Heirloom_Tomato

A 10 year fan here. ^^^^ This is exactly the attitude we should have.
It's all find to look forward to something new, report issues and desires but what a waste of time all this bitching and complaining is - about a schedule for f's sake. Go play CMRT or any one of the other games instead. Heck go build a snow fort in your back yard with your kids or grand kids.
Edited to correct how long I have been here.

I get that some people, a small vocal group of people,  are disappointed. I just wish they'd have the humility not to constantly flood the forum with petty bitching

This approach doesn't seem very helpful at all. 
In terms of BF decision making, it seems to make sense. 
Fix the problem behaviour for fleeing under bombardment - affects all titles.
Releast a major module that has been promised and was near completion. 
Prioritise potential major new business opportunity that will mean more security/better long term ability to develop (Develop CM 3 - ditto) . If this means a delay to CMRT, but means more certainty that BF will be around for the foreseeable, that is something I am happy to accept - aren't you? 
 
Also, with a very small team, real life is likely to impact them hard if something goes wrong (Elvis has made a few references to various team members being impacted) . Speaking personally, without being directly affected, Covid has been an utter nightmare for me, affecting my ability to do day-to-day stuff. 
They have tried to give forecasts, but by their own admission they regret this for many reasons (R2V being much more challenging, MoD project, etc). So holding them to past forecasts seems mean to me. 
It is in their interests to get product out of the door. Decision making in BF will be with the objective of making it sustainable/profitable. We can see CMRT is making progress. 
Ultimately I think almost everyone here agrees with/understands BF decisions, and are looking forward to new product as and when it is ready. 
 

11. Use your smoke rounds
12. Maintain fire superiority 
13. Reinforce success 
14. If a vehicle is getting shot at, it is going to break.

Here is another account - wherever he is referring to shelters or bunkers he is referring the Zoo Flak Tower
 

I decided to try and dig up my first hand accounts - here is part of one
 
 

Ah, Balance. 
I agree, we need to have balance in a competitive game. And that is made all the harder because the war it is trying to simulate was never balanced. The more the game balances things the more it is removed from the realism that many die-hards would like to see.
Personally, I don’t feel I need an excuse to be able to use certain vehicles. You mentioned the Cromwell and other Commonwealth vehicles and it’s an interesting example. Are they overpriced? Do their costs not reflect their quality, as you put it? I actually don’t know. Even if their cost was adjusted, would rarity not come into play and make them still problematic to purchase compared to the ubiquitous Sherman? I don’t expect an answer, it’s more an illustration of how this isn’t actually an issue that cost adjustments will automatically correct; more a “can we all buy something other than the same 10 units” frustration. Which I can relate to. 
To turn the argument around, I am fairly certain that were units priced for balance, many would complain that Unit X is nowhere near as good as Unit Y, so how can their costs be so close? In a realism focused game balance might require some mental effort and collaboration between players, sometimes. I get it; that can be a hassle and source of argument. 
NONE of what we’ve talked about should imply that I agree with the prices of all units. I DO wonder why the StuG is so pricey. I’m less concerned with the PzIV than you but I can see a reasonable person could think they are overpriced and I’m inclined to agree. There are other examples. So I while I may take a different viewpoint on HOW to price things, I think getting the costs right is very very important. 
 
ps: I enjoyed this discussion. You brought up ideas and approaches that were outside my focus and it’s good to have that mental challenge of having one’s approach to a problem challenged in a positive way. 

