GSX
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Posts posted by GSX
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Surely you can design a two player campaign that isn't one sided. Give both sides some core units and auxiliary forces in each scenario in case the core units get slapped, and reasonable reinforcement levels.
I was indeed thinking of the stock campaigns there.
However, the more I think about your statement, the more I dont know.
1. Can you actually design a Campaign for H2H rather than play one designed for single player H2H? Can you have two core units? Can you have differing campaign objectives for each player and, how would that work out?
2. Leading on from above, surely a campaign is just that, an attempt to play using some core units through a series of scenarios within the mission parameters given. If you had two core units surely you would need twice as many maps etc.
I do however, find the whole concept very interesting as it throws up so many possibilities for H2H, for one, you wouldnt have a clue what the next mission would be, whether you would be advancing or defending etc....
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Wouldnt playing the whole campaign H2H be dire and even more one sided? They are meant to be single player after all, and as you cant amend the forces in them I dont really see the interest in wanting to play them?
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I vaguely recall BFC saying that the Aussie SAS would be included at some stage. It was a response to a request that they be included based on the fact they were one of the first units into Iraq in 2003. It was before CMSF was released and I can't find the thread so I'm probably deluded.
In any case to say they are the best modern troops around is questionable. There is no answer to who has the best SF, at least when you consider the professional elite services of the more advanced militaries. Unless your going to put them all in the same combat role and see how they perform or put them against each other in some sort of death game knock out competition you're always going to get a nationalistic or biased response, with objectivity lost in the mix.
Hmmm I think I've just got an idea for a new reality TV show - Survivor - Special Forces.
I agree, every 'special force' has a designated role to play. I dont think you can compare them directly with each other.
While I dont doubt the Aussies are good, Im not sure they are the best. I dont think anyone is the best. Mind you, Ive always liked the Aussies when Ive served with them, gave me my first lesson in proper swearing they did. Oh and long may you be part of the Commonwealth.
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Well with all the stuff we've read about, it looks like friggin' game heaven over here...France, NATO, Afghanistan, Bulge, the Ost Front stuff...gonna be awesome.
Glad to see you are calmer than you were over that Tiger pic.
Mord.
P.S. When you go back over to your forum, punch Dudley Do-Wrong in the balls for me.
Ah the Tiger pic, yes, I was a bit over the top there, but in the main, I stand by what I said.
As for Dudley, then, he, as everyone is at GS, is entirely entitled to their own opinions. Its not owned by BF after all, and in the majority, there is some excellent talk at GS that wouldnt be allowed here. For obvious reasons, one being that BF owns this site.
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The nerf relating to explosions has been known pretty much from day one, I believe. Less well known is that a bullet crossing paths with a soldier will not necessarily result in an injury/fatality.
So:
1. How is this calculated, what is my chance in a given situation of being hit, and
2. If this is written into the game mechanics, then why isnt it explained so that I can take it into account when moving infantry around and fighting with them?
Id like to know my percentage chance of having my men killed or injured in a given situation, how do the die roll?
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Hmm, I would disagree with this. While there were certain aspects of the rifle that were prone to failings the A1 was a very decent weapon. As with all weapons it was improved upon, M-16 anyone?The pre-Heckler Koch rebuild L85 was roundly despised by the British troops in the field.Its always been a very accurate weapon but some of the parts were a llittle bit suspect. I remember converting to this from the SLR and was bowled over by its weight, well lack of it. Also, I could carry much more ammo for it and if anything it was more accurate. Yes. initially, the magazine catch for one was atrocious and your magazine could drop out at the most in-opportune of times.
Stoppages were a problem too as I remember as the extraction system wasnt as robust as it is now, but not whats billed as despised.
We also got the SUSAT, which was at a time when most countries still used an iron sight, including the US.
Anyway Sf is set in 2008, when the L85A2 had been modified. In all honesty though, since first firing the L85 I can count on one hand the times that it has failed to fire, and when it did, I always managed to get it going again in a few seconds. Except once when the firing pin broke.
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Gee, if that's the biggest failing then the game's doing pretty darned good. CMx1 had 12 men packed into a single point!
Gee, Im not comparing it to CMBO mate..... Im looking at it for what it is. CMBO wasnt 1-1.
I wonder why it is that when anyone says anything about an aspect of Sf that they dont like someone comes along and compares it to CMBB etc?
Also, I think you may be slightly wrong there too, I dont think CMBO packed 12 men standing on their heads all together in some sort of circus act. As I understood it, that single point was abstractly representing a 12 man squad spread out over a wide area.
Maybe Im wrong though? I often am.
