molotov_billy

Yes. Though I've spent a lot of time on the tech support forums, and the numbers of people having at least some type of technical issue is probably closer to 50%. I myself have access to three machines, all top of the line, and only one of them runs above 10 frames per second, and that's because we figured out that old video drivers work better than new ones in my case. All we can really do is compare SF to other games that are on the market, and in terms of first releases, SF is pretty poor - even compared to other low budget wargames (though that's no excuse for a buggy product, like some would have you believe.) Looking forward to those patches.

I've noticed that the 105's have a very long reload time. If they haven't fired in awhile, and I area-target a building, they tend to fire the 105's pretty reliably. The 50cal fires continuously while the 105 is reloading.

On a positive note, there have definately been specific improvements to the UI that have made playing Shock Force a lot more enjoyable than previous incarnations. The biggest one in my mind is the addition of selectable icons over units. So much simpler and readable than having to hunt through forests and terrain looking for soldiers and camouflaged tanks. I can't put into words how frustrating it used to be to try and select soldiers that were loaded into half tracks. Now I can just select the icon. They also improve the user's ability to guage a battlefield situation at a glance - I can see all positions of friendly and known enemy units at the same time. Good stuff.

This is a fairly innaccurate generalization. There are different people saying different things. A blind retreat to the CMx1 system would certainly be a mistake, considering that the controls for that game are just as foreign to the typical gamer as the current ones are. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell us that the diehards who have been playing CM for years are used to them. That isn't important, though, if we're attempting to expose Shock Force to a new audience in addition to the current one. Any control scheme can be adapted to, so there's no surprise that there are people that have done so. But that isn't important. The goal of a UI and control scheme should be to get the player up and running quickly. If a person is to have a good first impression (undeniably the most important thing in selling games), than they have to be playing the game from the first minute, unnoccupied by technical difficulties. The average time of 1 to 15 hours simply to get used to the controls is an appalling period of time that will cost you customers in the long run. Reading the forums and aruging with the users that have stuck around will not change that fact. My understanding of it is that we have a control scheme here that's completely different than anything else that anybody has ever played. There tends to be certain intuitive, logical control standards that people expect out of any game. The developers of Shock Force have chosen to ignore those standards (if they are aware of them), or simply throw them out the window. There are controls that are so unintuitive, I never found out about them until I read about them on the forums. No other game in the world pans the screen by left-click dragging, so it never occured to me to try it. I was stuck with the arrow keys, which work completely differently in shock force and are woefully inadequate for moving about the battlefield. I have no doubt that most new users have had similar experiences. Now, if the only customer base that BFC is interested in is the die hard gamer who's willing to put up with any and all technical difficulties to play a modern warfare simulation, then there are no problems whatsoever. People will get used to the controls, or they will leave. So far, that seems to be the case, and it's incredibly unforunate that BFC has passed on the opportunity to reach a larger customer base. Considering that the average user rated the CM:SF demo as a 2 out of 5, it seems likely that they're going down that road. [ August 02, 2007, 01:54 PM: Message edited by: molotov_billy ]

excellent info, thanks john

Good to hear!

The syrians have some type of special forces, don't they?

Theoretically, that kind of stuff is working under the hood. Have you tried any tests with your RPG's firing down from buildings to avoid the slat armor?

Anyone making red on red scenarios? I'd like to see what MOUT is like without all the fancy US gizmos and uber armor. I'd like to see a Grozny type scenario with T-72's/BMPS/BTRS with lots of artillery battling it out with guerrilla types. How about 80's afghanistan? The Russian equipment is there - and the environment is right for the job. I wish I had more time to do some map making.

Because you're playing a BETA.

Is there a darker texture than can be placed on trenches so that even when they LOD to flat terrain, you can see some indication of where the trench is? My main difficulty with this is when I'm trying to assign linear bombardments on trenches. I have to get very close an pan along the trench lines to assign targets.

Believe it or not, people do tend to run away from things that are trying to end their lives.

Pardon my acronyms, but WTF?!? Where on EARTH did you read this? CMx2 actually has a far superior Morale system compared to CMx1. Morale and Suppression are independent now. Look at any screenshot of the game and you'll see the Morale factor right there where you'd expect it (with Experience, Condition, etc.). If there is a thread with such wacky disinformation in it, I'd appreciate a link to it. </font>

This is a reproducible bug the majority of the time. Place several strykers side by side, select all of them, and "pop smoke." At least one of them will receive wheel damage and become immobile. Are the smoke canisters causing damage to nearby vehicles? I can put up a save game if needed.

Absolutely not true! Some folks may dismiss it as simple because it's popular - but in reality that couldn't be further from the truth. World of Warcraft is actually an incredibly complex game - the magic here is that they do a wonderful job of introducing elements of the game to the player over longer periods of time. You don't start out with a level 70 character with 60 spells, 30 hot keys, two jobs, a guild, talent points, equipment sets, PVP, etc etc. You start as a level one character with a single spell or action. New spells and abilities are fed to you over time, at a rate which is completely up to the user. Nothing is thrown at you which you are not ready for. All told, it's a deeper, far more complex game than what Combat Mission has to offer. The important difference here is presentation. [ July 31, 2007, 11:11 PM: Message edited by: molotov_billy ]

Sorry, what's your point? World of Warcraft's UI is absolutely fantastic. Anything you'd ever need to know is explained thoroughly in the game itself. They've done their homework and deserve every one of their 9 million paying customers.