This caught my eye after I wrote the above and wanted to address it because it is an important assumption. I emphasized one part because I think this is key. This is very much an assumption of the cost factor. It appears to imply that in this discussion, the Sherman is the natural match-up for the Panzer IV. I think this might be a easy conclusion to make, however, let's challenge that for a moment. It is a likely matchup? Sure. So is Sherman-Panther. Or Sherman-SdKfz 251. Or Sherman-infantry. 
I say this not be be silly but rather to draw one's attention that the kind of matchups they are likely to get into is a highly variable, theatre- and situation-dependent comparison. And I think potentially risky to use as a cost-factor. A unit has to have a value - for game purposes - based on its capabilities and limitations, and not compared to another unit. Only then will one have a true value for a unit. 
Naturally the unit does not exist in a vacuum, and naturally we would compare that unit to another, and their relative costs. That's useful information to have and to compare. But to base a cost on "how well it fares against its presumptive enemy" is making a comparison on a sliding scale where the Sherman or PzIV will change value based on what it faces, or how what it faces is improved over time. I know this isn't exactly what you meant, but I am explaining a design logic here. To carry that further then, I do not think we can use the kind of matchups they are likely to get into as a cost factor. What if the Sherman was constantly running into Panthers? It should still cost the same. Is a Sherman less pricey if it has to face Infantry most of the time (which in fact it would). I think while it is natural to make the comparison between medium tanks the value of those medium tanks it faces is not the sole factor. What about anti-infantry capability? I don't just mean weapons, how well can each spot infantry? How close? How about ammo supplies for various tasks. And so on. These are entirely unrelated to a presumptive match-up. 
I re-requoted your statement several times because it was the easiest way to discuss it, not to make it sound ridiculous. I hope it did not come across as the latter

3.6km x 2.9 I think. Don't quote me on that.
Shhhh. There's been a lot more since then and a part of this series is planned to cover the additional research information that you may not really need for individual scenarios but helps create campaigns. Never under estimate this community, there is a grog for everything.
Sorry very slight spoiler but no partisans here.
I will explain the Panzer III's in a further part while talking about unit selection depending on how far down that rabbit hole I can go. Seeing behind the scenes I'm honestly amazed at the level of detail some of the TOE discussions get down to.
Short version, most Panzer III's were pulled from front line units after Kursk and were sent back for conversions into StuG's, though a few were sent to Panzer Schools as training vehicles. The Germans in August 1944 were throwing everything they could at the Soviets as Bagration ran out of steam at the gates of Warsaw. At the same time the Soviets cut off Army Group North from their land route back to Germany at the end of July - a larger German force than what was trapped at Stalingrad. This included emptying training depots with their trainee crews from Germany and sending them east. They had guns and tracks. One of those units was sent to Latvia at the start of August.

I did the TO&Es for the British units which were derived from the official publications and manuals for the 2008 timeframe.  The implementation of the TO&E to fit CMSF structures inevitably means that there are compromises with groupings here and there but, apart from the NBC element which Steve did not want included because it was too specialist, the recce regiment is as accurate a representation of this unit.
Ground surveillance radars, UAVs and EW teams were not widely deployed in the British Army at the time and, possibly with the exception of Ground Surveillance Radars (I'm working from memory here), not part of the establishment tables for this formation.  The teams you see in the surveillance squadron were primarily trained and equipped to conduct dismounted reconnaissance, be that close target recce or sitting in OPs mostly employing the mark 1 eyeball, binos and a radio.

