Hister

Haha, yeah, no wonder, I was shelling you guys with boardgames.
I got Silent Victory, D-Day at Peleliu and The Doolittle Raid. Only opened Silent Victory - my wife have given a green light to open that one and that one alone as a reward to me for cleaning up the garage. There are two more day -long things I will do around the house and for each I get to open another game. Fun, useful arrangement, haha. Also makes the whole arrival more valuable due to accumulated positive tension. 
So I opened it and loved the content and then she came and I explained her the brief history of US submarine warfare in the Pacific and how it relates to this game. She said: "Oh but rhis is horrible, you can die in the submarine in this game!?" Hehehe. We went over the components, the medals, the historic captains and showed her where you put punched counters and she went: "Oh,  I wanted to throw away those plastic covers!" She thought my newly arrived counter trays were just some fillers for the games to stay in the box. Thanks (insert any diety you worship) she didn't! 
 
 

I use to play all the old stuff from Avalon Hill with ASL being my Love, with ownership of most of their modules in that and most of their other war games also.
But once close combat and combat missions came out,  my love for board gaming really began to stop. I sold my ASL stuff and held on to all the operational and strategic games. But don't find the desire to play them much.
The rules are too complex for most people to try and pick it as a game to play against most.
 
But I will put in the suggestion of the Conflict of heroes series. My kids gave me Storm of Steel - kursh 1943 a few years back as a present.
I will say, A much better design than ASL in that the Rules  are simple and not hard to understand and can be explained to someone else pretty quickly. High quality Board and units.
It does a very good job of dealing with and having the feel of battle at the tactical level.
So I feel good about having it in my closet  for when the world starts coming to a end and I have no electrical power. I have something to still spend my time on.
 
I dont know if I would consider it great as a solo game, just for the fact there is cards that are being used by the players, so there is a factor there that is missed unless playing h2h
 
 

I played a bit ASLSK #1-2 a few years go, want to do that again.
There is a Pacific module (self contained) for ASLSK: ASL Starter Kit #4 PTO
https://www.multimanpublishing.com/tabid/58/CategoryID/11/ProductID/368/Default.aspx
Unfamiliar with ASLSK? It's a light version of ASL on it's own or to learn the basics for the real deal
 

Uber pro usa? How dare they! 

How dare they say that about hardcore wargamers!  That makes me so angry! 😡
😄What exactly do they expect? 

Any thoughts on Steam Workshop integration?

The heavily limited "modding" capabilities of CM make it an almost perfect candidate. Command Ops 2 and Armored Brigade are using the workshop to great effect and make it simple to download new scenarios.

Do you mean this one?
 
 

This.
Also the other points you raise, but... This.

That‘s what they call „placebo effect“.
As long as it helps, all is good. 🤓

Also remember that the enemy within the core of the woods is effectively out of the fight. As soon as you push them deep enough into it that they cannot see out you can leave a small group of men to screen your force from it and move on.

How do you fight in woods? Don't. Or possibly "be the defender, and have lots of SMGs".
 
Failing that:

(This is assuming a squad or platoon is fighting in a wood of infinite size, so you have no access to supporting arms, and you have to actually move and fight through the woods).
Slow pepper-potting is the thing. One thing I do quite a bit is to use Target commands from the supporting elements to get an idea how far they can actually see - the hard limit of advance for each element is where LOS from the supporting elements stops, but should usually be a little closer than that.

Hunt is the command for movement, exclusively. Having the lead element stop when coming under fire is really important, and if you've set up the supporting elements correctly, you should have the best chance of dealing with the contact, whenever it arrives - if they have LOS to the lead element then they have a chance to react.

The general concept is that you need to make contact with as little of your force as possible, whilst maintaining access to fires from as much of it as possible.
Woods ultimately are a randomiser - you're going to get this wrong, and you're going to lose more than you'd like.

 

Split the platoon into fireteams.

