bloodworth646

I hope you use scouts, I always use scouts in these situations. The best way to beat a concealed enemy is to find them first, or atleast make them find only a portion of your force Since i'm very casualty-sensitive i have my own way of scouting woods with the intention of minimizing casualties (even the scouts themselves!): Firstly don't just stretch a single hunt command from one end of the woods to another! wooded areas in CMx2 are nicely detailed - Some action spots/squares (whatever those things are called) have more foliage and offer more concealment than their neighbouring ones and small elevations changes may provide cover. Plan a series of hunt commands with short pauses across the safest rout in the woods. During some of the pauses order your scouts to fire to recon what's ahead. having the 'hide' command activated is also usefull as in wooded areas 90% of time time the opfor will find your scouts and not vice versa, so if the scouts get shot at they'll immediately go hiding and get protection or concealment from the foliage. This method is time consuming at first but worth it beacause if done right you will gain the advantge of spotting the enemy with minimal causaulties.

Does this mean that the german platoon leaders (or even NCO's at the squad level?) were less reliant upon the higher rank officers in terms of tactical initiative? If so, i think that it is possible to simmulate this by making the german units less affected by the constraints of being out of C2 links. It's not optimal but it's still makes sense...if i understood correctly

Well, i have a problem with the fact that the only way to make your units stop and engage (AKA react as they are ought to under normal circumstances) an enemy is by using the HUNT command. Like already proposed in the thread about CMSF 2, it would be awesome to have this functionality of the HUNT comand with any movement command... but i'd like to further this proposal with an idea to add fire permissions\restrictions like: Return fire - fire only if your unit get shot at, hold fire even if there's a visual on an enemy. Open fire - your unit, upon seeing an enemy, will cease any action they were initially doing in order to shoot at the enemy.

Thanks for the explanation JMFC!

Another subject i find neccessery to discuss, with the intention to eventually influece its implitaion in the next CMSF, is the longevity of the firefights. From my experince, In a normal firefight in CMSF, rather than having two opposing sides exchangeing fire, the side that gets the first shots almost immediately suppress the opposing side, mostly scoring a nice chunk of kills and sometimes even eliminating the threat. The problem is that it makes manoeuvre based comabt obsolete since, well... there is no need to manoeuvre:) Look at this video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcapgRx1sxI (note that It's possibe to create this formation by spliting your squad) You see one element (in this case a fireteam) exchanging fire with an enemy while another element manoeuvres to the flank in order to actually eliminate the enemy! In CMSF this kind of encouners are over very qucikly: if the opfor gets the first shots - your forword fireteam would be quickly suppressed while the flanking fireteam loses the purpose of the flanking manoeuvre since there is no more effective base of fire to support them! But if Vice versa - your guys get the first shots there is no need for flanking - the enemy is usually so damn suppressed that you can order the the other fireteam to simply walk into the enemy's position and destroy them. IMHO, the next CMSF should opt for longer firefights by rendering higher detailed and cover rich envoirments which improve the survivibilty of the troops or making small arms fire less effective - the point is to have firefights which long enough to grant even more tacticaly challanging and realistic game!

Oh yes! These additions\changes would greatly improve the realisim of the game, especially for players who play CM as a simulator. Another improvment would be to increase the average size of the maps, like in CMA which has huge maps even for modest scenarios. Small (and narrow) maps made sense for CMSF because of the undepowered and manouvre-restricted enemy, but since CMSF 2 simulates a conflict between two state of the art forces bigger maps sholud only benefit the game!