LongLeftFlank
-
Posts
5,420 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
15
Posts posted by LongLeftFlank
-
-
Oops, upon playtesting, this "open wall" is basically treated by units as a solid building wall (though it appears as invisible to the player). So I'll repeat my plea for open shopfronts, with or without folding metal gates. The same feature could be used to represent damaged buildings with some or all of the facade blown away.Originally posted by LongLeftFlank:One of the CTRL-click options lets you delete a wall altogether, although this creates some visual oddities.
Note that the comparatively dimly lit -- and cluttered -- interiors of shopfronts would still be pretty hard to see into during daylight, although they wouldn't offer much cover to units in there once spotted.
-
Well then, I wish you joy playing those doubtless vastly superior games. No need to waste another moment of your amazingly valuable time here.
I agree, buildings are way too sturdy. And as noted in some other threads, RPG fire is way too accurate.
-
With a little practice, I'm starting to get better at creating suitably crappy Third World cement tenements with open storefronts using the existing tools.
The trick seems to be to combine several small 4 story structures to create a single building. This gives you interior walls to work with, representing "rooms". To further subdivide the ground floors, you can also insert tall stone walls and posted balconies. One of the CTRL-click options lets you delete a wall altogether, although this creates some visual oddities.
The main things still missing are
(a) parked cars (you can model these as crudely as you like to save frames, the cityscapes just don't look right without them). Imagine how much more effective technicals would be in RT too, if they could "hide" among the doodads.
(
Small cinderblock sheds (i.e. almost zero protection but concealment). Cinderblock is a ubiquitous building material.© Turn those shelter doodads that look like gazebos into rusty corrugated roofed things we could use to represent awnings, market stalls, etc.
(d) Lose the park benches and ATMs. Give us piles of packing crates and cement rubbish (the latter could provide comparable cover to trees).
These things alone would add a huge amount of realism and "lived-in-ness" to the townscapes, and wouldn't seem hard to add. The framerate-impaired could simply reduce or remove them, like trees.
-
Definitely satellite dishes. In Istanbul (Pera), I recall seeing an entire street filled with nothing but satellite dish businesses (I guess they had a medieval guild or something), including small street vendors in business suits (those Turks, always dressed to the nines) reconditioning used ones.
-
I know BFC has got bigger fish to fry, but I've been dabbling with the map editor to try to work up some authentically shabby Middle Eastern townscapes. At some point, I'd love to see the following elements added to the pallette:
- An authentic Syrian townscape would intersperse the traditional-looking buildings portrayed in the game with the cheap, ugly generic fabricated cement slab structures that are everywhere in the Third world, particularly along roads. Except for balcony fronts (if present), the front walls on all levels of these buildings tend to be either louvered windows or flimsy partitions, providing little protection. The facade is usually the first thing to go when the building is damaged.
- Open-fronted ground floor shops, again the Third World norm, secured with steel gates when not open. There would typically be a garish billboard or sign above the entrance, as well as a narrow sidewalk and curb out front even when the street is unpaved
- Dilapidated tin-roof and cinderblock sheds, shacks and stalls, as well as metal shipping containers/truck trailers. Useless as cover but obstruct LOS. Could we possibly replace the shelters, ATMs and park bench doodads with these?
- Parked car doodads... any Syrian community will have at least as many rusty Fiats and Toyotas as it has buildings. Again, no real cover but obstructs LOS
- Patches of dense jungle or thicket: mix of banana trees, low palms and brush/grass. Very hard to move or see into. There's plenty of these thickets even in arid regions.
- Piles of scrap cement with rebar sticking out would be far more common in the Mideast than piles of scrap lumber.
Is anybody else out there working on authentic villages and towns? The maps I've seen so far all seem to me to have far too much space between buildings. Pre-20th century (pre-automobile) neighborhoods in particular would feature a maze of tiny streets and alleys.
