womble
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Posts posted by womble
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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.
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Randomly picking from "canned" maps, as CMx2 does, is going to be a poor substitute, IMO, taking away some of the enjoyment of the Quick Battle system.
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
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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?
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I personally don't really care for the western front, I'd much rather have the eastern front.
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.
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The other thing to consider is the time of day. IIRC, "Out of the Wilderness" takes place at dawn and the visibility is pretty bad, but gets better as time passes.
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
FV432s without protected weapons stations are not the norm - usually they tip up with gun shields or remote weapon stations.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...
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Womble, I don't think you have - the scenario is a bit of a bugger and takes careful handling/timing. I think it was on my 26th attempt that I got the right balance between when to skulk and when to charge.
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.
I think, whilst the US light infantry have a bit more organic firepower - each platoon has a gun section with two gun groups in it - they would still have a problem with that scenario.Lets face it, there's good killing zones available to the Red forces and you have to get across a lot of open ground covered by AT weapons.
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.
The way I did it was to smoke off the left and right of the Police station and then pour everything over before the smoke cleared. The Engineers and their 'blast' command are invaluable...I regretted using the Engineers separately from my line platoon. Rookie error, that one, that I won't repeat
Don't be too ambitious too soon and pay attention to the bad hats over on the right, past that well.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.I would question the ammo load out on the Scimitars, not enough HE, especially in the context of the enemy forces.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?
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I assume there are squads that do fill the "run 'n gun" attack role for the Germans? More SMGs and such? Or would you usually have to make do with bolt action rifles and MMGs?
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.
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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.
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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.
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So you could buy a forward observer team, for example, and add a Sherman tank. ... In that case I guess the tank is subordinate to the commander of the infantry unit it's integrated with. Sounds good to me. But in this case would the game limit you to give orders only to the Infantry unit, and lose the ability to micromanage the tank?
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.
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...the governments in places like Greece and France ... FINALLY recognizes that you cannot keep handing out money to everyone,and taxing the "wealthy" to pay for it..sooner or later, those "wealthy" will not have money to employ people...
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.
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Healthcare in Oz...there is no "over sight committee"
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.
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lol this is like getting teased by a beautiful woman who knows what she is doing XD
The climax is going to be explosive!
That post goes so well with your .sig...
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It's difficult to explain, and I'm probably not getting this across very well. It seems that using the left mouse button and moving the mouse is the way that pretty much everyone pans across the battlefield. The problem is that the left mouse button also is used for selecting units and it's also used for issuing orders. It's doing three different jobs, but can only do one at a time.
If we take the left mouse button out of the equation and allow the player to move the camera directionally using some other method, then it frees up the left mouse button for purely selecting units and issuing orders.
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...
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I don't think heavy fortifications were built anywhere else in France, but it would be fairly common to find bunkers made from trees in areas of importance. Doubt seriously if you would find any metal or concrete pillboxes or bunkers.
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.
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Is there any way to un-bind the mouse buttons? Or to change the default behavior of the mouse to behave more as I describe above? I'd like to try out "moving" the camera with the keys and "looking" the camera with the mouse (no buttons pressed).
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?
edit: It would also be awesome if I could bind the spacebar's behavior to the right mouse button.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
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That maybe what he meant, but what he said - with emphasis - is that adding auto maps would make the game inferior than not having them. Which isn't true. And I don't think he was saying that within the scope of priorities.
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.
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This really isnt that complicated. When comparing CMx1 game features to CMx2, CMx1 has a good feature (whether you want to admit it or not) that is not included in CMx2, i.e. auto-generated maps...
I'm with you there, up to this point.
See this is where it gets ridiculous.1. So CMx1 would be a better game without auto-generated maps? Absolutely not. Then why do you say that CMx2 is better without that feature. Makes absolutely no sense.
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).Do at least a portion of gamers prefer the simplicity & time savings of auto-generated maps than trying to find user maps for their QBs.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.
