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Ruthless

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    Denver, CO
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    Embedded software engineer

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  1. Thanks. As it turns out, I don't need a new license activation after all.
  2. Trying to repair/reinstall CMSF on my PC. License screen says: --------------------------------------------------------------------- Unable to get or install a license Retrieval of license failed with error code = 11 There are no licenses currently available for this License Key. You have installed all of the licenses for this product to which you are entitled. If you need additional licenses, you will need to contact the publisher or vendor store you purchased this product from, or you will need to purchase another copy. --------------------------------------------------------------------
  3. Pretty good scenario. Very difficult to do well on the first part and very dramatic watching initial German forces getting overrun, which seems to be inevitable given the Syrian forces and paltry anti-tank capability of the German Gebirgsjager (maybe someone else has a more successful story to tell.) I managed a total victory as the Germans against the red AI, but only after getting pretty thoroughly overrun. Out of my initial Gebirsgjager company, only a few squads worth of infantry survived, scattered in hiding locations. None of the vehicles I started with survived. I found the idea that Syrian airpower could be such a factor fairly unbelievable. It definitely made the mission harder for bluefor. The most surreal moment was when I finally got air support of my own and Harriers/Tornadoes were providing me CAS while Syrian helicopters and (I assume) Su-25's provided redfor with CAS. Think maybe the Tornado would've done something about the Syrian a/c first? :-) Not sure if the scenario author intended the Germans to fall back or to fight. At first, I tried to prepare for a strategy of firing and falling back, but the Weisels did poorly head-on against enemy armor and rarely had time to fall back (and their first shots often missed anyway.) Plus my armor took a beating under the massive initial artillery barrage and I ended up losing half my paltry armor to artillery if I kept it in position to fire and then try to escape. And I was skeptical that any unit would really be successful at falling back anyway. So I scrapped my first attempt and started over. This time, I took almost all my forces from the military base and occupied the south end of the village on the redfor side of the map. I set up my anti-armor assets for flank shots in both directions to cover the approaches to the greenhouses/Fafin and the military base. I left a skeleton force in the military base, mainly snipers and spotters for artillery to occupy tall buildings. This worked pretty well; I mauled the Syrian forces as they tried to move towards the greenhouses and the military base. My TOW Weisels took out several BMP's and a few T-72's by pulling forward, firing, then reversing out of sight for a few seconds, getting some good side-shots. My Milan unit took out a couple of tanks before being destroyed by BMP cannon fire. My 20mm Weisels made short work of about 1/2-dozen BMP's as they sped (somewhat stupidly) towards the military base. I protected my Weisels with infantry, loaded with as much ammo and panzerfausts as they could carry. My infantry destroyed the shilkas as they moved towards my position in the village and they also obliterated enemy infantry that tried to move through the village as it passed the position. Although these forces took a beating, they were never really overrun and held the end of the village for the duration of the scenario. At Fafin, I rushed my armor forward to buildings just north of the town and took up similar positions. In all locations, I set up my infantry to hide and try to save them for firing at point-blank range at enemy infantry. This was not executed as well as could be. In some cases, my infantry just missed with their first panzerfaust shot, and then were obliterated by the BMP or T-72 they were firing on. In other cases, my infantry were spotted at range by enemy BMP's and cut up. In still other cases, my hiding infantry decided on their own to start shooting at enemy infantry and then were hit hard by BMP cannon fire. However, I took out many more BMP's and savaged their infantry. Over all, I was fairly happy with this strategy, even if not carried out quite as well as could have been. One thing that might have been an improvement would be hiding my infantry in the trees and brush instead of buildings. A single SAW squad seemed to last just about forever hiding in the trees and firing at Syrian infantry. So that may have worked better. I would have thought the buildings would have provided significantly better cover, but it kind of seems like the concealment advantage of the trees was better, but I've not tested this aside from that one case. I do know that, once spotted, my infantry was destroyed very quickly when taking up positions in buildings. At any rate, I was still completely overrun in the military complex, the greenhouses, Maerite, and Fafin crossroads by around 1 hour into the scenario. The AI destroyed