TheVulture
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Posts posted by TheVulture
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Here we go. Linky to infallible Steve comment:
http://www.battlefront.com/community/showpost.php?p=1144947&postcount=76
There is an information sharing radius that doesn't rely on C2. However, I believe it only applies to units within the same formation. Which it shouldn't, logically. Hopefully that can change for Normandy. With poorer C2 people will need all the help they can get
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Are you sure that this actually works that way? I seem to recall that spotting informations only travels through the OOB network, but not between "unrelated" squads.
Best regards,
Thomm
IIRC Steve said recently that it could pass between units in voice contact directly (but only ones in the same formation - not sure whether that means same platoon, company or whatever). And that passing info between entirely unrelated units (tanks and nearby infantry) was possibly coming in CM:N. Will check for link when I get a moment.
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Ricochet67 : it might be interesting to look at putting a sniper right next to a squad. The squad spots better with 9 pairs of eyes, and (in theory) conveys a '?' spot to the sniper which then has a greater chance of spotting. So putting the sniper next to an infantry squad might improve its spotting. Might be worth testing how much difference it can actually make.
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should I patch it in order to play those scenario that I can't play now?
You should patch anyway
Some of the original artwork couldn't fit on the CD and had to included in patch 1.01, and there are bugs fixes and improvements in the patches anyway. Plus, it lets you play the scenarios created with later versions of the game. There's no downside to patching. -
I think, but I'm not certain, that the problem is one of the version of the game the scenario was made under. So CMBB 1.03 (i.e. base game patched to version 3) can't run scenarios made with patch 1 or 2. A lot of scenarios would have been made and submitted for play, but not necessarily updated.
Again, I'm not sure that this is the problem - hopefully someone else will confirm or deny?
I'd be surprised if that was precisely the problem. I got the original v1.0 on the disk (surprise) and was able to play the scenarios that came with it. I patched to v1.03 and was still able to play the original scenarios (whose time stamp was unchanged, so they hadn't been updated).
A fairly reliable problem issue is trying to play e.g. v1.03 scenarios with an earlier version of the .exe. nbracco - have you patched the game to version 1.03?
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Hi Guys
I own Tow and CMSF and am interested in buying CMAK, i have a few questions though.
2. How many different campaigns and or missions come with the stock game ?
The CMx1 games (such as CMAK) don't have campaigns. They do have operations, which are several subsequent battles played between the same forces (plus reinforcements) over the same map, as the front line moves back and fore depending on how well you are doing. Can't remember how many missions come with the game itself, something like 30-40 IIRC. There were hundreds more created at the scenario depot, but I don't know how many of those have been transferred to the depository now.
3. Is the gameplay similar to CMSF ?
Broadly yes, although less resolved. It is the same 'level' of simulation in that it is meant to deal with the same level of engagement as CMSF, smallest units are squads and individual vehicles, largest organisations are battalion level. Squads are represented by 1-3 men, and take up a single point effectively (and consqeuently infantry behaviour doesn't have the same flexibility as CMSF). The entire squad is in forest, and after moving 1m, the entire squad is then in the open (I gather there were some programming fudge factors to allow more realistic behaviour though). There are some more commands available (seek hull down, shoot and scoot, hunt (which behaves differently from CMSF hunt - the new hunt is the same as the CMAK move to contact). There are the much-loved movable waypoints (you can move already plotted waypoints around, but then, you need to be able to because of the command delay system). There is CMSF functionality missing.
4. What level of micro management is there eg can your pixeltruppen pick up weapons and ammo from fallen comrades, can vehicles be repaired in game.
No vehicle repair - that is out of game scope as it is for CMSF. In operations damaged vehicles can be repaired and returned to action in later battles though. Vehicle damage is more coarse - vehicles are basically fine, gun damaged (unable to fire main weapon), immobilised or destroyed. Acquiring weapons off fallen troops is modelled to an extent, although IIRC it is mostly invisible, and is out of your control. A squad whose LMG guy is hit may magically (and instantly) transfer the MLG to another guy who has picked it up. Or not.
5. Do you carry units and individual troops over from one battle to another and can they be awarded medals and promotions (like in ToW).
No medals or promotions. Operations carry individual units over to the next battle (on the same map), and are meant to simulate an ongoing battle over a period of hours or a day or so with pauses for resupply, reorganistion etc.
6. Are there Italian campaigns / missions.
Yup. There are plenty of scenarios set in Italy, and the full 1943-45 Italian TO&E is included (barring the usual tiny exceptions). CMx1 games, as a rule, were much less 'one side' focussed than CMSF. Base CMSF is (IMHO) written from a US army viewpoint, while not preventing you playing Syria. CMAK includes the US, UK, Canadian, German, Italian (and others I think) forces and the scenarios and operations cover a whole range of styles without sticking to one 'viewpoint'. Possibly it is just the lack of a campaign (and the presence of blue-oriented campaigns in CMSF) that makes this difference.
