Bulletpoint

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.

Soldiers in the open often survive getting shot, because they have a bonus from terrain. I have a savegame that shows a soldier getting about 10 bullets straight through his body at close range, without any damage. But the halftrack gunners seem to get no cover bonus from their halftracks. And they are unable to duck down behind the cover like soldiers in the open can do behind walls and hedgerows.

If halftracks were always left behind before closing with the enemy in real life, BattleFront could have saved themselves a lot of time by not modeling them in the game. It's a bit sad to see all those vehicles just sitting around the starting line, wasting CPU cycles for nothing. Their included ammo could be automatically distributed among the squads.

The lesson is ... always be careful when you take beer from Germans.

It just seems to me they do it much less now than they used to.. so it's either been tweaked or I suffer from wishful thinking. Or maybe I just suffer from Murphy's law in that when I want to use it to my own advantage, my schrek teams refuse to fire, instead whipping out a pistol.

It can't target it directly by the target command, it needs to go through a spotter and the fire support menu.

I really recommend reporting any bugs you guys find directly to Battlefront through their official help desk. They do respond and it's the best way to make sure it gets to their attention. One of the bugs I reported was just fixed in the 3.12 patch. I long shied away from reporting bugs through the help desk because I thought it would be a lot of trouble, but it's really not that hard once you sit down and dig up your old help desk password. The more people reporting a particular bug, the bigger chance it will get fixed. Always remember to add a save game with the bug report if you can.

Not complaining at all, just interested in knowing more to see how it should affect my tactics

So basically it has nothing to do with HE then? If terrain cover values were generally increased against bullets, that could have big effects on gameplay...

Yeah but I'm talking about how it works in the game. Actually just tonight I destroyed an M8 with fire from a MG42, firing from the side at about 100m range. The crew bailed out after about 30 seconds when the commander was killed, then I kept shooting for a couple of minutes before it caught fire. I'm still on v3.11

I'm surprised by this. Shouldn't rocky terrain cause more casualties from high explosives? As all the rocks and pebbles would be thrown out like shrapnel?

Is that when shooting at the side, and does it say "Penetration"? Because the bug I reported was the crew inside the vehicle getting hit when shot from the front, with the commander unbuttoned.

Seems like they fixed the bug I reported about the M8 scout car - very happy to see that

The Eastern Front Bunny

Heck, aim for the medals

Trying to answer my own question, I found this. Not sure if it's reliable, but it says the grenade would self-arm after 3 metres of flight, so could be shot out through foliage but would detonate on impact afterwards. http://www.bergflak.com/psammo.html