BletchleyGeek

She will be turning 16 in December. Her Grade 10 History Class covered Canadian History from 1900 to present day and of course I was a big help for her WW1 and WW2 sections. When she asked if I had any books on the role of Canada in WW2 and I brought her 15 books..... lets just say her project on Juno Beach was the best in the class! 
Some of her friends at school like to play World of Tanks and she was griping about how it sucks to start off with a crappy tank when everyone else has uber tanks. I told her should could play with the best, if she played me in CM since everyone can have the best right off the start in CM. We have played a few battles in CMFI and CMRT, platoon of infantry and a tank. She is getting better, but with sports teams and homework it has been a while since we last played. We usually play the battle twice, each of us as either side, just to show her it is possible to win as either Allies or Axis if you use the equipment properly. 
No allowance in my house, everyone chips in to help out and we take care of spending money for them if needed. 

This is a rather comical back and forth.  You two should take this show on the road. 

Apple. What a mess they have made- but for the iPhone and iPad. Even the iMac is a decent utilitarian device, though pricey- but if my 70 year old parents can use it, they must be doing something right in the UI department. So they aren't failing on every front. But...
Powerful Mac desktops are increasingly a lost cause. People that have traditionally used them for work (like myself) are scrambling to figure out what to do about the years wait to see how they will screw up the next next MacPro (the trash can one is indeed garbage). I don't take kindly to the removal of modularity/DIY options in the weirdly pricey high-end MacPro models. I built a monster PC for map making a year ago, and it was half the price of my MacPro trashcan that I almost never use now. And so much faster for any gaming. Even other work (Adobe stuff and Maya, mainly).
Maybe they will turn it around, but they seem to have given up on power desktops, but they just can't seem to admit it to themselves as a company yet.
 

Apple merely inherited Steve Job's contempt for gaming and gamers. John Carmack wrote a post about it a few weeks ago which is interesting.
Couple this with years of low quality electronics from Apple and I'd recommend everyone move on from Apple.
 

Apple would never concede an inch to PC. They also never support a product that they perceive will compete against themselves. Its likely they are looking at the new Metal platform.
I feel an Apple IIGS rage coming on....Arghh! About 30 years ago the Apple IIGS came out, best computer at the time fully backwards compatible with Apple II and used new OS and even 3.5 disks. Apple cut production and support after 2 years. Imagine owning a $3500 boat anchor in 1988. The reason: Apple thought it competed against their own Macintosh. In reality the majority of GS owners moved on to x286 PC's. 
That's Apple   great now my skin is turning green and my shirt is ripped.
 

+1
I suppose the below quotes from the article are basically the reason.  They are trying to force developers to use their product which does not support cross platform use.  
Games and graphics-intensive apps that use OpenGL should now adopt Metal. Similarly, apps that use OpenCL for computational tasks should now adopt Metal and Metal Performance Shaders."  Apple introduced Metal, its proprietary low-level 3D graphics API, in 2014.

I think this is by design: if a vehicle is in operation it serves as a working c2 node. When the vehicle is dismounted, it is not in operation and therefore not a functioning c2 node. Troops in vehicles can use the vehicle c2 equipment but if they dismount they have to do with what they carry. From the manual: "Exception: On-map support assets including mortars and howitzers can fire indirect even if they are out of command & control and lack a radio, provided that either the spotter is within 50m or the support asset is next to a vehicle equipped with a radio".

These are pdf's with large, labeled pictures for every QB map, covering CMFB, CMFI, and CMRT. I always get frustrated trying to remember which QB map is which, and having to load up the scenario editor just to find one gets really, really old. So I created these.
I'll eventually put these on CMMODS. As soon as I finish the CMBN one, which is a significantly bigger task, and has had to take a back seat to a different project I'm now invested in. So I decided to just post these here, now.
Can someone please let me know if these links work for plain ol' public download / access? If not, I'll repost proper links in a new thread. Dropbox recently got rid of its "Public Folder" feature, and the new way to accomplish almost the same thing is not very intuitive....
Here ya go:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jffokwaq2w017bj/CMFB - All QB Maps.pdf?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3l4xpbdhps0mgq6/CMRT - All QB Maps.pdf?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4rh9ya8wbe3tldr/CMFI - Alol QB Maps - lower quality.pdf?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/p9vhj33u708h0f9/CMFI - All QB Maps.pdf?dl=0
*NOTE:  the "lower quality" CMFI pdf is actually the same quality as CMFB's and CMRT's -- plenty good enough. The higher quality CMFI pdf was my first, though, and features lossless images... which is great, except that the file size is almost 300MB.
 

