A Canadian Cat

Interesting. These three keep coming up. That must be a clue or something Yeah, that would be pretty cool I agree.

That would be how I think it will go too. I agree with that 100%. My personal preference would be for BFC to self fund or use kick starter and have us pay for it an interface to allow this kind of operational game to be hooked into CM. Creating ways for a community of apps and services to be developed by their users. Then we would see what the various existing operational layers would play like and see what @choppinlt comes up with. But he have already heard Steve's take on that so I guess we have to hope that @choppinlt's game is kickass and BFC sign up to cooperate with him to integrate. Fingers crossed. I have even been shopping this project around to my friends with game development experience.

That is so true. Thankfully one of my first experiences was with a friend in real life (which means we can punch each other if we do stupid stuff like that). I now have three regular partners that I trust to play blind and it is great. Plus several more that have proven themselves good players too. There have been a few annoying partners but I fired them . Since I always have several good games going I can afford to test out new people now and then. If they surrender like babies after the first time I draw blood or throw a hissy fit and rage quite after I take out a tiger - I just don't play them again - ever. Heck even one of the top guys on the ladder I play on, who's turn rate slows to ridiculous levels when he is loosing, is fired - I have politely declined games with him and will do so for the foreseeable future. None of that really bothered me much because I had multiple good games on the go at the time. I'll admit taking out that Tiger was such an effort that I was actually looking forward to the rest of that game to see if I could hold on. But ah well.

I am seeing an error "Sorry. This person moved or deleted this image." for each of the images in your posts.

Wow, if that is you being friendly I don't want to meet you in a dark alley I will put my effort where I think I will get the most benefit for me - thank you very much. At the moment I am finding *any* AI programming work extremely challenging and I am having very little success. I hope that changes with some of the very helpful design threads that are going on at the moment. But even once I get some traction I will not be concerned about "limiting what I can achieve" and nor will I be "not making an effort". What I will be is clear about how anything I finally achieve can be played.

Hee hee I am sure we could discuss this round and round. BFC have stated that Green means proper training but no combat experience. Regular means proper training and some combat experience. I think we should just go with @noob on this.

I think that sounds reasonable - go for it

Ah, I see. Thanks for the briefing. Sounds like there are a few issues and the argument (errrr discussion) about what an operational layer should be comes in a bit too. The total openness would also be an issue. I don't think any of us want something that can easily be exploited - just flexible.

Which gets back to the part I do not understand. PzC is open enough to allow you to integrate it with other games already. There is no involvement needed by the publisher if their input output format is open for use by the gamer. If BFC creates an ability to take input (in a format / method of their own choosing) to create a battle and produce output from the results of a battle they they will have an open game that allows it to be hooked to an operational layer. What COO is proposing to do is create a new operational game with an open interface to allow tactical resolution using a game like CM. on top of that @choppinlt is planning to do that without any firm commitment from BFC that they will create what is needed in CM. To me it seems that just gets us to the exact point were already are right now. Like I said it feels like I am missing something here because what I have outlined above makes very little sense, and I know for a fact that the people involved in this discussion are pretty damn smart. Please fill me in - what am I missing?

+1 here Exactly.

Someone said it before me on the forum - I did not take it to seriously nor did I mean it too seriously.

Well, Chuck Norris could do that. So you never know. Steve does own a tank.

This is what I don't get. I feel like I am missing something. If I am please let me know what it is. From what I have seen we have a Op level game which is able to take input from a tactical level game to resolve its battles. All transferring to and from CM is manual but the op game is automatic. This is precisely what @choppinlt is proposing to spend time and money to build. What we need to complete the loop and make this viable is work on the CM side that BFC has not given a firm commitment to do. So, I really feel like there is additional information that I am unaware of. Now that I would get behind totally. Interesting problem. I think I would be pretty flexible there. What I want is more and better context for my CM games. I am not really particularly interested in an op game for the sake of the op game. By that I mean I would most likely never play the op game stand alone but only ever play it to create CM games for me and my opponents to play. My personal estimation is that if there was seamless (or at least only file copying needed) integration between the layers I would probably play 50% of my games using the op layer. With manual jiggery pokery to setup CM battle after CM battle that would be reduced to experimental once or twice level.

