Ultradave

Need more info to answer properly. What version are you currently on?  There are all in one downloads for the current version and your license key will still work. Or there are updates up to the current version. However, to do those, you need to be on version 4 of the game engine. How old is "this old game?" and then we could point you in the right direction.
And no, there is no automatic update download unless you are on Steam, and I'm guessing you don't have it installed there due to your "old game" title.

Dave

Absolutely!
Tentative contacts should both be clickable and "engage-able". Preferably there should be varying degrees of uncertainty about what side a tentative contact belongs to, so that your units might end up firing on friendlies thinking them to be enemies, and holding fire against enemies who they think may be friendlies.
Another feature which would be very fun and challengning (thought came to me when you mentioned that British airborne "linking up" mission") would be units or reinforcements which the player doesn't control or even knows about until his starting/"main" unit has spotted them. E.g. you start the mission commanding some paratroopers stumbling around Normandy during the night of June 5/6 and you know that there are other units out there, but you can neither control nor see them until your unit has found them, just as how you can't see or engage enemy units until they've been found.
I've seen people make missions where paratroopers are spread out and spawn as reinforcements all over the map (CMFI years ago I think), but there the player still has the God's eye view, knows where all different units are and can control them all from the start.
I don't suppose there's a reinforcement trigger in the mission editor, i.e. that all reinforcements are just triggered by the clock? Otherwise something akin to that could be achieved with hidden objectives which spawn reinforcements when found.

I've been in a M60 tank buttoned up and I can say spotting anything is hard. It helps when the other guy fires 🙂  Muzzle blasts and smoke puffs make things easier. But just seeing things tucked in a treeline? That's really difficult. Sights improve, for sure, with the development of thermals, but thinking more of the TC or driver being able to see and ID things out the ports? That was hard.
Never been in a WW2 era tank, even in a museum, but I can't believe it was better. It's probably STILL just as hard today. Just a lot easier to hit and kill something once you do locate it.
Dave

Along with this I'd like to be able to click a sound/tentative contact and have it highlight which of my units has that contact, just like it works for a solid contact. That would tell me who I need to maneuver to get a better contact on it. I think this is realistic. For example, a squad gets a tentative contact. Squad leader splits off a scout team "See if you see what that is."  As long as they still remain in C2, that would then tell me what I'd need to do to fire on it. Sometimes it's only a small change in position or cover, but right now we don't know WHO needs to do that. We just have lots of tentative conctacts and have to guess who MIGHT have a LOS to one.
Dave

Mystery solved.  Thank you...

No. A 155mm howitzer shell has approximately 2 - 3x the warhead charge of a 120mm mortar.  (comparing a US 4.2" mortar HE shell to a US 155mm HE shell). I'm sure other country's ammunition would be in the same ballpark.
Battalion mortars are more versatile, are under the infantry battalion's direct control, so therefore can be more responsive to the infantry. They are also less susceptible to counter - battery fire as they can pick up and move and then re-emplace faster than a howitzer battery. This becomes more important the more modern the era. It is also more of a difference with towed howitzers than with SP howitzers. Even so a 155 battery is a lot of stuff to move and it's all heavy. In the Cold War period to the present, there is usually a 155 (or 105) battery dedicated to each maneuver battalion, and that association is permanent, so that units train together. Obviously that can be modified depending on circumstances, so there is usually a dedicated direct support artillery battery as well as battalion mortars, so response is fast. In WW2 this wasn't the default organization, so call times to the artillery would be a little longer, not even counting the advances in comms since then.
A 155mm howitzer has significantly longer range. While that may be important for targets of opportunity in the rear areas of the enemy, for CM game purposes it doesn't matter much. The normal real life doctrine would be to select firing positions for both mortars and howitzers so that the expected ranges to targets fall at around 2/3 of the max range of the weapon. Mortars then, would be placed closer to the front lines.  In game purposes, if you have off map assets, then they are already placed appropriately and can reach the whole map. If you were playing a game a scale level higher, where you control the batter position, it matters more. 
One last pretty important thing. A mortar section can put A LOT of rounds on the target in a short time. The sustained rate of fire is faster than a 155mm howitzer and they can keep it up longer before having to slow down. A 155 can fire at a high sustained rate but not for very long, if you want to use it again. It just takes longer to load and fire as well.
Dave

Thanks guys...  What I conclude is that it probably isn't that useful to provide the player with one offmap 120mm mortar unit when the scenario is built-up/urban.  2+ 81mm would be better for KOing ATGM's on roofs and generally keeping heads down.

