Bulletpoint

Would be nice if they would let us toggle all fire orders on/off like we can with movement orders. Would make it much easier to remember to stop area firing units.

The Kar98 has bullets inside. The Garand doesn't. The carbine doesn't. The MP40 doesn't. So I think it's safe to conclude that those graphical bullets are not necessary for anything.

I'm no computer wizard, so I can't say for certain. I'm just thinking that if there are 200 Germans in a battle, each with a Kar98, and inside each rifle there are 6 bullets, each made of, say, 10 polygons, then that's 12,000 polygons that are not contributing anything at all. Seems needlessly wasteful, especially since it would just be a matter of changing one model (the Kar98 rifle) to save all these polygons. Even if the graphics engine is clever enough to not bother actually rendering the unseen detail (culling), I still think the CPU somehow has to deal with each bullet, if only to decide that it will not be rendered. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong. The important bit for me is just to make sure people are aware of this. Maybe it's a complete non-issue, maybe it would be a 'quick win' to make the game run better. Who knows?

The game seems to be rendering bullets and other details inside some of the weapons, especially rifles. This is a wasted effort, as the player will never see this detail, and I believe it slows the computer down despite not being visible. To check it out for yourself, angle the camera very close to a soldier so half the model becomes invisible. You can now pan slowly left and right to do an "x-ray" and peek inside the model. All K98 rifles seem to be affected. The Garand has no hidden bullets in its normal version. But the rifle grenade version has. Some other weapons that have invisible detail that is never shown: M1911A1 pistol (handle shows detail under the wooden part) M1919A6 LMG (it has bullets inside, plus there's a hidden interior barrel) LMG42 (some bullets are outside the gun as a part of an ammo belt, but there are just as many bullets hidden away inside the gun) This is just a quick check. There could be many other wasted polygons inside weapons in this game. Other suggestions: The M4A3(75)W Sherman (early) has a grill above the engine. This grill is made of a LOT of polygons. They are not completely wasted, because the detail is visible from the outside, but it could be an obvious way to save polygons if this grill were changed to a texture. At least when playing on less than max detail setting. The saved polygons could be used to make the hatch openings more circular instead of angled as they are now. Also, a lot of the vehicles have hidden interior detail. While in some way this is kind of cool, removing this would also be an obvious way to save a lot of polygons.

I think the sweet spot is around company+ level. Once I reach battalion level, I start getting mentally crushed by the micromanagement, and it starts feeling more like work than fun. Also, there's a limit to how many individual tactical situations I can keep track of at once (even with the ability to deal with them in sequence using WeGo). The game just isn't designed for bigger scales. Even if it were technically possible to use a 20x20km map, it wouldn't work unless you had extreme levels of patience, concentration, and spare time.

Just like the Star Wars stormtroopers, the Germans can't hit the broad side of a barn with their STG44s. The Garands make much less noise and seem less impressive visually, but they are very effective.

In Northern Europe, we don't really have wildfires, because even in summer, the vegetation is usually not dry enough. If implemented in the game, fires should only be able to spread rapidly if conditions are set to extremely dry. And even then, it still does take some time for fire to spread (and wind speed and direction are very important...) So, in short, fire would only be a real problem in very few scenarios with special conditions. But I can live without landscape fires in Combat Mission. What I really want to see is that flamethrowers should set houses and bunkers alight. it should take quite a long time for a building to burn out completely. It shouldn't just go up like a match.

Yeah, some of my first posts too That's why I can sympathise with the guy now asking again. Of course, after some time, you start to get used to the way the game works.

I don't think anybody asked for that - just that the graphics better reflect that the hedgerow is unpassable.

Don't worry, you'll get the hang of it with practice. When I started playing, I remember finishing the training campaign with most of my units broken, out of ammo, and mostly dead. And that's not because the campaign itself is in any way difficult

Would be helpful if the bocage actually looked more like that in the game too. Then probably more newcomers wouldn't be so confused.

I was actually very surprised when I saw they had spent time implementing those little fires, instead of, well, any of the many good suggestions people regularly bring up on this forum.

Persistent map damage.

Interesting how real trenches can't be done in this game because they would break the FOW. Yet the fog of war is already broken, it seems

I also sometimes notice that hit decals are missing. In about 1/3 of the cases, it's just hidden in between the wheels or in other places difficult to spot. In another 1/3 of cases, it's hidden behind thin panels that for some reason don't get a hit decal. But if you zoom in close enough to do an "x-ray" on the vehicle, you can sometimes find the decals. For example, behind the little panels on the front of the US halftrack engine. But in the last 1/3 of cases, it just seems to not be there for some reason.

Let players type in the number of points freely for the battle they want to play, or at least rework the points system so that "tiny" battles are indeed tiny. Fix the light/shadow issue where terrain has light/shadow on opposite sides of the shading for houses and troops.

Yes. Also all other shells and bullets. Because the game tracks those Shell fragments - I seriously doubt it.

I'm pretty sure about that. I will see if I can get a video of it (I meant to say that the sounds may only occur IF you use a sound mod - which maybe gives you louder bullet-whizz sounds). Another explanation might be that the sounds of the fragments whizzing by are part of the explosion sound file used in the sound mod. But that can be found out by listening to the .wav files outside of the game...

I'm not using sound mods, and I hear no whizzing sounds. So I think you're just "seeing faces in the clouds" here And I don't believe the CM engine tracks individual pieces of shrapnel. It wouldn't make sense unless they tracked thousands of piecs from each explosion, and the end result would be very similar to a basic traceline & probabilistic calculation.

But isn't that what they (the mortars) are supposed to do? Small and medium caliber mortars were issued to rifle companies to deal with emplaced enemies, and it was their ability to drop bombs right in the foxholes and trenches that made them effective. Granted they wouldn't achieve that with every shot, but even when they hadn't, the threat was always there. Yes, correct - but that's where the limitations of the current trench system start to show, because in that case, the physical width of the trench is very important.

As mentioned above, I don't think that trenches provide enough protection for hiding troops because too many shells land direct hits because the trench is not narrow enough. I agree with you. The width definitely has an impact. It's mostly a problem against direct-firing mortars though. Off-map artillery has a large spread, so I find few shells actually land in the trenches. And even when they do, I don't think that's a big problem, because with a very narrow trench, you might get buried if a shell went off next to it. So even though the trench technically protected you from the blast, the end result could be the same. Which is realistic in many situations, but with trenches, I think a major part of their purpose is to make soldiers able to both fight and be quite well protected at the same time. I think the biggest problem with trenches in the game is not that they don't protect against artillery, but that they protect too little against small arms.

Yep, they do. Foxholes too. As long as you hide, you can even ride out nebelwerfer barrages with minimal casualties. I think the argument is basically over whether trenches should provide good fighting positions, too. And about what level of protection against artillery they should provide while not hiding.

+1

It actually happens very often. We just didn't notice it before we got the hit decals. Try to notice shots that make a decal on the lower part of the mantlet and on the top hull at the same time. You'll find it happens very frequently. Never seen such a hit penetrate, though. Never. And I think that's a bug somehow. Because the Panther top hull is only 16mm thick...

A basic problem with grenades in this game is that they are only thrown after your guys actively spot an enemy unit. Whereas in real wars, they are often thrown into rooms before the attacker knows if there's anyone there or not. Or he knows there's an enemy in there somewhere, but not exactly where.