the name would joke about whether Marty would momentarily forget his new ID and step forward. Fans of "North By Northwest" will remember that Cary Grant's character begins the movie by seeming to answer a page for a fictitious government agent.

"In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror is a 2004 book written by conservative American political commentator Michelle Malkin. Malkin defends the United States government's internment of Japanese Americans in relocation camps during World War II and racial profiling of Arabs during the post-2001 War on Terror. The book's message has been condemned by Japanese American groups and civil rights advocates. Its scholarship has been criticized by academics." I first read this book a few years ago, and I was impressed by Malkin's arguments and evidence. She provided sources for the historical information she cited, and the authors of the criticisms of her work I read couldn't be bothered.

gunnergoz said, "Neither we as a forum, nor BFC, have conspired against you in any way," and a few other posts in this thread have said essentially the same thing. Be assured, I have NEVER made such a claim, although YankeeDog, a known BFC insider, did tell me Steve had intentionally rigged the game against me. I took YD's statement as the joke it surely is. Many of the postings on this thread and others have offered to help me directly, but, as another source of frustration, I can't get the forum facilities claiming to enable private communication to work. I believe this disobeys forum rules, but here's my email address: harry.pool@hotmail.com . Anyone who wishes may use it.

Okay, you win. I'll admit I'm too stupid to play the CMBN demo, and I'll stop trying and asking for help. Steve may be right that realism sells combat simulation games, but, however realistic the game is, I see no point in playing a GAME when nothing I want done gets done in a predictable fashion. Not even something as simple as using the +(plus) and -(minus) keys to move from one unit to the next. This mechanism should ALWAYS work, whether I'm setting up units, viewing units during the action phase, or giving commands to units during the "giving commands to units" phase, and it doesn't. It only works sometimes, and other times it doesn't. Even when it SEEMS to be working, it doesn't take me to every one of my units on the map, so I leave units without commands. It may be realistic that you can't be sure what areas will be visible from a particular location and what areas won't be unless you stand at that location and look around for yourself. But this is a computer GAME, so I can only get that information by studying the game's map and using targeting lines. But, during action, enemy units appear and disappear from areas I earlier was told were out of view. So what's the point of map checking, particularly of spending hours studying the map? NONE of the information is reliable. As for realism, I also expect that in real-life, you could walk along a hedgerow on a sunny day and tell at a glance where you could get through it easily. I've found no way to duplicate that feat by map study. The only way you can be certain that a hedgerow can be moved through at a particular point is if a unit executes a movement command to go through at that point. A unit rejecting such a command doesn't tell you anything; that point in the hedgerow "normally" may be traversable, but the "realistic" AI can do as it decides for any reason (and I'm sure Steve can always suggest half a dozen plausible possibilities) or for no reason at all beyond a "realistic" die-roll. The "Game to hard" thread does show that I'm not the only one finding CMBN frustrating, and I recall a thread discussing how people have spent hours with the complete game creating dead simple situations to discover how to control views and how to move squads. Gamers with only the demo obviously can't do that, and I doubt many of them will want to try the demo multiple times after they've found how impossible the demo is. I've carefully read through every thread with "beat the demo" instructions, and none of the instructions work. "Use smoke to conceal movement." How? No units able to project smoke can see any useful places to smoke. "Place a unit with a radio near mortars, and use other units with a radio to call in smoke." How? No unit with a radio can move to a position from which to see a useful place to smoke and call in adjustments to the mortars firing smoke, as it (the moving radio equipped unit) will die en route. "Use a tank to fire covering smoke." How? Any tank which moves to a place from which it can see a place it would be useful to smoke will be destroyed by units which it can't see (according to the map info) -- until it's too late. Of course, there's a lot of "realistic" die-rolling in the game, so saying "something works" may mean works "two times out of three" or "three times out of four." When I say it doesn't work, I mean doesn't work "six times out of six." Admittedly, there's at least one thread out there which claims movement in CMBN is too easy, that their units move in the open and rarely take casualties! I can't believe they're playing the same game. By the way, I still don't understand why EVERY page in the on-line manual has a large ?-mark in its center covering useful text. I've looked at the manual with six different browsers on my iMac, so it can't be a browser artifact. WHY??? Why put out a demo with a manual concealing large chunks of text? The ?-marks don't appear when I print out the pages, but the phony 1944 field manual with faded ink on faded pages wasted a lot of my colored toner, to the point that I ran out of light-magenta with 90-odd pages to go -- unfortunately the first 90 with a lot of useful info.

