hoolaman

I've got a question too! What is the difference between "At Target" and "Unit"?

That puzzles me too. 3 years from the CMSF release and some people still seem to wish the whole company, the people and the game nothing but failure.

A bit harsh on poor Ruddy, I don't think people will respond well to the guy they elected being replaced with a left faction female who hasn't been doing a much better job recently either. Having said that we will probably have a true left vs right matchup at election time instead of a centre right leader vs a middle right leader. Rudd must have trod on a lot of toes for it to come to this.

I have suggested in some other thread that there could be combat bonuses based on the facing of a unit ie they can only entrench in one direction or something. Different attackers coming from multiple directions would also have big bonuses. Probably a bit complex for EoS though I guess, and once combat is started, there can be no reinforcements. At the moment the speed of tanks and the ability to exploit breakthroughs into rear areas is less useful because units defend in every direction at once. Really the speed of units in EoS seems to not be as critical as it should be.

What may be happening is that the top of the cliff is one action spot -which you can move to- and the bottom of the cliff is another -which you can also move to. The cliff is a sharp elevation change between the two squares. The game doesn't prevent you selecting these squares but the elevation between them can't be traversed. I noticed this just the other day actually. The cursor only shows impassable if a whole square is at too steep an angle. It's a UI bug I guess.

Why are crimes of passion exempt? The perpetrators are surely more unstable than someone who plans their crime for months. What is the difference in the suffering of the victim and the prosecution of justice between some guy strangling his wife in a fit of rage and some transient strangling a university student in a fit of strangliness? What gives a judge or more particularly a jury the right to decide on the subtleties of whether one crime warrants execution and another does not? In past times you could be executed for sodomy or adultery or witchcraft or even petty crime, but that seems archaic and excessive these days. Well of course if they are brown its a slam dunk.

Lol. I work in an analytical lab (nothing to do with forensics) and the CSI effect is a running joke. Mostly in the context of people's unrealistic expectations of what is possible. But apparently if you set up a lab with really poor lighting and install some UV lamps, you can do an analysis that takes 48 hours and 5mL of sample in 4 seconds with whatever they scraped up off the floor.

It just doesn't occur to me that killing someone is any better than imprisoning them for life, maybe capital punishment really is a matter of taste. But there is only one of those options that can be reversed, so I'd rather err on the side of caution. Even a four year old knows that two wrongs don't make a right, and many murder victims families hold this to be true as well. The argument that human life is not sacrosanct because there is war kind of misses the point. Nation states give rights and obligations to their own citizens that they don't extend to the other billions of people in the world. In fact nations spend most of the time trying to get one up on the other guy, from trade sanctions, protectionism, immigration control etc. war is diplomacy by another means and is ideally not about killing at all, it is about achieving other ends. Killing a criminal is about killing, nothing more.

I most often play WEGO for a couple of reasons, firstly, playing RT you are kind of forced to zoom out and watch for spotting icons to appear so you have some idea of what the hell is going on. This makes it a rather boring icon based game. WEGO allows you to watch the battle from any angle- down in the dirt or hovering closely- and not miss anything. Of course that brings up the other advantage of RT, the real-world time spent playing is much less, and a quick game is a fun game. Secondly I love replaying that sweet missile flight or spotting cool moments like a sniper making a nice headshot.

Having played CM first, CC never seemed worth the time to learn though I did try with the Bulge one which may not be a shining example. 2D just doesn't seem to work right, the ranges are compressed and the forces are massively scaled down to platoons. It's far more like Company of Heroes than CMBO.

But what purpose is served by executing them at all, perfect system or not? Its not a deterrent, it often doesn't make the family of the victim feel any better and it doesn't bring back the victim and I'm pretty sure God is no happier with us afterwards. I'd rather keep them very cheaply in a dungeon with plenty of dank.