I have never been inside an actual tank. So all of this is based on watching episodes of The Chieftain's Hatch, and playing Steel Beasts, Enlisted, and another game that I can't quite remember (games which restrict/can restrict the player's view to the internal optics of the tank). But, based on that admittedly limited and entirely virtual experience I believe the quality of the internal optics of most WW2 tanks was probably about on par with the M60A1. That requires some qualification. WW2 tank optics come in two flavors. There are the interwar designs that mostly relied on vision slits (mostly forward-facing, but sometimes there's a side or rear-facing vision slit). And there are the designs which came out either during the war or shortly before the war which used periscopes (often rotatable) and which gave the TC a cupola with full 360 degree periscopes/vision ports.
The prewar designs with mostly forward-facing vision slits have atrociously worse visibility than the M60A1. It is impossible to see anything that isn't inside a very narrow arc to your direct front without sticking your head out of the tank. These feel practically impossible to operate without being turned out most of the time. The designs with periscopes and a 360 degree cupola have pretty much identical visibility to the M60A1. My impression is that WW2 seems to have more or less perfected the periscope and cupola, and there really wasn't much more to be done to improve visibility until passive night sights and thermal optics came along in the 70s and 80s (and now apparently external cameras and large CCTV screens).
Visibility with periscopes and a cupola is still objectively bad, but it feels like amazing visibility compared to vision slits (visibility is much better if you turn out, but it's possible to operate while buttoned up). Unlocking the Panzer 3, after spending a while playing with the Panzer 2, in Enlisted was a huge eye opener. It felt like a massive upgrade, and not because the armor and gun were better. The armor and gun were better, but those felt like very minor improvements compared to the huge leap in situational awareness. The jump from vision slits to periscopes and cupolas felt almost as big as the jump from periscopes and cupolas to thermals and CCTV.

Easy answer. It doesn't have more HE.  🙂  Scroll back a bit. A 155mm howitzer shell has over twice the explosive weight as a 120mm mortar round.
In general terms a mortar is going to be less accurate than a howitzer. The velocity of the shell is lower, the trajectory much higher, making it susceptible to winds aloft more so than an artillery shell. That's something that can be calculated for and input corrections, IF you have time for it. The artillery battalion Target Acquisition Battery will fly a weather balloon a couple times a day and report direction and speed at various altitudes. You (the various fire direction centers) use those to look up deflection and elevation corrections to add/subract to the firing data, based on your expected direction of fire. Now obviously 2x/day still only gives a rough idea and weather and wind can change, so even those corrections are ballpark. 
In the game, I use mortars for a few things. 1) Against unprotected infantry they are good, or in trenches you'll get the odd direct trench hit which is great, and even if you don't it usually keeps their heads down. 2) Short harassing mission against armor to make them button up. 3) Smaller mortars especially are great for suppressing MG or AT gun positions and are usually quick response.  Against buildings or anything substantial, I leave that for the field artillery, unless mortars is all I've got.  Mortars can do pretty well against pillbox positions too. They probably won't knock them out, but they can suppress them. Nothing like a couple dozen mortar rounds landing on the roof and all around to disorient them and give them a headache. It helps anyway.
Dave

Ammo expenditure got so bad with the introduction of the assault rife that the Pentagon tried to limit the M4 carbine to either single shot or 3 round bursts. No full auto feature (M4 in CMSF2). They later backtracked and put full auto back (M4A1 in CMBS) more as a morale booster to the infantry than for any real utility.
Some years ago I tried a gameplay experiment. I played a scenario without 'eye of God' elevated view, no rewind, no flying over the map, no moving beyond my own forward line of contact, no floating icons, the camera only looking over the shoulder of one of the grunts on the ground. The game suddenly became very much more challenging. You find yourself cowering behind a wall as the earth shakes around you from incoming artillery. You hear tanks but see nothing unless you dare to look up and expose yourself. The enemy is seen in fleeting glimpses. Played as a FPS game instead of a tabletop game CM becomes brutal. I don't have the self restraint to play the game like that exclusively but I do try to avoid overlooking the map like an omniscient being as much as possible.

I've been in a M60 tank buttoned up and I can say spotting anything is hard. It helps when the other guy fires 🙂  Muzzle blasts and smoke puffs make things easier. But just seeing things tucked in a treeline? That's really difficult. Sights improve, for sure, with the development of thermals, but thinking more of the TC or driver being able to see and ID things out the ports? That was hard.
Never been in a WW2 era tank, even in a museum, but I can't believe it was better. It's probably STILL just as hard today. Just a lot easier to hit and kill something once you do locate it.
Dave

From personal experience, 120mm (rifled) at 6km is a lot more accurate when compared to 155mm L52 at 12km, which is apparently not how it is in the games.

