Alchenar

Guess what was translated from the Russian archives today! http://tankarchives.blogspot.ca/2014/04/panther-trials.html

What is it with wargamers and their hard-on for roleplaying the worst war-criminals?

That seems like a bit of a fallacy. The choice is not between 1) shell hits turret or hull and 2) shell hits turret but rather 1) shell hits turret or hull and 2) shell hits turret or ground beneath turret Or to put another way, if the enemy gunner is good enough to be hitting where he aims then he'll aim for the turret regardless of whether the tank is hull down or not.

I just want to say how incredibly well-written this manual is. I got my old Shock Force manual out to compare and the difference in terms of explaining how the UI works and showing principles of how to actually play the game is a world apart. Other wargame developers should be using this as a model.

The S-Tank was built for combat in Sweden's densely forested hills, where a) there's likely a tree blocking your turret movement anyway and you can take a defensive position where you can predict with a good degree of accuracy where the enemy will appear because there's literally no other lines of approach. John you are right, but that still means there needs to be a tradeoff - much faster rotation at close quarters should not be allowed to turn StuGs into monsters that can instantly acquire and range in on targets outside the gun traversal at medium-to-long range.

Because aiming with a turretless SPG is actually really difficult and requires intense co-ordination between the driver and gunner. e: CM doesn't really model 'a little left, a little right, there', so slow turning speed works out as one of those 'unrealistic to be realistic' things.

Well I'd like a $10 discount for pre-ordering for one thing.

It's immensely frustrating that my $10 pre-order discount is completely wiped out by a $27 shipping change for a physical copy I don't even want because who on earth wants a physical copy in 2014? There's literally no reason for me to pre-order.

You can build tanks, but they won't drive themselves.

That's partially true but the second sentence belies the assumption that the lead-lease question asks that we tend to gloss over: if the Soviets had been defeated by Nazi Germany (lets assume that lend-lease is important and without it there's a collapse on the East in 1942), would the Western Allies have been capable of accepting the casualties necessary to defeat a Germany that's had two full years without distraction to solidify its defense against invasion? I think the answer is likely no. So while part one of the answer is 'probably not', part two of the answer is 'and the reason you've asked that question is to shift the discussion over credit for winning the war away from the massive blood price the Soviet Union paid for victory that we did not'.

My issue with a straight port of CMSF is that replaying it now... the disparity in scenario quality from TF Thunder to the NATO Campaigns/Scenarios is vast and unmissable. This is an understandable consequence of designers learning from experience and getting to grips with the new engine, but it does mean that in retrospect a lot of the scenario content that exists just isn't very good and I wouldn't really want to pay much for it, especially when the bulk of the attraction of the engine upgrades is that they allow for the construction of more intricate scenarios.

I believe there's a massively fragmented argument going on as to how likely it was that a shell would hit the Panther's Shot Trap and how likely it was that said shell came from a particular gun. Obviously the easiest way to work out if something is off is to compare large-scale historical results to large-scale testing in game. Except the large-scale historical results don't really exist hence the fragmentation of the argument into how many of what gun was in what theatre with how many Panthers.

I know more than one person who's been turned off completely because they see they're being asked to pay for a patch. I understand your chain of reasoning, the problem is that nobody actually thinks that way. Nobody sees 'product at reduced price' because the reduction is invisible. They just see 'product' and 'additional cost to *fix* product'.

Simple and easy method is just to have everything by itself in the shop, but offer a discount if you put a base game plus modules into your shopping cart. Maybe have that discount stack slightly the more you buy at once, maybe not. It keeps the shop clean and it's technically trivial.

Hmmm... I'm skeptical. It seems to me that either an extra command is important to know (in which case it's important that beginners are able to use it to play the game), or it's of marginal utility (in which case it's adding to an already too cluttered UI).

Yeah I don't know anyone who actually relishes the idea of buying a game and then realising they need to pay more for the latest version. In fact, whenever I discuss grognard games with people on other forums and recommend Combat Mission an inevitable response is "Battlefront? Those are the *******s who charge money for patches, right?" Not one person has ever perceived it as a cheaper entry price.

