shared impressions and genaral thoughts.

[Pandur]

hi

i got the game some weeks now but my PC simply cant run this game. however, i was ably to play the game for some good houers on a PC of one of my friends. now i wanted to share my thoughts and some minor suggestions i have.

i played the demo, hm, "verry" often so i basicly knew what to do. after managing the cfg.bat stuff i fired up the game and jumped directly to the single missions. the ambush mission got some little flaw wich i will mention later. after one houer or so i thought lets start the campain. and so i did.

-the first mission was easy, played it 1000 times bevor. but it was my first time i never had to drive of the road in this mission.

-the 2nd mission wasnt that easy anymore. it took me one retry to finish it. fist try i took fireing pos 1(the northern). i saw the su100 first, i fired first, and died first. the su just fired one shot and done. 2nd try; i drove to pos2 now, and got more luck there. the su100 got a bad gunner this time and is just hitting everything but me. it took me some serious ammo amount to kill the su100 from the front(bad visibility was a factor too, so i missed some shots)though. the t34 afterwards wasnt any problem.

for everyone who didnt start the campain jet...

SPOILER ahead

-mission3

puh; mission 3 gave me some headache but was doable. my biggest problem was that i forgott how to change to night vision until i remembered while "crawling" up the hill to the village.

my first try wasnt any fancy. i just drove through the ravine and got slaughtered. i thought meybe this is the first mission where you have to abandom the "original" plan becouse its insane. after some thinking i diceded not to change the plan and continued going through the ravine, becouse where is the point in someone making a plan and everyone else is doing their own. this cant be any good, so i sticked to the orig plan.

i dispatched the recoilless stuff at pos1 with my coax mg from about 690m-710m. not difficult. after driving around the tank obstractles(sp?) i catched a rpg from the side, and got finaly finished by the shturm baby in the brushes. ok, everything again, than killed the shturm with my top mounted mg(while beeing save behing a crest), only to get blasted in the back by the 2nd shturm on the oposite side in the woods. it took me some more tryes to manage to kill everything wich is down there and guarding the area between us and the village. in the process my tank took several RPG hits from nearly every direction, but luckyly nothing "bigger".

and now there comes the annoing part(not rally, its more amusing- but can be annoing when you try to finish the mission). while i killed the last shturm with my top mg, i got 2 RPG side hits. i was really driven crazy in this moments becouse it took me some serious amount of time, sweat, and nervs to get that far.

finaly rpg dead, everything else dead, lets go to the village. i put in 4th gear and released the mountain break. shrugh; i was turning around...

the track wich was damaged bevor was allready repaired so i wondered wheres the problem...(i got track damage twice this round). after some try and error i discovered some rally bad news. at first my tracks and/or transmission where damaged so i just could go barely straight in 1st gear. all other gears leaved me turning around. next thing was that my engine didnt start to work. when i released the "E" button it stalled ??? it was really that bad; my fuel was gone due to damage to the tanks(at this point i remembered the "unlimited battery" option and was happy to left it at default-on). so my tank was barely able to drive anymore, but hey, i got unlimited battery and a starter. first part was easy. rolled down the hill and crashed into a inf ditch; took me some minutes to get out.

than i drove in 1st gear just with my starter(pressed "E" button), with about 7kmh to the street. remember; the tank constantly tryed to steer and i have had to reposition it all 5 meters or so.

now i was on the stree leading up the hill to the village wich took me another 30minutes or so. the starter wasnt able to drive me up the hill in one pice. it was necceserry to use the mountain break, "start" up the motor to high rpm, and then more or less hopping up the hill for a few meters, than the same again.

on top of the hill i saw the village and everything seemed ok. suddenly a rpg came over and hit right in the front. at this point i gone crazy and started to unload my HE loadout(i never fired the mainguni n this mission bevor, just my coax and top mag) into the village, and ofcourse near the guy with the rpg. i thoght my guys are bailing out allready, and wanted to maximize damaged in the few seconds i had left. suprisingly it was enough time to get out all of my HE shelles into the village to make sure the is nobody left. noone bailed out and i continued to crawl into the village and won the mission.

that was some thrill.

SPOILER end

i didnt tryed mission 4 so far, but i cant await to get to my friends place again.

Suggestions; simply after playing some time i noticed some stuff wich could get some tuning.

1.) single mission ambush; the opfor relatively often managed to roll its tank down the hill... .

meybe it should drive on the street!?

2.) auto transmission is somewhat inacurate. it shifts up and down to late. not a big problem since i like to shift manually, and its much much better that way(t72 is like a racing car in manual mode ).

3.) the heights maps in the F11 menue are verry good(the map in the russian beta demo was terrible) but i still got problems to see the high and low spots clearly becouse of its all white.

i also wanted to ask if there is a possibility to extract this maps and add some colour ti it, by myself if noone else is interested in doing this.

