WynnterGreen

A different ( ? ) contact for vehicles as opposed to infantry. Quite often you can tell by distance of the contact and the way it moves, but not always. It's information clearly different in the field, so should be passed up the chain as such? Another thing I'd like to see implemented at higher difficulty levels, Elite, Iron, is that you don't immediately get complete enemy unit information. So that as soon as you make contact you don't know that it's a (Forward Observer), (Breach) or (HQ) unit opposite. Information could be drip fed according to the experience of the unit in contact. Initially an (Infantry Generic) symbol of some sort, then after a certain amount of time in contact (relative to how exposed the enemy is), or taking fire, observing it, some extra intel about the unit composition is revealed. Same could be done for vehicles, (Halftrack Generic) > Further Observation > Stummel. Of course, player experience can still feed into the mix, discerning the type of incoming fire from certain weapons etc.

As above, in the QB PBEM I'm playing at the moment none of the 60mm mortars, or a 57mm ammo bearer, show any of their ammo load-outs without a shot having been fired.

Jones seems to be awol. Hijack. I'm keen for a PBEM though: Quick Battles Small to Large scale Meeting Engagements & Attacks. Elite difficulty Mixed forces, nothing unrealistic and I have a personal rule of 'veteran' units maximum experience. No arty on set-up zones Retreat AFV crews (Can be used 'out of contact' as buddy aid aficionados) Map preview allowed I prefer to play longer time frame games and call ceasefires, or surrender, when things look futile. I can and will surrender games, preserving little pixel lives to fight another theoretical day, rather than just default to fighting to the bitter end. A good games a close game and I consider myself 'Mister-Average'™ player. I think the best way to go is play a couple and see if the games are reasonably competitive, then take it from there. I use Dropbox and H2HH. Am a non-smoker, social drinker and enjoy long romantic walks on the beach. Anyone interested can send a game to wynnter.green@gmail.com or share a Dropbox to that address. Happy to bat for either team....... ahem'.

Was this against a human? I can't imagine using ATGs this way .v. a human opponent coming off well very often. ATGs seem to work best in ambush situations and defensively, even then expect artillery splashing down all over it as soon as it gives away its position. They're probably also best positioned in places that have narrow angles of opportunity for enemy observers to get sight of the guns location and drop stuff on it. Like, down a bocage lined road or artery that's key for moving enemy armour. Narrow angles of attack for the enemy often means narrow fields of fire for the ATG of course, and if the position really is key, then it's going to attract a lot of attention from they enemy, which is bad luck for the gunners. ATGs probably stand the best possibility of improvement in terms of relative usefulness with the introduction of a -cover armour- arc. Meaning they can be set up to lay concealed in wait for armour assets to appear, rather than open up on the first enemy infantry unit they see, quickly attracting the attention of the arty boys. Short -cover- arc in order to avoid shooting up the enemy scouting units is a poor substitute for a -cover armour- arc for wego players, as a minute is a long window for enemy armour to move into and out of sight of the gun in a single turn.

I made a thread about it a while ago..... http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=101886 There's a few replies that suggest the 'Gridded Terrain' Mod, which I've tried and is very useful. I like the 'idea' of contour mapping more, and being able to toggle on and off, but the gridding functions pretty well. .

Replay Compiler: For a game so steeped in strategy and tactics I'm amazed there isn't a mechanism for compiling a finished games wego turns into a single watchable, pause-able, rewindable, share-able replay of the entire mission. I first encountered game 'replays' with the replay feature built into the 'Red Baron' flight sim more than twenty years ago and have probably spent thousands of hours since then watching, scrutinising, evaluating and consuming as pure entertainment the replays of various games from other franchises that I, and others, have played. Not the least of the reasons why I think this is a must add feature is that CM is a very technical game to play. Watching how others play games has taught me countless tricks and tactics for better play in other games and the same would surely be true for CM. Expanded Multiplayer: H-H-2-H-H. Being able to play 2 humans vs 2 humans, or 3vs3. Awesome, 'nuff said. Objectives: The one man spoiler. Objectives that get halved or failed because you're opponent is able to hide a tiny unit, bailed tank crew, whatever, in an objective to spoil the victory condition. An example is a game I played where I controlled 95% of the objective, which was a town, with approximately 1800 points worth of units in the area and the objective failed because there was a disabled P.IV on the extreme edge of the objective in a lightly wooded area. My opponent wasn't purposely flaunting the mechanic and I'm sure would have conceded that the objective was clearly held by me, but the inflexible rule says otherwise. The answer could be as simple as a points value comparison between forces holding the objective at the end of the game. If force B has <15% (for argument sake) of the points value that force A has on the objective, then A is considered to be in control. Spotting WYSIWYG. Something here is broken, badly. It might be the visual representation of forest or the way spotting is handled, or the abstraction, whichever way, it's broke. This panther, is on a hunt move, the Sherman in front of it is never spotted by the Panther, which only stopped because it spotted another target. There's a unit in the forest just to the right of the Panther, that can see the the Sherman and has been able to for a couple of turns. The Sherman was firing in the previous turn and Panther was only 20m further back, stationary, with a view of the Sherman just as clear as in this image. This unfortunately seems not to be a particularly uncommon occurrence. This needs fixing, seriously.

