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Macisle

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Everything posted by Macisle

  1. That's true. One of the big issues with first-person sans bots is achieving proper troop density. With PS, you're looking at basically one platoon of infantry facing off against one enemy platoon, with a few vehicles in support on each side. Coming from CM, that's a tiny force, with the AFVs not even able to achieve a true platoon formation, due to spawn limits. IMO, the biggest realism killers for tactical FPS play revolve around morale and speed of play. In order to make first-person fun, you have to keep folks in the action. However, the available tools of things like suppression effects and ticket limits cannot properly model the degradation of morale. What this does is effectively nerf otherwise very-accurately modeled equipment like MGs. For example, in CM, if a player stumbles on an MG hardpoint and a couple of his squads get mauled, the remaining squad members will have suffered a loss of morale, the global morale of his force could be effected, and he has permanently lost assets -- just like in real life. However, in a tactical FPS like PS/HLL, as long as tickets aren't very low, the attacking players can quickly respawn and try again with no effective loss in morale. Therefore, defenses/equipment that would stop the enemy cold in real life or CM are routinely quickly overrun. The required speed of play to make FPS fun also adds a major handicap to using real world team tactics. In CM, we split our squads, have a base of fire and maneuver teams and the pixeltruppen sort out all the required team chatter and internal commands amongst themselves. In a tactical FPS, things are generally moving too fast, the comms workload is too much, or there is a lack of willingness to comply with orders, making a real-world level of coordination impossible. I've read game clan threads where PS veterans were throwing cold water on gungho newbies' expectations for trying to use detailed real world tactics. "We've tried. They don't work. Keep it very general." Ultimately, tactical FPS play is more flavor than substance. Sure, there are moments of magic and the VR buzz can be awesome. But, I think by nature they can't come close to the level of realism that a well-made third person experience like CM can. That's why CM is my steak and potatoes, while PS/RO/DH are occasional milkshakes.
  2. I'm very much hoping that the SDK for PS happens and opens up sandbox functionality for it. At this point, it kinda' looks like that's really needed to give it more momentum. I've so far passed on HLL and probably won't pick it up. Every time Arma 3 goes on sale, I nearly buy it, but just don't want to risk the lost time if I get into it. I spent a lot of time in the Arma 2 Editor for a stretch and know how lost in that world you can get. I really like PS, but the inherent realism limitations of first-person play mean that it doesn't take me long to want to return to CM and spend my very limited game time on the much more realistic battlefield I find there. Here's hoping that one of the effects of CM's entry onto Steam is to make enhancing the graphics and animations more of a priority.
  3. FWIW, it was interesting watching the progress of two seemingly-similar games on Steam over the last year: Post Scriptum and Hell Let Loose. Both are tactical FPS set in WWII. The general view is that PS is more realistic and hardcore (but not that much), while HLL is more casual and "accessible." There are a lot of people who play both. To make a long story short, the PS community is significantly smaller, but much better at team communication, with very few problems related to things like intentional team-killing. I have PS and never saw a first-hand incident of it. I think in 6 months, I only heard about two. OTOH, a constant complaint from HLL players is lack of team comms and intentional team-killing seems to be such a problem that the developers have spent resources attempting to find solutions, from what I understand. I post the above because I think it highlights a situation where pushing the realism slider only a marginal amount to the hardcore side has the dual effect of making the gameplay significantly better for those looking for realism, while shrinking the community and making the game obviously more niche. Over recent months, the HLL team has been going great guns on community interaction and frequent updates, while the PS team has been fairly quiet and had some people leave. So, that has obviously impacted things as well. After initial release, HLL tended to have roughly twice as many players online as PS. After the most recent DLC and free weekend, PS was briefly beating HLL. However, since then, HLL seems to have broken out completely. PS stopped showing its numbers when HLL started consistently having 5X the players online. So, to sum up, the above "case study" highlights how realism level impacts the niche aspect, community size and character of a game. It also highlights the importance of developer interaction with the community, the implementation of a clear roadmap and offering an update schedule to make the community feel that devs are on it. Worth considering as BF moves forward with CM on Steam.
  4. I've caught a few vids by YouTubers popular for military strategy and FPS content showcasing the SF2 Steam release. They've all been quite positive. One guy with a strong presence in the Arma community went out of his way to comment that the AI in CM absolutely wipes the floor with the AI in Arma. So far, so good. Congrats BF and Slitherine! -Looking very forward to the WWII titles getting the sunshine.
