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moneymaxx

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Posts posted by moneymaxx

    Will this be in the next patch?

    in Combat Mission Shock Force 1

    Posted

    Couldn't anyone with a radio adjusted to the radar's microwave frequency track and count all Trophy equipped armor from miles and miles off? I'm reminded of those old Star Trek eposiodes "Three Romulan Warbirds detected off our port bow, captian!"

    I guess that you could just switch it off until the tactical situation requires its use. It's a trade off between stealth and protection. If stealth is not an issue (e.g. driving your Merkava through someones front garden) you just leave it on.

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    Things about R.U.S.E that i'll love to see in CMx2 WWII eventually

    in Combat Mission Shock Force 1

    Posted

    One workaround that would enable movies to be made of the whole battle is to allow save games to be loaded up or switched to "Scenario author" mode (with both passwords for PBEM files).

    For the CMx1 engine someone programmed that (using a macro IIRC). It worked but was a little bit cumbersome, therefore I did not use it that much.

    That's the reason I thought it would not be that difficult to implement a slightly more polished version.

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    HMGs in Normandy

    in Combat Mission Shock Force 1

    Posted

    I concur.

    ... I reckon German riflemen will be firing pretty much the same as Garand-wielders and there will be no provision for bringing leichte MG34s and 42s back into action as quickly as possible (i.e., before buddy aid is performed).

    Wouldnt it be better than to rewrite the code of the Tac AI so that every squad, regardless of it's nationality, tries to use its automatic weapon again as quickly as possible ?

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    Command Delay In CM:N?

    in Combat Mission Shock Force 1

    Posted

    I think a command delay is a must, especially for RT not WEGO, not to punish complex orders (since no plan survives the contact with the enemy) but to lower the responsiveness of the units.

    Imagine your tank platoon being ambushed playing in real time, you press pause, order all units to lay indirect fire on suspected enemy positions and retreat. Or imagine your squad being attacked by an mg and you have a tank 1000 meters away, again, you just press pause and order the tank to lay indirect fire on the position of the mg. After you press pause again, all those orders are executed immediately.

    In a modern setting this is somewhat believable due to modern training and communications equipment, command delays are therefore not really an issue and that's why I think that there were not to many complaints.

    In a WWII setting it would seem rather odd. A buttoned up tank platoon of T34 without radios would sometimes not even notice that they are in an ambush since they might a) not see that a tank has been hit and B) have no means of telling the others if they did. To see them stop instantly, return fire and retreat would be highly unrealistic. The tank in the second example most probably would never receive an order to fire at all.

    Therefore IMHO there should be at least some delay in RT especially for indirect fire. In WEGO that's not such a big problem since you have to wait for your turn anyway.

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    CMSF Marines review up at IGN

    in Combat Mission Shock Force 1

    Posted

    Thanks Bigduke6 for the post, now I have to write less because I totally agree.

    - This last is maybe just me, but I think the scenario BFI picked - modern US invasion of Syria - has some serious negative baggage to it. Proably the most difficult bit is that with forces accurately represented (generally) battles are necessarily lopsided, and now matter how you skew things most of the times it's some form of blue attacking red. Plus with one side having M1A2 and Javelin, and the other not, it's alot harder to build a nice balanced scenario than in CM1, where firepower and capacity was roughly similar, just the kit varied somewhat.

    At least there are 2 now :). The scenario limits the tactical choices, for red it's almost exclusively ambush, for blue a simple procedure is successful nearly all the time (equip every squad with javelins and put them on the roofs of the high buildings or hills, wait until all Syrian vehicles are killed and than mop up the rest). The resulting scenarios are "Black Hawk Down" type scenarios or some form of hammering the Syrians. That's fun for a while but gets boring very quickly.

    If you contrast that kind of A/I behavior with something irritating from CMBB, for instance cowering Stalins, it is more or less the same issue (A/I identification and response to a target), but in CMSF because of its narrow scale, and clearer expectations by gamers as to what reasonable simulated behavior is, every little departure from "reality" is amplified to the gamer.

    Good point!

    The only thing I'd add to your post is that the reviewer is quite right about the pathfinding issue. Even after the 1.10 patch it's still bad and the "dance of death" problem has been around since CMx1!

