chuckles

It doesn't really last long at all, though. The enemy carrier shows up after taking 2-3 unclaimed islands. Then win. Granted, I could just...not kill it when it's taking my islands, but that seems pretty weak.

This has happened twice in strategy mode so far (out of two games, so 100% of the time), enough to know it isn't a fluke. I start by taking uncontrolled islands. I do this for a couple islands until the enemy carrier starts attacking my islands. Once he attacks an island I'll go there, he leaves before I get there. Then he'll attack another nearby island. I head there. He leaves before I get there. Repeat this 2-3 more times, eventually I'll get him on the scope, then follow him to the next island. After chasing him for a few minutes, he'll eventually stop (out of fuel maybe?). Once he's stopped, I drive up right next to him, and start shelling him. He doesn't fight back. He doesn't launch mantas or walruses. He doesn't launch defense drones. He doesn't move. I shell him until he explodes. Yay. I won. ... ....... Uh. Wtf?

Sadly, I haven't the time to read the last three pages of this post. The original issue was that you could blow up a tank a couple belts of .50 cal ammunition. Is this possible from the front? Try a stationary tank. If it's possible then something's stupid. Looking up the specs on a T-90, front armor vs APFSDS rounds is 800-830mm RHA equiv. So if you're using anti-tank rounds (which wikipedia tells me will generate roughly 3.5 tonnes of force at the point of impact) you've still gotta penetrate the equivalent of 4/5th of a metre of rolled steel. .50 cal will not do this; Granted, on the sides, top or back the armor is thinner, but a catastrophic kill on a modern MBT using a .50 cal crew served weapon? No, not likely.

It is very possible I meant Badlands.

Was it up near Willow or Black lake northeast of Khelm? I recently drove through there on one of the campaign missions and my "user mission awesome location!"-sense immediately perked up. (technically, by "drove through" I mean "was ambushed by Chedaki while attempting to drive through"...)

For most games your graphics card would be the issue. In ArmA 2 the graphics card is probably still the issue, but while ArmA 2 does use quad-core, from what I've seen and read, it uses one of the cores more heavily than the rest (my guess is main game loop on one core, offloaad AI routines onto the others?). Simple upgrades you could try would be switching to Windows 7. I went from Vista 64-bit to Win7 RC 64-bit and it cleared up a lot of my problems, but my problems were more stability than performance. (The upgrade the win7 is free until next March/June and from Vista it's a pretty painless experience). Another one you could try if you're feeling up to it would be overclocking your processor; lots of stuff can go wrong, but if you're careful and do it right you can wring a nice bit of performance out of it. If neither of those help, then consider either upgrading your graphics card or waiting for more patches. (I'd probably upgrade your video card regardless, as it's pretty date by this point.) Cheers

(Just finished reading the whole thread) So...wait, is wizbomb a troll? I mean, he seemed to have everyone riled up with questions that I wouldn't expect people to be asking. Perhaps my time in the software industry has just insulated me from common knowledge though.

I was running Vista 64bit originally and the game was not quite but almost unplayable; it froze every 30 seconds for about a half-second (not good in a firefight, tracking an enemy, flying etc). Installed win7 64bit and now it runs smooth as silk. Also: What's the point of 6GB of memory in a 32-bit OS? Seems kinda silly to me...

I had horrible mouse lag when I used my bluetooth mouse, but when I switched to wired(USB) it went away.

I'm playing Bear Rising and during the cutscene my troops were standing near a jeep that had been destroyed in the fighting... We can't move and it autosaved right before the cutscene. Luckily for me (heavy sarcasm) there is just enough time in the cutscene for the jeep to have secondary explosions just enough times to kill my entire squad when the cutscene ends. Serves me right for not saving more often during the mission. >.<

Consider installing Win7. I just replaced Vista 64-bit with Win 7 64-bit; performance went up a little bit and, more importantly, the game stopped crashing every time I started the campaign.

I want to love this game so much. OFP was amazing back in the day, I skipped ArmA 1 and then I got this. I loved the demo but performance was not great so I finally decided to build a new computer. I dropped about $1,600 into Newegg and bought the game. I played painfully on old computer waiting for parts to arrive. Parts finally arrived, I build the new system, get it all running and stable and happy... ArmA 2 campaign won't work. And performance isn't all that greatly improved. Whenever I start the campaign (my saves are sitting on some random hard drive in my closet) it'll either crash outright, or it'll wait until I've been playing for about 1-2 minutes then crash. I haven't messed about in the scenarios too much, so I only have the campaign to go off of. (Boot camp doesn't seem to crash, so that's how I know performance is not too great either) Performance: I went from a Core 2 Duo E4500 (or something to that effect) with an 8800GTS 320MB to a Core i7 920 with a GTX 285 1GB. I can crank the graphics up more than on the old system, but it still freezes for a half second every 30 seconds or so (not fun in a chopper). I tried the full suite of tweaks but nothing has fixed the crashes or the freezes. It's like, the game is smooth as silk for 29 seconds, then freezes for a second, then smooth again. Combine those two together and I'm an unhappy camper. To top it off, I took tomorrow off work to play on my beautiful new machine...but I can't even get ArmA 2 to work. Sadness overwhelms my soul. I want to vote for the really bad option, but I don't really want a refund...I just want the game to get fixed. Bah. PS I apologize for the rambling nature of this post, I am running on a heavy sleep deficit. PPS What's with the banana? Creepy. EDIT: Just installed the Win7 RC. It appears that it may have made all my problems disappear. <3