sebastian

Instead of having a game with all WW2-theatres, and only 3 linear missions per some theatre, without any operational level, i like the Close Combat approach much better. CC concentrated on certain operation in a limited area, allowing to have a operational level map, with management of supplies, air and artylery support. You were much more motivated to win a battle, when you knew how and why important it was for the whole operation.

I saw the term Real Time Tactical (RTT) somewhere here.

Then how about: single click : the individual soilder double click (on any squad member): the whole squad or even better, a switch to swap these assignments? I think many CC and CM veterans would appreciate such a option very much.

Thats a nice feature, but to select the soilders, I will sitll have to drag several rectangles holding shift, and still will forget the one guy, that was off screen. Me and many people here are not Wracraft players, that like to have to remember a dozen selection hotkeys. You schould at least consider to expand the leader functionallity, to all soilders: double click on a soilder selects the whole squad. I personally would prefer it the other way around: single click : the whole squad, doubble click : the individual soilder.

I would prefer birds on trees, which get flushed by nearby troops, disclosing their position...

I'm not against micro management. There were moments in CC, when I wanted to give individual orders to a certain soilder. But 95% of the time I want to give orders to the whole squad. Selecting individual soilders should not be the normal case. What is the point of having squads, if I have to keep them together manually? I can't even imagine playing CC or Firefight like this. Even clickfest-RTS are are going to squad selection (Battle of Middle Earth, Dawn of War). [ August 06, 2006, 01:14 PM: Message edited by: sebastian ]

Selecting individual soilders with an drag-rectangle is anoying. Especially when squads are close to each other, mixed, the soilders are scattered around, hidden behind cover, you always end up selecting some guys you don't want to select, and omitting some you wanted in. You spend most of the time selecting/deselecting units. In CC you move the mouse over a soilder, and his entire squad is hilited, giving you information about it. Clicking on any member selects the whole squad , which is what you want 95% of the time. Otherwise you would end up with splitted squads and single soilders left behind and forgotten. And when the leaders are dead, there are no squads anymore. Just soilders, you can select with a huge drag-rectangle and perform a human wave attack, like in Warcraft? Normally when a leader gets killed, the guy with the highest rank / expierence is the new leader.

Sounds like a micro-management-click-fest to me. Wouldn't it be smarter to make selecting/commanding squads the "default case" (single click on one of the squad members, like in Close Combat)? Having to find the commander, in order to move the entire squad doesn't sound comfortable. The case where you want to command every single soilder, is rather the "special case": Holding shift or ctrl schould give orders only to the soilder you actually clicked, and not the the entire squad.

Unfortunately wargames similar to ToW, like GICombat, Squad Assualt got it very wrong with the camera. Popular RTS-Clickfest-Games like Warcraft, Dawn of War or Codename Panzers have an extremely limited camera, not suitable for a realistic simualtion like ToW. The only RTS game, I can think of, that offers the freedom to zoom from ground level to a complete overview of the map, is Black & White. And they are using an orbiting camera, just like the one Google Earth is using. You can not only look up the great camera controlls from Google Earth, it has also a lot of WW2 military overlays, of battles. Great source for map designers.

Can you pick any map, and use it for a quick battle, or a multiplayer game, with any units of any nationality?

I would love to see at least something like the stategic map in Close Combat, and not just a linear bunch of missions. Especially if you have a limited amount of maps (like in CC and ToW), you can create a lot of playtime, if the player can loose a battle, be forced off the map, then attack the same map from a different direction. I remember CC-battles where I had to hold a map with a bunch of intantry, against tanks. I knew I could not win, I just wanted to survive and cause as much damage, as possible to the enemy. Because it all counted for the strategic situation. This was fun! The strategic level was very motivating. Games that mix tactical battles with a strategic level, are the most addictive ones.

I'm looking foward to the demo, to check this out. The best example for the orbiting camera I want, is Google Earth. You can get it for free here: http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html Download it, zoom in on a hilly area and you will get a very good impression, how great this camera would be for a strategy game. They use the sheme: mouse wheel pressed + movement : orbiting mouse wheel : zoom Since they have no interaction they "waste" the right button for zooming too, and use the left button for panning. But in a game you can do panning by mouse at edge of the screen or holding down the space-key, and have both mouse buttons free for other functions. [ July 30, 2006, 07:18 AM: Message edited by: sebastian ]

Moon, thanks for the answer. From what I've seen now, it looks like ToW has a very good GUI, very close to the CC-GUI i liked very much. My views about controlling the camera to get a fast overview are here: http://www.battlefront.com/discuss/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=63;t=000045 [ July 30, 2006, 01:51 AM: Message edited by: sebastian ]

Another cool feature would be centering the view on an unit, when you click on a text message, send by this unit. CC has a panel, which displays all your units, with icons, state and current activity. Clicking once in this panel, centers the view on the unit, while doubleclick selects it. This panel might not be needed in ToW, since it semms to display icons for all your units, even those off-screen, on the 3D-view. But it would be cool, if you could click this icons to center the view, and doubleclick to select.

I liked the feedback on the kill probablity, that CM and CC gave you. When you make an AT-Gun ambush in a real time game, and you have seconds to decide if to open fire, you cannot study the penetration tables of your gun, the armor tables of the target, estimate the impact angles... In CC your guys even said something like "We can't scratch that!", if they had no chance to damage a target with their weapon. In a real world battle visual contact is often reduced but not fully interrupted by dust and smoke. CC simulated this quite well. It is also important to show the player, what interuppts the LOS.

