Bulletpoint

I'm still waiting and hoping they will fix the buggy halftrack mortars from CMFB...

This is why I always suggest to my opponent that we agree to play with all troops being Regular +0. I find it makes the game more realistic, and saves time from having to cherrypick and min/max experience and soft factors.

In the game, it's full auto at short range and slow single shots at medium.

Making it fire in rapid but short controlled bursts at medium range would improve it, I think.

Great work - very impressive. Thanks for sharing. It does seem to me that the StG44 performance is somewhat lackluster when you consider that it led all countries to adopt assault rifles. I'd think that it would stand out a bit more in WW2.

Even the magic force shield CM trees will not stop small arms area fire causing casualty Sure, never meant to say area fire into forests can't be effective. What I'm saying is that unless you can put a target marker very close to the enemy contact, your bullets won't be able to penetrate that much farther. Don't expect to be able to "hose down" a deep area of trees by targeting along the edge. Depending also on tree type and density of course.

Would you consider making your textures available for CMFB too? CMBN already has a lot of good texture mods by Aris etc. But CMFB is a bit lacking.

Looks like just texture work to me. But good texture work.

They don't penetrate that much farther though. Woods in CM are really good bullet sponges.

The people who look for instant gratification won't get attracted to CM no matter what. Who cares. It's not necessary to sell CM to every guy on Steam. Just reaching 1 pct. of the users would bring a flood of money to BFC. But hey, the decision has been made. No reason for anyone to keep arguing

Feel free to bash me later if I'm wrong, but I don't think that will happen. I think the kind of players who will be attracted to this game will usually be the kind of people who are interested in history and realism, and who are intelligent enough to realise that they might be doing mistakes if things don't work out the way they hoped for. At least that's that style of the majority of posts I've read on these forums over the years. I think the idea of the unreasonable player has been exaggerated quite a bit. As Steve said, niche games are judged by a different standard than the latest and greatest AAA game. And played by very different people.

No, but it's an argument that keeps popping up... That the unwashed casual masses of Steam users will carpet-bomb CM with negative reviews, that they will demand that it be dumbed down, etc.

People on Steam usually only complain about graphics when they feel they've been misled to think the game would look better than it actually does. There was a big argument over Rome: Total War II where they released promo videos that looked way better than the game actually does in action. Also Witcher 3 had a bit of that, where people complained the graphics had been downgraded compared to early footage. But in the case of Combat Mission, nobody is trying to hide what the game actually looks like. So very few people are going to complain about that. We have to let go of the idea that people outside of this forum are generally stupid and unreasonable. There are all kinds of gamers on Steam.

Sure, but enough for people to see how well it runs on their computer, how the user interface is, and how the graphics look. I personally got a refund for a Graviteam game once, even though I picked it up at a major discount, simply because I couldn't stand the interface, gameplay, and graphics. I realised that in less than 2 hours. Later returned to the game series once they fixed or improved some of those things.

There are two limits. Owning the game for less than 2 weeks, and actively playing it for less than 2 hours.

Doesn't matter so much on Steam, where there's a general 2-hour refund option. The game itself is the demo.

No, but I remember this game which seems to be a direct descendant:

The main difficulty with woods is that they don't work like you'd expect. You'd expect each unit to have a chance to spot enemies in a circle of some radius (depending on tree density). What actually happens is that LOS in woods is more like a chessboard, with a pattern of some places having total LOS and some having absolutely no LOS. This happens even if the ground is flat and vegetation is uniform. I find the best way to approach it is to advance in a line abreast, since then there will usually always be one unit that has LOS to any enemy that might pop up.

Hmmmm I sometimes read the steam comments about games I like, and I find that most are pretty sensible. Also the ones mentioning the game's weaker points. Maybe because Steam has a comment rating system, which weeds out the worst crap. Also, I'm fine with people having different opinions.

Hmm... sounds interesting.. What the... ! Checks calendar.. nope, not April 1st...

This. Also the other points you raise, but... This.

So if you get your "As'es" handed to you, that means you get paid? The list is so long, but I'd hope they fixed the technical issues at least. Shadows that flicker on and off when moving the camera, hillsides that are lit from the direction opposite the sun, patches of terrain where no fog effect is applied, framerates that often run very low, shaders that crash the game unless you toggle them off. I believe most of these are caused by obsolete OpenGL driver support, so a move to DirectX would be great.

When you do area fire, your unit target the ground, but some bullets will go high and some low. The farther you are from the point of impact, the bigger the spread, and higher some of the bullets will go. In forest terrain, most of the bullets will get absorbed by trees, but you can manage to get some to travel on and hit deeper if you fire from farther away. When doing area fire from a close unit, they will just shoot into the ground.

One trick that can sometimes be valuable is the following: If you have LOS to the woods from a long distance, use area fire from a tank or similar. Even if you can only target a couple of squares into the woods. The thing is that area fire in this game depends on distance. The farther from the impact point you are, the farther your bullets will go. Many of them will get deflected by trees, but if you are IN the woods, you will only be able to target a couple of squares ahead, and that means most of your bullets will go into the ground. Area fire from farther away will have a chance of penetrating farther.

It is. It's just... well.. slow.