Nijmegen

When being gamey and dropping pre-planned artillery on a known/suspected enemy stronghold, the artillery will fall at least 50m off target. When under fire and in need of smoke or artillery rickity tick, the only available FO will be a Green platoon leader who will take 4 minutes to call it in. Mortar rounds and grenades rarely bother to drop on squads that are not tightly packed. If your attack is going well, your computer is probably about to crash.

European buildings are indeed more sturdy than US ones (in general) thanks to a major reliance on bricks and mortar, or stone. Churches in particular are solid buildings - that's why so many of them have lasted so long, even ones that are no longer used since the middle ages are standing in part or whole (for the stonework at least.) A church's weak spots are the glass and the doors, and not even all churches have the 'big' stained glass windows behind the alter you might think would be the easiest route in. I think other posters are correct that buildings seem to display more cover characteristics of wooden construction than concrete and stone. As for tactics on holding and taking buildings, well that's a whole other discussion. WP flares aren't modelled in game are they? ;-)

If you have LOS to the edge of a wood, and a map that tells you roughly how large the wood is and so forth, you should be able to call in artillery on it. It might not be the most accurate - say you're on a level with the edge of the treeline and are dropping behind, you won't know how far behind - but it's doable. Strict LOS rules for artillery needn't apply, so long as the commander knows that he can get very inaccurate results. Likewise, he can strike very lucky. I wonder when the Commonwealth module comes out will we see more advanced arty? The British love of set piece, creeping barrages and all that.

Ok, so HE arty can take down trees. But how about HMG fire, for example?

Tree degradation should be modeled in, given how many of the things there are in Normandy. Depending on the size of the trees / bushes etc, small arms and MG fire could take it apart. Set a .50 cal firing onto enemy troops hidden in trees and those babies are coming down. Of course, they do provide cover depending on where they fall... Well, I'm sure an entire development effort (maybe an expansion module? ;-) could be put into total realism here... But sufficed to say, in basic terms trees that come under fire should fall over eventually.

Hi all, long (long) time lurker, came to CMx1 after it was established and have enjoyed the fruits of everyone's labors there for years. I'm loving CMBN, but one thing I've noticed - and perhaps I've not tested enough, or have others noticed? - is that the randomness of quick battle's seems very low. I've let the computer select parameters, and it keeps throwing me the same maps without fail - even when there are several it could choose from in my defined criteria. The force mix can also be a bit strange, I know they're working on the AI's love of AT guns... It's less of an issue than the map selection though. Perhaps the computer could take account of when it last threw up a particular map? Or am I just getting lucky? I sense that QB's need some tweaking to throw up truly original scenarios.