SlowMotion

Thanks for the answers. Now we'll just wait for the game to be released. Scenarios against the AI can be made so much better with this feature. The AI can have several goals which change during the scenario. What those goals are cannot be easily guessed simply by checking from the map where the victory flags are. [ February 15, 2007, 12:01 PM: Message edited by: SlowMotion ]

Flammenwerfer: I'm not saying I wouldn't do it like you wrote, just trying to get an idea of how things can be done.

Ok, another question: would it be possible that a Group has units that start from first turn and ALSO units that come as reinforcement? So let's say some infantry is there when a scenario starts. They start advancing according to the plan. Then after some turns reinforcements appear. Can this later arriving bunch join the initial group? If this is possible, one might think they could even advance along different paths if their starting point was different. Think about moving from North to South along an Area the shape of letter Y. One group moves from the left and one from right. (had to use * to fill area because extra spaces were removed). infantry________tanks (reinforcement) *****\***********/** ******\*********/*** *******\*******/**** ********\*****/***** *********\---+****** ************|****** ************|****** *****___Both try to move here. [ February 15, 2007, 10:26 AM: Message edited by: SlowMotion ]

A couple of questions about this new tool: -can reinforcements be Groups? -can parts of a reinforcement belong to more than one Group? So for example tanks would be part of GroupA and some infantry part of GroupB. Both would appear at the same time, but would have different orders.

If taking care of wounded will be added in some future version I hope it will depend on circumstances like you say. I read your "was automated" that every time a soldier is wounded, 1-2 nearest soldiers are always and instantly taken out of fighting. About that what do when someone gets wounded question - the TV interview said that when infantry was advancing, they sometimes walked over their wounded buddies. And also that some such wounded had then tried to crawl back to own lines, but died before they got far enough or because they got lost. So those "scream in agony and bleed to death" cases that you suggested did happen. The way I understood it this way to handle wounded was agreed on before the attack started.

Should that immediate buddy aid be always automated though? I recently watched an episode of a TV series about Normandy landings. They interviewed a British infantry soldier who took part in an attack in June 1944 near Tilly. He said they had a firm principle that a rifleman doesn't stop if the guy next to him falls. So when they went on in some corn field or something, they sometimes stepped over their wounded/dead comrades that had been hit earlier.

I am trying to figure out what this other way of creating own scenarios could be. IL2 has also Quick Mission Builder... we'll wait and see. Anyway, the game with Full Mission Builder would be worth a lot more than one without it. IMO IL2 has stayed popular for so long largely because users can make so many kinds of new missions with FMB. Those keep online gaming interesting. So I really hope it will be possible to include a FMB at some point if not in the initial release.

I assume that means that this new game will include something like Il2's Full Mission Builder. Great news!

Radios were not needed as badly during WW1, because the whole air war was just starting. During those days radios were heavier and plane engines a lot weaker. So pilots wanted to get more performance by getting rid of extra weight. And if things worked well enough without radios, why use them? Air war developed a lot during WW2 and several of those advances included better ways of coordinating pilots. During Battle of Britain British pilots could be guided towards bomber fleets once those had been located using radar. This was much more effective when fighters could take off, get altitude and later still be directed to needed location if needed. How could you do this without radio? Germans had a similar system during later years when guiding their fighters to intercept allied bombers. This even though many of their own aces had been against radio usage during the first couple of years of WW2.

According to this http://lend-lease.airforce.ru/english/articles/romanenko/p-39/ first P-39s started appearing to flight units in May 1942. Many radios were removed from those planes because they were incompatible with Soviet equipment. Maybe that's why Pokryshkin didn't mention it. Some radios were kept, there's a comment on it in this interview, part3: http://lend-lease.airforce.ru/english/articles/golodnikov/part3.htm Soviet squadrons were using Hurricanes, KittyHawks and Tomahawks already in 1941. A quote from an 154 IAP ace Kapitan Petr Pokryshev about Tomahawk: "Horizontal manouver - good, fire power - as one can wish, radio equipment - we never had anything like it before". From the same site as the first link, an interviewed Soviet veteran said about I-16's radio: "Q: Did the I-16 have radios? N.G. The I-16 had a radio beginning with the type-17. They were poor excuses for radios. Garbage! The circuitry was wound on some type of cardboard material. As soon as this “cardboard” got the slightest bit damp, the tuning of the circuit changed and the whole apparatus quit working. All we heard was crackling. The throat microphones were such large, uncomfortable shapes that made our necks sore." http://lend-lease.airforce.ru/english/articles/golodnikov/part1.htm Then in part2 of the interview, there's similar question about KittyHawk radio. I'm not repeating it here, but there was a clear difference: http://lend-lease.airforce.ru/english/articles/golodnikov/part2.htm ----------- So what's the point: in the beginning of the German attack Soviets did have some equipment problems which gave a clear edge to Germans in this respect. Isn't this shown in CMBB as well? If you think how long some tank command delays are.

Planes get bounced more often if pilots flying in same formation can't warn others when they see the enemy. According to what I've read, when Russians started getting first lend lease planes from their western allies, the thing their experienced pilots most appreciated was reliable radios. Those they hadn't had before.

I'm sure this flying in straight line was rare, even though I haven't read that Lagg book so I'd know what really happened in this case. Was the leader lost near the target when enemy fighters attacked or far from the target to AAA fire? If those planes were still far from the target, the #2 plane's pilot might have thought he knows the way to target and the rest were doing what they usually did: following their leader. Still lack of good radios must have caused lots of problems: missing the target, attacking wrong targets, not being able to warn others when some plane is attacked and so on.

