RuhrRiver

Having watched the number and content of posts before and after CMBO and CMBB, I am struck with what I see as the much greater conflict between posters concerning TOW, and the passion of many of the negative responses--keeping in mind that many posters (we don't know about non-posters, remember) are delighted with the game. My current guess is that much of the negativity (and the neg-pos poster conflict) could have been avoided if there had been more than one week for the posting community to learn the game and do extended play after the demo but before the full game release. Many of these conflicts and questions would have come up, and could have been resolved and at least addressed more before full game release and the decision to buy/not buy. And just to anticipate one line of response: I think the "well you should have played the demo more before you bought the game" is correct, and not useful. It is a reprimand, not a reasonable plan for making things better. There are lots of shoulds and few constructive, realistic plans, which is one reason why everything from games to international relations are less than we would hope for.

MajorPrivate, you're a scream. You call people babies, or women (whoa--what an insult--women are terrible, aren't they?). I'm looking forward to being called a poopy head or some other hyper mature graphic insult. For a refreshing change from "clever" name-calling, you might try simply stating your disagreement.

No replay feature = no ability to watch what is happening on most of the battlefield close-up, right? I think the biggest thing the game has going for it (*personal opinion*--before someone jumps on me) is its gorgeous graphics, but in a battle with more than a few units it's hard to spot more than a few dramatic scenes while you're busy managing, and you can't zoom in and watch more than one unfold if you can't rewind/replay!

Odd, I would have thought that MajorPrivate was older...

So Rak, if you're behind a tree 20 feet away from the nearest road edge and bullets are whizzing overhead and one of your vehicles goes by--on the road--at about 10 miles an hour, and you can just turn your head and see that it's not headed for you, you would leave your cover and crawl 40 feet into the open???? Are you serious? The practical effect on play, and the only reason I noticed it in this scenario is because it means that you can't place your troops in cover behind trees on either side of the road (there is no other cover) and then drive vehicles slowly down the road without your troops. all leaving cover. To my mind, that's both unrealistic and a problem in terms of gameplay. If that doesn't bother you, if you never want to place troops closer than 40 or 50 feet to any vehicle that might move, no matter how slowly or carefully, more power to you.

LOL Ryan!

I did more testing of how vehicles cause troops to scatter, even when they have hold orders and are dozens of feet away. The pics below tell the story. What it means is that you can't have troops hold positions anywhere (like 20-40 feet!) near even slow-moving vehicles without the troops scattering, even if they leave cover and are exposed to fire. Try keeping your troops under cover of the tree line in "Last Chance" while your armored cars/trucks advance up the road. Hope the collision coding is tweaked real soon.

Good point, Crazylegs, about the treemowing, which is truely impressive in this game. Gunnersman, thanks for the suggestion, but I think you missed some of what I and the pictures said. The troops weren't an apparent 1 or 2 feet away, they were an apparent 6 to ten feet away. Use the length of a prone soldier as a ruler. The vehicle was clearly not about to run over either soldier: they were on the grassy shoulder and the vehicle stayed in the middle of the dirt road, never getting closer than an apparent six feet, and coming no closer than an apparent ten feet from the soldier on the right. If your point is that this is a reasonable way to code the proximity of troops and vehicles, I don't see it, and your solution seems unreasonable and unrealistic: that soldiers should flee their cover (by crawling 45 feet into enemy fire?? come on) because a vehicle goes by ten feet (or more--haven't plumbed the depths yet) away, so even in cramped spaces (say, a tree line) I should have to micromanage collisions since the program can't do it. If other games handled proximity this badly I could see accepting it, but they don't and I don't.

Revise the allowable distances between troops and vehicles so troops don't scatter and leave cover and negate their "hold" commands when a truck goes by 15 feet away!!! See my post about "giant trucks" with screen shots illustrating the problem.

