Jump to content

bbaker

Members
  • Posts

    79
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by bbaker

  1. The ability to somehow visualize the openings in Bocage, etc. It is really frustrating to tell a unit to move to the other side of a hedge/bocage and then watch them advance 50m or more into the line of fire, just to go around the edge and then head back to where you put the way point.

    Or, if a long move is required do to impassable terrain, then the unit should always seek to take the path that is safest (meaning back the way you came and around).

    best would be that when you plot a course like this, the interface should show you the anticipated path of the unit and then you can take steps to avoid this problem.

    This seems like it might be susceptible to modding--the gaps could be highlighted, for instance. Or is that not possible?

  2. The first mission of the Panzer Marsch campaign is a good tutorial for scouting at night, and the third is shaping up to be a good lesson in scouting at dawn. You might want to try those. So far, I've learned that if you let a team sit in place for a few turns, they're likely to see many things they missed at first. Spotting takes time. Seems like very different behavior than I remember from CMx1.

  3. No info in the unit panel, if a unit is hidden, or if a tank is buttoned or unbottened.

    +1 vote for this in the next UI iteration.

    Another pain in the ass for me are the missing C2-lines: it forces the player either to click like crazy on every unit to check, if the units are in C2-range or to bunch them up unnecessarily, or not to click like crazy and accept that they could be out of range. Shouldn't graphics be there, to support the gamer?

    This would be nice. I can get by without it, but it would help, particularly when a scenario assigns units to a platoon commander that the player may not expect (e.g., a truck) or when units are widely dispersed (say, a mortar left with the co. commander). As it is now, if you double click on the platoon HQ to move the squads, without the graphical representation of command lines it's easy to forget that across the map there are other units you may not want to move.

    This would be doubly helpful if BF implements movable waypoints in the future. As soon as that's in, moving platoons by selecting the leader, issuing the mass move, then fine tuning by clicking and dragging waypoints is going to be a (at least for me) preferred way of moving platoons.

    Way to much info about foreign units.

    This is the biggest one to me... or at least, I think it is. I think he means that when you click on an opposing unit, you can see exactly what it is, e.g., "First Squad B Team" or "Mortar Ammo Bearer." With all the attention paid to FOW, especially on Iron, this seems like an odd feature. Has BF said anything about changing this down the road?

  4. Without live cows, how can we:

    1) Enjoy the scenario "Save the town from a stampede!" or the campaign "Save the town from some stampedes!"

    2) Herd cattle from one side of a field to the other as MOBILE cover? Honestly, if the AI is going to rush a dismounted tank driver from the burning wreck of his Sherman at one end of a field straight across 200 yards of open ground at my MG-42, there's no way the gamey basterd is going to make it if he can't rely on the lee of a friendly cow or twenty. Obviously, his tacAI has come to the reasonable conclusion that if he's in a field, there must be cows. Please "fix or do somefink."

  5. Just wanted to add one more voice of thanks, Field Marshall. I've had a blast with the first two missions. Very involving and very immersive, to the point that when I suffered a few WIA in the second mission, I made sure to leave teams in place until they had finished buddy aid or to send a team to an isolated casualty--I didn't want any KIA! The pixeltruppen have never had it so good.

  6. <Spoilers, obviously...>

    About the wire blocking the near side of the bridge: twice I've had engineers use a demo charge to "blast" a hole through it, just as I would bocage, or the wall of a house. Each time, a significant portion of the engineer squad is killed by the explosion. Is this a [edited for the all-important "y":] boob[y]-trapped bit of wire (can you do that in the game? maybe by placing a mine under it...?), or does this happen any time you try to blast wire with an engineer squad? What gives?

  7. Hi there,

    I see what you are saying, and yes - when the ground is perfectly flat its easy to scroll down and use the camera to look around. However if any point is on a slope, without a means of tilting the camera to see if the far point can actually be seen - finding LOS can be really difficult.

    No, he means make a movement waypoint, then right-click to get out of the setting movement commands mode, then left click *on the waypoint* to select the waypoint. It will turn from a sphere into a pyramid. You can then use the target command to check LOS from the waypoint.

    (The same way, you can also attach orders to a waypoint, like hide or cover arc, etc.)

  8. Interesting idea. It's a little ironic that people want to play real-time but without "real time" in terms of continuously flowing time and immediate response to player input. But I DO see where this would be helpful for players and make it possible to handle larger numbers of troops and give higher levels of coordination.

    However, it could be troublesome in practice.

    Imagine you are planning a movement where a large number of units will emerge from hiding. You hit the "Pause Orders" button and issue orders to ~ half of the units. Suddenly, you are confronted with an emergency on another portion of the map. Now what?

    1.) You start issuing orders to react to the emergency but nothing happens! "Pause Orders" is in effect. Which leads to...

