SlapHappy
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Posts posted by SlapHappy
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Hmmmm....Tactical Blue Victory after the 3rd mission.
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I see even a mainstream game review site echoes my sentiments that the weapons are just too darned accurate.......
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I was hoping to have Steve chime in on this, but I guess he's bogged down in the bogging thread.
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I have the original TOW. Both TOW and TOW II are about platoon level games as mentioned. There is more of an emphasis on individual soldier control and no pre-defined squads at least as least in comparison to CMSF.
It lacks most of the TAC AI nuances that CMSF boasts and plays better (IMO) as an armor game. It's a good bridge between a less sophisticated type of RTS and Combat Mission.
If you like being able to control individual soldiers, you'll probably enjoy it, but don't expect to be able to have (or control) the number of units you sometimes see in CMSF's larger battles. I once had a quick battle with ~1700 Syrian irregulars....If you tried that in TOW, the game engine would implode.
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Seriously? Are you ok?
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In Real time lots of time goes by without doing much. It's a LOT different than WeGo where action is packed in 1 minute turns. I find this particulary ridiculous in QBs where you cant play with small forces in something larger than a tiny map because of the 20 and 25mins limits.
That's a very good point. Who's to say firefights and ammo expenditure are occurring for more than a small portion of the total time during a scenario?
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Add to the thought above the "roamer" may not necessarily enter another action spot in rather small buildings, but may simply change facing towards another area of a room or building if that satisfies the demand for establishing a new LOS vector.
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It seems to me from playing CMSF since it's introduction that squad "hearing" is not modelled. Instead the TAC AI seems to trigger entirely off of cues it receives via LOS. Even at very close range, infantry units don't seem to respond to potential threats if, for any reason, there is a legitimate blockage of LOS. This can lead to some interesting outcomes when troops are maneuvering around each other within spitting distance, especially around buildings.
To compensate somewhat, it does seem like they do have at least a margin of "eyes in the back of their heads" at least in some situations I've noticed. Perhaps BFC could verify how this actually works.
This can lead to problems with LOS for AI squads which are defending from stationary positions, especially in buildings. They can't hear the AFV moving just on the other side of the building from them, and since it is out of LOS, no response from the team.
I propose this could be alleviated somewhat by allowing a couple of squad members to randomly patrol into the immediately adjoined action spots under TAC AI control when the unit is stationary (again, especially in buildings). This would at least allow a probability that a soldier might ascertain a nearby threat that would normally fall outside the squad LOS and enable the rest of the unit to act accordingly to engage (or avoid) it. When I say "patrol", I don't mean wander off 50-100 meters away, just the adjoining action spots. I was encouraged that this behavior might be fairly easily codeable since it was recently added that soldiers can give buddy aid to wounded comrades in adjoining action spots.
I can try to explain further what I am talking about here if it is unclear from my description.......
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There's a lot more than just time scale involved in determining what is and is not "operational" scale....
In another thread, a poster posted a real WWII map depicting the battle area for a 3 battalion frontage of attack (2 in contact, 1 in reserve). That engagement actually lasted around 2 days. Still wasn't operational scale.
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If so much time is spend on scenario design, then I wonder why there are so few really good scenarios, and some really poor.
It was often mentioned that the Syrian performance is very bad. Steve has recommented to play the Syrians in a completly different way than the US troops. While I agree to this, I also notice that there is not a single tutorial to teach the Syrian style of combat, or even a scenario that is recommented to be played as Red side only, or optimized for the Syrians.
Another weak point are scenario briefings. CM2 has in theory a good and very complex system of victory conditions, but the briefings leaves you often with only a vague idea of the goal. The after action screen makes it even worse, since it gives only very few informations about the reasons for the achieved result. Both is to some degree also a result of the scenario design. IIRC, Steve also agreed to this before.
The way I see it a couple of things have to happen to make RED a viable force. Either the scenario designer has to artificially pump up either troop quality or quantity (quality seems to be the more effective tack) or they have to fairly severely hamstring the BLUE force in some manner.
Making extremely tight BLUE victory requirements is another way to "harden" the game experience a bit. This can have the negative effect of making what appears to be a blue romp into a frustrating "RED tactical victory".
Right now I don't see any command triggers which can be implemented to drive RED behavior when played by AI opponent. For instance, I had three groupings of RED combatants who just happened to be facing the wrong way in buildings as a Marine AAV drove by each of their positions. It would have been a fairly easy ambush situation for them if they had been able to acquire LOS and reacted accordingly. Instead they stood by blissfully unaware of what was going on just a few feet away from them.
