Poorlaggedman

These things might be forgivable if you eat up all the CM titles, I only ever got Shock Force and Battle for Normandy despite loving the gameplay.
 
Here's why:
Custom battles against the AI are almost useless.  The AI is almost nonfunctional in random battles.
I've had meeting engagements where I'm sitting here doing moves and excited about what's gonna happen and the AI never leaves their starting area. I feel like the AI signed off and left. I'm patched to the recent version AFAIK, I couldn't replicate this in my first attempt (some of the enemy battalion was actually moving two minutes in) but I still remember the huge disappointment as I'm methodically moving and realize the enemy never left their freaking start point. Enemy AI has to be a lot better in future titles.

The system for seeking online human players is subpar at best. I understand there might be revisions, that's great. Literally nobody I know in my life or my gaming circles has ever heard of CM. In the CM X 1 era I did play dozens of PBEM and WeGo battles online. Perhaps because I'm older now I don't have the patience to fervently seek out CM playmates without any built-in infrastructure. 
 
There's too few battles and campaigns, severely limiting replayability.  I've asked before but there doesn't seem to be custom community-made campaigns or battles. If there are, you have to dig farther than I have and I'm fairly certain I asked before. I've played all the battles and campaigns numerous times over a decade (or however long ago this came out.) I don't get why I'm so bored with a game I love.
Campaign play against the AI can work so why is so underutilized?
 
The Courage and Fortitude Campaign is basically rage bait trash.  I posted about this a decade ago (I lost my old account e-mail) and I still think so today, having made the mistake of booting CMBN up to try and get to that last mission once more so I can clear that final city with a somewhat intact couple companies of infantry.
In my mind Courage and Fortitude is the flagship campaign to CMBN because it's the allied infantry campaign. It sucks. Bad. 
The campaign requires too much of hugging the edge of the map, which is a gamey and ridiculous tactic. The first mission is relatively easy although the designer manipulation in the terrain in putting slopes to nullify observation abilities from hedgerows is very annoying. It would be one thing if there were several other infantry-based campaigns but there aren't.

Hard knocks is absurd, Razorback Ridge is absurd. It's not some stroke of genius, it's absurd for the wrong reasons.

In a first person game we call it "spawn camping" when you drop artillery on the spawn area. I made the mistake again (I'm an incredibly forgiving person when it comes to games I like) of starting this crap campaign once more. I wasted about four hours of my life over the last two nights just to decide 'Yeah, ____ this, not worth my time.' If I'm gonna look at pretty lights on my computer screen then I want to feel immersed not severely handicapped. You people are gonna make me start drinking again. 

You can't just squeeze players in a starting area under direct observation of artillery. You can't force them to do incredibly gamey stuff (like sending scout teams around to draw fire away from my cramped starting area - works great to an extent) just to avoid reinforcements spawning into artillery barrages. Razorback Ridge is ridiculous, if you even show your face you get pounded by artillery as more units spawn in under fire. Great war gaming, horrific presentation. If you want to do Omaha Beach, call it Omaha Beach, don't drop my waves of precious pixel troopers in a confined space under enemy observation unless you want to not sell me another CM, which has been accomplished through CMBN, and in large part through Courage and Fortitude specifically.
 
I'd like to try out the Italian, Soviet, and Market Garden games but I won't. It's because CMBN scenarios are lacking and I don't want to deal with that  type of disappointment. When/if it gets on steam, I'll add to my Wishlist and wait for a great sale
 

I think the developers should consider a series of linear warfare games with a 1:1 representation as the next generation of projects. Specifically American Civil War and possibly Napoleonic wars too. At the brigade or possibly Division level of representation. There is no shiny armor in those eras but there's still a variety of highly mobile artillery overwhelmingly influential and requiring severe mitigation from infantry commanders. 😉
The Civil War genre is utterly starving for good tactical games, has a huge interest, and I don't think it's ever been done close to justice in gaming or cinema. The games that are produced are generally poor and, of course, everything is severely abstract and not 1:1. Not that people don't adore them, because if you like the genre you have no choice.
Battlefront is extremely good at representing the psychological level of combat and the effect of visibility and spotting on what the individual soldier can accomplish. That era of combat is so poorly represented that even most buffs have little idea what it actually could have been like despite great multitudes of first rate research existing.
It would be a complex operation to represent that only a top-tier wargame maker like Battlefront could do.
Stragglers and shirking soldiers peeling off the formations. Brothers and cousins grabbing their wounded relative and dragging them off the field. Sergeants and officers trying to keep soldiers in ranks and keep them firing while the enlisted men's firepower is further degraded with poor visibility from black powder smoke. Battle lines devolving from well-dressed into confusing clusters of soldiers. Pixel-volunteers mucking up reload processes. The effect of discipline and the experience of the officers and enlisted men on their ability to function. Solid shot, unreliable fuses on shells, Artillery carriages breaking down, artillery horses getting shot. The effect of field officers and visible regimental colors on command and control. Riderless horses. Spotty and rare hand-to-hand combat. Lines giving way rather than facing or completing a bayonet charge, like a game of chicken. Soldiers dropping their weapons and ducking through enemy files and showing themselves to the rear as a prisoner.
Right up Battlefront's ally IMO.
I'm a Civil War buff first but I've frequently drifted to WWII because of the superior production quality and variety of offerings. It makes me (and a lot of us) depressed to be disappointed so many times. One company just came out with another overhyped pile of garbage for a CW RTS game. This is a common pattern for buffs looking or decent tactical games in the genre - hype and disappointment. 
I'm only recommending this because this company has always impressed me and I think they've pushed the envelop to a new standard and continued to do so with the 1:1 changeover. Not because I actually think it'd be done. If there was interest Battlefront would find an overwhelmingly supportive fan base and stupendous amount of primary accounts. Twenty-five years after Sid Meier's Gettysburg! I never would have imagined how barren the choices are. 
 
I've followed these games since the beginning BTW, This is my second or third account, I long-since lost access to the e-mail addresses for my old accounts 😪