Basically, think a less detailed CMSF, with some changed features to accomodate the difference between 'squads' vs 1:1 representation, and operations instead of campaigns. And with a greater variety of vehicles and other units.
I loved CMBB (and CMAK) at the time, but have found it painful to go back and play them having become used to the detail in CMSF. But I know others who have tried both and still prefer CMx1 games for various reasons.
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It's worth noting that, within reason, changes in frame rate have a greater psychological impact than absolute frame rates. Dropping from 30 to 15 fps is a pretty noticeable lag spike. Playing at a completely consistent 10 fps on the other hand is quite serviceable and often won't be problematic.
It is also possible to write code that can work one one or multiple processors. Not necessarily easy (and can be a veritable sod to debug)
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A British section storming a heavily defended room:
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A question that is always relevant to a game like this.
How many allied tanks succumbed to enemy fire during the wars in the middle east.
I have read about Abrams that were disabled, but never really knocked out.
Airpower and tactics played a large part, but is it really reasonable to expect an enemy tank in this game to ever knock out an allied one?
Also bear in mind that this game (marine module, anyway) - unlike Iraq or real-world Syria - features the t-90 which is a pretty even match for the Abrams head-to-head
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Conversely, the Brits have access to the LASM (light anti-structure missile) which can be picked up from many vehicles, although I can't say very well how it stacks up against infantry in buildings compared to javelins.
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There are 8 scenarios named "UK H2H <something>" which are specifically designed for head-to-head play, and no doubt a few of the others will work fairly well too.
Quick battles are unchanged, beyond there now being 226 maps as standard
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It has changed my tactics completely. Now the entire focus of my MOUT tactics are to get a LOF to the back of a building before I try to take it. Which jives nicely with several detailed AARs I read about Fallujah, and gives great confidence BFC is getting the bigger picture right.
It is a beautiful thing to watch a red squad scurry out the back into the LOF of a crack sniper team.
It took me a while to remember the new AI bug out behaviour. I lost any number of guys to it. Find enemy in building. Roll up some 30mm HE chucker and plaster the building for a minute or two. Run a squad in to deal with the suppressed and half-dead enemy, and find them standing in the next building along happily shooting the hell out of your guys as they charge in. Ouchies. I've gradually learned to plan my moves knowing that this is what will happen now though.
Getting LoF to the back of the building is nice if you can. But it makes multi-building buildings absolute deathtraps. The enemy move off to a building segment deeper in, and are absolutely impervious to anything outside. Sometimes you don't have much choice (aside from leaving them there and coming back later from all sides...).
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d those "ignorant Yanks" can blow up a Challenger 2 instead of yet another Red tank model. Somehow, I think they might just enjoy that even more. Modern versions of battles of the American War of Independence in 3...2...1...
I've been toying with ideas for some modern 'War of 1812' scenarios, with Yanks, Brits and the Syrians cast in the role of native American forces. Might have a crack at a battle of Queenston Heights scenario / mini-campaign.
Back on the point of the thread, I'm not a tester and so haven't seen anything of the Brit module yet, but I would note how different even the pure infantry squads of the marines and US army play, and that's just 'minor' changes in numbers and organisation. Same basic weaponry (SLAW aside) but it is enough that they play very differently.
The 'hidden' changes of different rifle types, numbers of LMGs / MMGs, grenade launcher, organic AT assets, grenade loadout might not look like game changers, but they can have a dramatic effect on gameplay once you notice that squads are more or less effective in different situations, and you adapt how you use them to optimise their behaviour. It has a knock-on effect to how you organise your whole battle plan.
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I guess I understand what you mean.
Regarding the visible muzzle flashes, I agree that it's not wrong that they are removed from the players eye if the firing unit ain't visible to the player, but my critic was about Steve's statement 'No, there was never a spotting bonus assigned to the special effects.', what implies that muzzle fire doesn't rises the chance for a unit to be spotted, no matter if the effect is displayed or not. But this might be a missunderstanding from me.
It is pretty definitely the case that firing units are more easily spotted than non-firing ones (as everyone knows in game MOUT situations, you don't spot enemy units in buildings at all until they decide to shoot at you unless you are in the same room). So firing generates extra chance of being spotted, but there is no extra benefit for spotting the muzzle flash graphics.
Anyway, I still think that dust of unspotted units should be visible independly from the unit itself, what would mean that unit and dust have each their own 'spotting value'. Yes, dust can be switched of (I think), but unit icons can be switched off, too. But if this is done, the player looses nearly all overview about the units on the battlefield, friendly or not, spotted or not. What's the sense of it, except a for taking a nice screenshot?
