Freyberg

Most of the things I would like probably wouldn't require a new game engine. Firstly, I would like to see some changes to the scenario editor and the AI. In particular, a way to program the AI more easily, as I find this a little hard to understand and even harder to predict how an AI plan will unfold. These could be simple, general AI commands - like 'advance and manoeuver against armour', 'advance, pausing at cover if under fire', or 'defend [x] location and fall back under fire'. Obviously these are not so simple from a programming standpoint, but they would make devising playable scenarios much easier. The other thing would be some features to make house-to-house combat less fiddly - like a 'transparent buildings' toggle; and maybe tweak some of the troop behaviours against buildings, like an 'attack carefully' mode, where they don't halt on contact, as with hunt, but the also don'r run in and get slaughtered, like throwing grenades and so on - although maybe this is already modeled and I'm just using the commands wrongly.

I really appreciate scenario designers, especially when it's a good scenario. I've tried it myself - it's quite difficult and rather time-consuming, especially testing, so thanks again

Hie thee to a nunnery!

This one was fun and quite different gameplay - it had a bit of a narrative to it. The entry of certain of the enemy reinforcements was exceedingly well timed. The map is first class (I'll reuse that in a QB for sure) with a great little village with winding streets. It was a little bit annoying that A Coy were 'unfit' (took a while to work that out and slowed things down considerably), but overall a really good play.

Its not just the buildings, you need to make sure there are no flavour objects too - which can only be done, painstakingly, in 3D preview mode. I tried to port some CMBN maps to CMRT, but it wasn't worth the effort.

I don't find the new licensing system hard at all - you open that little app in the folder, type in your S/N and it all works. And since the switch to 4.0, I didn't bother patching and upgrading the old games, I just downloaded the new one off the website and registered that. Or am I missing something? It used to be a bit fiddly to register games, but in the last year (I've registered bought 3-4 upgrades in that time), it's very easy. I would like to see more modules, too, but I think the 4.0 upgrade is nice - the AI certainly seems better, and the new squad behaviour, which makes it often unnecessary to split squads, makes the game much more playable. Those and the new casualty counting methodology make quite a difference IMO.

Sounds fun - I find most of the campaigns a bit frustratingly hard, so a tool that will help me (ahem) ...cheat against the AI... (ahem) will come in handy. I'm on a Mac though, but with plenty of access to PCs - do you need to have CM installed on a machine to be able to use the tool...?

I love those moments - I had one just last night: clicked the big red button, watched the digitroops running thither and yon, suddenly realised that the halftrack full of the best guys was going to use to storm some buildings was going to advance into the sights of a keyholed Panther (which I knew was there but I'm often careless). At the end of the turn it was 5 metres too far forward, right in his sights. Next move, gave a reverse order - fully expecting a little rose-garden of red crosses to bloom - clicked Big Red again. Boom, he fired, clipped the edge of a wall, missed! My men lived to be uselessly sacrificed another day (or a few minutes later, as it transpired). If it wasn't for WeGo I would be constantly wondering why various of my men and assets were burning or dead.

I'm not really sure where all these ideas for changing the fundamental gameplay come from. A minute seems perfect to me. If you changed it, you'd have to change the kinds of commands you could issue - in fact it would become a completely different sort of game.

Haha - OK, next time I'll let them die and just go through their pockets.

When I play against the AI, I cheat. I usually choose the opposing forces, based on the random selection which (like Anson Pelmet above ) I don't check too carefully but which I usually toughen up with some decent armour. And I remove some of their infantry, because too much AI infantry is less interesting than tanks, flak, AT guns etc. And I give myself some solid reserves (at least +100%), so if the game starts to drag on or I get 'unlucky', I can bring it to a conclusion without losing....

Yes - I sometimes find myself doing things like this.

It can be a little frustrating how difficult it can be to get units to perform buddy aid sometimes, particularly when the buddy is kind of on the boundary of two action squares. I've had cases where the troops are not green, not of poor morale and not under fire, within close proximity to the wounded man - I move them from square to square but they still refuse to notice the wounded guy. Are any units more likely than others - officers for example - to give buddy aid..?