  5. Speaking of the SP experience, the QB system is a vital piece of that. I know I spend most of my CM gaming time there. Well, I recently noticed that terrain triggers don't seem to function in the QB environment. If that is the case, I would hope BF sets making them work as a top priority. I'd really, really like to have that functionality for the QB maps I will be making from my urban map for CMRT. One of the big goals for my map is giving players a sandbox where they can use the full roster of available arty for opening barrages without having to worry about it being overpowered. Not having the ability to have AI troops hide and be triggered to unhide can be the difference between an AI defense taking light/medium casualties, but still retaining sharp teeth and a small, toothless group of shell-shocked remnants wandering in the streets and alleys post barrage.
  6. That's not my experience. I've done a lot of testing with arty strikes on my urban map. The safest place to be during arty is hidden on the bottom floor. And, the safest, safest place to be is on the bottom floor of a tall building with connected sections surrounding yours so you have a shield of solid walls between you and any landing shells. Of course, if the occupied section collapses, your team is dead. Also, I haven't tested with the new patches, but as of current CMRT, arty very often drives AI troops down to the ground level anyway. So, the designer is back to needing a way to get the AI back up to the upper levels without a clusterfrack of AI keystone coppers caused by having too few groups. A human can do this easily. Without having enough groups, the AI can't. This means that, as things stand, the human player simply needs to hit an urban area with arty to permanently flush the AI from higher building positions for the duration of a scenario. That puts the AI at a huge disadvantage when it doesn't have to be and kinda kills the point of having all those tall buildings... Exactly. Steve has said that the vast majority of CM is played in SP mode. So, most players are playing against the AI most of the time. Therefore, it is self-evident that maximizing the SP experience should be a top priority. Having a better, more human-like AI would absolutely enhance the SP experience. However, Steve has also said that AI programming is difficult and quickly produces diminishing returns. So, why not just chuck the "smarter AI" pipe dream and do what can be done now with the tools available now and git 'er done? Just need more groups (32 is just a minimum. Unlimited would be nice ). Of course, the SP experience would also be enhanced by many other things like a better AI arty plan system, better AI area fire (optional fire rates), triggered reinforcements, point-neutral exits, objective unlocks and on and on. And, adding tools for faster map production would yield more maps --which would be great. However, as pointed out, you're still fighting the same AI. The AI is at the core of the experience. At this point, nothing would make the AI more human-like than designers being able to apply their creativity fully by not having to worry about conserving group slots. And, unless there is some code issue making it prohibitive, adding the functionality should be straightforward and thus low-cost. Group limit unchained = better AI on the cheap = better SP experience = biggest boost to CM = big happy .
  7. Here's another example, very relevant to Fire and Rubble, where not having to worry about conserving group slots allows the designer to make the current AI functionality much more human-like and effective with minimal testing: The situation: A platoon-sized element of AI troops is defending an area of multi-story buildings with some space separations between them (street, etc.). The higher floors offer very good defensive positions. Enemy artillery and/or HE direct prep is expected. A human player would likely stay hidden on the bottom floors during enemy prep and use a few scouts to know when to occupy the higher floors after the enemy begins his actual advance. Now, what to do with the AI? Well, of course you can hide the troops on the bottom floors during setup and trigger them when the enemy advances. But what happens if you only have one group slot available? Well, if their setup uses more than one building, they are going to crisscross between buildings, waste time, give away intel and likely get shot to pieces. In other words, an immersion-blowing chitshow. Now, what if you had, say, a group slot for each squad and team? Well, not only could you spread them out to cover lots more buildings and make them unhide and go up the stairs when triggered, but you could also periodically have them move up or down in the same building (tip: to make this work, the painted tile needs to change between orders. Just select an adjacent tile in the same building). So, in addition to the other benefits, you can make the AI more human-like by having AI units return to levels they've displaced from and/or generally sneak around and keep the human player guessing. All that with no additional AI functionality needed from BF and very easy to set up in the editor. I just tested it in CMFB with six groups and it worked like a charm. Well, except for one group of two teams that I put in different buildings as a test. They crossed the street and got shot up (as did the whole platoon when I tested with one group). All the others did exactly what I wanted them to inside their own buildings. And it took a whopping 10-15 minutes to put together. Compare that with hours of testing trying to make something similar work with less groups. Ugh. More groups = better AI = happier designers = faster, more productive designers = better CM.
