Ultradave

Born in '56, commissioned an FA 2LT in 1979. THIS is exactly what I trained for. Field Artillery primary specialty, Nuclear Weapons secondary specialty (designated very early since my degree was Nuclear Engineering).

Oh the other hand, having US units WITH thermal sights when the bad guys don't in heavy mist/fog..... satisfying payback from some of the other waxings

It had the advantage back in the day that 1) It could pull an M102 and a jeep couldn't and 2) it was air droppable and a deuce and half was not. You could heavy drop rig a M102 and it's Game Goat in one C130. And HMMVs were just a glimmer in someone's eye then. Dave

Don't think so, but all my play so far as been as US so I can't say for sure. [edit - this was an answer to wood1, in case there is confusion - snuck in there between us.] Dave

Better than a LAW. But seriously, a helpful hint. When your mech infantry dismounts to take up a position, they DON'T automatically take the dragon that may be in the M113 with them. First order of business is each scenario is to "Acquire" the dragon launcher, its missiles and then as many LAWs as each squad/team can carry from the M113s that have them loaded. Then when/if you dismount the infantry, they at least have some punch with them. And since the M113s are nothing like M2 Bradleys, if you want your infantry to fight tanks, you'll be dismounting and setting up AT firing positions, remounting your M113s that you left in nice protected positions, and moving to a new location. Dave

Ah. Ok. Carry on. It's a nice map.

I will be interested to see how you both approach this after play testing the 79 version.

I am partial to Goats. I was also field artillery, and in the 82d. We had M102 howitzers towed by Goats and my FDC was a Goat and trailer we used to lay a tarp across to cover the gap. Gave us some good "interior" room to work. Fun vehicles. Hard (but not impossible - don't ask how I know) to get stuck. And they swim. 6x6 Low-Low could conquer most terrain.

I'll tell you what is fun though, is watching that Redeye plume streak off and then get the message of "Aircraft Destroyed" Dave

Oh, my, is this on the money. My comment in one playtest was how people (including myself) are used to pretty much cruising around with almost impunity in M1's. Well, not here. M60s, M48s.... it's a WHOLE 'nuther ball game. And let's not even get into the cracker box M113s The mantra from when I was a young Army officer during this exact time (commissioned in '79) was "If you can be seen, you can be hit. If you are hit, you are dead" This has been driven home to me any number of times very lately. Dave

Team Yankee for something on this level.

I think the answer to that was something like that's the way it is - there's not a mechanism to have the weapon unextended and then extended. I may be paraphrasing but this topic did come up and that's the gist of it. Dave

Also a good game. Different scale of course.

Top picture. We were on an ARTEP at Ft. Campbell, KY. Had to go into MOPP4 for the whole night. It was about 10F with howling wind and snow flurries. Never been so happy to don the "sauna suit and fly face" They gave the all clear and no one wanted to get out of MOPP. The sad sacks who were selected for the shower decor, though - we felt for them, just not enough to volunteer to take their place. Dave

"Follow" command that works in terrain or on roads, and duplicates the waypoints for each following unit so adjustments can be made.

I'm pretty sure that's not the case, otherwise you'd get all kinds of equipment for quick battles and use in the scenario editor for free. Should be the way it works is that purchasing FnR unlocks all of that.

Also infantry does not bug out toward the enemy, which was happening in all titles, but really most noticeable in BN. It did show up in FnR in early play testing too, and is much better now so that lack of suicide charges will come with FnR.

It's 20 standalone scenarios, not campaigns, and 2 big campaigns, and then the "mini" campaigns are in between size.

Geez, the poor guy who asked the question is probably sorry he did about now. He's buying an iMac because of [reasons]. He wants to know if it will run CM titles well. It will. If our several years old 8GB RAM integrated graphics MacBook Pros will, without issues, then that iMac will be just fine. In fact, more than fine. Everything else here is just Mac/PC/GraphicsCard noise, which everyone has an opinion about. Dave

8GB is plenty for CM on a Mac, but I'd get 16 anyway if I was replacing mine, just to have the extra memory when needed, and not just for CM. In fact, I can run Black Sea in Parallels Desktop Windows 10 on my 8GB MacBook Pro. The iMac he's looking at is much higher spec than my MacBook Pro and I have no problems running CM games. He'll be fine. Dave

In my post I mistakenly said Catalina when the graphics issue is actually in Big Sur. Two things - the blue progress bars don't show so when they are supposed to be there at scenario load and turn processing, it looks like the game locked up (especially on scenario load because the screen is black). It didn't. It's working just fine and will come back. It's just a graphics thing. The activation screen (that square screen you get the first time to put in your serial number) is all funky. You can use it, but it blinks and the buttons move back and forth. I've put bug reports in for both of these issues. It affects all titles so it's some graphics weirdness specific to Big Sur. I'm sure it will get cleaned up. I volunteered among the beta testers to be the guinea pig to see how Big Sur works with CM. Other than that, no issues at all. The game runs just fine and there are no in game graphics issues at all, just those odd ones. Dave

I've been running all the CM games on a MacBook Pro with Intel integrated graphics for many years. I have never had a problem with running anything, except it bogs down a bit panning around Ben's master map of Berlin. They do suck the battery dry pretty quickly, but I just make sure I'm plugged in. There is one Mac Big Sur issue right now, and that's that the activation screen and the progress bars are messed up. They were ok with all OS X 10, but 11 somehow broke them. There's a ticket in on it. Performance wise, that iMac should blow away my MacBook Pro. Dave [edited - I said Catalina issue. Catatina is just fine. I meant Big Sur, OS X 11 Sorry for any confusion]

My recommendation would be to pick the one that is the theater that most interests you. Guaranteed that's where you'll have the most fun. BN has the most content of the 3 (BN, FI, FB), if you include the expansions all at once. FI is second with the expansions. FB last (no expansions yet but coming eventually). ALL titles when you are in the main menu and select "Battle" (an individual scenario), you can order them by ascending size, which is really nice, if you are just looking for a quick getting started scenario or two. Also, Quick Battles can be selected anywhere from Tiny to Huge both for map size and force size. You can either select the type of map (open, village, town, forest, etc) or pick the map manually from a list. The automatic force picker for the AI can proved some "interesting" results. It's much, much better than it was but you still may be better off picking both sides manually and then using it more as a study than a battle into the unknown. For your purposes though, that may be exactly what you'd like to start and experiment. Hope this helps. Dave

Figured out how it works. Buy ARMA3, and you get complimentary Mac and Linux ports. So I just downloaded the Mac version and never downloaded the Windows version. So far it's working well. And Arma3 whether Windows or Mac, is on sale.

Don't know. I opened up steam on my Mac and was browsing through the sale items and lo and behold. Just going through basic training. Looks nice and runs nice. Granted I'm pretty much in one small spot doing target practice. There are a LOT of settings for graphics to trade off performance. Always sounded like fun but I had figured it wouldn't run well on Parallels. I tried Call of Duty Black ops on it way back (the original black ops ) and it was unplayable - too choppy and laggy. Mac native Arma I think is going to be lots of fun. People seem to like it. Dave