4.) a great improofment would be to get comands wich orders the gunner just to fire with maingun, mg, or both. i never let my gunner fire becouse obviusly hes trying to keep up with a mg42. so after short time there is no muni left.(i thoght i wait untlil they are better trained and hopefully hit better).

but i dont care that much about mg ammo and would like to command him to shoot just with coax mg.

another cool thing would be if you could tell your commander to shoot the top mg by himself. just the coax and top mg would help a grat deal to kill infanty while i drive the tank. unfortunatle its not possible. the top mg is just for "you" to use and the coax mg is only fired in combination with the maingun, by the gunner(i cant await to play the first lan, where driving shooting and spotting goes one in one).

its also an other question how realistic it would be to "order" you commander to shoot his mg!? but meybe there could be a way around.

some kind of bug;

while i drove around without running engine just with my starter, i still heared the usual motor sounds. meybe there should be an other sound when driving without the motor.

question;

in the 3rd campain mission i wasnt able to use my rangefinder for distances above 400m. is this becouse of the bad wheather? is it normal that i have to do the rest myslef when shooting above 400m(i mean to correct aim)? if its normal that iam fine

puh,

in the end i want to apollogize for my bad english. and hopefulli i mad no mistakes in the topic title.

and i hope that this little electric motor wich starts your engine is clled "starter" in english. if not some text passages could be somewhat cryptic.

greetings

EDIT:

oh; and ofcourse i forgott the most important thing; for the BFC staff

"its a great product and iam glad to have it"(and with some love it can get even better)!!!!!

greetings

[ December 08, 2005, 09:54 PM: Message edited by: Pandur ]

[Moon]

Hi Pandur,

thanks for the thoughts and impressions! When you say that you cannot run this game, does this mean that your computer is not up to specs? Did you try out the new v1.3 patch?

If the demo runs, then the full version should, too.

Martin

PS. There will be a new demo with a new demo mission out very soon, as well.

[Pandur]

thanks for the thoughts and impressions! When you say that you cannot run this game, does this mean that your computer is not up to specs? Did you try out the new v1.3 patch?

If the demo runs, then the full version should, too.

Martin

oh, its no problem that the game does not run on my machine. the rough specs are; amd650mhz, 192SDram, voodoo3 3000 graphix power

but its a good machine for small and medium CM battles

the patch, pitched in just in time becouse i installed the game at my friends pc one day after the patch was released. so i never tried it without patch.

there where no ctd´s or anything like that while playing. i got about 35-40 fps in 3rd person drivers view with every option at high(i turned off grass and reduced to 12cloud lvls) and it only starts to get somewhat slow when i have zoomed in with the sight and there is much smoke and fire ans stuff going on. i will try to reduce the smoke so that it isnt that dense, becouse to make it less is like cheating(i think thats the "particle effects" option).

thanks for your comment, seems that the others are scared away by my rusty english or so

anything you can say about point 1-4 meybe? would be great

greetings

Pandur

[Pandur]

hi again.

since my post and especially the questions in it are proffesionally ignored(why?), by everyone here i will simply continue to post my questions here in this thread. meybe someone who got the insight will answer them one time... . i didnt manage to get the answers out of the manuall, so iam "forced" to post em here

for now i just got one question, tough.

how does my crew gain expirience? i started with an untrained crew, after the first battle they where trained. i lost a crew member in mission 3, and since than my crew is untrained again.

now i wanted to ask how my crew gains XP?

by destroying infantry and tanks? by compleating missions? or both? do i lose XP when a crew member is killed? do the member get replaced next mission or do i have a tank with just 2 guys right now?

i cant find answers to this elswhere... .

and another thing;

i tryed the usermissions and have to say that they are verry good.

daskal´s mission was fun! but i got ambushed myself when going to the ambush WP(the leos are apearing a bit early). unfortunately the t72 in the village ended my only try so far(but i think it was one of the last tanks, if not the last).

both desert missions made by moon are cool too. iam not a "desert" fan but the missions are well done.

i think powerplant was the only mission i didnt try.

thats it for now...

greetings

[Moon]

Hi Pandur,

not ignoring. When there is no response it's either because people don't know... or simply missed the question. It's a mix of those two in my case (with the growing number of forums it's easy to miss stuff), but I'll try my best:

1.) single mission ambush

Oddly enough I have yet to see the AI behave like this in the first mission. But since you're not the first to mention this, obviously something's off. I bet it's as easy as opening the mission in the editor and tweaking the AI pathfinding logic a bit. Like you say, make it stick to roads more. But of course the mission would be a bit more predictable then (not that it matters much for such a simple mission).

2.) auto transmission is somewhat inacurate. it shifts up and down to late. not a big problem since i like to shift manually

Funny enough this is exactly what I though myself - I prefer to shift manually so never really noticed much of a problem... and really auto-transmission is designed for smooth on-the-road driving, not combat situations.

3.) i also wanted to ask if there is a possibility to extract this maps and add some colour ti it, by myself if noone else is interested in doing this.

Well, the briefing maps are only BMPs, so you can open and edit them with any graphics program out there. The maps are stored in the Levels folder in the installation directory.

