Bulletpoint

The game already has the guys shout "incoming!" about 1-2 seconds before the rounds hit, so they are currently able to detect shells in flight. However, they don't seem to duck down before taking suppression from the explosions, which is often too late.

There's an element of that, but CPU computing power is not increasing exponentially any more, and hasn't for some time.

I must say it also annoys me quite a bit too. If anything, I'd also prefer to see flamethrowers in the Target Light category. The MGs would still be able to suppress at range; the FT would only be fired at quite short range. The game would not get confused, because it already knows how to do this. Just like when firing an infantry squad at long range, the bazooka and SMGs don't fire.

I think all move orders are the same actually, when it comes to getting spotted or not. Even if there's a concealment bonus for walking, it also means troops stay moving for more spotting cycles to reach their destination. The only order that makes troops more stealthy seems to be SLOW, and I think that's mainly because it keeps troops down where grass, crops, etc breaks or degrades LOS. But I don't know for sure. It's just my impression.

I had an idea for some time that it could be cool to have "stances" in the game. So all troops would be either "bold" or "cautious". Depending on stance, they'd react differently to spotting enemies. A scout car on hunt with cautious stance would reverse upon spotting an enemy (or being fire upon), but with bold stance it would just stop and return fire. Haven't thought the idea through yet, so I'm sure there will be some issues with it. But I think the basic idea is interesting at least.

What makes you think the artillery damage model is sophisticated? I think it's quite abstracted actually. Trace line from impact, broken by solid ground, modified by a value for the cover/stance infantry is in. Kill calculation based on blast strength and distance from impact.

Did soldiers ever move like that in WW2? I'd assume they'd either stay put, crawl through concealment, or run as fast as they could in short bounds. Or "hunt". But a kind of hunt where they'd keep walking even though they started to take fire? I'm not sure HUNT actually makes troops more stealthy. When I play against people, I notice I often spot their troops hunting through woods at quite long distances. But I haven't tested it out.

This is the critical concept to bear in mind. Doesn't apply in this case; the unit has no cover arc.

I just checked with the CMFB manual, and it says the same. It even states it clearly in the tutorial: "If any enemy is spotted or they are fired upon, the units will stop moving immediately..." But that's not really what I see happening, so either I'm misunderstanding something, or the command doesn't work as intended.

It depends on what we imagine the "hunt" command to mean. I assume it means" Move forward carefully until enemy contact. On contact, take cover". So the guys already know the area is dangerous and they are ready to drop down.

I seem to remember it used to work like that some years ago... Yes, that's what (sometimes) happens. But I think troops should notice getting shot at, no matter if they spot the shooter or not.

To me it seems that as long as the hunting troops don't directly spot any enemy units, they can keep hunting. If their suppression meter gets full, they drop down though. But that can take a lot of incoming fire.

Currently, infantry on a "hunt" order will continue moving, despite taking bursts of small-arms fire. I think it would be nice if they dropped down and went prone in that situation.

Maybe the HE shell wouldn't even need to explode? It's 45 kilos at 853 m/s... Not sure if the shell would just shatter on impact, but the force of the blow might even flip over an enemy tank or knock off the turret?

This, basically. Once while playing a scenario, I came up against a Sherman Jumbo. I quickly realised my Panther couldn't kill it from the front, but I thought ok, if I keep firing, soon I can knock out its gun at least. Shouldn't be a problem, right? Happens all the time. I spent the whole full ammo load of the Panther, but of course the damn Sherman stayed fully operational. Meanwhile, my own Tiger II... Murphy always gets the last laugh.

Just for the sake of critical thinking: how to populate the select menu with all the arrays of available items? There is zero guarantee that even two of the selected vehicles have the same ammo stored up/left. If there's a squad who doesn't have a bazooka available in their truck, then too bad. That squad doesn't get it. The others do. It's a bit like when you select a platoon and order them to move 'fast', but one of the squads is exhausted. Then that squad can't move fast; it gets a 'move' order instead. The rest of the platoon moves fast.

Actually, in this case, the car manufacturer has come out and said 'yes, actually our cars are not meant to drive themselves off a cliff'. So they will fix that issue and that's what we are patiently waiting for. Meanwhile, it's still fun to drive the car in places where there are no cliffs. There ARE issues with 4.0. But even I don't think they make the game unplayable - and I'm one of the worst nitpickers on this forum.

