Zveroboy1

Probably true from a historical perspective and for a human vs human game but in a scenario played versus the AI, it needs all the help it can get. The AI is rarely going to use its arty efficiently. It doesn't anticipate by plotting a barrage ahead of time and then cancelling it when not needed etc, it uses its arty piecemeal using mostly short harassing fire it seems. And more often than not, if the tempo of the attack is fast enough, shells are regularly going to be falling 200 m behind you doing very little harm.

Okay this is something I struggled with myself in the past and I still don't fully understand how it works, but make sure that in colour management options or under preferences, you are working in RGB mode, 8 bits/channels and that when you export, it should be srgb. For taking screenshots there was a thread about it recently somewhere on the forum, personally I just use printscreen. Not sure why it doesn't seem to work for so many people.

Is there an alpha channel? When you save the uniform make sure there isn't a checkmark for alphas in the file saving dialogue box. Maybe that's it, I am not sure.

I don't really care one way or the other but to be fair, it is likely to be simply a business decision. A short-sighted one it might be argued if you look at the popularity of games that allow modding. The other reasons offered in this thread are secondary considerations at best imo.

Yes it needs to be in a valid setup zone with the mines deployed in the editor inside this zone. But the trick is to have the exact same number of yellow action squares in the setup order for the mine group as you have mines. If you have 10 mines, you need to have 10 yellow squares in the setup for this particular group and plan. Otherwise mines have a hidden terrain preference and they will always be placed in what the game deems to be the most favourable terrain tile. For instance if there is a choice, they will always go on a road and never set up in a marsh tile for instance. It works the same way with units too, if you have 5 squads and assign them a setup order with 10 action squares with say 5 buildings, 3 wooded tiles and 2 open/dirt tiles, they will always pick and deploy in the buildings. If you pick 10 buildings, then the 5 units will set up randomly in a different building each time. So if you want it to be random you need to either : A/ have the exact same number of tiles as units, in this case the terrain can be whatever you want B/ or you can pick as many action squares as you want but it has to be the same type of terrain tile The terrain preference more or less goes like this : buildings > woods > open > marsh

Nice. Great vid as usual, thanks for posting it. I like it how you were very liberal with air strikes and didn't hesitate to use them. That's the sop I have developed too myself while testing this and Afghan Roulette which sort of plays the same way : don't assault compounds unless you absolutely have to because they can be death traps and costly in lives and instead use air power whenever possible. I don't think that's too unrealistic at all either for ISAF in Afghanistan to proceed like this. The F-16 for the mission has a light loadout but usually at least 3 out of 4 bombs are going to be on target. And good job breaking contact when you couldn't achieve fire superiority because of that crossfire. Also you got to love it when they let loose with the RPGs and you have rounds flying from both sides during sustained firefights between compounds. Finally it is funny what you can achieve with green and conscripts when you give them reasonable objectives. Granted the opposition is weak too. The reinforcements yes they arrive sort of late. Actually there is a 20 minutes span so it is quite random. And yes you guessed the reason why they were late. Another thing that's random is the placement of mines. Not only are they placed in different spots in each of the four AI plans, but also there is a mix of infantry, mixed and anti-tank mines. So even if you draw the same plan twice, you might not have the same type of mine in one given spot. So a vehicle can drive over one and blow up and the next time get away scot free; same thing for infantry.

So I actually tested this because I was bored and I thought maybe Combatintman might be on to something here and I disliked not knowing for sure. I opened the editor, assigned the whole Syrian platoon on the map to a destroy objective worth 1000 points then opened fire with two abrams on them. Then pulled back the tanks behind a crest, saved the game and ceased fire. Then I loaded the save game but this time I made sure Syrians performed buddy aid on every single casualty on the map. Here is the result. There was no other objective that the destroy objective, no terrain objective or anything. Without buddy aid : With buddy aid : So same number of points and same cas number in each case, the only difference being the ratio of wounded or killed. It doesn't look like it makes a difference if this test is correct.

Yeah no worries, it is all good. We both feel strongly about this so a few sparks are to be expected but it was an interesting discussion. And it turns out that perhaps we don't disagree that much about the whole thing. Now tell us what is the one change you want the devs to add to the engine to put the thread back on tracks.