Thanks for all the positive feedback and responses. @sluggo337: That tank, would not die. I like to think that US ground forces were pulled back and the carpet bombers went to work on the square mile it was stranded in. Near the end of the film, when my veteran AT team gently sails his second missed shot from within about 40m over the rear of the P.IV, then takes a main gun round to the face for his trouble, sums up the entire end game for me. @ sgt shultz: I've only had the game for a couple of weeks and have started checking out a few Mods, as is evidenced in the film, and had been swapping a few in and out. I'd already downloaded the Aris Textures, but hadn't installed them yet, and had read about the great quality of the Aris vehicles. Living in a remote Internet access part of Australia means I necessarily have very small monthly data caps, so it'll take some time to acquire everything I'd like. I'd been wondering if there was an easy way to switch off all the unit icons, friendly and enemy, and also the vehicle 'hit' notifications but hadn't found anything in my quick looks through the manual. The 'camera work' was more 'fiddly' to achieve good results with than it could have been because I was actively trying to avoid having a sea of icons constantly 'in frame'. Although I came to the conclusion that other than just in 'overlay' scenes, it was probably quite important to have the icons visible at certain times to give the observer a chance to 'connect the dots' and get a feel for what was happening tactically and where. Editing out the GUI is easily done, but it would then significantly affect aspect ratio, meaning you'd have to crop edges too, to get it back to the 16:9 most people will watch it at. Doable, but it would mean constantly re-visioning when framing the 'original shot', knowing that you're going to trim the edges, kid of beyond the scope of simple 'hobby film' making. Though I might give it a quick try, just out of interest. Unless, of course, you're saying there's a setting within CM that can remove the GUI pane from view in game, if so, please let me know how. @ boche: "for the Germans did you use some CoD 2 sound files?" No, although that would probably be a good source. I unpacked the Company of Heroes sound files and found a couple of folders of 'demo' audio files in German, that maybe never made it into the full game but were still bundled with the Audio Package.

Odin: The overlay images, arrows, mortar target areas etc..... were created in Photoshop, by drawing with brush tools. But there's a very good free image authoring program called Gimp, that's more than capable of doing the same stuff on display in this AAR. PowerDirector10 has all the tools to do things such as set transparency, re-size, fade in, fade outs for 'overlay' images you create elsewhere and import. All the subtitles, text, audio addition and re-authoring was done in PD.

Don't think so, that whistling is part of someones CM:N Mod I had installed at the time...... not something I added.

Edited into the AAR, for dramatic effect and humourous purposes only.

A bold and 'failed' move...... I caught sight of the P-IV just too late to save the M5. The WEGO timing wasn't good for the light tank. I was hoping the Panzer wouldn't get in position to 'take a shot' by the finish of the turn. I had visions of the M5 careening straight through the German infantry lines headed at breakneck speed for the relative safety of the US positions. Wasn't to be though. Captured with: Fraps Editing software was: Cybelink PowerDirector10. I only used my own turns for the AAR. I think you could do something really interesting, retrospective analysis, with access to both sides maneuvers.

I just discovered the same thing with objectives, after playing my first PBEM, a meeting engagement with a town as the objective. The ONLY German unit still on the field at the end was a immobilised P-IV. It happened to be in the very last corner 'action spot' of the objective area and not actually 'in' the town at all. I had 60+ infantry holding 95+% of the objective. The trackless and isolated P-IV ended up denying me the 'ground victory'. I think the current mechanism for deciding objectives is left open to incredibly gamey mechanics where an opponent could sneak in a single man from a depleted unit to hide on objectives in order to deny ground victories? Surely some other method of calculating 'control' of the objective is warranted? When thinking about it later I came to the conclusion that the small town could (should) have been split into four or five terrain objectives, each one with a smaller victory points value. That way, in the instance I mentioned, I could have received four small objective 'check marks' and been denied the one with the P-IV on it.

