womble

Did you retry that often? Given that if you did, you had to re-select your forces? And how much of an inhibition was that to discarding a given map? Of course, that remains to be seen, but there have been some pretty emphatic noises from the testers that would seem to indicate that your fears may be somewhat unfounded. Let's hope it's not their love of the game blinding them to its lacks

It's certainly different for colour-vision-deficient folk, like, oh about 10% of the constituency for these kind of games. Never eliminate shape. I'd be hard pressed to tell you the difference between green and yellow in most interfaces, blue and purple, similarly. Particularly on an element as small as what's in the box. Having soft factors like 'Veteran' in text is fine. The info doesn't change and once you hit friction it's only rarely relevant, and even less frequently needed at high speed.

The conversion to SP would also help explain the greater tempo and pitch of operations after that. AT being towed around to defensive locations don't often get to participate in offensive operations at the pointy-end (and don't seem to have been counterattacked against much), but once the company was SP, that seemed to happen more often.

I don't get this as a blanket statement. Yes, a random generator is capable of producing an infinite number of fresh new maps. Yes, once you start to run out of pregenerated maps in your favourite size/terrain type, you will either need to find new ones or will start to run into ones you've already played on. Until that point, having a random map from a pregenerated selection is, as far as I can tell, precisely the same as having the game scrape you together a random map, only less likely to land you with something unpalatable to play on. I can see that 'having to go look for new maps' once in a while is a chore that a random generator would avoid, and I'm hoping that there will be good support for that activity, but that's for 'some other folk', because I'm having difficulty seeing how I'll ever have the time to play enough QBs to exhaust the initial tranche provided. For me, in the special case of QB maps, 300+ (with more each module) looks like it tends towards infinity. And I emphatically can't see that a random pregenerated map is any less fun than a random map, even given a 'good' (for whatever value of 'good' floats your particular semisubmersible ) random generator. Perhaps unless you enjoy having improbable (read 'unexpected, unpredictable challenges', I guess) terrain across which to fight... It remains to be seen whether having human-designed maps is actually significantly more 'fun' than the old CM maps were. The testers are all enthusiastic, but you'd expect that

That's a really interesting look at a unit's progress. Can anyone explain what "...3d Plat changed to SP..." means (14 Nov 44)? Was it a towed AT company before?

Can you say why that is, LemoN? I've personally felt the opposite. I think mostly because I don't feel any connection to the east. I've no German ancestry, nor Russian, and I've never been further east in Europe than Romania, whereas half my Grandfathers died in France (pre-Dunkirk) and family holidays have often been to northern France. I enjoyed playing CM:BB, but didn't get the same feeling playing it. I wonder if it's partly also because the winners of the Ostfront ended up being the enemy of my childhood and youth, so I didn't want the Russians to win, but I didn't want the Germans to win either, cos they wuz Bad.

There is that, I suppose. Though I thought BlueFor units with NVG were pretty good at spotting warm bodies on a cold background (like you'd expect a rooftop to be at dawn in the desert). Guess those Syrian MGers had gotten pretty chilly waiting for me to show That's good to know. I'd seen in the manual that those variants were available. I just went back to have a look at the scenario from RedFor's point of view, and realised I'd luckily splashed a number of units with 'speculative' preparatory fires, and had been either very lucky not to get spotted or very cagey in my positioning of my assets to have never given the second ATGM a single shot... I never knew it was there, and was only partially trying to avoid it; I put my third Scim into an overwatch position that was either well-enough concealed or just out of LoS to the thing for a large part of the mission; I just wanted to be able to spot and spray anything moving east out of the town...