Thats good news, thanks! How will interrupted LOS be indicated? Will there be partlly interrupted LOS, like in CC where a single tree, smoke or dust only reduced the quality of the LOS, indicated by a darker green line? You still could do direct fire, but it was less effective. How will kill probabilty / firepower be displayed? In CC the cursor was color coded from black (waste of ammo) to green. In CM it was just text. I learned the term "Live Mouse Reporting" in the old CM1 forums from one of the BTS guys, when I asked for about it in CM. Must be like 7 years ago.

If all weapon ranges are scaled down proportionally, the realism is not affected much. It is allmost the same like scaling up the units visually, like CM does. Well, not really because the speed of the units would also have to be scaled down proportionally to the ranges, to have aquivalent contracted space. But I can live with that.

"Playability and presentation issues" means they cannot make it look good. It is sad that features important for gamplay are dropped, because it is more important that games look realistic, than that they play realistic. Especially the step to 3D graphics forced the gameplay to be simplified in many games, because it is more difficult to display some things in 3D: Compared to the 2D Close Combat, the 3D-successors (GIC, EYSA) already dropped multi storey buildings. Now ToW even drops entering buildings. This is what I like about CM and its abstracted graphics. Even if it looks stupid when the soilders fly up the invisible stairs, it is important for the gamplay.

So the games makes a difference between visual cover(concealment) and cover stopping enemy fire?

It looks like the soilders have health bars going down from 100% to 0%, which remainds me of the typical "RTS-realism". Is this really a sensible way to simulate the state of a soilder? Will we see 1%-health-zombies walking around, and shooting people? Close Combat had only 3 relevant health states: - healthy - lightly wounded : limited speed and effectivity - heavy wounded or dead : not fighting anymore The damage was not accumulative: one shot could kill a soilder, or just wound him slightly. I liked this system, and find it more realistic.

Some screens indicate, that there will be live mouse reporting (small panel displays information about the unit, the mouse cursor is on): http://www.worthplaying.com/press/221/Theatre_of_War_153.jpg Or is it just the unit targeted by the selected unit? Live mouse reporting was one of the coolest features in Close Combat. Howerver in this screen: http://www.worthplaying.com/press/221/Theatre_of_War_139.jpg the small panel only displays information about a single soilder, instead his whole squad. Compared to the CC-panels, ToW seems to waste much space, for less information. In CC you had no soilders faces, but small icons which indicated the state of the soilder with their color. You could easilly display inforamtion about a whole squad, in such a little panel, and the colors had a faster perception than numbers.

I hope they get it better than CM. What I miss in CM is direct mouse control, using all mouse features (like pressed mouse wheel). For example: right button + movement : orbiting mouse wheel : zoom mouse wheel pressed + movement : pan Or, if you need both mouse buttons for something else: mouse wheel pressed + movement : orbiting mouse wheel : zoom mouse at edge of the screen : pan All 5 degrees of freedom, of an orbiting camera, can be controlled in a fast, intuitive way using only the mouse wheel and mouse movement. For those who still have a one button mouse with no wheel, or simply like pushing arrow buttons at the bottom of the screen, like in CM, they can keep these buttons optionally.

Hallo Madmatt, Lt Bull, thanks for the replies. "Attach to center" sounds more like an orbiting camera to me. Orbiting camera means: The area that is in the center of the screen, stays in the center of the screen, while you rotate the camera around it. This is what makes most sense in a strategy game. To make an 3D game, you need 3D-graphics-software like 3DStudioMAX or Maya, which all use an obiting camera. So the programmers schould just go over to the graphics department, and play around to see what I mean. The camera usecase of 3D-graphics-software is very simmilar to a 3D-strategy game: You have an area of interest, you are "working on". You want to quickly examine this area, from different angles, without loosing it out of sight. With an orbiting camera you change the camera height by rotating vertically, beetween 0° (ground level) and 90° (top down view) und zooming (changing the distance to the area of interest). Happy to see, that I'm not the only one anoyed by this "first-person-cameras" in 3D-strategy-games. It's like playing an helicopter simulation. [ July 29, 2006, 12:52 AM: Message edited by: sebastian ]

After watching the gameplay videos, I'm a bit concerned about the camera controls. It looks like the camera is rotating in place (around its own axes). If you want to look at the battle from a different direction, and rotate the camera, you loose the battle out of sight and have to move (pan) the camera. I would prefer an orbiting camera, which is always pointed at a target point (point of interest), which is also the center of the rotation. Zooming (mouse wheel) changes the camera distance to the target point, while panning moves the target point (keeping its constant height of some meters above ground) and the camera, so their relative position is preserved. rotation (right mouse): zooming (mouse wheel) : [ July 28, 2006, 03:03 PM: Message edited by: sebastian ]

we asked for that allready just after CMBO. my idea was to indicate the age of a spotted icon by its transparency. the older the spotting is, the more transparent it schould become and fade out completely after a certain time. most important: the icon schould show more information than now (big icon: vehicle, small icon: infatry). instead of a national insignia it schould show the units type. so you dont have to click on each icon to check what it was. however: exceptions will be needed. loosing and gaining contact to a unit several times within a short time schould not produce dozens identical icons on a the same place