sttp

Ok. I don't know if I misunderstood, or you were joking, but I gotta take exception with that one.
 
CMBB pic.

 
Same sorta pic from Red Thunder.
 

 
 
Mord.

After I mentioned Pavloc's house over on the CoC board on FB, one of the guys essentially said the story of Pavlov's house was propaganda. When I asked for evidence, he sent me this link to a massive discourse on the whole situation, complete with photos and Russian CC film clips. The amount of information here is overwhelming, but I thought it would delight the troops. The carnage is sobering (a battalion down to 18 effectives), showing how truly close the Germans came to taking Stalingrad, and there's grog chrome galore, too. Nets on upper story windows on German buildings to keep out incendiary bottles, for example. And did you know Serjeant Pavlov took the house with only three other frontoviki? They were its sole garrison for a time, and the buld-up began from there. All in all, this Reddit is a marvelous resource for what I'm sure is a CM game people dream of (or wake up sweating at the thought of it). There is a great deal more at the link, including a lot of amplifying remarks, corrections to the article's translator, comments about being respectful to the fighters and more. All in all, quite the education!

Fair use
Regards,
 
John Kettler
 

No the next Combat Mission is a simulation about a customer base waiting with great  anticipation for a new product.The new game is  tentativley being called CMBP , Combat Mission Beyond Patience.

I played the same mission yesterday, and while I agree it's a tough nut to crack, I saw plenty of cases where the AI ran into the streets to get cut to pieces. Somehow it's never as painful when it happens to the enemy as to my own guys
I don't think they will ever fix this behaviour 100 pct, but I feel there's still room for improvement. A basic check to not let troops run towards known threats (contacts) might go a long way. And if there's no escape route without enemy contacts, then to stay.
Staying put when under fire in a building might not guarantee survival, but it often seems the more "believable" choice. At least as I see it.

The only all-in-one installer I can locate is the "CM Normandy 4.00 Full" (4.3GB). Where can I find the all-in-one for v.3? I appreciate your help but, especially when it comes to CM Normandy, I throw up my hands in despair over the many multiple modules and engine upgrades and packs and wonder how I ever got the game to run on my PC in the first place.
 
OK thank you for this -- this is a clever work around that I will try out.
 
I completely agree with you that the pixeltruppen should not be supermen and should not make perfect decisions. The problem is the 'autonomy' as exercised by the truppen, esp. in v.400, just stretches beyond credibility. It's one thing to run into an ambush out of recklessness. It's quite another to choose to run headlong into enemy fire, which is what I saw in Abbaye d'Authie and caused me to put things aside -- a squad in a good position, putting good fire on the enemy, which then decides of its own accord to run *out* of cover and into a wall of bullets from *known* enemy positions. Willing suspension of disbelief terminated.
I was under the impression from reading other posts that the problematic 4.00 infantry behavior mostly pertained to troops under HE bombardment. What I saw was my troops 'exercising autonomy' simply during an exchange of fire. And they weren't pinned or panicked. They were in the advantageous position, and decided to give it up in favor of a completely disadvantageous position, leading to heavy casualties.
 
Anyway, I appreciate the responses from everyone who has weighed in here -- and that the comments have been admirably civil all around.
 

If the best CM game is the one you spend the most time playing, then CMFI is in my experience the best. It has the longest time frame, July 43 to May 44, most varied terrain and weather, steep mountains to flat farm fields, baking heat to winter blizzards, hard rocky ground to deep mud. And the forces? In my opinion, the widest selection of any of the titles. Italians vs New Zealanders is not a battle happening in any other title. When the Rome to Victory module is released, all the features I just listed will be expanded upon further cementing CMFI as the broadest in scope.
And WEGO every battle, every time. After watching a squad leader run from cover to stand over his cowering squad mate, ignore incoming fire, burn off a few dozen rounds in the direction of the enemy and then escort his man to safety, I was hooked. You can't watch that a dozen times in a row in real time.

I've made the point several times, but for me the 4.0 issue is experienced troops leaving cover and running when (in previous engines) they would instead briefly cower, simulating just keeping their heads down.
I've had fresh elite and crack British paras run out of heavy buildings when they came under rifle or very distant MG fire for less than a minute.  Something has definitely changed.