There are a number of aspects to this which I probably won't cover off entirely but here goes ...
In the early CMx2 days, a lot of people complained vociferously and frequently usually in threads called 'Extra Time for Scenarios' about early AI surrenders along similar lines to your original post i.e., 'I'd tee'd up the perfect plan to nail the enemy only to have the scenario end' - or as you put it ...
"Well I was all lined up for the final strike on the German Tigers. Been getting everyone in position for over 10 minutes."
It took people a while to work out that if you added a few extra units that the player never saw, you could create a scenario that would allow the player to execute their 'perfect' plan.  That is one of the reasons that the trick is widely used by scenario designers.
From a design point of view, I admit it probably isn't perfect and maybe the game should take into account other factors such as objectives held or the morale state of the opposition, although of course with the latter - that only becomes apparent at end game and still leads to the frustration at not being able to execute the 'perfect' plan.  Having a morale dimension would also completely kill certain scenarios at birth - my Ap Bac Scenario for the Heaven and Earth module absolutely would not work if morale played strongly into the equation as about 70% of the total ARVN force have shocking motivational and leadership factors.
Conversely to early surrenders, players don't like schlepping across the map for half an hour having knocked over the enemy and secured all of the objectives at the end of a mission to root out a single unit in a tactically insignificant location, and slot it, in order to achieve a victory.
FWIW, my scenario design philosophy has always been about the narrative and I am mindful of the fact that anybody who elects to download and play a scenario is making a choice.  This means you have to accept that it is transactional between player and designer and ultimately you have to try as best as you can to satisfy player needs.
That means your narrative and design concept has to either hit, or balance some quite often divergent factors and of course no scenario is ever going to tick everyone's boxes, but the closer you get to achieving that aim the better.  As a simple example of this - if I call a scenario 'the Battle of Waterloo' then it ought to include things like La Haye Sainte, an allied defending force, a French attacking force and some Germans rolling up late on in the game because that is what the player is expecting.  I would also do my best within the editor to make sure that the map and forces resemble the real thing as well as ensuring that the moving parts in the AI plan bear some resemblance to real events.  If I fail to do this adequately, the transaction between designer and player fails because the player is expecting to refight Waterloo.  Similarly, if I call a mission (or have as its premise) 'Platoon attack' I would design that mission so that the player gets to execute a platoon attack and can actually culminate that attack.  This means that the enemy doesn't surrender when it loses a handful of soldiers.
Since I learned the 'reinforcements that never arrive' trick I have found that it gives me more control over achieving my scenario narratives.  It certainly isn't the only trick by the way but it is one that I consistently use with what I would like to think are fairly successful results.
The transactional piece for me looks vaguely like this:
Players want to win. Players want to feel challenged. Players want to feel that they are a commander in a realistic environment. CM players expect scenarios modelled on real engagements to bear some resemblance to them. To achieve that, you give them the tools in terms of time, forces available to them (e.g., sappers if there are minefields), clear mission command-style orders, a strong narrative, a realistic setting and you set the objectives/VPs accordingly.
It is usually the latter that is the most nuanced mainly because objectives and VPs are how victory is judged and what the victory-focused player will therefore judge the outcome.  It is also nuanced in terms of surrender points - I'm happy that the AI will trigger a surrender at the point where the player has closed in on the last objective but will make absolutely sure that it doesn't happen before that because the player rightfully feels cheated.  The same is true of unit objectives of any description - you can't give a player the goal of 'destroying all the Tigers' and then have the AI surrender before the player has even seen them.
Your comment about reaching the point where you'd expect them to surrender is absolutely valid but is subjective - some will call a scenario/surrender unrealistic if it doesn't happen at the point at which the force suffers 30% casualties - CM has it modelled at around 60% - yet this didn't seem right to you based on the fact that some gucci armour was on the map in the engagement you were fighting.  There is a lot of truth in what @sburkesaid - you only know you were 'cheated' after the scenario ended and to a large extent are judging based on that godlike information given to you at ceasefire.  I recall testing one of @George MC's scenarios recently and had got to a point in the scenario where I thought - "I'm not getting anywhere here, I'll hit surrender and see if I can edge a win," - an excellent example of how friction and the essence of manouevre warfare works - shattering the enemy's will (or in this instance mine) had come into play.  As it happens, I thought - "I'm testing this scenario so I should play it through in order to give the best feedback" and about three turns later I got the sense that the enemy had culminated and that I could actually continue with a reasonable chance of achieving the set objectives.  About five turns later, the enemy surrendered.  In short - a brilliant example of scenario design which ticked most of the transactional boxes for me.
To conclude - balancing these factors and explaining it in the narrative to manage the player's expectations and then testing the scenario to make sure that the thing works is key to the whole scenario design piece.  Adding a few extra dudes that the player doesn't see to stave off the early surrender is a proven and effective tool that people use to best deliver a 'really good scenario which I recommend' comment versus 'the AI surrendered early' comment.  Not perfect of course and it would be better if the designer could control the ratios and maybe use a combination of tools.

