Bulletpoint

Yes, I know that Tiger was disabled by that lucky shot. My point was not about damage to tank hulls, but that shells should glance off barrels when hit from the front. I have still only seen barrel-penetrating hits that are from the side. Never from the front.

I think we all do that

Much of the game seems realistic, but this is one of the things I don't like. Getting a gun knocked out frontally happens all the time in the game, but I have never seen any WW2 photos of such damage. Only pics of shots that clearly hit the barrel from the side. This is what should happen when hitting the barrel from the front:

To be fair though, about the original topic - I can't remember seeing tank crew bail without the tank taking some kind of damaging hit first. But since morale hits are somewhat shared within platoons, maybe it's because some of the other tanks got knocked out?

The problem is that when you close assault a tank, your guys are already very close. When the tank crew bails out, enemies outside the tank start shooting before the crew actually bails. Wasting their ammo hitting the tank. And once the "panicked" crew exit, they immediately spot and engage enemies camping outside. Often killing several. Same problem goes for bunkers. It's one of the silliest design flaws of the game.

They're still rambos though. Being in a panic doens't stop them from mowing down nearby enemies, often with their pistols. It does take longer before the player is able to regain control over them though. So there's that.

I just did a little test of this. One 57mm AT gun can knock out the guns of two out of three panther tanks frontally in one minute. Distance 500m. If and only if the panthers are hull down. If not, their guns survive much longer. Also, an interesting thing is that the gun crew immediately know when they knocked out the tank gun - they then start firing at other tanks.

This is sad reading, but it does underline the need for CM to keep improving. Falling this much behind does hurt sales - even when it comes to people who are genuinely interested and could become good customers. It's not only a case of "real serious intelligent gamers with good taste VS unwashed stupid masses". If I tried to make a friend interested in this game, literally the first thing I would say would be "Ok, so it's a really old game and it looks bad, BUT..."

Perkins, suppress that building! No sir... there's no point. What? NO AIM POINT

@MOS:96B2P What do you think? I can send you a test scenario if you would like to take a look.

The same. I tried it. Also there's no difference if I set a manual target order or not. I also tried changing troop experience to elite, and to give them +2 leaders. Same results: They fire APDS extremely rarely. Mostly when they run out of regular AP. And even then, they seem to be just as likely to shoot regular HE at the tank as APDS. It's like they don't realise it's a good anti-tank round.

The German Nahverteidigungswaffe is a quite simple device installed in the turret of some German tanks. It's basically a hole in the turret roof from where the crew can launch grenades to defend the tank against infantry close assault. However, I noticed that this device is extremely often knocked out when the tank receives non-penetrating hits to the front hull. Is there a good reason for this? It doesn't seem to me that this device would be sensitive to shocks to the hull like the radio might be.

In CMFB, I'm playing around a bit with the 57mm AT gun VS Panthers. But I am nearly unable to make the gun fire its APDS ammo. The Panther is coming straight towards the gun, and I tried firing at various distances. The gun keeps using regular AP ammo, which has no effect. Only when the tank got closer than 190m, the gun fired one single APDS, which penetrated the hull, but then it kept firing more regular AP. It has 22 APDS shells available. The crew is regular, +1 motivation, in close contact with HQ. So, why isn't it using it? Any ideas?

They can afford to put it off for a bit, since building a helipad on the roof pretty much amounts to painting a big white "H"

Yes, that's another of the things that could be added without too much extra work.

We don't even need very sophisticated AI routines. We just need the current AI to be improved slightly in certain key areas. Example: In the editor, I can give an AI platoon orders to advance in bounding leaps. However, I can't decide how long each leap will be (and they are usually way too long). Also, teams won't stop in places of cover along the way. They will run right past a low wall or hedgerow to go prone out in a field. So, the code that gives the teams the individual movement orders should do a quick check to see if the movement path intersects any good cover. If so, the movement should stop at that cover until next movement order. Compared to what else goes on in the game code, such a check is easy to do. The code for the AI to evaluate cover is actually already in the game, it's just not used very much. You can see this for yourself if you do a scenario and paint a setup zone for infantry across open ground that includes some cover. The truppen will deploy in places of cover.

Just looking out the wrong side of a building breaks C2 on Iron. On Elite, it's enough to be able to trace a line to the building. Also crops etc often break it.

Iran-Iraq war? African proxy wars.. Vietnam is probably too early for ATGMs.

That was my reaction when I read your post, too.. "We must be playing two different games" I think it's like seeing faces in the clouds. Where I see random enemy placements, where one team is randomly in a good position, and another randomly placed in a bad position, you might see one position controlling the high ground, while the other team is deliberately placed too far forward as bait.. etc. We humans like to find patterns in chaos.

I'm sorry, but that is just not true. The AI has no understanding of any of those things. It does not understand how set up AT guns in good positions, make interlocking fields of fire, use bait, or anything else like that. It doesn't even keep squads from the same platoon close to each other or in contact with their HQ. The only thing that the AI does when deciding when to place units in the painted setup zone is that it will look for positions with cover. So if you paint a whole field, including a hedgerow, infantry will always get placed along the hedge, and never out in the open. But of course, if you have a lot of units and paint big setup zones, you'll get a good spread of enemy positions. Some of them will be in great locations, but that is completely down to chance. And especially if you set them to ambush orders, you can get a randomised setup that will pose a challenge and might even surprise you. However, you are likely to still meet AT guns in the middle of forests, etc.

The problem is that the different types of battles are meant to be played out on different types of maps. So that the extra points the attacker gets in an assault are countered by the map being more difficult to attack, and that he will have to reach objectives deeper in the map. That's how it's supposed to be. BUT many scenario designers don't understand that, so they just ship identical versions of the same map, labelled as probe, attack, assault... Even in the QB maps that come with the official game. In effect, this turns the battle type selection into just a kind of difficulty setting, where probes is the most difficult attack missions, and assault are the easiest.

It's a well known bug. Maybe there will be a fix for it in a couple of years.

The info sharing system is buggy in some ways. I tested it before. If an enemy tank moves, its updated contact marker will never get shared through C2. Maybe that's what's happening in your example too. In your example, notice how the HQ has an enemy tank marker kust above it, in front of the white building. That's probably the marker for the same enemy tank as the other Sherman knows now moved ahead. But it's unable to share this new info.

There are many ways in which this game could be fundamentally changed and improved. But it seems their strategy is to produce more content for the existing engine, rather than to update the fundamentals.

That all depends on what quality you set them to. Paratroopers and Fallschirmjäger are not intrinsically any better than any other unit. They get some different equipment of course.