I don't really have time to study this in depth right now and already spent more time on this than I should have but... 1/ The whole thing is not super useful without providing the details of the test, but it is still interesting I guess. Did you just do this or is this an old test? trench troops take 90% of casualties in the first 30s of shells landing and immediately abandon the trences That seems to indicate it is an old test made when pixeltruppen just fled under artillery fire instead of staying put, so I am not sure how relevant it is. 2/ It seems to show that trenches are just plain awful. That much is obvious. It is even shocking really how they perform a lot worse across the board compared to foxholes. 3/ Buildings offer a protection that's nearly ten times as good as foxholes in the open according to the data here. And they should be better that goes without saying, but ten times? It is going to be rather hard to reproduce engagements like El Alamein or Birk Hakeim. Foxholes in forest versus buildings is close yeah, but really the sample size is tiny so I'd be careful about drawing conclusions based on this alone. 4/ "They are great but you cant expect them to act like forcefields making your infantry immune to fire. " Please be so kind as not to put words into mouth or make me say things I never said. If anything this test makes me more convinced that fortifications need to be beefed up, trenches big time and foxholes if I was going to give a ballpark figure, I'd give them a 15% boost or so.

Yeah I don't know, obviously it is better than standing in the open, but I find them a bit underwhelming personally even though maybe with the new infantry behaviour under fire introduced with the latest patch it is going to be better now. Anyway this has been debated to death. Some people find them satisfactory, some not so much.

Hmm from artillery or from small arms fire you mean?

I take it you have never played CM1 because right now in comparison they're barely adequate and offer nowhere near the same level of protection as they did before or should irl especially with half the pixeltruppen's torso sticking out.

By the way, if anyone has struggled with the scenario I need to hear your input as well. It is hard to balance a scenario properly if only people who win hands down comment. Maybe Boche is some sort of retired ninja navy seal and after his mini aar I will beef up the difficulty level or say add more mines since he didn't step on any. But maybe another person has had a different experience and spent the whole battle playing a twisted version of the Hurt Locker movie without the blast suit on and is going to scream bloody murder at the thought of me adding more mines. You feel me?

Okay well if you put your mind to it, learning is not that hard really and there is a vast amount of tutorials online about photoshop and the like. But without knowing the basics, it is going to be a bit tricky to do anything beside the simplest of editing. Copying the vest from one model to another one is easy though like waffelmann said. Far from me the idea of discouraging you but If you really want to you should grab a copy of Gimp or whatnot and spend a month or two watching tutorials about the main features and then give the uniform thing a go after that. Just my two cents.

Better trenches and foxholes that offer more protection.

Have you used an image editing software before?

Just a quick addition, a Taliban HQ icon for the unit panel. Drop in the ANA folder under extras (anywhere will do really). silhouette hq red.bmp

Yes smart play. Actually I did just that in Afghan Roulette. If you go say east, there is a chance some of the Taliban combatant groups on the west side of the map will move to the east and vice versa to engage the player from another direction. Here it was trickier to do with the way I set up the AI groups. I'll try to add more of that in my next scenario. Thanks for the feedback.

I use the special effects made by 37mm. It changes smoke, explosions, dust, muzzle flash etc. Give it a try, maybe that's what you were looking for.

Very nice Boche. I like the annotated graphic in the second picture with the path you took etc, makes it easy to see what you did. That's very interesting and useful for me. And also cool little story about the rpg gunner. By the way how did you use the F16? Point target right? And you encountered no IED or landmine? It is funny because I just finished replaying it myself and used a different avenue of approach than in my previous tests and at first everything was going fine. Then 5 minutes later an ANA HQ steps on a mine then a second squad panics and piles on the HQ detonating another mine, a pickup gunner gets shot and it all went pear shaped real fast. I went from thinking it was maybe too easy to too difficult in the span of 5 minutes. Depending on what AI plan you draw it can vary quite a bit the result. I don't know how you use spoiler tags.

I think I had this same issue the very first time I tried to install CM on my new computer. Unfortunately I don't really remember what I did exactly to fix it, but it is not something that has happened ever since. I haven't read the whole thread but have you tried something as simple and obvious as deleting the display size.txt or even the preferences.pfc files in your documents/ Battlefront / Combat Mission ? (back up the pfc just in case before you do this). And Jock Tamson is right about these anti virus software. They cause tons of problems and are frankly useless. If you need a particular file scanned, just use a site like Virus Total.

By the way the whole thing is sort of inspired by this Vice docu, especially part 2, but the whole thing is very good, definitely worth a watch if you're interested in the situation in Afghanistan. The documentary is both really candid and a bit disheartening too at the same time and not all like your average Vice docu which tends to be rather clickbaity to put it mildly. This is good journalism and serves to explain why I chose to rate the ANA and ANP troops in the scenario green or conscripts.

Nice high res pics.

Ah yes I didn't think of looking in a uaz, thanks.

Okay temporary fix until I find a better solution so you guys can play this weekend. I'll update the briefing later.