GreenAsJade

I'll take a look. Any specific terrain in mind?

About 20 years ago, when I first entered a MUD, I chose that name to signal to the experienced denizens therin that I knew nothing. Since then I've just kept using it My ROW IV results indicate that it's still a pretty good moniker for CM work. Recently, on realising that at my age perhaps I'm no longer as Green as all that, I had started to change to the other internet nick that I have (in much more limited use), but it's suprisingly hard to change! There are lots of places where the hassle/price/impact of changing is high. So it looks like I'll be Green till I die. Cheers, GaJ. (Oh - jade is a very green and hard kind of rock, often used in jewellery and sculpture, if that wasn't clear to non-English people!)

KG - the best you can do is point people to the relevant threads. Otherwise you just have a quote from Steve out of context.

Thanks Carl. I'll have to look into these... after ROW V ! GaJ.

You get enjoyment from the graphical representation of more bodies? I suggest quartering them...they're all doomed anyway....doomed! </font>

Darn, I was going to bribe Cpl Carrot to make sure I was the Yanks in the jwxspoon scenario this time

Yeah - no fair eh? I deliberatly stopped playing you 'cause I was sick of the canings & entered ROW to find some new opponents instead. And now this!!! Argh! I guess I was too slow with my bribe eh?

I hope Steve doesn't mind you quoting him out of context. . </font>

I hope you won't be mistaking moaning about halfsquad usage for entertainment... GaJ. Steve, BFC: "If both sides play with all their squads in halves... it is more even, and in some ways a little more realistic."

And will you also be pre-negotiating all the other gamey things that can be done? No attacking up the sides? No jeep recon? What about Marm-Herr recon? Crew recon? I certainly wasn't expecting there to be a "negotiation phase" before the battle... I'm hoping it wont come to that however as it becomes tedious to the point of boredom having to micro-manage twice as many infantry units than the game designers originally intended. I thought this was a tournament to for people who want play CM. CM has a set of rules. Are we adding more? People who want to play CM usually _like_ giving orders. If you want to minimise your orders time, why don't you play FPS instead? I might split all my squads in two just to give myself double the enjoyment from each battle GaJ. Steve, BFC: "If both sides play with all their squads in halves... it is more even, and in some ways a little more realistic." [ February 03, 2005, 03:32 PM: Message edited by: GreenAsJade ]

I wouldn't worry at all. I'd try to learn from where it works for you and where it doesn't. GaJ -- Steve, BFC: "If both sides play with all their squads in halves... it is more even, and in some ways a little more realistic."

Awesome!! Give us more!!! Thanks!!! GaJ.

Hey, Carl, the original 1000 ways to die was for vs AI only. Yours almost look like they are designed for vs human, though I couldn't find anything to tell me that for sure. Can you clarify... do these fascinating looking random reinforemcent games play well (reasonably balanced) for human vs human? Ta, GaJ.

Oh no! My "Scenario Balance Indicator List" program will have a hard time telling the difference between results for "Our Backs to the Volga" and "Our Backs to the Tiber"!!

In principle I can do anything you ask, it's all just code I'd like to do something that ends up being easy to present and understand in the limited display format that I have available. Can you suggest something specific that would make sense, and that would not result in a massive table of numbers for people to sift through? (I'm also contemplating weighting balance results by player rating disparity.... I may have the player ratings available for each player that participated in each battle. These ratings are only issued once players have 10 results, so they are pretty good. ) GaJ.

Yeah right "out" he said, but came back again eh? "Out" of the sig with the hype would be nice...

Stick it to 'em wiggens.

Can you give the halfsquad thing a rest, Tree? Few if any people will have a 'strategy" of using *all* halfsquads. Plenty (and increasing) people are gonna split squads when there's an advantage to do so. Live with it. It's going to be a real bore if every game/tournament result is peppered with "yeah, but he used halfsquads" GaJ.

I like Phillipe's first suggestion. Elegant. Makes "in command" _really_ mean something to the player who is supposed to be in command. Of course, it does asking for "the unit to be able to keep to the spirit of the original orders" might be tricky for the implementors, but not impossible I would have thought... (J2Ds point about not confusing "player's God view' with "Borg Spotting" is important to keep in mind - don't confuse the two while discussing scounting! Also, I'll pass on the electrodes (maybe literally, if they are implemented ) ) GaJ.

Yeah, who's grass mod is that, anyway? (And isn't using grids gamey?)

So we now know that splitting is an advantage. Even the winner of ROW IV tells us so. No more debate on that one. So what's the problem? The only problem I've heard is Treeburst saying he doesn't want to spent twice the time ordering twice the number of units. The answer is easy: play games with half the points. Everything is back the way it was before, except your infantry units have A and B in their name and 4 and 5 men instead of 9 and 10. GaJ. PS: if you don't like spending time doing orders, why do you play? I thought that "spending time doing orders" is what you do when you play CM!! It's certainly what I do when I play CM ... if you didn't like doing orders, surely you'd be better off playing FPS or somefink?

It's just another piece of information that you now have that you didn't have before about how balanced a scenario might be. It's certainly not definitive. To make that clear, I've changed the topic of this thread to "Scenario Balance Indication List" instead of "Rating List". However, here is a challenge for you, if you don't believe the results. Go look at the force balance ratings that players have subjectively given the scenarios at The Scenario Depot. See how well they match the results reported here. I think you'll find that the level of correlation is suprisingly good for games with far less than 20 played. In fact, so far only a couple of results have stuck out to me as "questionable - needs a closer look". A discussion on other anomalies that you think you can find would be interesting.... In other words, instead of just saying "you don't think these results mean much", how about an example to show why? GaJ.

(forget it)

Nice quote! It's strange how ideas seem to "have their time" ... only a month ago I started experiementing with splitting - I can't remember what triggered me to do so, apart from the idea that having two lines of fire on a target was better than one. It was interesting to see all the historical comments from Steve about the intent of squad splitting. Now we probably just have to wait for a while, let the first rush of half squad experimentation wash over without instantly rushing to abuse an opponent who happens to split a squad, and see if the half squad tactics that we encounter in real battle hurt enough to draw attention too themselves, or whether on balance the negatives that are supposed to be there do actually come through.

Mark, I've sent you a copy (it's "beta" now). McMMM is now supposed to do as close as possible to what you asked, as long as the scenario designer provides the information. McMMM V4 allows the scenario designer to load a set of appropriate mods, then with a click of the button write a file that describes those mods. The scenario designer will then distribute that "Mod Set Description File" along with the scenario file, and the users can use McMMM to load those mods, again with a couple of clicks. Eventually I'd like McMMM to know how to actually find the Mods for you to download if you haven't got them. Right now you have to do that yourself though... McMMM can tell you what you need. GaJ.