Not sure what you are expecting to get patched here?  I am looking into the equipment of the Fire Support Team to determine if they should have a thermal optic in addition to their laser target designator, but that's not a bug per se.  Everything else seems to be working as expected.

We are too grouped !!!

It was actually the village of Kham Duc - although there was a military compound where a lot of the tribesmen and their families were hanging out along presumably with some US Special Forces types.,
The purely military bits on the map in my previous post were the airfield of which the buildings to the south of it formed part and one of the clusters of those buildings was an SF compound.  There were also about half a dozen outpost positions scattered across the various high features surrounding the airfield.  This is why it would have been a great mini Khe Sanh type battle as you have the fight for the outposts plus the battle for the airfield itself.  When I first looked at it, I could see that theoretically I could do it at one to one scale (the original map area was 4km x 2.7km).  Unfortunately the combination of elevation changes and number of trees were what caused it to CTD even after I'd cropped it to 3.9km x 2.2km, stripped a bunch of trees out and dropped the elevations.  I could probably eventually have got it to load with a bit more tree stripping but there was still a bunch of work to be done with all of the buildings (facades, roof and door/window layouts) and of course I hadn't even started purchasing units.  To make it representative of the action that would involve at least a battalion of US and irregulars, about a company's worth of spies to represent the tribesmen's families, a sh1t tin of fortifications to plonk around the airfield perimeter and to build the outpost positions and then at least a regiment's worth of VC.
I might try another crop at some point just to do the assault on the airfield but we'll see.

Well no Halloween release but, as any viewers of my channel are likely aware, the People's Militia campaign is ticking along well now.
Indeed I'm hopefully not too far from entering the (dreaded) briefing writing stage.
One of the scenarios was slated to be a simplistic conversion of the Will'o'Wisps scenario however I've dropped that conversion now (I'll probably just stick that in the single scenario content for 0.97) as I needed a more "brutal" scenario.
As such I've decided to use a heavily cropped & (eventually) edited experimental map by @Combatintman...

...  the original was massive but this portion will load much more easily.
 
The modpack itself has, for the most part, only seen rather subtle changes. An example of this is tailoring the geometric floating icons by @Vinnart for red vs red warfare during the Bong-Hai Civil War era & beyond...

You can Acquire ammo and/or Share ammo. 
To Acquire ammo a team needs to be in a vehicle with ammo or in the same action spot of an ammo dump.  Acquire  allows for the taking of thousands of rounds and AT weapons.  The vehicle does not have to be in the same platoon as the Acquiring fire team.  
Ammo sharing distance is two action spots (about 16 meters).  Ammo sharing only takes place within an organizational unit (whatever highlights when you click that unit is a more practical definition).  Basically ammo sharing is within the same platoon and within 16 meters.   Sharing is done in small amounts, about a magazine at a time as @Erwin said.   
Probably the easiest way to observe ammo sharing is to move a mortar ammo bearer team (with mortar rounds) to within 16 meters of the mortar.  Then move the ammo bearers away.  In the user interface for the mortar you will see the number of mortar rounds available to the mortar team increase and decrease as the ammo bearers move in and out of ammo sharing range. 
In some cases a vehicle parked next to a building can share ammo with a fire team inside the building.  For the fire team to Acquire ammo from that same vehicle they would need to enter the vehicle. 

Speaking as a former mech soldier, there is one FO per platoon plus a FIST team at company level. The platoon FOs are usually SPCs, and the Company FIST team comprises a LT, a SSG and a PFC/SPC RTO, who ride in a M7 Bradley FIST/V.

Hi Erwin
I tested out the scenario you suggested and can confirm what akd is saying is correct.  Under the scenario conditions the FO & HQ units will never spot the unit that the scout team spotted because they don’t have access to the thermal sights.  If you go into the scenario editor and change the conditions to clear you will find that the HQ (for example) will spot the tank in question fairly quickly (even without C2 sharing).
Also the sharing of spotting information is clearly working fine - many units (even those without LOS) get tentative contacts.  This is all that C2 sharing does.  As has been pointed out by others, the unit then still has to actually see the enemy unit to turn that into a definitive contact.  Because it is beyond their visual range in that position and under those conditions this will never happen.