The only situation I can think of where it is legal to kill someone is where doing so will prevent the death of yourself or another person, in other words this concept is also based in the sanctity of life. People who track down and murder the guy who they know killed their wife/daughter are just as guilty of murder as the first guy. Even police and soldiers in times of war are not permitted to do this. But the state can catch the guy, take him off the streets and lock him up for decades, and only then decides that he must be killed. It just seems so arbitrary and pointless to me, and killing a person when it is arbitrary and pointless is not good. Not to mention the death penalty in the US can be imposed by jurors on certain people who they just don't like the look of. So poor people, black people and men are pretty highly represented on death row.

That's my preference too. The hypocrisy of killing someone because they killed someone is a big thing imo. The state declares that juman life is sacred, the only way you get away with killing is if your life is in danger. Yet the state can declare that someone must be killed when they are already safely locked away in jail. Ironically a lot of "pro-life" folks seem to be the same crowd that supports killing criminals. The death penalty is not a deterrent to murder and rape, and even many family members of murdered people are against the death penalty, so what purpose does it serve?

There's a really interesting documentary called "The Corporation" that sort of sets out to prove that a corporation, which is a "legal person", would medically be considered a psychopath if they really were a real human. A corporation has no emotions, no empathy, no motive except seeing to profit at almost any expense. It is really a very good documentary, despite its clear left leaning premise, it is well worth watching. It also includes a history of how corporations came to be, and how they came to be so huge.

Theoretically the positions of friendly and enemy units are shared by units with this system instantaneously. If it was destroyed, you'd be back to voice, radio etc for transmitting the location of spotting contacts, and playing with friendly FOW on you may lose your mates a bit more often. The effects of this are usually pretty minor especially for blue with its already excellent spotting abilities, units will have to spot an enemy from scratch instead of getting a <?> sent to them. It can have a big effect on Red AFVs though, if you spot with a dismounted HQ and wait till the enemy positions get to your BMP/T62 they acquire targets much quicker. Friendly FOW's only practical effect is to make life more difficult for you, but if you role-play a bit you can use it to give more realistic FOW based orders.

BP probably bit off more than it could chew when it took over Amoco in the 80's. The company was firmly in the sights of regulators already for killing 15 people at Texas City, and unfortunately these massive accidents don't happen without a lot of safety checks and procedures being ignored or never existing in the first place. OTOH There seems to be a lot of hysteria and hearsay in the media at the moment. Hopefully the truth will come out eventually and the industry can learn from it, because there are a lot of similar wells out there.

Your dismissiveness of the UN is rather naive, this is the sort of situation the UN was designed for (as opposed to rubber stamping the US's colonial adventures). Remember North Korea's only friend in the world is China, and if the security council does anything, it will be with China's support. China's support means that they will have already had a quiet word with the North about pulling their head in.

I agree this is a bit of a weakness. There is also the problem with a relatively small active community that relying on user created content might be a weak point of the game. I'd like to see maybe ten or so official "missions"/unit sets that can truly showcase what the engine can do. EoS could easily be relaunched as a wargame construction kit. You can still make use of user created material just give it some quality control and include it in the release by default (with the author's permission of course). Combat mission has its scenarios created almost exclusively by unpaid beta testers. Maybe releasing a free "content pack" would allow you to make an announcement and get more old players back, as well as getting some buzz for new players. Yes I've been trying to get more of a insight into what is going on during a battle with my posts in the other thread. Battles taking a bit longer and having some sort of report of what is happening as units literally trade blows would be cool. Allowing for reinforcements, withdrawals, pincers (unit facing bonuses) might be good additions. One other observation is that the demo seems to be rather generous. The maps you get in the main game aren't vastly different to the demo map, and the demo allowing players to go through a whole game allows players to get their fill and get sick of playing before they ever have a chance to crave more and buy the game. I was quite keen to buy EoS but the long beta demo knocked the edge off my enthusiasm. I eventually bought to support the development of the game and mainly to play with the unit editor. I'd suggest a turn limited demo that allows maybe 40 turns at most of gameplay. Probably you could give access to the ruleset editor as well, just prevent saving of the ruleset as a demo limitation. I think this would be much more of a "one more turn" incentive to buy th full game.

