dan/california

Clay can we get an easier way to place fighting positions during deployment maybe? Something you pick and place kind of like a turret and it just appears. It would be a huge plus for defenders on all of the maps and would increase the importance of fixed defenses a lot I think. It could be as simple as being able to fire mortar rounds targeted in your own deployment area during deployment. Very carefully targeted mortar rounds I might add. I have too much to do during deployment trying to get the bots organized into something more useful than a thor scrum. Traffic on the servers is picking up. I think many more people will star using the command track correctly going forward. You need a couple or three human shooters before you can spare a person for the command track with the current level of bot intelligence. Last but not least can we get a group drop command, so all three plus ships come in at the same time. That way one guy who is having a hot hand with the 120 is not going to get them all. Less capture the flag would also be good in this regard. None would be better.

Middle LOW is the sweet spot from the side for just about every thing. That is where the fuel cell is. Don't use AP for very light vehicles. The new HE round shreds shrikes, gotta love it. Those little dune buggies were getting uppity. Perhaps Yurch can grace us with one of his brilliants tomes on the subject. The scary part is that he is an even better player than he sounds like.

Could we possibly get a separate category for turrets on the end of game stat sheets?

Informed opinions such as yours peter are why I spend enough time on these boards to drive my wife crazy.

Three things I would like to propose as initial lessons from the current Hezbollah- Israeli conflict. 1. Active defenses against atgm's are about to become a lot of peoples top priority. A lot of money is about to be thrown at this problem. 2. Various electronic means of locating the source of incoming small arms fire are likewise about to become much more aggressively and expensively pursued. 3. No amount of precision in weapons guidance when the will help prevent civilian casualties when the other side is willing to use human shields to the extent that Hezbollah is doing. Their must be a decision made in advance to live with this or not engage in the operation in the first place.

Clay does this apply to laser towers as well. They have pretty much been taking down any incoming fire of any significance , period. I just want to state this is the best customer service/support of any game ever!

I was referring to Adzling's post regarding assaulting a laser tower above. As is often the case this should probably be two threads.

Their is some confusion happening here because the laser tower does shoot down some 120 mm. I specifically recall watching it do so. Therefore a laser tower on a hill becomes the perfect place to camp with an ion thor. Which then can only be removed by another ion or close assault. This may be due in part to the uphill shot reducing the 120 mm velocity. I have not sorted it that deeply.

Clay, my one, and admittedly picky, response to your post above is that you do not necessarily have to use antimatter to get big booms. You just decide the size of the boom you want and do the math for how many micro grams of antimatter you need. This doesn't work for current generation nuclear weapons because their is a minimum size required to get the whole thing to work and that minimum size is a rather large in terms of explosive yield. Any amount of antimatter, from fire cracker to planet buster is going to go off with exactly the same , very large, amount of energy per gram. The underlying physics are fundamentally different. The Squid Lord is dead on about the 6mm ion. It is all about ammo space and handling, No ammo, no problem. I still like the idea of giving the infantry a ckem style missile instead. I apologize if I am geeking out completely here.

Yes as I understand it, and the Iraqis took more battle casualties because the were forward deployed in the desert around Kuwait. The factors discussed above reduced the Iraqis chances of a first round kill to a small fraction of the Americans. This of course massively affected the morale of both sides. Th references to thermal sites above should probably be broadened to include the superiority of the fire control systems as whole. Remember these have to be maintained and calibrated as well as bought up front.

Based on TACOPS 4 there are three very simple facts that explain much of the Iraqi armies complete failure. The first is training, always has mattered and always will, and the Iraqis were lousy at it. The second was thermal sights. The U.S. had them and the Iraqis did not. So at night the Iraqis were big targets with kill me signs in blazing neon. The sights also also lets you call smoke on on a position and then shoot at it while it is blind, you do not even have to breathe the stuff until you drive by the smoking wrecks. They frequently never knew what hit them. Lastly the Iraqis did not have the latest generation atgms in quantity and their sabot rounds just bounced of of The M1's fronts at any range much past zero , so Abrams tanks felt free to drive forward to draw fire and then take their time killing what ever showed its head with the Bradleys in overwatch. This combination created an overwhelming overmatch. TACOPS when the other side does and does not have these abilities/technologies is two different games. How many of these things the Syrians do better I don't claim to know. Ditto for how CMX2 is going to deal with all of the above. Having both your unit and its supply lines bombarded by an air force with complete supremacy and ample PGMs obviously did not make it any easier.