I must've gotten lucky. Failed the 'casualties' parameter (but I think I'd done that before I rushed the compound) but still got a good victory. Could be. I was very worried about ATGMs set up at the back in the flat fields, but realised that the charging APCs would only be exposed to them for a few seconds as they crested the rise and dropped down the short, steep slope. An initial probe down the right had flushed out a couple of AT assets, including what turned out to be the only ATGM. Small arms fire neutralised the 105mm tube, and mortars saw to the HMG and the Sagger. I suppose it wasn't so much the scenario specifically that piqued my wondering, but comparing it with the 'Going to Town' scenario. I think the Brits would possibly have had a much tougher time of that one than the Stryker troops did, lacking the protected vehicle gunners and quite so much ability to reach out and touch/slap down distant targets. I regretted using the Engineers separately from my line platoon. Rookie error, that one, that I won't repeat They were my first contact. Cost me an FV432, 2 Scimitars (second to a bonehead maneuver) and 4 casualties. But as I mentioned, scared their AT assets out of hiding for mortars to finish off Oh yes, the ATGM had taken out a Jackal by then, fortunately parked and dismounted. Yeah. Definitely. I'd've thought that pretty much any situation the Scimitar needs more AP than HE, it'd want even more to not be there... Still, they have coaxials, and they suppress quite nicely One thing I've read about on a number of occasions in CMSF is the importance of observation, to find out where your enemy are before committing. I had eyes on that police compound (spotters, snipers, HQs) for a good 10 minutes, and was taking fire from things that weren't really concealed (an HMG on a flat roof much lower than my position, for example), but couldn't localise any of them for suppressive attention. Anything to be done to help with that?

Not so much in your standard squads, no. You'd get the 'run-and-gun' bit by splitting off an assault squad, I reckon, and doing 'caterpillar overwatch' by team instead of by squad.

The ground military action of Star Wars, as depicted in the movies, wouldn't fly as a combat game of the CM style. Ancient period tactics applied with 'modern' weapons. Eclectic mixes of tech level. It lacks verisimilitude because it's all designed to 'look cool' and have lots of whizz-bangery to it. I'm sure it works fine as a 'traditional' RTS-style game where cover and concealment are pretty rudimentary.

Another factor will be the capability of the unit to deal with surrendered troops. I'm pretty sure someone here mentioned an official 'no prisoners' line for D-Day itself, and that's, I suppose, understandable given the exigences of war and the given situation: taking prisoners at that point could even be considered to be using surrendered troops as a shield against further enemy action, they would have been so intermixed on the first day of the beachead. I know it's fiction, but I'm sure the situation of "Do we kill 'em or let 'em go, cos we surely can't take 'em with us?" that Saving Private Ryan depicted occurred more than once between D-Day and Berlin, and that sometimes even decent men had to choose the first option.

Does the game restrict the micromanagement of anything just because of the HQ it's attached to? It hasn't in any of the CM incarnations so far. I don't expect it does in CMBN, either. The manual doesn't seem to imply any restrictions on your use of vehicles attached to a parent formation.

Baloney. The wealthy are still increasing the gap between them and the moderately well-off. Mostly by squeezing more work out of the same or fewer people for the same or lesser pay. They still manage to make their profits, thank you very much. Government just isn't as good at taxing them as they area at squeezing Joe Blow who can't afford a swanky tax accountant.

Really? Not even an equivalent of NICE (National Institute of Clinical Excellence)? Or local bodies with the same duty? There are a lot of new treatments out there that are very expensive, with variable levels of outcome. If the pot of money were infinite, then no one would need to prioritise, but it isn't. Perhaps Oz has sufficiently good health and health funding to not need to, but that's a truly fortunate situation if it's so. I really do not envy the clinicians who have to make the decision between extending a thousand octogenarians' lives by 6 months and improving the quality of life for half a dozen sufferers of rare cancer in their last six months.

That post goes so well with your .sig...

I get that bit. What I don't get is how, if the camera moves when you move the mouse with no buttons pressed, you get a cursor to hit the thing you actually want to click on to select...

Yeah I was thinking the other day that if I was going to bed my AT gun down into a scrape with sandbags, I'd really want to try and find some overhead cover (a log roof, maybe) too. Though perhaps that wouldn't be as useful before the advent of airburst fuses.

