Mud
-
Posts
366 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Never
Posts posted by Mud
-
-
Originally posted by Barleyman:
True enough... but engine fundamentals such as action spots or terrain approximations are one thing. HUI aspects are another. There would seem to be ways in which the game-playing experience might be improved without requiring fundamental redesigns, significant rebalancing of existing scenarios, massive DARPA grants for AI research, or the like.Ex. -- turn-based, given that modern combat can be rapidly lethal (all those RPGs in Mission 2, for instance), vehicle count is usually small enough that a single loss is significant, and vehicle TacAI is not particularly trustworthy over a full minute, the ability to set shorter turns or even variable-length turns would provide greater ability to provide appropriate human-intervention in lieu of death-by-TacAI-failure-to-react. By 'variable turns', think condition-based autopause, like the new spotting of an opponent, destruction of a vehicle, movement orders being complete, or friendly units giving an all-clear of sorts after eliminating all spotted enemies on whom they've had LOS/LOF. Even just allowing turns of shorter fixed duration might help.
Ex. -- RT, there is an utter lack of message log, minimap, unit roster, alerts regarding contacts or significant events (such as vehicle loss or clear threat to vehicle), units reporting that they're being hit by air/artillery, units reporting in after being completely idle for some time, or so forth. This is not particularly good from a coordination point of view, or for dealing with situations in which the TacAI is not sufficient. For a complex situation, such as when you're breaching an airbase at multiple locations, it becomes too easy to focus too much on one particular sector while neglecting others -- because the game won't remind you.
Concrete example -- aircraft have begun strafing near a Syrian position. It is not clear that the TacAI should be capable of figuring out a response (hunker down, move, whatever) -- this depends on a variety of factors. That the fact that the position has been deemed worthy of attention from US airpower is, however, quite possibly worth notifying the Syrian player -- especially in RT where he may be obliviously examining some other sector of the battlefield. The appearance of an AT asset in an area which had not yet been suspected to have any would be a similar noteworthy event for the US player. It would be unreasonable to expect the game to 'correctly' adjust the orders of all nearby AFVs, but letting the player know that -he- might want take some action does not seem unreasonable.
An obvious enhancement of a message log would be one that can be saved for use when writing an AAR... although you'd want a way to indicate coordinates.
There's other, more minor things which could be added (ex. spotter with multiple missions ongoing, should visually indicate -which- target area corresponds to a selected mission; if it does already, it's subtle about it) or explained (the mysterious green dots with support assets, say). The ability to de-acquire equipment would seem quite reasonable, compared to guessing whether you'll need the Javelins and trying not to overestimate. A sanity check in QBs, such as "do both sides actually have a positive number of units", perhaps coupled with "reroll for a finite number of times, and report a suspicion of incompatible settings if we fail 'em all" should not be difficult.
'course, maybe I'm just overly frustrated by HUI factors. The lack of notifications/minimap won't matter quite as much down the line when it's actually possible to have multiple human players for one side, as well -- more micromanagers to go around.
Meh. Haven't posted for a long time, haven't really been inclined to play much since 1.04, and it would be (pleasantly) very surprising to me if 1.05 changes this significantly. Back to lurking.
-
Originally posted by Lucid Nightmare:
This makes very little sense -- certainly not under 'elite' FOW, where this function still operates -- without some extremely good communications interception capability....unless it's strictly "might theoretically be able to see" and not "actually is seeing", but even then, there's some very good estimation going on.
-
Interesting.
Are Strykers any more likely to use their machine guns without explicit targeting orders? At least in 1.03, they seem a bit slow to do so, even if they have plenty of ammo, no other orders (targeting or otherwise), and spotting on a fleshy-but-dangerous target (like an RPG team with their 500mm Circle o' Death).
-
It would be fairly bizarre to be able to 'see' cover arcs from opposing units -- facing, yes, but cover arcs?
-
An M-388 Davy Crockett might be perversely amusing, but probably not more than once.
-
Note that just because the command exists for both the vehicle and the passengers does not mean that it covers the crew -- just like Disembark, it could mean the difference between unbuttoning for all passengers (selected by vehicle), or individual teams (selected by team).
-
MGS? It'll only fire one HE shot per target-area order. Cancel + retarget. Reason -- low ammo count, so you may not want the TacAI firing and reloading for 60s.
-
Oh, yup. 12x air assets (if memory serves) will tend to do that...
-
Underneath the building?
Playing around with all the air support in the 'Warlords in a Barrel' user-gen scenario, using 'heavy' fire missions, I've seen quite a few leveled buildings surrounded by crater... but with the building wreckage at its original level (as if on a dirt pedestal, basically). Never saw building wreckage pushed downwards -into- a crater.
-
Hmm. Is spotting doctrine -- well, who's allowed to call in support fire -- dictated by unit type, or by the side nominally in control of the joint force?
-
Another thread has some graphic examples of odd movement and spotting problems involving infantry.
There's the case of a completely stationary soldier perhaps 1-2m behind an enemy ATGM team, aware of an enemy presence (question mark contact) there, who hasn't actually spotted them.
There's also a report of a Syrian soldier who Hunt'd past 2 Bradleys 8-10' away from him without noticing. Seems there might be some remaining weirdness here...
