Pericles

Playing the new US campaign in the CMBS battlepack and my engineers are not able to Blast through walls. I issue the command and instead of a red line, a yellow line shows up and the engineers just run around the building through a door when I push play. Soldiers with breach kits do Blast through walls, so this is a problem only with engineers and/or demo charges. Anyone notice this bug before?

I have called three precision artillery strikes with 3x Excalibur HE and I have missed the enemy tank every time (I'm 0 for 9). What am I missing here? The spotter is a veteran, has spotted the tank with a drone, has no laser designator, is not under fire, and has command link to superiors. The only explanation I can think of is that the spotter has no laser designator, but this doesn't make sense given that he is spotting with a drone. I have successfully destroyed targets with precision arty and drone-spotting in the past.

sburke, I agree with what you're saying. MikeyD, thanks for the info. Making propensity to duck back inside vehicle upon taking fire a function of motivation seems like a necessary compromise. Something I can learn to live with. Playing Mission 2 of US campaign now. Another thing that urks me is that the enemy's AFVs and tanks are pointing in the wrong direction (away from the attacking threat, which is me). Doesn't make sense.

Purchased the CMBS Battlepack. Haven't played for a while and this first mission in the US campaign is reminding me of how this game frustrates. If a gunner in a Stryker is shooting at a target, but then is fired upon by the enemy, he should duck back into the vehicle to stay out of harm's way. But the AI does not do this. The gunner will stay out in the open until he is killed/wounded. Anyone agree that this should be changed? Another thing is the attacking behavior of the enemy units. In the middle of the mission, two enemy jeeps came rushing towards my units. They ended up driving around in a small village, weaving around buildings at high speed until they were taken out. Not realistic/immersive. The game is being held back by these AI problems, among others. I would opt for AI improvements over new content.

"p b e m pllss" "cmooonnn" "linky pls"... WTF is with this Sublime dude. Unnerving.

I look forward to when Battlefront addresses this issue. That will give me incentive to buy more of their CMx2 games and modules.

Here is another stylized CMBN video AAR for those interested.

Glad you enjoyed it guys. I think the mission time could be doubled safely to give the player an attempt at taking the last objective. With the existing one hour time limit, the player really has to rush forward hastily in order to take it... which isn't realistic imo. But a great mission overall, very immersive with the flaming jeep at the start and lots of ambushes. I'd like to make more of these, it just takes so damn long. Maybe someday the game will ship with a "movie maker" feature.

Here is my first video AAR for Bulletpoint's "Contact Front!". I chose to use the "Color Movie" effect in my video processing software to liven it up a bit but the color turned out psychadelic after uploading to youtube. I will probably not use this effect in the future. Anyway pretend you're watching the movie as a German solider circa 1944 who is high on meth or something.

Vanir. I was unable to fire smoke after the HE shells were used up, even when positioned in an open field without any tree canopies in the way. It's strange that you're not seeing the bug on your end, as there are many users who experience the bug.

Ts4EVER, no I haven't tried any German campaigns. For some reason I can't bring myself to head German forces... eventually though. I prefer Commonwealth and if not then USA. Your opinion of the CMx2 WWII campaigns seems to be the same as my opinion of CMBN campaigns. Have you tried any of the CMBS campaigns? I find those better. PS I have watched and enjoyed many of your Combat Mission videos. Bulletpoint, I could have used a doubling of time on your "Contact Front!" scenario. Finished yesterday and in the process of preparing an AAR, which I'll put on youtube. I'll post it later today on the CMBN forum.

Just tried to upload the saved game. Not allowed.

I can confirm that the British mortar "target smoke' is still a problem with v.4.0. Apparently if the mortar team fires all HE shells, then it can't fire any of its smoke shells. Doesn't make any sense, must be a challenge to fix this bug.

Bulletpoint, I agree with what you're saying about being able to skip the odd bad mission during campaigns, and the fact that Scottish Corridor was for the most part solid. I am about to embark on a play through of "Contact Front!". I'll report back.

Ithikial, I appreciate the work you must have put into that campaign, including the .pdf that provides historical background. It's just the fact that I took the positions on the map in Mission 1 and then in Mission 3 I have to retake them. It's not consistent from the gamer's perspective. That ruined it for me, but enjoyed Mission 1 and being repelled in Mission 2. Bulletpoint, you might be misunderstanding my criticism. All I'm saying is that CMBN campaigns often end up with a mission or two that ruin the immersion and realism. And imo that is a problem because immersion and realism are what CM is all about imo. Others don't seem to care as much about immersion and realism and be more into the different vehicles, units, skins, etc. Most of the individual CMBN missions that I have played, both in campaigns and as individual "scenarios", and both stock and user-made, have been immersive and realistic. Not so for the CMBN campaigns.

Actually I'm wrong. Courage and Fortitude is not stock.

No no no, sburke, you insufferable sod. Courage and Fortitude is indeed a stock campaign. And we are not saying that 'all campaigns, all scenarios, CM is just too hard now?" To take that from our discussion up to now is to be deliberately trolling or mentally disabled from CM fandom. I am saying that immersion and realism is not as high as it could be in some of the campaigns (stock and user-made). And yes, that means sometimes it's too "hard" because your men won't advance. That being said, I'm currently enjoying CMBS's "Into the Breach", with map courtesy of you. So thanks for that. But you must see some valid criticisms in this thread?

