Bulletpoint

One thing that can for sure make me reload is trying to position a tank close to a hedge, only to click on the far side of the hedge by mistake - as vehicles don't "snap to grid", this means the tank is now heading on a long detour straight into enemy fire. Oh, or when a squad refuses to assault a house by the back door, but instead run all the way around the building and get decimated in the process...

I think that what I really enjoy about WeGo is that it forces me to think ahead and issue commands that will gain ground but at the same time will be reasonably safe.. that is a difficult compromise every turn, and that's the challenge.

In a mission I had a Sherman with sandbags strapped to the front. Close inspection revealed that this Sherman did indeed have a bit better armour rating, but only on the rightmost of the four armour "blips" - indicating that the sandbags protected the top of the tank, rather than the front, as I thought would be logical. Is this as it should be? Not that it matter much in the big picture, but still.. just curious

I was just wondering, do you save and load repeatedly during a single-player campaign to avoid high casualties or just to complete each mission better? I try not to, as I think it would be too easy if I knew the location of the enemy forces. Sometimes I find that I spend the better half of the allowed time for the mission advancing tactically through a completely empty part of the map, and if I played the map again, I could just breeze through that part, call down mortars on known machinegun-nests, avoid AT-guns etc.

I only played WeGo so far, and I like it. There are some problems with it though, most notably about artillery. If you call down a strike and it goes wrong, you might have to wait a whole minute to cancel it, and even then, there's still the built in delay. This gives a large advantage to the realtime players. Even worse is that sometimes the TacAI will make a blunder, running a squad around the wrong edge of a hedge for example, exposed to enemy fire. Playing turn-based means you can't correct such errors before they turn into disaster. Sometimes I even had to reload a savegame because of this happening in a crucial moment. Though of course being paranoid and placing extra waypoints is a way to safeguard against such issues, it still nags me a bit. Of course, I'm free to choose to play realtime, but WeGo must be doing something right too, because I don't feel like it EDIT: Something I'm not sure anyone has brought up is that WeGo-battles take a LONG time to play out. I can literally spend a whole day on one battle, because each small maneuver takes at least a minute. For example sending out a scout just to cross the road. The crossing takes a maximum of 10 seconds, but I'll still have to wait a whole minute before I can send more soldiers across. I often run dangerously close to mission time limits because of this, but then again I like the feeling of urgency in some way too ... it has cost me dearly doing some last minute frontal assaults... but that's when you crack open a beer and yell "It's do or die, lads!"

Maybe it's just that I'm not a native English speaker, but I was under the impression that "it's been hit or miss" meant that sometimes it's good, sometimes not - at least that's what I wanted to say And speaking of Roat to Montgarde, I just began that campaign, as forum member Pak40 suggested I start with. Just completed the first mission, the D-day landing, and enjoyed it very much - apart from some tactical blunders in the last 2 turns that cost me dearly.. The map layout was brilliant, and the only thing I wondered about was whether bocage is used so close to the seaside? Have never been to Normandy, so I have no idea, really.

By the way, I agree that this game is one where the "pay for extra content" business model could work well. I have yet to play the included maps with the game (I did play and enjoy "Busting the Bocage" in the demo though), but I could imagine that paying a bit for extra high quality content would be something I would do, if I could be certain that quality would be high, both with regards to map layout for gameplay, lots of AI work, and maybe even extra flavour objects and details to bring the locations to life. I just love attention to detail. That is not to say amateurs cannot produce high quality, just that in my experience with fan-made content it's been hit or miss. I would pay extra for content with a professional level of polish and fine-tuned gameplay balance and challenge, no matter if it had been designed in a game developer office or by a fan.

Ok, this is very embarassing for me, but ... trees and vegetation were in fact toggled off (!) When I toggled it back on, I found the quality of the map improved a lot. I now feel like the guy who takes his brand new car to a mechanic because the gas tank is empty. So, while I haven't yet had the time to sit down and actually play the campaign in full to see how the individual missions are designed, I think it's in order to apologise for coming in here and blaming the map editors, when actually it was my own fault. I'm really sorry for the "friendly fire", especially for the person who made the map. I will not delete this topic, but go back and add a line about it so other people who might make the same mistake can search online and solve the problem. [EDIT: seems like I cannot edit the original post for technical reasons. If an administrator would like to add a line about my mistake, please do.] I don't know why the vegetation had been toggled off though. It was late at night, and I had just finished the final tutorial mission, where I had toggled back and forth a bit, but mainly just kept the trees partially off, and I could have sworn that's how I had it when I completed the tutorial. So I assumed they would be on for the next game too. Could have sworn I tried the tree toggle too, when I saw there were no trees, but seems not. They say lack of sleep is like being drunk - maybe I should learn to go to bed before midnight, eh?

Thanks everybody for your comments, not least for the BattleFront guys, great to see that you read and replied. If it's a love or hate thing, then I'm definitely in the first group, and when you love something, you feel strongly about it, and sometimes get extra picky. For the people asking about which map I talked about, it was the first mission in the campaign "Courage and Fortutide". I will go back and give the campaign another chance today.

Hello everyone, I just bought the game a couple of days ago, after being blown away by the demo. For many years I have been looking for a game like the good old "Close Combat" series, anyone remember playing those? So when I found out about Combat Mission, I immediately knew I would be hooked. And for three days straight, I certainly have been! So, please take my criticism below as coming from somebody who actually likes this game a lot, and for that reason is extra disappointed with the actual included campaigns. Playing through the tutorial missions, I was enjoying the game immensely, but impatient to start the REAL missions. Then, I finally finished the tutorials, and loaded up the first campaign with lots of anticipation. The one about expanding the bridgehead. It sounded promising, but reading through the briefing... I just couldn't believe my eyes. The campaign was not produced by Battlefront's professionals, but by some beta testing team? Ok.. but let's give it a shot, I thought. And then I saw the first map in the campaign. After the well-crafted tutorial missions, I had been spoiled with a high quality in the map design. Lots of details, nooks and crannys, convoluted spaces with orchards, bridges, buildings, all coming together to form a labyrinth of tactical potential. But now - I was looking at a child's drawing in comparison. Ruler-straight hedges, enclosing featureless fields, not even a single tree in sight. Ok, I understand that this is supposed to be a quite realistic game, and that farmland is not always very interesting to look at in real life. But in real life, there are always lots of little signs of human activities, such as tire tracks, piles of logs, an old tractor.. and even in modern intensive farming, there might be the odd shrubbery here and there, a solitary tree left in the middle of the field, a pond or just the portion at the bottom of a slope where water has pooled after some days of rain. In this map, there is hardly any detail at all. I know the gameplay is most important, but also in this respect the map just fails to interest. I have a massive amounts of tanks to roll forward to the top of the hill, then sit up there blasting everything away before moving the infantry down to mop up. That's not good gameplay. For me, an interesting mission is when I look at a map for the first time and have to think hard to plan my attack, zooming in to little details to see if my troops will be able to squeeze through a hedgerow just before the assault, if there are any windows on the south side of the farm where a defender might fire from, and what about that little stretch of low wall around the perimeter? Better I stop writing before this post gets too long. It's just rare that I get this disappointed. When I download user-generated content, I know there's a risk the quality will not be as high as the original game. But that's ok, user-generated content is free. In this case, however, I bought and paid for the game, so I expected it to contain at least a couple of long, well-designed campaigns of the same level of quality as the demo. I swear, at first I thought I had installed the game wrong somehow and only had access to some extra bonus content from the community... which would have been fine enough to have, if it had been just that - an extra. So, the reason I post this is basically that I want to send feedback, and at the same time ask if I am the only one who was disappointed by this?