Bulletpoint

Could we have that in English by any chance? He means it's a darling, luv. A proper stonking conker to be sure, and no mistake.

This has nothing to do with CM3?

I'd say extend the map. Even in WW2, I think that map would be too small for 2x180 men. There's no general guideline, but when playing H2H, I tend to choose "tiny" forces on a "medium" map size. It also depends on how much dense terrain there is, and if there are vehicles or just infantry etc. But in general, I think it's best to have the map be a little too big than a little too small.

It sounds like my experience. In my case, all troops were fresh and OK:

Problem is, a barn looks pretty sturdy in the game, but it isn't actually good cover. Many buildings in CM look like they are made of stone, but some are treated like they are made of wood and plaster.

Game covers are not designed by the customers

I have them too. I wake up wild-eyed, drenched in sweat, screaming "Reverse Slope - No Aim Point!"

With a bit of creativity, we can explain away nearly any weird behaviour in this game. In this case, it actually seems quite rational to get away from the area of shelling, especially since they had no enemy contact markers to show that they would evade straight into the enemy line of fire. However, I can't remember seeing AFVs automatically try to evade incoming artillery before. So I don't know if that's what's actually going on here. It must have been very frustrating for your opponent to lose his key asset this way.

I thought I was the only one

I set you up for that

You shouldn't put yourself down like that. It's bad for your ego. And anyway that's your wife's job. I don't have a wife, so I have to do it myself

You're basically saying the same thing as @Domfluff, but with more nuance. I agree that the formula becomes apparent, but there are so many ways I can still make mistakes, even after playing CM for who knows how many years... the devil is in the detail

This is new to me. Are you sure, or are you just talking about how you think it should work?

This video shows that a concrete pillbox is much stronger in reality than in the game. In the video, it takes 16x 75mm Sherman AP rounds to penetrate a concrete pillbox, and 40x HE. In the game, it takes 3-4x HE to kill the inhabitants.

I only play WW2, so it's not thermals. And not AI area fire either. It's simply that even tanks spot infantry easily when in close proximity. I haven't seen tanks spot inside smoke though. Edit: I should add that I don't know if tanks spot infantry TOO easily. I don't know what should be expected. Just saying that's how it works currently.

I had this situation in a H2H game which surprised me. A team of two men were sneaking up (slow movement mode) to a Sherman from behind it. The tank leader wasn't sitting with the turret hatch open so I thought I should manage to knock it out. When they were close enough to shoot off their panzerfaust the turret turned almost 180 degrees and shot off a shell. I decided that maybe that tank had eyes in the neck and accepted that wonder of action from the tank. I think Erwin is right though. I've seen it happen many times in singleplayer mode that tanks spot infantry sneaking up on them through forest. Tank spotting is heavily affected by two things: distance and whether it has a cupola. At 20m distance the tank will spot infantry quite quickly, even if they are inside buildings or in forest terrain. It doesnt't happen immediately, but since infantry takes so long to crawl anywhere, there's a lot of time for the tank to do its spotting checks.

Interesting system. There are so many ways to improve on this aspect of CM; I hope somebody picks up on it. It would be quite easy to make some sort of optional armour restriction. Letting players choose a limit to how many % of points can be spent on tanks seems quite obvious...

That's why I would love to have a system that could reliably and randomly choose a decently balanced force for both players. The current auto purchase system in CM is not good enough for this. If it's too difficult to fix the system, I would like to see a system that chose two random human-designed forces from a big pool of sensible and decently balanced options. That would take away the guessing and counterguessing and arms race to the top we see currently.

And that's what you got to do. It's the kind of game theory decisions that go on during unit purchase every time .. If the map is open and I bring smaller tanks than you do, I'm almost surely going to lose. Since I don't know what tanks you will bring, I have to assume you're going for the biggest ones available, so I will do the same. I've won several games where the results were sealed by our purchasing decisions. That being said, I only ever brought heavy tanks to a PBEM once. Most of the games I play are on smaller, more dense maps, and I generally play with very low points costs. I find it gives more interesting situations, because the biggest tanks get left out.

Most of you already know this, but just for the record - You can turn down the amount of powerful tanks a bit by choosing stricter rarity setting.. most of the big German panzers have a pretty steep rarity cost.

Agreed. Also real troops would have situational awareness of ranges to potential enemy positions and the amount of incoming fire they were taking at any given moment, and make split second decisions to fire or duck back behind cover in the halftrack. Sometimes they would make the wrong choice, of course, but they would act less robotic and have a better "feel" for the tactical situation than our pixeltroops have. I see many halftrack passengers get hit and killed only after several previous shots have ben pinging off the sides of the vehicle. My personal opinion is that while fighting from a halftrack should not make troops invulnerable, it should at least be more viable than it is in the game currently. But we all know what a personal opinion is worth.

Thanks for proving me wrong. +1 I was very surprised to see this happen, because in the Aachen campaign I had two M36 fire a lot of AP shells at enemy infantry in a building. It seemed like the shell would pass straight through the enemy soldier each time, but causing no damage. So that's why I was convinced it was simply not possible.

Thanks But I think what we're seeing here is an AP shell with bursting charge going into the ground and exploding and the explosion then causes the casualty. I meant that AP slugs without explosive filling can't kill infantry in buildings just by passing through them.

I have never ever seen this, and I've seen many AP shells go straight through infantry in buildings. Not saying you're lying or anything, but I'd love to see a video of this happening if you have one?

The odd one out: I recently observed that the M36 will fire AP at buildings even though it still has HE left. I think it's because it's AP with a bursting charge, but it only triggers after the shell has gone out the other side of the building, so there's no effect. Unless the elevation makes the shell go into the ground inside the building. No effect, actually. Regular AP slugs never hurt infantry inside buildings. Though I think they were historically used against enemy troops.