Suzuya

To add, myself and a friend are currently experiancing a very similar issue. While trying to run a CMBS quick battle on the Steam version of the game we are able to start a quick match, buy our forces as normal and proceed to the first turn of the game. However the first player to go (we have both attempted this separately) can input their orders as normal but when saving the game it will create a file around 1kb in size for the save file. Any attempts to open the file result in an immediate crash, both of us have attempted to create the mission and each player had the same issue on both our machines. I have attempted by myself a number of times to recreate the game using an altered version of the map and game settings to no success, for whatever reason the first turn will always result in a corrupted file. We were attempting to play on a slightly modified version of this https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/tsd3/cm-black-sea/cm-black-sea-add-ons-maps/chernova-hirka-mastermap-v1-0/ however i did also make a game based upon an unmodified version of the map just to make sure we had not made any issues while tweaking the map which also resulted in the same error. I had no issues creating a standard PBEM game of one of the games pre made battles but this is the first QB game we had started on the Steam version of the client. We have played similar sized scenarios before in CMBFN and both our machines are rather powerful so i had not assumed this map would have been an issue based on that.

As Holien said Bill's explanation hits the nail on the head, hull down keyholed armour has a major spotting advantage. Worth mentioning the terrain is quite strongly in favour of Bill for the nature of this armoured engagement. The Capt's Armour is hemmed into his side of the map by the forest, all the trees and foliage will be heavily limiting the amount of firing angles and positions he has available and spots within the forest will likely have poor firing angles so to engage Bills armour he is being drawn to the edge of the treeline where his tanks face a punishing 30 second crawl back to cover if they are spotted whereas Bill has the choice of the larder, if his tanks are spotted he can pull back into defilade at will and reposition to a new hull down spot. I'm not the biggest fan of how the T64's were used here but the fact The Capt was expecting better tanks than T62's as his reinforcements goes a way to explaining that, if he had a Company of T64A's as reinforcements the losses on the field would be far less important. As it is most of his best armour has been whittled away in a gun duel that favoured Bill from the offset.

I actually quite like The Capt's use of his BMPs so far, to get fire into the valley Bill needs to use his M-150s and M60s to put down meaningful fire since his own M113s don't have the firepower to threaten much on the other side. Unless Bill can get some M47s up there he has to expose his armour to far cheaper yet still lethal BMP missile fire, i would trade a pair of BMPs from my scout company for an M60 in this scenario and probably happily call it a win, especially if he can knock out any of the RISE+ varients on the field.

It’s been quite a while since I've been subscribed to SB but different thermal sights do have multiple magnifications, colours and resolutions how accurate those are to RL though i can't say. One of my friends fairly recently found his licence Codemeter in a drawer after misplacing it. I can ask if he doesn't mind taking a few screenshots of different tanks to showcase some comparisons. Theres also a few youtube videos up that give a decent idea of some of the differences sadly not helped by the video compression.

The spotting ability in CMSF should be substantially more capable than the vehicles present in CW, many of the Thermal equipped vehicles in SF such as the Leopard 2 and M1A2 have both higher quality thermal imagers multiple generations ahead and independant thermal sights for the commander to use independent of the gun sight greatly increasing the tanks awareness. With that said the vehicles here equipped with thermals should have a massive advantage over any armour that lacks them, thermal sights made target acquisition in most terrain and weather conditions far easier than most day or night scopes that came prior. It’s also purely anecdotal but i read that the ANVGS-2 sight on the M60 was considered very high quality for the time period. Sadly not real images but Steel Beasts does do a fairly good job of showing off a theoretical comparison between thermal imaging (daytime, no night shots sadly) and the nightsight present on the M60.

Direct quote from the first post, "You purchase will also give you access to the Steam version of the game." ie. purchasing the game will give you a download from the battlesite website as usual but you will also be given presumably a key from BF or Slitherine that you will be able to redeem for the Steam version. So purchasing here will give you both versions.

I would be wary of those Panzerfaust 3s on the German dismounts Bill, being unguided means their range is limited but they can disable even MBTs frontally and should not be underestimated.