GreenAsJade

Great post, full of gems. Thanks!

I really goofed using the word "imbalanced" actually. I'm glad womble could see what I mean: he expressed it well. I meant that CMBN games are likely to deliver extreme, rather than closely fought results. This is not what balanced means at all, mea culpa. A scenario that delivers extreme results can be balanced! IE it's balanced because each side has an equal chance of winning.... it's just that when one side wins, they win with much more of a decisive victory than with CMAK. Howver stoex observed something really relevant: I think that this is a very very likely explanation for a large part of what we are seeing. So we can say "yep, you guys are experiencing much more extreme results right now: guess what, this is what happens when less experienced people play. So hang in there, learn to play the game, and play it with others who have learned, and the battles will become closer". That's probably a lot true. I can't help thinking that CMBN has factors that make things more extreme - the inability to escape being one that's been observed, and the lack of cover prevalent in many maps being another. And longer games being another. Well, it sounds like many of these things will improve with time, it will be interesting to watch the stats GaJ

I wasn't saying "CMBN games are unbalanced". No-one could support a generalisation like that. Neither was I saying CMBN games can be unbalanced. Obviously they can. What I _was_ saying, and backing up with data, is that it appears that CMBN games TEND TO BE MUCH MORE unbalanced than CMAK. All other things being equal, with CMBN you get an extreme result way more often. IE given a set of 80 random pairings of players, which presumably include some mismatches and some close matches, the outcome tends to be more towards the extremes than the middle. This is the opposite of what appears to be the case with CMAK: even with a random spread of players, a large pool of CMAK games tend to deliver closely fought results, with decisive outcomes being far more rare. Therefore, I don't think this is about "trying to match player skill levels". I think its about "overall", with a random mix of skill levels. What we can see is that _despite_ a random mix of skill levels, CMAK delivers closely fought matches. That for me is a "good experience" - which makes me keenly interested to hear opinions why CMBN is not like this and what can be done about it. GaJ

... I just read about how trees need an appropriate ground tile to go with them to provide decent cover. http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=100109 This adds up with the experience that I'd had that lots and lots of the time, maps have trees with no cover-giving-ground-tile, making the treed area really poor for cover. Combine that with the fact that there isn't much other cover either, and it makes life really hard! So if you're making a map with trees, please give some cover GaJ

Yeah - its great. It's just that it seems that there's a _lot_ of maps out there with trees and no cover providing undergrowth... ... how easy is it to recognise the "good cover" stuff? GaJ

The strange thing is that I was expecting the victory system in CMBN to deliver _more_ balanced results, assuming that scenario designers use it in a way that you can score points even if you loose men. It doesn't seem to work that way as much as I thought! GaJ

Man, I'm glad to hear this sort of explanation. If this is really the case, it'd be great to have a decent post explaining it in the Scenario Design forum. It's so wierd having "forests" that provide cover only where the visible tree trunks are, and yet only one tree trunk per action tile. How is a squad supposed to take cover all behind one tree?? GaJ

If we take an observation, like "CMBN results in more unbalanced results", then one thing is clear: some people will think it's a problem and some will think it is not. This is simply a matter of opinion. Especially in this particular case, I find if of little interest. I know that some people will like it when every game is a "grind the opponent into the dust". I know that I prefer tightly contested matches. So for me, an interesting discussion is whether the observation itself is true or not. Is it the case that CMBN battles really are by their nature going to be more imbalanced? And also - suppose they are, and you're in the group that see it as a problem, what could we do about it? If you agree that they're more imbalanced by the nature of the game, that's interesting. Beyong that, if you don't think it's a problem, then ... that's your opinion, you won't be interested in the discussion about what to do about it GaJ

Yeah, that's for sure! I don't think disparate sample sizes is itself a problem. If there were 1000 CMBN games and 1,000,000 CMAK games, the comaprison would still be useful. The question is whether the "small size" in absolute terms of the CMBN data is "too small". A small size, in absolute terms, of the CMBN data set would certainly limits its usefulness. But there are 80 games in there: that's not ridiculously small. After 80 games, we can see that the "apparent trend" is for at best a flat distribution, maybe even favouring extreme results over even ones. How many games would you want to see in the data-set before you started to thing that this result is statistically significant? I'm no mathemetician... but it seems to me that after 80 games, having 30+ of them with an 80% plus winning margin seems like a lot. All the information is available at WeBoB Statistics Database. You need an account, which comes with WeBoB membership. In very broad terms, these 80 games consist of the scenarios chosen for the H2H games that the WeBoB members have played since CMBN came out. They are a mixture of scenarios and QBs. Is there any other relevant "characterisation" or statistic that would add to your understanding? GaJ

This latter idea doesn't ring so true to me. It seems to me that the decisive victories are happening where the attacker can gain the VP _and_ go on to wipe out the defender. So something needs to offset this "opportunity" to "get all the points". I could be wrong, but one feeling I have is that once you've lost some ground and your opponent knows where you are, it's hard to survive. There's so little real cover. So if you're on the back foot, you're on the road to total wipeout... it seems hard to "be fighting a brave hard-fought back foot defence". Just my experience so far... it does seem like a shorter game length would go a ways to redressing... GaJ

That's a good point. Suppose this was the "only" factor. What should we do about it? I'm coming from the point of view that I don't really enjoy decisive battles. I want a close-fought battle. I guess others are like this too? From this vantage point, does it mean that in fact CMBN games should have their length shortened, so that it's harder to get the objective and have time left over to wipe out the other guy as well? It might be as simple as that! GaJ

Add to that the problem that forests often seem to provide suprisingly little cover. I'm not sure if this experience is just because I haven't encountered a "proper forest" yet, but any treed area I've had forces in has trees quite widely spaced apart, to the extent where the cover they provide seems incidental: bullets whiz around and guys die all over the place!