What a fabulous, intense and difficult scenario! Those damn Luftwaffe are few, but they are so fiendishly well positioned. The map is fabulous - the game-play is nicely varied (rural and house-to-house. I also saw my Quad-50cal completely destroy a building, which was fun.

1) Using the scenario editor to edit scenarios I've already played and changing the attacking force to New Zealanders (with British & Commonwealth support).

That was very very interesting. This seems extremely realistic to me - 15 minutes doesn't seem too quick (you'd assume this was something they would have wanted to know). I figured CM would be sophisticated and realistic in C2, but to see it in action in such a detailed way is cool. I've noticed that radios go in and out of communication - it's a cool feature.

I have to admit, it was the lack of replay that stopped me from using Real Time. I kept looking round and finding one of my tanks a flaming wreck or one of my squads a mass of red crosses and wondering what had happened. The same thing happens to me in WeGo, too, of course, but at least I have the fun of watching the explosions. The other aspect with Real Time was that CM requires giving quite a number of commands. In Real Time, I was stopping so often to give them that I was losing the feeling of the action. In WeGo, the replay can be more exciting.

I think it's a shame that much of this thread has descended into incivility (that's the thing that so often keeps me off this forum) - and it's particularly unkind that peevish things are said about the developers. This is a niche game, from which I get a great deal of pleasure and have done for many years, and I feel lucky that Battlefront have continued to improve and expand on it. No other game I have ever played has held my interest upgrade after upgrade the way Combat Mission has. The pity is that this an interesting thread. It's made me interested in playing Iron Mode again; some of the ideas suggested don't appeal, others are a bit far-out, but fun to think about, and others would be really interesting to try. I agree with the point made that maximum 'realism', in the absence of a super-AI with human-like ability, would be less realistic. The abstraction in the AI balances out the abstraction in the command interface pretty well, in my opinion. However, I like the idea of increased immersion, to enjoy the feeling of the commander's experience without trying to recreate every aspect of it. I think Iron Mode can be quite immersive and I'll probably get back into playing it (It's been mostly Elite for the past few years); and I hope this experience is something the developers continue to improve.

I'm not asking or arguing for the feature discussed above - but one way to achieve it, which might be fun once in a while, would be to have something like an 'intel-view' lock hot key. If you could lock the intel-viewpoint onto, say, the company commander, then until it was unlocked, you could select and give orders to other units (assuming you could see them, for example in Iron mode), but the intel you received would remain that of the company commander. It would achieve most of what those above are asking for without reworking the whole game, and might be interesting.

Oh yes - that would be very cool....

I notice several people discussing features they loved from CM1, so I thought I'd mention one I used to love: the ability to import units from a scenario or finished battle (or even a battle in progress) into a QB. I remember having some extremely enjoyable H2H games based on this idea, where a self-made scenario with a few units would be imported into a QB, so both players would know a few of the units the other one had, typically the toughest pieces (for example, we might import a little heavy armour into a QB where we agreed the rest of the units would be selected by a rule-set like 'short 75'). I remember also once playing a second QB over the ruins of the first, in effect adding reinforcements to an ongoing game. ...anyway, I love the game. My only real wish is more maps/scenarios for the old games with up-to-date AI plans; but since the discussion is so often about fond wishes - that would be mine.

I play some CM nearly every second day. I have all the Second World War titles, modules and packs. I browse the forum regularly. One of the reasons I seldom post is that although I'm quite knowledgeable about history and the Second World War in particular, I'm not 'grog' and I don't that degree of detailed knowledge; and some of the posters here are frankly kind of hostile to those lacking their encyclopedic knowledge.

In a recon battle, their armoured cars are fierce...

I like to use bailed-out crew members as medics.

Flamethrowers are quite useful in forests, too. They don't do all that much, but they're cheap and if you know there's some enemy hiding in a general area, a few bursts of flame can degrade their morale and really loosen up an ambush position.