-
Just musing out loud here, but if BFC could only somehow get the USMC module home by Christmas, bundling it with the 1.05 original game, it could generate a new wave of more favorable reviews and give the ol' revenues a shot in the arm. Even if the AI remains imperfect by then, CM is still light years ahead of its competitors.
Major overhauls like multiplayer would be deferred to the third Allied forces module: say, British 7th Armored, French Etranger and, say, Western-equipped allied forces -- Iraqi Army or Kurdish peshmerga with USSF or SAS advisers and support. All kinds of (ahistorical) Blue v Blue v Red multiplayer mayhem would be possible then.
-
Is anybody doing Iraq scenarios and maps? This is both OIF and present day.
It would seem an obvious topic for scenario design, but searches haven't turned up much of anything.
-
Steve Zaloga is a longtime fixture in the wargaming, military history and general military communities. I suspect he's on this board somewhere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_J._Zaloga
He's the author/editor of a number of books in the Osprey series. I first ran across him when he delivered a lecture on the Soviet military in Afghanistan at Columbia U (yes, as in Ahmedinejihad) way back in 1984. I quoted him in my undergrad seminar thesis on Soviet airborne forces.
Oh, and btw, I'm betraying a very high level of geekdom here, but much of this board will understand. October 6, 1942, was the date of "The Guards Counterattack" (Stalingrad), the first Squad Leader scenario, and hence a celebratory day in my lexicon.
-
Amen to that, brother. With 1.04, I can now run CMSF on my laptop which has both Windows 2000k and an Intel 910/915k graphics card. I've had to thumb back some of the graphics settings (vs. my desktop rig), but I get a nice, fluid play experience regardless.Originally posted by Zemke:For me the graphics went down, but the performance went way up, I prefer the performance by far.
Count this longtime BFC fan as a satisfied customer, and looking forward to more.
-
Well you've got to admit there's a pretty big difference between doing things as a unit and doing things like the Three Stooges on a chain gang. I won't presume to argue that a line Syrian squad would approach an AFV as a unit. But then -- in real life -- the riflemen would seek cover and watch the RPG team with bated breath as it moved the last few meters into position for the final shot.Originally posted by Battlefront.com:the Syrian Squad structure is not 7 men + an AT Team, rather it is 9 men with an AT capacity. The doctrine calls for the RPG to be used to support the Squad, not to act independently of it. If we allowed people to section them off then they would (not could, would!) be used in appropriately to the extent of perhaps undermining the simulation aspect of CM (as well as the game aspect, in all likelihood).
...Since we always aim for simulating things as they are and NOT as they might be, the Syrian Squads will not be altered in a way that we feel runs contrary to real life.
Syrian line troops (and any other unit not trained to modern US/NATO levels) would do much the same thing in assaulting a suspect building -- neither a SWAT-team style ballet nor a mass headlong rush (unless explicitly ordered), but rather 2-3 "gutful men" approaching and entering the building with grenades while the majority passively watches the outcome.
In game terms, what has occurred in each case is that the squad has temporarily become 2-3 effectives. The remainder are converted to some kind of "pinned and hiding" status -- unable to spot, fire or receive orders (or do anything other than be targets) until the squad reunites. This saves PC power and also provides a deterrent to gamey tactics.
The detachment ends and the squad is instantly reunited in the parent location (I can live with the abstraction of a "teleport" which represents the guys scurrying home) as soon as:
(a) the cancel orders button is hit
(
the detachment tries to move more than 1 tile away from the parent.© either the detachment or the parent is fired on resulting in a casualty
(d) an enemy enters the parent location
Or sumfink like that...
-
That is almost Robert Duvall enough to be a sigline. Ya smell that?Originally posted by JasonC:I find body parts easier to recon than live enemy.
