I believe to reason for Africa first was that the amount of statics and detail needed on maps was much less, thus making it an easier start point for the first release.

It was, but that first release was disappointing for people coming straight from FH1 with its huge amount of theatres, maps, vehicles, weapons and pure fun. FH2 had a handful of wide open desert maps, anti-tank rifles as the AT class when we were used to fausts and zooks, no ships, barely any planes... FH2 was very dull in comparison to the original. And then it took a long, long time for new content to come. Almost all the people I used to play FH1 with got bored of FH2 quickly, NA and Euro alike. It killed the numbers and they mostly never came back. I was sick of playing the same few maps too by mid 2008 and ditched it for RO for a year or so but something drew me back to FH eventually.

Gaming has changed massively in the last few years though and I think that far from declining there's big potential for games like FH to grow now. A few years back you had to buy a copy of an outdated game to play it, and you couldn't demo FH before you spent your money on BF2. But now BF2 is free, FH2 has a slick updater and masses of polished content... just needs to be promoted to the right people and there could be many more players trying it out. Being niche can be a positive today in gaming, as long as the whole thing is free... people love free. There's still nothing of this quality where you can get 100 players blasting around a WW2 map - FH2 is in a league of its own.

Played yet another round where all the allied armour heads off to cap Sidi at the start of the round, leaving less than half the team struggling and failing to cap the southern flags. I've always loved this map for the tough challenge playing as British but it's become impossible lately.

I think just starting Sidi off as uncap might be enough to help focus the map again and encourage more people to head south and southwest to get the job done at the Tells before trying to push on.

Also perhaps pushing back the weird out-of-bounds area northwest of Tell el Aqqaqir to give British inf a chance of cover from the panzers and more scope for a flanking attack.

All the new maps are awesome, but I love Seelow, another huge epic advance map like St Vith. But like St Vith it needs more tickets so it's not such a desperate rush. Borrow them from Sidi Rezegh, that's got way too many 

Also could use some tweaking so the advance to the first flag is not so frustrating for Russian infantry. More cover/concealment, more arty for the attackers or less kit for the defenders maybe.

Also needs surfable Goliaths like the FH1 version.

Does anyone actually use the mine detectors?

Pretty useless most of the time as you need to get so close to a mine to detect it, but I've used them occasionally on maps like Mareth (as Brits) where you have major choke points for advancing tanks. Those bridges before the first flags often get mined by sneaky stay-behind squads who can take out tank after tank after Brits have capped the flags. I've saved a few tanks by guarding the bridge as an engineer, finding mines with the detector and taking them out with the wrench.

Would miss them if they're removed, but I would like to see them beefed up so you can detect mines in a much larger radius, if that's possible?

FH2 is the only game I play too, and the only reason I bought BF2 all those years ago.

It gets better and better. Amazing quality new maps, plus awesome work on the coding, animation, models and everything else in the patch. Thank you for a superb game, guys 

Blast, missed it. The Pacific was always my favourite theatre in FH1 because that combination of land, sea and air gave battles such a huge, epic feel, especially on maps like the second version of Midway. I think young Dago is spot on about naval combat being the missing piece of the puzzle. It might be slightly buggy in FH2 - it was pretty buggy in FH1 too - but it's also a hell of a lot of fun.

What I did get to play recently was the WaW Kefalonia map from the 762 pack, which captures a lot of that old spirit. When I spawned on a fully-manned Italian torpedo boat I was grinning like it was 2005. We had all guns blazing, fighting off air attacks, drive-by shooting the island and hunting the destroyer... awesome.

It has nothing to do with official development and it will NOT be integrated with FH2.

Doesn't this attitude harm FH2 rather than help it? It makes sense that the devs want to produce a finely polished package where everything is well tested, historically accurate and so on, but I've never understood what harm rolling some of the best custom maps into the installer would do. You slap a big 'BETA' or 'Community Map' label all over them so it's clear they're not 'official content', and then leave it to the servers and the popular vote to decide whether or not to include them in rotation.

Would the small FH2 community really be so appalled to have some of these non-official maps in rotation (some of which are really very good indeed)? People endlessly bitch about and criticise the official maps anyway so it's not like you can please all of the players all of the time as it stands. Especially at this stage of FH2's life it would be good to have the variety and fun these maps offer, without having to have all-or-nothing special events and split up the playing community for an evening. Seems such a shame to have all this great content created and barely used.

Starting a new server when the playerbase isn't big enough to support it has the potential to be a disaster and drive away more players than it brings in.

There was a big problem for a while when 762 was running both a 128 and 64 server. It all came down to which server got populated first in the day (starting Euro afternoon time). If the 128 server got going first it was fine, and you often got 100+ people playing FH2. If the 64 server got going first then you got 64 playing. And the rest of the people? They disappeared off to do something else more fun, because most people don't want to dick about on a lightly populated server on the slim chance it will fill up. Or sometimes you'd end up with 30-40 players on each server which made for a crap game for everybody. This was solved when 762 switched to running two big servers - there's now 100 slots available on each, and it doesn't matter which starts first so there's no problem, as it's not often more than 100 want to play at once.

Personally I think the 762 guys do a superb job as hosts and admins, so IMO setting up another yet another 64 server would be at best a waste of time (because nobody plays on it) and at worst harmful (because it splits the small playerbase, so both servers end up half-full).

What might be cool, though, is a dedicated *small* server which runs the CQB 16/32 player maps we don't often get to play, and strictly limits playercount. It could be available for people wanting a real alternative to the big tactical games, and the go-to server for people wanting a quick blast at times when the 100 player server is full (because realistically there's no chance of getting two 100 servers rocking except around Christmas or patch release time). It ought to be strictly limited to 16 or 32 slots though, to avoid that problem of splitting the playerbase and to make it genuinely different from all the empty 64 servers that are still around.

As Airshark says some of the small maps could be refined too, as the 16/32 layers have sometimes (not always!) been an after-thought since the focus is on 64. The smaller playerbases in NA and Oz/NZ have struggled because of this. The new updater makes it easier for quick fixes and experiments with the small maps so maybe a mini CQB server could end up with loads of variety and be a welcome occasional alternative to the 'proper' big server, as well as a draw for new players across the world.

What's the deal with the tickets on this map? It drags on forever - a round on the server just now took over 45mins to complete, way longer than any other map in the mod.

Sidi seems to be a very divisive map, a favourite for some and hated by others. Personally I'm not a big fan, but I can appreciate a lot of superb features in it and I like the way it has developed and improved over the years. There's some excellent design and detail in there, especially in the defensive positions around the airfield and blockhouse, but why the hell does it run 2 or 3 times as long as most other maps. Most maps feel like a race against time, whereas this one just plods on... and on... It's a proper server killer sometimes because people know it's going to be running for a long, long time.

It's a decent map but it really needs a shoter playtime IMO. Is there any prospect of the tickets being reduced, or the bleed being increased?