It would be nice if individual dust clouds were indepedantly spottable, but a) it might be very hard to retro-fit that to existing code (depending on how everything is implemented) and
it is potentially an awful lot more LoS calculations. You can't make the dust plume a single object, since it can be very large and only parts of it may be spottable. So you have to break it down in to 'sub clouds' - and each unit can conceivably have quite a lot of clouds associated with it (but at least that is a linear rather than a quadratic problem, since you don't have to worry about calculating LoS between different clouds). But is also breaks the existing enhanced LoS system. Currently LoS is pre-calculated for each action spot and height setting (of the 5, 7 or whatever it is standard heights). But clouds aren't constrained to those heights, and it is precisely the clouds at heights above any vehicle or unit (aside form aircraft) that are interesting. Which means either a great deal of time-intensive on the fly LoS calculation, or potentially massive pre-calculated tables and dust clouds only at certain 'standard' heights (cue the complaints about how LoS calculations for dust clouds don't exactly match up with the geometry visible to the players). -
Targetting smoke commands is something BFC had said they planned to introduce. I vaguely remember Steve saying it would be in the next patch.
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I doubt its "sales based" as being a moddable game would surly help sales. What i think the problem is that its difficult to make a game easily moddable especialy for a small team like BFC's.
The problem is that it only helps sales once. Sure, they could make CM:SF so that you can mod new vehicles, weapons etc. in to it, change TO&E And it might improve sales, although I'd be very surprised if it gave them even an extra 50% sales, to be honest. And as cabal23 mentions, before too long you'd have every modern army in the world modded in to it - at which point, you really don't have much to sell by way of modules, or any other way of generating more revenue. Which means that over a 3 year period, you have considerably less revenue from the game. They are trading off extra up front sales vs repeat sales of modules to a smaller install base.
I assume that this is because they've looked at their market data and research, and figured which way to go. Steve has said before that the moddable version, according to their figures, is great way to get people saying "CM:SF was a great game. Too bad the company folded...".
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It's been reported on before here a few times. IIRC Steve said he'd look in to it and hopefully get it sorted for the next patch.
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Looking at something three times and basing your conclusions on that doesn't seem very representative, even if that turns out to be the general trend.
Looking at 75 separate 4 km tank drives (which is what he did, 25 per run) is much more representative though. 19 immobilisations in 300 km - one every 15.8 +/- 3.6 km. That's enough stats to be pretty reliable.
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Don't know how much of this is due to different AI plans / setups, but I didn't have too much trouble with this mission. Or maybe my definition of "not too much trouble" is more casualty-tolerant than yours, 'cos I certainly took losses in the house-to-house fighting in the town. 3 casualties is pretty light - I'd wager you'll take a fair few more than that before you're out of the town, and yet more covering the open ground to the east. Only lost one AAV though, to an AT team hiding somewhere, and the enemy arty never bothered me. Possibly because my mission 1 sniper team holed up in the mosque, and seemed to draw the AI arty, which trashed the area, caused a few causalties to the sniper team (all sniper teams have taken a beating in scenarios throughout the campaign under my gentle leadership), but didn't hurt any of the main marine platoon or vehicles.
But you will take causalties in MOUT, since you can never spot the enemy before they open fire on you. It's split-squad recon by death with rapid and lethal response on the Syrian defenders. And of course, the AI changes mean they bug out of the buildings under fire fairly quickly, and finder a better place to hide, so try to cover their escape routes too. It is slow, patient work.
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Your percentages agree with mine for wet.
Incidentally I do wonder if very large number tests - 100 tanks per time actually obscure the average effect in battle. I have used dozen, tens and twenties and it seems to me that low figures record higher. Not logical but then in coding who knows what gremlins occur. : )
I also find the immobs. are front loaded. Arguably with less tanks going further into the game the problem would be less anyway but allowing for that perception it does appear front-loading exists.
I did notice in my tests that a fair number occured almost immediately as the tanks started moving. From memory, 3 or 4 tanks bogged wiothin the first tile, out of the 60 or so total boggings observed. Since the map was 200 tiles long, you'd expect 0.3 tanks to bog in the first tile - 10 times higher is pretty significant.
Recollection isn't great data though, so might be worth testing. But it raises the possibility that tanks have a higher probability of bogging when accelerating, or just starting a new movement order from a waypoint (or, indeed, when turning). Since precious few tank movements in game involve single 4 km fast moves along a straight road, the bog rates for tanks doing stop-start moves, multiple waypoints, turning etc. may be considerably higher.
Just an observation. And yes CMAK is a great game. CMBB I am not fond of!
Burn the heretic!
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Yup - 2 SMAW with standard ammo loadout at the start. But if my memory is correct the reinforcements include a javelin team that has no javelins to start (but you can acquire them from the AAVs) - made that mistake once running the team to a firing position only to then notice that they had no ammo on them.
