Bulletpoint

How so? They're perfectly fine infantry even without armour...

Maybe the rest of the contents also made the meal of a mouse. RIP.

I have noticed that when using a building texture mod, some of the damaged roof textures are somehow turned 90 degrees from what they should be. Is that the same problem you're having? I have not been able to solve it...

In 1944, there were many more kinds plants, insects, and wildlife in the countryside, and weeds and wildflowers growing all over the place. It's not the warming that has killed them off since then, but access to powertools and machines for clearing plants, as well as weedkiller herbicides. Without these, a patch of brambles is a LOT of work to remove. Also, fields back then were smaller and there were many more hedgerows between fields. These were home for wildlife too.

I'd love to see many more kinds and sizes of trees and bushes, weeds etc. in the game.

I don't think Co-op play would work. In my experience from playing coop boardgames, the individual player tends to lose control and it becomes a discussion/argument game between the players what the optimal course of action will be. Then the player eventually just starts moving the counters to carry out what the consensus is. Even if there are just two players, you'll find situations where player A can't advance before player B does something. Clears a forest and removes an AT gun for example. Then player A just has to sit and wait for player B.

I meant more that the version that goes around says the assault took 10-15 minutes, where this source now says 2-3 hours. Also, the 60 German soldiers in trenches are now just an artillery position huddled along a hedgerow to escape air detection. Not doubting that the assault was well conducted, but it doesn't seem like the hero story it's made up to be. @Paper Tiger made a nice little scenario about this action, based on the "15 minutes trench assault" version.

Well, the planes could actively spot and target the individual tanks from the air. The thing I find a bit odd in CM is that we can target individual buildings or a specific spot on the ground in a time before laser was used to paint targets.

Intreresting. Another one of those actions that have been exaggerated a bit after the war.

We fully agree.

They actually close up much faster now than they used to, so things have improved a lot.

You could say the same for the Russians taking a look at the map when the Germans were at the gates of Moscow maybe. During the war, most German soldiers probably had little grasp of how bad the situation actually was.

I think several updates/fixes to the game engine were eventually lost when new versions came out. Because the fix might have been applied to CMFI while the source code for the next game had already been split off and start worked on. Another example is mortar crews firing rifles on "target light", giving away their positions. I'm sure that was fixed at some point, yet it came back. In CMFB at least, you can happily park a panzer outside a building full of infantry for as long as you need to spot them and machinegun them one by one. Used this method heavily just yesterday, but it does seem like an exploit.

It's a long way from Moscow to Berlin if you have to fire heavy artillery at any little Dacha, comrade Besides, the Soviet doctrine called for rolling waves of infantry to make the enemy reveal himself before destroying those positions with artillery and heavy guns. At least if I remember that post by JasonC right.

That's not the scenario I described.....I was talking about an assault on a known enemy position, but one of sufficient complexity that his exact positions are unknown. I admit that in some occasions, a force might go in blasting away at everything. But I'd say it only happened occasionally during the war, whereas in the game, it happens in every battle. The player knows it's a target rich environment, where you start with full supply in all vehicles and won't have to care about resupply. You're right, and that's why I always suggest it could be an optional thing. The important thing for me would to place more emphasis on scouting, spotting and information sharing between units.

You might have to pass through several small villages that day. How long are you going to spend blasting every window of every house? How fast can you get resupplied with shells? What if you waste them all on the first two hamlets, and then you run into a roadblock in the third? Soldiers care about not getting killed; their officers care about advancing on time.

The problem here is that we, as players, know that we're now going to play an assault mission, and the map is limited. We know on this small map, there will be enough enemies to challenge us. In that case, it makes sense to blast the most likely buildings with HE. But in the real war, the area of operations is not neatly fenced in, and you don't know if there are even enemies in that area. If you know there are enemies, then that is represented in the game by giving pre-battle intel. If you don't get this intel, it's basically an order to "Take village X", regardless of whether it's enemy held or not. In that case, you send in a couple of guys to see if they can find out something.

I believe this photo shows the results of artillery/aerial bombardment, which is a different discussion. I wouldn't prevent either of those from targeting areas without contact markers.

In general, yes, I think even when assaulting a village, you don't know exactly where the enemy will be deployed. Could be in the houses, it could be in woods, trenches and foxholes, etc. Sending scouts forward to probe would be part of the assault, so you don't end up wasting valuable HE ammo on empty positions. But I still think the player should be allowed to use MG area fire on any position on the map, without a contact marker. As an aside, I started using this as a personal house rule when playing singleplayer, and I find it works quite well and increases immersion. There is one case where it creates a problem though. In my current game, there's a church tower which is an obvious artillery spotter location. I don't have any contact marker there, but from seeing which locations get shelled, I can conclude the spotter is very likely in the tower. I'd be ok with not being able to target the tower though, as I think the general rule is interesting to play with.

Thank you. I actually restrained myself a bit, because I did not want to create a "perfect" defence. There are five different AI plans, and the enemy setup is variable within each setup, so each team has a variety of positions to choose from, all of which make sense, but the combination of the various placements might not always add up to a 100 pct optimal defence. Even so, it's probably still a bit too difficult. Did you manage to beat it?

As I see it, contact markers identify just that: Likely enemy positions.

Merci, I had not seen that photo. But here is the photo I used: I also used old photographs to get some details right. For example, in some of the first versions, this house had three stories, but I realised it had only two:

That is because I have made the map by recreating a wartime air recon photo - and I spent a LOT of time placing every single tree

It does create a few incidents where the AI is at a disadvantage to the human player. I think the root of the way it works is that the use of grenades is supposed to simulate using grenade bundles and placing them at key points (engine vents, tracks, underside) that you cannot do from inside. Hence how it currently works. But you cannot place a grenade bundle from a trench either, if the tank is 20m away. Yet the game shows troops throwing grenades, and this is meant to simulate the troops making a quick dash, placing the grenade bundle, then running back to their foxhole. The same logic could be applied to troops inside buildings. They'd run out from a doorway, place the grenade bundle, and rush back inside.

Yes, if I remember from researching for the scenario, it was the XXX Corps. The only reason it's US troops in my scenario is because I didn't have the Commonwealth expansion at the time. I have been working a bit to redesign the misson, including changing the church and redoing all the elevations, turning down the difficulty a bit, etc. And also to make it a CW mission. But I haven't found the time to continue.