Caesar

Sorry, I forgot to mention - this was the demo

Overall, I like the game, it is a lot of fun. It is quite the challenge after the previous CM series. Modern firepower is stunningly effective after the WWII stuff. I think (I could be wrong here - it might have been misidentified) I killed a T72 with 80mm mortars. I was a tad disappointed with the effectiveness of the Javelins though, my guys missed with every shot they fired so far (though that could be something to do with the fact that half the squad had been shot up by the tank they were shooting at - maybe it it hard to aim when your pants a full of excrement ). Evidently Steve was not lying when he said charging in with Strykers relying on speed was a mistake; the explosions were pretty cool though. The M1A1s look amazing be they moving, shooting or just sitting there. They are pretty good at killing stuff too Can their turrets really rotate that fast; the gunner must need a seat belt to hold them down. The game is however, a long way from perfect; in fact in some respects it feels more like a beta than a final release. The positives; - The arty system is fantastic. It is really easy to set up and you can do a lot with it. - The sound is probably the best I have heard in any game. - The explosions are great - The animations of both men and vehicles are very well done (the wheels do disappear into the terrain a bit at times but I can live with that. - The graphics are reasonable, the details are good, the terrain passable (my rig is pretty weak so it is probably better on better rigs) - The AI is at least as good as anything else on the market that I have played and at times better. - The game is great fun and I suppose this is the main point. The negatives; - The camera control is just awful. I have played a lot of different games in lots of different formats, and this system is just not good enough. Yes I can make it work but that does not make it good - The detail textures (grass & small bushes) stay the same colour regardless of the lighting. - Path finding at times is a bit odd - The tabbed GUI control system is clunky and awkward (not sure how else to do it but it's still clunky). The interface overall, is not terribly intuitive. Most games I have played I can pick up pretty easily but this one you need to read the manual to get any idea of how to play it. - Tool tips are missing - Quite a few bugs; crashes and some other graphics oddities.

It was the whole screen.

I have a screen shot and a save game if you need it. It does not happen all the time but when I selected an enemy unit the whole screen flashed bright (in time with the enemy's flashing icon??? I think so because it fades to and from bright but am not certain). My system is; XP Home edition SP2 AMD Athalon 64 3000+ 1 GB RAM GeForce 6600GT 128MB RAM The game hung the first two times I tried to run it but it seems fine now and I have since then had no more problems. Let me know if you want the files

Sixxkiller, How would you rate the AI (both tactical & strategic) compared with the earlier versions of CM. Is it harder to defeat now (once you are used to all the differences between the games of course).

Excellent - that is much more how I assumed it to be. I am really looking forward to this feature. A couple more questions; The trigger man can be detected but can the IED itself? Does the trigger man have to have LOS to the IED (this kind of makes sense as how else could he know when to trigger it)

MikeyD You say the AI handles the placement and time the IED, can you at least give it the rough location. I would have thought that one of their primary uses would be to add a bang to an ambush; to help stun and panic the victims. Is this possible or can you not use them for coordinated attacks?

Perhaps it costs you victory points to use artillery so you are not going to want to. The same reverse logic could apply to getting units too. You can have them but there is a major downside to losing them. The US forces will be so much more powerful than the Syrian forces anyway - will more matter?

Looks like a nice simple quick arty interface - I am most impressed. Getting all the details in while not making it a bind to use has to be a bit of a challenge. A couple of questions; Did you draw a region on the map as the target area - it was a bit hard to tell what was happening there. Are the collapsed building graphics final or is there going to be more in the way of wreckage remaining. I can understand why you would just collapse the building all in one go - PCs have their limitations but the lack of rubble doesn't look too good.

Does anyone know if they are going to include those remote control planes with camera's on them. I saw a program on them on TV some time back and got the impression that they were either available now at company level or soon would be. Seems to me that they would give a huge advantage to the US forces.