While I think for the purposes of an operational layer for CM it would work much *better* on a PC, I can see it working on a tablet. You can - right now setup drop box on your tablet and your PC and have a folder sync between them (and your opponents). I could then sit on my couch and play my op turn which could say spawn files for 2 CM battles. Before going to bed I could flip over to my PC fire up CM and get my part of the CM battles going and have H2HH send files to my opponent. As long as the op layer can save its output files to a device folder then this can work pretty seamlessly.

LOL so true - well the "too busy to post" part not the Paris Hilton part.

Yes, it is a dramatic view when they do it. I personally like the way the animation works for Bren Carriers.

No one is quite sure what triggers the inability to make the switch. I have faced this a few times and as recently as a few days ago. I have no idea what causes it to happen. I hope they can track it down and fix it at some point.

Ah, I did not get that from what you said first either. Are you sure we need to do *all* of that work? I don't think we need to create maps from an external definition. Don't get me wrong being able to generate maps from external data would be very cool. For an operational level game it would be enough to allow a CM map to be assigned to cover the various squares or hexes or what ever the operational game uses. I actually think that the needed information transfer would be the order of battle going in, including the soft factors and unit strength etc. Coming back we would need a revised version of this with the updated unit strength from casualties sustained etc., remaining ammunition etc. The next level of goodness would be to record and reset the damage sustained to a map. I think that is it - am I missing anything?

Having CM provide an interface to allow it to be tied to an operational layer is something I would really like. I have to be honest though I have a few concerns about this project. Can you provide veritable qualifications for your game design chops? I ask this because there are three other operational layer on to of CM schemes already actually happening. One with an existing computer game. One with a game design tool box. And I forget about the first one. All three have actually conducted games and CM battles. Those three are all quite a few steps ahead of where you are. I am certainly not against this - I have funded a useful kickstarter project in the past. It seems like a good way to get things done. However I submit that there is little point unless the design of the CM integration is part of this up front. Here lies my biggest problem. Given that there are already three operational layers out there working right now that have no integration support for connecting to CM, why add a fourth one? xkcd Standards The only reason I can see this being worthwhile is if you can - from the start - have integration with CM. By that I mean automatically handling the order of battle both directions and the creation of the initial turns from the operational game. Otherwise you are just creating another operational game - yawn. It is a bit of a catch 22. BFC have said they don't want to divert resources to supporting something that is not proven. Many of us who would be interested in playing CM integrated with an operational layer have little patience for spending the time it takes to manually modify orders of battle back and forth to spend a lot of time playing this way. Kick starter might be a good way to break the catch 22. But I will say it again there is little point unless the project includes resources for BFC to actually do the work to support their half.

Indeed it works great. I cannot claim credit for this. I am pretty sure I read in on these forums. So, whom ever it was that came up with the idea - thanks.

To clarify you can already target a specific floor of a building. The issue with area fire on buildings is that you still need to be able to see the centre of the action square to do it. This makes it very hard to shoot up the front of a building down the street that you men can plainly see just fine but because the neighbouring building is blocking your LOS to the centre of the action square you cannot fire on the front of the building. Fixing this may well rise to the effort of many features but it is not a new feature it would be fixing a design flaw.

That sounds good to me.

My bad. Your are quite correct I was focusing on the tank crew swapping part - that is denied. The re crewing AT guns was not denied but I am not holding my breath either because they have stated the priority is low for them. My memory tells me that the tank crew switching was pretty firmly denied - for the prevention of gamey stuff. The only real crew swapping that had much likely hood to happen in a CM battle would be an unhorsed HQ crew kicking some lower ranked crew out of a tank to regain command of the force. I compensate for that by getting my HQ crew into a radio equipped HT or jeep. That puts them back in command and as long as you keep them safely back it works quite well.

@noob, Is the fact that we are talking about our operational orders, an indication that there was no CM battle to be fought resulting from the Allies turn?

Please, make him second. I really don't think I am up for the turn rate at the moment.