thewood

I thought in stuff like brush and foliage, it still was some kind of % LOS degradation.

While I agree with the thoughts on why these got removed, I would hesitate to call CM1 more feature rich than CMSF. CM1 was broader, had a better launch, and needed only a little tweaking to play out of the box, but CMSF brings a lot to the table. Unfortunately, much of its under the hood, or overshadowed by a few key bugs. I too think CM1 is a better overall game, but since 1.06, I can start to see what BFC was trying to do. There are a lot of thngs in CMSF that I would have killed to get into CM1. But with that said, I still don't understand the LOS tool removal as a design decision, especially as CMSF is still not completely "what you see is what you get.

Parsing it as to not call it a bug is all well and good, but I hope the urgency puts on the level as a bug. Making the editor as complete and easy to use as possible is probably needed to get CMSF on track with the masses. Its the little things about the editor that, to me, are holding it back. It is incredibly powerful, but somewhat cut off at the knees due to little things like the building issue, AI arty, unit selection, etc. May be small in isolation, but compiled, can lead to a little aggravation in developing scenarios.

I know I am one to not talk, but if you call someone an idiot, try spelling the entire sentence correctly or have proper word usage.

It may actually be a good feature for the AI in the editor.

What I have noticed (not scientific or statistically valid) is the area fire seems to all over the place. Should it be spread around 15 of 20 ft. or more concentrated. It is also high a lot.

Steve mentioned previously that sound contacts were part of the ?. The thing I miss as much as standalone sound contacts is the stepped intel from CM1. Now its either a ? or you know almost everything about a unit. With all the fancy intel and C2 stuff going on, I find it a little silly that I can differentiate HQ's and spotters from a thousand meters away.

Is it just certain situations that suppression isn't functioning, or is it overall. Kind of a killer if its overall.

The issue to me is in WEGO, you don't always have the luxury of giving a specific target command. I have seen ATGM also very slow to react. with arcs. Haven't observed if its suppression or not.

How can we prove you wrong? There have probably been more TOW and Javelins fired at vehicles in CMSF than in all the real wars put together. Also, you say it keeps happening. Thats what I am focused on. I haven't had more than a half dozen TOW failures, yet you say you see it keep happening. So how many times have you seen multiple TOW fialures?

So you don't think having two failures in a row is at all possible?

I have a boner...is that excited enough?

Which possibility are you talking about? PT's last suggestion or actually getting AI arty to work beyond a dump in the first few turns.

Those and other improvements have been discussed in several threads and I'd love to see them all implemented. But I don't get your logic that having more options is going to make more people use the editor. In my opinion the opposite might be true. The fact that there are fewer people doing missions as compared to CMx1 is simply because doing missions in CMx2 is more complex and time consuming. There are a few things that can be done to save peoples time while designing but not much. -- </font>

I think some of these pathfinding problems in urban areas are somehow caused by the terrain itself. Either it is too constricted to hold the mass of the squad so the AI sends it to a different path or the actual building/door/wall is not being shown accurately due to some issue in the editor. It always seems that you get one or two opennings like the one shown that seem normal, but they always have a consistent issue. A hypothesis only.

Seems like the general answer is yes. Most of the bad stuff seems to gone. I have played four of my test scenarios that are meant to highlight weaknesses and outright bugs in CMSF and they all played out almost perfectly. The only one that didn't was an urban battle, but I would call that one well over 90% there. The only issues were some minor pathing issues with a couple of infantry units and one area fire issue that Charles explained in another thread. To me, the game finally plays like I expect CM to play. I hope someone somewhere understands what a difference a minor change like the space bar menu makes in making a game feel different. Also, I am at a point that I have high confidence in the AI handling my forces in the 60 sec. WEGO action phase. Other than some tweaks, I am hoping some focus is put on beefing up the scenario editor with something other than time as a trigger, easier unit selection, some way of watching what the AI is doing in a test mode, and general tools for map building. The editor needs a little work to make it a tool that more people than the handful of designers who are now using it can use. Overall, good job on 1.06.

But at the same time, if I were seeing muzzle flashes coming from a window, I would probably fire on it in a battle. Now, I can't do that without repositioning. That means an enemy can fire at me with impunity due to an angine limitation. That seems a little gamey to me.

I think BJ has one, but it looks like a chimp. (80's TV show reference)

When you build scenarios, do you play test them in WEGO?

Hopefully one last question: If a squad gets stretched out over several action spots, I have had situations where the leading members come under fire, but don't return fire until the "center" of the squad catches up. That is leading to my questions about action spots of an enemy unit "seeing" an individual, but not the "center" of the unit, then firing on the individual. It seems in those situations, the individual is at a disadvantage. I assume from what you are saying, those situations are going away.

Are you sure or guessing? I thought the action spot's center was the start of the LOS check. I am not sure and a lot of the discussion seems to be about the action spot in the 8m x 8m box, not the odd men in the squad at the periphery of the box.

Let me see if I can clarify my question... If A and B action spot centers are both hidden from each other just barely behind the wall. The squads occupying A and B seperately are spread out over the 8m x 8m Action spot. Can the outlier soldiers whose graphics are beyond the end of the wall potentially see each other if all other parameters allow it. So in other words, are there times when action spot centers have no possibility of LOS, yet some of thier individual soldiers could be exposed with no possibility of response?

So if you move A and B back along the wall slightly so the action spots are behind the wall, will soldiers in A and B that are on the corners not spot each other even though they are a meter or two apart?

I thought I saw this in earlier versions, just not very often. It seems the frequency has increased.

No it was in CM1 right from the start. It needed tweaking because sometimes AFVs did or did not reverse based upon opinions, but I can play a vanilla CMBO today and a halftrack will reverse out of LOS of a serious threat. While CMSF has advanced a lot of areas, people seem to think CMBO came out in a pretty deplorable state. I only remember one or two major bugs in the first few patches, and they were patched pretty quickly. The rest of the patches were to add features that people thought were needed to make it more realistic or playable. I still remember the major debate over tanks tracking targets and forgetting them out when they went out of sight. The next patch led more "stickiness" of targets. I think that eventually led to covered arcs. While we have a few of those debates going on here, I still see a lot of the debates being around bugs. The debates in CMBO were a lot about tweaking a new concept. Not fixing pretty significant bugs six months into release. I think CMBO was granted a pretty big honeymoon for having to take a few shortcuts in abstraction because of this. CMSF was darned close to ubnplayable in 1.00 and 1.01. Because of that, the honeymoon was over pretty quickly. Maybe the next module will rekindle excitement and by then the game will be in a shape that will draw the community back in.