thejetset

Thanks Vinnart. I will check it out this weekend!

I like the idea of using icons for the soldier stat inside of the weapon panel. That would be very quick and easy. Does your animated text mode work with BN??? I have all of the CMx1 games but don't have ShockForce.

I did a search and found a post from 2005 and 2006 so I thought I would bring it up again after all these years. It would be nice to have some color coding to help quickly see what individual soldier stats are inside of a unit. Currently, there are two areas on the screen that show soldier stats. WEAPON AREA: This is at the bottom of the screen It switches between GREEN weapon and YELLOW weapon. Basically, this entire area is dedicated to showing which weapons are being carried and how the squads are divided. SOLDIER STATUS: This is pure GREEN text in the lower left hand corner of the screen. This shows what the soldier is currently doing i.e... Medic, Firing, Aiming, Spotting, Cowering, Casualty etc ... My suggestion for improving this is the following: Incorporate the "Soldier Status" directly into the "Weapon Area". The actual weapon could be made a little bit smaller to leave room for the additional text that is currently displayed in the "Soldier Status" area. Color Code!... Color Code the Weapon to display soldier health. (Green = Healthy, Yellow = Hurt, Red = WIA, Red Outline = KIA ... don't eliminate the WIA and KIA from the unit so we can see the overall casualties of the unit) Color code the status text depending on the soldier action: WHITE text for general actions: Spotting, Hiding, etc .. BLUE text for "Medic" ORANGE text for "Cowering" etc ......... This will greatly help to quickly digest the information. Also, some information could be toggled above the floating unit icon on the screen or incorporated into the color of the unit's floating icon. .... Individual soldier information could be toggled onto the unit's base-plate. Currently, this base is fixed to represent unit health. .... It would be nice to be able to choose this to represent something different ... like maybe C2 status. Here is a screen-shot from back in 2005 of someone trying to explain what I am saying above. http://i224.photobucket.com/albums/dd194/vinnart/loacationcasualty-1.jpg

I played all three of the CMx1 games and was always a big fan. But I think that CMBN is an overall great improvement. It feels a lot more "real". A green GI manning a 57mm AT gun is not going to know the exact percentage probability of that Panther rumbling towards him at about 600 yards out. There are a lot threads by people requesting tactics and tricks. Inevitably, the best responses are real-life tactics. .... All you need to know about CMBN is how to use the controls. .... the actual tactics for winning the game could be picked up from Army Field manuals and real life after action reports. You can tell that the BF team put a lot of emphasis on "Real Life" with the CMx2 engine. This has been improved upon with CMBN. However, that said, it would be nice to be able to toggle some additional heads-up shovelware clutter that would float over the board or float around a unit's screen icon. These toggle floaties could include: - C2 - Suppression (rough estimation for overall unit) - Ammo (rough estimation for overall unit) - Moral All of these toggles could be turned ON or OFF depending on user preferences. Also, ... and I know this has been repeatedly stated and is for some reason hard to program in the current build ... but an Armor ONLY arc would be GREAT!

I agree with Broadsword56 with regard to how the German dialog could be portrayed. ... so long as the German company is not a fanatical Nazi SS corps, I don't think it will be a problem. One of my family's great friends who only died last year was a former WWII German soldier who lived in my hometown in the USA. He came from a family that made chocolates in a small German town and ended up manning an AA machine-gun on a German patrol boat in the North Sea. ..... Just a draftee following orders and subjected to a lot of propaganda. He always said, "But I never hit anything!" ... anyway, at least he missed the Allied plane that blew his boat out of the water. (he spent the rest of the war at a prison camp in England) But I think that regardless of how you decide to portray the dialog, you're not going to offend anyone that plays Combat Mission by portraying some Nazi ideals and propaganda. .... after all, that's why we were over there fighting them. ... there's nothing wrong with a little drama every now and again.

Also, can tanks move through openings that engineers detonate though the bocage?? I can't seem to get any of my tanks to move through them.

I think I know the exact spot you are referring to. There is a wooden bunker directly to the left of the opening correct?? If so, yeah, I found this too.

It's WELL deserved! You've really added a great additional dynamic to this series! ... but my wife is definitely going to hate you for this! Some of the scenarios do end up like a failed Japanese banzai charge! ... but as some of the other people have mentioned, it is much harder if you try to keep your casualties down to a bare minimum. KEEP THE NARRATIVE PLEASE!!!! And let us know if you need any help writing it or editing it!! It makes it so much more cool and personal. But the bottom line is ... Thanks! Great job!!!

You get it on the repository on the www.battlefront.com website. You have to sign in to download files from the repository. Once you download the campaign, unzip it and drop the uncompressed file into the "Campaigns" data folder in one of the subdirectories that the Combat Mission game was installed in on your computer. Run Combat Mission ... when you click on the "Campaigns" button in the menu ... Devils Descent will appear!

