BletchleyGeek

Thanks for the update and happy new year to all the team!

It means that the password you use on the forums has been found by Google on a known database of hacked data (this same service is provided by the website https://haveibeenpwned.com/). If you are using the same password on your online banking, netflix, amazon, etc. you should be changing it ASAP.

Hi Steve, great to see you on the forums again. Many developers and publishers seem to keep e-mail newsletters in high regard. The Epic Games store, which was setup not too long ago, asks whenever you buy a game whether you would like to share your email with the publisher/developer, so you usually get newsletters etc. with new releases and stuff. There were some concerns about its compatibility with the European Union GDPR, but those turned out to be unfounded/quickly fixed. Also many devs I have supported via crowdfunding keep newsletters and send them more or less regularly (or you can subscribe via email directly to any new posts by the project developers on Kickstarter/Fig/Patreon etc.). Blogging seems to be alive and well, I still read most of my nerd news via RSS/Atom feeds. To connect with the younger generations I have no idea what you have to do. Setup a discord server? Videoblogging? But that could be curious to behold. Even one of the coolest old dudes in game development I bother following - Mitch Gitelman from Harebrained Schemes - looks distinctly out of place and slightly unhinged - in a good way - when compared to his younger peers

Well, the way I see is the following. US Army infantry squads firepower is lacking especially when compared with that of countries equipping their infantry squads with organic, real LMGs. Indeed, not a huge difference since you are already at a disadvantage. So if I look at the Brazilians I will be like "okay, let me plan for this attack and make sure I have light mortars and HMGs from the Weapons company attached. Four squads will be more than enough for the task". And that will be possibly wrong. By having the vintage rifles possibly I will need 4.5 or 5 squads to do the same job. That half team worth of weight of fire may or not prove useful, but I would rather account for it than cutting corners.

Not sure if there was a revision (since BFC doesn't produce comprehensive changelogs) but I have noticed that the shaders in CMFI now look better on my NVIDIA card (with the latest drivers). Lighting effects over surfaces are softer and more pleasing to the eye my eyes.

That's a significant reduction in squad firepower.

The Windows installer is by default pointing to a "generic" path on the C drive, rather than the folder I had CMFI installed in. So watch out for that eager clicking installing R2V somewhere else you want it in.

My imagination doesn't trump your experience if you think it is doable the happier I am tbh. My reckoning was that PLF, NVA on the one hand, and US, ARVN on the other, were already a quite serious project (was ever the official US Army TO&E followed in Vietnam? I do recall reading somewhere - Hastings? - that Abrams kind of slammed the fist on the table and forced everyone to turn up in Vietnam with his take on TO&E). ANZAC and ROK sounded to me a bit of an "above the call of duty" pain with their own particular equipment and organisation.

Excellent shot, summarises perfectly the kind of tactical challenges posed by the terrain and vegetation. The fighting could be as compartmentalised as in Normandy, with the kind of broken, complex terrain of Italy. Great work @37mm and everyone else involved. I wish this effort convinces BFC to boldly go to Indochina. Just leave the US Allies out for the sake of the poor soul having to work out the TOES.

Yup. Probably he is a fun guy IRL. PS: I almost choked on my coffee when I read that John was friends on Facebook with NUTTERNAME. Nice one mate PS2: I bet money that John is also friends with that guy in Grogheads who allegedly had his Steel Beasts usb key "confiscated" by Chinese customs on a business trip.

Fool of a Took!

