Codreanu

Political officers seem like more an act of desperation or necessity than a "bonus" so to speak. Nazi Germany didn't feel the need to start creating NSFOs until the war turned against them and they need to create more indoctrinated, politically reliable soldiers.

Something set in 1966-1969 has a lot of promise I feel, North Korea was doing a lot of agitating and cross border raids and America was preoccupied in Vietnam. Add in a little alternate history with the Blue House Raid killing President Park Chung-hee, or even it failing and triggering a South Korean attack against North Korea without American help initially.

Yep, exactly.

If the mortars are close to each other they all share their ammunition into one big pool, so you aren't gaining or losing shells, it's just that one mortar can lend ammunition to another if it needs to. Separate them and it will go back down to 22 each of the tubes. It's a poorly explained UI element though, I agree.

With how ridiculously delayed CMCW was because of having to add PBEM+++ implementation you'd think CMBN would release on time, but there's not even a store page for it on Steam yet. Maybe Slitherine has released some tidbits of information on the release date on one of their streams without actually notifying people anywhere else, that's what they did for Cold War.

I think it'd slightly lean towards the USA but not dramatically so. American infantry is overall better but those SMG platoons shred everything in sight if they can get in range, M4A3 (76) is generally better than the T-34-85, but the Americans have no real tank counter to an IS-2 obr. 1944 or IS-3. C2 advantage goes to America and they'd better be able to employ their artillery tactically with quicker call in times. Balance could easily be achieved by just giving the Soviets a bit more troops to play with anyway.

Not everything is on there, there's a lot of stuff you can only find on these forums or other places. I'm sure it was a pain for people like 37mm to compile their scenario packs hunting through the scenario depot and Battlefront forums trying to find old scenarios, the most up to date version of those old scenarios, and any accompanying files that came with them, Steam Workshop would literally just be 1 click to install it and would install any new version automatically.

Steam Workshop support would be huge. I can see the modding community getting a second renaissance if there was a central repository like the workshop where people could just one click install new mods and scenarios, coupled with a new, more user-friendly scenario designer and opening the game up to more expansive mods a little bit more.

Is it intentional? I always thought it was just a bug that has never been fixed for whatever reason, same as spotting icons disappearing depending on the camera angle. They're weird for everyone though, so nothing you can do about it.

Using Reshade gives the biggest boost to the visuals of the game IMHO, coupled with texture and effect improvements which you can get at https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/cm-mod-warehouse/ or just download a @37mm All in One pack which includes a lot of those visual improvements along with a lot of other stuff. As for Reshade profiles @jamxo has a wonderful looking one linked here or you can just make your own through trial and error but his is a great starting point. All of this won't turn the game into a Picasso painting but I think it's a massive improvement over the vanilla look and feel. Here's a sample shot using both jamxo's Reshade with a little tweaking and 37mm's mod pack for RT.

If you can get a spot off on it with an infantry unit or something, get that information to your tank platoon or tank company commander and wait for the contact to disseminate through the unit, then roll them all up at once, unbuttoned if you can and there's a very good chance you can kill it with zero or maybe one loss at worse. That or find dead ground to get an AT-7 team close enough to fire. The Soviet campaign is damned hard so I feel your pain, you have to use speed but going too fast will get your advance elements smashed before reinforcements can arrive, you have to use mass but even a single M60A3 can take out your tank platoon without you ever seeing them. Artillery does nothing to M60s without a direct hit in my experience but it will absolutely kill anything using an M113 chassis so at least you have that going for you.

This would be a nice feature. I believe in most tanks at least one of the machine guns usually comes with a bipod stowed away somewhere so if you have to bail you have some extra firepower. I bet typically it would just be left in the tank because nobody is gonna want to take the time to yank it out of it's mount and grab the bipod when they're being shot at but maybe it could be an option for tank crew to be able to go back and retrieve it, or even a friendly infantry squad.

I've noticed that CMBN seems to have more pathfinding issues than the other games, not sure if it's entirely due to the bocage or some minor differences in code even if it's using the same engine version as the rest of the games.