But what would they acquire? Expounding on your idea if I get your overall perspective is you’d have some kind of drop down. Select what you want and then close with dismount. Is that what you ate thinking? I do like the idea of selecting from a list kind of showing 2 panels. One of what is in vehicle and the other what my squad has and being able to move stuff in either direction. Then once I have moved everything I want close and dismount. Just like we can select a bunch of squads and then give them all a move order at the same time, maybe they could just make it so that we can select several squads at the same time, and then go through the acquire process once, but all squads grab the same ammo selections from their individual vehicle. That would be a nice, simple solution. Cuts the amount of clicks by about two thirds and still gives control of who gets what, when needed. Example: 1. Platoon is mounted in halftracks or trucks. 2. Player doubleclicks squad, the whole platoon is highlighted. 3. Player clicks "acquire" and sees a list of all the ammo in all the relevant vehicles. Then selects 1000 rounds of rifle ammo 4. All squads selected grab 1000 rounds if available. The ammo menu stays open. 5. Player clicks acquire Panzerfaust 60, then 100 6. The relevant squads pick up their PZF 60 and 100 7. Player clicks acquire Panzerscreck, then 8 rockets. 8. Squad 1 and 2 grab that weapon. Squad 3 doesn't have any available. Squad 1 for some reason has 10 rockets available. Takes 8 rockets, leaving 2 in the halftrack. Squad 2 only has 6 available in their halftrack, so they take them all. A couple of issues with my idea: Player has to de-select HQ team and other small teams first, or they will also try to get 1000 rounds of rifle ammo. What to do when two teams/squads are in the same vehicle? Both will try to get 1000 rounds. If not enough are available, they will share equally. Two teams in one vehicle, only one bazooka. Who gets it? Random. If it matters, in those cases, the player can still allocate manually.

It would go more like this: Driver, forward. Driver, halt. Gunner, target tank at one o'clock. Gunner, fire! Driver reverse! I like how you said basically the same thing but with more bulletpoints. I like those.

Another simpler way might be to just pay attention to what happens to bullets as they hit a half demolished wall. Do some of them bounce off, like they do against an intact wall? If so, that would be at least an indication that there's probably some protection offered. Could be contrasted to what happens when you remove a wall completely in the editor.

About the acquire command, I often find it a lot of click-work when using armoured infantry - each squad must be told to pick up 1000 bullets for the MG, 200 for the SMG, maybe some extra for the MP44, a Panzerfaust or Bazooka.. the next squad. And next squad. Especially with larger scenarios several times, it would be nice to have some kind of "grab ammo and dismount all" option. Or it could be built into the existing "dismount" button. So if you pressed that during setup, they would grab ammo, but if you manually moved the squad out of its halftrack, they would leave the ammo behind. Something like that.

All soldiers in war zones make split-second decisions all the time. If a tank commander wants the tank to go into hull-down, fire one shot and then reverse, that's what he will order the driver and gunner to do. He wouldn't tell the driver to go forward, wait exactly 10 seconds, then reverse. And yes, I play WeGo exclusively. The problem with the all-knowing player is not a timing/micromanagement problem but rather a perfect situational awareness/coordination problem.

One more thing that nobody mentioned yet: The quality of the singleplayer campaigns. CMBN base game comes with Road to Montebourg, which I highly recommend (the version that comes with the game is quite easy, but I sure didn't feel it was easy when I just started out!) Then once you complete that, you can download an updated version that makes it more challenging. If you get the Commonwealth expansion, there's the Scottish Corridor campaign which is also very good (and not easy). The CMBN German campaigns were not bad I guess, but I hardly even remember them. CMFB comes with the Kampfgruppe Peiper campaign which is also very good, and made me learn a lot about this part of the war, because I kept looking up details on the web as I went along. The Allied campaign of CMFB ('Knock 'em All Down') is also worth playing, but didn't leave as much of an impression. It's tough city fighting and I kept getting frustrated with the way flamethrowers don't really work as the assault weapons they should be. But that's another story. I don't know how the campaigns of the other games are. In the end, go with the setting that interests you the most, then I'm sure you'll have a blast.

I never meant to say that you can control all units better in real-time. I just gave a list of examples of some basic tactical things that are possible in RT and not (or only with a lot of extra click-work) in WeGo...

I think you are contradicting yourself a bit here. You're making a case that we obsess over having more control because of our egos. But then: The problem is that we actually can't trust our computer troops to do a lot of this stuff. So we need to micromanage them to make them do basic tactical things. Combat Mission is very heavy on the micromanagement already, and I think at least some of it could be solved by giving the player better interface tools... Not just adding more orders, but making it more user friendly. For example, simply ordering a tank to fire on three buildings, instead of having to program in a sequence of short movements back and forth, dialling in short target orders on the various generated waypoints.