I'm confused. If with 'no buttons pressed', your mouse is controlling the camera behaviour, how do you ever click on anything to select it? I think the Second-quickest and easiest way of improving the interface would be to add a 'hotkey customisation' interface that gives you a point-and-click way of setting your own hotkey for every available function. That way, things like special keys, Tab, Enter, Backspace and the spacebar can be bound to different functions, as well as allowing ctrl- alt- and shift- combos. The interface could check for duplicates and that 'mandatory' features are bound. Doesn't require any tinkering with what's on-screen while we play. The quickest way would be to add a 'load hotkeys' function, perhaps with a three-radiobutton option for Relative/direct/mixed that will ignore the relevant sections of the currently-loaded hotkeys.txt

From what we hear, it is true. It's a bit "meta", but given the added complexity of the terrain and the fact that there's zero AI activity above the TacAI without a Plan, putting in a random map generator would be useless for Solo play and would produce a horrible mishmash of unplayable/boring terrain much of the time without far more work than there is resource available for. MikeyD has lived with this for a long time, so perhaps he doesn't state all the conditions every time he states his case, but it's a valid opinion for him to hold.

I'm with you there, up to this point. That's not what people are saying. They're saying that the replacement for random maps (lots of high quality maps made by dedicated fans, with plans for AI that will make solo play a bit closer to meaningful) is better than a) random maps in the CMx2 engine (which wouldn't have AI plans, and would be even screwier than some of the trash the CMx1 random map generator turned out) and the random maps in CMx1 (which while convenient weren't very good). A non-point, since that portion of gamers won't have to 'try and find user maps' - there are over 300 included with the base game. And you'll reject less of them since they're rationally rather than randomly designed. It's not sacrilege. And yes, if some philanthropist were to set up a trust to fund the development of a random map generator (or even a farm of talent making rational maps) then it'd be great to have a random map generator. But the chances of that happening are less than that of me winning the EuroMillions jackpot on Friday. And it's not like the alternative actually sounds that bad. Maybe it'll seem restrictive right quick; 300 maps might not go so far when it's divided into size categories and terrain types. And maybe it won't.

Maybe it's a case of "That M5 could poke its nose out and get a rear shot. Is it worth the exposure?" rather than being all that's left. And even if it is all that's left and it can line up the close range rear-aspect, it's nice to know you're not totally without a paddle. Or maybe you are. My memory of M5 Stuarts is that they always hit and usually knocked out whatever armour I was driving...

Ohhhh. I thought the demo was to keep us quiet until the actual release date... Should have realised BFC know that it'd do anything but...

Aha. Good. I thought it was probably manualry at fault. Glad to have flagged up the issue. Excellent. All that can be expected for now, naturally. I look forward to the new interface whichever decade it makes it out for.

I don't know whether that's poppycock or a straw man. I think it's a straw man, because you don't need to 'pack an entire encyclopedia with your product' to deliver the information people are asking for. It's poppycock, because we don't know the sources that BFC used to determine the effectiveness of given weapon systems and we don't have years to do the extensive research and might not arrive at the same conclusion if we did. Neither have we been trained on nor fought with and/or against all these weapon systems, so passing on a distillation of the knowledge to the (possibly new to the genre, especially at this level of accuracy) player is entirely reasonable. The old 'info' screen from CMx1 was hardly information overload.

The only way, as I understand it, to do that is to have edited out the relative keys from your hotkeys.txt Or if you strictly self-limit. Note also that I'm not saying that mousing for the commands is 'onerous'. You can move obliquely with A/D and W/S, but as soon as you hit Q or E your movement ceases and you begin rotating. And if you're rotating, and press 'move', the rotation stops and you move. Aha! Some further experimentation demonstrates that you can combine mouse and keyboard camera movement. While left-mouse translocating you can use the rotation keys to turn left and right. It even gets stuck on sometimes if you've been zooming around a lot... Thanks for prompting further experimentation. It's kinda arsey-versy compared to 'game standards' in my world where you keymap the side-to-side and use the mouse to rotate. I tried that too, and it works to a point, but the rotation seems to stick on more quickly, and that's irritating. It's entirely possible in lots of games. Some call it 'free flying camera', I think. The way you do it is to have that mode (however it is engaged) have rotation be activated by sideways movement, and forward motion triggered by just having the buttons pushed.