Here's a link to a video AAR I made of my first PBEM game. Having only played a handful of solo games before diving into PBEM, there's a degree of 'learning on the job' going on. But the pace is good and I think it's entertaining enough to warrant a look. Game was as follows: Meeting Engagement Battle Size Tiny Map Small Village QB-085 Difficulty Warrior Rarity Strict As you can see, I kept the scope small and everything simple. I didn't want to feel overwhelmed by the scale or difficulty on my first outing. I'm interested in a couple more opponents to play QB's, Small Battle Sizes on Elite. Big thanks to sluggo337 for popping my PBEM cherry, and also for ok'ing my post of the game here on the forum.

I've just started playing Normandy and have quickly come to the conclusion that the only real way I'm going to be interested in playing this game is with a human opponent. In my mind the nuances and nature of a human player are infinitely more interesting than any AI routine could possibly be. That said, I'm very much a learner, having only played a dozen or so quick matches v. AI. So in reality I'm still learning how not to make terrible game mechanic and pathing blunders, let alone tactical mistakes. I actually bought a couple of copies of the game as gifts for friends, hoping they'll be able to find the time for some PBEM with me. However,in the meantime, I'd be interested in a PBEM game with someone similarly situated in terms of skill level and learning curve. Game to be structured something like this: Battle size: Tiny (The intention being to keep the scale this small to engender less maddening confusion while getting to grips with the game) Small map: From those on offer with the base game. Time: 45 or 60 Force Composition: Mixed or whatever we agree on. Unit Purchase: Player - Strict Rarity. Difficulty: Warrior CM:BN Version 1.01 I'm just looking for one or maybe two opponents, anyone interested??? Hilarious as it might be, it wouldn't actually be 'fun' to be blitzed by some 'Uber Combat Mission Player' unceremoniously defiling of my 'CM-Virginity'. I've noticed that some others on the forum use Dropbox and H2HH for sharing game files. I have Dropbox and have installed H2HH (though I've never used it). Wynn

IMO adding a whole new layer of waypoints is going to be seen as a massive over complication from the designers point of view. I think, of course, a unit being hit by indirect fire should initially all take cover, cower, stop spotting etc, where they are. If, or when, they hit a casualty or barrage intensity threshold (without actually being 'broken') in their current location, they should retreat along the direction of their previous waypoints path. Bounding in much the same way an assault works. Half the unit breaking and running for cover and hitting the dirt in the direction from which they came. The other half cowering/hiding where they were, too frightened to risk it or hesitating, then making the dash to follow the rest of the unit. This bounding retreat should continue until the unit stops taking casualties, or clears the barrage area, at which point they regroup. Heading back along their previous waypoint path should go some way to mitigate the 'running for cover into some yet to be contacted direct fire'. If it takes them 'back' into direct fire, it simulates a preference for that over the artillery. Having them not retreat out of the 'zone' until they take casualties, or an intensity threshold is reached, means that the AI is 'considering' the potential that 'staying put' is safer. The same bounding away reaction could be used for units being strafed.

Ahhh, here's a noob question then. Will tracer fire potentially give away a snipers position in WEGO? In the OP's instance, where there's not even a sound contact, could repeated turn playback reviews 'give the otherwise invisible sniper away due to trace?' 'Gamey', I know, which is why I'm interested. I'm extremely new to the game and still getting to grips with fundamental mechanics, let alone possibly important details like this.

And, in your mind, it's effective in the same way contouring would be? Can it be toggled on/off? I should just look it up and try it I suppose.

That just hasn't always been my experience. There are subtleties of light and shadow, etc.... that happen in a real world environment that give a whole slew of extra clues when physically evaluating slope and elevation that aren't modeled, or aren't modeled well in game. As I said, and maybe it's just me, I've already thought several times that it would be useful. And, not only do 3 dimensional contour graphs exist, they're also extremely useful.

Hey there.... I'm quite new to this, but I've already thought several times, in game, that it would be really useful to have a toggle on, toggle off, for contour lines. Topo'map style. Then I noticed in the manual that in the map editor you create elevation by simply drawing contour lines. It doesn't, at least on the face of it, seem like it would be difficult to translate a feature that exists in the editor into something quite useful during play? Unless it's actually there and I've missed it?