Codreanu

How satisfactory they were would depend on what you're shooting at, I guess. I'm curious if the criticism of them was about their penetration or about their HE shell's effectiveness versus infantry and how many shells they could stow on board. If you're spending most of your time shooting at infantry I can see why individual tankers might have missed their old 75 Shermans or 76 T-34s, playing CM has really made me cherish tanks with a large amount of powerful HE on board.

Fire and Rubble was so good it just made my craving for more Eastern front modules even worse. I don't really care if it's Barbarossa or Stalingrad or whatever else, if it has the same quality and attention to detail as F&R it's an instant buy for me.

If you've spotted an anti-tank gun or machinegun team, keep them under fire until you actually see that the gun has been abandoned. Nothing is worse than having an MG open up on your men out in the open after you stopped shooting at it because you thought you had knocked it out.

Will a triggerman only detonate an IED if an enemy is on the same square as the IED or is it up to his TacAI whether he thinks an enemy is within the blast radius or not?

Wow, beautiful work, it's so easy to just open one of those pictures taken from the ground level in fullscreen and feel like you're looking at a real place because, well, you pretty much are!

Are they all literally the same? No, they all feel different and unique to me, although I do wish there was a little more innovation and a feeling of improving with each new game, imagine if CW added some sort of advanced hit analysis feature to the engine that was added to the rest of the games down the road, that would make buying new CM games more enticing if there were a few new special features to mess around with. The graphics and special effects are all pretty bad, I agree with you totally on this, and the games run terribly despite how dated they look. Better graphics would help a lot with enticing new players and increase the immersion factor of the games substantially. Agree with you again, new PBEM system helped a little with not having to bother with sharing files manually but the ability to play with random people is half-baked at best, the only thing I can really say about it is that it functionally works, but not much else. PvP campaigns, co-op, some sort of server browser system, maybe dev ran tournaments would all be nice to see but I know it's never going to happen on the CMx2 engine. It means nothing to me but even something like Steam achievements being added might be enough to get someone to buy CM if they were already on the edge. Really depends on how much you enjoy your time playing and how many hours of entertainment you get out of the game. I don't mind $60 for the base game but maybe shave the modules down by $5. I do think there needs to be more frequent sales that slash the prices down a bit more. I've been putting off buying CMBN for awhile just because I can't see myself spending that much money in one lump sum for a game, especially because to my understanding all of the maps and missions and campaigns were created using an early version of the engine with some campaigns having missing units due to OOB changes and smaller map sizes due to engine limitations at the time. If all of that was modernized and tweaked a bit for the latest version of the engine then I'd feel better about it. Of all the problems with CM, this one must be near the bottom of the list. It'd be nice to have I guess but I would rate quality of life improvements and modernizing the engine as far, far higher priorities. Already went over this, but I agree that $35 is slightly too much imho. I have zero clue about Battlefront's margins or how much they actually earn or anything about their finances and what they can or can't afford to cut prices on, but speaking purely as a consumer you can pretty easily get games off of Steam for 50% off if you wait for a sale and it would be nice if Battlefront would do that too. Maybe they've already done steep sales like that on Steam before and I just didn't notice though.

A good sniper should just as effectively stop an enemy's advance as a machinegun nest, sadly that really isn't the case in the game. They only really seem effective in a designated marksman role and even that is down to your dice rolls more than it should be. Having them only fire when they have a high chance of actually making the hit would make much more sense.

HVAP/APCR would be the BR-365P which we already have in Red Thunder, not aware of any further shell developments for the ZiS-S-53 beyond that.

Look at your picture a little closer, those are the values of the D-48 anti-tank gun, an entirely different gun from the one used in the T-34-85. The shells in the D-48 would not even fit in the breech of a T-34-85, it would be far too long, 708mm vs 629mm. If you can find evidence of some post-war super shell for the ZiS-S-53 gun I'd love to see it, but, well, if nobody can find any references to it how could it be added to the game? Nobody would know the stats for it. Here is the D-48 gun, clearly very different from the T-34-85's cannon.

There's no way humanly possible an 85mm could penetrate 195mm at a km with APCBC, that's rivaling Tiger II levels of penetration. Best stats for it I can find is 195mm at point blank with armor sloped at 0 degrees using APCR, and most are less favorable than that. Ultimately it doesn't really matter because even with those super gun values it would not come close to the penetration of a 20 pdr using APDS. You're right that this is very off topic but I guess that's par for the course for these threads .

Never heard of the T-34-85 getting improved rounds post war minus the presumably more widespread distribution of APCR. Wiki mentions smoke canisters on the obr. 1945 and an improved engine on the obr. 1946. Smoke canisters might already be modelled on the T-34-85 (latest) we have in game but they're just not usable, not sure, so any needed update to the model would be small to non-existent. I bet the Centurion mk. 3 with the 20 pdr would be an absolute monster, definitely outclassing the T-34-85 and being able to penetrate IS-2s with APDS.

1948 might even work as a module for CW, we already have the 1945 Soviets and I'm guessing their doctrine and gear couldn't have changed very much in only a few years. All that would have to be added is a couple fun vehicles like the IS-3.