In the US Army Forward Observers used to be embedded with an infantry company, and would usually be with the Company Commander to provide fire support calls. That's how things were in WW2, and in Korea and Vietnam. Post Vietnam (mid-70s-ish) the FIST came about. FIST stands for Fire Support Team. The idea was to provide FOs down to platoon level. In the 82d, a FIST would have a 2LT (FIST Chief), SSG (FIST Sergeant), and SP4/PFC RTO (all 3 with radios) as its HQ unit and they would be with the infantry Company HQ. By TOE an E5 SGT + PFC (RTO) would be with each infantry PLT leader. The FIST provides a more responsive fire support element. (We never had the 3 RTOs that were suppose to go to the platoons and most of our E5 FOs were E4s). 
In a mech unit it's a bit different. They have their own vehicle, and could detach one of the personnel down to platoon level, but the FIST vehicle allows them to be mobile so that's not as necessary (and doesn't work with armor unless they want to ride on top 🙂  The FIST vehicle provides all the radio nets they need to monitor and use, plus a laser target designator. Having an FO down to platoon level in a mech unit would be most useful if they were dismounted, I would think, and not so much when mounted.
Artillery battalions also deploy Fire Support Officers, who are usually CPTs or senior 1LTs (and they come with a SSG/SFC and a PFC) to infantry brigade HQs as a Fire Support Team to do fire support planning with the infantry brigade (now Brigade Combat Teams but in SF2 days a brigade). 
Back in WW2 you'd just get a 2LT Forward Observer, usually down to company level. But in general, things were more compact then. In a modern battlefield platoons tend to be spread more than they were in WW2, and the FIST is a way to have the artillery be more responsive.
Hope that helps.

Dave   (ex US Army, FIST Chief, Battery Fire Direction Officer, Brigade Fire Support Officer, FA Bn Asst S-3, FA Bn Fire Direction Officer).  All Airborne so my knowledge of the mech units is a little less detailed.

Friends, Grognards, Forummen, lend me your eyes...
If I have thermals and you do not, then there will be conditions under which I can actually see a target and you can only know that it is roughly where I tell you it is, possibly no more than this bearing, this distance since you also may not be able to see relevant reference points.  No amount of time is going to cause you to develop innate thermal vision and see the target yourself under those conditions, well unless we are speaking on evolutionary scale time.

well no, it does work as in real life.
CMx2 does not have "Borg" spotting, so every unit has to spot on its own and the game does a separate calculation for each.
Having C2 just means the spotting info will eventually be shared with other units, so it will be easier for them to spot it, but they still have to spot on their own.
As to how it works in RL, I have been in many situations out in the wild where I or someone in our group spots something that the others don't and even when it is pointed out to them, it may take several seconds or minutes before they "see" it. Just because you have a line of sight to something does not mean your brain will automatically recognize and identify it, even more so when the "object" is stationary and trying to hide and the spotting unit is high on adrenaline and gripped by fear because it is in a combat situation.
reminds me of a story..
Gabby Gabreski was a USAAF fighter ace in WW2. On one of his first combat flight, he was wingman. As they entered the combat area, he was warned by radio that bandits were around. Gabby started looking all around to spot the planes but the sky was empty. All of a sudden a call came in: "CHECK YOUR TWO! CHECK YOUR TWO!". He looked as his two o'clock and all of a sudden spotted a Me-109, big as a house, not even 200 yards away going the same direction that he was slowly gaining on....

Thing is no one needs to buy that concept as that's not how it works in CM. But somehow you seem to keep thinking it does even after AKD explained how it does works.
There are some quirks sometimes with sharing and Syrians have some limited capabilities IIRC, but for me too it does work in all CMx2 games.