Now that would have made an interesting twist to the movie "The Wicker Man".

Didn't sound like he attacked anybody to me. Sounds like he is trying to bring some positivity to the table in the midst of all the negativity that's been posted lately. But apparently you aren't gonna let the rotten b****** get away with it.
 
Mord.

For more than a year, I joined this community after the acquisition of the complete CMBN game.
and I confirm that one of my childhood dreams has been fulfilled
The thread on the patch is stiff.
Criticism can be constructive but can also be morally destructive for a team
Also I wanted to tell you that I thank you for your wonderful work
 

From my favourite book on software development, and the only I think anybody needs to buy. I don't think everything below applies, but I will leave it here to invite some reflection.
https://pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer/extracts/software-entropy
 
Software Entropy
While software development is immune from almost all physical laws, entropy hits us hard. Entropy is a term from physics that refers to the amount of “disorder” in a system. Unfortunately, the laws of thermodynamics guarantee that the entropy in the universe tends toward a maximum. When disorder increases in software, programmers call it “software rot.”
There are many factors that can contribute to software rot. The most important one seems to be the psychology, or culture, at work on a project. Even if you are a team of one, your project’s psychology can be a very delicate thing. Despite the best laid plans and the best people, a project can still experience ruin and decay during its lifetime. Yet there are other projects that, despite enormous difficulties and constant setbacks, successfully fight nature’s tendency toward disorder and manage to come out pretty well.
What makes the difference?
In inner cities, some buildings are beautiful and clean, while others are rotting hulks. Why? Researchers in the field of crime and urban decay discovered a fascinating trigger mechanism, one that very quickly turns a clean, intact, inhabited building into a smashed and abandoned derelict .
A broken window.
One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don’t care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short space of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner’s desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality.
The “Broken Window Theory” has inspired police departments in New York and other major cities to crack down on the small stuff in order to keep out the big stuff. It works: keeping on top of broken windows, graffiti, and other small infractions has reduced the serious crime level.
Don’t leave “broken windows” (bad designs, wrong decisions, or poor code) unrepaired. Fix each one as soon as it is discovered. If there is insufficient time to fix it properly, then board it up. Perhaps you can comment out the offending code, or display a “Not Implemented” message, or substitute dummy data instead. Take some action to prevent further damage and to show that you’re on top of the situation.
We’ve seen clean, functional systems deteriorate pretty quickly once windows start breaking. There are other factors that can contribute to software rot, and we’ll touch on some of them elsewhere, but neglect accelerates the rot faster than any other factor.
You may be thinking that no one has the time to go around cleaning up all the broken glass of a project. If you continue to think like that, then you’d better plan on getting a dumpster, or moving to another neighborhood. Don’t let entropy win.
Putting Out Fires
By contrast, there’s the story of an obscenely rich acquaintance of Andy’s. His house was immaculate, beautiful, loaded with priceless antiques, objets d’art, and so on. One day, a tapestry that was hanging a little too close to his living room fireplace caught on fire. The fire department rushed in to save the day—and his house. But before they dragged their big, dirty hoses into the house, they stopped—with the fire raging—to roll out a mat between the front door and the source of the fire.
They didn’t want to mess up the carpet.
A pretty extreme case, to be sure, but that’s the way it must be with software. One broken window—a badly designed piece of code, a poor management decision that the team must live with for the duration of the project—is all it takes to start the decline. If you find yourself working on a project with quite a few broken windows, it’s all too easy to slip into the mindset of “All the rest of this code is crap, I’ll just follow suit.” It doesn’t matter if the project has been fine up to this point. In the original experiment leading to the “Broken Window Theory,” an abandoned car sat for a week untouched. But once a single window was broken, the car was stripped and turned upside down within hours.
By the same token, if you find yourself on a team and a project where the code is pristinely beautiful—cleanly written, well designed, and elegant—you will likely take extra special care not to mess it up, just like the firefighters. Even if there’s a fire raging (deadline, release date, trade show demo, etc.), you don’t want to be the first one to make a mess.
Challenges
Help strengthen your team by surveying your computing “neighborhood.” Choose two or three “broken windows” and discuss with your colleagues what the problems are and what could be done to fix them. Can you tell when a window first gets broken? What is your reaction? If it was the result of someone else’s decision, or a management edict, what can you do about it?  

