Thorsten

I don't know to what level of detail units or individual soldiers are modeled in CC3. I know that it does model individual soldiers, though. The largest Russian unit has 10 soldiers, so 14 of those teams, plus a 5 man command unit, makes a max of 145 soldiers. The largest German unit has 7 soldiers, so on their side, the max is about 103. Thus the maximum is 248 soldiers in a single battle. With this many, my P200MMX slows to a crawl. Now from visual indications, it doesn't seem like these soldiers are confined to 2m x 2m boxes, but visual indications do not always indicate what is in the code underneath. I am a programmer, just not a very good one. I thought it would be a fun idea to have something that was half way in between CM and Hidden & Dangerous, especially since the most common criticism I've heard of CM is the quality of the graphics, especially the soldiers. That and it's a whole lot more fun to see a squad of 10 men charging a position, than a symbolic 3 man representation. Thorsten

Ack... miscredit. I got the information from Mick(xe5), not Cappy-R. Perhaps when you folks are all done coding CM, and adding all the things in that you want to after the initial release, you could code an experimental version of CM afterwards. Just have a small (100m x 100m, for example) area, and then see how detailed you can get. Individual soldiers instead of squads, smaller tiles, more unusual terrain and buildings. Then just put in a squad or two on each side and see what happens when they fight it out. Perhaps even release it as shareware to get other peoples' input. Just a thought. Thorsten

"Close Combat, for example, has a tile structure under its maps too. We have the understanding that their tiles are 6m x 6m. Seeing as their maps are at least less than 1/2 our max size (someone know what CC3's max map size is??)" The maximum map size in CC3 is 576m x 408m. Terrain elements are 2m x 2m. Megatiles are 8m x 8m, but they have nothing to do with calculations, and are merely used for troop deployment, plotting artillery barrages, etc. Just so you know, I got this info from Cappy-R. I'm not much of a mapping expert myself. Thorsten

Thanks for the prompt response, Steve, and as well for you, Lokesa. "Thanks for the clarification Thorsten. We have no plans to make an über campaign. We don't see it as being practical because of the time required for each battle. Unlike CC the average battle is not measured in minutes of play, but rather hours. This makes it fairly impractical to play out the whole of Martket Garden for example (even if it is just Arnhem or XXX Corps). There are some very LONG threads on this from a couple months ago." Sorry I missed out on those threads. You are right, it would take a very very long time if only two players were involved. *hint hint* Since the game is broken up into 60 second turns, and is capable of PBEM, a massively multiplayer campaign is quite feasible. "But if someone wants to attempt to make some sort of utility we will take it on a case by case basis in terms of support. If we think it is worth providing information to help the coder we *might* do it. All depends" I may be up for that challenge. I'm not much of a programmer, but I can probably round up a group of people who would be interested. Still, I'll have to wait for the game to actually come out before I can make any sort of commitments like that. Thorsten

I was actually talking more about add-ons like an operational-level layer, than patches to fix/change data. Do you have any plans or ideas for future releases to have an operational level so that entire battles can be re-created? Another, slightly related question is will there ever be the capability to have amphibious landings? Thorsten

Sounds like a familiar idea. TinTin, Cappy-R, and I had been working on a strategic layer system to overlay CC3. Now that CC4 is coming out, I don't know if we'll bother trying to complete it. It would be a nice idea for CM, particularly if you could piece together a battle like Operation Market Garden. That would be a blast to play, especially if it could be made massively multiplayer, i.e. two or more people playing each side. I decoded the saved-game files of CC3, which was a lot of work. Hopefully, the CM design will be a bit friendlier towards this sort of user-made add-on. Thorsten

Then again, there are certain advantages to a public, or semi-public beta. For example, when Close Combat III was released there were a number of typos and misspellings in the names of various German units and a lot of data on vehicles and weapons were off. A number of posters on the cc2.gamestats.com site poured through the various data files of the game with a fine toothed comb to sort these things out. It may be possible to find a good group of alpha and beta testers who are as devoted as these guys, but Atomic didn't, and a lot of other game makers don't. Just wanted to toss that idea out there. I really like what I see of CM so far. Of course it has its flaws, but what game doesn't? I like what the designers are trying to do, and I think they've done a good job of it. Of course, I also have tons of ideas for their follow up version, too. Thorsten