I have every sympathy for the four guys who died, they were just following orders in a bad spot. But come on man, "peacekeeping" in what may be one of the more even standup shooting matches in years. I simply have no clue what their superiors thought they were going to accomplish, none. Peacekeeping can work very well when both sides want peace, and the peace keepers can act as honest intermediaries on day to day issues to reassure both sides that the terms of an agreement are being kept. The only agreement Between the Israelis and Hezbollah is that both sides agree they want to erase the other one from the face of the earth. Getting killed for a better view of the party did not make much sense in my honest opinion. There comes a time when smart people pick a side or start avoiding the middle of the battlefield.

To much chaos may make a good simulator but it is a large downer from a game perspective. For a scenario at this level to depend entirely on if a B52 or other large asset is in the right place or not will not be a lot of fun to play. This doubly difficult for a mostly desert/open terrain game. The side with the better airforce is way, way ahead. Not a whole lot of Syria provides the natural defenses available in southern Lebanon.

What I am about to say is really bad, I admit this in advance. The real trick is to get the OTHER SIDE to kill/injure the camera crew. Thus drawing down on themselves the wrath of the world wide media self protection monopoly. The Israelis just lost a round of this game in the last day or two in regard to those unfortunate U.N. types. Who really should have either had the sense to leave or dig a really deep whole and watch the show on closed circuit tv. They certainly were not doing anything useful. Its not nice and surely is not fair but that is how the game is played.

A left over piece of tech that doe not see the right IFF codes for either side comes immediately to mind. And that is just the sort of place you find the best salvageable hi tech stuff too.

A containment field of some sort is assumed. If the vehicles are running on it then the basics of controlling it have already been worked out or they would instantly go boom. You just have to be able to miniaturize the the system. And from what I know of current systems for attempting this, which only work with a very few molecules, it is easier to do in a very small space because it reduces the size of the field you are trying to hold. So a round would consist of a containment field generator, control electronics and a tiny bit of antimatter. Impact with the target causes the field to fail and the antimatter does its thing. The current Drop Team vehicle schematics assume some way of doing this for vehicular power. They show separate antimatter storage systems and engines. So a way of getting the stuff from one to the other has to exist already. If you can move antimatter that effectively you move it toward the enemy. Among other things the munition only has to work once and is planning on eating itself in the process. The engine has to do it continually and with much finer control. Current hydrogen bombs vs fusion power are an excellent example. The first generates nuclear fusion for a split second blows itself and the entire vicinity to very small pieces in the process. The second has yet to produce one watt of net power for a commercial power grid. It is harder to make an engine than a bomb. As I said in my post above what I am really arguing for is that they change they change the back story to state that the vehicles run on hydrogen fuel cells or ultrahigh energy synthetic hydrocarbons or any of a number of proposed future systems. I just don't see antimatter being used for anything except the liveships stardrive. They do not even really need to change the schematics, just the labels on the drawings and some text. It is a small thing, the game works very well. I just want this little piece to make a little more sense. Hammers Slammers really provides a much more coherent theory of vehicle power and so on. And the important parts are generic enough to be mostly borrow-able. This should really be its own thread.

Well their is a tape floating around the web somewhere of a U.S. soldier taking an AK round dead center in the chest plate, granted the best case scenario for the vest probably. It knocks him down but he then GETS UP and takes cover behind the humvee he was standing beside. He needed a couple of days of light duty due to the bruising. The funny part is that one of the Iraqis doing the shooting took the film. The U.S. unit in question was on the ball and they caught him and his camera. Sometimes the insurgent's propaganda machine has a bad day. It did not get nearly the mainstream media play it deserved. I question if the Syrians have huge numbers of tungsten/du AK rounds. I could be wrong The U.S. ratio of wounded to killed is the highest it has ever been as I understand it. A LOT of guys are making it home who would not have even in 1991. They may have peices missing but they are not KIA.