I appreciate the response, Erwin, both yours and Warts'n'all's -- but correct me if I'm wrong, wasn't the 4.00 patch released in Jan. 2017? That's over a year ago. I'm not sure how to take "BF is working on fixing it" then ... "with a grain of salt" seems appropriate and, indeed, generous.
It's dismaying that one can come back to CMx2 after a hiatus and discover, within less than an hour of play, a major problem that still hasn't been addressed, 13 months on.
It's equally dismaying that it's by no means clear that the standard work around -- 'roll back to version 3.00' - is possible. Given the headaches associated with BF's 'activation' process and confusion over version numbers and order in which modules need to be installed... I wouldn't even know where to begin.
This truly is not meant as 'Battlefront bashing' -- I fully recognize I haven't been part of this community nearly as long as many of you, but I own all the CMx2 games and have poured a lot of hours into each of them, and don't regret that in the slightest.
Still (and I know the phrase gets thrown around a lot) this really does seem game-breaking to me.  I can't see the point of spending hours carefully plotting out tactics if your squads can just move about of their own accord, making the stupidest of decisions and getting annihilated in the process. If there really is no work around for this, then I guess it's back to the shelf for CMx2, and will check back in 6 months to see if BF has bothered to sort any of this out.

The ability to copy and paste pieces of maps into other cells. As it works now, if you want to move some feature(s) even one cell over you have to basically do the whole thing over. I'm convinced that this is part of the reason we don't see more user created maps and scenarios. I know I've been burned by this a few times, and it makes me just want to quit the editor altogether sometimes. (But who am I kidding... I usually pick it up again a few weeks later.)
Also, an "undo" button in the scenario editor.

A rotten argument, just because you can use other tactics i doesn't mean that single shot bren guns aren't a big deal, if i wanted a close range weapon i would have 2 sten guns in my sections...

@Kuderian @slysniper
 
If you watch this video and still think there is absolutely no problem, you're either high, delusional, or both. 
The fact is, there IS an issue, and Steve has already acknowledged it and said there will be a patch that addresses it. Again to reiterate what I've already said, I would like it if the patch was out sooner rather than later, but I'm not all butthurt that it hasn't been released yet. 

Try fighting german squads with mg42s firing bursts with your good old british sections with single shot bren guns, i'd say that's pretty game breaking in certain scenarios... after 14 months and no patch people will complain, like it or not, and they do not care how marginal you think the issues are. 14 months are a long time.

Well, a long discussion about those problems in engine 4.0 started in April: (10 months ago!). And a lot of people were agreeing there was an important problem.
And Battlefront acknowledged the problem, after a lot of requests from his customers, at least in August (6 months ago):
In my opinion a patch to fix the main problem with engine 4.0 should have been already released. I can not understand the policy that Battlefront is following with engine 4.0. It was released 14 months ago and at least 10 months ago a long discussion was started pointing out an important problem with that engine and stock campaigns. But that is only my opinion, of course.
Txema

The whole communiction from the side of BF is a joke. People can defend it as much as they like, but their PR is not only very bad, it is almost non-existent. I don't buy nonsense like 'they must concentrate on their work', 'new information will only bring discussion and questions' and 'you can tell them how to do things once you have your own company'.
Reading this forum IS like being stuck in a time-loop and the lack of information IS causing speculation.
 
 
Utter arrogance. Technically not allowed to say that....

True. My charge that the scenario was designed "incompetently" was too harsh. It was borne out of frustration. 
No I have never attempted to design a scenario. 
Overall, pointing out problems with AI/scenario design is constructive if the problems are real. I provide two examples in this thread of enemy bunching in the first 10 minutes of a scenario in a stock campaign. This is sufficient empirical evidence that there is a problem. It does not matter if I play the scenario over again and find that the AI does not bunch. The fact is, the AI bunched in two separate instances in the first 10 minutes of the scenario.
The problem may be with the AI ("TacAI"), it may be with the scenario design tools, or it may be with the scenario designer's decisions. Given the comments so far,  it seems I was wrong to conclude that the problem is solely with the decisions made by the scenario designer. It is all of the above. Perhaps the designer could have split the enemy into smaller groups. 
Overall the designer for this campaign has done well. But bunching like this really takes the wind out of my sails. 

While Pericles was a bit blunt in the way he phrased his frustrations, his point still stands. A campaign made by Battlefront should ideally be quality checked to a higher degree than a user-made campaign.
I'm not saying the editor is easy, and I definitely understand how errors can creep in. I made a good deal of mistakes, myself, and I wouldn't call anyone incompetent. But when I make mistakes, people generally forgive them, because they know I spent several weekends of my spare time providing a scenario for free.
If I sold my scenarios for real money, I would also have to accept that people would get more frustrated with my mistakes. In that sense, I think Pericles has a fair point.
 

was first talked about in the 2015 Christmas Bones thread. Not even a screenshot since then? What gives BFC? Can we get something? The only pictures we've seen was the head shot of the Indian model (unless I missed something). 
 
Mord.

Thank you Slysniper. Always nice to hear player comments.
Meijel is one of those more obscure battles in Holland after the failure of Market Garden. Finding detailed info was pretty hard, but eventually I found enough. Only on the German OOB info was scarce.
But I could not resist making it. It is my own backyard . I went to visit the site too, but much has changed.
The map is VERY much like it was in 1944, based on detailed period maps and photos. It was fun to make. It is somewhat oversized. This is intentional to give players a good feel of what the area looked like. There is also a master map which is larger. More battles where fought here. Maybe someone feels the urge to make one or two.
 