I was playing "last chance" with French troops/vehicles going down road, when I realized something. I was trying to keep my troops on either side of the road where they had a little cover. However they kept scattering and leaving cover (even with "hold" command) when a vehicle seemingly got within 15 or 20 feet of them. I decided to do a test--here are the results. In this first pic, I have a soldier on either side of the road on the shoulder. The car will pass right between them: I carefully drove an armored car (I think it was) as close to equidistant between the two troops as possible. See the progression below, where I took five screen shots. I cut and pasted an image to show exactly where each unit was at most of the progression points. I may have altered scales very slightly in assembling it, but it is a very accurate representation of what happened: As you can see, the two troops, no closer (visually--which is all we have) than 6 or 7 feet from the passing vehicle, under fire, and with a "hold" order, crawled about 45 feet away, completely leaving their cover. Doing this cancelled their hold order, so afterwards they would have gone wherever the AI (which I find whimsical) led them. This isn't a bug, but at the very least it is a significant game play issue. Trying to move a few vehicles and infantry through the same limited cover that would have wide margins for everyone to share in "real life" (and according to the visual feedback of the game) , even with careful plotting, resulted in repeated "crawl for your lives!" reactions from troops up to 15 apparent feet away (haven't actually figured out exact max. distances). This suggests a French armored car about 4o feet wide--bigger than even the Germans and their Elefants would likely use--or troops so shell-shocked that it's a wonder France didn't fall quicker. Seriously, it makes an already busy game much too much work even for this relatively small scenario. I really hope this is a high priority for the first fix/revision.

Thanks very much. That mostly works.

I bought the game, but I think I could do better at learning the possibilities and how to play better if I could have a variety of small battle situations. Am I correct that the only small battles (couple of squads and a few vehicles/armor) are the training scenarios? Has anyone started developing/designing some small battles? I tried focusing on just a squad (?) and four tanks in the "Razor's Edge" battle, and while I carefully advanced my forces, all the rest of my troops on the map were slaughtered and the victorious Jerries from those fights came after me . One other thing: units--especially tanks--keep moving forward to be shot down despite repeated commands to stop, reverse, fire, etc. It seems like if they get a few hundred yards from the enemy they decide that charging is the only effective tactic. Am I missing something here?

Thanks Matt. There's always something to complain about and I still think you guys would get less ulcers if you were less defensive about what you know is inevitable, but I guess I'd rather have engaged customer service of almost any kind than the empty silence that I usually get. --Max

I downloaded the game in about 45 minutes. No D/L manager, no problems. Sometimes the gods smile...

Jeez, I didn't realize how out of date, underpowered, and pathetic my computer is until reading what everyone else has. Guess I'll go back to playing pacman until I get another grand together... : (

The specs with on the demo download page say it all: you want a real cutting edge machine to play this game. I have a P4 2.2 Ghz CPU with 1.25 gigs of RAM and a Radeon 9600 video card with 128 or 256 (can't remember) MB on board and separate audio card..running Win XP--and my frame rate, with all graphics at minimum or off, was between 9 and 15 FPS, according to fraps. That means jerky vehicle movement (although not as bad as the videos have been) and almost (but not quite) smooth infantry movement animations as long as too much isn't going on. I haven't been able to bring myself to cut down my screen resolution to 600 X 800 yet, but that's my next experiment. Time to upgrade, gang. On the brighter side, the game looks gorgeous and the animations are excellent.

Lack of defensiveness has never been the strong suit of BF. However, the products are excellent, so I guess we can't have everything. I do get tired of the "best defense is counter-attack" tone, however.

Okay, I pre-ordered and am now interested in how much before the 19th (now less than 48 hours away) we early adapters will be able to download the game. If the lead time ends up being a couple of hours, that might qualify as less-than-wonderful "hype," so I hope we are able to download tomorrow, at least.

Oh. Okay. Thanks. All that pent-up emotion for nothing. Rats. --Max

Is this it? Is this "Combat Mission: The Next Chapter?" Am I home after years of waiting? Hello to Madmatt and anyone else who may remember me from the halcyon days (or maybe "Halcion," since I was sleeping a lot better then) when we played the demo of CMBO for a year and Madmatt was a volunteer... After CM African Antics (or whatever...I'm not big on desert war) I drifted away and wandered over to Battlefield 1942, then BF2. In any case, I'm delighted to see what looks like CM's genes being passed on. And to see a forum where "grognard" isn't just a nard where you keep your grog. --Max Molinaro

Thanks Klapton.

Hi there, I dutifully did my search and could not find the answer to this. Is there any way to have a picture appear within a post like this other than adding a link to some other web url? Thanks in advance. --RR