Codreanu

Beautiful, I've genuinely been putting off buying CMBN until your All in One pack for it came out, it adds that much to the CM experience for me.

I would rather have Battlefront work on refining and improving the TacAI behavior rather than adding more abstraction to it. I've never played any of the CM1 games so I can't speak to how well it worked in those. I do think that a lot of learning how to play CM2 is learning how to best utilize orders at the tactical level to make the individual unit AI do what you want to more often than not, so it could use some work.

After playing most of the American campaign and a bit of the Soviet one something that I noticed is that the loss of an M113 or BMP can, for all intents and purposes, take an entire squad out of action simply because they'll have no quick way of reaching the battlefield. How would having too much infantry and too few transports been solved in the real world? Would troops have been crammed onto the roofs of any IFVs available, would they have just acted as shuttles and gone back to pick up more men if they had the time, or would those units without transport just have to sit where they were and wait for follow up forces?

Great editing, cinematography, use of insert graphics, explanations, use of music, and pretty much everything else. The fog seems to have played havoc on your troops and once you lost the initiative Megalon really made it difficult you to regain it, and initiative is your lifeblood when playing as the Soviets. Can't wait to see what you make in the future.

I find the AI's accuracy to be spot on, it would be very difficult to actually, in the heat of combat with your adrenaline surging and your fine motor skills failing, find your target, align your front and rear sight, apply the proper lead, and actually deliver a smooth pull of the trigger to actually hit your target, not to mention that if you're working a typical bolt-action rifle you're going to have to move your face away from the gun to cycle the bolt, having to start the whole process again with reacquiring your target. At very close range your adrenaline would probably be replaced with sheer panic and terror and I doubt you'd really try aiming at all, just pray that you're one of the lucky few with a submachine gun and can just hold down the trigger with your gun pointing in the general direction of the enemy and hope that you hit him with something.

Yeah, if you could guide them in it would be fine but with how RT handles planes I don't think it works well. Stukas were never meant to act as CAS anyway, and especially not within 100ish meters of own troops. The general ambience of the campaign is good though.

Great video, a Combat Mission: Fall Blau would be so fun, I mean, look how great it is just with what a handful have modders have done with the base game? Assault team fragging and clearing an apartment building. With limited armor support it's the only real way to progress and with proper suppression it's pretty safe. A Stuka drops it's bomb a bit too close and knocks out a Panzer II, the battlefield went dead silent after with the battlefield filled with smoke and most of the men on both sides instantly pinned. Mortars hit a friendly trench wiping out an entire squad in seconds except for a single Oberschütze.

Having some good fun with the Rattenkrieg campaign.

Chieftain seems like an overall worse version of the M60 to me in this time frame. More armor but not enough to matter so it just adds a lot of extra weight, bigger gun but only firing APDS. According to Tankograd the T-72A should be impervious to L15A5 APDS even at point blank range unless you hit the lower front plate which is pretty much how M735 performs in game.

Dunno, I think at that range I would rather be the guy with the pistol who has 8 shots on tap rather than the guy desperately trying to work the bolt on his Mosin while multiple rapid shots are whizzing by. Stuff like this is really the edge case anyway, it would be nice if some of the whacky interactions you can get with the CMx2 engine would happen less often but it happens to both sides equally, and if the margin of error of you winning or not is determined by a random guy getting lucky with his pistol, you might need to rethink your tactics.

The issue is the planes never arrive at the battlefield so they never have anything to spot for the first place. Doesn't matter if you have an entire tank battalion sitting in an open field, if the planes never arrive to the battlefield they can never shoot at anything. The question is if it's a bug or arrival speed is based on experience and maybe low experience planes take an excessive time to arrive, or it's something else. Doesn't seem like it happens consistently because I've had planes arrive fine and other times they never show up at all.

Not attacking because of the AAA threat makes sense, but sometimes planes will not show up at all.

I've noticed that in a couple of RT scenarios planes never seem to arrive to the battlefield, or if they do they never drop any bombs. In Against the Odds I remember all of the German AAA shooting at the planes but I don't remember them ever bombing or strafing anything. I've definitely had planes "preparing" for over an hour and never arriving though.

One of the struggles of game design, you will never ever have the time or money to add in everything you want, just have to choose the most important bits. Still an incredible mini-campaign without them and absolutely nails the feeling of fighting in Berlin and is a big part of why F&R is the best CM module to me. When you compare two buildings to everything else F&R adds it really is nothing more than a minor nitpick.

Part of the reason why the second mission of Night at the Opera fell flat for me, especially after how epic the first mission was. The Reichstag and Brandenburg gate really deserved custom models.

A curious thought is, would making artillery behave realistically cause more harm than good to the game? Campaigns and scenarios are more or less set in stone after they're released and significantly messing with artillery performance versus vehicles might seriously upset balance, I remember people talking about this in one of the CMBN Commonwealth campaigns where making infantry less likely to break cover significantly increased the difficulty of the campaign.

I remember seeing a thread about this a few months ago and from what I remember nobody/almost nobody saw any performance increase from increasing the resolution, me included. I have an Nvidia card too and VRAM and GPU usage was the same no matter if I had it set to native resolution in the .txt file or increased it up to 8K. Are we sure it's because of that and not because of disabling shaders and shadows? Because both of those definitely do give a sizable FPS increase.

AFAIK Soviets did not have thermal imagers on any of their production tanks until right after the end of the Cold War. Agava-2 was added to some T-80UMs in the early '90s. This site mentions 1993 for the T-80UM but doesn't give a source: https://en.topwar.ru/139819-teplovizionnye-hroniki-chast-3.html I see 1992 mentioned also.

My experience has generally been the complete opposite. More often than not I see AT guns still fighting it out even with only 2 crewmen left alive and are more or less invisible until they fire. I've seen 88s take multiple direct hits from high caliber HE shells and not kill a single crewmember. My advice would be to use them in keyhole positions if possible, their maneuverability is practically zero so they should be used as area denial weapons, force the enemy to expend more resources to maneuver around you, opening him up to crossfire from more AT guns if possible, or force him to expend more resources to take you out. Much easier said than done of course, but proper positioning is 99% of proper AT gun usage, make yourself as difficult as possible for the enemy to take out while still being in a position to cover important ground.

An infantry company clear a wooded hill of German stragglers after a heavy smoke barrage... ...and manage to catch a retreating squad in the flank.

I wonder if it wouldn't be better just to remove the hitboxes for trees entirely and just add a time penalty for aiming when shooting into/out of forest tiles to simulate the tank trying to avoid hitting trees. Not a perfect solution by any means but it's gotta be better than impenetrable tree armor or your dummy gunners blasting away at a tree in front of your muzzle for a whole turn. Either that or just reduce your round penetration by a percentage and increase shot deviation but I don't know how difficult it would be to code something like that.

A very small request would be the ability to sort scenarios chronologically.

Makes me wish there was more visible vehicle damage in the game, if that was a real T-72 the turret would have landed on the moon.

Looks great to me, loved seeing that T-72 explode so hard it knocked down the house next to it! Never even knew that was possible.

Haven't played Rome to Victory but Fire & Rubble is really, really good. Night at the Opera has an absolutely epic feeling to it and To Berlin is just perfection. I wish every campaign played like To Berlin does.