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And since the subject has come up, that reminds me of a question I had: will the air support interface be much the same as in CMSF? I figure probably not, since in a modern setting the communication between aircraft and ground forces is pretty good, while in WWII it was non-existent. So I'd guess that being able to set point targets, area targets for aircraft and have them turn up in 5 minutes isn't remotely realistic for Normandy.
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More in-game testing for the masochistically inclined.
Test 4: t-34s on dirt roads, damp conditions (same 4km drive x 30 tanks as before). 20 runs, 0 boggings. That's 30 t-34s driving 80km each with nary a glitch between them on damp dirt roads. That sounds better than what I'd expect in real life, not that I'm an expert.
Beginning to wonder if my copy of CMBB includes bogging at all (despite knowing damn well I've had it in the past).
Test 5: 30 x t-34 on dirt roads, wet conditions, and we finally have some action. After 5 sets of runs, I have a total of 10 bogs, 5 of which give immobilisations. For one tank, that is a bog every 60 km and an immobilistaion (in game terms) every 120 km. No idea how realistic that is.
At the other extreme, lets have some hot tiger action in the same wet conditions.
test 6: 30 x tiger on dirt roads, wet conditions. 5 sets of runs again (5 x 30 tigers x 4 km). Total of 47 bogs observed. 35 of those freed themselves, 12 became immobilised. That's a bog every 12.8 km for a tiger, and an immobilisation every 50 km.
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Dragging this back from the middle of the thread...
still, historically you have stuff like a tank army do a 300 km road march with 5-10% breakdown rate. in CMBB you get as many breakdowns for 1% of that range.No, you don't. Since my wife and son commandeered the good computers to play World of Warcraft for a while, I was relegated to the laptop, so decided to run some CMBB tests on road immobilisation rates.
Test 1: July 1943, southern theatre. Dry conditions, paved road, 4km long map. 30 parallel roads, with a regular t-34 (early) on each.
After 30 test runs, 0 tanks bogged, 0 immobilised.
Okay, so that is testing pretty much the ideal situation, where you expect the lowest bogging. But we still have 3,600 km of t-34 road driving without a single problem
Test 2: replace t-34s with 30x early Tigers, since they are notoriously unreliable. Another 30 test runs. Still 0 boggings observed.
Test 3: Make things a bit tougher. Put the tigers on dirt roads, still in dry conditions. Only had time for 10 test runs. 0 observed bogging events.
Since tests 2 and 3 should result in more boggings, it is fair to say, I think, that we have the equivalent 70 runs of t-34 on paved road (doing 70 runs of t-34 on paved road ought to result in fewer boggings than the actual 70 runs with a misture of tigers and dirt roads thrown in).
URC's real world data is of 5-10% losses of t-34s on a 300km road march (road quality, weather not specified). 5% losses in 300 km would give a typical time between failures of 6,000 km. I have 8,400km of tank drives, so you'd expect 1.4 immobilised tanks in that time (not factoring in CMBB immobilisations should occur more frequently since they include any problem that can't be fixed in CMBB battle timescales under combat conditions).
So either something is screwed with my CMBB copy, or if they are actually undermodelling 'bogging' on road driving
Some of the original artwork couldn't fit on the CD and had to included in patch 1.01, and there are bugs fixes and improvements in the patches anyway. Plus, it lets you play the scenarios created with later versions of the game. There's no downside to patching.
it is potentially an awful lot more LoS calculations. You can't make the dust plume a single object, since it can be very large and only parts of it may be spottable. So you have to break it down in to 'sub clouds' - and each unit can conceivably have quite a lot of clouds associated with it (but at least that is a linear rather than a quadratic problem, since you don't have to worry about calculating LoS between different clouds). But is also breaks the existing enhanced LoS system. Currently LoS is pre-calculated for each action spot and height setting (of the 5, 7 or whatever it is standard heights). But clouds aren't constrained to those heights, and it is precisely the clouds at heights above any vehicle or unit (aside form aircraft) that are interesting. Which means either a great deal of time-intensive on the fly LoS calculation, or potentially massive pre-calculated tables and dust clouds only at certain 'standard' heights (cue the complaints about how LoS calculations for dust clouds don't exactly match up with the geometry visible to the players).
Impression of the Standalones?
in Combat Mission Shock Force 1
Posted
I'm loving "The Full Monty" at the moment, although it is making even my fairly powerful work computer have some relatively low frame rates from time to time (what with 90 odd blue units, heavy combat, largish map, lots of buildings and wheatfields). With a full infantry company on hand, with all the odds and sods, plenty of time, and a lot of artillery and air support on hand, I've been able to take my time, slowly advance, and when I find some resistance, bring up the appropriate response to deal with it without having to rush things. Having great fun with it. And two of my snipers have nailed the best part of 5 ATGM teams, a sniper and 2 HMG teams almost on their own. The benefit of crack troops, I suppose...