Can't see this happening. Just imagine how much animation work would be required - that alone will eliminate it. Then they introduce all the AI work required to get the vehicles to do this at the right time without overdoing it and getting themselves blown up. Yes I agree that there are events like this in real life but consider the Iraq war (and aftermath if you like) - what percentage of the dead and wounded (both sides) were the result of a vehicle deliberately running them down. Seems like far too much work to do for the benefits.

I suspect that when this game was first announced that they thought that they could deliver it waaay before now and that some pretty major hiccup has occurred that has slowed it down ... lots. Give the guy a break, there are only so many ways he can tell you that it is not ready and that he is trying his best to rectify the situation. It could be a lot worse, he could pull an all too common stunt in the software industry and just release it, problems and all. When I bought HOI it took four patches before I worked out how to exit the program - I never needed to prior to the last patch that I bothered downloading, it would crash before I was ready to shut it down. It still sits there on my shelf, gathering dust - I should just use it as a coaster, it is not much use for anything else. Maybe he should just post something saying that the delays are going to be quite long, but then he risks losing all attention for the game - seems like a lose lose set of choices to me.

Excellent looking grass movement. The movement looks very natural. The tree movement looks a little off to me, though I suspect that if the branches and trunks sway a bit that will fix most of the problems. Is there any chance of getting another one with the camera panning around some so that I can see the LOD popping effects. The popping totally ruined Oblivion for me, it looked ridiculous and my rig is pretty reasonable.

Where do you live, on a billiard table? Most of the world is neither perfectly flat nor totally uncluttered. The ground rises and falls, and for a man lying down, even an irregularity of a few inches reduces the probability of being hit. Add in the occasional stump or moderate-sized boulder and you begin to have some modest degree of cover. Not great, but not negligible either. If on top of that there is tall grass that makes it hard to see a lying or crouching man, hitting him with aimed fire becomes noticably problematical. </font>

Rune, how accurate is that list. From what I can see the Syrian equipment does not seem to be being updated at all, in fact it is getting cut back if anything. Yet I recall reading of their purchasing new equipment.

If you could run the demo then why can you not run the full game. I fail to see the difference. If they have changed the policies between times then there is little you can do about it - after all, that is one of the purposes of those policies

I was having some problems first when I tried resupply (things had been going quite well up until that point) and everything kept freezing and the graphics were glitching - the terrain was at times not being rendered and the Skybox below was showing with the terrain objects (rocks etc) hovering in mid air. This cleared itself after a while and I continued to play. After I died I switched to some other games. The first one I had a problem where I told it to drop my main battle tank (forgot the name of it) on the wall and it tipped over and blew up (cool effect BTW). Problem was I would have expected that it should have declared me the idiot I undoubtedly was and continued. It didn't, it glitched (as above) a few times and I switched to yet another game. In this one I dropped in ummm unfortunate positions and was promptly killed. I dropped again, died again, dropped again, killed someone and then the game crashed. Hope all that helped. My PC is an Athlon 64, 1GB RAM, Geforce 6600 Gt 128Mb RAM. I am on an ADSL connection servicing only my one computer. If you need any more info, log files or whatever just post here. I will watch this thread. Now for some general comments. Cool game - lots of fun. The graphics are better in the game than in stills though probably not quite state of the art nowadays. They are certainly adequate for the game. I didn't read any manuals or the like, I just dived in and played so take all comments with this in mind. It was rather confusing at first and some parts were not all that intuitive. I have already read comments on how the servers not automatically refreshing was confusing - I agree, I assumed I was not connected. There have been times where I tell the tank to turn and it is inconsistant in how fast it turns - I assume this is network lag (though I was driving a Hurricane at the time so maybe some of it was the drive mechanism - don't really know). My ping times were around 250 when I connected but as I am in NZ and connection is only 128/256 some of the problems could be attributed to my connection - not sure of the demands of the system. I found the red target arrows showing through the hills and over the horizon to be confusing. I wasted a lot of shots at first until I realised that I couldn't target them. On the other hand, you obviously need to show them somehow so I don't know that you can do anything about that anyway. At the moment, I am not interacting with my team at all (to be honest I don't know how anyway) as I am a bit overwhelmed. I will be interested to see how this aspect works out as I get more familiar with things. Now back to the game...