    Personally I think 6,5 is a fair score (My score would be 6, -2 for the setting, -1 pathfinding, -1 a mix of many small things like: UI, can't purchase units in QBs, graphics, firing through ceilings......).

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    LOS, LOF, units, and you!

    in Combat Mission Shock Force 1

    Posted

    Originally posted by iLikeThisGame:

    Does this mean that every unit checks every terrain tile in its field of view, even if it is empty?

    Probably i am simply misunderstanding the explanation.. but if it's like that, aren't all those checks too many? [/QB]

    Same question here, seems to be a huge waste of computing time.
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    The Wrong Left Turn and the Uncanny Valley

    in Combat Mission Shock Force 1

    Posted

    Originally posted by dalem:

    </font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by moneymaxx:

    To wrap this up I'd like to ask why would one want to stick with abstractions if there was perfect 1:1 representation.

    Because unless you're the fire team or squad leader, you're commanding units, not individuals.

    The only way it's gonna work is if you show me individuals but let me not "care" about them, and the only way I'm not going to "care" about them is if their actions and reactions are "reasonable" in the context of the game's output.

    -dale </font>

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    The Wrong Left Turn and the Uncanny Valley

    in Combat Mission Shock Force 1

    Posted

    Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:

    It doesn't necessarily follow that the results would be more "accurate". 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.

    With accurate I was only referring to the combat results not to the visuals. I understand that if we talk about visuals we enter grog country and I dare not to venture there ;) .

    As I said earlier, trying to kill an enemy squad in a heavy building isn't a viable tactic, in CMx1 it was because of limitations of the game engine. In a perfect 1:1 calculation only the soldier being in the LOF of the MG would be killed.

    By saying perfect I mean such things like, no firing through walls, the squad members will, depending on the tactical situation, either engage the unit in full force or search cover inside the building, if ordered to leave the building the squad members will identify and use cover in relation to the perceived threat axis etc..

    Obviously, to succeed in the creation of such a 1:1 system, one would have to program a terribly good TacAI otherwise, I think, we would be better of with abstractions.

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    "Timeouts" for TCP/IP battles?

    in Combat Mission Shock Force 1

    Posted

    There is much debate here about the RT mode and many say that they don't mind because they can pause the game and give orders if its' get too hectic.

    The problem is that in TCP/IP play you can't pause and some fear that the faster mouse-user wins but not the better tactician or that it would limit the tactical options since one hasn't time to coordinate e.g. an attack with 2 battle groups which are far separated on the map.

    Couldn't it be a solution to give each player a limited amount of let's say 1-minute timeouts, that could IMHO overcome most of the above mentioned problems and could even be gratifying (look what I've done to him with my surprise flank attack he's taking his third timeout in a row :D )

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    The Wrong Left Turn and the Uncanny Valley

    in Combat Mission Shock Force 1

    Posted

    Originally posted by GreenAsJade:

    You don't have to have 1:1 representation to corretly model the response that you described of a squad in a building to MG fire on the building.

    It would be interesting to find a concrete example where 1:1 representation gives you something you really can't have in abstract form, must have 1:1, and really do want to have in commanding a company of squads to do its job...

    GaJ

    Before I try to answer I'd like to give another CMx1 example. HQs are very good at killing tanks with just grenades from up to 30 meters. There were threads about this and I think to recall that the reasoning was something like this, the grenade isn't actually thrown but a member of the HQ approaches the tank and places the grenade, it's an abstraction. But that member is never killed if the HQ is in a position where it can't be seen by enemy units even though the approach path to the tank is covered by dozens of enemy units.

    In a perfect 1:1 representation that wouldn't happen (again, at this stage CMSF is IMHO far away from that), one soldier steps out in the open 1 gets probably killed.

    Yes, you could model that in abstract form, one example would be rules (if a unit is in a concrete building and draws unexpected fire from a MG gun then the probability of loosing X squad members in the first 30 seconds is......). But then you would end up with a large list of rules for specific situations in which the abstractions don't work as intended. Like in the above example where there is a mismatch between the LOS abstractions (the HQ in an unspotable location) and the abstraction of the grenade attack (1 member of the unit approaches the tank, should be sighted but retains it's invisibility).