If unit squads could have "roamers" who would occasionally reposition in such a situation to check out other LOS positions, he might have spotted the AAV and called the other guys over "Look Mohammed, a juicy target coming up the road, just behind us!" Since our CMSF soldiers are effectively "deaf" this seems to be the only probable means of enemy AI to maintain some level of battlefield awareness.
CMSF does a good job of simulating a realistic battlefield simulation on a fairly large scale. Where it is not always so strong is realistically depicting the actual unit-level contact points between enemy forces, especially in short-range engagements. Hopefully this will improve as new TACAI behaviors are added to the game. As an example, the "bugout" feature has added tremendously to the believability of the soldiers in firefight situations.
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Perhaps we resurrect the mile-long thread about how HE devices are too effective?
Perhaps not........
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For explosive devices, like grenades and artillery, the effects in the median range for these weapons are compressed. Meaning lethality is tuned down to simulate that soldiers in squads are typically much more dispersed in a squad than they actually are in CMSF. Note that the short-range and long-range effects of these weapons are not compressed.
It's an abstraction BFC uses in CMSF to simulate a more realistic casualty rate (or attempt to).
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This methodology may or may not work for you depending on the nature of CMSF:
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You have to copy the baked scenario into the "scenarios" folder. It will initially be in the "baked" folder.
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Apparently one of the Marines Missions "To Ambush or Not to Ambush" is an exact recreation of one of these tactical problems......
I had never played it before, but I fired it up to give it a try...It was a dead-on rendition of the original map and the scenario conditions.
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Actually, that is another technical support issue - I've had problems with the search engine not wanting to return any results. Keeps saying the minimum number of words (3) is not being met, which is not true.
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Sorry...I meant the Youtube video where the Brit soldier is firing over the wall with the mortar......
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Steve
So this mortar can or cannot target units out of it's line of sight if LOS can be established by a friendly in contact with the firing mortar unit? Or can it only use area fire against those targets?
Never mind, Steve, you answered the question already in your statement. I just didn't read it well enough.
So this mortar, in-game can't actually target enemies in the fashion depicted in the video one of the other posters refers to
in this thread.
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I found the archives for these from 1996-2006. Is it ok to post the link?
Some of these are in .pdf format. 2005 and 2006 are just web documents.
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From what I am able to gather in attempting to increase my performance in CMSF with my Q6600, additional clock cycles mostly helps to improve your minimum frame rates.
Another text to indicate whether or not an application is cpu-limited is to dramatically decrease resolution settings. If this does not lead to an overall increase in FPS, then the application is most likely cpu-limited.
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The AI seems to use every move type in AI except the actual "move" command and the "slow" command". I think they will only revert to those when exhaustion sets in or they are forced into slow move by opposing fire.
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I always liked the "click on unit unit, select from pop-up window" type interfaces although they do throw junk up onto the battlefield viewing area.
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There is a realism add-on (which is still in beta) which increases the weapon ranges substantially in the game. I just bought Men of War. It's cheap, 30 bucks. I'm quite amazed at what they have done with the original concept of Soldiers Heroes of WWII. The soldiers really do make some pretty sophisticated battlefield decisions compared to other RTS's.
I think it would be difficult to say that the scale of TOW is bigger. The maps are bigger, but the number of on-screen units is heavily tilted toward Men of War. At the end of the failed second Russian mission, I had destroyed 679 German infantrymen and numerous tanks. I agree, I wish they had gone to a squad-unit concept like in a more serious wargame. Apparently you can work with squad units at least in the MP game version.
Also, the scenario editor appears to be a winner and very heavily featured.
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You could utilize the normal command set if you opt to bake the scenario. This would allow you to utilize the "move" command just like in-game.
The side effect of that will be that you won't be able to edit the finished product. You can also have baked orders troops do things like area fire or deploy smoke, wait, etc.
Operation Hangman Campaign Released!
in Combat Mission Shock Force 1
Posted
SPOILERS
Yep....that's what happened to me, too. And will probably happen to about 90% of others playing this mission. Without heavy weapons and only a very light mortar support, I think you'd be VERY hard pressed to dig those reverse slope infantry out while maintaining casualties below 10%. But, hey, if anyone does it, I'd be happy to be clued in to what they did.