lmfao...
I could've sworn someone a few pages back here was saying something about tabling evidence but being ignored. Starting to empathize. This thread should read "the blind lead the blind."
We already have a panic feature; when men panic they will break. The "its not a bug, its a feature" rhetoric has to die. Trained soldiers somewhat in control of their wits do not (a) break under artillery fire when in some semblance of fire and (b) break and run in the face of a tank attack. When they do that, it's called panic. In fact the term "tank fright" was literally coined to capture the type of hysteric irrationality that would be required to do so. 

It is absolutely unrealistic, no army on the face of the earth trains soldiers to displace out of fighting positions, or to run around like headless chickens when they take indirect fire.

The (poor) sarcasm is doing you no favors. Jackass move.

This is a bad argument. They keep all relevant information (sales figures, cash flow, etc.) secret ostensibly to "protect it from competition." Just pointing to longevity is ridiculous, for all you know they could have been limping along for 20 years, it's literally impossible to know how successful they are. 
I'll tell you what's not a sign of a good company, releasing an update with a game breaking bug (I consider it game breaking because it effectively makes the single player unplayable, unless you enjoy effortlessly gunning down fleeing AI troops) and charge $10 for it. Then going over a year and a half without any sign of a fix on the way. Bonus points for the fact that the update to fix 4.0 will also likely require you to pay for it because BFC loves its customers so much that they nickle and dime them for basic bug fixes. 
But hey, I gotta give some credit to BFC, they've clearly mastered the art of building up a dedicated fanbase. Paying customers are demanding some action to fix their game, and we got @IanL throwing out terms like snowflakes, because screw them for wanting to be able to play their $60 game without using janky workarounds. 
 

You nailed it.  If its an infantry flame team you can really do two things -
1. Use them to destroy or route pinned enemy troops.  This only works really during the "mopping up" phase of battles and really doesnt seem to work especially better than bullets and explosives.
2. Use them in ambush. This is really difficult because of the 30m range. Basically its the same as trying to ambush with a Pzfaust 30 except the team isnt half as mobile.  Im just using the faust as an example,  flame teams have heavy equipment and draw fire like mad.
That said I have had some great Aha moments with them just like using mines etc. 3 out of 5 times my mines do minimal if any damage but sometimes..
Just like Id place mines outside buildings on the door tile and especially out the back door I do the same with flame teams. So the first row of buildings into a town will have light infantry elements to spot and harass the enemy the huge bulk will be in the 2nd row of buildings or outside larger firsy row buildings. This is where you can destroy a platoon attack - have your team sitting on the back steps of a building to shoot flame at enemy infantry entering the other side.
The true success of the weapon in this role isnt that itll kill 10 men, you.ll be lucky with 8 enemy casualties, but that immediate platoon those troops are part of is gonna have lower morale than bad tempered impoverished kids on Christmas
 
 
edit: This isnt your older brothers flamethrowers from Close Combat 2 and 3 - the ambush team of doom with fire streaking out causing catastrophic tank explosions.

To be honest, that was back in game engine version 1.
Some lessons don't ever get "un-forgotten" though.
EDIT: The presence of trees or other obscurants partially blocking LOS, but not LOF was the contributing factor to the previous observation.
 
 
I learned quite a few lessons as a result of that earlier experience:
 

Kholkoz workers were collective owners of the business, so they did care.

Lmao this is a woke derailment. Partisans in WWII didn't derail things this effectively. 
God Bless

Thanks @General Jack Ripper for the intro
 
You have almost answered the question yourself, but there are a few aspects that impacted my decision making which I don't think were "observable" from your POV.
 
The attack on Casa Fanella didn't start on the conditions of my choosing. That stray private walking onto that HMG was pretty much like firing a flare up into the night sky, as my line engaged yours. I wasn't ready just yet, or more exactly, I hadn't the forces I thought I needed to breakthrough all the way to the top of the hill completely in position. Hence the delay in breaching the wire. The engineers were still on their way. In hindsight, perhaps, the rational decision would have been to call off the whole thing. I wasn't very sure I had the combat strength to push all the way to Casa Riposa in the units I had in position. And I was very aware that as soon as we had made contact, there would be artillery coming my way.
 