all of my original vehicles and most of my infantry and I had no anti-armor assets by the time the Syrians were clearing out Fafin. This is not hard to believe, given the air power, artillery, armor, and infantry the AI redfor had at its disposal compared to the relatively few anti-armor assets I had. Considering I destroyed several of his T-72's and perhaps 1/2 of his BMP's using my initial forces (plus probably 2/3's of his infantry), I thought this was not a bad result (though in real life, I'd probably have ordered my forces to simply abandon the place so as to keep them from being annihilated.) Once my Leopard reinforcements arrived, I maneuvered them to first destroy the remaining roughly 6 T-72's. Then I moved them up to destroy the remaining BMP's. I used my Marders only a little; they took out a few of the BMP's, but my Leopards took out basically all the redfor's remaining armor. The AI surrendered when I had destroyed all but 2 or 3 BMP's and it had only a few dozen infantry left, scattered across the map. I had a few recurring problems, related to the game engine: (1) With two squads in the same room, one of which had a panzerfaust but no rockets and the other of which had rockets but no panzerfaust, they apparently couldn't be persuaded to share with one another, leaving me with non-functional anti-tank weapons for no apparent reason. (2) Seems like at least 1/3 of the vehicle deaths were from the TacAI deciding, for no apparent reason, to drive the vehicle out of cover and directly into the LoS of about 2 dozen enemy vehicles. (3) I know the Weisel is basically the size of a Shriner's car, but in several cases, I witnessed a Weisel getting hit and exploding catastrophically, which caused the immediate destruction of another Weisel...30 meters away on the other side of a building.
  4. Usually on the second turn in or so, this scenario locks up. I get the Windows 7 version of the hourglass and it doesn't come back. I hit CTL-ALT-DEL and bring up the task manager, at which point I see a "Combat Mission Shock Force.exe is not responding" message. I've played other scenarios on my laptop, so I'm wondering if there's a bug in this scenario?
  5. I would generally prefer to play against the AI, as well, but that's mostly because I prefer to sit down and play either half or a whole scenario at a sitting and for multiplayer I usually end up playing maybe a few turns per week, so an entire game takes quite awhile. I actually think playing against another player (talking PBEM here) takes up a lot less of my time than playing against the computer. Anyway, so count me among those who would like a good AI to play against. However, I was speaking more from the standpoint of practicality: From the business perspective of BFC, they are probably correct that spending a lot of resources trying to get a marginally better AI is not resources well-spent. However, I would suggest they create an API for the community to tinker with the AI through a simple scripting engine. This is similar to what I previously proposed for letting the community write a campaign system for the game. I understand this is low on their list of priorities, but they should consider the investment this way: Spend a little resources up front and you get some coders who will work for free.
  6. I can buy that explanation, but I was speaking of the CMx1 series, which, presumably, could be replicated in CMSF (depending on which system is superior.) From your description, I agree that triggers would be necessary to make the AI have _some_ reaction to the player if the "AI" is simply executing a script. Hey, there's an idea. Why not open up the AI for scripting with a basic language (i.e., one that would naturally contain branching and iteration logic) and then turn the community lose. Not that it would necessarily get us a much better AI (as many have mentioned, writing a good AI isn't trivial), but it would at least give the community the tools to solve the problem to the extent it can practically be solved.
  7. Well, my understanding (at least of the CMx1 games) was the that AI got a peak at the forces of the human player before the game started so that it could make a plan. If this is true (and I have no idea if it still holds for the CMx2 series), then why does it seem like the AI doesn't re-plan when it starts making contact and losing units? Also to add: I agree with the logic of not spending much time on the StratAI because players can play against other humans. However, if the expectation is that we will mostly play against other players, then I'd really like to be able to issue more complex orders so that we the humans can make our little digital troops behave better without spending a lot of resources on the TacAI. One thing that I think would help is to give the units a "mode" (for lack of a better word) that indicates to them what they are doing. I think this would help refine their behavior. For example, if you tell soldiers to move, this could mean "march from one safe location to another" or it could mean "move to contact and engage" or it could mean "advance under fire and take that position". BFC has responded by adding "assault" and "advance", but I think it would be better to give the units a mode that governs what their behavior should be as they move from point A to point B.
