Bulletpoint

Hello everybody, I would like to play some more PBEM matches, and to get things moving at a nice pace, I'm primarily looking for people in my own time zone - Europe. About myself, well, I am far from a master at this game, but I would say I am a decent player, with a couple of years of experience with the single player mode, and around 5 PBEM matches so far. I prefer playing defense, as that is what I have the least experience with and would like to practice. I can play both US and Germans, but I have no expansion packs yet, so just scenarios for the core game please. Something small to medium sized would be nice. Mostly I like the infantry tactics with a bit of support, not too many tanks. Generally I prefer playing scenarios (not quick battles), and I prefer scenarios that are about attacking and defending, as they seem more realistic to me than meeting engagements. I like that both sides have different strengths and weaknesses, and I like to play the cards I'm dealt, rather than "cherry picking" my troops. About my opponent, I am looking for someone with a mature attitude, who has an interest in tactics and history, rather than only seeing the game as a game. But yes, it is also a game, and I don't expect that anyone stick rigidly to any specific real-life doctrine. Most of the gameplay would be on weekends, when I can dedicate some hours to sending turns back and forth. Well, if this matches what you're looking for, let me know, and maybe we can start up a game...

Oh, it should be quite easy to get fire superiority to dominate the ford. You have all the aces on hand: perfect cover for a base of fire, numerical superiority, fast-firing Garand rifles (devastating at the less than 100 metre distances you're engaging at in this mission)... there's no way the Germans can keep you off that ford. Remember that though there are many potential hiding places for Germans, you only have to pay attention to those that have line of fire to the ford. And those locations are very few, apart from the first line of hedgerows, which are no threat, since you can dominate them from your side.

Wow, I never thought I would see anyone complain that this series develops too fast As far as I can count, the "new CMx2 engine" is now nine years old... (with some tweaks and updates along the way)

Is it a G-sync screen? If so, I think there's another setting where you need to set monitor tech to "fixed refresh" before the V-sync option becomes available.

I think what many people really want is to be able to see the contours of the map better.

I just had the exact same problem in my recent game. A unit that had a covered arc behind a hedgerow was immediately spotted and destroyed. Another unit that was hiding with a covered arc did not unhide, even as the enemy spent a lot of time crossing a ford less than 40 metres away. The hiding unit got clear sound contacts for a long time duration but did not react. The enemy just ran straight up to their position and grenaded them.

I fully agree with you - I don't make or play "tabletop" maps either, but I thought I would try to help the guy do what he likes anyway.

By now, finally, people can MAKE it flat

You can flatten any map very quickly. Just load up the map in the editor, then go into elevation controls and choose the tool to set elevation directly (it defaults to 20 metres I think). Then choose the largest "brush" to work with, and you can paint the whole map in no time. Flat as a pancake.

I fully agree with you, I just wanted to give you a brief overview of the previous discussions about the performance issues. My view is that it has to do with the number of polygons being rendered, and that there's a CPU bottleneck somewhere that makes the computer work harder, not smarter. Like a general that has to give personal orders to each and every soldier under his command. But we won't know the truth unless we hear from one of the engine programmers (if there are more than one).

Well that's the beauty of scenario design... players will invariably play it the 'wrong way' The German defense zone is quite big, especially on the flanks. Due to the landscape, it's my conclusion that there's no way the Germans can defend the hedgerows close to the river, since they are in full view of hedgerows on the other bank, at around 70-80m distance. The US player can approach his hedgerows through covered approaches, so it's easy for him to bring all his guns to bear. Since the US player has a 3-to-1 advantage and since the US rifles beat the German ones at close range, there's no way to achieve fire superiority in that setup. Ambushing with covered arcs doesn't work either, as units must be actively hiding to avoid detection, which means they won't act even when the enemy walks straight up to them. Learning this lesson cost me half my force. So, my conclusion was to fall back to set up a defense further back, where there's a reverse slope situation on the right and light forest to the left. Anyway, I can ramble about my tactics till the cows come home, but my point was that the briefing tells me to defend the high ground, not the ford. It is implied that defending the high ground will indirectly maintain control of the ford. So that's what I did...