I have always enjoyed playing the CM series (although I'm brand new to the CMx2 engine). This new way of doing "Personal" campaigns with the option to make CHOICES inside of the campaign is not only ingenious but a hell of a lot of fun!!! It is very smooth and extremely polished and VERY original. I hope the Battle Front team takes notice of this campaign! It would be really cool to include the "Choice" option directly inside of the briefing. Also, hopefully the rest of the modding community takes notice of this campaign. It could be a pretty cool way to incorporate higher level tactical command decisions into scenarios. .... Maybe you are a battalion commander in charge of 3 companies and support?? .... Where do you send the companies?? ... Where do you send the support elements?? How do you assign mission support??? This campaign proves that to a certain extent it's already possible with the EXISTING software!! ... This would be a very cool aspect for the Battle Front team to follow up on for a future release. Anyways, contradulations and thank you to Field Marshal Blücher and the other people who made this campaign possible. It adds a whole new layer of love for my pixletruppen!

- Peeling off an AT or Scout detail from your squad. - The new power and versatility of on-map mortar crews. You can keep them in the background for fire missions or keep them moving right along close behind the firing line for close support .... either option is seriously deadly if deployed correctly! - Buddy-Aid!

Seeing the bocage getting shredded up when pouring area MG fire into it.

I agree with this too. The setup zones in CMx1 were easier to understand.

+1 for Infantry units to be able to move VERY SLOWLY through barbed wire. This would simulate them using wire cutters and "Buddy-help" methods to push through the obstacles. If not, ... I'm making a new quick battle map with a barbed wire line all across it. US attacks with only inf platoons ... Germans are up on a hill (with a single line of barbed wire all around it) with LOT's of ammo! .... anyone want to play my map? ... I'm the Germans!

This has been fixed in the full release!!! The trunk's toggle works as shown in the screen shot!!! THANKS!!!!!!

Should be renamed to CM:BO ..... Combat Mission:Beyond OWSOME!!! It is everything I was hoping for AND MORE!!!!!! .... Hurray!! 10 more years of cool WWII gaming!!!!!!!!

That's really cool. Yeah, I had my platoon CO's moving around a lot at the time I noticed they lost contact. I wasn't sure if that was the reason though. That's a great modeling feature.

I was playing the Bocage scenerio as the US. My Company Commander was behind my two platoons by about 100 yards. (I had him with my 60mm mortar teams). My logic was that all my Company and Platoon COs have radios. Therefore, I thought the forward platoon COs could act as spotters and order in 60mm missions via the radio (instead of having to remain within voice or eye contact range) However, after the two platoons advanced forward some, I noticed there was a red "X" in front of the "Company" level of the Chain of Command icon. (I wish I would have taken a screen shot). Did the Company CO loose radio contact with his Platoon CO's?? ... Under what circumstances can this happen?? ... They were not more than 150 - 200 yards apart. I thought that the radio ranges should be valid for such a short distance. ... or maybe it is a different reason all together?? Thanks!

Thanks Steve, You know what? (and this might help other people debating on upgrading their computers) The laptop with the 1.8 GHz 4-Core processor is scheduled to arrive today from Amazon ... but I'm going to send it back to them. It's better to run a Dual-Core processor with higher clock speeds and L3 cache for the majority of applications that only require single/dual processors. .... And it was cheaper too! So I'm going with an Intel Core i5-480M(2.66GHz). But this is my WORK laptop right?? ..... CM:BN had NOTHING to do with this decision! ... Right!!??

I will (hopefully) be running the full version of the game on a laptop that has an AMD Phenom II Quad-Core P960(1.8GHz) and a video card: AMD Radeon HD 6370M The CPU has a low clock-speed and is optimized for low power consumption. ... But I was reading that CMx2 doesn't really support multi-core processing. Am I screwed here!!?? .... or is there something I can do that will make it run nicely??

+1 for the cover armor arc

+1 here on the original post! This is the game I've been waiting for since Close Combat 1.0 MANY years back!!! ... Then came along Combat Mission ... and since, then I have always wished there was a way to somehow combine the best of both of these games. So far from what I can see in the Demo, BF has gone BEYOND those wildest expectations!! I think we have a foundation that will provide some incredible WWII gaming for many years to come!!!!!!!!

Will the full version include the option to re-play your battle? I'm not refering to the turn-based battles that let you replay the last minute as many times as you want ... I'm refering to being able to replay a real-time battle without all the pauses for issuing orders. I don' know if this has already been covered in the forums ... I did a quick search and didn't find anything. Thanks!

Would it be very difficult to have the WEGO be selected to be 30 second or 60 second intervals prior to starting the battle?? After playing in real-time, 1 minute seems like A LONG time between orders!!!! If it's not too difficult to program, it would be a great option to have.

I fully agree with this. Also, it would be nice to be able to specify "Armor Only" and "Infantry Only" commands on the human side of the game. .... As mentioned in this post, AI should be able to do the same thing. But even with the MGs targeting tanks at 300m, the bocage map is STILL challenging!