Bulletpoint

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.

Your answer is surprising, because in my recent game, I thought I was being very sneaky with my tanks that just arrived as reinforcements. But then my opponent tells me on game chat "Oh it seems like you just got 3-4 tanks". I'm pretty sure I was way more than 230 metres away from him, and for sure I was out of LOS as there was a slope on the map. Thanks for answering though. I'm disappointed my moving around on SLOW speed made no difference. I thought that tank engines in real life made more noise when they work harder.

I had a similar, but different, situation in my recent H2H game. Knowing a Panther had moved out of cover, I sent a bazooka team to crawl up along a hedge to hit it in the rear. Once they arrived, they spotted the tank, 50 metres away... the bazooka guy started aiming... then suddenly the tank disappeared and the guy with the bazooka went back to "spotting". Meanwhile, the Panther was starting to turn around, I saw this by another team that had a visual on it. After maybe 4-5 important seconds, the tank had almost completed turning, then the bazooka guy saw it again. He fired twice but it was useless now that the tank had turned. So, it was like your situation, a very close by tank disappears, even for a team of 4 infantry, so it's not just a matter of limited situational awareness for tanks.

When I move my tanks, I don't want my enemy to hear them and get sound contacts. I think I once read that if I use SLOW, tanks make less noise, is that correct? What if I use MOVE, QUICK, or FAST, does noise go up with each new speed, or is it a case of SLOW = quiet and all other movement types = noisy? And is there any rule of thumb about how close to the enemy I can drive my tanks without being heard?

Just had a battle where my tank destroyer fired on a Panther, the shot bounced off, then artillery fell and my unit's LOS was cut off by the smoke and dust. The crew stopped aiming and went to "spotting". Then the Panther fired through the smoke and killed them all. This happened two times in a row, so I'm wondering if Panthers have some kind of infrared vision or if smoke/dust doesn't really block LOS but gives a random spotting penalty so you might lose LOF or not depending on chance? In the same game, enemy infantry opened fire on my unbuttoned tank destroyer through several puffs of heavy arty dust, and the tank destroyer returned fire immediately. So I'm starting to think dust from artillery simply doesn't work to block LOS, or at best it's very weak effect. How should I interpret it?

I'm a newbie to H2H games, so for me, everything about CMhelper and the process of doing a multiplayer game was new. However, what happened was that I set up CMhelper correctly, but it didn't work. I know it was set up correctly, because when I downloaded version 1.5 and set it up the exact same way, then it worked just fine. When it didn't work, I didn't know what to do. My opponent told me to set the second folder, I didn't actually want to. Because I read the note saying "second folder is optional", so I assumed it wouldn't need to be set. However, once I chose to set a second folder (but in fact selected the same single dropbox folder), then CMhelper sent the turn to my opponent. However, CMhelper is clever enough to realise that I selected the same folder as both incoming and outgoing, so it reset my choice, leaving the screen to select folders as it were: Just one folder, the dropbox one. I guess what's happening here is the same as you noticed a couple of times. CMhelper gets confused somehow. Probably because we had in fact aborted the game once and restarted it without playing, so there might have been some files left, even though I had chosen "end game" and deleted the files. Maybe 1.6.2 would work if I reinstalled it and then manually copied the files as you suggested. But I don't want to risk doing anything stupid while we have our game in progress. If it's not broken, don't fix it...

Maybe you could also write a few words about you as a player, your skill level, what kind of scenarios you like to play, what sides you like to play, etc..

I only tried setting a second folder because the program didn't work with only one. I asked my opponent about it and he told me to set the second folder. So I did that, and CMhelper immediately sent the turn to him, but next turn I had to do the same thing, etc. Now, with version 1.5, it works as designed, using only one dropbox folder for incoming and outgoing save files

I started out by using version 1.6.2, that's the version that didn't work. When I installed 1.5, it started working as it should, with just one inbound/outbound folder (the dropbox).

Brilliant, it works. Thanks.

The BattleFront promotional splash screen (picture of tank firing) is nice and all, but I would prefer just to go directly to the menu. Especially now that I started multiplayer and enter/exit the game all the time. Is this possible?