Bulletpoint

Thanks, interesting. Unfortunately I never saw mentioned what the effect of the bombardment actually was - were any of the concrete bunkers actually destroyed, or did the bombs and shells just make lots of holes in the ground? Current photos show various bunkers that seem to have survived (or the tidy intact foundations - I assume they were neatly dismantled later) but maybe there were a couple more that were blown to bits and therefore are no longer visible?

Yes.

But the good thing about olympic standard swimming pools is that both athletes and the rest of us can enjoy swimming there

Well snicker if you want, but all the elements are already there. A H2H campaign would just be a series of subsequent H2H battles, with the scenario data drawn from the campaign file, and force preservation carried over for both players. The code to stitch these existing features together would not write itself, but most of it would be copy/paste from existing code.

That's not because of the AI, but because of the very intelligent human scenario designer... Which is the reason I love playing campaigns too. Not quick battles against the computer, where the lack of intelligence becomes extremely obvious.

It's a great idea and would require very little programming by Battlefront - but it would require whole new campaigns, as the current ones are all balanced VS the very incapable AI.

Yeah I sometimes played soldier back then too... when I was not potty training

Those 44% are H2H Quick Battles? I was talking about quick battles as a means of rapidly setting up a fight VS the computer - a game mode I personally find completely useless. QBs against a human opponent are more interesting of course, but still I find them to be too much of a "cage fight".

Is there any evidence of this? I'd think the opposite is true, and that longtime players avoid QBs. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't understand how randomly generated quick battles can offer any challenge to experienced players? But scenarios certainly can. Especially the ones built for replayablility with varied AI setup plans. I'm currently replaying Scottish Corridor, and I'm delighted (and frustrated) every time the enemy is not where I thought they would be...

I guess I didn't make my point clear - the point is not that it's a historical place from WW2, or a unique training village. My point was that it visually looks like something out of this game. The copy/paste buildings sitting on top of the grass like boxes, the high walls and the low walls intersecting at 45 degree angles, etc.

"Villagers were given a few weeks' notice to pack their bags and leave before the community was abandoned in December 1943. It was needed by the army to provide an exercise area for US troops preparing to invade Europe." http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-wiltshire-37144240 Could be fun to recreate this village as a training mission

I think it's not just the sharpshooters that especially target AT gun crews - those are bullet magnets for all infantry.

You might want to post this on the other forums too, if the group is for the CM games in general, not just CMFB...?

No problems, Ithikial told me you were off to Poland and would get back soon, so I'll just be patient till then.

Thanks, I'll PM Ithikial then.

I'd like to get in contact with Bootie, because I need an author log-in for his site the Prooving Grounds. I have a H2H scenario I'm dying to upload and get some final player feedback on, before I propose it for Scenario of the Month. But the good Bootie doesn't reply to emails or direct messages, so does anyone know if he's on vacation or something?

It could work a bit like the medic AI decision? The troops will generally only start doing medic aid when they are not suppressed and there's no enemy in sight. The guys could just have another check added: "Am I under fire? No. Do I see any enemy contacts? No. Do I see any buddies needing aid? No. Then should I maybe top up my ammo? Yes."

Apparently the most powerful Swedish grenades don't come with a pin included

That's only true when playing quick battles against the computer, which, in my opinion, is a waste of time. I'm talking about playing scenarios.

Minutiae

I think people focus too much on main battle tanks and tend to forget that there were huge numbers of lightly armoured vehicles fighting too, not just tanks. Without anti-tank rifles, those light tanks and armoured cars would have be able to operate much more freely and dominate infantry much more.

Actually trees protect quite well against artillery in this game. Because even though the trees correctly make bursts more dangerous by moving point of detonation up above ground level, either the trunks block many of the LOS checks to individual troops, or there's simply a protection bonus for being in wooded squares that more than makes up for the tree burst effect. At least with 60mm mortars and smaller bombs. But I've also seen a 150mm shell burst in a small tree directly above one of my scout teams. One man was lightly wounded.

I think this is pretty much how the Allies won the war. As long as you have tanks, mortars, and artillery, and plenty of time, that's the rational way to fight. However, I personally like infantry centric battles, and I find I've slowly come to learn when I need to micromanage, and when I can be more loose with the orders. Usually what I do is that I will have some scout teams run forward and detect safe routes of advance, and I will then loosely move platoons up along those routes. When I detect enemy presence, I will then form up the platoons (again, in a loose way), and move them closer. Then before real contact, I will start splitting squads and consider the finer points of the terrain. I very rarely play battallion+ sized battles.

In the scenario I'm currently designing, I set the Germans to "typical" EQ level, and the first 2 times I playtested, they got the usual MG42s, rifles, and MP40s. But in the latest playtest, I noticed all the squads suddenly have STG44s instead of the MP40s. So it seems like there's a small chance to have better equipment, but it's not on a per squad basis - it's the entire formation that either gets it or doesn't. Their amount of grenades etc seems the same though.