MOSwas71331

That sure sounds like info you wouldn't have in real life. As a unit commander, you would certainly know where your own troops would (or at least should) be and can deploy. And, for CMBN purposes, these areas have to be exactly defined. However, you'd have only whatever intelligence info had been developed on where enemy units are and where they might appear. And some of that info could easily be wrong.

I was surprised to see in my fifth attempt at the demo training scenario that there's quite a variation in the German forces the US is up against. In addition to the 75mm AT gun, this time there were two heavy machine guns, a batch of AT teams, and the total German troop strength was over 100 men. It doesn't seem right that the US player should get so much info about the visible G forces, but, when G forces are sighted, I can click on the unit and see its ID, its ammo level, and the state of each man in the unit -- spotting, aiming, cowering, whatever.

I erred in my last post. I don't get a special cursor when I try to deploy the mortar, so I guess the deployment is supposed to occur where the mortar presently is. In any event, though, the mortar doesn't deploy. The command shows as available, so why doesn't the mortar group execute it???

I can't even deploy a mortar. I issue the command, the purple deploy box becomes bright, I get a movement-like cursor, I move that near the mortar group and click on the screen, and the purple box goes dark. Then, when I play the turn, nothing happens. The various men in the mortar group are mostly shown as spotting (without being able to see anything much), though sometimes one is cowering. The weapons platoon leader has a radio and is moving to where I hope he'll see some Kraut units. I'm counting on another leader with a radio and another mortar arriving soon. I trust that leader can relay the weapons platoon leader's instructions to adjust fire from the two mortars. (If that doesn't work, the mortars will be of little value.) I find this very frustrating.

The demo also works fine on my iMac, though I've a lot to learn about how to accomplish goals with my US forces. The Kraut defenders (of obviously poor quality from examining the map after the Cease Fire) seem to murder my Shermans and my infantry at little cost to themselves. I understand from reading other comments that the US mortars can be very effective. However I haven't yet been able to get the mortars to a position with a line of site to any Krauts, nor have I been able to get a platoon leader to a position with a line of site, much less close enough to the mortars to give them fire directions. Actually, it took me three plays of the first four or five minutes just to get a US rifle squad into the first field on the left past the first hedgerow on the left without casualties. (The squad got almost wiped out in my first two plays.) Unfortunately both Shermans accompanying them had their crews bail out after numerous wheel hits, weapon hits, and a couple of turret penetrations. Given that it's a 45 minute situation, perhaps I'm rushing too much. There seem to be a lot of US troops in the scenario, with the US strength about doubling from the first batch of reinforcements four or five minutes after the start. Two squads and two tanks should be sufficient to take the farm objective from the defending German half squad, but I have yet to figure out how.

It's a shame the demo doesn't say the units are already placed. The text at the top of the screen says, "Setup Phase. Place units and give commands." A few responses have said you place units by giving movement commands. How do you distinguish between movement commands for placing units and movement commands for actually moving? Is there some way to tell the game engine you're done with placing the units and now you're giving them commands?

1. How do I place units? The top of the screen tells me to place units, but the manual doesn't tell / show me how to do that. 2. The quick keys list says I can delete the last waypoint using the backspace key. My iMac's keyboard has no backspace key. It does have two delete keys, the first two rows above the return key, the other (with a small x in an arrow pointing to the right) two rows under the f13 key. Neither deletes a waypoint. 3. How do you place a waypoint where you want it? (I'm using the demo, not the full game.) The cursor seems to point to a location on the map, but the waypoint always goes someplace else. [i want a squad to move down a road, hugging a hedgerow without trying to go through it, a simple task to order verbally, but a hard one to command in the demo.] 4. How do you clear a unit's orders and start over? The only way I've discovered so far is the obvious one of quitting the game and starting over.

Just after the material you quoted from my earlier reply were the following two sentences in parens: (I dread to think what the pages would have looked like if the printer driver had given me a choice to print just black and white instead of color. I might have had grey text on greyer pages and emptied the black cartridge.) 1. My printer's driver does not provide a choice of black and white printing. 2. As the text is in grey and the background color is a darker yellow shade, I expect the printed result of choosing B&W would be light grey text on a darker grey background. It wouldn't drain the LightMagenta cartridge, but the various shades of grey would certainly use some (probably a lot) of my Black cartridge.

The on-line manual for CMBN is very annoying. I suppose the phony 1944 Field Manual seemed attractive, but it's hard to read the "faded" greyish text against the yellowed "paper". The ? mark in the large box in the center of each page also covers some of the manual's text. (Sometimes I can deduce what the covered text probably is, but important information is frequently unreadable.) I tried printing the manual on my Epson line printer. Big mistake! The boxed ? mark doesn't appear (which is great), but the greyish text on yellowish "paper" emptied the LightMagenta printer cartridge. (And the printer stops working if ANY cartridge is empty.) So now I have a printer I can't use until I get a new set of cartridges for $70 or so, and I have the last 100-odd pages of the 200 page manual (which Epson prints back to front) which have a lot of interesting info but no discussion of the how one views the map and gives orders to the units. And it's still hard to read the light text against a dark background. (I dread to think what the pages would have looked like if the printer driver had given me a choice to print just black and white instead of color. I might have had grey text on greyer pages and emptied the black cartridge.) As I've owned CMBO-CMBB-CMAK for years, I have a lot of experience with those games. That experience doesn't transfer too well into CMBN. I've tried the training patrol scenario three times now, and I still haven't figured out how to view the map easily. I've given simple movement and targeting orders to one of the Shermans, and the Sherman appeared to move as I directed. However "locking" the view to the Sherman didn't do anything. I expected that would give me the tank commmander's view of what was happening, which I could then raise above the tank better to see what was going on. To my surprise, nothing happened at all. Is there a UTube intro to the game which talks through exactly what the player does to control views and issue commands to units? One lengthy intro video I've watched has the view jumping around so much I almost get a headache watching it. It does show you can move the view around easily, but it gives no clue about HOW the narrator is moving the view.

I hate the on-line manual. The phony Field Manual may seem clever, but the greyish text on the aged yellowish paper is hard to read. (The large ? mark in a box in the center of each page also doesn't help. The manual text it covers can't always be interpolated.) As CMBN fills my screen so I can't refer to the on-line manual while I play, I printed the manual on my Epson printer. That got rid of the ? box on each page, but the brown text on yellow pages is still hard to read. Even worse, the yellowish pages emptied my printer's LightMagenta cartridge, so I got only the last 110 pages of the manual. My printer's out of action until I replace that empty cartridge. I own CMBO, CMBB, and CMAK, so I'm familiar with the user controls for those games. CMBN's controls are more complex, and, with my incomplete manual, I haven't figured out how to view the map in the demo. I've given movement and targeting orders to one of my M4s, but locking the view to the M4 doesn't seem to do anything.