@Bulletpoint made a good question, by asking whether it would be possible to abstract the impact of good tactics and what passes by battlefield leadership and command and control in a "gamified" simulation as CMx2 is. So this post is not a dismissal of @Hapless observations, which I subscribe 100%. Still, sh*t happens all the time. One interesting data point for this discussion is the following diagram, which I found the 2nd edition of this wonderful little book I bought recently https://www.amazon.com.au/David-Rowlands-Stress-Battle-Quantifying/dp/0244203059/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=john+curry+the+stress+of+battle&qid=1573119600&sr=8-1 For this table/summary/statistical model they used data from 29 WW2 and WW1 battles (adjusting the latter to WW2 standards), where the attacker successfully forced the defender to vacate its positions, and indirect fires were not a factor (at least a documented one). To give a sense of the temporal spread of data points used in this analysis, the battles go from the 1918 Allied counterattacks after Operation Michael, to Operation Veritable in 1945. I would love to hear what you guys think, but the casualty estimates seem to me to be on the lower side (not by much) of what I have come to expect from playing CMx2 either against the AI in well-crafted scenarios or a human opponent that has done the work to keyhole guns and check for micro terrain providing reverse slopes etc. The analysis of these results led to confirm the following tactical "verities" one can find discussed in memoirs, treatises on tactics and what not - Well placed HMGs trump rifle/LMG fires - Tanks trump HMGs - AT assets "suppress" tanks, enabling HMGs to do their work on the attackers What is evident is that AFVs are king... when it comes to keep suppressed the defender. I think that CMx2 does a reasonably good impression of these relationships (and Graviteam eventually got there too), from a statistical point of view. Which is admittedly, not the most fun point of view.

Oliver, we are in the 21st century https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/4043921/windows-10-get-started-eye-control It is not perfect, but relatively speaking, in the same league as upgrading from the good ole chamberpot-contents-out-the-window-every-morning arrangement to Edwardian-era toilet arrangements. PS: without the humour now, as a child of a sufferer of chronic arthritis who loved his computing time, these devices are a significant QOL improvement.

There is also Dan Carlin's Hardcore History "Supernova in the East" series, plenty of good references in there. The second part pretty much starts (and stays for while) discussing this mammoth of a topic Carlin doesn't flinch going into the devastatingly gory details, so I would say this is PG stuff Matt.

You're the first I have spotted so far

And here you have summarised what is CM about in two sentences. You wrote magnificient guides for HTTR many years ago too. Your writing has that rare quality of marrying clarity with brevity. /me waves at @Commanderski too

On one of the big night scenarios - the one featuring the 84th US Division IIRC - infantry movement was noticeably slower, and troops were getting winded up quicker, than what I am used to. Similar conditions can be found on the first Chaumont scenario. On CMFI I fought a couple years back a big QB with similar settings - that got AAR'ed by my opponent on these forums - and I don't remember the same difficulties.

I don't have access to the forums backend, so I can't tell you how many users there are who haven't posted anything but browse the forums, how many and what kind of queries users put through the search engine or what is the ratio between registered customers emails and forum accounts. The above is a guess informed by what I have seen in other communities where spikes in forum activities are strongly correlated with new patches or DLC.

To be fair, the community has been very prolific and the games haven't changed as quickly as we have gone over topics. With a few distinguished exceptions, most conversations these days seem to me to be rehashing old controversies: we're in "archival" mode. Until Battlefront shakes the sandbox with a new iteration, I don't think there's that much interesting to write about tactics and what not. IMO the last major shake up to the games came with CMFB, where the simulation was expanded to account more fully for winter fighting (EDIT: I am writing this thinking that CMFI winter simulations had to be tweaked a bit to be more convincing). Yet, if CMx2 went to other places - such as Vietnam - I would say that there would be something to talk about, as organisation, equipment and terrain would be way different from everything else Battlefront has achieved with the CM2 games.

Tim Stone saved me a wag of cash. What he reports is just terrible, reminds me of the hapless ill fated foray of CC into 3D back in the early 2000s (EYSA).

Hmmm, even The Wargamer was lukewarm about this one @Thomm... that is something. Tim Stone in his Flare Path was similarly guarded too. Looking at the videos the scenarios look to me like extremely close ranges. Will keep an eye on it but I don't miss Close Combat that much.

A ridgeline worth dying for?

Shameless musical plug

Amplifying this signal... cutting out access to the "naked" RT mode and keeping it for debugging/development would probably help streamline the game a bit, but would also mean that BFC definitely walks away from the possibility of distributing gaming sessions over a network. Would that be a great loss? The decision-making in that is not unlike that of one having a platoon sticking out a bit too far or across a river, pinned down by mortar fire and basically cut off. Once pixelblood has been spilt it is hard to pull back...