FlemFire

Are basic "Grenades" capable of destroying armor? I've seen it done with guys throwing from windows into open-top vehicles, but curious about other situations, or Modern ones for example.

Still persistent issues as this thread has already stated. Not to be a Debbie downer, but this is so far probably the worst "official" campaign across any CM game I've played. I'm shocked this is in the final product, much less an add-on. How do you not even fix the basic stuff like correcting the stated equipment? The campaign in general has a distinct vibe of not even being playtested at all.

In a setting like SF2, would RedFor (Syria) ever have the breathing room to have actual air superiority over the BlueFor?

Smoke the line you want to go to and suppress the defense with artillery support. Is the expectation that the defenders, whose job is to watch out for attackers, to not notice attackers setting up? LOL

Make sure that besides the driver there's +1 bullet magnet soldier inside when you do hit that Open Up button.

Perhaps you solved a problem of Office Politics.

Be that post-millionaire sob story, except instead of saying you blew it all on corvettes and adult ballets, it went to wargames.

Gotta think of them as fireteams, but yes. Edit: I see what you mean now, I originally read that as "three man/two man squads"; I'm not that pedantic I promise. A four man fireteam has less firepower and fewer eyeballs, but also fewer targets to hit. A six man fireteam has more firepower and more eyeballs, but has more targets to hit.

My anecdotal experience suggests that the MG42 is the deadliest MG in the game by far, and I'd rather be shot at by almost anything else (as far as MGs go). It is remarkably deadly, accurate, and suppressive. Again, that's more observational than anything. As for cause of casualties, you have to be very careful with things like that as you're often drawing data from the entire scope of a campaign instead of from the 'small screen' which would be scenarios like CM depicts. From the big screen, where you have interdiction and all sorts of artillery exchanges happening, yes, the vast majority of damage accrued over time would be from explosives and not all of them inflicted on combat-oriented units. We can tell the difference pretty easily by just looking at combat units themselves, which often have egregious lossrates of 50%+, wounded and killed -- basically, being the actual guy doing the fighting is an insanely dangerous job (no surprise). If the army as a whole had rates like that it would be drawdropping amounts of casualties. But as for bullets specifically, John Ellis's book has this remark about it:

I'm a very fast typist, heh. I should add that once you hit Combine Squad I don't know if it is possible to go back to 3-fireteams, at least I haven't figured it out yet. Squad used in the images is the Marines which is a 13-man. The manual states that some nations might be a little more restrictive in squad/fireteam independence so I don't think this is necessarily applicable to ALL 12+ man squads, but I haven't tested that far.

Here's some images that might help. Pay attention to the columns. Images in order: Full Squad --- Split Squad (3fire teams) --- Combined Squad (two columns) --- Split Squad (2fire teams):

They do not do it automatically. I think you're misinterpreting when this event occurs. When you look at a squad's UI, you can see the guys in the little squares. For a large squad, you'll notice 3 columns. If you hit Combine Squad, it'll put the men into two columns. Those columns are the fire teams. It's an entirely different element than the original conversation -- I mostly meant to suggest that it ALSO do what everyone is trying to do here, which is get these fireteams to group back up, but instead of leaning on an abstract sense of squares and timing, just have a button to do it.

Does what I said -- takes the fire teams and combines them together, but you really only see this for country's that utilize large squads. Example: 12-man squad. If you split this squad, you'll get 3 fire teams of 4men each. If you combine squad first, and then split it, you'll get 2 fire teams of 6men each.

I think the self-restraint itself isn't even that easy to do for super vague reasons of tactical consideration: my issue with the idea of not firing at an adjacent and un-reported 'spot' is that I may have already been preparing to fire at that spot to begin with. So it almost seems counter-intuitive that if one makes a spot that it would then preclude any preparatory fire just on account of avoiding 'gaming' it. I still think it's just some sort of gamification that one has to roll with as best they can. Maybe they'll someday implement some nice multiplayer features such as multiple players with each controlling a platoon and seeing ONLY what that platoon sees. Things like that are probably in the sci-fi realm of BF development timeline, but it's nice to dream.

Really should just be a button. There's already a "Combine Squad" button they could use for it (right now it just combines the fire teams). As it is, I've not a clue what causes it to auto-proc a squad to come back together. Even during the setup phase there's a strange lag that I can't quite pinpoint the trigger for.