+1 A lot of bandwagon jumping going on. I'd rather watch a dozen games of AFL than 1 game of soccer, and being a queenslander I don't really like AFL much either. At least a draw in AFL might be 76 points each instead of nil-nil. I don't understand how anyone enjoys watching a whole game of anything without anybody scoring a single point.

Hopefully this works (can't edit my post now), the forum seems to have lost my attachment. Perhaps my problem is that the combat equation you posted should give 100% predictable probabilities, but the combat simulator doesn't seem to do that. Adding randomness to the equation makes it even less predictable and I am no closer to getting the results I was trying for. This happens regularly with ground units too. I have a unitset with fairly high hit chances 50 attack and 1 defence and zero combat randomness. This sees the majority of my battles result in both battlers dying. If combat was truly sequential, first to zero HP should die.

Cool, looking forward to this one. I played this scenario PBEM against our colleague MeatEtr playing the US, and it was one of the more fun and balanced battles I've played. Of course I lost (yes I lost as US vs Syrian), just like I have lost pretty much every CMSF game I play, so I'm looking forward to see how you go. My take on the map is that the big rocky hill split my forces and made it hard for them to mutually support each other, but I won't give away any more for your readers.

Setup Blue vs Red, buy your blue or red forces, then switch to Red vs Red/Blue vs Blue and add whatever units of the other side you want. This is in the mission? parameters. Also in the end screen, whatever you have FIRST in the unit list will be the side that lists in the result screen eg. "US Army vs Uncon".

Thanks for taking the time to reply. That does help a lot. The combat simulator is still doing things I don't really understand which I find a bit frustrating. For example I've taken the class 1 infantry from the official ruleset and given them 10 HP. Combat randomness is set to 0.5 as this seems to give the closest to the "correct" binomial curve. Both units have 4.0 defence and 4.0 attack, so each tic they should be subjected to an attack and a defense "roll" of 0.01 right? By my calculations there should be 13% chance of doing zero damage in 200 rounds of combat, but here there is no chance of zero HP damage. Oh a BUG: If you set a unit to have more than 99 hit points, the combat simulator goes absolutely nuts, damage seems to only calculated to 99 HP and over 110HP there are really weird entries like 145124% to get 184 HP damage and such. Please is there any chance of changing the combat calculations (or an option) so that units don't both die in a combat? First to get a hit and go to zero HP dies, the other unit lives? This is pretty important if you want to make a ruleset on a smaller scale (Like setting units to be like single tanks instead of divisions) or a simplified dice roll type combat system. If I want two units to go head to head and whoever hits first wins, I can't really do that if all the hits are assigned at the same time and both units die. This latter situation is what I'm seeing almsot every time in my simplified ruleset.

The manual might be a good place to start, though it explains this stuff very poorly imo. I'm not a guru by any means and some of my understanding might be wrong, but to explain the basics, an AI order is part movement and part deployment. For each order you have a movement setting which changes the way the units move TO the setup zones for that order. This is Assault, Dash etc. the meanings of these are in the manual. Be aware that assault orders will cause the AI to move by the "Assault" move order which sucks sometimes. When the unit arrives at the setup zones, they will deploy as you set the options for floors of buildings (only if they are in a building obviously) and they will dismount if you tell them to. Active, cautious, ambush represent their fire discipline so you can tell them to hide, or ambush when they reach their zones. The Exit Before/Exit After are the timings for the scripting. For each order including setup, these timings will allow you to set the time at which the units will leave that setup zone and move on to the next order. The manual sort of explains what the two times mean, but I think the idea is that the units in that group start moving at the exit after time and try to complete their move before exit before time.