dan/california

I have read in several places about the 105 mm on the AC130 being replaced by the as yet experimental XM395 guided mortar round. Is their any reason that it could be deployed from UAVs or other aircraft in this role. For that matter if they have a 120mm guided mortar round, a small UAV and the battalion mortar platoon are all the air-force you need for a lot of situations. Even if the rounds are expensive the battalion UAV doesn't burn 50,000 dollars a mission in jet fuel whether it drops any ordinance or not.

We need to start a thread on when we are going to do to do anything with UAVs.

How hard would it be to enable the player to draw on the tactical map? I mean being able to draw things similar to the lines of departure and advance that are currently available in the editor. This would allow the player to carefully examine the map once to determine things like subtle hill crests, and other terrain features that have a significant influence on tactical planning once, and be able to note them to save having to re-examine things in detail over and over again as he actually deploys his units. Speaking just for myself, this would save me a great deal of time. Just being able to do simple straight lines like what we get with a linear artillery target, but in a different color, would be very helpful. I am not asking for the game to recognize them in any meaningful way. I just want to be able to make notes to myself.

There are a great many things about air support that the game doesn't handle very well. I think Steve is made reasonable case that the reason the game doesn't handle these things very well is that it would require writing a whole new game to do them well. It would be called the JTAC trainer model 101. This problem is made much worse by all the neat video coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan, of air strikes made in very close support situations. However, the game posits a situation in which there is a full a conventional war going on, and the Air Force will have a great many other things to do besides flying in small circles and waiting for the Army to yell for help. The Air Force's primary jobs are to ensure that not one enemy fighter makes it off the runway, and that not one significant size unit or supply convoy can move any distance whatsoever behind enemy lines. Both of these tasks have an enormous influence on what happens at the sharp edge of the army's spear, but they don't show up in the scope of the game. The games great failing is that it is not modeling the drone support that is now integral to most US army brigades at all. These have a very limited strike capability, if any. But they do provide a persistent top view of the battle on which armored fighting vehicles in particular stand out like sore thumbs. Most of these drones also have the ability to designate for various kinds of GPS and laser guided ordinance. Many of the specific issues with helicopters occur, I believe when trying to use the same interface for both helicopters and air strikes. There is also an issue with trying to model what we see in many of the videos from the current low intensity conflicts. My understanding is that no Apache pilot, with any desire whatsoever to stay alive, would over-fly an enemy mechanized unit with any functionality left at all. Instead they would carefully approach just close enough to deploy their missiles, making full use of any available terrain features to do this. Every possible attempt will be made to stay out of the enemy's line of sight except for the actual moment of the deployment. It is my understanding that in some cases it is even possible to deploy the laser designator of the JTAC in such a way that the Apache never has to show itself in the known enemy line of sight. Thus, the game both under, and over models various aspects of the Apache’s capabilities. I do feel that in some cases it is far too difficult in practice to kill enemy armor in uncovered positions. That is the single job that the Apache was designed to do well. If someone who has actually flown one wants to tell me that I'm wrong I will cheerfully listen to him.

Dang it, they fixed it before i could check it out. I hate it when that happens.

Couldn't you get 90% + of the true iron man simply by blanking out every unit on the map, except the one you are giving orders for at the time, if the camera is not locked into the Iron Man position/setting?

I had this problem with one enemy Tank in George Mc's excellent scenario Hammertime. The T72 was sitting about 2/12 houses back into a built up area which gave it a very narrow field of view. It would occasionally get a shot of and ruin my day, but t was extraordinarily difficult to get my M1s positioned to get a shot off. I figured it was about halfway between good scenario design and a problem with the spotting routine. That scenario should resolve any questions any one has about play balance by the way. It is HARD.

Slug88, how long is it after you designate the target area that the Hellfires start hitting. I assume you are designating with the FO. I just want to understand what I am doing wrong.

I played v1.1 tonight and the extra room greatly increases tactical flexibility, so that helped a lot, and thanks for rewriting it. However, I still can't get the Apaches to do ANYTHING. Does the fact that red is advancing down the road at the very bottom of the valley affect the Apaches ability to target them effectively. There is a lot of evidence that Apaches shred armor trying to move through the desert after all.

Field Marshall, just out of curiosity, are you play testing this on veteran or elite? I believe it has a radical effect on Apache performance. It is also quite possible that I'm simply not very good at marshaling Apaches. I have never had any notable success with them. Likewise my experience with a AT4s is that they are actually useful to at most a hundred yards. This can make things tactically complicated when you have a team that is armed with both javelins and AT4s. For the javelins you want the longest possible engagement distance, or at least several hundred yards, since it seems to both increased javelin accuracy and reduce counter fire. Thus the instant you fire your last javelin with a given team, you need to escape from a position that maximizes their engagement range to one that minimizes it. This map presents a plausible real-world situation where that can be very difficult to do. The idea of expanding the map to the rear of the US starting position has argued and discussed, and in so far as I can determine more or less agreed on. I do think it would greatly increase the playability of the whole scenario. Killing enemy mechanized companies is not the recon platoon's job unless the situation is already well and truly out to lunch. The recon platoon's job is to find them and let someone else kill them. In that regard I really do feel that more maneuvering room would allow more realistic tactics to be employed. I do however really like how you have included multiple and varied AI plans. Furthermore, any scenario is always appreciated, they do take a considerable amount of time to write. I have been meaning to do once since the game came out and have just lagged on the subject. Everyone have a good day

Steve talked about this a while back. As I understood it some damage indication for buildings was a moderately high priority, but better damage graphics and or physics for vehicles just seemed like a lot of trouble for something that would have no effect on gameplay.