  8. Agree and I'm fine with just having more slots with the current system. IMO, they're really not hard to keep track of once you get a feel for things. I also had a Photoshop tool for awhile, but ended up going back to paper and pencil. The built-in randomness of the AI is exactly what you want in some situations and exactly what you don't want in others. Having more groups allows the designer a good chance to avoid the situations where randomness is unnatural and/or suicidal with a minimized workload. Another big help would be in facilitating things like triggered local counterattacks and keeping ambush groups shielded from area fire/arty until they are triggered to take their intended positions. FO use is another big one. Having enough group slots to be able to use a number of single-team groups would be huge. (On my urban map, I'm finding the AI much less aggressive with arty than usual. It seems to only reliably call it when it has a TRP. So, having enough group slots to control individual FO teams to keep them in good positions with views to TRPs would solve the problem). Basically, as you say, there is quite a lot that can be done with current tools. The problem is, there aren't enough group slots available to make full use of the existing tools. There's a whole heap of cool stuff that could be done with what we have now if we didn't have to worry about running out of group slots. Definitely. I'm not making any digs against BF here. It's just the nature of the beast. Steve has said on the forums that AI programming is one of the areas you readily hit diminishing returns. So, when I say I'm not expecting a smarter AI, it's not said with any piss and vinegar -- just matter of fact. Like I said above, I'm actually fine with the current AI if you give me more groups to avoid its rough edges and facilitate my devilish schemes. Having said that, what I'd really like to see is the current system buffed up with 32+ groups and a host of things like terrain objective unlocks, triggered reinforcement groups, point-neutral exits, more reinforcement groups, all-arty-asset AI area fire, and...
  9. Yup. This. It's been said many times by many people for many years. The AI isn't going to get smarter with CMx2 and I doubt much smarter with CMx3. The only way to mitigate that is for scenario designers to have more groups. That actually makes the workload less, not more. Less groups = more time spent with workarounds and testing, testing, testing. More groups = less time as the designer can get something organized, test a bit and move on. 32+ Groups is still at the top of my desired feature list by a country mile.
  10. Same problem on PC, running Firefox under W10.
  11. I do have CM:BS, but only spent a few months with it after release. Modern is just not my thing. I don't have any of the other modern titles. I've been pondering the conversion issue. I'm at, like 2+ years and counting of time IOUs to the wife and am kinda' sweating spending more time on this, TBH. At this point, I'm thinking that, perhaps, if BF or community members with the skill can do the basic conversion, then I could clean it up and provide the adapted clean master to the CM:BS community. I think that would be the limit of what I have time for. I'd imagine this map would be perfect for military sim use. Would be way cool to see video of it being used that way!
  12. Yeah, the worst is when you're trying to clear a wall out and overclick. I eventually got a rhythm down to where I start fast and slow down at the right time. Thank goodness THAT work is done. It's a bit hard to see from the picture I posted, but the map has a fair amount of elevation change. It's generally mild on the S/SE side of the river, but once you get across the river and go NW, it gets heavier. I actually had to flatten things out a bit from real life because the RL elevation changes are too extreme for the current CM tile system. It doesn't really matter because the tactical situation is primarily from the building environment. The elevations are mostly flavor, I'd say. However, I've done my best to keep them as close to reality as possible, while still keeping the sprawling connected building concept as first priority. There are some interesting areas near the N edge of the map that resulted from dealing with the elevation issues. I'm keeping those under my hat for now, but players who like to skate the map edge are in for something of a wild ride there. The master could generate quite a few QB maps. We'll see how many I decide to do. I'm constantly getting new ideas, but have to limit myself to get things done. That's particularly true of scenario ideas. I keep having to pass on them to get the core work done. I might do one that's been in my brain almost since the beginning, but I can't allow myself to spend the time for any more. However, a good supply of QB maps will mean that the community is getting plenty of play from the master over the long term.
  13. I've been hard at work on the project in recent weeks. I finished updating building internals across the whole master and am now working my way through final elevation polishing. That's a slow slog because it can take a lot of time, trial and error to get the sprawling connected building pieces in line for both a flush series of connected roof pieces and doors at the right level on the ground. Sometimes it's impossible to get fully clean. However, the ones I can't get perfect aren't too far off and are fully functional as far as infantry use goes. Most players won't even notice and slightly sunken doors appear on many stock maps. So, not a big deal, I think. I'm also polishing some of the ground textures as I go to get a more natural mix across near tiles. My eye has improved as the project has gone along and certain areas stand out now as needing more of that work. I'll largely be waiting to add flavor objects until I see what new FOs are provided in CMFR. However, I'm putting some in as I go when the fancy takes me. I've also done some potential QB slice testing and am pretty pleased with those. Overall, the AI is setting up a defense that will provide a reasonable challenge for the player. I've just been doing broad areas of coverage with six AI groups. As per usual SP QB CM, the AI tends to leave undefended zones that a human would never do, but I've been impressed with the overall traction from the AI. One standout problem is ATG placement. The QB AI almost always puts its guns inside the internal areas of building blocks, rendering them pretty useless. It sometimes does the same things with its tanks. So, going forward, I'll be continuing with the elevation polishing while waiting for CMFR. Then, once I have that, I'll be finalizing FO placement, updating the map with anything new, creating a custom texture pack (not going overboard here -- as little as possible) and getting the campaign, scenario and QB work done. Oh, yeah -- and making sure the map is ready to go for winter fighting! So, still a ton of work to do, but very much a light in the tunnel and I'm very pleased overall with the combat on the map. It's performing better than I expected going into the project and the problems are all common to any CM map. Over-n'out!