So I wonder about the hundreds of posts being sifted through every day, where questions are being asked about something that's already "clearly explained in the manual." Multiply that by 10, considering that 90% of users don't even visit the forums, let alone post in them. I'm still wondering why any of this means that the UI shouldn't explain things better than it already does.

My goal here isn't to find out the specific answers to these questions. I'm giving feedback to the developers about the questions I had in mind when playing the game over the last couple of days. Why I haven't read the manual isn't important. What IS important is the actual real world fact that most users don't read manuals, or look stuff up in a book when playing a videogame. Developers should create their games with that fact in mind (and most do), with a great deal of attention put towards user interface.

What drivers are you running? I haven't had any luck with mine.

There are plenty of GeForce cards having issues as well, especially the 8800. I have access to three machines with various geforce cards, all have issues.

Most users don't read manuals, especially when they're 200 pages. It's a reality I wish you guys would accept and adapt to. Anything with significant importance to gameplay should be self-evident or explained within the user interface. Again, I think tooltips would go a long way to fix some of it. I understand that it's on your wish list. Two other suggestions that I remember now - You should display just how long each artillery bombardment option will last - how does "Short" and "Emergency" equate in game minutes? Also - it would be useful to know how much ammo each of those options will consume. This will allow you to make decisions such as - "should I do one long bombardment, or three short ones?" At the moment, I'm just guessing. There's also no indication to how much ammo air assets have left. Is the apache out of hellfires? Is he down to just his 30mm cannon?

Certainly. I think the point here is that what's included in the game is merely the bare minimum required to call it a "story-driven campaign." The bare minimum, in this case, got Battlefront a 5 out of 10. It makes sense, to me.

The comment about the campaign seemed a bit off; he said he wanted to see where the lines were after every game, but every briefing in the campaign has a Strategic Map which does show the location of the friendly Task Force. The whole point of the campaign is a thunder run to the heart of Syria, so asking for the position of "lines" seems silly, given that there really are no traditional battle lines. But situation maps are included at the start of each battle. As for knowing about what was going on in the wider war - we're talking about exhaused front line soldiers in a Stryker brigade moving fast in enemy territory. Likely, ironically, they probably wouldn't know much about the wide world around them - just what gets filtered down to them in daily situation reports and battle briefings. Stay focused. The review is well written and nicely illustrated, but I think he missed the boat on his description of the campaign. I would have prefered something more meta-ish and interactive also, but it seems stupid to complain that stuff that clearly is in the campaign somehow isn't, or that stuff inappropriate to the campaign should be. I'm not sure what he means by "poorly-paced" either? It seems like he was struggling for ways to criticize it with a lot of his comments and just pulled stuff out of thin air. Does the reviewer post here? </font>

For the most part, I do like the artillery/air UI. A couple of suggestions/observations - (most of these could be solved by tooltips.) -The UI icons seem relatively small compared to their level of importance in the game. I didn't notice them for a long time, and didn't realize they were clickable buttons. -I don't have a good feel for how well a specific unit is at calling in assets. Some type of visible rating would be nice, so that I can make better decisions about who calls in what. Does distance to target have an effect on this? -I didn't understand that a shorter time limit meant that assets would be less accurate, until I read it on this forum. Again, I don't have a feel for how innaccurate each mission is. I had assumed that a shorter time was always better, and didn't understand why longer time delays were available to me. -In the case of apaches, I didn't understand the benefits to each of the attack types. (Point, linear, or area.) This was obvious with artillery, not so with the apache. This required a lot of testing on my part, at which point I had ran out of air support by the time I understood what each one did. -It seems like one unit could call in multiple air assets, but not artillery. I'm not aware of any penalties in terms of accuracy or time if one person is calling in several aircraft - are there any? -I couldn't find a way to go back and adjust mission configurations that I had mistakenly put in. In other words, when I mistakenly put in "5 minutes" instead of "immediate", there was no way for me to go back and adjust that. I had to cancel the entire mission and redo it. -Some type of audio cue would be useful once the mission actually begins - like a radio message telling me that artillery was now inbound, or the sound of a helicopter to notify me that an apache had arrived.

You're confusing two different things here. We're not talking about the content of the game, or the special features that make Combat Mission unique; we're talking about the user interface and presentation of those assets. Combat Mission: Shock Force is without a doubt a fantastic game under the hood, but so many people will never see that because of the poor controls and UI. That is an absolute fact. I think you guys are unaware of it because you've grown used to the controls and have completely lost touch with a new user experience. It's a mistake a lot of game companies make, and you guys should pursue a solution to it - and yes, you should keep an open mind. Acknowledge the fact there are other games in the universe aside from your own. Play them, learn from them. Realize that other games have developed controls and user interface to an exact science, and many games share the same controls for a reason - they're intuitive! It's what the human brain expects - people play more than one game at a time, and in doing so, expect a certain logical similarity in control schemes - not game content. Invite a new user to your company's building and watch him play shock force - watch what he expects left click and right click to do, watch what he expects the arrow keys to do. Observe how many questions he has to ask about the UI to even place his units at the beginning of a scenario, nevermind the actual gameplay. You'll probably find that your game is ass-backwards in just about every conceivable aspect of user interface, and to claim that as "progress" is absolute pig-headed foolishness. You guys are getting an absolute wealth of feedback from new users who've never tried Combat Mission - and you're completely ignoring it. If you think the CMAK or CMBO were successful because of their controls and UI, I suspect you may be borderline delusional. They, like many games before them, were successful in spite of their controls. Anyway, enough bitching. I'm off to play some shock force. [ July 30, 2007, 11:02 PM: Message edited by: molotov_billy ]