agusto

The truth is that it is quite the other way round: the process of the creation of CMBS has started long before the war in Ukraine, so it is actually the Seperatists and their Russian allies who support CMBS by increasing peoples interest in the scenario. An article about CMBS on the front page of the NY Times discussing the controversial setting of the game would probably be the best advertising BFC can get for free. Within 24 hours hundereds of millions of potential customers could be informed about the existence CMBS, think of it. I bet this thread gets locked within the next 48 hours. Any takers?

IIRC the scenario designer has to designate specific areas as 'inhabited' or 'protected' (dont know what to call it). Only buildings in these areas will count as negative points if the player that has to protect them destroys them.

You never know when your recon teams encounter enemy T-Rex rider squadrons.

In war you always have to balance political goals against military needs. If the political goal is to win the hearts and minds of the local population, avoiding civillian casualties whenever possible is a political necessety, even if it sometimes contradicts the immediate military needs. For example the widespread destruction of the Iraqi civillian infrastructure (water supply, electricity, etc) during the early stages of the 2003 Iraq war and the failure to quickly rebuild these things contributed to the civillian support for the Iraqi insurgency later in the 2000s. Likewise the man who lost his family in an airstrike that hit the wrong building wont be convinced that the US forces are here to help him, even if you tell him a thousand times that collateral damage is unavoidable in armed conflict.

The problem in CMSF was that the Syrians didnt really have the military hardware or the training to match the Western armys they were up against. In CMBS, on the other hand, the Russians, with their upgraded T-90s, ERA-fitted BMP-3s and well trained personell are definately going to give the US & its allies a hard time. Man, i cant wait for this . I ve always loved wargames depicting late-Cold-War-style Russia vs. the West confrontations. CMBS is definately going to be on my harddrive as soon as its released.

Or will it be like in CMSF, were all stock campaigns are Blue vs Red AI? The Russians surely have lots nice toys worthy of beeing led into battle.

Ohhh, man. I cant wait for CMBS! The screenshots i saw in the news make me want to play the game so badly . I think i i am going to play CMSF + Euroscape until Black Sea is released, just to get myself in the right mood for large scale US-Russian conflict in Europe.

.50 cal isnt exactly the weapon of choice when engaging armored targets and 400 yards seems to be quite far away. Possibly you were just a tad too far away for a penetration or maybe you did penetrate but the projectiles had not enough energy left for causing any serious damage. Did you load up the save game as OPFOR and check weather the engine or tracks of the BMP were damaged? I know for sure that .50 cal can cause damage to armored vehicle subsystems in CMSF, but i very, very rarely (if at all, cant really remember doing so) actually scored a kill against an armored target with .50 cal. EDIT: Another possibilty would be that, because the BMP has its engine and crew in the front and the seats for the infantry in the back, your .50 calibre rounds did penetrate but just went through the empty infantry compartment without causing any damage since there are not vital subsystems located there. Anyways, without testing and reproduceable result, all we can do here is speculating.

I dont really know what to say. That' s horrible stuff. I hope the guys on the pictures survived.

I have experienced similar issues with Marders. There seems to be an issue with the LOS calculation: if you put them in a hull-down position, i.e. a position where the hull is covered behind a hull but the turret, the ATGM and oberservation equipment are still peeking over the crest in such a way that they should be able to spot and fire at the target, the Marders in CMSF simply dont see anything. The only thing that can be done about this is avoiding hull down positions.

Win 7 will automatically creates a system restore point each time an update is installed. Reset your system to that restore point and see if the problem with CMSF still persists.

Maybe you will find a more fitting background sound loop in one of these mods: http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=114725 http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=117061

Excellent article, thanks.

Which game are we talking about?

The group we today know as ISIS did not appear just out of nothing but has, in some form or another, existed ever since the fall of the Saddam regime. After the war in Iraq in 2003, several hundered thousand soldiers and members of the previous Saddam-era government suddenly were 'unemployed' and many if not most of them dissatisfied with the new leadership. This was the hour of birth of the iraqi insurgency, wich later contributed to the formation of ISIS. The religous nature of ISIS comes from the way the distribution of power changed after Saddams fall: Saddam, a sunni musilm, had formed a regime where almost all important positions were held by other sunnis (wich made up only 1/5th of the overall population), while the countries shiite majority (among other groups) was kept away from power. After the US-led invasion, the new governments mostly consisted of shiite muslims, wich further encouraged the sunni-dominated iraqi insurgency. During the american occupation of Iraq however, the insurgency was compareably effectively surpressed. The insurgents did though have years of time (almost a decade) to gain experience in guerilla warfare, and when, a year after the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq in 2011, the Syrian civil war started, they had the opportunity to bolster their already motivated fighters with captured gear from Syria and to form 'alliances' or 'unite' with other radical syrian groups, incorporating their men and weapons into their own structures. The withdrawal of US troops and the war in Syria are IMO the key reasons for why ISIS could become so strong so quickly. If neither had happened, ISIS (or a similar group) would probably still exist today, but it would not nearly be as powerful as it currently is. Another factor that certainly contributed to the way ISIS as it is today is funding by foreign countries, but according to most sources i ve seen this only makes a up a small percentage of ISIS' financial assets (like 5-10%). Economically ISIS mostly relies on voluntary support from the local population, looting, ransom money and oil sales. Interestingly there are many similarities between the rise of ISIS in Iraq and the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany. In both cases the countries were destroyed by a devastating war, followed by a peroid of occupation and a weak democratic government. In both cases there were hundereds of thousands of unemployed veterans, many of them still loyal to the old regime. In both cases the weak democtratic government failed to fill in the gap the old autocratic regime left and in both cases extremists quickly started to gain ground, filling that power vacuum. I tend to disagree. The best thing to happen to the ME would certainly be half a century of democracy, political and economical stability, just as we in Europa had it after the last great war. Those are the only things that effectively prevent extremism. Continous fighting in the ME will only destabilize the region further and make it an even better breeding ground for extremists who wish to harm the West.