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In any case, the effects of HE and small arms fire is nerfed to account for the exaggerated density of the troops.
Is it? Are you saying that firepower is dumbed down to account for dense troop concentration? news to me.
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Just to balance out some perceptions of my attitude towards CMSF and the upcoming CMN Id like to say the following.
I like SF as a wargame. There is nothing that compares to it out there right now, and I think for the foreseeable future BF has this niche cornered. In a world where companies can put millions into games like COD BF has continued to cater for the wargamer, with a single programmer and a vision.
I see SF as a worthy successor to CM-1 and the ambition of the new modular system is, I think, a great one. SF, for me has been much maligned, some of it deservedly, some not, but as long as I and other continue to enjoy it, then I think the franchise has a lot of legs left in it. To this end I continue to support the game wherever I play games. Over at WaW I will continue to foster the ever growing SF community there and plan a few more tournaments next year, and yes even over at gamesquad I will continue to run an open SF forum for those that both like and dislike the game.
I think, and hope that with a return to ww2, CMx2 will engender the same spirit and size of community that CM-1 has.
So keep it up BF, a little criticism now and again is good for you.........
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Elmar said it best:
I've explained many times now that the delays we're seeing are a continuing part of the up-front costs of having a true "engine" instead of a linear one game at a time made by one team. It's taking us longer than we would like to get the code, tools, and personnel setup to make this happen, but we're making progress on all of that *and* Normandy, *and* Afghanistan, *and* NATO all simultaneously. There's even been some work done on Normandy's Modules.
The bottom line is that the past is not a good yardstick for the future for two reasons:
Our fear isn't about having too few releases over the next year... it's having too many. I'm sure you guys, at least, don't fear having too much to choose from
Steve
And yet, you have been saying this for quite a long time. Since CMSF arrived and maybe before. You also said that CMN would definitely be out in 2009.
Dont get me wrong, I'm really not particularly bothered when CMN or the NATO module arrives, I will more than likely get the latter anyway, even if its a year from now. I also enjoy SF as it is right now, with a couple of misgivings about the infantry.
However, the fact remains that I can only judge whats happening next by whats happened before with the CMx2 engine. I suppose I could say that you had to do so much work on CMSF because it needed it and was probably released about a year or so before it should have been. So with this in mind, I really dont want CMN rushed and released too soon.
But, BFC are the ones driving the expectation levels here by stating that a module will be out every six months and a new game every year. Which, hasnt, so far, been the case.
All hail the future though, it seems like gaming heaven to me.
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You see, for me, this is the biggest, probably the most important failing of CMSF.Not quite correct. LOS is not 1:1, that's true. However, LOF is 1:1. That means the exact location of a soldier does matter in terms of shooting and being shot. There is some abstractions for cover and concealment because we can not possibly simulate, graphically, the true chaotic and varied nature of cover as found in the real world.Spotting is completely separate from LOS and LOF in terms of how it is calculated, but it does use the LOF's 1:1 routines. Otherwise if you saw one guy in one Action Spot then you'd see all his buddies instantly at the same time all the time. Obviously that's not how the game works. To restate:
A LOS check is made between Action Spot to Action Spot. This is the primary filter. If you can not draw LOS from Action Spot to Action Spot then no other calculations are done. Period. This is where we save millions of calculations over the course of the average game.
Infantry doesnt get a fair crack at the battlefield simulation. Infantry is just too tightly packed into a small area. This leads to several things in the game for me:
1. An an infantry squad is far too bunched up on most occasions. This leads to incoming fire causing far too many casualties when compared to real life.
2. In real life, to stop this happening infantry spread out and use various formations, which means that if they come under concentrated fire from a certain direction, not all of them become casualties.
3. Again in real life, infantry squads have Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for when they come into contact with the enemy. For instance, on contacting the enemy to the front soldiers should automatically adopt a procedure for this, which includes putting an immediate fire upon the enemy, seeking cover, even withdrawing if necessary.
My whole point I suppose is fundamentally this;
"If the infantry in the game are exactly where I see them, then the infantry model is flawed, because they are too densely packed into too small an area".
Of course this doesnt mean I cant enjoy the game, because I do, but it means I play infantry very differently from real life experience. I tend to always split the squads down and move them farther apart for example.
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BF could answer this, but perhaps soldiers will pick up what is coded into the game as a more effective weapon? So if the L85A2 gets a bigger score then it will be swapped out for an M4?
