Bulletpoint

I found a similar problem with Panther tanks. Sometimes, the front cover for the tracks disappears, it doesn't look to me like it's to represent a historical variant, more like a bit of the graphics is missing.

Yes, it's an issue that's been raised a couple of times. Opinions differ, but I agree with you that repeated direct hits from 75-105mm artillery should be able to destroy wooden bunkers. By the way, I suppose you are currently at the mission "Hell in the Hedgerows"?

Yes maybe there's something about the bocage that causes more than just tactical problems...

I only have CMBN, but I have updated to the latest version of the engine. Maybe there's an issue with the game's models and assets - and in later game they have started to optimise their stuff more?

Not to be a naysayer, but amphibious vehicles would be way far down on my personal list. There are so many other things I would hope to see them add to the game instead. Also, if you want to have river crossings, wouldn't it be possible to just tile the whole river with "ford" tiles? Then it would be crossable to both vehicles and infantry. Same goes for D-day scenarios, though strangely I never saw any scenarios that did this, so maybe there's a technical problem with it?

I got a very powerful laptop, an Asus G751 with the 980M GPU. Bought it second hand, so actually got it for around half price - if not it would have been too expensive for me, those things are even more pricey over here than in the US. It plays modern games perfectly with all details enabled, but it doesn't do too well with CM unfortunately. It's playable but a bit laggy, framerates fluctuate a lot and the game generally feel a bit sluggish. I've been posting about it here on the forum, and lots of people with powerful computers have the same problem. I think there's some code problem that holds back the performance, so probably you would get basically the same performance as me with your 960M. This is just my guess though.

I find that depends on how exhausted they actually are. The text just says 'exhausted' after you tire the guys enough, but if you then continue to make them crawl about, the underlying number seems to keep going down. Eventually it will take ages to recover, but if they just reached the point where the text flipped from 'fatigued' to 'exhausted', they will quite quickly go back to 'fatigued' if you let them sit for a minute or two.

Good luck with it. I researched a lot about gaming laptops before finally buying mine - so if you go for the 960m + UHD, I'd appreciate if you would write a bit about how it runs CM

I think this should be somewhat dependent on experience level and motivation. It must be hard to not try to help your wounded buddy, even if you're ordered to hide. Reminds me of that old Viet Nam movie where they go one by one into the sniper's field of fire to help those that already got hit there. Also, wounded buddies should be harder to resist helping than dead ones.

It's well able to support UHD for regular windows use, but in games it's a different story. UHD needs to calculate 4 times the pixels. All reviews I've read of the 960m says that it's not able to do it, and that you will need to game in 1920x1080 anyway. Then you might get scaling problems. Theoretically, it should scale without any blurring (because UHD is exactly twice the resolution), but I've read people on forums saying it's a different story in reality than in theory...

With that GPU, I would say try before you buy. The 960m is a decent card, but not really meant for more than 1080p resolution. But then again I think the CM engine is not so hard on the GPU. It has other bottlenecks. If you could bring the laptop to a friend's house and hook it up to an UHD screen for some time, that would help deciding. But I am sure you already thought of that...

I wonder if it was deliberately programmed to sometimes give those error codes during peacetime training exercises, to make sure you still knew how to do the math yourselves?

Thanks Phil, I'll remember that if CMhelper causes trouble again. But I'll just stick to 1.5 for now. Not sure what 1.6.2 brings anyway, probably it just recognises the newer games such as Black Sea (which I don't have).

Maybe I read it in the manual then. I knew I had seen it somewhere. Much appreciated that you pass it on. It would (arguably) be more realistic to have slow moving armour be more stealthy, and also it would create new gameplay choices. Do you go slow to avoid detection, or full throttle to get a jump on the enemy?

Thank you. Spitzenklasse.

This.

The shadows seem to render differently too on Nvidia compared to AMD, if I'm not mistaken. On the AMD graphics, shadows were more pin-like, Nvidia shows them more blocky (if that description makes sense to anybody..)

I get fps problems at ground level too, especially looking down the length of a map. Doesn't even need to be all that big of a map really. My old crummy laptop was using AMD tech, the new one is based on Nvidia graphics tech. Maybe CM works better on the AMD machines ?

I understand where you're coming from, but I was just trying to figure out possible reasons why the game engine might give the result in this case. It might be the tree somehow interfering, even though it wouldn't in real life.

Not if spotting is based on chance with modifiers. So each tank would have a chance to spot the other tank, based on distance, visibility, experience, etc. and that chance would then be cut by maybe 30 pct by the tree. The Sherman got lucky with its "dice roll". I don't know if this is the way the game actually works though. It's just me doing my best to explain your situation and many similar situations that I have been in. Just recently I wrote on this forum about a tank battle where dust suddenly blocked Line of Sight, my tank lost visual and stopped firing, the other tank kept shooting and killed my guys. So smoke/dust seems to not be a yes/no spotting switch, more like a modifier.

You might be on to something. Because units get shocked when their comrades die - even if they are on the other side of the map and outside of contact, they immediately get a morale condition hit). Scratch that, Just checked the video and the crew are cool as cucumbers. I now think it has to do with the tree in front. Probably all tanks behind a tree get some kind of "hide bonus", even though it seems ridiculous when the leaves don't go down to ground level.

I'm wondering if the burning tank has anything to do with this. We as players see the smoke going straight up and not obscuring anything, but maybe the underlying game code treats the area immediately around the tank as being a bit smoked up? Just a guess.

Well, thank you for sharing your experience. They say one fool can ask more than ten wise men can answer. On this forum, I'm doing a lot of asking, so I'm always happy to get good answers

Good point, and very important one. In the distance, even the biggest tank in the world would just make a background noise that would be impossible to pinpoint. You might be able to say "I think there's armour coming from the east", but not say "there's some heavy tank lurking behind that farmhouse", which is what we get with the CM contact icons.

It's not me you replied to, but I'd like to chime in... I used to play CM on a really weak laptop, weak CPU, weak GPU, lack of system RAM, lack of video memory.. and I found that despite of all that, I could still play CM, and while it was choppy, it was playable on "balanced" settings. So, I was happy. But I also assumed that if my crappy laptop could do that, then upgrading to a new powerful gaming computer would hit it out of the park, so to speak. Finally I would be able to crank up the graphics and enjoy smooth gameplay. But now after I finally bought that new computer, I find that performance is not all that much better than on the weak laptop, despite the new PC being massively more powerful. It IS running better now, but it seems like marginal gains. Actually I thought it must be my PC that has a technical problem, or there must be some magic setting that I forgot to activate, but then I read on the forum that I'm not alone in having these issues. And at the end of the day, it does impact my purchasing decisions. I'm still on CMBN and was looking forward to move on to Commonwealth or Red Thunder. Have been holding off on those because I hear they have many big battles, and I wanted to have a computer that could handle that before jumping in. Now I'm not so sure. Please don't take it as a tantrum to not buy anything unless you cater to my preferences, I just thought you might like to get some feedback from a player who spent countless hours playing your game, started designing scenarios, and even heavily based his decision to buy a new computer on getting more fun out of your game.