Whisper

To the best of my knowledge, there are only two things the various engineering tools are used for: unlocking things (picklocks of whatever kind) and disarming traps (everything else). I haven't seen any way you can, for example, cut holes in fences a la Jagged Alliance. PS: the Master Engineer perk lets you ignore the skill number requirement for all the engineering tools, much like Master Medic lets you ignore the skill number for medical stuff.

That happened to me once as well. I don't believe you can destroy parked PKs, although you might try it if nothing else works. Maybe you could destroy some wall or floor or ceiling around it so you can get past. When it happened to me I ended up blowing a hole in the floor near it and tunnelling back up from below.

I have played that mission from the Axis side a couple of times myself, as well as from the Allies side now - I don't *think* anything's randomized, nor do I think there are really any fixed missions with randomized content, but I haven't played the game through enough times to know for sure. Like Kermix said there is something that can happen in that mission (even if you're playing Axis) that is what you're seeing, the reinforcement squad. It's a bit wierd, for me every time those poor bastards appear they are blown to bits by some landmines planted right where they spawn - their CO even rags on them for finding landmines to step on in the middle of a schoolgirl classroom or somesuch. My advice is make a push and get over the wall, or else move up the road and past the gate/opening. *** SPOILER *** There's a radio on the far side of the big building, in one of the small separate buildings next to the truck. It looks like a box (has a little door icon like a box too). I believe that when Axis is playing, an Allied guy is scripted to go work the radio (if you are Allies you can go work it yourself). Maybe you or the renegades killed script boy and he never got round to calling for reinforcements?

I hit this mission last night on my second time going through the game - I don't think it shows up for the Axis campaign. Yes, it's somewhat tricky but not terribly so. Incidentally this is with a solo scout, so of course I did it with stealth Now, my scout was level 14 at that point with about 100 Throwing and 108 Hide, so if your corresponding skills are very much lower, then it would probably be harder. I was able to go all the way through the mission without being detected except for during ambushes (see below) and in the down-ramp garage area where there are four guys very close to each other (see below also). Firstly I started at the back of the base, much like you did. Nobody saw me so I went into hide mode, and I expect a team of even the klutziest would be OK here too. I was worried about the tower guard in the middle of the base fence, so even though he couldn't see my scout, I went ahead and took him down with throwing knives. Why not silenced SMG or pistol? I've noticed that even though the weapon itself is silent, the bullets do make noise if they hit hard targets, and especially if they do enough damage to something like a tower to knock it down; knives don't do this. Bring a *lot* of knives though (15+) as some may land in places where you can't recover them without destroying buildings. My scout also took the Extra Throwing Range perk, along with Faster Throwing, which made this tactic work so much the better. Be aware that objects in the way will interfere with your throw even though the interface tells you you have a high percentage chance to hit, so you may have to hunt for a good angle to hit the tower guard through his little wooden crate he stands in. The silenced sniper rifle might work just as well if you can avoid blowing the top off the guard tower. Silenced SMG tends to do too much damage to the tower, making a lot of noise; silenced pistol doesn't have enough range to hit him accurately enough to kill him in a turn IMO. Once the first tower guard is down, you should be able to sneak your party up round the second tower. Lather, rinse, repeat. Again this should allow your non-sneaky party members to progress. From there it's on to the gate. There were two guards there at parade rest. I didn't hit them right away, but rather waited a bit because I could hear guys moving around inside the fence. Sure enough, four or so guys came out, one at a time, and I dispatched them very quietly. Eventually they stopped coming out. Then the scout sneaked up on the two gate guards and killed them with melee. Since you have the luxury of a silent sniper rifle, you could set up a pincer ambush on the two guards with sniper and scout and take them both down in a turn very easily. My advice is to make sure the sniper is sidelong to the fence, to keep the bullet from blowing through the guard's head and making noise on the chainlink. The scout proceeded to the little motorcycle parking space to the left of the gate with a guard on the ground and killed him with melee. Silenced pistol would work fine here, or you could snipe him with that fine hushed carbine of yours ( :twisted: ). The guard up on the roof manning the fixed MG shouldn't notice (didn't for me). Come to that you might as well whack him too. Mind the path of your bullets - I used the hushed Sten and aimed for his head in long burst at about a 45 degree angle. Then there's the three story building with many guards armed with MG42s. None of them are especially perceptive and the only place this is hard to do sneaky is the top floor, since there are three or four guys packed close together. I made a little extra noise in the hall and one of them came out to take a look *bink*. Another was standing just inside the door *think* and the two left inside were not very anxious to come out and play. Kill them as you see fit but mind the guard tower outside the plate glass window - oh yeah, the plate glass window. Heh. There are several more guys spread out onesey twosey which shouldn't pose terrible problems killing silently. Of course by this time you may have had enough of stealth and choose to get loud, which won't be very bad with over half the base dead. The four guys packed in the underground garage: Grenades. Hope this helps.