In many Russian early-war planes most radios had only receivers, few also transmitters. So if only the leader knew the target and was the only one with transmitter, this plane going down was bad news for the rest.

Not so interested in the AI version, but if you could give units short text messages that they would "say" during the movie, that could be good. Your PBEM opponent and you would see a speech bubble or something during the next movie. If you could also have a delay for the message (the same way you can delay movement orders), then you could have one unit say something at the beginning of movie, another after 30 seconds and so on.

That layered setup zone could be used for another purpose as well. In CMBB and CMAK it was possible to use the map and units of a battle as the starting point of the next quick battle. You could continue where the previous battle ended - it would work a bit like "quick operation". One difficulty here was that all QBs had to use same setup zones. On a larger map, many of the turns would be used just for moving slower units forward. This could be improved if: -the battle file would contain info about the battle sequence number, ie. is it battle #1, #2 and so on. -one could mark for setup zones which battles they are for. Then one could have setup areas for battle1, another ones for battle2 etc.

I wrote my suggestion in this thread: http://www.battlefront.com/discuss/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=52;t=000156;p=1#000023 It could easily remove some of those uninteresting purchases. You don't like getting HTs? Exclude them from the list that is available in the purchasing phase. Or want to play a QB with certain tanks only? Exclude all others and there you have it.

Some things not mentioned in this thread can be found from this three part interview (people from several sim game companies): http://www.simhq.com/_all/all_006a.html

I don't mean that rarity would be skipped totally. The inclusion list would just do the first round of rarity. You could use any rarity system for the units that were chosen to be included. So what's wrong with just agreeing on which units to include? The number of units is one. If you remember there were some QB buying rules like "short 75" etc. The bad thing was that sometimes they were difficult to remember and could lead to other player remembering that some unit was included when it wasn't. Using that list idea, those buying rules could be made and also enforced. I'm not sure I understand what you mean with the Battalion XIII example, maybe it's too late. Do you mean that for a campaign there could be a absolute number of units of some type? That if 2 rare antimatter-disrupter squads were destroyed in battle1, they would be that much rarer in following battles?

That Scipio's idea has the problem that what if the game doesn't include the OOB that was used in some area at some date. What if you want to use units that were available exactly in some certain battle, but not say two weeks later. Should there be a patch to add that rare OOB? What about a much simpler solution? The game would allow people to make lists of which units are available for purchase. Those lists could be saved and loaded. This way players could have all OOBs they wish to use (realistic or fictional) and Battlefront could use their time for doing other things. If you don't want to see some unit, just exclude it from the list.

This is one situation where random selection of reinforcement places would be useful. Another similar feature that would be nice to have: this same random location feature, but for units that are shown in setup. A scenario designer could lock a unit position to one of many places. Which one would be used, would be selected randomly. This would be VERY useful for things like picking good AT-gun positions for the AI, good places for mines etc. Scenario designers could help the AI a little, but there would still be a surprise element in case someone wants to play the same scenario again.

This was suggested already before CMBB. I did a search to find it from CMBO archive forums, but it seems that the thread has vanished in some forum crash where lots of messages were lost.

LOL! If that picture is a slight hint to end this thread, ok. But before doing that, here's one more post. Don't raise that sledgehammer yet before reading the whole thing If someone thinks that this thread has deteriorated into whining about minisculous details that nobody cares about and user posts like mine had a totally wrong attitude, compare this to another similar case: the IL2 series. The developers of those games have also published several WW2 games based on an engine that was developed further game by game. Now there is a new game engine under development and this week they decided to release new info about what people are about to see in games using this new engine. And how did people react? Take a look, the last time I checked there were 24 pages of replies. Also note what kind of wishes people are listing, does this look familiar? http://forums.ubi.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/63110913/m/8371080943/p/24 Ducking the hammer, there are more important features even on my CMx2 wish list...

BF: "And you guys can brainstorm all you want... but I have already said, from the beginning, that this is a feature thta will NOT be significantly expanded." Ok, I understood that original comment so that this feature wouldn't be modified much BEFORE we'll see how well it works in the first released games. But that there might be changes afterwards. No demands of course, just that this tip of the iceBERG suddenly appearing after long sailing with only small pieces of ice sometimes floating in the sea, easily "overrevs" the brain . I agree 100% with the requirement that the system must be easy to use. Most people probably see the learning curve of existing CM games too much already. Still I hope there can be ways of doing some not-so-simple things in the scenario editor, if the results are easy to use and understand for people who play a scenario. After so many hints about new additions, it will be very interesting to see how the new scenario editor works.

... and I don't think much brainstorming will be done if people think the game will be bad.

Ignoring the things that will be there according to recent announcements, like better graphics, more detailed terrain, SOPs and improved arty. Also ignoring requests that seems won't make it, like scenario file import/export. CHANGE: 1. Campaign system 2. Multiplayer -for all game modes (qb, scenarios, operations, possible new ones) -several human players against human player(s) or the AI Improved Scenario/Unit editing, including: 3. Alternative reinforcements (say 3 unit lists defined, randomly selected one arrives. This could simulate among other things: some of the vehicle column breaking down/getting destroyed during transport) 4. Alternative reinforcement arrival places 5. Map copy/paste - possibly only selected layers HarryInk had a good list about map making, but if you can change only one thing, add copy/paste first - please) KEEP: -WEGO -Asynchronous game play (PBEM now) -Easy to use UI