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Thats sounds good, but unfortunately I have tried to persuade some of my peers to play the game. Most military are the same as non military in my experience, more interested in COD than CMSF. My mates are all obsessed with their quest to get 300 head shots to unlock the 'Fall' camo for their ACR etc etc....I recall saying, when CMSF was first announced, that a natural draw to the game would be serving Army Stryker Brigade personnel, ex-Army Striker Brigade, and future Army Stryker Brigade! That now also applies to Brit military, and goes double for Marines who tend to love all things Marine. The number on serving military posting to the forum tends to bear that out. It might do BFC some marginal good to get the game in front of THOSE eyes. Target a venue where the 'young military' demographic is most liable to be. Everyone who was once a Marine is a potential customer. -
You do realize the action spot is only for the rough initial calculations and that the actual spotting is in fact true 1:1?
Not according to Steve, he very firmly told me that the 1-1 is actually abstracted and that the infantry arent necesarily where I see them on screen. With infantry Im led to believe therefore that its not true 1-1.
It it were then the current way we use infantry in the game is fundamentally flawed. Why? Well real life infantry use formations and tactics, CMSF infantry dont come near this.
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This seems to come up regularly, mostly by criticaster who for whatever reason seems to think this proves them right on the inferiority of the CMx2 engine.
Most of the delays stems from both the engine, the module system and the external team being new. Yes, there's been delays and will be again (I don't think we'll be seeing CM:N as soon as Steve hopes) but things wil probably get better over time.
And in the mean time we should get a steady trickle of content.
I don't see the problem.
Well I for one certainly dont see any inferiority in the CM-2 engine. Its far superior in most respects there. All my statements are based on observations from this forum over the past few years. Its nothing to do with the game engine at all.
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I think often the consusion here arises from the fact that weve gone 1-1 visually but as stated before the program doesnt really see the infantry as 1-1. I know that Steve has explained all this before and I fully accept the reasoning why it is the case. But it still leads to confusion as my brain wants to shout out that one of my soldiers can see the fecker in front of him, while my CPU is saying no.
One day we may have true 1-1 with each individual soldier being tracked as you see it and no need for the action spots!!!!
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Combat Mission Shock Force
Base Game Released July 07
US Marines Module Released Sept 08
British Forces Module Released July 09
NATO module Release first half 2010
If we follow this model, and nothing I have read here seems to indicate otherwise, then the Base game is followed by Modules at roughly yearly intervals.
So CM Normandy would be released in say Jun 10, then CMN Commonwealth in Jun/Jul 11 etc etc. I see absolutely no evidence that the modular system produces new games any faster than this 1 yearly interval. Despite all the rhetoric here about timelines etc the actual game and module times speak for themselves. Marines was advertised as going to be out way before it actually appeared (with a broken campaign) and the Brits was advertised as going to be out in Dec 2008, with an actual release of Jul 2009.
Simply by using this forum to predict game arrival times means that some of you will need to be a lot more patient than you have been as there seems to be a 6-8 month delay on any timeline given by BF for cm-2 games.
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Interesting post Big Duke, thank you.
One small point, Gurkhas are Hindus not Buddists.
Oh, and this sentence, "The Gurkha tradition of loyal individual service to a foreign ruler is very close to anathma to the entire Afghan culture, which might very well be said to be united only by a desire to resist foreigners, and loyalty only to family and clan" is not very accurate either.
Pathans and other Afghan tribes had a long history of faithful and loyal service in the British Indian Army. Indeed, from 1857 Pathans formed a large part of said army. They served with honour and distinction wherever they were sent into action, including the Western Front in WW1 (somewhere I have a photo of a Pathan soldier being decorated with the VC by King George V whilst recovering from his wounds in hospital in Brighton, Sussex).
Yes, a whole lot of service was given by a lot of people in what was the Indain part of the Empire.
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^^^For real.
I play a ton of Left 4 Dead which is about a twitchy as it gets (don't really understand why that has to be a bad thing... it is with wargames but not necessarily for games in general) but have been playing wargames of some type since I was 14 or so (21 now)... though admittedly I'm not as advanced as some on here mostly because I never had the money to go all out into the hobby.
Don't assume that all people who play shooters and RTS games (of which COH is one of the best for its style) are too brain-dead for Combat Mission.
Just look at the reviews Gamespot and IGN for example gave CMBB back in the day, 9.1 and 9.0 respectively, from mainstream gaming sites.
I too play Call of Duty and CM, one is not exclusive to the other. Some days I think, heck Im in the mood for running arond and play COD, other days I might be in the mood for some CM. Heck even some RTS games are fun, Warhammer immediately springs to mind here.
I suppose it all depends on who BF is aiming CM at?
