Muzzleflash1990

I think that improvement may be most beneficial to machine guns and HE. Area firing with ATGM missiles and AP rounds sure sounds like waste and a way to run out of ammo quickly?

IIRC someone did adhoc tests long ago. They seemed to indicate that unbuttoning improved short range spotting, especially for tanks to the sides, but buttoning up improved long range spotting especially to the front, since then the narrow-vision improvements provided by optics exceeded the wide field of vision by the eye. (Of course in WW2 games, unbuttoning is generally always better). About your conclusion, sure, but many tanks are not in the open (if they are then often hull-down), rather they are between foliage, where thermal vision might do better?

About BRDM-2 ATGM. I think it has same problem: it only shows two missiles ready, but it has 4 tubes.

The tentative marker in my example would that be "deep opaque blue" or are you talking about something else. The moment I got that tentative marker, there was no doubt in my mind that an actual vehicle was there - although as c3k says, I doubt the crew was so sure. Had they fired on that marker they would have missed by 10-15 meters to the left (in fact after full spot, the missile you see in the video, missed anyway by 15cm (5.9 inches for you weirdos)). But maybe you are talking about a different kind of marker. If you are: what difficulty level are you playing at? Also, if you can get a screenshot, or a save game next time it happens.

It only took two minutes of ingame time to find an example. Note that the unit in the video gets a tentative contact before a conclusive location and identification. In the video, I only select a few vehicles, but no other unit than the Khrizantema ever gets a spot on the vehicle.

Denmark is a pretty small country go for directly, but if they make Netherlands and Germany (like they did for SF), then only small variations for much of the equipment is needed (like the rifles, CV90XX, Leopard 2). The OOB will be quite small since there is only one division.

I think Euri might be referring to the very first time you spot certain units. Before you get first ever proper contact marker for a unit (not seen before), you get a tentative contact. As an example. Sometimes, especially in BS, I have noticed occasionally a position on the map (where nothing have been spotted before, tentatively or not) gets a contact mark. About 5s to 60s later it becomes a solid target with respect to the spotting unit, and the unit engages the contact. I always interpreted this delay as: the first very opaque question mark on the exact location, means "something" was detected there (something looks "off"); then the unit (e.g commander/squad leader) uses it optics to indeed confirm, that yes, that weird looking thing (that Private/Crew member Pyle detected with the naked eye) is indeed the corner of a vehicle; and time is spent determining whether the corner is to the "right" or the "left" with respect to observer position; finally the unit has enough information to conclude the actual position of the vehicle, the proper contact marker appears, and the unit can engage.

Isn't the plan to: 1 more italian module, release 2/3 more east front module, 2/3 black sea modules, 2-3 final blitzkrieg modules. Maybe some packs in between and upgrade 4, maybe and upgrade 5 and 6. After this, CM 3 maybe?

The issue with the Russian vehicles, is that the squad leader is also the commander. Whether or not he dismounts various in RL, but in game he is always part of the dismount squad. This means, if you disembark your infantry squad from a BMP, you are left without a commander to man the good spotting equipment. This does not happen with the Bradley where there is a dedicated commander, part of the vehicle crew, but not the dismount squad. What some do with russian IFV/APC, is split two guys off (it is not possible to only split off one) from the squad and keep them in the vehicle, but then you are left with only 4 dismounted soldiers. I just played a QB, where I had a 2 man sniper team in my BMP-3. They spotted an infantry squad to the front, and engaged with the BMP-3 bow machine guns. Unfortunately, they did not manage to inform the gunner of the vehicle about the position of the enemy, before a javelin struck.

@lapdog33 do you remember to keep some extra crew in the russian vehicles to help spot?

These changes seems to be general improvements to the TacAI. Will these changes eventually reach the other game series?

More stuff coming from the air is always good. Did the Navy ever try training the naval combat dolphins for airborne insertions? Could be useful, especially for rapid deployment to conduct Black Sea operations.

I just wish they would make some game announcements. Each game release is preceded by an announcement 3 months before. So, by applying causal logic: to increase customer satisfaction and profits, the wise thing for Battlefront to do, would be to announce a lot of titles today (since yesterday is not possible), perhaps all the proposed titles in this thread. Then we will be able to play them 3 months from now in the coming new year.

The reason you didn't hear about it is most likely because the event was swept under the rug for decades, not something you wanted to talk about. Also, in terms of topic, I think Africa may not be that large on people's radar in terms of conflict. There are so many "larger" conflicts, people focus on, like Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, etc.. About the number of people. I do not think it suffered anything from it, focusing only on the "platoon"-sized part of the company (although since we only see that, it did look they were getting an awful lot of food). Obviously, the benefits gained from hiring another 100+ people to be in the background is outweighed by the costs. Remember, you didn't see 3000 militia people either :P. But yes, it is definitely worth the watch, and interesting to see something a bit "different".