Step #1: fireteams on line and within LOS of each other. One team advances a short distance forwards using hunt (about half of LOS maybe less) and then sits for maybe 20 seconds.

|

| -> |

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step #2: Other fireteams then advance inline with the sacrifical element and waits 20 seconds or so before repeating.

| -> |
.     |
| -> |


It will take a long time but it allows your mean to move forward bit by bit and gives them time to spot and engage any enemies. Once you locate the enemy you can then engage them on your terms. You can make this slightly faster by just having your troops do a similar style of movement but with having them firing into the woods as they advance using target light.

The reason you use hunt is that you want the team to immediately hit the deck should they suspect anything is going wrong. Going prone in woods gives them a lot of concealment and the accompanying fireteams should be close enough to provide supporting fire quickly.

 

2 hours would be a terrible way to demo a complex game like CM.

Ah, yes, true. Not sure 2 hours window is enough though.

Not gonna lie I am completely taken by surprise with this. I never thought I would see Combat Mission in steam. I thought at the most we would see it sold on the Slitherine store. 
 
I hope this move benefits CM as a whole. I am however braced for the impact of an influx of the usual steam player base. It’s certainly going to be interesting. 

It'll be interesting to see how successful this is. Sacrificing CMSF2 to the gaping maw of Moloch might be worth it in increased brand awareness alone.
I can't tell you how many times I've had this conversation:
'What to you do?'
'I work for a game company.'
'That's interesting. What's its name?'
'Battefront.com'
'Oh, I know that game! Star Wars, right?'
'Sigh. No, it isn't Star Wars'.

Aleluja! 
Congratulations and to another 20 years in business!

Excellent, thanks very much Steve  Now we can write a review.

how about key which buy from bfc store.,will we recive the steam key?

Any way to use existing keys to migrate games over to steam? (Once they are there)

Obligatory question for when this happens:  have you decided whether to issue Steam keys to current customers to let them transition over to that platform?  
In case anyone hasn't used Steam and is wondering why - the quality of life improvement from never having to worry about installer .exes and getting automatic patching is something you'll never want to come back from.  

So if you get your "As'es" handed to you, that means you get paid?
The list is so long, but I'd hope they fixed the technical issues at least.
Shadows that flicker on and off when moving the camera, hillsides that are lit from the direction opposite the sun, patches of terrain where no fog effect is applied, framerates that often run very low, shaders that crash the game unless you toggle them off.
I believe most of these are caused by obsolete OpenGL driver support, so a move to DirectX would be great.

PTO!

I have Pike & Shot who uses the same system as Fields of Glory II I think. It is okay but I couldn't really get into it for some reason, it felt a bit too bland and lacking character and didn't feel as satisfying as the tabletop equivalent which is vastly superior in my opinion. I haven't really played enough of the computer version to offer a comprehensive review though. I suspect the same applies to Fields of Glory II.
Alexander as well as Hoplite and SPQR are really epic and ooze with history. If you go down that road, don't start with SPQR  because Roman legions add another layer of complexity but I don't see how you can go wrong with one of these. The only thing that's missing imo is an order system like in the Musket and Pike series (from the same designer as Fields of Fire incidentally) where it feels like you are commanding a freight train with no brakes. Your troops are hard to set in motion but when they do get going and march toward the enemy, it is equally hard to stop them. It is full of impetus that feels real and is tactically very challenging. This combined with the terrain that disorganizes your formations really sets it apart.
But even without it, Great Battles of History is definitely a classic yeah. It is a bit of a time travel machine, I love it.

Also it's not tactical level but Unity of Command is an outstanding virtual board game too. 
Other cool thing about DVG is that many of their games are available for virtual purchase for use in Vassal Engine, and they're much cheaper than the physical editions! I might grab Warfighter that way soon. Lock n Load Tactical is also starting to show up on Steam and it's way cheaper than the $80 modules for the regular edition.