GreenAsJade

Dietrich posted a new mod at the CM Mods Warehouse: Dietrich's CMBN German voice mod v1.0, by Dietrich Description: This mod omits the quiet/muffled/distorted/fake-shouted stock German voice files and replaces them with other better stock files from CMBN as well as some voice files from the German edition of Company of Heroes. (no image) GaJ

The Fighting Seabee posted a new mod at The CMMODs Warehouse: Description: Pointe du Hoc Mod Pack Includes: Vein's 2nd Ranger Battalion skins. Ocean waves background sounds. Vein's Short Tracers. Vein's Explosions and Smoke. GaJ

You appear to have completely misunderstood my point. No-where did I say that each side should have the same objective. Indeed, I praised CMBN for bringing Asymetric Objectives. I raised a more subtle point: I suggested that now there is this wonderful tool, scenarios need to be designed so that each commander has enough information - directly or indirectly - to know what to do to thwart the enemy from achieving his objective. He doesn't need to know in detail what the enemy's objective is, and it certainly doesn't have to be the same as his. What I said is that the goals need to "oppose one another" in some way. IE in striving to achieve my goal, I need to have some notion of what I'm doing to stop you achieving yours. Without this, scenarios could present nasty surprises at the end where a player thinks he has done well, only to find his opponent did even better and he didn't know it. Please understand my points before disagreeing with them. I'll try to be clearer if I can GaJ

I'm starting to think I might put mine, that arrived just the other day, on Ebay in the UK

For me, the answer to Seabee's questions is "now that you have asymetrical objectives, you should be able to both have a historical battle (including one side getting whacked) _and_ have a decent score outcome". And you definitely _should_ (must?) aim for this "balance". For example, suppose the historical outcome, and totally expected outcome with two equally skilled players, is that the Axis is killed down to the last man. Then the Allies victory condition needs to be to achieve exactly that. And the Axis victory condition needs to be someting like "you are allowed to get wiped out, but you have to kill at least 50% of the Allied attackers" With this wonderful new objective system, there is no longer any excuse for scenarios that are easier to win from one side than the other side. If you are making scenarios for two-player action, they simply must be designed to be equally challenging from both sides. IMHO. GaJ

I agree with you, but I think that it goes a little further than this. This is why I chose the exit scenario as my example: it's a likely candidate for strife. If you give one guy the goal "Exit all your troops" and the other guy the goal "take the town", then you have set up for frustration, because you haven't given the players a reason to clash. The exit guy can frustrate the attack guy without the attack guy even knowing he was supposed to stop the exit. Indeed, it's almost guaranteed, because the exit guy is going to be trying to avoid a fight! When I write it like this it sounds kind of silly, like "who would make a scenario like that?". I'd put money on this problem cropping up though: it strikes me as an easy one to inadvertently do. Asymetrical objectives are wonderful - and I like the principal of "reward the commander for behaving realistically". But you have to remember that the player-commander has been instructed by you the scenario-designer-general to do something, and so he is going to be focussed on that ... and expecting to be rewarded for doing well at it. This is a bit hypothetical, in that I don't have a scenario in front of me that suffers from this, but I can easily see how it could be a trap - even a temptation - to make a scenario that accidentally suffers from this... GaJ

The whole purpose of being here in the BFC forum is to provide feedback and solicit alternative opinions about possible problems. I'm not a fan boi. I don't start thread after thread about how great the game is. I bought it, I play it, and I contribute to the CM gaming community along with the best of them. Web sites, mods, scenarios and club acitivities. I also do praise what I think is good, in good measure. Go look properly at my posting history if in doubt. But as I said, the primary reason for posting at BFC is that it's the place where people who can influence the game read about experiences with it. So these posts aren't "nit picking", they are genuine feedback with the goal of sharing player experience that may lead to improvement. I always take great care not to cry "bug" when I'm not certain my experience is a bug. I always follow up on my bug reporst with substantiation - videos, save files etc. In the case of this thread, I started it not to nit pick but to have a sensible discussion about the impact of the direction the game has taken towards realism: the impact being that it's much more likely to experience "stoopid" things, because so much more has to be modelled about the behaviour of troops. If this observation doesn't interest you, too bad. It interests me. BFC have taken on a heck of a lot in moving to individual troop representation and I shared two examples of where the increase in realistic representation hasn't yet had the AI catch up with sensible behaviour. I also offered an opinion on the root cause in programming terms (pure guesswork from the outside of course) in case this small contribution triggers some thinking somewhere like "hey, we could give troops awareness all around irrespective of facing for say 3 meters circle, and this behaviour would be solved". Who knows, it might be that easy, it might not: the goal is to share the experience and seed improvements to the game. In one case, this sharing caused some valuable information to come to light: that cover inside a building is abstracted to a dice roll _after_ the bullet intersects the solider. Knowing this abstraction, I can now view the exact same video, of bullets going through a guy and not killing him, with different eyes. For me that was worthwhile. If I was to ask one thing, then, it would be to read my posts not as nit-picking, but rather for what they are: genuine well intentioned player feedback. GaJ