-
Great point, Michael and it really opens a can of worms regarding premodern battlefield psychology. SLA Marshall's Pareto heuristic (i.e. 1 in 5 ETO GIs uses his weapon) has taken a (not entirely undeserved) hammering on this board. So to what extent will we see Wignam's "3 or 4 gutful men" leading assaults while the bulk of the squad hangs back or cowers outright? Will huge performance gaps be assumed to exist between "green" and "elite" units that a player can bank on? Or will combat effectiveness be treated be more randomly, a la Squad Leader: "men fight like lions one moment and scared hares the next"? Will there be berserk type incidents, or Audie Murphy heroes?Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:Just the simple matter of getting squads into a building will be interesting when we get to WWII. There are specific drills for it now. Were there in 1944? What kind of animations will we see? I see that as an example where abstraction may be better than specific representation. Having 1944 soldiers doing 2006 battle drills would be unsatisfying.
[ August 12, 2007, 10:00 PM: Message edited by: LongLeftFlank ]
-
-
Any comments on this idea, Steve? I'm still willing to be convinced that it's just my lousy playing, but I'm losing a lot of squaddies swanning about in a crossfire and no amount of micro seems to help much. Their sense of self-preservation seems distinctly zombie-like.Originally posted by JasonC:At the risk of recommending something hopeless in implementation terms, I point out that many AIs use "influence maps" for things besides pathfinding.
Example - I'm infantry. So I take every spotted enemy on the map and I estimate his visible areas, weighted perhaps for range or some estimate of soft firepower. Every spot now has an enemy fire value, and I should take it into account in pathfinding. I look for minima of it, near me (especially if my morale state is poor etc).
I can do the same with my own visibility. Suppose I have a hide order. Then I want small LOS footprint. Suppose instead I am in good order and ready to fire. Then I perhaps want LOS to a known enemy, and if there are none, wide LOS or LOS that creates a "threat map" that overlaps with a "close to known enemies" map.
-
Best point of this entire thread (although I've enjoyed reading it).Originally posted by Bigduke6:But right now, the Stryker isn't a square peg in round hole, it's a square peg when the game is chess.
-
Hee hee. Sounds like you're still riding the caffeine wave that got you through it.
-
Just bought the full game today after playing the demo and loving it. Great work BFC, well worth the wait in this longtime fan's opinion.
One minor bug I noticed in the demo: when I saved a game and returned to it (WeGo), my casualties were standing up again (although they still showed as casualties and I couldn't issue orders). Once I hit the Go button though, my zombies obligingly returned to the grave and stayed there. Please fix or do sumfink... or don't, it's just FYI.
My two cents though: I REALLY miss the LOS tool, and it's all the worse in RTS mode. In CMx1 that blue stripe showed me the contours of the land really quickly so I could spot draws and dells (you know, where elves and fairies live), etc., for deploying and hiding. While I appreciate the reasons why the terrain gets fuzzy in CMSF when you look at it from a distance, I've now lost several grunts by debouching them from their vehicles into "low ground" I thought was out of enemy LOS and wasn't anything of the kind (the aforementioned zombies among them). Would providing a toggle to a terrain wireframe mesh view be too gamey? At present, I'm at a loss as to how I'm going to learn to use ground in the open desert the way I could in CMAK. My tendency now is to leave my infantry mounted... they're safer.
-
Direct answer to your question: no, the VDV had no organic AFVs, they were rifle formations (and served as elite infantry at the front far more often than they were used in any kind of airborne role). Towed AT guns and PTRs were their organic AT assets.
I did pretty intensive research in (translated) Soviet military historical journals for my college thesis (1985), but never came across any refs to Red Army glider ops in WWII, much less ones carrying vehicles. Russian staff were certainly impressed by the German glider coups at Eben Emael, the Marathon bridge and Gran Sasso (Skorzeny), but these were small scale raids.
The Russians made more use of air landed forces than did the other WWII powers (given access to partisan-controlled airstrips in areas not covered by German AA). They saw it as a much less complicated way to insert forces than paradrops or gliders, in spite of the risks to the transports. Here too, I doubt they bothered with vehicles -- a supply nightmare and of little value in the hinterland. They'd use man- and horse-pack to get their ordnance off the LZs.