No. A 155mm howitzer shell has approximately 2 - 3x the warhead charge of a 120mm mortar.  (comparing a US 4.2" mortar HE shell to a US 155mm HE shell). I'm sure other country's ammunition would be in the same ballpark.
Battalion mortars are more versatile, are under the infantry battalion's direct control, so therefore can be more responsive to the infantry. They are also less susceptible to counter - battery fire as they can pick up and move and then re-emplace faster than a howitzer battery. This becomes more important the more modern the era. It is also more of a difference with towed howitzers than with SP howitzers. Even so a 155 battery is a lot of stuff to move and it's all heavy. In the Cold War period to the present, there is usually a 155 (or 105) battery dedicated to each maneuver battalion, and that association is permanent, so that units train together. Obviously that can be modified depending on circumstances, so there is usually a dedicated direct support artillery battery as well as battalion mortars, so response is fast. In WW2 this wasn't the default organization, so call times to the artillery would be a little longer, not even counting the advances in comms since then.
A 155mm howitzer has significantly longer range. While that may be important for targets of opportunity in the rear areas of the enemy, for CM game purposes it doesn't matter much. The normal real life doctrine would be to select firing positions for both mortars and howitzers so that the expected ranges to targets fall at around 2/3 of the max range of the weapon. Mortars then, would be placed closer to the front lines.  In game purposes, if you have off map assets, then they are already placed appropriately and can reach the whole map. If you were playing a game a scale level higher, where you control the batter position, it matters more. 
One last pretty important thing. A mortar section can put A LOT of rounds on the target in a short time. The sustained rate of fire is faster than a 155mm howitzer and they can keep it up longer before having to slow down. A 155 can fire at a high sustained rate but not for very long, if you want to use it again. It just takes longer to load and fire as well.
Dave

All I can say is that George's scenarios will challenge you at every turn with surprises. It's not unreasonable behavior. A unit on the attack is going to plaster any suspected enemy locations either by direct or indirect fire, whether or not they spot anything. If nothing else you keep their heads down. Treelines are obvious targets where enemy might be expected.
Dave

All I can say is that George's scenarios will challenge you at every turn with surprises. It's not unreasonable behavior. A unit on the attack is going to plaster any suspected enemy locations either by direct or indirect fire, whether or not they spot anything. If nothing else you keep their heads down. Treelines are obvious targets where enemy might be expected.
Dave

As posted by someone else the other day, here's another one with John Cleese and company:
And with that I shall stop, it's silly and a bit suspect I think...

My wife and I lived in England for several years. We watched ALL the episodes. 
Dave

My wife and I lived in England for several years. We watched ALL the episodes. 
Dave

My wife and I lived in England for several years. We watched ALL the episodes. 
Dave

The AI force picking was greatly improved back a while ago, HOWEVER, it still does bizarre things, and it gets weirder as the battle size gets smaller, like small and tiny. Still needs work. 
One thing they are good for though, is to practice tactics. Set up the AI played side as defense and pick their forces, pick your own offensive force, and practice a company assault with a few supporting tanks against a village defended by a platoon with 2 AT guns, for example. You'll know what they have, but not where they are, although you can guess likely locations, which in a lot of real life cases might not be that far off.  If you pick reasonable forces for the AI, it will usually do a halfway decent job of setting up, I've found. Or even if it doesn't, you won't know where they are until you find them.

Sure, and like I mentioned, he could be impeached - even a Republican House would, I imagine, if they did in fact declare war. Would he be convicted and removed from office? I don't think there's any guarantee of that, even in that situation. But assuming the Senate convicts him and he's out, then what? His hand-picked VP, whichever MAGA sycophant that is, takes over. Does anything change? Or does everyone suddenly throw off the yoke and act "normal" because he has no power anymore?  50/50 - there's still the 8-10-12 however many die-hards in the Republican Party who want to stop everything. On the other hand, if Democrats take over the House, then that crew loses ALL power they have. 
Sorry for being pessimistic, but if Trump gets elected, it will be messier than last time. He (or more really his closest advisors) won't make the mistake of putting anyone with any integrity in any position of power. 
I'm also pessimistic about the election in general. If Trump wins, well, we've covered that. If Biden wins, does anyone think that Trump will just say "Congrats" and go home? Nope. We could easily see worse than Jan 6. 
I'll stop now and get back to play testing and reading everyone elses' commentary, which is always interesting, no matter the viewpoints.
Dave

Having seen the changes in security here, I'm not worried about a coup. The way Trump could have prevailed was in his control of the security services. He has none of that now.

