hoolaman

Actually, I think this is repeatable, try to load any save during "processing" and you should see it. At least I do.

mmm I don't think the autosave in my game dir is the same one. Regardless they're 17mb and you'd have to let me know how I could send that to you.

Also, a page of going on about bridges and how awesome they are going to be, but do we get a picture of a bridge? No we do not. Disgusting really.

I've yet to see the AI accept any offers trade/peace alliance with me. Is it possible? Also, earlier peace/trade offers stay in your inbox and can be accepted at any time! If the AI requests peace five times at the start of the game and then later has the upper hand you can accept each peace offer in your inbox five times at a time that suits you.

Starting with two or three cities would certainly allow a quicker start. After all, in every game you will very likely capture the three closest cities and garrison them with an infantry unit. I'm beginning to think though that it is the demo map that is giving a bit of a false impression of the speed of the game. Bigger continents and land based conflict could allow bigger empires to grow and quicker. Putting 7 AI players also allows you to get into combat pretty quick!

failure.txt When loading an autosave game during a turn the game died.

I spent quite a bit of time on HOI1 but have never been tempted back to the sequels that looked more like a patched version of the same game. By far the biggest dissappointment of the original was sea combat, making playing the US or Japan really tedious. The province system works really well for land battles but not for sea battles. It's a shame since the system where a capital ship is one unit but anything smaller is a flotilla seems like it had huge potential. There were also bizarre things like being unable to transport air units as cargo by sea, unless you put them on a carrier, where you had to put a whole air fleet on the ship (how many hundred of aircraft does that represent?). There were also a bunch of crazy things with supply, where you would find garrisons starve to death and disband when they are in established colonial posessions. This made playing the British Empire really tedious. So it came down being to a European land war sim anyway. The concept is right up my alley but it just did not work.

Yes I had that bug too.

Yes I can confirm this, if you have two units on a ship that are grouped, then try to put the ship in the group, the game crashes to desktop.

One thing I have found a bit disappointing is that this game can be ponderously slow to get started. This is a game of naval combat, and building a ship for twenty turns where each turn is approaching 30 seconds of real world time time, means that it can be almost an hour before you are even really starting to see serious contact with the enemy. It is hard to get away from feeling like you are stuck in a stalemate when you build a ship and it gets sunk, then you are back to waiting for the next one. To amass a serious invasion force is a very slow process. I don't know what the answer is, but maybe a double time "quick game" option might be possible like civilisation 4 has. Halve the resources to build or something.

Suggestions: A bit of feedback about whether upgrades are working and how long they have to go. They may take 4 turns so it would be nice to see how many turns left and if it is even working. Maybe a little upgrade arrow on the unit icon. Results of combat seem a complete mystery. A bit of detail on the results would make it a bit more satisfying. As it is it is hard to even see how many hit points a unit has, or whether combat is marginal or a complete slaughter. This makes it hard to work out what the best units and the best strategy is. The unit analysis thing is very hard for me to understand.

1. If your technology advances to say level 3 infantry, if any of your infantry remain at level one, you cannot upgrade them throughlevel 2 to get to level 3. They are stuck at level 1 forever. 2. Warships not upgrading? I had a dreadnought sitting there for ages and not changing to battleship, despite having money and steel. There seems to be no indication that it shouldn't be upgrading. 3. I find that often units will not engage other units during movement in a turn, despite the "attack all" orders. It is pretty frustrating to send out a ship to patrol for an expected attack only to see your warship sail right past the invasion fleet. 4. Similar to #3, is there a way to make units capture unclaimed resources if they walk nearby them? Right now they walk past them and you have to go back.

My #1 top UI issue is not being able to cancel individual waypoints. Please please put in a backspace (in combat mission terms) option where you can delete the last waypoint only. If a unit is moving and you add an extra waypoint in the wrong place, you have to cancel even the orders that are in progress. ditto if you plot a complex track and the last waypoint sucks, you have to delete the whole lot. #2 The mouse scroll wheel "button" panning and zooming doesn't seem to be documented anywhere, and although it is pretty easy to get the hang of, it isn't very intuitive. #3 Also how about some HOTKEYS!! Many of us will be used to a civilisation style hotkey system, but at the very least I'd like to see hotkeys for: Clear orders Repeat Orders Submit turn In summary: Add to the user manual the basics of scrolling Add a zoom in option. Maybe have three or four zoom levels in total. Make the scroll wheel up/down control the zoom in/out as is an established standard control scheme. Add an option to delete the last waypoint. Add hotkeys. Add an option to reverse the map pan to be a "grab" option instead of a "scroll window" option. Basically invert the pan control.

Demo lobby?

Face command is really critical for how troops position themselves. Even more so than the UI really tells you. A good way to find out is to go to the editor and move some troops so they snap to their setup position. This will show you how they line up around ridges, walls and trees and help you tweak your "face commands" to get a good position. No system so complex will ever be perfect, but this approach helped me get the best out of it.

It has been discussed in beta forum but I'm pretty sure it hasn't been explicitly (graphically) modelled. The SMAW should have an accuracy advantage modelled due in part to the spotting round feature, but since you can only compare apples to oranges who knows how much effect it has.

Speaking of signatures Pandur, have you ever been tempted to fix that mess of code in yours?

Don't forget spotting is by "action spot" which is 8x8m or smaller around walls and buildings, or one per building. You can see where the action spots are by the highlights when you move a squad. If the middle of an action spot is behind the crest it will have limited LOS over the crest for prone men. Imagine a stick with six notches on it stuck in the middle of every square. If you can trace a line from notch to notch you have LOS. Forget about heads and torsos. All the game sees is: is everyone in the team prone? Is anyone in the team kneeling? Is anyone in the team standing? I think there are some improvements that could be made, like being more fuzzy with spotting and less black and white, but it works pretty well I think. Partially identified units feature would add another layer of coolness to the mix too.

100% prone squads will often get blocked LOS on marginal ground like ridges or low walls due to the way the spotting system works. Having them default to kneeling DOES make them slightly more exposed in game terms, but the benefit is all troops are always able to get LOS and fire their weapons. They will only do the kneel thing if they are behind a fairly sharp ridge that gives them some cover. I've come around to the view that this is the best option, with a bit of tweaking using hide and unhide, you can choose maximum cover (and sometimes have LOS blocked) or choose maximum situational awareness (and expose yourself more). Its the same deal behind low walls, if you want your guys to remain out of sight you can guarantee that with hide and guarantee they will jump up to spot when unhidden.

"The husband pays for the wife's purchases". Hmm. The future is now.

There is no spotting outside of LOS, so no pure sound spotting like in CM1, but I believe noise is factored into the odds of spotting something as long as it IS in LOS.

I'd just like to chime in and say that I'm really looking forward to this game in a way that I almost never do with games this days. Good luck with development and hope to see it soon.

CMSF is 1:1 graphically but still represents teams as the smallest unit and aims at company + size battles. From what I understand ToW is smaller scale than that and seems to closer to games like Company of Heroes than it is to CM.

But explosions in movies are not high explosive anyway. If all real bombs were just drums of petrol and a little pot of black powder, the rock would be ok too.

That clip seems to show the tube being pulled forward by the rocket, which is not illogical when you think about it. Theoretically a tube launched rocket will not have backward recoil like a gun, all the gases go out the back. Most RPG's don't have a sight that goes up to the eye anyway. Sounds very unlikely to happen often enough to be a "thing".