I agree with you @rooibos on the LOS issue. Instead of constantly moving around waypoints and doing careful LOS checks to key positions until I get my uber hull-down position right, I would prefer just moving my camera to a "good enough" position. But the 10 feet limit is really annoying. For many modern tanks like in CMBS, the gun barrels are too low for the camera. For infantry you also have to resort to using waypoint-los. But it often uses uses walking height; so then you units arrive, they cannot see anyway because they go prone. I'm not sure of BFC viewpoint on this, but I seem to recall that the height limitation is intentional. But in terms of whether such a change warrants a patch or feature, my guess would be that the height limitation is simply a number to be changed in the code - Limbo, how low can you go :).

Target arc works rather similar to facing when units, both vehicles and infantry are stopped. For moving infantry, I'm quite sure that their facing direction is the direction of movement as you mention. I do not believe that you can change this. Also that segment of the manual can be a bit misleading, as it can be interpreted as target arcs giving increased attention to an area. Target arcs are purely for controlling fires, but by changing unit facing they can indirectly affect spotting.

I agree that units seems to eager to "waste" a faust, and also shrecks, and bazookas for US. And in CMBS, sometimes russian will also spend, IMO, too many rpg on infantry (OG and RPO exempted). I often avoid giving target orders on either area or spotted infantry, because the TacAI often interprets that as a direct order to waste AT-munitions, resulting in even larger waste than otherwise.

No. The area of the entire chart is how many games have been played total. The height of all colors at a given month is how many games were played in total that month. The area of a particular color is the number of games played with that particular game module - like sburke says, CMBN is the most played (at FGM). The height of a particular color is how many of games with a particular module was played in a given month. For example 2 CBMS games were played in March 2016, but 14 CBMN games in the same month. The chart for example also indicates there were a large drop drop in interest of RT at the shortly after FB was released.

@Erwin, you got it reversed, the Strykers were being shot more quickly by the BMPs. This technique helps vehicles whose crew are missing a dedicated mounted commander (which is the case for the common BTR and BMP classes) spot better.

I just looked in the editor. Unlike the M2A3, the cavalry version of the Bradley (M3A3) does not come with "built-in" commander. Does that mean that if you dismount the recon team from a M3A3 it also suffers a spotting penalty?

Just finished a quick battle probe with mostly BMP3s and BTRs with auto cannons and the difference is significant. Not only were they spotting faster, but I swear I was getting spots on more enemies than you otherwise would have (even if given large amounts of time). Bit unfortunate you have to leave at least two back in the vehicle, rather than just one, does leave the remaining "fire team" very brittle. I moved the vehicle up as the infantry progress, just outside of the typical BMP-3 explosive range - even if they ambushed my men, the reaction from the 100mm would punish them. In fact I charged a Bradley from the rear at close range, and this time it did not spot me, turn around, and destroy my BMP-3 without my unit seeing it, like has happened so many times before - instead my unit spotted it rather quickly and destroyed it.

I found a fix, but I am not sure it is the same as what you are talking about antaress? It doesn't explicitly talk about spotting. But, assuming it is, it seems to specify that it is only the squad leader/crew commander, that can give that bonus? So if you split the squad up your squad, the element you put back into the vehicle has to contain the squad leader (also from the same squad) for you get any benefit?

I offer only a (now old) anecdote on the first (I think) russian campaign mission. I was frustrated with my BMP-3 spotting ability with only driver and gunner, so I put some of the dismounted squad members back into it as "cargo". Shortly after I spotted lots of units, particularly infantry. But it seems information was not relayed inside the vehicle between the crew and "cargo". Even several minutes later with the units still spotted and in view, the main gunner was not engaging, and I suspect the spotting was mostly done by the bow gunners. My conclusion at that time was that BMP-3 terrible at spotting without additional crew members, and that with additional crew members decent to rather good at spotting, but you still had to manually area fire (with the vehicle, since only the "cargo", and not the crew, had spotted the units) on the contacts. Curious, how does it work in real life? Would the squad leader be most likely to stay inside the vehicle as commander, or to go outside and lead his dismount element?

Do the Marines still use the Close Combat Marines Workbook? While I find the modern version of close combat very fast-paced in terms of extremely high lethality, almost instantaneous fire support, and it only goes up to company scale, I can definitely see how it could teach some easy lessons, including bad places to put your only TOW humvee.

Which squads are we talking about? Just fired up a QB and a 7-man rifle squad from BTR had 970 rounds. Another 6-man rifle squad from BMP-3 (no SVD like the 7-man btr group) had 900 rounds. If the PKM guy carries 600 rounds, then there are 3 rifleman left to each carry 1x100 round box? Upon further experiments, it appears, the gunner and assistant leader combined carries 500 rounds (maybe the gunner just carries it all). Then a single rifleman carries the remaining 400 hundred.