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It's gonna get delayed man. Any game due out so soon would have a ton of media available. If it really was due out in 4 months then they would be beta testing right now; the vast majority of the content, models, maps etc should be done.
Id agree with this. After all it wasnt all that long ago that Steve said the game would essentially be finished this week. And, if they wanted to it could be published next week but they wanted to have a nice holiday.
What do we actually know about CMN? Well, it has no forum for a start and a game that was good to go would surely have that by now. We have seen a total of 2 screenshots in the past year or two. Again, not indicitive of a game thats ready to go in the near future. No real information or discussions on how the game will improve on the CMSF mechanics.
How do we takle close armour assault, river crossing, camoflage, AT gun animations, soldier animations, mortar animations, how do men wade through water. Can a man see over a hedge or even partially through it? If the game was anywhere near done then Im sure all of the above and much more would be being discussed on the Forum for the game.
I suspect (and this is simply from reading these forums) that the game is no where near completed in the programming department yet. After the programming is complete then the Campaign guys have to work through this and again, this has seemed to be a major brake on modules and so I see no difference with a whole new game.
My best earliest guess is that CMN will be finished around March and out around June after the campaign has been tweaked etc. This is earliest though and recently Im beginning to suspect that this title may be slipping a lot farther back than this.
As for NATO, I have no idea where thats at as Ive read nothing on it for a long while now. Yet another Campaign problem? Or are BF suffering from too many CM projects for a small company? Short answer is, I dont know, but it sure seems like every one of their games is either suffering long delays or as in the case of Histwar and CMC, cancelled.
Of course, I'll be ore than happy to be proven wrong on any count above.
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I'd LOVE to see an option to target a "circle area" as an option to the standard area attack. What I mean is you click once to area attack and then move your mouse outwards or inwards to create a bigger circle.
Of course in real life a GPMG or such MG would be able to fire in a cone shaped effect or something similar. It would be cool when deployed to allow a GPMG to enter SF mode in certain circumstances.
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my dell latitude E6500 runs the battle for Pooh on full graphics quite well in RT. A little slow down here and there, but nothing too much. WEGO should be even better.
It is a Core2duo 2.4 ghz IIRC, with 4GB ram and a nvidia QuadroNVS 160 (i think 256/512mb ddr3) and a 7200rpm hd.
Since this laptop is already 1+ year old I reckon you can get a better setup for a lot less then my one costed. You should have a Dedicated GPU in it and a decent cpu. 4+GB ram and a 7200 rpm HD might also help for larger maps.
My Vaio is nearly 5 years old and doesnt have any problems running any Sf scenarios. Although on the biger ones my troops tend to turn into stick men! However, if I zoom out, its still eminently playable.
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Can there be a ww2 game without flames and flame throwing equipment? Can we have a CMN without close combat?
Im assuming that engineers will have flamers and satchels and that they can blow stuff up like we do in SF.
Were only weeks away from CMN now and have no information about it, no bones to speak of and no forum. This is a game that Steve said is ready to go before Xmas but theyre waiting till just after to have a nice holiday. So if the games complete, why no info except a bit on bridges and a couple of bland screenies from months ago?
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Elmar,
I agree with you there, at least from my perspective. In CMx1 I often found myself moving around units without having a good sense of their casualties only to find out the key unit/s were seriously depleted. This, in turn, caused me to be a little bit reckless at times because I'd put a unit into a bad situation which it really should have been kept out of. The 1:1 aspect makes it much clearer up-front, which means I'm less likely to ask too much of that unit.
But there's also the "emotional" aspect that 1:1 brings about. I've seen a lot of comments over the years about people honestly having problems with watching their units take casualties. There was one made today, in fact, in another thread. I don't recall seeing such comments for CMx1 games.
Steve
As I mentioned in another thread. 1-1 doesnt necessarily make you want to save lives, asymmetry does. Sf is by design a game that need to limit Blue Force casualties in the vast majority. WW2 on the other hand is all about getting the job done as quickly as possible. The War in Afghanistan has already almost doubled the time for ww2, imagine a ww2 where the sides didnt want to take casualties? It might still be going on today!
Another factor of course is that CMSF is more pertinent to a lot of us and we will try and limit our casualties becuase it may be a scenario that is directly modelled on something Afghanistanish or Iraquish.
I definitely wont be so squeamish about taking 70% casualties to drive 'Jerry' back to Bosche-land in CMN......
IDF vs NATO
in Combat Mission Shock Force 1
Posted
Er, as BF are well behind the drag curve on their own announcements I think you mean about 18 months, as there are no SS units in the Normandy game.