Bulletpoint

I agree with you. Just trying to help mentioning a couple of the things that can cause this to happen. Another thing is that the unseen tank seems to be in a ditch - possibly giving it a higher chance to remain unseen.

There's an element of chance to spotting. It's perfectly possible to have LOS to two tanks and only spot one of them. Then later lose sight of that one and spot the other, etc. Also, it can be because there is foliage blocking the LOS to the second tank. It's not really clear from your video, because we only see the receiving end.

Just for the record, I'm fine with the game not being perfect. I'm just trying to help it improve. When I report bugs and discuss various issues, it is not an insult or attack on the developers or anyone on this forum. I'm happy to be proven wrong - when I am in fact wrong - but it needs to be based on actual arguments, not just assuming I don't know how to play the game.

How is having a calm discussion about how the game works "being a jerk"? Do you think anything will improve if nobody dares to discuss the game? If you want to be of any value in this thread, try to read the many constructive posts made by RobZ and others, where they provide data from actual tests of what happens in various situations.

I think you need to have a programmer on board who will work on this project as a hobby - at least until you can present something tangible. Look at how the mod teams for many games are putting in a lot of hours just out of love for the game. Not very helpful, I know

Brens are good, but I find the 51mm mortars have too little ammo to do any real suppression. I think it helps to think of playing CW as putting the game on hard mode. Take it as a challenge.

And flechettes are not banned by international convention.

Another good photo of a tank barrel shot through from the side. Had not seen this one before. Thanks. Still hoping someone will find a pic of a penetration from a shot coming from the front of the tank.

From the same book you link to: "Units without mutual support are doomed. Mutually supported units protect each other from being fixed or assaulted." Remember to compartmentalize the battlespace - find the places that can be isolated from the rest of the battle, due to woods, buildings, hills, smoke, fog, etc. and then focus on those. As you found, it's no good being able to suppress three buildings in front of you, if your assault team can take fire from other positions on the sides as they cross the open ground.

I think maybe it might be the opposite actually - because they know they won't be able to carry the additional ammo? In other cases, it's because the downed buddy is actually not in the same action square. It can be difficult to see exactly where they are. Using the casualty marker base as a reference works better than looking at the location of the pixelbody.

I didn't know that either. But I wonder if it's true.

What is the resolution of your monitor? I'm asking because I had a similar problem with a completely different game that expected the monitor to have a different resolution and refused to run because of that.

Yes, I understand that the engine goes way back and was never programmed by a big software company with an army of employees. But I'd love to see a CM based on modern computer hardware some day.

Does it refuse to even start the game at all, or does it crash during gameplay? What graphics card do you have?

To understand something, it helps to read the arguments first, instead of just dismissing them as stupid.

If you didn't understand my post, there's not much more I can do to help you.

My impression is that at least some of the performance problems in CM are due to the engine constantly loading and reloading textures, sounds etc. from the harddrive, instead of just caching them on game load. I'm no computer expert, but I base this hunch on how the game often seems to drop down to minimal graphics detail (texture quality/draw distance) for a moment, stuttering a lot, then redrawing the graphics. The problem of general lowish FPS might be some bottlenecks with the geometry rendering stressing the CPU. Which could be the reason we are seeing performance depend so much on single-core speed. I'm wondering if it's partly because of a lack of LOD scaling. Vehicles and trees have levels of detail, but I don't think the infantry have? Which would explain why big city maps such as Aachen with loads of buildings and trees are generally playable, but if I play a couple of battalions on open steppe, performance drops like a stone.

You seem to confuse this game with reality. In reality, hull down is a good thing for any AFV. In this game, it's a bad thing for certain tanks. But play it your way.

Yes, Graviteam has a free moving camera that doesn't affect performance by itself. In CM, when I move the camera rapidly and turn it, I get a quite big performance hit. One example is tank shells and even machine gun tracer bullets hitting the ground at shallow angles and skipping off. You won't see that in CM. The vehicle damage model is also much more advanced than in Combat Mission. Tracks come off, making tanks veer off course, they can spill fuel, and the risk of the tank catching fire is based on the exact percentage of fuel left in the tank, etc. But this is not a sales pitch for Graviteam. Those games have plenty of their own problems too. I was just answering the question about the CM poor graphical performance.

I suggest not too high resolution actually. The CM interface doesn't scale, so if you go hi-res, you'll end up having really small text and buttons on the screen. 1920x1200 should be fine, unless you have an enormous monitor.

Try playing Graviteam games. Smooth performance, insanely complicated calculations. More realistic ballistics than CM. (but worse interface and gameplay) Please stop propagating the myth that the CM performance problems are due to simulation calculations. Those calculations are not going on while the game is paused, but still the performance is the same, whether you pause or not. The honest answer is that CM is based on an ancient engine that does not take advantage of modern CPUs and graphics hardware. And no, that's not an attack on BattleFront. It's just how things are. The only thing you can really do to improve performance is going for a computer with very high single-thread performance. Usually this means going for as many GHz as possible, rather than multiple cores.

I think WW1 is not a good fit for the CM engine. It would be much more suitable for Graviteam games.

The Tiger that took out the Pershing with the broken muzzle break. But please stay on topic. We're going in circles here.

The OP started by writing this in his first post:

If I were facing a reloading Tiger a close range, then yes... I'd take the shot. Being a soldier in WW2 was a lot more dangerous than being a soldier today, and they often took crazy chances. In this case, I don't think the bent muzzle break would do much to stop a 90mm AP round leaving the barrel. A quick HE fuze might be a different question.