Jock Tamson

I used to love browsing the 1:72 packs of Airfix infantry, with the beautiful box art. In my part of Scotland, or maybe just among my friends, we used to call 1:72 soldiers "midgies". I built dozens of Airfix models, but never painted any of them, it was all about the building for me. Although the AFVs had a part to play in my various solo wargames, usually with copies of a couple of Donald Featherstone's books lying open which I had out on repeat loans from our local library - maybe "Solo Wargaming" and "Wargaming Airborne Operations". I was 8, and I thought Featherstone was a god. My battlefield was a reversed Subbuteo pitch laid over chipboard, with books underneath to form hills.

...which is quite clearly for a product called "Easy PDF Combine". I agree that they hope that people who don't read what the screen is saying will accidentally click on the wrong link.

Yes, much the same as assaulting vehicles, the crew - who had no idea you were there - will come piling out and kill your assaulters once you have blown up their vehicle. Meanwhile your assaulters will allow themselves to be shot up by the egressing crew as if they had no idea there might have been anyone in the vehicle.

No it is not hard to install, but it does not encourage casual purchase. S***m on the other hand enables casual product discovery and purchase - search by genre.

Absolute bunk. By your logic, Battlefront start selling their products via Steam, and then somehow Steve stops being Steve and succumbs to the deluge of feedback. "New people", my God, the mere thought of it!

Fan tears a strip off fan, because first fan wants more people to find and play game they both love. Nuts! Meanwhile outside the CM bubble a generation of gamers spends billions of dollars on Steam, GoG.com etc and is barely aware that software is available anywhere else. When I built my gaming PC back in 2011, after being away from games for a decade or so, I was suspicious of Steam and bought Rise of Flight and Arma 2 on CD. That lasted about 6 weeks before I realised that things had moved on. I now have I guess 100 or so titles, many of a type that I probably wouldn't have considered back in the day when I purchased CDs. As any Steam user will tell you, the shop is always open . Buy a game, go and get another beer, come back and it's installed.

Impressive although I think 6mm works better for WW2

With respect, and speaking as someone who works in this environment, the decisions as to what appears in a given version of the game engine have got far more to do with available programming resource, desired release dates and business decisions relating to worthwhile features, than what can be "packed into the code" - a phrase that doesn't really have any technical meaning. Most people have systems with an additional three CPU cores doing no work while CM is running. Re-engineering CM to make more use of these would be a huge undertaking, but it is a resource and business limitation, not a technical one. Different 3d engine offering improved terrain and building deformation? - business decision, not a technical limitation. I don't share the OP's criticisms, most of them are flat out wrong, however as someone who only plays single player and has bought pretty much everything that has come out, I do share his experience of upgrading over the years and then slowly going off the boil as I come up against familiar let downs in single player particularly.

I think the bugging out behaviour, in urban environments in particular, is probably the most frustrating. I would prefer more nuance - sometimes crawling out of the back edge of buildings rather than the full on dash out into the open across the street and line of fire.

Appreciate your point re the possibility that there is no HD location. However, I don't believe your point about Area Fire is correct, no Area Fire will take place even if a HD location has not been found. I will happily stand corrected on that though, I will experiment tonight.

That target line on the HD waypoint is not an area fire order. Have you actually tried it? - I don't see the behaviour you are describing (ie the Area Fire).

as others have said, using the target command from the waypoint you have plotted is key. Adjust the waypoint until you have a clear blue target line to your proposed target.

Sure, but at least if you have them copied off locally you don't have to go to the site when you are reinstalling.

Next time you check through the items, copy the license keys into a notepad doc.

Which will still work - the unit will stop at a position which is hull down to the waypoint, if it finds one. Setting a target from a HD waypoint will make the unit stop at a position which is HD to the target, somewhere along the line to the waypoint. Both equally valid ways of using the command.

How would you know your opponent was doing the same?

It is trivially easy to have one directory containing your sound mod, which all the games point to. It doesn't even have to be in the game's directory structure. Use Directory Junctions (in Windows). Example: you have CM installed on C: You put your sound mod in a directory on a different drive D: mklink /j "c:\program files\CMBN\data\z\sound" "d:\mods\CM\sound" mklink /j "c:\program files\CMFI\data\z\sound" "d:\mods\CM\sound" mklink /j "c:\program files\CMFB\data\z\sound" "d:\mods\CM\sound" etc Obviously your precise installation paths will be different to the ones above. A variation of this would be that you have a sound mod in CMBN and you want all the other games to use it: mklink /j "c:\program files\CMFI\data\z\sound" "c:\program files\CMBN\data\z\sound" mklink /j "c:\program files\CMFB\data\z\sound" "c:\program files\CMBN\data\z\sound"

Agree. In fact I would like Iron to limit map scrolling to within a couple of hundred metres of your troops, creating a frontline / fog of war effect.

Looking forward to trying this scenario out. Can I shamelessly plug my own version of Mord's Mixed Combatants for those who want more variety in their enemy:

I appreciate the relation between RT and WEGO in the current engine. But this discussion is not limited to the current engine. The point I am making is that the game is already CPU bound because it is largely single threaded. Unless they completely rework the engine to use greater multi threading - a lot of work and difficult to predict benefits - the amount of processing available for this engine or the next is going to be limited to that one thread and core. There is a limit to what can be going on in that thread whilst maintaining the sort of frame rates that RT needs in order to be playable. If RT is dropped, frame rates become much less of an issue. If frame rates are less of an issue, more computation can be done in the thread = more features. I am sure, for example, that most WEGO players would wait a little longer for turn resolution if it allowed the AI to have more processing resource, for example to move away from scripted plans to something a bit more dynamic. I have played a lot of RT, but I would rather have a better, less predictable, game against the AI and only have WEGO.

Hopefully one day he'll realise what a cul de sac it is and divert the resources elsewhere.

Dropping Real Time. For me, the addition of Real Time must have significant influence on acceptable amount of computation going on under the hood, in order to allow playable frame rates. One wonders how much more computation would be available if the game was WEGO only. Would it, for example, allow a more dynamic tactical layer for the AI ie an AI commander of sorts, who could react to events on the battlefield.

Saw one of my guys take out a BRDM in CMBS with a LAW from a corner while the rest of his team were faced up against the wall, was very cool.

Imagine if we could export / import QB forces as, say, XML. You could then share XML around the community. For single players, this would mean being able to import someone else's XML into your QB and thus would mean you would be unaware of the AI's force composition, provided you didn't peek at the XML contents.

I would even pay just for the update of the Quick Battle system in CMSF