None of those other units have thermal weapon sights.  They all have NVGs.
Read my post above again regarding information sharing.
 
It has a thermal weapon sight for the M249.
Yes, it has a much more powerful thermal imager than the weapon sights carried in the rifle squad.
The squad as a whole will be better because it is observing with 3x thermal sights instead of just one.
I think your conceptual problem here is that the thermal weapon sights are tied to the individual weapons and are not shown in the special equipment panel, whereas NVGs (light intensification, not thermal) are shown.  That's why I said the issue was obscure, because it is not readily apparent and takes careful testing to understand.  Possibly we could address this via a mod by denoting the thermal capability on the weapon icon itself?
 

First, the misunderstandings about how spotting works:
When a unit shares a positive contact, it generates a possible contact marker for units in C2 or proximity (including tanks) following a variable amount of time, regardless of whether or not the receiving unit has any chance of spotting the target itself (i.e. a unit in comms / proximity but with LoS completely blocked will still gain the possible contact marker).  If the unit has LoS to the location and has the means to see the given contact under the current conditions, this possible contact marker will increase the chances of the receiving unit gaining a positive contact for itself.  But this is most important: the unit must still spot the contact itself with its own sensors. All spotting has a highly variable "human factor" applied that can lead to significantly different outcomes in the same circumstances.  Anecdotes comparing times to spot are useless for drawing comparative conclusions about spotting beyond possible / not possible.  I don't care if 3 times in a row X spotted Z one minute sooner than Y, that does not mean X is better at spotting Z than Y.  Now repeat this 100 times carefully controlling all other factors and perhaps we can talk about quantitative differences in spotting ability. (Does this suck? Why yes, from experience it really does.) Second, what Erwin is encountering in George's scenario:
The US Mech Inf squad has access to 3x thermal small arms sights: 1 on each M249 and 1 on the Marksman's rifle.  A split off scout team from a full squad includes one M249 gunner, so it too has a thermal optic.  Here is what's a bit weird: the model switch showing these actually on the weapons is tied to a hard day / night time that does not vary based on conditions, but the thermal optics are still considered to be in use when they provide an advantage over day optics.  In this case, they seem to be allowing units with thermal optics to see further into the morning haze. Of the infantry units discussed in the scenario, only units with Javelin CLUs also have access to thermal optics. The units without thermals lose LoS at 1668m (at scenario start on my test map using the same date, time and conditions as George MC's map), so if a unit with thermals has shared a possible contact beyond this range with a unit without thermals, it will remain a possible contact for the receiving unit with no chance of becoming a positive contact unless conditions change or the unit alters its spotting equation (moves, acquires a new sensor). 

The old flowchart is for the SF1 version ONLY. While the order of the battles and what happens next has not changed, the rest, refit and resupply variables have been modified to reflect the updates in the game engine since SF1. 
While I understand you were disappointed to encounter the exit zone error playing the updated SF2 campaign, this advice makes literally no sense. The updated campaign file is based on the original campaign, meaning the exit zone error was, and still is, in the original SF1 campaign. Not only will some one playing the original campaign run into this issue, they will also miss out on all the other updates improving the campaign. 
I did a speed run of the campaign last night as your comment about this being a bug in the campaign needed to be checked. I ceasefired in the setup phase of every battle not requiring a victory to move on. There was only one battle needing a minor victory to advance. I kept the tanks out of the battle as much as possible and did not suffer any tank casualties. In the Counter Attack battle, I started with 1 tank on the map and more than 3 tanks arrived as reinforcements. Since all the tanks in this particular mission are core file units, you must have suffered a tank casualty in a previous battle.
As for the British platoon HQ units being unable to call for artillery, this is a game engine issue and not a campaign specific problem. The issue has been reported in the official channels and should be fixed the next time a patch is released. Knowing this problem exists, and the importance of timely artillery and air support, I can only recommend doing your level best to keep any Forward Observers alive. There is nothing further I can do on this issue as any further work is above my pay grade.