    2.) You toggle the "Pause Orders" in order to react to the new threat, but now your coordinated action is screwed up. Only half of the units begin reacting to their orders while the other half stay hidden.

    So it could be tricky in practice. Would you want a way to quickly cancel any paused commands? Would you want a way to issue paused commands to only a specified subset of units?

    Also, with the action continuing, there could be some strange results as units move or change state between when the orders are issued and when they start reacting.

    I think you solve this not by using a universal "hold" that affects all troops, but by adding new functionality to the current "pause" command, "indefinite pause until triggered" --- you issue this order to an individual unit first, then plot its actions. It remains paused and does not execute the orders until the trigger is given.

    You do this for whichever group of units you want. All of these remain paused until you hit the trigger command. Meanwhile, troops not given the indefinite pause behave/can be controlled normally.

    This way, if you're interrupted by something on the other side of the map, you can go deal with that and your half-formed attack plans are still on hold while you deal with the crisis.

  9. 1. How do I place units? The top of the screen tells me to place units, but the manual doesn't tell / show me how to do that.

    2. The quick keys list says I can delete the last waypoint using the backspace key. My iMac's keyboard has no backspace key. It does have two delete keys, the first two rows above the return key, the other (with a small x in an arrow pointing to the right) two rows under the f13 key. Neither deletes a waypoint.

    3. How do you place a waypoint where you want it? (I'm using the demo, not the full game.) The cursor seems to point to a location on the map, but the waypoint always goes someplace else. [i want a squad to move down a road, hugging a hedgerow without trying to go through it, a simple task to order verbally, but a hard one to command in the demo.]

    4. How do you clear a unit's orders and start over? The only way I've discovered so far is the obvious one of quitting the game and starting over.

    1. If the scenario has a set-up zone (not all do; the demo tutorial does not). If it does, you'll see it as a highlighted area of the map. You can move units within the setup zone by selecting them and issuing a move order to wherever you want them to be. They'll move instantly.

    2. Sorry, I can't help with Macs. I still can't get past the one-mouse button thing. Where the delete key is way beyond me.

    3. The waypoint will snap to a grid location. This confused the heck out of me, too. Ignore it, it's a very general location. You'll see that the location you ordered the move to has highlighted spaces, these highlights are the specific positions your pixeltruppen will occupy. You can fiddle with these locations by clicking, e.g., next to the hedgerow and fine-tune by issuing a "face" command. I believe, however, that if you're moving troops down a road that is bounded by hedgerows, they will automatically choose to walk next to one row or the other, and not straight down the middle of the road.

    There is a bug in the demo that makes the highlights hard to see; in the full version (in most instances) they are MUCH more apparent.

    4. You can clear a target command by issuing a new one or by hitting the space bar, which will pop up a menu that will include "clear target." More generally, you can clear orders by deleting all waypoints.

  10. Some map makers have used slightly different ground colours for different elevations.

    In a desert like grand canyon way this even looks good.

    I didn't study the different terrain tiles yet, but in CMSF you could play with green and yellow grass, and with yellow and red sand, dirt, etc. The colour didn't have any game effects.

    In CMx1 I believe there were mods that varied the tile color based on elevation. There certainly was an extremely valuable mod that highlighted the edge of each tile, so you could see a grid superimposed on the terrain -- really made the 3d "pop." I hope whichever talented modders did those are still around (and can do the same thing in CMx2)!

  11. I think GreenAsJade is saying... Is there a way of showing that a spotted contact of a tank (that then moves out of contact and becomes just a question mark), is still an AFV contact. If a contact happens while you are on another side of the map and by the time you notice it, it is just a question mark. Somebody saw it and knows that this is a tank but there is no way you will know it unless the tank comes into view while you are focused in that area.

    Maybe have out of contact icons be a little more specific. ie. have an infantry icon with a ?. or an AFV icon with a question mark.

    +1. I'd suggest the same thing for AT guns, which in my (limited) experience have a habit of popping in and out of view. If you're looking at the position at the right time you can see that, yep, that's a pak-50! and you can watch the pixeltruppen play their loading and firing animations (awesome!) but then five seconds later it's back to being a generic "?"

    I get that the game models relative spotting and FOW. It's unclear to me how far that should extend from the pixeltruppen to the player. If I have the ability to watch the map from any spot (and, so theoretically, can manually check every "?" every turn to see which decloaks as a gun) it seems odd that the game would hide this information from me, the player.

  12. "Battlefront Newsletter 17 May 2011 You are receiving this newsletter because you have subscribed to receive updates from Battlefront.com. For a one-click unsubscribe, please follow the link at the bottom. --- Hello Bryce Baker! You are receiving this email because you have pre-ordered Combat Mission - Battle for Normandy. This is a one-time notification (you are not subscribed to any mailing lists). Your Pre-Order Download is now ready! You can download your copy using various methods: [and so on and so forth]

×
×
  • Create New...