Steiner14

Are tiny turret heights (i.e. PzIV) reflected in adequate low hit probabilities when the tanks are hull down?

No flamethrowers: does that mean no Sdkfz 251/16 (and other flame-throwing vehicles), too?

Would it be complicated to implement an artifical (low standing) "sun", that can be activated with a hotkey?

Yes and therefore Fliegerleitoffiziere drove with tanks on the battlefield. You even confuse a preplanned attack on a big city, that was guided from the LW-HQ behind the lines, with an supportive ground attack guided from a Fliegerleitoffizier on the battlefield. Incredible.

One of the key features of Blitzkrieg is the combination of land and air forces in a combined tactical attack. Have you never heard about "Fliegerleitoffiziere" placed within tanks engaged in tactical combat? They were directing Stukageschwader for close tactical support from within the battlefield. What else is CAS?

Hoho. I suggest you inform yourself about German Blitzkrieg-tactics and the role of the Luftwaffe in this concept, especially of the Stuka JU87...

Decoupling rarity points from "power" points is very clever and elegant. Wow.

This is Steve posting here up top. I did something I've never done before... I hit the EDIT button and composed my response instead of hitting QUOTE and making a new post. This resulted in me accidentally wiping out Steiner14's post. Sorry about that Stiner14!! If you have a better copy of this please post. Otherwise accept my humble reconstruction attempt. All of unquoted parts are word for word what Steiner14 wrote (they were quoted in my response), though I might have lost a sentence or two. All the quoted pieces are from my previous post and I think I got the right parts put into the right places. ------ You say it all the time, that i don't understand it. I don't like your kind of discussing with strawmans. Your post was about putting into readers mind, that i'm not capable to understand the superiority of CMx2 and that i were just writing about liking or not liking. You didn't even touch the aspect of fantasy as part of the sucess of CMx1. But how is that possible, if CM:SF sells much better than CMx1? No, it is just one aspect that fills the picture. As another argument you can take the forum itself and compare how the discussions have changed from CMx1. The forum, even years after release, was full with excitement, of what was happening in the game. Gamers were reporting, as if they were there themselves. All this has vanished - in quantity and in quality. But i fully admit, that your sales raised. Again a strawman. I fully accept, that you don't share my opinion. My initial post was about nothing else, that you have a complete different vision of where you want to develop the game and i tried to show the differences and where the psychological reasons are. And i'm also not bitter at all, since i'm glad i don't spend time for gaming anymore. But i do like to come back from time to time and check, if CM:N is out already, since i will give it definately a try.

Steve, i know, that we, who think that CMx2 has lost the magic that CMx1 had (which is not the same thing as saying that CMx2 were a bad game), are from yesterday and not intelligent enough to recognize it. But if that were true, why isn't CMx2 used in the wargaming community for turnaments, ladder-gaming and huge campaigns like CMx1 was used?