Why is this such a sacrilege?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.
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If your down to a 37mm against a Panther I humbly submit its too late to matter.
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...
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Ah, but the demo is for those who haven't bought the game yet and are sitting on the fence until they have a chance to try it out. Which after all is prudent considering the size of the price tag on this baby.
Michael
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...
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Looks like we have to tweak that. The camera only rotates around a unit when Locked. That's the whole point of Locking
Aha. Good. I thought it was probably manualry at fault. Glad to have flagged up the issue.
We've already done that, so the answer is "yes"
The Alternative Hotkeys is from OtherMeans' well tried and tested set.Steve
Excellent. All that can be expected for now, naturally. I look forward to the new interface whichever decade it makes it out for.
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Needing to pack entire encyclopedias with your product is as out of date as plus fours
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.
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I only use the default direct hotkeys, so I have never bailed when I wanted to hunt.
The only way, as I understand it, to do that is to have edited out the relative keys from your hotkeys.txt
But I only use a handful of hotkeys for frequent commands, the rest I use the mouse and click the buttons which I don't find too onerous. The only keys I use are N - Move, G - Rotate, H - Hide, P - PauseOr if you strictly self-limit. Note also that I'm not saying that mousing for the commands is 'onerous'.
Yes that's true with the mouse, but you can do this if you use the keyboard panning (WASD).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.I don't know how you could do that with the mouse anyway, moving the mouse could control one or the other on each axis, not both at the same time.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.
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What I find amusing is I bet some of those people complained like Hell about the CMx1 interface when they first experienced it
Maybe they did, but were so blown away by the novelty of a 3D tank game that they could be bothered to find a way through the morass of confusing controls. I don't remember being particularly flummoxed by CMx1, though having spun up AK for the first time in a while last night, that might've been because interface expectations weren't as developed back then, too.
You don't have the novelty to drag people over the hump this time. Sure, the "hooray, back to WW2" joy will help some develop their own way of playing the game. Others who failed at SF in the past will see the same I/F and silently fade away.
It's really hard to write a manual and a game concurrently. We were making changes to the game all the way up until we shipped. We then made MAJOR changes to the game after release. This caused the game and the manual to get out of synch. We largely had it tightened up for the last couple of manual revisions, but of course that doesn't help if you have a printed manual.I understand the problems of documentation. I understand that sometimes things get missed. Can anyone address the specific issue of camera rotation using the mouse with a unit selected (not unit-locked)? Does the view rotate around the unit, or the point on the floor under your viewpoint? I have a PDF manual from 2009 that effectively says selecting a unit is the same as locking it. Just like the BN manual does. Does the current release of SF do that? BN?
This is the heart of the keyboard shortcut problem. Like a flight sim, there's a ton of functions to give the player access to. A FPS game, for example, has probably 15 or so major "Commands", including 6 for moving the camera. There's just no way CM could ever be that simplified.No one ever said it should be. There are lots of complicated games out there that have the capacity to map many, many keys. Look at RTSs and MMOs rather than FPSs for examples. They at least use all the F-keys.
Excluding the editor shortcuts and the 18 keys used to give commands in the relative mode, there are 57 keys mapped in the manual. My most-played-with at the moment WoW character maps something in the order of 90 keybinds Edit: not counting the alternate actions that pop up when I change mode, most of which I use almost every time I wake the toon up.
We are planning a better design for interacting with the Commands. But that's a major overhaul which we had no time to do for CM:BN.Steve
I am in no wise demanding that this capability be brought into BN. I recognise that it's far too late for that much work.
Is it too late to push 2 additional hotkey files and a readme.txt into the release ..\Data folder, one with the relative keys disabled and the other with the direct ones chopped?
) random generator. Perhaps unless you enjoy having improbable (read 'unexpected, unpredictable challenges', I guess) terrain across which to fight...
the random maps in CMx1 (which while convenient weren't very good).
What floor are they on?
in Combat Mission Shock Force 1
Posted
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.