No, I'm not saying that the players should know each other's objectives: it's important to be clear about that. What I am saying is that it's important that the players are given instructions that help them defeat the enemy and deny him points. I'll give you an example. Suppose the Axis player gets instructions that say "the enemy is holding this critical town blocking our supply lines. Starting from the south , secure the town then reestablish supply lines by getting all your forces off to the north, destroying the enemy in the process." And they are given exit points. Then suppose the Allied player gets told "We need to make a strike to the south. Exit all your units to the south." They get only exit points. This is a recipe for disaster. The axis player will be attacking the town, expecting the Allied player to defend. Meanwhile, the Allied player will exit the town, and try to sneak past the Axis player out to the south. The Axis player will take the town and exit to the north, and he will sustain losses as he tries to fulfill the "take enemy forces" command. He will not do anything to block the Allies flanking around and escaping south. He will get to the end of the game, and have a really nasty surprise at the high score of the Allies... this is what you want to avoid. It could easily be avoided by simply saying "make sure you protect our territory to the south, no enemy units must penetrate south". Do you see what I mean? Because of the complex options available, what works and what doesn't will be more subtle ... but very important. In your example, it will be vital to give each player instructions that cause them to oppose the enemy, even if you don't tell them exactly what the enemy's victory conditions are. Otherwise you could have the ludicrous situation where each side "flanks right" and reaches their "attack line" that they have to reach without even fighting each other, and certainly without the opportunity to use their skills to achieve a victory by defeating the intent of the enemy... GaJ

Sticky! Sticky!

ellisam posted a new Mod at The CM Mods Warehouse: us_helmet_net, by ellisam Description: Adds helmet nets to some of your infantry. GaJ

For example, this one ^^^^. How exactly is this a "known issue"?

It's becoming clear to me that there is one thing you can do in a scenario design that is both tempting and yet bound to cause frustration. Its this: setting goals (victory conditions) that don't oppose each other. I know for sure that if I get to the end of a scenario and discover that my opponent scored handsomely by achieving something that I had not set out to prevent, I will be very irritated. The feature of "many forms of victory conditions, the opponent doesn't know what they are" is extremely powerful and good, but it brings with it the temptation, I think, to play "tricks" that ultimately don't lead to a satisfying outcome for the players. Scenario designers... beware! GaJ

Note: this thread would be way more useful if it had just facts and not discussion. As it is its almost useless due to the volume of traffic in it.

I have the opposite experience. Read the thread about "two stoopid things". In there, it is explained that the cover inside a building is of the "dice roll" type. You can find a link to a video where I show my inf guy in a building being peppered with tracers, but he doesn't die. It is explained that this is due to the abstract cover operating in the building... GaJ

(BTW, I just had a successful barage where the FO called it in then left his post halftway through "spotting". He called FFE while wandering through the woods to his next mission! ) GaJ

Surely the whole point of spotting rounds is so that the FO can call for FFE if they are in the right place. If the game has the arty go to FFE while the FO can't see spotting rounds _and_ has C&C, then this is broken, right? If the FO doesn't have C&C I can imagine a scenario where the arty says "OK, we didn't hear so we'll fire anyhow". Note that the manual specifically says that if there is significant downtime of C&C then the barrage may cancel. I guess if the FO dies in the minute before the FFE is due, then this isn't "significant downtime". If the FFE goes offtarget even if the FO has LOS and is calm to the target, but doesn't see the spotting rounds, then what's the point of the FO having LOS? GaJ

Sequoia posted a new CMSF mod at the CMSF Mods Warehouse. It's Sequoia's "ATM to vending stall" Description: "Changes ATM flavor object to a common street scene, a venders stall with candy and cigarettes...." GaJ

Sheeyeah, right....

I'm pretty sure that if the spotter dies the barrage will stop. It says in the manual that if he goes out of C&C with the arty for too long then the barrage will stop. So in my mind this is about the only thing I'm reasonably clear on. To me the question is "what if he stays in C&C with the arty, but moves around/gets blocked/can't see spotting rounds" etc. GaJ

As someone else mentioned, I like these, but they are rather quiet... I was right on top of a guy who gets shot, and it sounds like the cry is in the distance...

Can someone clarify what a spotter has to do in order to call in a barrage successfully. It's clear that he has to have LOS onto the target at the time of calling. After that, I'm not at all clear what he has to do. Suppose it's 12 minutes till the full barrage. Does he have to maintain LOS that whole time? What if something temporarily gets in the way? Does he have to be able to see the spotting rounds? If you spot a spotting round that he clearly can't see, then does that tell you the barrage will be off, or will the arty keep firing spotting rounds till he _can_ see one? Thanks! GaJ

The challenge that I was observing that racking up the level of realism brings these stoopid hard to deal with behaviours that you don't have to worry about at the higher level of abstraction. Of course, everyone knows this, so I was just motivated to post to share the experience and compare notes on how close or not the game currently us to matching it's modelling (I mean the AI behaviour modelling human behaviour) to the level of realism of the artwork. GaJ

I agree that you can get a line to move a troop somewhere and in CM1 when they got there they would all occupy the cover that was at that place, wheras in CMBN you can find that some of them are left out in the open. Indeed, there are other problems like this. If you plot a movement through some woods alongside a diagonal road, half the squad tends to step out of the woods and walk along the road instead... my thinking on this is that it's AI tweaks that will come in due course... GaJ

I'll submit some save files ... maybe there's something I didn't think of that made this happen ... always possible On the topic of the room: This was the whole point being made in my original post. It's hard to have it both ways. If you are representing things "realistically" you generate visual expectations of realism, which cause a grating experience when they don't work properly. It was good to hear the explanation of how the extra cover bonus works... I didn't know that, and it does explain how the tracers appear to go straight through the guy without killing him. Visually it's still a small bug IMHO. At the time that the game calculates that the shot that intersected the pixeltruppen is not actually a hit, the shot should at the very least terminate, not appear to go on through the other side... (actually, I better take a closer look and make sure my impression that the shots go straight through is correct... it's easy for the eye to be tricked, too!) GaJ

OK, back to the humour, which uncovers another possible bug: the movie of the scene I descibed above is here: Watch the HMG dude wander un-noticed up to my guy and nail him! Interestingly, what happens next I didn't notice back when I did the turn. The HMG guy takes round after round of fire from outside right to the chest, and doesn't even blink! GaJ