  8. Alright, guys, this time I really did figure out the issue. It turns out there's a fatal flaw in the installer: It was not able to adequately anticipate my level of stupidity. Despite the fact that I had already successfully installed the game on my PC, patched it, installed the modules, and patched up to 1.21 and had been playing it for awhile, this did not stop me from trying to do the following when installing it on our new laptop: (1) I installed the base game (2) I patched up to 1.10 (3) I patched up to 1.21 and selected "Update Marines + British". Obviously, there should have been a step between (2) and (3), which for some reason I missed. (Well, the reason was that I missed copying the module installer to the new laptop, so the absence of the file led me to believe the 1.21 patch was it and I forgot in my frazzled state that there was a patch on top of the modules. I blame work + ornery 3 year-old...) So the installer happily patched it up to 1.21 and it tried its best to upgrade the non-existent modules. This did not work so well, as it turns out. I think this explains why I could load at least some of the USMC games, but the units didn't draw properly. Anyhow, it's working perfectly now. And clearly I owe the community a round of drinks.
  9. At the risk of making my skill level at the CM series game obvious to the community, I always thought that the AI (speaking mainly of the CM1 series here) was fine with one exception: It rarely reacted to what I was doing. I'm not the type of player who tries to figure out how the AI works and use that to my advantage, so perhaps the AI is better for me than those who do, but it is noticeable when it keeps sending vehicles into an area where its already lost a bunch of vehicles. I wouldn't say the AI is clever by any means (it isn't that difficult for me to trick it, especially when it is on the attack and I'm on defense), but my only real complaint is that it doesn't hardly seem to change its mind.
  10. The problem is that I discover where they are because one of my AAV's (that I thought was in reasonable cover and/or facing the most likely attack direction) blows up. Also, I intend to respect the ROE for the scenario, which is not to just light the place up, which would otherwise be my preference :-)
  11. Alright, gents, I kindof suspected this wouldn't work, but I tried changing the install paths to be under Program Files instead of the default (Program Files (x86)) for the base game, the 1.10 patch, and the 1.21 British + Marine installation and it did the same thing. Sorry, we have to try again. I've been thinking about this and, given the evidence, the only remaining conclusion I can draw is that the 1.21 update doesn't fully update properly. I draw this conclusion because (1) the game still runs (2) the key installers both came back successful (3) the main screen shows version 1.21 (4) the Marines scenarios are selectable and load, but the textures don't load properly, so the vehicles and men are either not drawn or they look like black blobs. So I'm going to re-download the 1.21 update and re-install and see what happens. One question, though: For Windows 7, does it need to be run in Windows XP compatability mode or not? I've tried both (though not necessarily in a consistent fashion), so, although I don't think that's a realistic cause (if it mattered, I would think the game just wouldn't work, rather than just having the 1.21 modules not quite working), I'd like to eliminate that as a variable.
  12. Does it matter what the install path is? I accepted the default path on install and it appears it put the game under c:\Program Files (x86) rather than c:\Program Files.
  13. Hmmm. Hadn't thought about the height. However, I've been trying to keep them back and behind cover, but my opponent still blasting them to bits with, I think, recoilless rifles. They seem a lot more fragile than Strykers, but could also be the enemy has better weapons than the average base CMSF scenario. Imma going to try keeping them in motion, moving behind cover as much as possible, get my guys assaulting and then get my AAV's behind cover.
  14. So here's more specifically what I did. I'm trying to install CMSF British + Marine modules on my new laptop, which is running Windows 7 (I assume the modules will work in XP compatability mode for XP Svc Pck 3.) (1) Installed the base game from disc. Ran as admin and input the original key. Game came up fine, loads scenarios and seems to run fine (version 1.01.) (2) Installed the 1.10 patch. Then ran it as admin and again it seemed to work fine, main screen says version is 1.10. (3) Installed the 1.21 Marines + British module. This seemed to install fine, I selected "Marines + British update" in the dropdown. Then, I ran it in admin mode and it asks for the key for Marines and the key for British (or perhaps the reverse order), it appeared to install the keys successfully (it told me they installed successfully), and the game comes up. The main screen shows version 1.21, but does not show either Marines or British module icons, just the base game icon. The scenario selection shows the Marine scenarios as selectable, British scenarios do not show up. But when I try to load a Marine scenario, although it comes up fine, the textures are missing for the Marine units (Army units are drawn properly.) No virus protection or firewall, AFAIK.
  15. As a Marines module newby, in my first mission, I have to say the Marines' ride seems to be quite easily destroyed. Any tips on keeping these alive? I'm getting my butt kicked. Should I keep them in cover and just bring them out to support my infantry or do I need to just keep them moving or what?
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