My understanding is that marking mines doesn't remove them -- it simply lets others know they are there. So while infantry might carefully step around them, a large piece of metal on wheels/tracks might not be so nimble as to ballerina its way through a 'the floor is lava' scenario. I think that mostly leaves you with the HE route or the "go around" solution. One thing I haven't tested is if it is possible to set off mines by doing a manual-target with infantry and having them throw grenades at them.

Unless there's subtext I'm missing somewhere, I don't think highlighting Stalin's atrocities automatically makes one an apologist for the 'other' side (Nazis, in this case). It's a rather large leap in logic. Typically, if you're against murder you're against it. End of. Nevermind that as time progresses onward and onward that these two men will presumably blur and we'll just be left with blips of abhorrence whose import will be left to the nerds and historians. I think Hitler's Vlad-like place in the history books is pretty well set in stone, but I am not so sure about Uncle Joe. I am all for reinforcing that Stalin was a monster, lest you end up with him being another Genghis Khan to the layman, great big statues built in his name, his appearance adorning video games and the like in positive light, and the absolute monster that he was buried in the long years that have passed. We know that simply 'winning' is well enough to rehabilitate one man's historical character. As for Russian cinema, it is a boring and largely non-introspective snoozefest. But then again, that's not too dissimilar of the American media's "war movie" output. I find that the quality of movies in general has nosedived considerably the past twenty years. That or maybe I'm just getting old and cynical.

Better to get somewhere fast, tired, and safe than slow, rested, and dead. Javelins can delete men just as well as material. You can throw grenades over walls by force-targeting the opposite side. That gut-feeling/intuition is usually correct and reluctance to adapt in time can be a killer. Making snipers Crack or Elite is usually a very good investment.

Test

I use OBS to record video. Steam has a good picture function (F12) if you have SF2 on that platform.

I've seen the footage of at least one of these incidents and I think anyone would be hard pressed to defend it.

This is my observation as well. I'm no expert in the matter, whether real-life or in-game, but my surface-level analysis of the latter is that the German tanks and their crews tend to be a little better at spotting and shooting than the Americans/Brits.

One of the tests was primarily with 155's, but also let me clarify: the tests were to see how effective arty was vs. the housed infantry themselves, with variances in AP, General, and Armor rounds. Expectations of 155mm rounds obliterating ceilings and killing everyone inside, while not unfeasible, should be tempered. One of my tests including a ceiling being destroyed, but the men inside remained healthy. My unscientific conclusion is that it is best to approach infantry in large buildings as though they are in bunkers and plan accordingly regardless of round-selection. I bring up the issue of cost-effectiveness below. As for general usage of arty I think it depends on what you want to do. Here's my thoughts, related to the above, but also largely tied to the QB setting where arty is purchased at a large premium: Naturally, heavy artillery fire can delete something if you want it to. How useful is it to exhaust artillery to delete a vague # of infantry? Depends. As you say, it's probably better to utilize vehicles to flatten structures. 25mm cannon fire or certainly tank rounds coming through a window are far more effective at killing infantry than salvos of the much larger and pricier 155's hitting the ceiling. When arty batteries cost 1000s of points in a QB, it's something to keep in mind so you get your money's worth. Spending 1000s of points on arty and thinking it's going to magic wand away your foe is about as cost-effective as buying some Abrams and rolling them around ass-first. It's why, with these results, I look more at the pinning nature of the bombardment instead of its kill potential. Even minor bombardment has a tendency to renegotiate the thinking of even Veteran+ level soldiers. If you order troops to cross to another building and a shot comes in anywhere remotely close, they're very liable to give up and return back to where they came from. Meaning you can use light/harass levels of artillery to basically pin enemies in place for very long periods of time if you want to (and obviously make it a scary notion to go anywhere if one of those rounds has your name on it). It has changed my usage of arty in this way: you either use it to delete, or you use it to pin. We know that infantry tend to recover from pinned statuses and worse within about 30-60seconds. If you fire a Medium # of rounds into the battlefield and your opponent walks out with 90% of his forces unscathed, unpinned in half a turn and firing back in a full turn, did you get your money's worth? Or should you have just launched everything, destroyed the buildings, killed the infantry, and removed that area from the field of play, or alternatively had your 1000+ point arty launching moderate rounds for 30+ mins to keep that area fully fixed while the rest of your forces apply and maneuver resources as needed?