  14. +1 I'm holding off on reading the German side until the Soviet side catches up.
  15. Nice! Lookin' very forward to playing around with one of those babies.
  16. Yaaah! C'mon Sherman! It's a partial...there's still hope... Gotta' log for now, but fingers crossed for the brave defenders while I'm away.
  17. Popcorn! But, oh boy, those Soviet ATGs can be slow to spot and fire...
  18. Oh, I totally understand on the camera angles, time, and work. I haven't done a video in ages, but IIRC, last time I did one, I clocked the production time. To really follow the action closely and add voiceover, it came out to roughly an hour of work per minute of video.
  19. Bummer, but yeah -- ATGs are pretty specialty-use. They need to have an optimized situation to spot and land the first shot. Also, in current CM, they can be at an unrealistic additional disadvantage in terms of spotting and reaction time in some situations versus AFVs. That, and it seems like they tend to putz around loading a round when they spot something, while tanks seem to always have a round ready. As things stand, the stock map design concept along with a ruined city setting is pretty much a worst-case environment for ATGs in current CM. AFVs are at a big, unnatural advantage in that environment. Historically, a ruined urban environment was a great place to hide an ATG for tank ambushes. In the pics posted, I'm not seeing many places to achieve something that feels like it has a reasonable chance of that historical application. I'd say the Soviet player's best bet -- assuming the abundance of independent buildings, rubble mounds and the resulting pathfinding actually allow for it, is to have close assault teams stationed for ambush at every potential AFV entry point, assuming they can put there without falling under enemy LOS.
  20. Wait...scratch that.. Ta'fuh-... NOooooo...! $#%&!!! Well, at least a late-arriving sniper team was able to bag the two slowest members of the MG team. And, the alley is mine, now.
  21. As the Soviets probe forward to their objectives, fighting across the city has been stop and start. Extended quiet periods of careful scouting revealing nothing but empty buildings, followed by sudden contact and short, intense firefights. The enemy seems to be consistently grouping in platoon-sized elements at key hard points. The Russians have found themselves taking the bull by the horns in yet another such firefight. Having assumed the enemy was fairly depleted, the commander ordered a full-company assault with incomplete scouting. The first minute was initially a pretty even firefight, small arms broadside against small arms broadside across the street. However, the Germans looked to be more willing to hold their ground. Thankfully, the situation was saved by support fire from a heavy AG platoon, light and medium tanks. Having thrown the Germans back from the main street with apparent heavy losses, the Soviets once again rush forward...only to discover the Germans have taken effective positions in the alleys and courtyard areas behind -- ones that the tanks cannot yet access. A Soviet platoon commander peaks his head out a back alley door and it is immediately severed by a machine gun burst. Having identified the enemy MG location in the alley, one of the dead commander's squads attempts a point blank rush from the adjacent building. However, the German team is ready for them and two men are cut down as they enter. The Soviet team quickly withdraws back to the main street, regroups, and then attempts another push into a different part of the same building. They spot the MG team! However, the Germans again react faster than the now rattled Soviets. A burst of MG fire cuts down the lead Russian. With their platoon commander dead and the company commander briefly out of contact, that is enough for the Soviet team. Hands of surrender go up. One man, two, three... But not four! Hardoutovich, isn't going to let the platoon commander's sacrifice be in vain. As his comrades drop their weapons, he raises his and empties his magazine right into the enemy. A German drops to the ground, lifeless, while the others hug the ground for cover. The MG team leader shouts, "Displace!" and jumps up to make his move. As the minute draws to a close, it looks like Hardoutovich has turned the tide and won the alley. The company commander, now back in contact, is well-pleased.
  22. A perfect close assault from the alley behind. Revenge for a friendly tank that tried...and failed.
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