The flat background image that surrounds the map, look at the pictures posted in the thread and you'll be able to identify them pretty fast.

CM has never been known for its graphical fidelity... There are some mods that add pretty good ones but it would be nice to have some high resolution official ones and maybe some way to get rid of the unsightly void past the map boundaries. Maybe some volumetric clouds too? A man can dream.

I think a lot of players are very glad reliability is not modeled, there's enough frustration when your tank gets bogged in a field, can you imagine the forum posts from people who could only use HEAT on their M60A2s because the missile control system was broken or lost a T-64 because the engine died out in the open?

Strong agree with the first one, it's really nice not to have to shuffle files back and forth manually and it's nice to have the ability to just play a random game with someone but it's a bit underbaked, due to engine limitations presumably. There's not even a way to see if you're going to be on the BLUFOR or REDFOR side before you join the match unless the person you're playing with is nice enough to mention it in the filename, if they even know that's possible. I was hoping for a full, modern looking server browser, maybe even a way for a person to list their own skill level so people of similar skill could be matched together. I can only assume all of that is just a limitation of the game engine and it would have been added if it was feasible. Still, it's certainly an improvement over the old way of doing things.

I meant more like specific features that sets it apart from the other games, Hapless ran a poll on what people were most excited for with CMCW and almost half of the responses were cluster munitions which would have been my response too. Stuff like drones, precision guided munitions, electronic warfare, civilian density, engineering vehicles, APS, etc if that makes sense. I guess some of those are in multiple games but they really make the setting come alive to me, if that makes sense. I think CMCW would have benefitted with more features like that, some engineering and mine clearing vehicles, maybe an abstraction of the use of chemical agents and the usage of MOPP suits, an abstraction of counter-battery radar only letting you get a couple of volleys off before your artillery assets have to redeploy, FASCAM, illumination rounds, planes dumping their ordinance in a single glorious pass due to the high threat environment instead of dropping bombs one by one over 10 minutes, more fortification options? Some/most of these might have been impossible to add for various reasons but it was mostly just a spitball to say I would have liked a bit more Cold War flavor to the game minus the mandatory T-64s, M60s, Dragons and the rest.

I really enjoy CMCW but I can see their point, the series is really difficult to learn and sometimes it's hard to deal with the jank and generally "old" feel of the games with not much actual innovation when a new game comes out. Did CMCW really add anything unique besides cluster munitions? On the other hand Battlefront keeps giving even 10 year old games engine updates and occasional patches which no other devs do which I'm sure takes up a ton of developer time. CMx2 feels like it's at the end of it's lifespan so I hope we do get a CMx3 that brings the game up to 2020s standards.

Some screenshots from a PBEM I finished up. B Troop infantry take out a BRDM-2, they end up picking off a pretty significant amount of them in the first stages of the battle but in the long run it gives away their positions and uses up precious Dragon rounds. After a long preparatory bombardment, a thick curtain of smoke is dropped and the lead elements of the first infantry company swim across the river. My M60s and Dragons get quite a few but they can only get keyhole shots through the smoke. Artillery dropping on a section of 100mm anti-tank guns set up on a road on the far side of the river. Despite the good half-dozen BMPs either sinking in the river or burning on the banks, Soviet infantry press on. My M60s take a serious beating and I lose 3 in one turn and don't really have the manpower or firepower to counterattack and push the Soviets back across the river so I hit surrender after a few more minutes. Good decision because there was another entire company in transit across the river and what looks like another company in reserve. It was a tough but very fun fight despite getting my butt kicked. The smoke barrage on my side of the river was what really did me in, I think, my opponent was able to mass his entire force at one small point in the crossing and I couldn't deliver any flanking fire across the river due to the smoke.

Is this the Combat Mission equivalent of holding your pistol gangsta style?

No worries, there's always something new to learn with CM even if sometimes that new thing might be a bug! Besides that it's a really lovely scenario and I'm having a ton of fun playing it, so thank you for that.

Dropping the resolution is worth a shot, I barely managed to make it work by facing the camera towards where the Soviets would be coming from and slowly deploying my units front to back to keep as little of my own setup zone in view as I could. Awful experience but it made it slightly more tolerable.

Is it during the setup phase? If the map has a really big setup zone and you point the camera at it it will demolish your FPS no matter your system for some reason, once you actually press start it should go away.

I always mess around with scenarios quite a bit before going for the campaigns, it's like eating your appetizers before your entrée to me. The Soviet training scenarios are really good too, would recommend playing them all before you even touch the Soviets because they really get the gears in your head turning on how best to play them to their strengths. Wow, I'm playing a PBEM of Rumpenheim Rumpus and couldn't figure out why my Redeye teams weren't doing anything, didn't expect to find the answer to that in this thread so thanks.

I don't know much about the BAOR but they seem like they might be in the most precarious position in 1979-1982. They just barely miss out on getting the Challenger 1 and the Chieftain with Stillbrew, and I'm not even sure if it's late enough for them to get APFSDS rounds for them, I can only find evidence of L23A1 entering service in late 1984. Maybe a slight timeline extension would be in order? Unless the Brits have some special tricks up their sleeve I'm not aware of.