Can we have an AAR from CMC ?

[Peterk]

...especially when you have an idea for a campaign you want to try but you don't have your CM maps ready yet. Yes it'll be handy.

I have a feeling map making is what's going to take the longest.

[BigDog944]

I'm certain that a large portion of the beta testing will have very little to do with game play, and tonnes to do with testing that the program doesn't allow the human players to do strange things with the interface that breaks the game and causes a crash to desktop or other "unexpected" results.

The beta testers will be spending hours just clicking buttons and scrolling around the CMC operational map, just checking to make sure that some interger value somewhere in the program doesn't overflow and crash the game. Then they'll be spending hours upon hours punching data into every data entry field that is visible in the campaign editor. If the beta testers are good, they'll dream up absolutely bizarre, "broken" scenarios and try to punch them into the game, to see if it accepts them or not. The worst thing for a software product to do is allow a user to get it into a state it doesn't know what to do with and can't recover from. How about adding a platoon to the OOB, then deleting it, then adding it again, then deleting it, then adding it, then deleting it, ad nauseum. If there's some kind of a memory leak or something in the program, this is the kind of stuff you have to do to find it. Lots of fun.

Screen resizing... what happens when you alt-tab away from the game, change your screen resolution and then come back to the game?

How about importing maps? Only a human being can reasonably say that the operational CMC approximation of their map is a good one or not. You need a lot of maps to test even a small portion of the possibilities.

Only after that's all done and declared "clean" will they be looking at battle results from human played CMBB battles and the auto-resolver. I think it'll still be quite some time before the beta testers are even coming close to playing an actual battle.