Some things I've discovered also, that were not immediately obvious playing the game through the first time: - Enemies are much more likely to interrupt your turn when you assault them from the direction they are facing. Let's say there are a couple of guys that can't see you, and you run up on them and toss a grenade at them. If you do it from a direction they're facing, they will amost certainly interrupt you and shoot you dead. On the other hand if you hit them from behind, they will be surprised (oddly enough) and won't be able to react until their next turn. The first time round I didn't actually give the AI that much credit, but I've seen this repeated a great many times now. - Grenades are really, really, really good. Get your throwing skill up a bit (grenadiers are obviously best at this but scouts and soldiers are pretty good also) and throw all those piles of grenades that the enemy politely leaves laying round. They do ridiculous amounts of damage and it's common for one guy to take out 2-3 enemies in a turn with some grenades. - When throwing grenades, be careful of surrounding objects that will interfere with the path of the throw (same goes for other kinds of thrown weapons as well). If you're trying to toss a grenade through a tree, it's very likely -- even though the interface shows that you have an 80% chance to hit the enemy! -- that your throw will glance off tree branches and fall short, probably hurting you instead of the enemy. - To amplify what Kermix says above, hide is really powerful, especially when you see a scout get 100+ Hide and the hide-improving perks. It doesn't even have to be dark when you have a really high hide skill. This is in the late game of course, but even early on hide is very useful. Don't expect that you can walk right up to a guy and punch him in the face, but you can creep up from *behind* fairly regularly even in the first missions. Enemy officers will be your bane with their high alertness. - The Spot skill is extremely important. Snipers are by far the best visual spotters (the extra vision perk is extremely nice once you get it), although scouts are by far the best hearing spotters. One of each in your party will go a long way towards getting the first action for your team. Even if the non-spotters can't see or hear the target, they can careful shot where they *think* it is and have a very good chance of hitting (usually critically hitting due to surprise in my experience). - High-calibre weapons can shoot through almost all walls and ceilings/floors. The big MGs and larger rifles can blow through brick very easily -- this goes along with spotting hand in hand. Remember that awful movie Navy Seals with Michael Biehn and Bill Paxton? "This is God." *BAFF* *ka-thunk* - Ambushes work reasonably well on Easy and Normal difficulties (not so well on Hard because the enemies rarely move out of what they consider a safe area, which paradoxically makes them easier to kill, but whatever). Set up around a corner from where you've heard some enemies, hide, and wait. Maybe make a little noise (have a guy un-hide and run a step or two) and watch the bad guys run right into your ambush. Hours of fun for the whole family!

That would probably explain why I can't recall it. That's very interesting actually, I stuck with the Helmut Koch mission until I captured him and didn't know there was a completely different branch of the plot (duh that makes sense duh!) May have to replay the game and let Helmut get away!

