LongLeftFlank
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Posts posted by LongLeftFlank
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Jason, given this discussion has spread across 10 pages in 2 threads, could you kindly recapitulate your recommendation for a workable design-for-effect fix, or edit the below?
1. Suppression-based firepower reduction or cover modifiers for stationary units based on dyads (e.g. LOS pairings). Modifiers escalate to "gone deep/total cover" where a unit is all but unhittable (but also doesn't shoot) from a given position -- depending on cover terrain, range to shooter and shooter weapons.
2. Rapid loss of spotting to/from suppressed units.
3. "Spreading" out of area fire effects to (a) improve the defensive effect of concealment (
blunt the impact of the (hard to fix) design that keeps non-moving units bunched into a single 8x8 target rich "slab o' meat" even when under fire.4. Other
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No, it is merely the way of his people to confuse North with South. Comes from walking around upside down down there, and from being descended from convicts who weren't deemed cunning enough to the Poms to be hanged at Tyburn. DO try to be more culturally sensitive in future. :cool:Originally posted by gibsonm:Good story but ...
“Given that I’m the only Australian south of the Sinai desert“
In case you have forgotten Syria is in fact North of Sinai.
In addition you seem to forget the guys in Sinai (OP Mazurka), those in he Sudan (OP Azure) as well as those deployed closer to home in Timor (OP Tower and Astute), the Solomons (OP Anode) oh yes and everyone in Australia all of which are “south of Sinai“.
Not sure we want you back after your attachment if you are that geographically embarrassed.
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Methinks somebody read one too many "Hotspur" or "Scorcher and Score" comics back in the Seventies... maybe while getting stoned. But then again, 'tis the season for the Christmas Annuals.
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IIRC, "It is all Rum, Buggery and the Lash" is First Sea Lord Churchill's famous retort when Royal Navy "tradition" was cited as an argument against oil-fired (vs. coal-fired) warships.Originally posted by 'Card:...or if it's a British Marine module...
CM:SF: Rum, Sodomy, and The Lash
"Rum, Sodomy and The Lash", in contrast, is the title of a Pogues album. Evidently the word "Buggery" was unacceptable to respectable music stores. I, personally, prefer the original quote.
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But including just these very 2 items -- rusty Fiats/Toyotas and some piles of cement rubbish and rebar -- as flavour objects (I honestly don't care if they have any effect on LOS/LOF or not) would make the urban landscapes so much more photorealistic and less generic and "sterile". Pleeeeeeeeease, pretty please (grovel, bow, scrape) consider adding these items for the Marines module (I have no dignity left, I'm a married manOriginally posted by Battlefront.com:We don't need to have broken down cars and rubble barricades graphically represented to make that happen. Just a variable tweak and that's all that is needed.
).Oh, and I'm very glad this thread still has legs, as resolving the casualty curve issues will have a HUGE payoff for the CMx2 game system as a whole, regardless of theatre or era. Everyone who has posted here so far seems to have the very best hopes for the game, and we're down to really short strokes now. Hang in there!
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Sir John Hackett's "The Third World War: August 1985" is still my fave.
Never been a big fan of Clancy -- nice tech detail, but his characters are about as lifelike as a 1930s radio serial.
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Agree wholeheartedly on the RPG accuracy. Makes MOUT with vehicles virtually impossible even against a complete rabble.
While I feel that BFC are doing a great job, that CMSF is the only game worth playing right now and that it is getting better by leaps and bounds, I've got to agree that the basic infantry combat model -- even as of 1.05 -- makes it very difficult to replicate real world behaviour (and yes, there's ongoing argument over what that is in different situations) of men against fire.
As BFC and others point out, lethality is EXTREMELY high in the first few seconds of a fight, particularly in modern warfare... whole squads will just melt away in the kill zone IF they stay there.
What happens then, however, reminds me of the old high school explanation of calculus: your dog does it rapidly and instinctively when she spots a squirrel... as does the squirrel.
In other words (as JasonC pointed out earlier), anyone who isn't hit or caught exposed on the worst kind of pool table pavement figures out nearly instantly where to go to be safe and goes there, tout suite. Except in the very worst cases, there's no drawn out "crawl of death" (except by those already wounded), and no weird milling around the action spot.