The campaign structure is just a big deal as well, separately to having a dedicated tutorial. Mainstream games that are comparatively quite simple still ease the player into the game by introducing concepts one by one and gradually ramping up the scale and complexity; 'Here's a simple squad vs squad firefight. Now there's two squads. Now a machinegun (see how it changes things). Now a mortar. Now a tank and anti-tank weapons'. But to return to TF Thunder as our example: The first mission is 'Use tanks to shoot enemies in conditions where they can't shoot back!'. Then it's 'Use infantry to clear a mixed urban/open environment of irregulars and special forces!' then 'Use mounted recon and tanks to attack entrenched infantry and tanks!' It's an interesting and wide variety of combat scenarios, but the new player doesn't really get a chance to learn and develop an understanding of how to play from progressing through them. ps. I know I'm picking on what's probably the weakest official campaign out of all the CMx2 line-up and that design got rapidly better even with the first module, it's just illustrative of my point. Scale matters just as much as complexity of elements, because a player with one platoon to control is going to have much more focused attention (and therefore a better degree of understanding) on what's going on with that platoon than one who's moving three around (and this is an issue that real-time has over turn-based play).

Obligatory: (they manage to take off at the 40 minute mark... and that's with one person at the controls and two people with the manual open reading out stage-by-stage instructions) e: I don't think the learning curve of CM is necessarily higher than other games, just different (it's sharper at the early point and then gets easier). It's just so very different to anything else on the market and that makes it very difficult to understand how you are supposed to play. Example: the first time I played Shock Force I tried to use use Strykers like Warhammer Space Marines - I'd drive a Stryker right up to a building I wanted to occupy, pop smoke, dismount and assault right in. Obviously this did not work well. It didn't help that the tutorials... weren't and the first map of the campaign was this huge thing but which was actually 'here's a bunch of Abrams vs stuff that can't shoot back, you can't really lose so just have fun'. Aside from a remake of the UI, the best thing that CM could have is a real tutorial that takes the player and says 'all of these rules you've learned from playing other strategy games don't apply here, these are the terms you need to be thinking in'.

That's a 'soon' thing. It was 'soon' a year ago and as of a question I asked a few days ago it's still in the works along with some sort of general revamp for all of the CMx2 games in the store in terms of their versions.

Ok that makes sense. Thank you. I remember dropping $1 to upgrade to 1.21 to see what the game-state was after a year of not playing and a few days later I was having a good enough time to get the Marines+Brits pack, which is how I ended up with these options.

Problem encountered: I have the Paradox>Battlefront conversion 1.21 patch and it doesn't give me an option to install for Marines+Brits modules. If I install it before the modules then they don't get patched, if I install it afterwards then access to them gets removed. What do I do? Install my conversion 1.21, install Marines+Brits, install 1.21a again and then proceed?

Yes I know, I just spent two days waiting for the distinctly non-magical solution of a guy somewhere pushing a button so that I could install the software I have a license for

While I do appreciate that decisions made many years ago can't be simply undone, and I'm actually surprised to hear that there's a tool in the works to clean up the CMSF install process (I wouldn't have been surprised or upset to hear that it was only going to be for CMBN and CMFI because 'newer'), the delivery of DLC is not exactly a unique problem that only Battlefront has to grapple with. I know grognards tend to get all weird and Luddite over programs that 'call home', but a launcher that interrogates a server for version details and then downloads and applies patches automatically is a pretty standard expectation these days.

I found a bonus stage: email support to have your elicense reset because at some point in the past someone thought that DRM that limited installs was a totally customer friendly move

As someone going through the clean install process right now: I'm realising how much I've become accustomed to one-click installers. Given that Battlefront's orientated itself entirely around a modular sales strategy I'll be very disappointed if the next wave of games hasn't had some work put into making this end of things more user friendly.