SlowMotion

I just promptly tried the program a couple of times and I hope this idea will be included in CM2. There are many ways to adding some randomness to scenarios, and the number of turns is certainly one of the best. I have one wish for possible future versions: IMO installation programs should always ask the installation path, not just assume that c:\Program Files is ok.

Well, how about this one: I thought that it would be nice if scenario designers could select some troops for both sides AND: -let each side buy worth of X points in set up phase after seeing the map. For example, the attacker could have 2000 points worth of preselected troops and 1000 user selectable. The defender might have 1500 preselected and 500 freely selectable troops. I think this would be a cool new addition, because you'd never know for sure what kind of opponent you're facing.

I wish they did a similar thing for viewpoints. It would be nice if the player could move to one part of the map and store that view. Move to another part of the map and store another view. Then later on, during the game one could easily move to any of these stored viewpoints with one command. On many big maps this would save lots of time. And setting those views should be possible at any point, not just during the setup.

AI-hint flags: Why? Some background: It would be nice if scenario designers could create scenarios with just one or few goal flags that count in the final score, BUT also assist AI troop placement (useful mainly in defense) by telling that some parts of the map are TEMPORARILY important for the enemy when it tries to reach the goal. For example, it might be important to keep the enemy from reaching a cross roads, from which a road to the goal flag branches. Currently it's possible to mark such important places with flags, but there are some cons: -To get a high score, attacker has to leave troops to guard the flags -Both sides know the flags. At the moment it's easy for the human player to guess that if there's a flag, then it's likely that sooner or later there will be enemy troops nearby. Also, if all important places are readily marked, choosing attack strategy becomes much easier. SO (The suggestion), It would be useful if scenario designers could place new kind of flags to the map. There would be different sets of flags for both attacking/defending sides, and they would be "visible" only for the AI playing that side. Human players could see them only in scenario editor. The flags would mark places that are temporarily important for the enemy. When planning its (defense) strategy, the AI could consider using troops to keeping enemy from these temporary goals (or causing damage there), while keeping in mind that there may be other ways of reaching the real goal flags. Maybe this feature would be used only on some AI experience levels or maybe it would be just an extra option to the setup phase. Of course, the AI shouldn't regard hints as orders, but as suggestions that it may ignore if it has better ideas. [ 06-02-2001: Message edited by: SlowMotion ]

I think "No Better Place to Die" and "La Fiere" are two quite different versions of the same battle.

Those who say they never lose to the AI, do you ever try giving it more troops? At least in some scenarios the AI is very tough to beat if you give extra 100% or 200%. I still lose some scenarios when I play them first time.

I wonder if this rumour about 4 times the graphical detail means that scenarios would be made of smaller tiles (one 20m x 20 m tile would be broken into 4 10m x 10m tiles) or that the vehicle models etc would have more polygons? Or maybe both? [ 04-19-2001: Message edited by: SlowMotion ]

Has anybody thought about this? When starting a game, it would be nice if one could adjust the amount of troops for BOTH sides, say: allied: +50%, axis: +100%. Sometimes it is nice to use exactly the same map, but with more troops. I've tried using +100% and +200% in some scenarios, and playing with certain troop modifications can make a scenario much more challenging.