Not really. I wrote 5-10 minutes, not to brag but to be modest in my estimate of how long it usually takes someone to play through an hour-long mission. So taking 10 minutes as an average order time, and taking 3 minutes as an average playback time, that's 13 minutes per turn. Multiply that by the number of turns (60) and we have 13 hours to play an hour-long mission! If you game for 2 hours a day, that's almost a full week for one mission. Now consider that campaigns string together a number of missions and we're talking one week best estimate. So my point stands. Campaigns ought to be good, given the enormous investment of time. CMBN campaigns are not good, if you are like me and believe that immersion and realism are what's "good" in CM games.

RepsolCBR, that's a good point about the development of the scenario editor since the days of CMBN. I too am looking forward to more CMRT and CMFI campaigns (which will cause me to buy both titles I imagine). It all seems to boil down to the age of CMBN. CMBS campaigns were great. probably due to the extra features in the editor. The 4.0 infantry behavior (cut-and-run) might not be so much to blame.

An acceptable amount of time to complete a one-hour scenario in my mind is about 8 hours. My point is that this is a demanding game. If you want to finish what you started, you have to play over multiple days. This goes double for campaigns. It is therefore important that campaigns are constructed expertly, so that one does not feel like he's wasting his time. But to each his own, I get that. I might be more picky than some here. What I am saying is that the CMBN campaigns that I have played have sucked for the most part imo because the immersion (which is what I play for) is killed by something stupid (as outlined in OP). All those hours feel like a bit of a waste (if I had enjoyed them, they would not have been a waste). StieliAlpha is getting at something that has been brought up by many on the forum before: the 4.0 infantry behavior will make many older missions/campaigns "unplayable" for many gamers. Cpt. Miller asked if I've ever tried learning and understanding basic tactical principles. Not sure what this has to do with my post. It is about campaign design and resulting enjoyment. I would love to fight you in a PBEM someday though, Cpt. Miller. I would defeat you so fast that you would be left scratching your tactical bowlcut (I imagine you with a bowlcut, sorry).

I have tried to play four campaigns in CMBN and easily have over 100 hours of gameplay. Overall, my opinion of CMBN campaigns is low. Lions of Carpiquet, The Scottish Corridor, Courage and Fortitude (with the Razorback Ridge mission). I gave Road to Nijmegen a try but the first mission really defeated me as you have to send your infantry across a large field and version 4.0 infantry behavior makes this frustrating. One thing about CM gameplay is that it takes a great deal of time. Completing an hour-long mission is 60 turns. Orders for each turn take about 5-10 minutes to complete with a few exceptions. Then you watch and re-watch the 1 minute-long action sequence, which can take 3-5 minutes to complete. That's a minimum of about 8 hours for an hour-long mission. That's about 5 days if you game for 1-2 hours a day. Anyway, it's a lot of time. The question is whether it's time spent where you're left feeling like "damn, that was great, glad I did it". I rarely feel this way at the end of my CMBN campaign experiences. I just stopped playing the Lions of Carpiquet campaign. Huge 4x company battles, massive maps, but Mission 2 is not winnable and Mission 3 is the exact same map of Mission 1. I successfully defeated the Germans on the map in Mission 1 and now I am asked for some reason to retake the map in Mission 3. There is nothing to be gained from this. The campaign author claims that the campaign is historically accurate, but really? There seems to be something missing here in terms of text explaining why the positions I took in Mission 1 must be retaken all over again in Mission 3. Even with the explanation though, I have no interest in grinding through the same landscape over the course of the next week. This highlights the critical importance of excellent campaign design. And it lacks in all of the CMBN campaigns I've played. The missions are either completely unrealistic (Razorback Ridge), suffer from bad final missions that highlight the weaknesses of CMx2 coding (Scottish Corridor's night mission where infantry can't see tanks unless their within 10 m of them for longer than a minute (or something like that)), suffer from infantry 4.0, or have no consistency and repeat maps. I will give the Road to Nijmegen a chance again in the near future and report back. Any thoughts? Note: I have not had the same problem with the CMBS stock campaigns. They all play very very well.

I would also like to wish ChrisND a full recovery from his "burn out" and hope that he will continue working on the CM series. I think his tutorial videos for Black Sea and Final Blitzkrieg were particularly effective (that's how I learned about all the CM features). As for trailers and screenshots, I don't imagine that was one of his work priorities. That being said, the game would greatly benefit from better advertising... there are hoards of potential mature gamers out there (I think).

Update: So in this second Lions of Carpiquet CMBN mission I'm playing, I received tank support a few turns after making the initial post. I initially "targeted" the concrete bunkers with the tanks. This didn't have much of an effect. I then "light targeted" the concrete bunkers with the tanks, making sure that MG fire was directed at the front slot of the bunker. Within between 20-60 seconds of MG fire from the tanks, each concrete bunker was knocked out. One of the bunkers exploded (must have hit interior ammo boxes with MG fire) and the occupants of all the others were killed. So the MG hypothesis (Hardenberger, RepsolCBR) seems to hold. To deal with concrete bunkers, fire at their front slots with MGs.

How do you deal with concrete bunkers if you don't have any artillery? Are 51 mm HE mortars enough? Can you take a bunker from the back with your infantry (away from where the MG is facing)?

Thanks for the info. So let me get this straight: the only means by which a unit can be alerted and respond to the presence of enemy units and associated dangers are: 1) Direct spotting (including any enhanced spotting that might result from get fired at) 2) Indirect spotting (spotting facilitated by C2 links) 3) Laser warnings I would constructively criticize the decision to not include: 4) Friendly in proximity to unit gets obliterated But it must be very difficult to code for that, so it's fine. Still saps much of the realism when a bunch of tanks cruise forward together in plain view. I guess I can blame the scenario designer for that. Anyway, I'll finish it, maybe it will turn out to be challenging.