    To wrap this up I'd like to ask why would one want to stick with abstractions if there was perfect 1:1 representation. The combat results would be more accurate, the graphical representation more satisfying and you wouldn't, as a programmer, have to worry so much about the interaction of various types of abstraction.

    I think that CMSF still is far away from the "holy grail" of 1:1 representation/calculation as many threads about TacAI, LOS/LOF etc. show and I really don't know if they can make it work in the future (I hope so), but for me it's the right direction.

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    The Wrong Left Turn and the Uncanny Valley

    in Combat Mission Shock Force 1

    Posted

    I think that 1:1 representation with an underlying 1:1 calculation, in theory, is superior to the highly abstracted CMx1 calculations.

    To make my point clear I'd like to compare CMx1 with a "flawless" 1:1 system (and not CMSF at its present state).

    In CMx1 you could kill an entire platoon in a heavy building (e.g. a church) by MG fire, because the probability to be hit is shared by all members of the squad. But that's not very realistic, most squad members should find perfect cover and while some unlucky guys standing at a window might be killed at the beginning, the rest should be 100% save for the rest of the engagement. CMx1 masks that shortcoming because it takes an insane amount of ammunition to do so and there is no graphical representation of that blunder (What does that squad do? Rotate squad members to an exposed position?).

    A perfect 1:1 system however would simulate that most squad members find cover and further MG fire wouldn't do any more damage then blocking certain spots around windows. The squad wouldn't be entirely killed or routed like in CMx1.

    For me comparing CMx1 and CMx2 is like comparing a matured technology with the possibility for only marginal improvements with a new technology that has much more potential but in its initial installment is inferior (like the first TFTs compared to CRT monitors, the first digital cameras, cars and carriages ....).

    So for me the real question is if battlefront will be able to push the new engine beyond Cmx1, which would require many improvements that have already been mentioned in this thread. E.g.the TacAI must be up to the task to position the squad members according to threats and received information, otherwise all the theoretical advantages of an 1:1 system will be lost.

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    Have Times (and/or Techs) Changed...?

    in Combat Mission Shock Force 1

    Posted

    Originally posted by dynaman200:

    I never will, one of my favorite parts of CM is watching the replays from different vantage points, RT holds no interest for me at all.

    So it seems that the only thing that is missing at this moment is a replay function for the last let's say 90 seconds in RT, since RT is essentially WEGO with variable time-limit. Just pause to give new orders.
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    Annoying bugs and missing functions...

    in Combat Mission Shock Force 1

    Posted

    Originally posted by BlAin:

    -RV Strykers and Humvees do not relay informations to other vehicles in the group.

    It seems they don't even relay info to the troops riding in them. I had a Stryker facing a T72 and I ordered the inf. to disembark to attack it but they couldn't see the T72 (not sure though if the Stryker detected the T72 with some special equipment).
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    CM Lite?

    in Combat Mission Shock Force 1

    Posted

    Originally posted by KNac:

    ... is the repeated false fact that CMx1 TacAI was so great compared to CMSF TacAI.

    I can't see anything false about that fact if I compare the TacAI of CMx1 and CMx2 at its present state.

    I'am not saying that it can't be improved or that it isn't a bug but at this moment for me it's a game breaker (playing only the demo right now).

    Just 2 examples that happened to me:

    - A Stryker sees a T72 and does nothing to evade the threat, it doesn't even use smoke. Well yes sometimes it does something, it attacks the T72 with 0.50 cal. :confused: .

    - A group of 2 T72 detects some Strykers at a distance of 50 meters and they don't attack.

    The result is just laughable. T72s that don't attack standing next to Strykers that don't do anything. If you experience something like this the immersion is instantly gone.

    That being said, I don't think that CMSF is CM Lite. All that was modelled in CMx1 is in CMSF and much more. Relative spotting and the much better arty (the interface is a gem) come to my mind. If anything it's CM Plus.

    The problem is that all those improvements won't be appreciated by some (me :D ) at this point because they are overshadowed by things that need a lot of work still (TacAi, LOS/LOF, UI, weapon bugs...) or are just missing (info screens, a playback function, at least a minute, for RT...).

    But I have faith that they'll manage to improve what is already there and to add some new features (can I have a playback function for RT, pleaaaaaaaaase) which will make CMSF the CM Plus we all hoped for.

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