BF is convinced, that more realism transforms into a better game. IMO that is not true and is one of the core mistakes of their development decision for 1:1 representation. I will try to support this with facts: The human player is not a machine, but a human with feelings - and IMO most importantly - fantasy. So a good game is much more about the impression being created on the player's mind, and less if there is pure realism delivered on the screen (or board, or something else). I don't know what all the details are, that have taken the magic away. But i'm quite sure, it has to do with the player's fantasy not being activated that much anymore. Therefore i think the, not perfect, 1:1 representation has a lot to do with it. Why? I suspect it's better, before you show something that doesn't really look sound and realistic, it's better not to show it at all and instead offer something to the player, that his fantasy will be forced to fill the gap in a natural way. But even if you can deliver something that looks very good and realistic, it still could be better, NOT to show it. Very educational in that regard are movies and the process of their creation. What can stay in the script, and what must be taken out? Even the very best scenes often enough fall victim to the cutter. Directors can love them and actors be proud of them. But if i.e. the rhythm or the speed is negatively influenced, they are deleted. That's why most sucessors of movies can't reach the first part, since they are an extrapolation of what worked in the first part: increase the dose of what people liked in the first movie. Increase the budget for more blood, increase the action, increase the dose of sex. And the result is nevertheless - worse. Back to games: The magic is - even more than in movies - not happening on the screen, but on the players mind. And when CMx1 was developed, they had to aim - because of available computer power and no alternatives - all the time at the imagination on the players mind! Maybe they tried to create realism, but in fact they created a magically working abstraction! BF was FORCED by the technical conditions, to develop something abstract, that will activate player's fantasy. So their focus was (maybe subconsciously) much more about the impression in players mind, and not about realism behind the hood of game mechanics, than they have been realizing. Therefore i'm extremely sceptical, that the ever increasing processing power, will ever translate into a "better" CM-series. In fact i think the available processing power will lead the development away from what made CMx1 such an incredible game. The magic will never come back, as long as they don't recognize, the magic of CMx1 did not come from it's realism, but from the impression it created on the player's mind. And there is another extremely important psychological human aspect, they should be aware of: A extremely well working nice fantasy creates always the will, to increase the impression of it. That's natural. If the abstraction of soldiers just works in a magical way, like it did in CMx1, it's natural and logical, that the player wants more of that "realism" and also for the developer, if he wants to be a realistic as possible and if the thinks, that was the key of the original's success. It's similiar to a beautiful women in a bikini. It's the impression in the head, that makes you wanna see more. But it's key, not to deliver the demand... What is the most common and natural conclusion with abstracted soldiers in a magically working game? More realism, more details, less abstraction! Put that bikini off! That's what the crowd wanted. That's what BF wanted, because their target is as much realism as possible. Because they don't know, that the magic of CMx1 was not it's unprecedented realism of tactical warfare. It's definately no shame not to recognize that and it too me very long to recognize it, too. Most authors and developers fail to recognize what was the real key of their original sucess. The natural answer was: Reduce the abstraction, deliver more on the screen, make everything "more realistic". Humans are not machines. I'm sure games do not work because of realism, but because of what they create on the player's mind. Therefore, if you deliver more details, you can nevertheless destroy the magic of the much more simple original. And IMO that happened with CMx2. And as long as they don't recognize that psychological key factors, CMxY will fail even more, since the increasing processor power, let's them put more and more "realism" into the game. And the magic will never come back, because, as i tried to explain in this much too long and time consuming post, it was not there because of the action or realism, but because of that, what wasn't shown.

IMO the discussion shows clearly, where some of the problems are and what the big difference to CMx1 is: In CMx1 the outcome had priority. How does the player receive, what is presented? Only the result mattered. That it was achieved with not so beautifully engineered software, often enough with hacks, made it ugly for the developers over the time. But what counts for the customer is the result, not what's going on behind the hood. In CMx2 they lost this focus, due to the much superior engine they created. Now they pay much more attention to the technical internals of the game. So their focus moved from the pure result, the outcome, to the internals. The outcome you describe cannot be that bad, since we use such an advanced model... If the player notices a strange behaviour, he exaggerates the problem, because he doesn't honor the engine enough. Now the player has the wrong focus. While in CMx1, due to the abstraction, player's fantasy had to compensate game limitations, this no longer is the case in CMx2. Here you see all details and if you notice that something simply doesn't work as the representation suggests, there is no room to explain the problem with fantasy. As a player, who is interested in the tactics, not the individual soldiers, I think it was not a good decision to give up the abstraction concept. How much energy and development time have the problems due to the 1:1 visualization consumed, that could have been spent on tactical depth? On gameplay issues? And additionally it destroyed the magic of CMx1: the players fantasy automaticallyy kicked in and compensated for the visuals, that were NOT shown. CMx1 was a beautiful woman in a bikini - while CMx2 is a porn actrice.

