Bulletpoint

The incessant squeaking may be too much for us! Don't worry, I'm sure somebody will make a sound mod that will let you apply historically appropriate oil

When I win the lottery, you can look forward to a whole series of Combat Mission games based on Danish bicycle infantry resisting the German Army for around three hours before capitulating for lunch. The last scenario in the first campaign might feature an armoured car.

Thanks for the heads up... looks interesting. I always wondered why nobody made a good WW2 tank simulator. This might be it.

Could also simply be that they had tunnels and kept sending in new suicide candidates to man the ruins.

I sort of think they might not have been very good at aiming, because I can't imagine many buildings that would not be pulverised by that kind of barrage.

You can still kill infantry in buildings quite reliably with 37mm HE though.

I think this might be a misunderstanding. The only thing the retreat command does is to automatically place a FAST movement order. The only reason it's there is for convenience in realtime play where you can bind it to a hotkey to quickly order retreats. If your team is so pinned that this command doesn't work, you won't be able to do it manually, and vice versa. So, in the case of teams in builings, now that the retreat command doesn't work, you can still order the movement manually. If your team is able to, they will retreat.

in theory maybe, but what actually happened was that troops would just leave cover and run out into the open field or street to get gunned down. The game is not intelligent enough to make troops retreat in a sensible manner, so I'm happy with the way they now stay put.

Again, that's interesting, because my experience has been the opposite. The 60mm is a key weapon for the US, while the British mortar... It's rare it can even get within range, and then it barely manages to get a bomb on target before it runs out of ammo.

They do tend to fire at longer distances though, so that would take some of their accuracy away.

You had bad luck then. I find mortars extremely effective against infantry in bocage.

Sounds like the MG was in a house. Smaller mortars are nearly useless against modular buildings.

After Syria and Islamic State, any war would have to be really bad to cause much of a reaction, regardless of US elections.

Yes, that is a better anecdote. However, you did actually spot the vehicle as it came close.

I had the exact same experience this year, while looking for mushrooms. But did the bull weigh 44 tonnes, and was it running on tracks powered by a 690 hp Maybach V12 engine? Were you actually looking for such bulls? If no, then I don't think the comparison really adds anything to the discussion.

Nope. Unfortunately.

Some StuGs do have cupolas though. And no I don't think it's rare at all.

Thanks!

Do German tanks have smoke shells in this game? I can't remember seeing them...

I've seen the same happening several times. Infantry crawling through forest to catch a tank from the behind.. only to find that when they finally spot the tank (a few metres in front of them), it has already spotted them, turned the turret to face them, ready to fire. Tanks seem to spot infantry better at extreme close range than vice versa. I think it only really affects tanks with a cupola though. There might be something about the spotting algorithm for that cupola that causes it. Just a wild guess.

Yes, I am quite sure I have seen that many times. There's also a bug where tank contacts won't get updated through C2 if the tank moves after getting spotted the first time. Adding to the confusion.

I think that view is actually not the player's view, but the view of the highest level of local command (regiment?). If you, the player, see something happen on screen, it means at least one of your units saw it and you're 'looking through their eyes' at that moment. But the contact marker system represents the knowledge each unit has, so on higher levels that info hasn't ben updated yet. The weird special thing about AT guns is that even the unit that saw it knocked out will still often keep a contact marker there if they lose LOS. Maybe, just maybe, that's because the ammo carrier team is still alove but in a different place on the map. So if you hunt those down and take them out, maybe that's where the AT gun marker finally disappears?

Could be because BFC are not really sure what kind of game mode they want to base their design desicions on - realtime or turnbased. In a realtime game, the player might well have missed seeing the knocked out gun, so the marker would keep him guessing.

That's true. Also dead AT guns leave a contact marker even long after they are gone. But that's deliberate I think, not a bug.

I think you might be confusing CM2 with CM1.. back in the first games, the spotting contacts were apparently not exact. When you see icons jumping around in CM2, it reflects the spotting info from various units getting combined. Each unit has its own spotting picture of where it thinks enemy contacts are (where it last saw them) and those are getting sent up to higher levels of command. When you deselect all units, you are seeing the combined spotting map. That's where markers will sometimes jump around. Not from spotting for long enough time, but because new info from units come in and the overall map gets updated. When spotted tanks move from their initial location, their contact marker is for some reason not getting updated through C2. In those cases, you can spot a tank in a different place from its contact marker. In the case of AT-guns, you can count on the spotting markers being exact. Because the guns are very unlikely to move.