4.) a great improofment would be to get comands wich orders the gunner just to fire with maingun, mg, or both. i never let my gunner fire becouse obviusly hes trying to keep up with a mg42. so after short time there is no muni left.(i thoght i wait untlil they are better trained and hopefully hit better).

Indeed, the crew AI gets better with more experience in the campaign (and the crew skills can be set by the mission author for custom missions).

Your suggestion isn't bad but obviously it's mainly geared towards your style of play, and others might want different options. We cannot allow them all (but I agree more flexibility for the future wouldn't be bad).

Personally, I like to let the AI gunner do the shooting in many cases and prefer to keep my situational awareness. Again, question of style of play I guess...

in the 3rd campain mission i wasnt able to use my rangefinder for distances above 400m. is this becouse of the bad wheather? is it normal that i have to do the rest myslef when shooting above 400m(i mean to correct aim)? if its normal that iam fine

It could be the weather (or other environmental factors, like for example smoke). But what could also happen is that in some early campaign missions the rangefinder is simulated as "broken" on purpose (though it's unfortunately not mentioned in the mission briefings).

now i wanted to ask how my crew gains XP?

by destroying infantry and tanks? by compleating missions? or both? do i lose XP when a crew member is killed? do the member get replaced next mission or do i have a tank with just 2 guys right now?

I think that all of the instances you list should gain you XP. And yes, you lose XP when you lose crew members, and those members get replaced with tankers with less experience. Notice though that I say "I think", because I don't know all the aspects 100% myself.

Martin

[Pandur]

hi

Well, the briefing maps are only BMPs, so you can open and edit them with any graphics program out there. The maps are stored in the Levels folder in the installation directory.

Exellent!

Your suggestion isn't bad but obviously it's mainly geared towards your style of play, and others might want different options.

ofcourse you are right! but suggestions are nearly allways subjektiv

and i cant think that iam the onlyone who wants this...(but meybe the others really dont care :confused: )?

Personally, I like to let the AI gunner do the shooting in many cases and prefer to keep my situational awareness.

hehe, i let the AI commander do his job and drive/shoot myself. but my information about whats going on outside is limited

on the other hand this could change when i could give the gunner more precise orders ! he must not engage the rpg gunner; 500m away with HE, especially *in some cases* i dont have that much ammo left myself and so he must not waste it when i order him to engage such a target. as it is now i do it myself... .

but as you said, its a matter of play style.

yes, you lose XP when you lose crew members, and those members get replaced with tankers with less experience.

good to know(i have thought this but i wanted to make sure)!

i play role playing games too, thats why iam interested how the get my crew lvl up quick

many thx for your time

Pandur

[Jack7(Tankgunner)Denmark]

Hello

Here is just some thoughts for the game.First i think it is a GREAT GAME!I have only the Demo now, but i will buy it, after chrissmas.Trasers especially on the HE would be nice. with a speed of about 830 meter per sekund, you can see it easily, i know because i have been, a tank gunner for 12 years. ON APDSFS with 1480 meter per sekund, you dont see it as a gunner, only the Commander will see it.THE sound of the gun being loaded, is very importen this is the sound, when you have a target as a gunner is listen for, because you are always waithing for the gun.SO this SOUND is sounding very high in your ears.SMACK READY !! maybe you only have a split sekund !TANKWAR is split sekunds.WHEN you fire the main gun as gunner, the bang ! is not sounding very high, but sound of the gun recoiling IS!BUT outside the tank it blows your ears off, if you dont wear protektion!

This was just some thoughts from me !

PS. I like the after battle report, where you can see the hits on your targets very much.

Best regards Jacob

[Pandur]

there is this fine option where you can turn on permanent trachers! its in the config.bat options/realism.

and if there is a target where i got enough time to shoot on, i allways change into the exterior view. there you can see everything clearly.

the after battle report is surely a great function. only problem i have with it, is that i would prefer to look freely around the tank with mouseview. zooming in and out with mouseweel.

the view should ofcourse still lock to the tank, so i dont have to look up every tank manually, but everything wich is done with the num block now, should be doable with the mouse.

than it would be perfect!

Pandur

[AK-47]

Hey I have an idea... never seen anyone mentioned it earlier. What about an ability to watch a replay of Your battle, so You can record some of cool situations, that sometimes happen. Watching them from friend or enemy's side, from a dropped camera, or even slow motion projectile camera, so You can precisely watch how Your killshot hit a target. It could be terrific, when playing using multiplayer. Record the replays with program like Fraps, re-edit them, add some cool audio tracks or comments... Hehehe! Sounds like a cool idea to me

[Pandur]

i thought that myself too but it was some kind of daydream i had, not a real idea. i immedeatly thought;"too good, to be ever true".

if it turns out that we can watch a replay, one day...hm i dont know...it would be *fillinanysuperlativeyoucanthinkof*

[Freya]

Originally posted by AK-47:

or even slow motion projectile camera, so You can precisely watch how Your killshot hit a target.

Hmm, that sounds like Sniper Elite and you're right: watching your round striking the enemy can be VERY rewarding indeed.