I also have had a lot of trouble positioning waypoints to ensure my units end up hugging terrain features. I expect the waypoint's position shows where the center of the unit would be, so a tank twelve feet wide should have its waypoint six feet from the terrain feature you want it to hug. If we ignore gun barrels (which we can't in a combat game), vehicles have rectangular shapes, longer in the direction of travel than wide. If you have fifty or sixty yards of straight road to follow, it should be fairly easy to plot waypoints to move a vehicle into the exact position you want. To maximize the precision of your waypoint positions, I'd suggest you plot from a view directly above the desired destination and as close to ground level as you can get. If, after five or six tries, you still can't put the waypoint where you want it, give up and accept that the game is ensuring a "realistic" result.

I complained repeatedly about CMBO-CMBB-CMAK not allowing me to direct a vehicle to follow a road. So when I plot a road move for a US tank in the CMBN demo, I place a waypoint for each turn the tank must make to follow the road. I make sure the lines connecting the points stay on the road, and I replot waypoints when connecting lines go cross-country. After all that effort, when the turn starts the tank's actual movement can become disjointed moves and turns. (If a state trooper saw a vehicle behave that way, he'd insist on a blood alcohol test and cite the driver.) When I watch Chris "tyrspawn" Krause's YouTube recorded AAR of Closing the Pocket, he has a Panther which has been hit repeatedly which he wants to move along a trail in the woods shielded from US observation by high ground. He places waypoints vaguely along the trail with some of the lines connecting them going cross-country and lets the Panther go. When Krause does it, his Panther unerringly follows the desired trail and, when it gets near the end of that path, it fires on US targets. I understand there's no way (in the absence of road movement commands) for the AI to know when you want a vehicle to follow a road and when you really want it to go cross-country. So why does the AI know Krause wants his Panther to follow the trail rather than the cross-country path, when it can't tell that I want my Sherman to follow a road when I've carefully plotted its movement to keep it on the road? Does Krause have a version of CMBN with road movement commands?

My CMBN experience has been totally the other way. I've tried the demo training scenario six times, and my BEST result was to get 6 men of a 12 man US rifle squad cowering in trees at the cost of the other six men AND two Shermans which had fired smoke to cover the squad's entrance into the field. The squad racked up a handful of German casualties, I guess from firing at German muzzle flashes. The Shermans also fired off some MG ammo in addition to the smoke rounds, so they must have seen something. Neither Sherman was credited with any German casualties, so they couldn't have seen much. Frankly, I find the whole CMBN control interface frustrating. To take just one example, the + (plus) and - (minus) keys are supposed to take you to other units, and they do -- sometimes. Other times, I can repeatedly press those keys and not move from the unit I earlier selected. I have CMBO-CMBB-CMAK on my PowerMac, but that machine has died and isn't worth fixing. I now use an iMac, and I was excited to learn CMBN would run on it. Frustration was the demo, however, is killing my enthusiasm.

"Sounds like you have the right idea, but something is very off with your execution... that scenario is really not very hard. this weekend, I'll try to take some screenies from my play-through of that scenario, and make a sort of mini-AAR that will hopefully answer some of your questions." Sorry to contact you this way, but the AIM facility isn't letting me contact you any other way. I'd really like to see that mini-AAR.

The web site says there's a Mac version you can download, but neither Google nor I can find it. All the links lead to PC versions. Does anyone know why Battlefront put a large ?-mark in a square with rounded corners in the center of each manual page when you view it on-line? It makes no sense to me to distribute a free demo with a crippled manual. The large ?-mark doesn't appear on the printed pages, but that phony ancient field manual with faded text on yellowish paper uses up a lot of ink. The light magenta cartridge in my Epson printer ran dry after printing a bit more than half the manual. As Epson's printer driver prints back to front, I don't have the info from the manual's first 90 pages.

Well said, TheBlackhand, at 1157, 12Jun! I agree completely.

I agree. Men moving along a hedgerow can easily see where such gaps are, but I can't see them when I scroll around the map.