Yurch said "Drop ability is a operational/strateeegery advantage, and I hope that it never becomes a really tactical advantage. It's for getting ahead of the enemy advance, or encircling a position from 6km out. NOT for dropping amongst enemy units. "The confusion" is on a larger scale. And to be honest, we don't really need the confusion. Our AA is so pathetic the primary weapon of choice for killing aircraft is the 120mm HEAT round. If command could feasably put drop pods amongst enemy tanks in the walls of a base, why aren't they dropping piles of explosives instead?" It all makes sense to me, although it does depend on the size of the base and the precision/effect of the available munitions. From a game perspective what is needed is make the AA more effective, make dropships only available in limited numbers and at the same tim reduce the effectiveness of point defense against main gun rounds. artillery shells are much harder targets than missiles. From the real world why in the heck didn't they do it this way perspective, If antimatter is available a 20mm round should leave a hole about the size of the big mortar. Antimatter_ matter annihilation energy is literally found from e=m*c^2. That gets to be a large number very quickly since c is the speed of light. For .1 grams of antimatter meeting a like quantity of matter that works out to about 1.8*10^14 joules of energy. For comparison purposes an M1 main gun apdsfs ect. hits with about 8 *10^6 joules plus or minus a couple of decimal places. .1 grams of antimatter is a small nuke, why bother with anything else. Yes Clay I know this is really a back-story issue as opposed to a game mechanics issue, but it is a big back story issue. Ultra high effeciency fuel cells would have been much easier to talk around. [ July 27, 2006, 02:18 AM: Message edited by: dan/california ]

Of course, the leaking gamma radiation from the antimatter cells is all but frying the poor @#%&%$%@s anyway. How could I have overlooked that. Of course given that infantry are supposed to hold them next to their head it gives you a feel for the expectations of their long term survival. That might explain a lot of infantry behavior come to think of it. Memo to all live ships, remember the infantry get the "special " radiation badges. :eek: Deploying infantry from pods that could survive being dropped on enemy positions would definitely put the drop in drop team would it not. It would be great to see a coordinated three squad drop cause panic in the base on the ice world for instance. I do think it would also put a premium on the job that infantry do in a real army. Which is to discourage the other sides infantry from such pursuits.

Point 1: If Battlefront put up a request for pre-orders on an Arab Israeli version of cmx2 they might be surprised. Heck, just don't run the cc #s or start development until you have enough guaranteed buyers to make it worth your while. Once the game engine built it is all artwork and stats anyway. That is not trivial but it does not approach a whole new game either. Point 2: Our Israeli friends certainly have a point of view but they are usually polite and what they say seems to make sense, given that some of them are IDF tankers they should. That is less true of the other side on all counts so far. If someone wants to give a coherent account of what Hezbollah is doing and how they are doing it I am sure this board would give them a wide audience. Well besides managing to drop half of their rockets in Israeli-Arab neighborhoods, that is, even Time Magazine can cover that. Point 3: I like Battlefronts games immensely and own at least three of them not counting demos. The developers interaction on these boards and the informed opinions of the the people on them are one of the primary reasons why. That said, the developers horse on the issue of what games they will and won't make is getting a little bit too tall. All wargames simulate situations in which people die very unpleasantly, the rest of it is details. Does something make a good game and or sell are separate and valid questions. We do want them to be able to keep doing it after all.

I have a suggestion for infantry that makes some sense but might be a balance issue. Step one: Be able to group squads in formation, so one human player can command more that one squad. Step two: Have the bot squads shoot at the same target as the human player. Given the assumption of even basic radios and the the ease of following an ion beam by eye it seems very doable. For that matter why can't you slave bots that way to the human player in AFVs Might make ion squads a little too popular, but their availability could be more limited. On a related issue, if an infantryman can carry a six mm ion, why isn't their a thor turret with about 50 of them installed laying waste to everything on the map?

Clay I played three network games today with no repeat, so I guess we will just have to see if it recurs. The game overall is fantastic. Could you post a pinned thread at the top of the tech support section to help people get you the right log file the first time? it might save a lot of hassle for everyone involved.

Hello Clay, did you receive the email and log file I sent you? Was it the right file? Just double checking. Thanks dan

The interesting question is which side will find it a more useful training tool. I can potentially foresee a large order to be mailed to a certain post office box with diplomatic privileges. :eek: There is a very real risk of being able to compare the game to reality in almost real time.

Well the French do have those lovely shaded avenues for victorius invading armies to march down.