CMx1 was infinitely better in this respect because even when you clicked on the unit you did _not_ find out what it is. CMx1 had fog of war for unit identification, with units having variable appearance on the 3D landscape depending on how they were identified, and it had visible unit bases. CMx1 also had scalable 3D models, so you could see what every unit is by looking at its 3D model even at high camera angles. Icons and any other accesories were not necessary. CMBN unfortunately has none of these, which is a large part of the reason we end up focussing on icons. GaJ

This is what I thought, too. So I was expecting CMBN to be _more closely fought_, rather than having apparently more binary outcomes. I reckon this, combined with scenario design "inexperience" is surely a contributing factor. But I also have a suspicion that the current mechanics of CMBN are contributing. In my limited experience, the CMBN battlefied seems way more harsh. There is just hardly any cover anywhere. This appears to mean that the guy who spots the other guy's bulk of force first and manages to shoot at them gets rolling advantage. Once you're on the back foot, there's no-where to hide... GaJ

Thanks for pointing out the bleeding obvious. What is your point? Do you think that despite annecdotal evidence in this direction, tabling some actual data, scanty as it is, is a bad move? Or maybe you'd like an actual conversation here in the forum where we converse about CMBN and our experience with it?? I happen to think it's interesting. Are you willing to hazard an opinion about what the trend will be as more data points come? Do you think that scenario designers will get better, and that this will deliver a better percentage of close-fought matches? Do you think that scenario designers are fine, and we're just looking at a random small sample? GaJ

My sense, so far, has been that there are fewer closely fought battles in CMBN. You either win decisively or loose disasterously (generalisation) has been my impression. I thought y'all might be interested in some stats from We Band Of Brothers game database: http://gregories.net/bobster/bobster.cgi?function=scenario-spread-histogram GaJ

Oh, what a video! I can't even tell you what that looked like to me!!

There's probably not enough room, horizontally, for icons all at the top? That's why there are those little arrows Does anyone use them? I can't recall ever looking at them... maybe they help RT play? GaJ

Not a bad thought. Not sure if it's really an issue though GaJ

The first couple of lines in the log window tell you where it is. Cheers, GaJ

Texas 'Mac' Toast just posted 1.2.3 Alpha for Mac, which (fingers crossed) fixes the performance issue., 1.2.3 Alpha also brings (for Mac and PC) the much-requested "Tidy Up Dropbox" option. If you CMSF dropboxes are fully of old files and you turn this option on, it will take a little while to run the first refresh, while it tidies up all those files. If you regret tidying them up, you should find them in your Trash/RecycleBin. 1.2.3 also has bug-reporting feature, under "Help". Enjoy! TT GaJ

Actually, I never really need this for my own units: it's always spotting/following/planning about enemy units that this trips me up... GaJ

I agree with you. In fact, I noticed another thing, which is that if you stay at a certain camera level, and "calibrate", then the funkiness goes away, similarly if you "concentrate" on thinking about "what height are the icons". Once I've deliberately made myself aware of this, I can use them. While the feeling lasts. I want to add that the purpose of the icons is (IMHO) secondarily about being able to select the units. It's primarily about being able to see "what is where" _because there is no other solution for this_. So the "where" is very important. In another thread somewhere, Steve said "users should not focus on proposing solutions, they should just say what they want from the game, and let BFC figure out the solution". This is fair. What I want is to be able to reliably tell where all the units are that I see (or hear). The problem that I experience with the current implementation is that this is not the case: I find it difficult to reliably tell where units are based on the cues I am given (which is almost solely the icon). One solution would be to leave the icons where they are and provide visible bases Ooops, there I go again, proposing solutions! GaJ

Ooops, I meant Veteran GaJ

An interesting "solution" that hadn't crossed my mind. I have to say I find it hard to picture, visually ... so I can't guess whether it would really help: I find it hard to picture in a way that it would help I also find it hard to picture the issue of "icons going behind things" being a problem. For a start, they don't go "behind" trees, see the Level1 screenshot above. Secondly, at the critical levels of 4 and 5, there is very little for them go "behind" in a way that they could disappear. They are bigger than most obstacles. If a prototype of "lower icons" could easily be done, my sense is that it might "just work". Maybe even better if icon height is a function of camera angle (I can't quickly tell if it is or not), and only levels 3-5 might be affected. My guess is that simply having them lower might be better, though at the same time I can see that surely various heights have already been tried and the current was found optimum by someone at some point. I suspect that more experience might just be telling is that this old judgement needs to be revised. Its very likely that early tests were done more with low camera angles, where the glorious graphics are most attractive, and focusssed less on the more useful play-angles of 3-5. GaJ