That's a good point. It's one of the scenarios included with the game, and so probably was one of the very first games made with the CM2 engine. In any case, I'm not really trying to call the designer out, just wanted to highlight the issue. Both players felt pretty sheepish after spending a tense evening waiting for an attack that never came.. though certainly very realistic, it wasn't the best possible use of our time

So, I spent yesterday evening doing a PBEM. I was defending the high ground of the scenario 'Platoon Patrol', but nothing happened. 40 turns went by and the evening passed. When finally the game ended, I realised the Germans have different objectives than the Americans. My opponent had been defending his objective down at the river ford, which doesn't appear on my map or in my briefing, and I had been sitting on the high ground objective, which doesn't appear as an objective to my opponent. So, what's the morale? Scenario designers, please make sure both players see all objectives.

Lots of people have asked the same question, including myself. You might try searching around for many other CM performance threads, but the bottom line basically seems to be that while lots of people are frustrated with it, nobody knows for sure why it's running so slowly. There's a group on the forum who believes it's because CM does a lot of calculation work behind the scenes, others argue that the game engine is poorly optimised.

On a related note, did they fix bushes and branches blocking AP-shells?

For a moment I thought that guy was checking the water cooling in his computer On a serious note, it looks like he might be sitting on the floor or on a box, not on the benches in any case. All photos I've seen indicate that eye level was at the edge of the armour plate.

Try setting this to 1. I find it helps decrease the "floatiness" when panning the camera. But still some remains when using 1.

Vehicles and troops only look the same when you drop the camera to ground level and very close. Troops and vehicles that are farther from the camera will be low detail, and also the "blur line" in fields and crops moves closer to the camera when using low detail settings. No such thing as a free lunch unfortunately..

It sounds a lot like the bug I reported about the M8 scout car (and that bug was just fixed in the latest patch). If you have a savegame where internal StuG crew get killed without a penetration message, I recommend that you open a support ticket and upload the file, with a note about what happens, where it happens, and exactly at what time.

Does the game show a "penetration" message when the StuG crew members get hit? If not, then that to me would seem like a bug.

It was brought up before, check out this thread:

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Also, there's a weird "floatiness" when I use the right mouse button to look around. This floating is like a delay so that the view change is always trailing behind the mouse movements, and it happens even on tiny maps with all detail set to minimum and very high FPS. So it's not directly related to game performance. I wish I could find out what causes it... maybe some obscure setting somewhere in drivers, but I think I tried everything..

I've been doing some close looks at the game, trying to figure out what might be holding back performance. This list is just my findings, for what they are worth, I'm no expert and not trying to teach BattleFront to "suck eggs" The soldier models seem like they are well optimised, they don't use an excessive amount of polygons compared to the detail, as far as I can see. The tank models also mostly seem like they are sensibly designed, apart from having modeled interiors (but I love that!). Some polygons could be saved by removing the modeled interiors, at least for lower detail levels. The Sherman tank is using a huge amount of polygons for its rails over the engine. Each of these rails is fully modelled in 3D, which gives the effect of being able to peer through them into the engine. I love detail, but this part could be replaced by a texture with transparent slits to save polygons, at least on less than the highest detail settings. Trees are composed of many planes of polygons with leaf textures. They scale down some of the detail with distance, so that seems ok to me. Hedgerows however seem like a big performance killer, as they are also made from many polygons with leaf textures, but they don't seem to scale at all with distance. At least not in my testing. Making lower detail versions to use for distant hedgerows might help performance. Generally, it doesn't seem to me like there are too many polygons in the game for even modern mid-range GPUs to handle. But if the CPU is involved too much in the render process, it could be bottlenecking performance, if the processor has to manually tell the GPU what to do for each and every polygon, instead of sending "batches". Also, it could be that the engine might be optimised to better "cull" polygons that are hidden behind other polygons, so they don't need to be rendered.

I'm going to file an official bug report about it. Then at least it gets to their attention and they can decide what to do about it.