I've seen three different playthroughs of that mission (one being my own) and all of them had totally different ideas on how to best tackle the mission and they all succeeded. Unless you're facing a real time crunch I think recon is always valuable, if you can spot and take out any enemy AT assets first then the rest of the scenario is mopping up with your tanks as long as you stay out of panzershrek/panzerfaust range.

I thought I told them, Private Jenkins' grenades were to be replaced with potatoes after what happened last time... Also interesting engine quirk that the grenade voice clips still play even when an entire squad is dead.

Hopefully some day. I would put down $60 for CM: Barbarossa right now to help fund it even if it meant only getting it in another couple of years. Or maybe it will be CMx3's launch title

I think the terrain in the base game is a bit same-y and only the German campaign is that fun to play, with Fire and Rubble the game really comes into it's own and you get so many more units to mess around with, snow, real urban combat, really excellent scenarios and four really excellent campaigns. I think it's unpopularity is largely due to the fact that many more people in the western world are interested in the western front as opposed to the eastern, that and it's a lot harder to make scenarios and campaigns that take place in the eastern front because most of the primary source documentation you can find is in German or Russian which not a lot of people speak. I would say you should buy the game set in the theater that interests you the most, if you really like the Eastern front buy CMRT, if you really like Italy buy CMFI. Red Thunder is a great game and I've gotten many hundreds of hours of playtime out of it and still have a bucketload of scenarios and campaigns I haven't even touched so you can't go wrong there if it's the game you end up choosing.

Now done with the fight for Tukums proper, a completely different experience from the first scenario. It felt so good being able to lay the hurt on with proper panzer forces and mechanized infantry but the Soviet forces were also very stubborn defenders as usual. I finished it with 40 KIA 42 WIA, a good chunk of that being disposable SS troops so I'm feeling pretty good about that. Near the end every time I rounded a corner in Tukums a group of Soviets would instantly throw their hands up in surrender which felt good, and they threw in the towel with almost an hour still on the clock so I didn't even get to see the SS reinforcements from the first battle! @Ithikial_AU if it's possible to create that monster scenario using all three maps without crashing the game I'd love to see it, whenever you aren't busy working on the CMBN battle pack, of course

A shame you don't have Fire and Rubble because the To Berlin campaign is perfect for beginners IMHO. Not too hard, a lot of medium sized battles, urban and non-urban combat, some punishment for playing recklessly but it's also generous in replenishing most of your core forces every 3 missions and you get a good amount of non-core forces to play with if you really happen to mess up. Every mission in it is excellent too.

Seconding this, could you post a link, or at least point us in the right direction? I haven't seen any videos of war crimes like that.

I'm taking kill claims from both sides with a huge grain of salt right now, what's happening there is just too chaotic to know for sure. So far I've only seen pictures/video of 2 Ka-52s, a Hind, an An-24 that crashed not due to enemy action, an an Su-30 that I think was destroyed by a Ukrainian Tochka that hit an airbase.

Made it through the first mission with a Total Victory, definitely a scenario that requires a lot of persistence and patience to pick apart the enemy AT assets. Now I'm getting stuck in with the second one and it's a really beautifully done map, when you go down to camera level 1 to scout out the terrain it feels like you're really there.

Kudos to them, then. Will push my reinforcements hard when I get them and hope they can make a breakthrough, even tattered reinforcements for the 2nd battle will be better than no reinforcements at all.

Anyone who tries moving their vehicles down the road would find out very quickly that it's not going to work, and besides that there's only one real option so I think it's pretty self-explanatory what you need to do. This scenario is hard but I don't think it's poorly explained or confusing at all. So many scenarios where you play as the Germans give you a force of Übermensch too so getting a dog's lunch of crappy outdated tanks and green infantry is unique. Did anyone manage to beat it on their first try during testing?

I had no problems clearing the woods of infantry, my vehicles ran them out of the woods rather easily, but my god trying to move on from there is hellish. My vehicles got absolutely massacred by their AT defenses. Without a direct hit to the gun they would just keep popping up to shoot even with multiple MGs providing suppressing fire. I hope the StuGs and Tiger show up soon, I need more vehicles to throw into the meat grinder...