-
I don't see any shadows, so maybe it's just a really dark room, or they've all learned how to cloud mens' minds.
-
Even with Hunt... there's a problem if the TacAI won't recognize a vastly superior force/position and have the Hunt(ers) shift into a position that'd increase cover/concealment, or even completely block LOS.
Ex. if your dismounts are Hunting through an intersection, and newly-revealed enemy seems to be an HMG team on the 6th floor of a building 300m away, stopping and returning fire might be less reasonable than diving for cover. Even more so if it's a T-72 that comes recklessly barreling down a parallel street with its turret pointed appropriately, or if it's the building you're Hunting towards turns out to be an enemy strongpoint.
-
If memory serves, the game manual strongly encourages selecting a FIST or JTAC (for art/air respectively) in an FSV for best accuracy and speed.
OTOH... didn't one of the YTC training scenario briefings say to select the FSV itself, and not the FO? Might be remembering it wrong.
If your FIST or JTAC is carrying LLDR gear, and there's a location with very good LOS to areas that you really want to smash, from a reasonably safe distance... well, no LOS == no impact right now. 'tho the mission isn't canceled if you lose LOS to the target area.
One related bit that probably should be tested is whether multiple simultaneous targets impacts accuracy or speed. It would seem reasonable that they would -- at least, if they're not hitting essentially the same target.
-
If somebody else has LOS to the target unit, not such a big deal -- target choice is retained, at least for a while, because the alternative is a target order getting canceled and the unit possibly doing something stupid every time a targeted unit drops out of sight.
If it's violating FOW because there's also nobody else that can see it, and you're therefore getting information that couldn't otherwise be obtained -- then it'd seem there's a problem.
-
If we're talking about playing more cautiously... what would be a reasonable amount of time to clear an airfield the size of Ash Shammas on, say, Elite/1.03, w/o being gamey and taking advantage of knowledge from previous attempts?
-
In the past. It's included with the demo.
-
Oh, that explains it. Heh.
Does seem to be impossible for Red to get -any- points, at least if the three designated targets are killed -- not hard given the firepower. I don't recall any objectives even listed as failed, so perhaps it's impossible for Red to get points...
No need for Blue to even attempt to escape. Only possible hitch is if one of the technicals spots the HQ closest to the road -- possible, rare, but possible.
If we wanted to pressure Blue more...
- give Red points for spotting Blue forces
- give Red points for actually killing any Blue
- give Blue more points for controlling the exit spot
- give Red a starting bonus, to pressure Blue to actually complete the mission and bug out
- perhaps Blue should have a JTAC, somebody with LLDR, or both
-
Unlimited time would eliminate what would often be a fairly important constraint on the attacker -- particularly on Blue Force, which often gets the ammunition to be painfully methodical if it only had the time. Check the machine-gun ammon on the Strykers, for instance.
I wouldn't mind scenario authors having the option to set different time limits based on FOW/difficulty, 'tho; as they affect pacing, a scenario that's meant to have very little spare time with reasonable careful play in Veteran may require reckless abandon in Elite.
-
It would probably be easier to have a simple event log -- ex.Originally posted by KAding:You know what would be ideal. RT with replay functionality. The game should keep a cache of the last minute of the battle. While paused you could then rewind a bit to see what happened.
But somehow I doubt this will ever be implemented.
'{time}: X killed by {rpg?} from {Y, maybe unknown} at {Z}'
with some clickable items to take you to the location of the target, or the location of the shooter if known.
'{time}: {x} made first contact, spotting enemy at {y}'
or so forth
Buffer last N 'important' events, probably simpler than trying to rewind the math or buffer the last x-seconds worth of state, and might be enough to preserve the essential information.
I'd also consider reinforcements message-log-worthy, as right now they don't arrive with orders and they're fairly easy to miss if things happen to be busy.
-
Do you have the Javelin CLU as well? If you have the CLU, at least one Javelin missile, are dismounted, aren't too close and aren't too far (neither of which is a problem in the training mission setup), you should be able to give a normal target order and they'll get to it.
Mind you, in-game if there's enough of a target you might not even need to give the target order.
-
Hm. If I were a dev, I would have been severely tempted to embed an Easter Egg in the starmap at some point.
-
Interesting. Entertaining. One fairly likely to elicit a "Noooooooooo!" scream.
Noted that briefing seems to caution against collateral damage, but there doesn't seem to be any 'preserve building' points...
-
Show All Waypoints defaults to Alt-P; only visible when a unit (any unit) is selected.
Results in the interesting case where you may not have awareness of the locations of other units, but you have full awareness of their move orders.
Edit -- might be any friendly unit; I didn't check with hostiles. I haven't edited my keymap at all.
WEGO, RT and the blue bar that gets no lovin'...
in Combat Mission Shock Force 1
Posted
On a related... tangent... of idle thought,
...would it be possible to go the other direction, and voluntarily run through action (in RT) at slower-than-realtime? This might be useful in particularly complicated situations, so the user isn't quite as hampered by reaction time, without the stutter of rapid pause/scroll/unpause cycles.
Might also be more pleasant than full pausing in MP, as long as it's done in intervals of some length, perhaps limiting the total amount of slow-time per game. I'd prefer to let the MPers judge whether or not it'd be useful for MP, 'tho.