Freyberg

Hippies are excellent.

It would be extra cool if they did the Pacific theatre too...

When playing British/NZ/Commonwealth, I find myself trying hard to minimise casualties. When Americans, slightly less so, playing Germans, hardly at all... Instinctively historical??

I remember a story about Patton ordering some men to advance through a minefield, on the basis that staying put and being shelled would have resulted in more casualties.

You can always eliminate so-called gamey effects (like triangulating sounds) by being a lazy player, as some of us are.

I played Finns, Roumanians and Hungarians in CMBB a few times - they were great. That scenario between Hungarian and Roumanian forces was excellent - as was the one between Finns and Soviets in 1940-ish.

The screenies look fantastic - love the dead horse !!!!! And the hit decals. Can't wait...

I agree with this. I read this forum regularly, because a lot of you guys on it are very knowledgeable and I respect you for it, but do some of you have to be so sniffy about it...?? After all, this is also a forum for Combat Mission players who just want to shoot the breeze isn't it...

IIRC, there are a handful of units like that, and the artillery in them comes at a pretty good points-price too.

Have you tried the Face command? I vaguely seem to recall a field gun that wouldn't fire responding after that command.

I certainly won't be waiting for a demo. What does it take to become a beta tester??

It was vanishingly unlikely that the western allies would have made peace with any German government merely with the replacement of Hitler, but if the West had moved on Berlin instead of cutting Germany in half, the German government minus Hitler had retreated to the 'southern redoubt', and the USSR and the West had confronted each other around Berlin; and if the Germans had held out for some time while the Soviets and the allies had faced of against each other for an extended period, then it's not inconceivable - though still rather unlikely - that the West would have softened their stance towards Germany. Much would have depended upon the actions of Stalin - what if, in the above scenario, he had decided he had more to gain from westward aggression than from the immediate liquidation of the remnant of a still defiant German state? Having said that, Hitler was the evil psychic force that drove German military power. I don't believe it was possible for any other leader to motivate the German army to continue fighting.

I've watched a few of these. The 3D graphics are a bit cheesy, but the stories are interesting and well told. I have no problem with a slight Soviet bias - I reckon they earned the right.

Close assault is often effective, and gun damage is quite frequent.

Instead of command delays, to simulate a single commander, you could have an interface that only allows a commander to give the same orders scenario designers can give when controlling the AI - setting groups of units, setting terrain objectives and simple, general orders to groups ('advance', 'ambush 700m' etc)- with all actual combat and movement orders to be handled by the AI. However, the player should be able to give, say, 6 normal CM commands per move, to any unit within immediate command radius of the CinC. Troops out of command turn to icons, most enemy are icons, except those visible to officers in the command chain. Any change of orders recieves a command delay, but the AI will continue to move troops according to previous orders. The AI does almost everything. Large parts of the battle may even take place invisible to the player, just a few ghostly icons. It would be realistic. It would actually be quite fun to play, easier, and different to CM. It would encourage players to play lead from the front line where they can give direct orders to units. But it wouldn't be as fun as playing the regular way where you command every team.

Is it possible the hull-down tank is easier to spot because it's silhouetted on the skyline ?

I'd give a burst of machine gun fire, just to be sure...

Gun crews are affected by the same game limitation as infantry, in that they cluster very tightly together. If they could spread out a lot more, especially under fire, they wouldn't need to leave their weapon and still seek cover. Infantry and all crewed weapons could adopt more dispersed formations and to spread out under fire. Then there would be no need to actually leave the weapon in game terms.

I was a CMBB addict until it got unplayable on the Mac (required upgrade) and I like CMx2 even more. Still think CMFI-Gustav Line is the best so far, because you can play a much longer period of the war, right from mid '43.

CMBB 1941 was exceptional fun. France 1940 would be a very interesting game. The very question of whether the edge the Germans had was mainly in tactics or technology would make those games like a scientific experiment.

How about 'point fire' and 'area fire' for units, but you can only 'point fire' to something you have an ID on, whether by spotting or through the C2 net.

I'd forgotten about the Finnish Army!! I loved CMBB...

Area fire without spotting is pretty inaccurate as it is. I wouldn't want to see excessive command delays. Armies like the Italians are hard enough to handle with their rudimentary C2 and lack of radios - quite inferior enough. Actually, based on playing with the Italian army (which I like a lot) and other CMFI forces from 1943, I think the CMx2 games are much more sophisticated at modeling inferior forces. To me, Combat Mission models command at every level - you play the role of every commander from Battalion or Company level to the individual team, squad or vehicle, so a good player basically represents as good command at every level as you have the time or inclination to fuss over. It would lose more than it gained if you could only give commands as if you were a single overall commander - if you want perfectly abstracted strategy, there's always chess.

Gustav Line is what makes FI a great game, in my opinion. The Italians are fun though a bit of a pushover, but the Brits, other Allies, Luftwaffe, and the Gustav Line itself, make this a really gritty historical game.

It seems like since the patch, the AI makes much better use of setup zones, objectives etc. I'm only surmising, but it appears to allocate troops to the different setup zones quite intelligently depending on what kind of plan that zone has - like a long-range ambush plan for ATGs, that sort of thing.