The dynamic lighting that they have promised us will give a much better idea of the undulations in the terrain. I suspect that the LOS tool will actually be much less necessary than in CM1 as things will often be quite obvious.

The casualty evac may be abstracted somewhat by your losing more than one man for each casualty (to simulate that man's having to help out his buddy).

I like the dynamic objectives idea. Make the trigger for the objective changing quite flexible so that it could be triggered on turn, casualties, gaining control of a flag/position/whatever, taking prisoners, achieving the first objective etc. Another scenerio type I would like would be a fighting withdrawl. The scenerio designer would set some constraints to decide how it would be scored. E.g; Exit the map (or retreat beyond a marked line or into a designated zone) losing no more than X casualties (whether or not the player gets to know the casualty limit is up to the designer) Exit the map within X number of turns (or after no less than X number of turns) losing minimal casualties etc. Again, whether the player gets to know 'X' is up to the designer. I wonder if they can provide a set of objective types, a set of possible constraints and free text orders, this way allowing the scenerio designer the maximum flexibility in coming up with what he/she wants. Working that in with the dynamic objectives could be an interesting little problem.

Is that 122mm shell solid shot or does it have an explosive component. If it is a straight momentum calculation, for it to make sense it would need to be a solid projectile that hit straight on. I don't think in that case you can use anything so simple as a straight momentum calculation. A 50 gallon barrel would weigh either 190 or 225 kg (depending on which gallon measure you use) which is a mighty large man. I assume the barrel was not full which might make the water surge idea make sense.

Well I did try to make allowances for my lack of real knowledge in this area. The rationale (however right or wrong) was that killing huge numbers of enemy for virtually no loss will not be reported as the excellence of the US forces but rather is more likely to be reported as 'US forces killed over 200 Syrians while rescuing their downed pilot' or some such similar tripe. This sort of report can play out quite badly to those sitting at home with nothing more dangerous than a rather vicious looking pair of toe nail clippers in the near vicinity. It would similarly play out badly on Arab TV. Unfortunately, despite the impressive media technology available, the accuracy and objectivity standards of the modern media are appallingly low. Now that would be cool. That is far more selective than I would have expected. I hope you guys can get that to work.

I don't think that it need remove most of the complexity. - Suffering a points penalty for property damage (particularly for holy sites) - Restricting area fire weapons (Arty/Air etc) to areas within an arc of known enemy or if not restricting it, they could put a risk of points loss due to unseen civilian losses (the restriction is a better idea IMO) - Use of certain weaponry could (depending on the scenerio) cause an automatic points loss (those seen as excessive force). This would give the US forces realistic firepower available but a strong incentive not to use it. - They could even possibly include the option of penalising excessive enemy casualties so that being 'too successful' is also a bad thing. I am not too sure how realistic this one would be though. It sounds like an ok idea when sitting here in a nice safe place, that inflicting massive enemy casualties may give your forces the reputation of being brutal etc but I don't really know enough to judge.

Steve, Can I get some clarification on how success will measured in CMSF then. Will success be measured simply in terms of points accrued/lossed by casualty counts and controlled areas? Will there be penalties applied for damage to buildings and in particular building such as Mosques etc or will such damage instead change the fanaticism/motivation of the Syrian forces? Will U.S. forces be penalised more heavily for casualties than the Syrian forces (over and above the inherent troop values I mean)? As far as the example in this thread goes, viewed simplistically, it appears to me that it was a U.S. victory as the U.S. forces appeared to achieve their aims for minimal casualties while inflicting a fair number of casualties. If say, the use of the JDAMs accrues a penalty then I suppose it could be viewed differently. I have been following the boards fairly consistantly and I have not seen any details on this subject - is it yet to be decided? If so, the general theme of how you are approaching this would do.

Will the demo run on .Net 2.0 yet?