My wish list is about defining reinforcements, comments? Getting any one of these to CM2 would be nice, getting all of them would be really nice 1. Placement list: It would be nice if the placement of a reinforcement wasn't just one place, but for each reinforcement, one could define a list of alternative places (their positions would be defined with flags just like now) from which the computer would randomly select one during a game. In scenario editor, when adding a reinforcement, by default there would be just one place on this list, so it would work like now. But, a scenario designer could then add places if needed. This would give scenarios lots more re-playability against AI, because the human player could never know for sure where the enemy will pop up. I assume that this would be a simple tweak to implement, yet it would have a big impact. The maximum number of these "appearance places" should be more than 5, at least 10. 2. The max number of reinforcements could be more than 5. Then a couple of ideas that would add new possibilities to reinforcement arrival timing. For example, it would be easier to simulate parts of a convoy arriving from a road in predefined order, separated by a certain amount of turns. Or, one could make two groups of reinforcements appear to the map at the same time, but in different places (say infantry from north and tanks from east). These would also make scenario editor user interface a bit more complicated, but I think it would be well worth it. 3. First Possible Arrival could also be the "realized" turn of some other reinforcement. Then one could define these arrival timings: t1 = 15 + chance1 (current way using turn number) t2 = t1 + chance2 (new way: t2 depends on t1) The UI would have to check that there are no circular dependencies. Say t1 depends on t2 and t2 from t1. 4. It would be nice if the the random factor used in calculating the arrival turn, could also be defined as a range of turns, like from 0 to 5 turns. These two minor tweaks would allow defining reinforcement arrivals such as: t1 = 15 + chance1 (the 1. part of convoy arrives...) t2 = t1 + chance2 (then the 2. part...) t3 = t2 + range(2->7) (... and the 3. part, at least 2 turns later) t4 = 20 + range(0->3) (Reinforcements from north) t5 = t4 + chance_100% (At the same time another group appears from east)

BTW: is there some minimum range for using the main gun of Panthers? Yesterday I was playing against AI and I saw how a US 4 man platoon leader unit (or something like that) decided to attack my Panther in scattered trees with nothing but pistols and handgrenades. The figure ran to 5 meters from the front of the tank, stopped and threw a couple of hand grenades while my Pather tried to aim low enough, but failed? because it didn't shoot even once. As if the tank crew had been thinking: "What are you doing?"

I've also noticed that sometimes my computer gets unstable. I think it only happens if I keep switching between CMBO and the Windows desktop. Maybe some gfx card driver problem?

nabla: 3DMark2000 allows you to specify how many times a test should be repeated. I don't know if there is any upper limit...

Murph: I didn't mean "everything has been asked before" the obnoxious way. Afterall, I'm new here I meant it as "there's probably lots of answers to your question already. You may get answers faster by doing a couple of searches than by asking a question and waiting for replies"

i.e. If you're new here, always search earlier discussions first before starting a new thread. Almost every question has already been asked. Like PeterNZer wrote, many others would like this feature as well - I sure would. It would be not only fun, but also very useful when designing scenarios. For example, it would help choosing good unit placements in scenarios that should be playable against the AI.

Yes, I meant west = left. You can add space to south and west edges by pressing SHIFT while clicking those "ChangeSize" buttons. I learnt that recently by reading some CM2 suggestion thread And I'm using version 1.12 in case that matters. I didn't do any other editing. What seemed to happen there, was that terrain tile coordinates were increased by say 200 meters, but the unit coordinates were not updated. So I had to go through all units and move them to their original positions. Lots of work

Hi! Yesterday I tried increasing the map size of one of my own scenarios. I added the new empty space to the left side of the map and no problem there - BUT when I previewed the map, I noticed that the units had NOT stayed in their places. IMO if I place a machine gun inside a building and then make the map say 200 m wider, shouldn't the machine gun still be in the building and not 200 meters away from it? Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug?

Hi, First, the volume of this forum is so huge, that it's not possible to check all the old threads, so I just hope this hasn't been suggested by someone else already... While playing some large CM scenarios, like August Bank Holiday, I came up with an idea for a new UI feature: kill counter. Sometimes there are so many units on the map that it's very difficult to notice everything that's happening during the 60 second movie that is played after each turn. So, instead of watching the actions from several viewpoints after each turn, it would be nice to have resettable counters for own men, tanks and so on, that have been lost. Tanks and vehicles are the units I'm most interested in, maybe the categories could be similar to the ones shown after the game ends? The user could reset the counters at any point, so he could for example see how many tanks he has lost during a single turn or say, after enemy reinforcements arrived. This way I could check the 60 second movie from those other parts of the map ONLY if something unpredictable has happened, like losing 3 tanks instead of 1: "What the **** happened?" IMO a useful and probably quite easy to implement as well. What do you think? Would this make playing too easy or just more comfortable?