"Well when it comes to air defences the guys at Jane’s recon that losses for NATO could be as high as 2% when up against current generation Russian air defences. This may not sound a lot but it would be a show stopper for air in support of ground operations. Manned air assets anyway." All valid points but. Two related issues, the first is whether or not that loss rate is maintained over time. Or are the air defenses degraded over the course of the opening week to the point of complete ineffectiveness? The second point is that anyone who really knows the answer the first question would probably spend quite a while in prison if they talked about it on a public board. It is also probably worth pointing out that strategic level radars and missile systems take a much higher grade of operator and maintenance tech than an RPG 29. The actual Russian military may have those people, but is VERY unclear if most of the other people operating their stuff do.

Spoiler Alert ******* ** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * It kicked my rear end twice. It would help immensely if their was a little bit of running room behind the Americans. A stryker recon platoon is not going to keep advancing into the better part of a mechanized company.

Until there is some evidence that the the Syrian air defense system would actually work, the assumption has to be that they would get hammered. As mentioned above the Israeli's took out the reactor site without a missile being fired. That was not the only time they have demonstrated the ability to overfly Syria at will either. Thus the assumption that the U.S. Air-Force would have absolute air supremacy in a matter of days seems quite valid until there is some actual evidence otherwise.

AKD is making far to much sense with this one if it is doable with reasonable programming effort.

1. Is the game lopsided in favor of the Americans or can the Syrians put up a real challenge? Not in well designed scenarios. The game, like the real world is very unforgiving, if you try to run your Abrams past a Syrian squad without suppressing first they will cheerfully shoot you in the rear with an RPG and ruin your day. On the other hand, and this is also realistic, if you attempt to frontally assault a couple of Abrams, even with the better part of a company of Syrian armour, the scrap metal dealers will be very grateful. The scoring system also allows for almost infinite balancing of scenarios. 2. Does the WEGO still work well or do most people play it Real Time? Why do you play it the way you do? WEGO has improved with every patch, but I still play real time most of the time because the AI will just do silly things occasionally. With further AI improvements in the 1.1 patch WEGO may finally be over the hump. 3. What videos would you recommend I watch to get a better feel for the game on Youtube if there are any? I see the AAR videos, but I'm not quite sure what I'm watching to be honest. Play the demo, all of the videos assume you have some idea what is happening. 3. What was the biggest problem at launch and how has it been addressed (or not) in your opinion? The game was extremely buggy at launch. The unit level AI was barely functional at all, among many other problems. It has improved by orders of magnitude. Now, if you give sensible orders and understand how differnt commands interact with each other you will spend most of your time thinking that your pixeltruppen are behaving sensibly. Again I expect further improvements with the next patch. 4. What was the biggest problem at launch and how has it been addressed (or not) in your opinion? At launch they were to numerous to list. My understanding is that BFC was in a contract squeeze of some description and simply couldn't wait any longer. There are whole threads on this issue. Single player real time now works very, very well. Currently,the multi player options are still limited and require more fiddling than is ideal. You can play WEGO by PBEM but not head to head continously. 5. How well does the game support/simulate MOUT gaming? Is it still focused like CM 1x on open terrain or does the system appropriate adjust? The game was written with MOUT gaming in mind and as of 1.08 generally simulates it very well. You can read endless complaints about little stuff on this board, I have written a few of them, but mostly at this point they are little stuff. And it all gets better every patch.

The single biggest improvement they could make in the interface would be to have some of this information displayed on the unit icons that they already have. Flashing red for taking casualties, flashing yellow for suppression, and some kind of signal for outgoing fire come immediately to mind. As C3K says this information would come up on the company and/or platoon com nets almost instantly. At the current time the icons probably give us too little information about our own units, and too much about the enemies'.

What would actually be better is a "fire one round command" that could be queued with a movement orders. So a tank could appear from cover, fire one round, and reverse back into cover in a single set of orders. It would have a great many other uses as well.

My understanding is that most individual scenarios can be uploaded in the Editor and modified as you wish. Campaigns however are essentially sealed files and cannot be modified. Cheers

Well, a U.S.-Russian clash in either the Caucuses or the Ukraine just got a whole lot easier to work up the back story for.

I teach high school for a living and the cruelty of this module coming out at the busiest time of my year is just unreasonable.

Pre-ordered, can't wait!

I was always going to pre-order this module, but now I am dying to actually get my hands on it. Any word on trigger/condition based plans for the AI? As badly as I hate the thought of George Mc's scenarios making me look even more like an idiot, they really would help.

Now I know why some of those Syrian buildings are so hard to knock down, they have 100 ft plus deep foundations. The FAC must have misidentified the target as Assad's bunker

I'll buy whatever they are turning out. BF has the best customer support in the world, period. I just wish they would hire some overseas support for the grunt level coding, but I realize that is a lot easier and cheaper to say than it is to do. While we are talking about long term questions how long will it be before the engine takes advantage of multiple core processors in a major way? I am considering a new computer and wouldn't mind knowing whether to go with two cores or four.