My calculation is that I would have like 6 to 8 minutes before the shells started coming... but I did that on the back of wishful thinking, as you had a TRP right on top of Casa Fanella. That was great forward thinking and probably the second small decision which saved the bacon of your left flank. The first was to put down wire
 
In any case, it is fairly evident that I had enough combat power to gain fire superiority over your forward line and the defenders you had in Casa Fanella. I was actually surprised to see them routing (or falling back) after 2 or 3 minutes in the firefight.  It was also one of the most intense firefights I have had in a CM game in a while. Yet, I wasn't in position to exploit that success because the wire effectively preempted me advancing further. The only unit I had able to move forward was the platoon on my right flank. I could have squirmed a squad or two more... but it felt like I was feeding my men in dribs and drabs to the maws of German machine gun fire. So I stayed frosty.
 
The right flank platoon wouldn't be able to make much progress. The quality differential between my force and yours became apparent then. You mention in the video that one of your HQ teams was able to pick one by one several members of a squad. That wasn't my choice. My squad had jumped over the wall to move across the road,  and then got a casualty and became suppressed/pinned. The platoon commander was too far to provide support, and the TacAI  wasn't going to take them anywhere but backwards.
 
First thing I did was to bring forward the HMGs and the light mortars and start putting some hurt on your guys... which I thought would be reeling (and they were). Your position shuffling tactics reduced considerably the effectiveness of the mortars. Here the diminished Commonwealth squad firepower failed to reduce the mobility of your higher quality troops, which as a consequence avoided those little shells of death (which were falling quite close from what I can see in your video).
 
Eventually, I breached the obstacles and was able to move forward in strength. But then your artillery arrived.
 
In hindsight, it is clear to me that I should have made my engineers a more integral part of my plan, so I could have brought them forward way quicker. The initial success of my infiltration was squandered because of lacking engineering support at the right time.
 
 
 
 

Thanks @General Jack Ripper for the intro
 
You have almost answered the question yourself, but there are a few aspects that impacted my decision making which I don't think were "observable" from your POV.
 
The attack on Casa Fanella didn't start on the conditions of my choosing. That stray private walking onto that HMG was pretty much like firing a flare up into the night sky, as my line engaged yours. I wasn't ready just yet, or more exactly, I hadn't the forces I thought I needed to breakthrough all the way to the top of the hill completely in position. Hence the delay in breaching the wire. The engineers were still on their way. In hindsight, perhaps, the rational decision would have been to call off the whole thing. I wasn't very sure I had the combat strength to push all the way to Casa Riposa in the units I had in position. And I was very aware that as soon as we had made contact, there would be artillery coming my way.
 
My calculation is that I would have like 6 to 8 minutes before the shells started coming... but I did that on the back of wishful thinking, as you had a TRP right on top of Casa Fanella. That was great forward thinking and probably the second small decision which saved the bacon of your left flank. The first was to put down wire
 
In any case, it is fairly evident that I had enough combat power to gain fire superiority over your forward line and the defenders you had in Casa Fanella. I was actually surprised to see them routing (or falling back) after 2 or 3 minutes in the firefight.  It was also one of the most intense firefights I have had in a CM game in a while. Yet, I wasn't in position to exploit that success because the wire effectively preempted me advancing further. The only unit I had able to move forward was the platoon on my right flank. I could have squirmed a squad or two more... but it felt like I was feeding my men in dribs and drabs to the maws of German machine gun fire. So I stayed frosty.
 
The right flank platoon wouldn't be able to make much progress. The quality differential between my force and yours became apparent then. You mention in the video that one of your HQ teams was able to pick one by one several members of a squad. That wasn't my choice. My squad had jumped over the wall to move across the road,  and then got a casualty and became suppressed/pinned. The platoon commander was too far to provide support, and the TacAI  wasn't going to take them anywhere but backwards.
 
First thing I did was to bring forward the HMGs and the light mortars and start putting some hurt on your guys... which I thought would be reeling (and they were). Your position shuffling tactics reduced considerably the effectiveness of the mortars. Here the diminished Commonwealth squad firepower failed to reduce the mobility of your higher quality troops, which as a consequence avoided those little shells of death (which were falling quite close from what I can see in your video).
 