If the unhit guys have to sprint back 20 meters into the next room or the trees to get out of the kill sack, that's what they'll do, then rally from there. Some more guys might get shot in the back during the bugout if the unit was badly exposed, but thereafter lethality falls steeply (though not to zero) for both sides. Until the next "bump"; lather, rinse, repeat.
That's where the CMx2 model still falls short IMHO... squaddies under fire remain stubbornly mired in their "hex" even when it's patently obvious that staying there = inevitable death. There needs to be a "bug out" vs. "go to ground" (or even "charge the enemy if it's a point blank ambush and we're high quality troops") decision logic baked into the AI.
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I like Jason's analysis very much, and it reconciles with my observations about only a limited number of guys shooting at any given time.
At long last we might see the end of the hated "crawl of death", as the crawlers quickly find cover and fade from sight.
Also, I've long bemoaned the inability of either CMx1 or CMx2 (so far) to realistically model infiltration tactics that are such an important part of asymetric warfare even in the era of night vision gear. Functionality as described here would likely address that issue.
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Yeah, I usually use conscript/fanatic settings for Red (uncons)... this also takes some of the edge off the RPG accuracy.
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I personally feel that the NUMBER of shooters at any given moment, not the accuracy of their fire, is what's overmodeled, at least on the Syrian side.
I've posted on this issue before. I've pretty much exclusively played tiny/small Iraq MOUT scenarios in this game to help me understand the situation there (eagerly awaiting the Marines!). I've been annoyed with how many casualties I take as the US player even when I'm being careful and the enemy is an utter rabble (at this point I pretend that US casualties are just unavailable for orders for some reason, not hit). And the conclusion I've come to is that the enemy's volume of fire is just too great.
If you look at combat footage from 1939-present (and yes, I understand that combat recorded by film crews isn't necessarily a representation of "normal" combat), what you normally see is 1-3 guys or a single SW team doing the shooting or grenading or flamethrowing or whatever and the rest mainly watching from cover... not cowering but not active.
I call this the "union road crew" effect, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has driven past one.
The "mad minute" -- where everybody in the squad is pouring it on -- is generally limited to situations where the enemy is (a) at point blank range or charging in full view and it's kill-or-be-killed (think Episode 2 of BoB), or (
is not returning much fire (and it's safe to be a hero).If you look at the copious YouTube footage from Iraq/Afg, US and British squaddies show high firefight participation, presumably a result of training, but also relative paucity of enemy return fire (I'm sure the presence of the cameras helps some too). But even there you frequently see the "union" effect. And it's pretty much all you ever see from the jihadis (although I wouldn't compare their fire discipline to that of regular soldiers).
In game terms, what I'd expect to see is a sharp dropoff in fire effectiveness of non-MGs depending on how much return fire it is taking, as well as its level of training.
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I have similar problems trying to make out the status of the "button" / "unbutton" toggle.
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Only a Hero can save us now!
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OK, this quote is almost good enough to become a new sigline for me. Let me sleep on it.Originally posted by Battlefront.com:The arguing (I would call it hurtled feces in our direction) was not over specific issues but fundamental and philosophical directions we took from a design standpoint.
Illegitimi non carborundum, Steve!
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Hey Charles, don't see you often on this board, so while I've got you --
This is an awesome game system shaping up, and represents a fantastic, groundbreaking effort by a small gaming shop.
You guys are WAY out in front of the industry (and probably the defense community as well) on CMx2 in the most important areas, and DON'T let the critics (many of whom will agree with my general sentiments, however) make you feel differently!
Happy holidays!
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Fulda Gap, yawn. Go East, young man.
Winter 2008: a series of bizarre and seemingly inconsequential incidents abruptly triggers a second Korean war. During a 4 hour exchange expending more firepower than all previous wars combined, several thousand GIs -- and half a million ROK soldiers and civilians -- are killed or mortally wounded by crude but effective nuclear artillery. Much of Seoul is also devastated by a savage nuclear, chemical and conventional bombardment before the DPRK fortifications and armies along the DMZ are vaporized, together with much of its command net, by US counterstrikes that have been carefully planned for some 60 years. These include "surgical" nuclear attacks on hardened command centers that cause enormous collateral damage to the Pyongyang metro region and create significant nuclear fallout.
