Bulletpoint

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.

[...] First thing to realise that "hunt" is not very effective. Even if your guys have an enemy contact marker, walking along with a hunt command will get them cut to pieces. They will rarely spot the enemy first. So what you do is (if you HAVE to clear woods.. the best is to try to avoid it) is massive suppressive fire. You can rarely target very far into the woods, but in some cases, you can make bullets travel a couple of squares. Then after hosing down, you crawl forward, and rinse and repeat. No, it's not very fast or efficient. But it's the only SOP I've found for this situation. There is no magic trick. Clearing woods will cost you.

I doubt you'll find anyone here who disagrees

Come on, you lost the opportunity to catch a completely fictional fish...

I like the changes to make infantry less likely to run away. It seems more realistic that soldiers will not abandon positions of cover, and it also increases the challenge of many scenarios when you can't just flush out defenders by artillery or suppressive fire. I'm currently replaying the huge scenario 'Mission to Maas' by @theforger, and the different AI is definitely felt. The American paratroopers really put up a good fight.

That's good.

I'd be happy with just flamethrowers burning out buildings. It feels so silly to see FTs attack buildings and nothing really happening. Make flamethrowers great again. Or just useful.

For long ranges, you don't even need to give them the arc. They choose whether to shoot or not based on their weapons as well. So for example if you dismount a scout car crew to scout ahead, and they are only armed with pistols, an arc is rarely needed.

It depends a lot on terrain - both how much tall grass/weeds there are and if you're trying to crawl down a slope facing the enemy, etc. Also the relative experience levels. On this parched Italian hill, there's probably not enough vegetation to be sneaky. In many cases, it's perfectly possible to crawl into position unseen. But in any case, one should not play WW2 with a modern warfare "spec ops" mindset.

They're getting a LOT of free publicity from the good youtubers putting videos out there. People who are interested in military history will get the videos in their suggested feed, and then I suspect a lot of those will end up buying one or more games. That kind of publicity was something that small games companies could only dream of before the internet.

I remember seeing this happen, but it's a long time since the last occurrence. At least in CMFB.

Even I don't think there's an issue here

Hopefully it will be changed in the final version. Several vehicles in CMFB have the same problem with the crewmembers placed way too high. I've been reporting some of them.

I thought I was being all clever, but it seems I was not the only one to figure out what mission it was based on the description It was my first CM scenario too.

Yes, and this assisting soldier is also the reason why it takes extra time for MGs to set up - when you run a team with an MG to a position, they arrive fast but then the assistant has to crawl slowly from one end of the team to the other side before the MG can start deploying. Whereas in reality, the assistant would follow the gunner and go prone next to him, ready to help with the ammo belts. This was one of the first issues I reported six-seven years ago. It was obviously never seen as a priority to fix.

Problem is, AA is pretty much useless. I played a user-made scenario some time ago where the player gets more than 20 AA vehicles (three or four guns each) against only two attacking aircraft. I played the mission several times, and the average result was that after 30 minutes, one of the two planes had been shot down. And there was no notable decrease in the number of times the planes attacked or their accuracy. That a strafing place costs 30 points seems to be a simple typo in the cost table, like when rocket artillery cost way less than they should.

Yes, they will take some fire and casualties, but in a WW2 setting, it's often a trade off worth making. If casualties can be expected to be at reasonable levels, you trade a couple of riflemen for many minutes of time. That time can then be used in the later part of the battle to prevent casualties by having more time to take the buildings. But it always needs a close evaluation. Where do your guys crest the hill exactly? How far do they have to run to cover? How much concealment will they have by the sparse trees? What's the range to the enemy position? How much time do you have in total? Etc.

In most cases, you don't sneak up the SBF element. You gain fire superiority through maneuver elements and then shift to the SBF element to make the rifles able to get closer. I don't think you're gaining any real advantage by flanking right, and the small farm seems to control the low wall you need to take in order to take the big buildings, so here's what I would do: Run the maneuver element through the trees to the first low wall. Immediately fire all rifles at the big buildings. Once they are suppressed, run up your fire element and set up MGs and mortars. Small mortars are nearly useless against buildings, except for (short lived) suppression. Use them to take out enemies behind low walls. MGs now take over suppression while the rifles flank left to take up positions at the low walls left of small farm (which is also suppressed by your MGs). Then the rifles take the small farm and you can then approach the final objective through the trees or along the low wall. Typically in CM scenarios, you never reach the final objective, because the enemies surrender before that.

LOL What @Wicky said the run away to the ground floor too quickly. I like that they changed that. Aways felt it was a bit too easy just to flush out building defenders like that. Or at least force them to the ground floor where they often would have no LOS.