Large numbers of VDV, infantry and spetsnaz troops were successfully airlanded at Japanese airfields during the lightning occupation of Manchuria in 9/45, largely after the Kwangtung army had been ordered to cease resistance. Here too, I doubt this included vehicles -- a few jeeps maybe. The armoured columns were simply moving too fast.
Postwar, a number of Soviet AFVs were designed to be air transportable by the huge AN-22 Anteus, including the PT-76, BTR and BRDM. The former was allegedly able to carry a T-62 MBT as well, but this may have been maskirovka.
If you want to do a what-if, I'd think Lend-Lease Wacos would be more likely than Hamilcars. These could hold jeeps with towed ATGs.
-
Yes, a little bit of apples and oranges here. But I'll hazard some guesses for the fun of it.
Doctrinally, the Red Army might have viewed a Market Garden as worth the gamble, and worth the lives of their Red Devils, even had they known of the presence of 2 refitting SS Panzer divisions at Arnhem.
A key difference: Soviet airborne doctrine would have had their VDV paras transition over to partisan warfare as soon as German heavy forces appeared, rather than fighting to the last man for the bridges.
Also, a Soviet Horrocks would be instructed to achieve a linkup with these forces by any means necessary, using infiltration (infantry, cavalry) if the armoured columns couldn't get up the roads and flooded countryside.
The German defenders would then be faced with a deep combat zone, with armed bands of Russians all around them on both sides of the Rhine, and infiltrating across in steadily greater numbers (phone poles, the whole Dnieper thing)
Would a Russian force have been in Berlin (or Hamburg) by Christmas as Monty hoped? Probably not. But winter 1944 would have been a lot uglier for the defenders (and for the Dutch populace) than it was in the event.
-
"I've hurt you.... And I wish to go on hurting you."
Not to spoil the levity here, but Khan exemplifies a home truth in entertainment (including video games): a strongly drawn villain is as important as a strongly drawn hero.
Khan's backstory was wholly fictional but intriguing: a bioengineered superman with an outsized ego whose subsequent actions were defined by that background, and by more normal human failings (e.g. pride, haste, inexperience). He is us, under different conditions, and is therefore a tragic, sympathetic figure in a way, though evil.
Syria doesn't work at all on this level, as villain or hero. AFAICT, non-Arab gamers will be unable to identify with them as either:
(a) effective fighting force
(
users of cool gear or tactics© human personalities with compelling motivation
(d) underdogs skillfully fighting the odds
I'm not sure what my conclusion is here, since you're already doing what you gotta do, but.... (punt).
-
Nice analysis, Steve, and other folks. I've enjoyed reading the thread.
Let me add a nasty wrinkle to the equation. Abandoning the Kurds as part of a general bugout of Iraq would result in the following:
a. Adding them to the long, shameful list of faithful US tribal mercenaries left to their fate when their usefulness had passed. Talk to the Hmong about that.... I have.
b. Resume the longstanding genocidal war waged against them by all their neighbors with a new fury (i.e. knowledge that the West would not come back to help them would make a Final Solution tempting).
c. ... which would also likely drive them to become the newest adherents to AQ brand Sunni extremism -- the Chechens of the Fertile Crescent.
An alternative -- neither tidy nor risk-free, but plausible IMHO -- would be to pull out of Arab Iraq but leave a significant US/UK (UN?) military presence in a de facto Kurdish republic. Out of consideration for the Turks, this state would not be internationally recognized, or enter the UN in the forseeable future. It would simply weather the storm as a relatively stable, secular Middle Eastern republic (notice I didn't say democracy).
The Kurds (95%+ of them, anyway) would love our honky asses as they have since the start, because they know what'll happen to them if we leave. Their backs are against the wall, literally.
Also, the Coalition's Arab Iraqi friends, including some of the best educated and wealthy Iraqis, who currently risk being mass beheaded as collaborators post-bugout could be resettled in Mosul and Kirkuk instead of Dearborn. (Phew, no helicopter lifts from the Embassy roof in the Green Zone!!!!) These people would KNOW how to identify AQ infiltrators in their midst. They might even be able to wield some influence in a post-civil war mullah Iraq.
