Bulletpoint

Nope, because I'm still on v.3.12 so my brens work fine In any case, it was a deployed MG42

I just played a battle where I deployed one MG in a keyholed building, covering an open field to the east and I put another MG in another building looking down a road towards the west. During setup, they had great LOS and were protected from enemy fire. But after about 5 minutes, I noticed both teams had shuffled around, moving the MG to another window without LOS. One of the teams had a covered arc set, the other hadn't. My whole defensive plan was based on those two fire lanes, so everything just fell apart. Worst bit was spotting a enemy whole platoon running across the open field in one big bunch, and I couldn't fire a shot. I must admit I rage-quit, but now I am wondering if there's anything I can possibly do to prevent this happening again? Why is it the TacAI decides to change location of the MG?

I think there might be a problem with your test. As far as I understand, the game doesn't analyse if there's enough space to flee, it simply sets a fallback waypoint some distance behind the unit. If there is no way for the unit to actually reach this waypoint, the unit stays put and doesn't move. So in your test, if the unit decides it wants to fall back 3 squares, it will do so because you gave it space, but if it feels like running back 4 squares, it won't move. In short, you should give them more like 10 squares of space behind them, and make sure there are gaps in the walls so that if a unit decides it wants to flee diagonally back into one of the other lanes, it has a way to do so.

Never said it was lucrative. But I bet the money we pay for a CM game would go a bit further in Eastern Europe too.

Maybe I should ask what the point of grazing fire really is? The wikipedia article is not very helpful. Is the point to make lots of bullets pass over a lot of ground, so that every potential prone enemy along the firing path will be suppressed? Or is it to defeat WW1-style of massed infantry charges because each bullet can go through several people?

This is interesting. Never thought of it before. Does that mean that MG fire from a second or third floor of a building will be less effective against targets on a reasonable flat area than if I set up my MG on the ground floor? And are we talking effects that are happening in reality, or do these things affect this game too? I usually always set up MGs as high as possible, to give them a bigger field of fire, but maybe I am missing out on this grazing fire thing...

No need to wonder for so many years, simply take a look at the manual, page 119: http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_flippingbook&book_id=19

Also the reverse is true. No matter how big tanks you are given, you can be sure the enemy will have guns big enough to take it out. Got a PzIV? The enemy will have Shermans. Got tigers? You'll be met with swarms of Fireflies. So basically it never really matters what tanks you have. But of course I understand the reasons why scenario designers make that choice. Not much fun having battles be complete walk-overs. I have the feeling that the next generation CM-like game will come out of the left field from some small, currently unknown game company, probably in Eastern Europe. It won't be perfect though. Things will never be perfect. But at least we will get to complain about new things

There was just a new version released, so the next one is probably years away at best. And the new versions add quite few substantial changes anyway, so it's still going to be pretty much the same if you feel burnt out now. I doubt we will ever see a Cm3x, because by the time they cover the whole war, the guys doing this will be in retirement. But try leaving the game for some time and then coming back to it. Or try playing against a human opponent if you haven't already. It really changes the game.

Yes, this is a big fundamental problem, not just with this game but with wargames in general. Many scenario designers try to give the defenders very good defensive terrain along the edges, to discourage the attacker from sticking too much to the map edge. Other designers block the edges completely, using rivers, forest, bocage, etc. I personally prefer the first option, as blocking often looks very obvious and gamey.

Great, happy to hear that.

Just to make sure, since there are two separate issues (firing smoke after HE & the out of range message), 4.0 lets you fire the smoke ammo using mortar targeting rules, even after all HE has been fired?

That thing only happens with off-board artillery support. This is an onboard mortar, which works differently. I definitely have smoke rounds left.

It's not fixed in 3.12, verified that a lot of times. Just yesterday I had a situation where my British mortar was happily lobbing shells at a contact in an orchard. When it ran out of HE, I tried to do a smoke mission to the same spot, but found there was no LOS. Just tested it and verified it again in another situation. Also, when targeting smoke, the LOS tool gives "target out of range" at all ranges apart from less than 20 metres, where it switches directly to saying "target too close". I prepared a savegame showing this problem. If anyone wants to take a look, the procedure is as follows: 1: open savegame. British mortar unit is shown with a target line to a point behind a slope. 2: press end turn two or three times. Mortar ammo is expended firing at targeted point. 3: select mortar unit and do a target smoke order, targeting the current target location. LOS tool displays 'Reverse slope - no aim point', and 'Out of range'. (at 205 metres range)

I think that might be because the charges used during a turn are subtracted at the very start of the turn. Works the same way with grenades. But I don't know if it's working as intended that 3 charges be spent for doing one blast command... I've never seen it happen.

Skål! I already had three big "Kellerbier", so if you take your turn now, there's a chance I might send an inebriated response and make a tactical mistake

It was just a joke

Actually I just tried this out in a casual game I'm playing VS the computer. I ordered a combined squad of two teams of engineers to blast a hole in a hedgerow, taking note that they had 6 charges before doing that. After the blast, they correctly had the expected 5 charges. So I could not reproduce the bug.

Has the British mortar bug been fixed in 4.0?

I just still don't really get how an armoured division would have fought in any aggressive way. In the game at least, the moment your tanks get into LOS of an enemy AT gun, they are toast. Armoured cars too. Halftracks even more. Usually they never see what hit them, and if they do get a spot on the enemy gun, they will fire one shot, it will miss, then the gun crew will duck down and the tank will promptly forget about that target. Hopefully it won't be too long before the next orders phase so I get a chance to do manual area fire. I don't understand how any armoured formation could have advanced in any assertive way when they could at any moment get wiped out by a couple of well-hiden AT guns. In the game, my armoured advances feel more like mine clearing. On my belly, proping slowly for enemy defences using infantry, then waiting patiently while I bring down mortar fire, or slowly flank the position, then creeping slowly forward with the tanks again, hoping I actually took out that gun. This approach works, but I sometimes wonder what the big deal about tanks was, given that they were so vulnerable. And BTW I don't mean to say there's anything wrong with the game in this regard... Just that I'm a bit puzzled why tanks are praised so much. They seem like "glass cannons". Maybe the main point of armoured formations (tanks&halftracked infantry) is just that they can advance while mostly disregarding enemy artillery?

Thanks for helping test this out. I would never have guessed it came down to the arty being onboard or offboard. They really should have some kind of "bugfixer medal badge" on this forum for people who spend their time testing stuff like this out. We all benefit when issues get found, flanked, and fixed.

I fully agree. It's like the landscape was created for the sole purpose of protecting the nazis. Maybe there was some truth to the old German war slogan "Gott mit uns"..

But your suggestion is good. Right now, we can add "points of interest" to the maps. would be nice to expand that feature so we could add "lines of interest".

We're all struggling with it to make maps realistic looking.. especially when re-creating real places. There seem to be two "schools" in CM mapmaking: Either you place everything where it was in real life, using the overlay, and then you get zigs in the zaggiest places.. or you choose to interpret the real map and squeeze it into the CM limits, changing the proportions in order to minimise the wriggles. My own Pierrefitte-en-Cinglais is an example of the latter approch, but both have their merits of course. Anyway, just musing. Didn't mean to go off topic.

Wasn't talking about your mod, but the one that makes the ping sound