Xorg_Xalargsky

Well, the grenades were produced in the millions. You can also find photographs rather easily although an order of magnitude less than other infantry weapons. My guess at the relative rarity of those is that they were removed from the rifle outside of battle.

I find that equipment quality for small arms has the most effect on Germans and Soviets (mostly for submachineguns).

I assume it was because of the waste of small-arms ammunition (those SMG's unload pretty quick!) and standard grenades. Maybe infantry are coded to fire all weapons at a bunker, regardless of their penetrative power or the direction of the opening.

The Combat Mission game I'd like to see? CMx3 - a single executable, a single codebase, but all nations/theatres/time periods are modular and purchased in packs. I think that would spare a lot of trouble since in CMx2 all the games share a vast amount of code, but are maintained separately.

Perhaps the terrain geometry is blocking the line? I know that the Face command line is always at 0' (vertical rotation), so if you give such an order on a sharp slope, you won't see the line.

@JoMc67 There's a significant amount of randomess in CMx2 explosions, as should be in my opinion. Just yesterday, I had a T-34's 76mm HE strike a low wall behind which an AT gun was located, no casualties! A few days ago, I had a Sherman's 75mm HE hit the middle of a street and 3 ground-level occupants of a building perpendicular to the shell were killed! Count your blessings and try to guard yourself against bad luck. The best defense infantry has against tank shells is to get out of sight.

I guess the only way to know every soldier's name would be to kill them off in order of rank... poor buggers. But then again, I don't know how Combat Mission handles the picking of names. Are the names of all soldiers pre-generated upon creating a scenario - like the name of the squad leader? Or are they generated (randomly picked from the names list) when they are needed - when the most senior soldiers of a unit dies?

From what I read he started a new job at a large non-gamedev company

Actually, this post was never about a PaK38's precious 150mm HEAT grenade being used against infantry, OP was simply puzzled that a mere 50mm HE shell was able to cause as much damage as a 150mm Infantry Gun's HE shell (according to OP). In truth, Combat Mission's handling of explosions/shrapnel integrates a lot of randomness (in my experience), but I think it's a good thing as it generally reduces the lethality of the battlefield. Although it sure feels like it, the game is not exactly WYSIWYG.

Might as well try, but I doubt it would work. Even if there's no system to check if a scenario comes from a certain game and no units are purchased, they come with certain information that is more or less unique to each game. Date, Region, and Weather for example.

I just checked, Heer and Luftwaffe, Sept '44, Excellent equipment quality. Both have 2 such projectiles (both the gun crew and the ammo bearers have 1 each). It's not something you're going to see often and apparently it's only accurate at short ranges so even then, whatever the outcome, the fight won't last long

@Ithikial_AU Some sort of monthly to quartely devblog or official Q/A session would be great, especially since Combat Mission is a franchise that relies heavily on its tightly-knit community. As it stands right now, we are paupers standing under the window of a rich merchant, hoping that today he will toss out a few coins like he sometimes does.

The way I imagine things are done, there is an invisible polyhedron roughly (key word) representing the volume of a tree's foliage. What a player sees depends on the Level Of Detail of a particular tree, distant trees tend to be amorphous blobs and completely opaque, while closer trees have distinct leaves and space between them. This space is purely eye-candy, it would otherwise be wayyyy too costly to calculate Line Of Sight. Instead, those 3D shapes act as a tinted window, degrading, but not blocking LOS. This degradation is quite small, but adds quickly as more and more trees are between a spotter and its target. The problem I have with Combat Mission's trees is that, in my opinion, the amount of foliage shown to the player does not always accurately reflect the "opacity" of the tree in terms of LOS degradation. I'm no botanist, but some species of trees have a naturally sparse foliage while some have so much it should be nearly impossible to see through them. Looking at a soldier's level does give you some insights into what the game actually takes into consideration, but you have to make some estimations - consider that it will be generally possible for your pixeltruppen to clearly see between trees, and that it will generally only be possible to see large/moving/loud objects through trees, regardless of if you can see clearly between their leaves (though as I said, some trees should, in theory, degrade LOS more than others).

@sbobovyc I just discovered your tools, you're doing god's work son! Thank you for your efforts. Reverse-engineering a custom file format must be a hell of a task.