The Turks would still bitch and obstruct, but would not invade or even openly subvert under such conditions. The always pragmatic Turkish army would much rather contain old style commie PKK rebels in their Kurdish areas than new style whacko-Islamist Kurds.
[ September 21, 2006, 11:58 PM: Message edited by: LongLeftFlank ]
-
So I'm trying to imagine the backstory that explains the random objects scattered about the streets (i.e. besides that they're just doodads to provide cover for the shooters).
"Maurice, put down zat packing container full of steel ingots, and load ze cast iron replica piano on ze reinforced steel tumbrel cart! Ze Amis will be here in 30 minutes!"
-
Hi, Mum!!!!
-
I absolutely agree that the game's backstory MUST be credible for it to sell outside the CMx1 installed base. BFC's competitive advantage in the market (at least among better educated strategy gamers) is that it simulates real armies in realistic conditions, and the backstory is a part of that experience.
As I see it, there are two options:
1. Come up with a new venue and compelling/credible backstory that meets the following basic requirements:
- Combat in arid/desert/mountain terrain
- Blue team = US Army Stryker brigade
- Red team = Mainly bloc-equipped regular / irregular forces
The problem with this one IMHO is finding a backstory that is credible and holds gamer interest throughout a full campaign, as opposed to a scenario or two. Other than Iraq, nothing really springs to mind right now for me.
2. Broaden the scope of the game to include a wide range of historical and fictional scenarios set in a variety of (arid) hotspots. This wouldn't be limited to US Stryker brigade vs. Reds.
With Stryker Brigade (using Queensberry Rules or with "gloves off")
- Iraq
- Afghanistan
- Fort Irwin (Blue on Blue)
- Korea (large parts of this country are pretty arid)
- Iraq border clash with Iranian forces
Red on Red combinations (Neither side cares much about collateral damage)
- Iraqi army vs. insurgents / militias
- Chechens vs. Russians (though RA TOE might be a bit too much)
- Insurrection / civil war in any Middle Eastern state
- India vs. Pakistan -- Kashmir clash or full scale war (I bet you'd tap into a HUGE gamer market in both these countries, BTW)
- Darfur rebels vs. Sudanese army / Janjaweed (Red on Red)
- Horn of Africa (Ethiopian, Eritreans, Somalis)
- Turks or Iranians vs. Kurds
- South Africa/UN intervention in (arid) Zimbabwe or Angola
OK, OK, I can already hear the disdainful groans of gamers who could care less about "commanding" bands of indisciplined, unwashed heathen spraying Toyota-loads of Chinese ammo at each other for control of some tin-roofed shacks. Just play the Blue vs _____ scenarios all the time, fine, and wait for the next game.
The practical downside of this "Janes All The World's Tinpot Armies" approach is that you would need to stick in a bunch more "Red" equipment. Oh, and of course there's the flesh tone issues (a lot of folks in the Mideast and India are as dark as subsaharan Africans... as are a lot of American infantry, for that matter).
I also know that BFC swore off this "wargaming kit" approach given its experience with CMx1, and I sympathize with its reasoning. But I just feel in my gut that the wider market isn't going to show much interest in a game based on a NEW intervention in a theater that is making the entire world increasingly queasy.
Small cinderblock sheds (i.e. almost zero protection but concealment). Cinderblock is a ubiquitous building material.
Wish List for authentic Middle East towns
in CMSF Scenario and Mod Design Forum
Posted
Shameless bump for my own thread here, but I have a couple more items:
a. Cement Jersey barriers and T-barriers
b. Laundry on lines -- good LOS obstructor
Also, I'm tackling a map of the much embattled Route Michigan, Ramadi. Some phenomenal footage of the destruction along this road here:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=YW7zzQBJr-g
Awesome soundtrack too.