Which country is this German test site in? I'm trying to remember one of the German areas with guard towers in it and I'm drawing a blank.

As attractive as the base guys' stats may look, you can easily train your team's skill levels quite a bit higher with just an hour or two spent practicing shooting. It's not terribly exciting, but on the other hand if you do this you have the luxury of being able to pick your perks (the base guys just try to take all the perks and end up with several sub-optimal ones). For Shooting, Sniping, Throwing and Burst, equip guns and get lots of ammo, kill a few guys in a random encounter, drop the corpse in the corner of the map, arrange your squad in a quarter circle around the deader and proceed to shoot it a lot. You can select all ("=") and have everyone fire at once. The game allows you to mix firing modes (e.g. two guys sniping, two guys bursting and two guys throwing). While you could have a guy or two meleeing at the same time I guess, he'd likely catch a few bullets in the back while doing it. For melee you can have your guys punch pretty much anything, including each other. A bonus to this is that you get to train your medic a bit (although there aren't enough bandages in the game to really get a high medical skill imo). Engineering, find a hard lock and try to pick it. You will rapidly run out of lockpicks though, which was the sole aspect of the game for which I used cheat codes (to summon more lockpicks). For Vitality Points and Evasion, when you take damage both of these skills go up. When you get a Bleeding condition, they go up with each bleed. I found this to be rather too chimpy so I didn't do it a whole lot, but I did find that you could easily pass the base guys in both Vitality and Evasion with just a little bleeding (which is stupid). The only skill that can't be quickly practiced is Interrupt. Even in the end game, after much combat on Hard difficulty, my highest Interrupt score is I think 39.

Sniper, Sniper Scout, Scout (although I might as well have had a third sniper really) Engineer (to disable mines and pick locks) Medic (to remove those annoying critical conditions) In retrospect the snipers and scouts were so powerful that they really spoiled some of the fun of the game - enemies rarely got a chance to defend themselves and almost always died in one shot to the head. The engineer was largely a boat anchor outside of locks and traps, if there is another class with an engineering skill cap in the 70+ range at level 10+ then that would likely be just as well. Same goes for the medic.

Well to be fair, there simply aren't enough lockpick tools in the game to "legitimately" raise your engineering skill above 50-55 IMO. And really there aren't all that many throwing weapons to go around either, when you can often get them "stuck" in places you can't recover them without some fairly heavy demolition work.

When you get a character right next to a friendly NPC, you can switch places with them (the mouse pointer changes to a pair of arrows pointing in opposite directions).

I didn't find the game's AI terribly bright either - playing on Hard (Impossible), once you get a sniper to the point he has extra vision range, the game becomes far too easy. Alternatively, a scout with very high Hide gets you to the same place. Basically the enemies have no reaction to people shooting at them when they're outside a certain radius of them. Frequently I'll drop a guy that's about 10 squares away from another enemy, and the nearby survivor will not react. Recently in my Axis campaign, a scout with a high Hide and a silenced SMG stood about 2 squares away from a panzerklein in Berger's Factory (very close to the end game) and emptied about 100 rounds into it without the panzerklein ever moving at all, much less firing back. In the same mission, there is a long hallway in the underground part, at the end of which are two gatling PKs - I lined up my entire squad and plinked them with sniper fire, and they never moved. Enemies do not seem to react to gunfire noise at all, only footstep noise. You would think that if you got shot in the head for 60 points of damage your first instinct would be to take cover! Enemies are fairly smart about short-range combat though, in which they will step out of cover, fire a burst or two, and step back. It seems really rare that enemies will toss a grenade at my squad, but it's always memorable. It's also nifty to see a guy ditch his SMG and pick up a sniper rifle or heavy MG and start using it, or when a guy with a sniper rifle takes a turn to aim at you. Long-range combat on the other hand is severely broken. If I play the game through again I'll most likely skip taking any snipers and do something silly like use only throwing weapons or melee, with a solo character