TheVulture

I managed a similar thing in a 1.08 PBEM (and it is absolutely definitely 1.08, but it was on rather steep gradients rather than flat ground: It did some crazy stuff like that for a few second (I still have the PBEM turn file if it is any use) before eventually sorting itself out.

Odd - the first few sites I checked weren't selling any CMx1 products at all.

The (BIG imho) weakness of the assault command is that the overwatch element of the squad doesn't do suppressive area fire, and so only reacts after any defenders have shot at the assaulting unit, which is often too late to save them. Then couple that with the fact that the suppression state is shared by the whole squad, and in bad cases the overwatch element which takes no fire can get pinned and unable to fire back while the assault element gets killed. You can get better behaviour by splitting the squads before hand, and charging one in with 'quick' while the others have cover arcs or area fire commands. (Cover arcs don't solve the first problem, but then that's probably realistic, but does solve the 'overwatch gets suppressed' problem). But as Thomm says, the best solution is to have a whole platoon blow the hell out of the place before the point squad goes rushing in. Made easier by the fact that small arms area fire can't cause friendly casualties, so you can keep suppression on until way after the last realistic moment.

Same reason you can't area fire through smoke. a) it is extra work to code it to make it possible, and the number of legitimate uses it enables compared to the number of gamey ones probably weighs against it. </font>

Same reason you can't area fire through smoke. a) it is extra work to code it to make it possible, and the number of legitimate uses it enables compared to the number of gamey ones probably weighs against it. You're barking up the wrong tree with that kind of request.

How much difference would it make if beam-riding missile beam was detected? Would the smoke have any effect? Sure, smoke will affect 'normal' laser guidance ,which depends on reflecting laser off the target, by dispersing the reflection so that the missile has nothing to aim itself at. But a beam rider using the beam striking it from behind for guidance? What happens to the beam ahead of the missile ought to be irrelevant. If it trigger smoke, then that only affects things insofar as the operator may not know exactly where to target the beam. And once the missile enters the smoke it loses its guidance information from behind. But at that point it is surely pretty damn close to the target (in terms of actual travel time - how far off course is it going to go even if it has to travel through 100m of smoke to hit its target?) While I can't pretend to know much about these systems, I find it entirely plausible that a beam rider missile could cope with flying the last 50-100m blind (assuming we've made a pretty damn big smoke screen here. I'd guess that the reality is that the amount of smoke put out between laser detection and incoming missile is more like a few meters, which would make close to zero difference).

I managed to dig up one reference to it (and people managing to gets units to move beneath bridges...) http://www.battlefront.com/cgi-bin/bbs/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=16;t=020684#000004 And another old thread confirming my memory of the TacAI managing to get vehicles to do 90 degree turns in the middle of a bridge and drive off on the lower road: http://www.battlefront.com/cgi-bin/bbs/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=13;t=013364#000000 I know I saw an AAR of this with screenshots once, but a) can't find it, and don't know if it was on this site or elsewhere.

And you might remember the problems that arose when bridges went over anything that wasn't water - a vehicle could drive on to the bridge, turn right in the middle of it, and drive off on the road it was supposed to be going over. And vice versa I think. And IIRC you couldn't drive under bridges - you again went over the top of them. The bridges were, essentially, hard-coded on the assumption they'd be over water, and could go a bit screwy if you put them over anything else.

Tea. That's more or less it. Any argument? </font>

Challenger II MBT. Warrior ICV. </font>

Judging by the way it decelerates after jumping to high speed, it looks like the only quirk is that the speed of the tank got set very high at some point in the trench, although as to why that could happen depends entirely on how the game is coded and objects are represented. (Who knows - could be the slope of the trench and the tank suddenly thinking it is on a steep slope. Could be all the random suspension jiggling as the tank bounces around suddenly aligning and being interpreted as a linear velocity... it's not something you can even intelligently speculate on without knowing the internal workings of the game). But once the speed got set to mach 9, the behaviour after that looks 'normal'. The tank slows to a stop eventually, and presumably would have either stayed where it was or gone back to the intended waypoint (depending on whether that waypoint was deleted as the tank passed it). I've managed to do similar things with a stryker moving at 'fast' down a genuine steep slope - it overshot its waypoint at the bottom of the slope, coasted up the other side of the valley and eventually came to stop abot 100 meters away from its intended position. Right in front of a T-55 I should add...

In fact, just checked the save, and I can watch them run up stairs, on to the balcony, and then they bounce up and down between floor and balcony until they all eventually reach their final positions on the floor. ALso noteable (if irrelevant) is the fact that 3 of the 6-man HQ squad are carrying AT-4s. They've obviously been scavangeing well.

I think I've seen it in Wego single player too (in misison #2 of webwing's 'Ghost' campaign). HQ unit ordered in to a building 1st floor with a balcony (to avoid any cultural confusion, 'first floor' here is the first one above the ground floor...). Nothing much happening in their area, so it was a turn or two later that I noticed that they were standing under the balcony in front of the building. So I order them back up to the balcony. I don't track what they do, but next turn, they are back on the ground outside the building, beneath the balcony again. Wondering if I forgot to give them the order (or hit 'delete' and cancelled it without noticing) I give the order again. Once again, they end up in front of the building. I've got a save of this around somewhere I think, if another one would be useful.

The flip side of that is that in those games, if you didn't know which units were which, you still needed to suicide units sometimes (because there was no other way of unlodging a well-entrenched defender: it was guaranteed to win the first few fights and you didn't have time to faf around and be careful). If you didn't know which ones the 'core' units were, then there was a fairly big difference in outcome based on luck. You could be penalised or rewarded for guessing wrong. Arguably the same thing could happen in CM:SF, but I don't think I've seen a situation yet that required suiciding units, although you do sometimes need to take more of a risk with some than others.