Eventually, I breached the obstacles and was able to move forward in strength. But then your artillery arrived.
 
In hindsight, it is clear to me that I should have made my engineers a more integral part of my plan, so I could have brought them forward way quicker. The initial success of my infiltration was squandered because of lacking engineering support at the right time.
 
 
 
 

Thanks @General Jack Ripper for the intro
 
You have almost answered the question yourself, but there are a few aspects that impacted my decision making which I don't think were "observable" from your POV.
 
The attack on Casa Fanella didn't start on the conditions of my choosing. That stray private walking onto that HMG was pretty much like firing a flare up into the night sky, as my line engaged yours. I wasn't ready just yet, or more exactly, I hadn't the forces I thought I needed to breakthrough all the way to the top of the hill completely in position. Hence the delay in breaching the wire. The engineers were still on their way. In hindsight, perhaps, the rational decision would have been to call off the whole thing. I wasn't very sure I had the combat strength to push all the way to Casa Riposa in the units I had in position. And I was very aware that as soon as we had made contact, there would be artillery coming my way.
 
My calculation is that I would have like 6 to 8 minutes before the shells started coming... but I did that on the back of wishful thinking, as you had a TRP right on top of Casa Fanella. That was great forward thinking and probably the second small decision which saved the bacon of your left flank. The first was to put down wire
 
In any case, it is fairly evident that I had enough combat power to gain fire superiority over your forward line and the defenders you had in Casa Fanella. I was actually surprised to see them routing (or falling back) after 2 or 3 minutes in the firefight.  It was also one of the most intense firefights I have had in a CM game in a while. Yet, I wasn't in position to exploit that success because the wire effectively preempted me advancing further. The only unit I had able to move forward was the platoon on my right flank. I could have squirmed a squad or two more... but it felt like I was feeding my men in dribs and drabs to the maws of German machine gun fire. So I stayed frosty.
 
The right flank platoon wouldn't be able to make much progress. The quality differential between my force and yours became apparent then. You mention in the video that one of your HQ teams was able to pick one by one several members of a squad. That wasn't my choice. My squad had jumped over the wall to move across the road,  and then got a casualty and became suppressed/pinned. The platoon commander was too far to provide support, and the TacAI  wasn't going to take them anywhere but backwards.
 
First thing I did was to bring forward the HMGs and the light mortars and start putting some hurt on your guys... which I thought would be reeling (and they were). Your position shuffling tactics reduced considerably the effectiveness of the mortars. Here the diminished Commonwealth squad firepower failed to reduce the mobility of your higher quality troops, which as a consequence avoided those little shells of death (which were falling quite close from what I can see in your video).
 
Eventually, I breached the obstacles and was able to move forward in strength. But then your artillery arrived.
 
In hindsight, it is clear to me that I should have made my engineers a more integral part of my plan, so I could have brought them forward way quicker. The initial success of my infiltration was squandered because of lacking engineering support at the right time.
 
 
 
 

So far, we have seen an excellent infiltration and attack on one of the victory locations. My forward line in that sector was easily overcome, and mostly destroyed.
Vicious close range fighting then erupted between the leading Canadian troops, and my elevated positions of the second line.
Somehow, my boys were able to hold off the enemy long enough to bring in artillery. To this day, it still confuses me how this was possible.
The sudden pause in the enemy advance gave me time I needed to re-organize my defense and consolidate my combat power.

The next segment of the AAR videos will focus on the fight at Casa d'Antonio.

Yepp...the face command introduced with the V4 update is a very good one ! 
Previously the AI-units would end their move by ROTATING towards their NEXT waypoint...Very frustrating at times...The V4 update fixed this problem...Thank you !
Another neat feature of the V4 update is the REVERSE feature...This, for the first time, alows scenario designers to program shoot-n-scoot move for the AI...
I don't know if this is what the scenario designer is trying to do in your particular case mention above...having some armour move forward...wait a short while...and then withdraw back again...Pre V4 there was no REVERSE command. Before this update the vehicles would need to turn around i place (exposing their rear to the enemy) to be able to withdraw towards the same direction they came from...
If the scenariodesigner in this scenario have placed the next waypoint for this particular AI Group behind them...like mentioned...this would expain the AI behavior seen here.