May we trouble BFC/playtesters for an AAR showcasing one of the soon to be released modules..
The forums have turned very quiet ones again...We need something...

The ability to copy and paste pieces of maps into other cells. As it works now, if you want to move some feature(s) even one cell over you have to basically do the whole thing over. I'm convinced that this is part of the reason we don't see more user created maps and scenarios. I know I've been burned by this a few times, and it makes me just want to quit the editor altogether sometimes. (But who am I kidding... I usually pick it up again a few weeks later.)
Also, an "undo" button in the scenario editor.

On this idea of artificially 'grow a pair' adjustment to morale from the CM1 days, has this ever been thought about for limited CM2 use? Why I ask relates to my biggest personal thump head on table gripe relating to the TacAI that makes pixeltruppen look dumb as two bricks at times. I keep running into it, particularly in urban fights going building to building. A fire team/squad conducts a move order and when only one or two action squares from their destination "Johnny" gets hit.
At this point, rather than working out they are a couple of strides to their destination they stop and decide to flee the way they came which means running back through the same LOF that caused 'Johhny' to go down. I've seen this occur even when the unit that lost 'Johhny' realises immediately where they took fire from based on a strong sound or visible contact. There also appears to be no factor in play based on the action tiles the unit is about to enter at the end of the way point. ie. "Hey my destination has a giant stone wall between me and the shooter, I'll likely be safe there than heading back the way I came."
Granted I fully expect unit experience would certainly play a role here, with Conscript and Green troops being more likely to opt to simply drop to the ground ground and call for a change of pants, but when Regular and above rated troops have this reaction as well it gets 'weird' watching replays. I've never been in the military or near an active combat zone (thankfully!) so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't see a trained soldier being taught from basic that the best thing to do when coming under fire is to turn around and run through the same LOF again to give the enemy another chance.
Could the 'grow a pair' unit morale adjustment for the final few action squares help alleviate instances like this?

A terrain pack would be awesome. My dream is to have specific buildings one day, like the Grain Factory in Stalingrad of the Kremlin in Moscow. Also more variety in trees, buildings and so on is high on my list. 

I'm in the same camp as Sgt Squarehead where it would be a nice inclusion to play with some fantasy "1946" toys but 'not right now.' There are still so many other historically based 'packs' that can still be explored for the WW2 titles that would and provide us with a lot more variety in gameplay and scenario design opportunities compared to some shiney new vehicles with bigger guns.
Partisans, elite formations and minor nations would be at the top of my wishlist for future packs/modules. I'm probably the only one that's also flagged the idea of a 'Terrain Pack' in the past - again to give scenario designers some increased variety. Playing in the editor in CMBS you realise not having an infantry non-easily passable chainlink fence that doesn't block LOS/LOF is a real annoyance when trying to make a modern urban/industrial map.

I am totally there with you!  I also wish there was some means of Infantry going over a tall wall with some kind of penalty, but that would require new animations etc.

First of all, some more notes:
there is no discernible difference in MP44 and Sten effectiveness whether it is fired by a Leader or a Soldier. I am showing Leader data only. similarly, there is no conclusive evidence that Sten Mk II and Mk IV are any different. I am showing Sten Mk II data only. MP44, Bren and B.A.R. switch from full auto to semi-auto fire above 150 meters, so there is a step change in the results between 120 and 160 meters where I ran the tests the statistics may still not be good enough for weapons achieving few kills at long distances, so the results for rifles at the edge of their range are indicative rather than accurate. Firepower
First note: the vertical axis is in log scale, otherwise the drop in firepower with distance would drown out all detail. I'll post the excel file so you can make any graphs you want.
Bolt-action rifles are at the bottom, Lee-Enfield appears to be superior to Kar 98K. Semi-auto rifles are better, both M1 Garand and Gewehr 43 are on the same level together with the MP44 (when fired in semi-auto mode). All SMGs are better than all rifles over their entire range up to 200 m. MP40 and Sten have very similar performance, Thompson is the most powerful SMG. MP44 is less powerful than SMGs but is in the same league with them until the 150 m mark. Bren and B.A.R. are generally in the league with SMGs as well but, of course, keep going beyond 200 m. The B.A.R. is inferior to the Bren, apparently due to its smaller magazine, and therefore lower average rate of fire. MG42 beats everything by a wide margin except the sniper rifle. The scoped rifle benefits much less from closing the range than the other weapons.

The only problem from my perspective is that SMGs keep their high performance out to 200 m. Their firepower does not fall much with distance in the outer part of their range, and as we will see, their accuracy (on "bodies per round" basis) is constant or even rises between 120 and 200 m.

[more to come]