I don't know what a neo-nazi wants or what you believe that a neo-nazi wants. What i want is very clear: an army that defends Germany. Afghaistan did not plan to attack Germany nor did it threaten Germany. Very simple. In this forum are all the time much worse remarks made, without any problems, as long as they are aimed against certain groups. So don't hide behind forum rules. That's hypocritical. You just want to make me shut up because you don't share my opinion. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. (George Orwell)

Interesting photos. Especially the second one. Please, stop calling units of mercenaries GERMAN ARMY. They are payed HiWis for USrael, nothing else.

That was a major bone. And most probably great nows for everyone interested in the Ostfront. What i'm asking myself now: is it technically possible with the base of CMx2 to bring out "final" family-games, that would include all the modules' units, or would the development of such a game be definately way too labour intensive?

Can brigdes be remotely detonated with the appropriate equipment?

Nice bone! The pic looks very promising. But what i miss is undergrowth among the trees. Will it be present and modelled?

For the USA 2000 killed Americans were reason enough to attack Iraq, although Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. For Germany the murdering of hundreds of Germans, thousands of Germans in Polish concentration camps, the suppression of Germans in the polish occupied land, i.e. Oberschlesien or Danzig and not to forget the military ambitions of the peaceful Poland , that led war with all it's neighbours since 1918 doesn't matter? In point of fact, war was officially declared by world Jewry against Germany on March 23, 1933, a short time after the National Socialists came to power and six and a half years before actual armed conflict. The local German-Polish conflict assumed worldwide dimensions when Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. Curiously, those countries did not go to war against the Soviet Union when it invaded Poland several weeks later, but eventually allied themselves with it despite mass Communist killings at Katyn.

IMO absolutely. The hundreds of murdered Germans and the thousands in polish concentration camps and the tens of thousands Germans under Polish occupation were glad, that that the Wehrmacht finally was coming to help them. That certain forces in Britain and France turned this Polish-German war into a European war, and later, that the same forces in Wall Street turned it into a World War, doesn't change anything of the just and long overdue attack on Poland.

Wrong. You decide, if you offer a simple interface for unit im- and export. But the programmer of the system decides, if he makes it Open Source. Interesting new attitude. And i thought the Quick Battle system is overhauled, because of community requests...

For this problem an elegant and quite simple solution comes into my mind: Just offer a tiny interface for the COMMUNITY to import/export units. PRO 1 + 2: Then let the community do the labour and after some time you will see, what direction is the most popular. PRO 3: The only one who can offer total integration is you anyway. So if you decide that it would be a good deal, you can integrate a system. If you think the effort isn't worth it, let the community play with their own campaign-tools. PRO 4: If a community-tool is outstanding and becomes that interesting for you, just buy it from/with the author. PRO 5 + 6: Every bet that such an interface would also increase sales of the product and - last but not least - increase the life-cycle of the product due to tremendously enhanced long playability due to the meta-campaigns. CON 1: Development time to implement the interface. For a great programmer like Charles this would be an effort of a few hours (testing included).

If inventing the wheel is difficult, why not evolutionize what was there already in the direction of the most common agreement? Why not take the CMx1-campaign-system and put those things in, that were missed most. What seems very important to me for a good campaign system ist the stuff, that is produced for it. Therefore really good test-tools and -options for the campaign-designer should make the overall outcome of a quite limited system better, than a extermely powerful and complex system, that can't be tested and run through in an acceptable amount of time or only by a very small minority of the potential campaign-designers due to the huge amount of testing time that is needed.

And the alternative was? Wait for Day-M and see what happens?

Since it has become extremely silent around CMN, i guess that's a very positive sign: to avoid inflicting the sales of the the recent CMSF-modules, because everyone would start talking about CMN, the forum would be flooded and CMSF would be hurt. Therefore i expect big surprises with CMN.

Still no news about CMN? Where's the - several weeks ago - promised bone (no, not the tiger-pic)?

Thank you Gordon. Hail to you!