@slysniper Out of all the cover/weapon combinations, the only ones that fled were Foxhole/Off-map and Trench/Off-map. The Ground/Off-map and Bunker/Off-map teams did not flee. Then again, my sample size was poor, but it does show there is an issue. Perhaps tonight I will make a better version of the test, using larger teams and run it many times.

@slysniper If it's worth anything, I just performed a little test... (Red Thunder, 4.0) 15 lanes, 1 Action Square wide, surrounded by tall stone walls, 500 meters long. On one extremity, a Soviet weapon, on the other, a German Scout team offset by 3 Action Squares from their friendly edge (so the cowards have somewhere to run to!) The Germans had 5 types of cover : none, sandbags, foxholes, trench, wooden bunker. Each of those types of cover were matched against 3 Soviet weapons : Maxim gun, medium mortar (on-map), medium mortar (off-map, 1 tube, medium/medium fire-mission) Bear in mind, my test was flawed : the 3-man Scout teams are rather fragile and I ran the test once (in my defense, I'm getting tired). This makes for a poor sample, but the results were interesting nonetheless. Every team stayed in position, even as they took plenty of suppression and some casualties, except the Foxhole/Off-map and Trench/Off-map teams which ran out of their positions shortly after the first shell landed - without effect (no wounded/injuries, barely any suppression). PS. I also now realize I missed two important cover types : buildings and low solid cover (stone wall, etc...), I've seen units flee buildings quite a lot since the latest update.

Very nice! Eager to see your next videos, they've been really informative.

@textanker Unfortunately, there exists no such thing as a "unit builder", TO&E is not moddable either. However, almost every country has a varied array of infantry squads. There are in fact a couple of options if you want all a lot of MP44's. Volksgrenadier (Wehrmacht infantry) and Sturmartillerie (Wehrmacht/Waffen SS armor) formations have some infantry squads armed with a very high proportion of MP44's if their equipment quality is increased.

@textanker Unfortunately, there exists no such thing as a "unit builder", TO&E is not moddable either. However, almost every country has a varied array of infantry squads. There are in fact a couple of options if you want all a lot of MP44's. Volksgrenadier (Wehrmacht infantry) and Sturmartillerie (Wehrmacht/Waffen SS armor) formations have some infantry squads armed with a very high proportion of MP44's if their equipment quality is increased.

Always fun to see how non-standard matchups, like Sherman vs. Sturmpanzer, turn out!

Good to hear about the new module, I'm very excited about it! Now, for more experienced Battlefront customers, I know there are base game+module bundles (along with juicy savings) but is it something they offer on release or some months after?

@Oleksandr Thank you for the detailed guide! One thing about RPG's is that they produce so much smoke that it's easy to spot them after just one shot. I really wish the game would include a Hit And Run command. The way I imagine it, it could be used like a Target Briefly command, but based on the number of shots or "fire until taking return fire", after the command is finished, the team would go to the next waypoint or some location away from the target (kind of like hitting the Retreat button). As of now, it's possible to have a similar effect with the Target Briefly command, but there's too much guesswork and it relies on up-to-the-second timing.

CMx2 games could very well do with a Movement Speed audit. Along with Crawl (as mentioned in previous posts), many crewed weapons are in dire need of a boost. As it stands, all of them seem to move at a snail's pace, even a piece as light as an Lg.40 (~150kg) on good ground (paved road) and fully crewed! (does crew count have an impact on movement speed? That would be interesting). In my opinion, a good (and simple) solution would be to make the Quick command available for sufficiently light carriages, but make the crew's Stamina drain very high.

I have only two major concerns about infantry behavior in 4.0 1 - infantry retreats from good positions much too easily. I think the nature of the position (trench, flat ground, wall, building, foxhole, etc...) and the distance with the enemy should play a major role in the stay/flee decision. 2 - infantry faces in the direction of their movement after a retreat, thus away from the enemy. I think they should get an automatic Face command pointing at the direction of their previous position. A lot of "cheap" casualties could be avoided that way.

I believe it's simply a matter of appending a number at the end of the file's name. ubersoldat_ubercamo.bmp, ubersoldat_ubercamo2.bmp, ubersoldat_ubercamo3.bmp, etc...