Bulletpoint

I don't think they had the means to just call up the artillery and say "fire at grid coordinate XX.XX.XX.XX" and it would come in on target. If they had, there would be no need for the spotter to observe and call for adjustments.

I think they are trying to make artillery weaker in any way they can, to prevent it from dominating the battlefield too much. For example, it often would be great to be able to pause an ongoing fire mission, then restart it later without starting over. Or the simple option "repeat last fire mission". But all those tricks would make it extremely unbalanced, especially against a human opponent. It would turn into an artillery shooting match. My personal take on it is that I would prefer to have each shell more realistically powerful, some better options for fire zones (square zones for example), but at the same time that availability and accuracy of artillery be reduced.

Basically if I understand you right, you want to call down the fire on a location in front of the enemy, and then tell the gunners to shift the fire, say, 100 metres north, into the area where you have no LOS?

Might not be exactly what you're asking for, but I think that if you give a fire order to a buttoned halftrack, the gunner will man the gun and start shooting, while the passengers will stay seated.

Not just halftracks. All vehicle crew are extremely vulnerable if they unbutton. It's related to the other evergreen discussion here on the forum, about the vulnerability of tank commanders. Your theory about an accuracy bonus against unbuttoned crew is very interesting, would like to see it elaborated further by testing.

That's unfortunately not anything I can help with, I was just inspired by what @Raptorx7 said about there hardly being any scenarios with the M8.

Hmm... now I feel like going and designing a scenario that uses the M8

Sometimes, high accuracy means less kills. I've had a sniper shooting at a squad from 100 metres for many turns without causing casualties. Turned out his targets were slightly elevated and behind a low wall, and because of the high accuracy of the sniper, every single shot was hitting centre of body mass, which in this case was covered by the wall. A less accurate shooter would have missed a couple of shots so that the bullet went a bit high and would have found its mark. Haven't looked at your savegame about the halftrack, but maybe the same thing is happening there.

As I understand it, the reason why an SSD doesn't speed up load times is that each map is saved in a very basic format, and then compiled by your CPU when the game loads. For this reason, loading and saving maps in the editor is super quick (instantaneous), but when you then load the map in the game, your computer has to do a pre-check of all the lines of sight etc, which is what takes time because the game is not able to use your additional CPU cores. Checking LOS is a task that would benefit immensely from parallel computing (because if you have 4 cores, core 1 can check LOS from square 1 to 2, while core 2 checks from 3 to 4, etc.)

That's the regular effect of the light level increasing. In sunset missions you'll get the opposite effect.

It was in response to the test made by @Heirloom_Tomato:

Also, if the AI won't shoot at buttoned halftracks, then you are in some way exploiting the limits of the AI. Against a human opponent it will be another story..

Yeah but it depends on what exactly you're testing. If you're testing accuracy, setting troops to elite will make them aim much better than regular troops, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of the test. If you're testing whether doing aggressive halftrack attacks are viable in general, it's also better to use regular troops, because fanatics won't be suppressed, and suppression is part of the supposed halftrack attack plan..

I don't think the game allows weather conditions to change during gameplay, even when lots of time pass. I recommend that you report your findings to Battlefront through their official helpdesk, and provide them with a savegame and a description of the issue. Then they will take a look at it and pass it on if it's confirmed to be a bug.

Hello @Heirloom_Tomato, thanks a lot for testing, but don't you think testing with elite +2 fanatic troops could skew test results? I'd say the test would be more representative of normal gameplay if they were regulars with zero soft factors.

That says a lot about trenches in this game...

Interesting how many people seem to think the Germans were either superhuman soldiers or complete suicidal fools. I guess that's what happens to those who are defeated in war, they fade into history as carricatures... My question was earnest though - surely there must be some historical accounts of how these aggressive halftrack tactics were trained, tried, and then the results?

No, actually just the opposite. I just gave an example of how the actual FPS numbers are better with 'V-sync half refresh rate' on than when it's off. And these better numbers are also reflected in my subjective feeling of gameplay smoothness. Why is the game doing all that in the orders phase, while the game is paused? It should do that when I hit end turn. Whatever holds back CM performance is probably not the actual simulation.

Surely there must exist some diary or memoirs of a German soldier that can shed light on how these vehicles were actually used in battle?

Where are those numbers from? Wikipedia has this info, for what it's worth: "With regards to penetration, the M2 ball can penetrate 0.4 in (10.16 mm) of mild steel at 100 yards (91 m), and 0.3 in (7.62 mm) at 200 yards (180 m). M2 AP can penetrate 0.42 in (10.67 mm) of armor steel at 100 yards (91 m)"

Lots of things happen in war that are not supposed to happen. You're not supposed to let enemy infantry get close to your Panther Tank either, yet it has close defense grenade launchers. Battlefront coded that, even though if enemy gets that close, you should probably change your tactics. You're not supposed to drive your German halftrack into an ambush, but if you do, I think it would be nice if the soldiers reacted in a realistic way and ducked down. That has nothing to do with Übermensh propaganda, and I don't think it's an unreasonable request to have aded to an otherwise very detailed and realistic game...

It's not even really about the FPS (frames per second) number. It's more about CM feeling choppy and laggish, stuttering even when my FPS are reasonable. I have about 30-35 FPS usually, which should be enough, but it just feels really unsmooth, and I'm not sure why. I guess because the framerate fluctuates wildly? Sometimes I will select a unit and then try to scroll to a place to target, and the game will have a "seizure" for half a second where it locks up and then the camera will end up in some other place than i intended. It doesn't lose me any battles, but it's a nuisance, which is a nice way to say it's a pain in the family friendly neck. In other news, I did some tests today, and it seems setting adaptive v-sync (half refresh rate) actually boosts FPS, which in theory it shouldn't! If I disable that, I go from 35 FPS to around 28. Which is really bizarre, as that setting is only meant to cap FPS to half the refresh rate of the monitor. It is not supposed to boost the FPS. In theory, if your game runs at 28 FPS without adaptive V-sync, it should also run at 28 FPS with v-sync on, because it doesn't hit the ceiling of 30FPS (if you're using a 60 Hz monitor). I'm completely confused by this. The game definitely plays smoother with adaptive V-sync - half refresh rate on. But it's still not what I would call decent performance when I compare graphics to hardware.

They are a small company, with very few (maybe just one?) programmer. I'm sure they're really clever people, but it could be they just don't have the employees in-house to optimise the engine properly, and lack the money needed to hire someone to sit down and spend the time needed to track down the performance sinks and eliminate them.

Depends on personality and expectations as well. CM runs sluggish but playable on low end hardware, and slightly less sluggish and a bit more playable on high end hardware. When I played on a weak laptop, I was happy with the performance compared to my hardware. Now, not so much, even though my game performance did increase somewhat after upgrading.

From what I've read on this forum, nobody gets good performance in CM on high detail levels, even on massively powerful computers. I have a laptop with a GPU much stronger than yours - at least in theory. But I get unsatisfactory performance as well, and not even on maxed out detail levels. So it's likely to be a CPU problem. I know they keep saying performance is limited because of "massive amounts of calculations" being done, but really.. those calculations are made in a couple of seconds when you click end turn. There's no reason for the game to do the fire, movement and spotting calculations while the game is in the orders mode, or when paused. Yet the game still lags a lot. Though I very much enjoy the game for what it is, I'm convinced that it suffers from highly unoptimal coding, like a fast car stuck in the first gear.