I dont mind biased news as long as it is marked as such. In this case, it is obvious, it is the NAFs very own media outlet translated to english. I like the combat footage, but i dont trust any of the interviews. I dont trust aynthing people like Givi say unless it is obvious or can be confirmed by other independent sources.

Private Message, isnt that the son of General Motors' cousin?

You are surely going to love this one, John:

To be honest i think no one replied because the thread was neither particularly funny nor particularly relevant. Daring? Shocking? The age of the average battlefront.com forum member is 44 according to a thread we had last year, so i guess most of us have seen their share of naked women or men or whatever. If you want to shock me, tell me you will be running as candidate for the next american presidential election - and win it . But hey, at least now you got a reply.

The T-34 should though suffer some noteable performance issues if its engine has been destroyed. Without the engine, the turrent has to be rotated manually (probably, i dont know exactely how the internals of the T-34 worked, but tanks usually require the engine to be running in order to rotate the turret, unless a small independent secondary engine is innstalled for this purpose) wich is much slower than powered rotation, the tank should not be able to move or turn its hull and each hit in the engine section should have a certain probability of igniting the fuel. If the T-34 remained completely unaffected by the first 8 hits of the 88mm in the engine section at 200m, their outrage was kinda justified.

Theoretically everything in CMSF that is of a larger calibre than and including 12,7x99mm will do damage to walls and buildings. Practically though it would be a waste of ammo to take down walls with anything smaller than direct fire 30mm HE, unless you have a a LOT of surplus ammunation. Regarding artillery, howitzers or guns in the ~150mm range on a general purpose fire mission (ground burst HE) are best in my experience. Mortars should work as well, but because you will need an almost direct hit on the wall due to their small calibre, it is going to take a lot of ammo. Air burst is the worst fire mode for destroying buildings or walls because it will do almost no damage. It is only effective against soft targets (people, unarmored vehicles and the like). EDIT: Just as Combatintman said, direct fire systems work best for taking down walls. Preferably something large, like the M1 Abrams 120mm gun. It will let you tear down a wall in less than a turn with only 1 or 2 shots, compared to artillery where you have to wait for several turns until it arrives and then have to expand 10+ rounds for spotting + the strike.

The best thing they could do to physically attack Poland is probably launch somke terrorist attacks, car bombs etc, making their already very questionable legitimacy as independent state even more questionable.

Yes, now that you say it i remeber that, but yesterday i couldnt find the image i was looking for. I was looking for this sequence of photographs in particular: http://azkojatakoja.persiangig.com/image/panzerwurfmine/7.jpg I was happy though that i found any images of the PWM at all. It was very rarely used because throwing it accurately required extensive training.

The Stielgranaten had the Stiel (litterally stick) so that they could be thrown further than regular grenades without a stick attached at the bottom. If held at the stick, the center of mass of the hand grenade was further away from the shoulder of the thrower, so it could acquire a higher velocity and thus had a higher throwing range when compared to regular grenades. The very common german Stielgranaten 39, 42 and 43 were blast grenades in standard configuration, but there was also a fragmentation 'pot' that could be attached called Splittertopf (litterally fragemntation pot): http://www.warrelics.eu/forum/attachments/ordnance-ammo/465770d1360695613-m43-stielhandgranate-detailed-pictures-img_9503.jpg http://www.fjr2.be/Wapens%20-%20Stielhandgranate%2043.jpg The fragmentation pot could explain why the narrator in the vid says that the german greandes were used more to stun than to kill: without the Splittertopf, the kill radius of Stielgranatens blast effect was probably inferior to allied fragmentation grenades like the Mk2 grenade. The reason why the germans wanted to stick with the optional Splittertopf though was that without it friendly troops were less endangered of getting killed by their own grenades when used in close combat. This was especially useful during attacks, when the germans often could not throw from a position where they would be safe from the fragments of a regular fragmentation grenade. The most produced german hand grenade of WW2 was the Eierhandgranate (litterally egg hand grenade 39); a blast grenade with a slightly smaller charge (112 grams Donarit) than the Stielgranate 39 (170 grams TNT): http://historyconect.szm.com/6ZR06_b.jpg Another interesting german grenade type was the PWM, the Panzerabwehrwurfmine (litterally Thrown-Anti-Tank-Mine): http://photos.imageevent.com/ricklarson/ammunitionphotos/large/PICT0270.JPG It was to be used in that manner; http://greyfalcon.us/picturesw/w28.jpg much like this modern toy for children: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31k%2BvsS-JkL._SX300_.jpg

Wow, the footage with the translation is truely excellent. The ukrainian seperatists seem to be bloody well equipped and organised when compared to the insurgents in syria. I wonder why the ukrainians allow them to move around with their tanks that freely. This guy wont live long. No helmet, no flak vest, standing out in the open and not caring about artillery falling so close that the fragments land next to his feet.