As surprised as anyone by this turn of events, China, the only power with sufficient ground forces to invade and secure the DPRK within 30 days, delays and prevaricates (partly to gain time to mobilize). Desperate to forestall further nuclear attacks, the US meanwhile throws the proverbial air power kitchen sink at the North, including upper atmosphere EMP attacks that heavily damage portions of Manchuria (whence media reports of fallout and panicked refugees are already emerging) as well as parts of the Russian Far East, South Korea and Japan.
With the DPRK regime fallen eerily silent, and an estimated 60% of the North Korean populace already killed, injured or in radiation-affected areas, jaded world opinion turns quickly against the "overreaction" of the American "nuclear cowboys". Beiing finds itself under strong domestic pressure not just to restore order in the Koreas but to eject the roundeyes once and for all from the Asian mainland. At the same time, US Navy, Marine and Army Airborne units deploy to chaotic South Korea by air and sea, while Russian airborne forces reinforce frontier positions along the Amur river.
You fill in the rest....
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Wow, guardedly positive reporting on Iraq from the Guardian. They must be getting quagmire fatigue.
I'm a big fan of Pat Dollard's grunt's eye view (I'm not necessarily endorsing his conservative politics, just his documentary style), although his stuff is well over a year old and Ramadi has calmed down a lot.
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Yeah, I love this game too in spite of the bugs and the overmodeling of certain elements (e.g. RPG accuracy, buildings). Keep up the good work, BFC -- Failure is not an option!
Since I pretty much play self-designed Iraq scenarios (i.e. company-size COIN actions), I'm eagerly awaiting the Marines, as well as the Hummvee uparmoured gun trucks.
For further Blue side expansion, I'd add a vote for British Paras/SAS, French Etranger and US Special Forces together with Western-trained and equipped local forces... Iraqi jundi and police commandos or Kurdish peshmerga -- with a correspondingly wide range of leadership, tactical ability and morale options.
For the Red side, I'd like to see more customization of uncon forces (e.g. more 2 man RPG, sniper and "spray and pray" LMG teams), a wider variety of IED and mine options and an enriched urban terrain environment that would provide uncons with a more challenging "sea" to shoot and scoot from. I'd also love to see BFC loosen up on the Syria focus so the community can model conflicts and interventions from West Africa to Pakistan.
Tank warfare junkies might hate this, but hey, it's just my opinion.
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Saves a lot of lives and limbs though, it seems, for all the expense and added weight although I'm sure there's a better way to do it. I've been doing heavy research on Ramadi for a scenario and these things seem to hold up to IEDs a hell of a lot better. Plus the troops have turned the turrets and doors from trashed vehicles into armoured embrasures for OPs that have saved a lot of sniper casualties.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
blunt the impact of the (hard to fix) design that keeps non-moving units bunched into a single 8x8 target rich "slab o' meat" even when under fire.
).
Too all modders out there.
in Combat Mission Shock Force 1
Posted
The first 8 hours would be an all artillery Götterdämmerung -- likely including nukes -- whose firepower would exceed the sum total of all firepower used in all the wars to date. Each side has had half a century to study the other side's positions in detail, and while the North has more tubes (and-- maybe-- the first shot), the US/ROK has precision munitions.
Even were some KPA units to survive, tactical movement would be rendered impossible by liberal use of submunitions and FASCAM fields. After Day 1, US airpower would then take over, saturating the entire DPRK defense infrastructure in order to forestall (further) use of nuclear weapons. This would likely include EMP attacks which could slop over the borders, wreaking some havoc there too.
Even assuming that the KPA/DPRK effectively ceased to exist after D+7, occupying the place would be no simple matter. The DMZ and the Seoul metroplex would be contaminated rubble and the rest of the South would be a fallout ridden humanitarian disaster area. As for the North... think 20,000 square miles of Passchendaele. Literally bombed back into the Stone Age.
A Marine/82nd AB expeditionary force might manage an amphibious landing somewhere in the North around D+30. That would likely also be the time at which the Chinese PLA is able to cross the Yalu in real force.
So IMHO if you want combat that is meaningful at a CM level, you need to think China vs. US... with maybe some Russians thrown in for spice.