Changes? Well, Democrats used to have a majority in the House, and Nancy Pelosi, whatever you may think of her politically, was a masterful Speaker of the House. So things like aide for Ukraine could make it through the House. The Senate, being (supposedly and usually) the more rational of the two houses, had broad support for Ukraine.
Now, Republicans control the House, with a weak and vulnerable Speaker, who has to do a lot of the bidding of the 8 or 12 or whatever the number is based on subject, rebellious Republicans - rebellious to their own party - or lose his job just like the last one did. The Senate remains more or less the same, at least on issues like Ukraine and NATO. Still supportive, but as we've seen just recently with the border security bill, scared witless of Trump, and ready to drop support at his bidding. Maybe that would change after election, should he win. Maybe not.
And the biggest danger that I see is that because of legislation Congress passed, a president cannot remove the US from NATO without the 2/3 consent of the Senate (an impossible hurdle to overcome, IMO), he could effectively render US participation in NATO non-existent. He could, by himself, remove all troops from Europe, or anywhere else. He could refuse to support with arms or troops a NATO ally under attack. He could, as he signaled just recently, invite Russia to do "whatever they Hell they want". He could send home our representatives to NATO's organizational structure and not replace them. He could gut the State Department. ALL of these things are functions of the Executive Branch, under the President's control. All he has to do is give orders for any of that, without Congress being involved.
So while I'm pretty sure their is very broad support for NATO in the Senate, and probably in the House, even with the Republican fringe trying to throw wrenches in the works, they themselves can't order troop movements, or provide aid even if it was voted for successfully and a president signed it. Again, the implementation of any of that falls under the Executive Branch.
Congress only other recourse should a president not honor NATO obligations would be a formal declaration of war against the aggressor. That is in Congress's control. But then, what would a president do, if he didn't agree with the declaration? I think, theoretically, he could just ignore it. If Congress passed bills and a president ignored them, the president could be impeached. But we see how that went, with a closely divided Congress.
This is how I currently see it, anyway. 
Dave

Sure, and like I mentioned, he could be impeached - even a Republican House would, I imagine, if they did in fact declare war. Would he be convicted and removed from office? I don't think there's any guarantee of that, even in that situation. But assuming the Senate convicts him and he's out, then what? His hand-picked VP, whichever MAGA sycophant that is, takes over. Does anything change? Or does everyone suddenly throw off the yoke and act "normal" because he has no power anymore?  50/50 - there's still the 8-10-12 however many die-hards in the Republican Party who want to stop everything. On the other hand, if Democrats take over the House, then that crew loses ALL power they have. 
Sorry for being pessimistic, but if Trump gets elected, it will be messier than last time. He (or more really his closest advisors) won't make the mistake of putting anyone with any integrity in any position of power. 
I'm also pessimistic about the election in general. If Trump wins, well, we've covered that. If Biden wins, does anyone think that Trump will just say "Congrats" and go home? Nope. We could easily see worse than Jan 6. 
I'll stop now and get back to play testing and reading everyone elses' commentary, which is always interesting, no matter the viewpoints.
Dave

Sure, and like I mentioned, he could be impeached - even a Republican House would, I imagine, if they did in fact declare war. Would he be convicted and removed from office? I don't think there's any guarantee of that, even in that situation. But assuming the Senate convicts him and he's out, then what? His hand-picked VP, whichever MAGA sycophant that is, takes over. Does anything change? Or does everyone suddenly throw off the yoke and act "normal" because he has no power anymore?  50/50 - there's still the 8-10-12 however many die-hards in the Republican Party who want to stop everything. On the other hand, if Democrats take over the House, then that crew loses ALL power they have. 
Sorry for being pessimistic, but if Trump gets elected, it will be messier than last time. He (or more really his closest advisors) won't make the mistake of putting anyone with any integrity in any position of power. 
I'm also pessimistic about the election in general. If Trump wins, well, we've covered that. If Biden wins, does anyone think that Trump will just say "Congrats" and go home? Nope. We could easily see worse than Jan 6. 
I'll stop now and get back to play testing and reading everyone elses' commentary, which is always interesting, no matter the viewpoints.
Dave