I suspect the problems would be with the large open areas which are mddelled as a whole load of buildings with all their walls 'empty'. It just isn't treated as a single large space. On the plus side, you get the ability to position your guys within the large room (in a single sub-building). On the down side, I have no idea what it does to movement, LoS, LoF and such things - I suspect that is part of what makes it unplayable. And from a game-play perspective, people can move up and down between floors anywhere, so there is no ability to control all the stairs leading to a particular floor in a large complex building, which is something that would be pretty much essential if you even a vague semblance of realism (which combines with the fact that you can spot and fight through two floors of a building too, which again only is 'realistic' if their is one or more staircases connecting the floors. WHich when modelling a building as a singly building, is probably reasonable).

Random aside that might be interesting to Linux nutters: a friend of mine got sick of how badly World of Warcraft ran on his new Vista machine, so he tried it on the same machine under Wine - the windows emulator in Linux. It ran 10-15 frames per second faster... (Wine has improved a lot in what runs on it in the last few years, but I have no idea whether CMx1 or CMx2 will run under it or not. If it does it might just give better performance than Vista though). Somewhat amused me that a computer running Vista directly had far worse performance than the same computer running a completely different OS and emulating windows on top of it

Not any more you can't - if you try and target from a waypoint, it draws the target line from where the unit currently is (with the effect that you can't order a unit to move in to LoS and start shooting at a target, since you can't actually issue the target command until the unit is in LoS - although you can use cover arcs obviously). You can also use the face command from the waypoint to the target direction, and see how that waypoint line interacts with the terrain - might be enough to give you a hint about whether you have LoS or not.

Depends whose LoS you are talking about in a vehicle I suppose - the sensors, the commander, the driver...?

Paid expansion - less than the price of the original game. The business model is full price game (CM:SF) with cheaper modules that add in extras, such as new equipment (Steve has been understandably vague about what else might be in a module in terms of new content). Modules expand the game in the same basic setting. At some point a new game (CM:Normandy) comes out at full price, much the same as CM:SF. This one also gets a series of modules adding in extra equipment, TO&Es etc. So there are actually three sources of updates: New game (full price, completely new setting), modules (lower price, some new content, expanding on the setting), patches (free, no new content, bug fixes and game tweaks).

1.08 bug I noticed today The curse of the persistent waypoint From webwing's ghost campaign, first mission (save available that shows the bug (I hope - haven't checked, but saved just before hitting 'start' and seeing the problem). US MOUT squad currently split into 3x3 man teams. I am trying to get them to move up from their current positions to a wall around a building (whence they will breach the wall and storm in, hopefully). Each time I give them an order to move (usually 'quick') the team runs backwards some twenty or more meters before turning around and attempting to complete the move. This behavious started before I split the squad, as it happens (no save of that though). Setup phase: move order is given. Two turns in they have nearly reached that first plotted waypoint. If I recall correctly, some soldiers had stopped moving, having reached their destinations, while others were still walking, and the 'move' command still showed when the unit was selected. I cancelled the move command and gave them a new one, which caused no problem that I noticed. A turn or two later on, I gave them an assault command to move forwards through a forested area, and the first team up and moving ran backwards some distance before going forwards. As I said, after I split the teams, this continued, with each team doing the same thing (my memory may not be perfect on the details BTW). They all seemed to go back to the same point no matter where they started from, and I am pretty confident that it is pretty much to the point where their original move command ended. (Incidentally, minor graphical glitch in the same scenario: after breaching the wall, on the replay the wall correctly started the turn intact, but with piles of rubble at the edges of where the breach was going to appear. Since I've also seen breaches where the replay has no problems, it isn't something that happens every time).

I'm pretty sure that units--particularly units with night-vision equipment--shouldn't fire on their own men at the short ranges we're seeing, especially when their mission is to cover those men as they move forward. I'd trust that they could keep their eye on the squads they're protecting as those squads move forward 100 yards. I was unaware that FF was merely cosmetic. In fact, I was sure that I've taken casualties from it. (If it *is* merely cosmetic, this might explain why units with "hide" commands continue to do it.) Does FF use ammo? </font>

I'm pretty sure that units--particularly units with night-vision equipment--shouldn't fire on their own men at the short ranges we're seeing, especially when their mission is to cover those men as they move forward. I'd trust that they could keep their eye on the squads they're protecting as those squads move forward 100 yards. I was unaware that FF was merely cosmetic. In fact, I was sure that I've taken casualties from it. (If it *is* merely cosmetic, this might explain why units with "hide" commands continue to do it.) Does FF use ammo? </font>

I'm pretty sure that units--particularly units with night-vision equipment--shouldn't fire on their own men at the short ranges we're seeing, especially when their mission is to cover those men as they move forward. I'd trust that they could keep their eye on the squads they're protecting as those squads move forward 100 yards. I was unaware that FF was merely cosmetic. In fact, I was sure that I've taken casualties from it. (If it *is* merely cosmetic, this might explain why units with "hide" commands continue to do it.) Does FF use ammo? </font>

And what about water as cover - high velocity rounds break up pretty much immediately on hitting the surface for example. How do various HE rounds interact with water? With 1:1 representation and pretty accurate terrain, do you have to worry about how fast each soldier can move given the depth of water he is in (lets ignore currents for now). You know BFC are going to want to get things kinds of things done accurately, and there is a lot more work there than you might imagine.