Bulletpoint

I don't think napalm burns long enough to remove the crew's oxygen...

My guess would be that it's simply a case of the skirt physically stopping the flame from touching the tank hull, and that it's only the actual hull that has been given the property that it can be destroyed by flame.

From watching the full video, I'm thinking it's not about weak spots... it's more that each flame "blob" has some small but non-zero chance of causing a catastrophic explosion.

How long (how many flame bursts) did it take you to knock out the Panther?

A bit difficult to take the author seriously when he thinks that is an E-100 turret...

That's new.. I've seen some other flamethrower test that showed absolutely no damage on tanks. Maybe it got changed with a recent patch...

Rifles are way better in reality than in this game. Range, accuracy, and firing speed has been dialled down. Probably for gameplay balance considerations.

I have a pretty bad track record of guessing if that was the last enemy tank or not..

I'm wondering if the commanders of those vehicles actually are able to observe from the edge of the casemate, or if they are assumed to be fully ducked down and only looking through periscopes, even if the graphics show them poking slightly above the edge..

How do you manage to find the exact spot where only the commander's head pokes over the incline?

It seems too good a vehicle to just drive the road and see when it gets blown up. But it's not that great either, unless you're playing a mission where there's basically no enemy tanks or AT guns. So the Puma sits in a bit of an awkward place in the OOB.

I'm trying to find out how far from the enemy they actually have to be to stand a chance. My current experience tells me at least apprx 500m if they only have tall grass to crawl around and hide in. Closer if they have better concealment such as forest. But that depends a lot on amount and type of trees too.

I think they just call in mortars on anything they spot... also I am not exactly sure if there were any direct fire weapons with LOS to their position. It might be there was only a 60mm mortar with direct lay.

I just re-ran the scenario and tried this. I was able to keep the crews unspotted for quite a long time by only using SLOW movement and sticking to long grass... however, in the end, both crew teams were mortared.

I guess I can rephrase my question as: Is there any way I can be smart about it and use these Pumas as anything else than "recon by suicide"?

It's actually my concern for their wellbeing that made me ask the question

I'd like to ask for some advice about this mission. I just finished it and got a total victory, so it's not that I can't win it. The thing I would like to ask about is if there is any intelligent way to use the Puma heavy scout vehicles at the beginning of the mission, other than just send them forward until they get blown up? Any way I can use them to actually gain intel without losing them? In my playthrough, the only info they gave me was that the main road was covered with AT guns.. which was frankly no surprise

I get the idea. But, one feels let down from a fun perspective if one recons slowly and carefully along these long wooded and scary-looking roads for 25-30 minutes and absolutely nothing happens. I understand where you're coming from with this, but at the same time, that is the nature of recon after all. Finding out where the enemy isn't is as important as finding out where he is...

That's because you are talking about shots now. I was talking about grenades going off.

Since I posted the previous version, I also went over the entire map and broke up the borders of the many big blocks of trees were there were two trees per tile.. they should blend together better now, and it saves your computer from calculating several thousand trees. Especially in the large forest areas to the west of your starting positions, where now fighting take place anyway.

I have made a few changes to improve this impressive map further. @theforger gave me the go-ahead to post it here. Previously, the edges of forests seemed a bit artificial, because it was pretty obvious they had been painted with a tool in an editor. So what I did was to work over all the terrain edges and break up their outlines. I did it with respect for the original map, so there should be no real gameplay difference and it should not break any AI plans or player tactics. But hopefully you will also find it easier on the eyes. Before After Unfortunately I can't upload the file, because the forum only allows me to upload 1.22 MB and the file is 1.45 MB ....

Also, what kind of class requires you to play Combat Mission?

Yes, I agree with this.

Very good question, that has been discussed several times.. without any consensus, I think. The main line of thinking is that setting and arc does NOT affect a unit's ability spot. However, I seem to have noticed several times that it might. And Steve just the other day posted saying that setting a wide arc would spread a unit's attention too thin, while setting a narrow arc would do the opposite. That can be interpreted as saying that the arc somehow helps narrow a unit's focus. For what it's worth, I played a scenario where I wanted my tank to drive up to a ridge and spot an enemy tank. I made sure to give my tank a contact marker through C2. Well, my tank spotted nothing and got taken out. So I decided to reload the turn several times and see what the odds of spotting in that situation actually were. I ran the same turn and orders 3-4 times and each time, my tank spotted nothing and was destroyed. Then I tried setting an armour arc on the location of the contact. My tank near immediately spotted the enemy and took it out. I then re-ran the turn a couple of times with the arc, and each time the result was the same - with varying spotting times, but I did get a spot each time. So that's the best info I can give... if you invest the time to test this out methodically, I'd love to hear what you find.

Oh, I'm far from infallible. I believe I was wrong about something back in... 2017?