Prince of Eckmühl

The pics are lovely, but they don't do a thing to support your assertion that a "good" crew can throw an effective 120mm round down range every four or five seconds. Linkage? Honest, that's all I'm asking for. Please remember that this exchange began with a vignette further up the thread in which you described a vehicle moving into a turret-exposed position, firing two aimed-rounds and then withdrawing back to turret-down, all in 6-8 seconds. Consider the linkage to be educational in nature. PoE

Without regard to maneuver, you've got the main gun firing about twice as fast as it would appear capable, say 6-8 rounds per minute. If the m256 can fire 12-15 rounds per minute, then by all means document it. I shall consider virtually anything suitable in this regard, excepting more anecdotes. PoE

Please provide us with some authoritative evidence which substantiates your claim that one of these vehicles is capable of firing 10+ rounds per minute from it's main gun. I will not quible as to the environment. A practice range is fine, Grafenwoehr, wherever. Please, just throw us all a link. PoE

Care to break down steps 1-11 into time increments, from the time the vehicle turret is initially exposed until it's turret is back under full cover? PoE

So, a modern AFV with a large caliber weapon can pull into a turret-exposed position, acquire a target, fire two rounds, and then reverse into an unexposed position in 6-8 seconds. Remarkable. Tell us more. Nah, what's unrealistic is declaring a cease-fire every sixty seconds so that players can micro-plot the behavior of every unit in the battle. In fact, its down-right silly. Hey, in CMx1, all that any player did was baby-sit. In watching others play the game, what was ultra-hokey was the extent to which some would take hours to plot a move, only to undo it all at the beginning of the NEXT orders phase. Silly, silly, silly. PoE

My vote is to drop all further development of WEGO. Wasting resources on a hopelessly outdated, turn-oriented feature strikes me as a waste of resources on the part of the developer. PoE

Respectfully, why not post this in the CMBB forum? I'm sure that the BF staff occasionally attends the venue and reviews the posts related to the now abandoned CMx1 gaming engine. Nostalgia, aside, what's the point? PoE

One of the limitations of a one-on-one contest in the continuous play environment is a ceiling on the number of units that a player can be expected to handle without being overwhelmed. At some point, matters will become so fast-paced and intense that a fella simply can't keep up. There are tools that a developer can employ to help mitigate against this affect, group orders and formations, column, line, defend, advance and so on, but if the game is gonna be fun and playable, it's important to hold the number of units down. There are a number of games that do this quite successfully, Sid Meier's Gettysburg and Close Combat, for example. One of the keys to both designs was the developers' realization that, at some point, it was all just gonna be too much to handle, so they designed the games with this in mind. SMG had formation and order tools which off-loaded some of the burden of command to the (limited) friendly AI. It's worth noting that these mechanisms could prove inadequate, AS THE BATTLES COULD STILL GET TOO BIG TO HANDLE. The common sense approach to this was simply to limit the size of the "scrap" to that which wouldn't overwhelm the sensory-motor skills of an average adult. IIRC, the preferred size of a contest in multiplayer was a "minor altercation" with two or three brigades per side and attached artillery, totaling perhaps fifteen regiments and batteries. Close Combat took a different approach. Rather than employing formation orders which helped dictate movement and posture, the developers severely restricted the total number and type of units that could appear in battles to ten, or so, a number that could readily be handled by most folks, in part because the maps were relatively small. It's also worth mentioning that the developers slowly but surely bastardized the design and yielded to the demands of the game's fanbase by adding more unit-slots, larger maps and AFV in the game, additions that undermined the core-strengths of the game as a nifty little infantry-combat simulator that was quite easy to play, again by an adult with normal hand-eye coordination. And so it shall be with CMSF. If you want to enjoy the game, you're gonna have to face some limitations on the size and scope of the battles that you fight. Not only will this improve your game-play experience, it's also far more realistic in that there are very real limits on how many units a commander can "control" in the heat of battle, the number of subunits, in fact, being quite small. Obviously, if you want to play Prochorovka and command each vehicle, and have your opponent do the same, this type of game system isn't for you. PoE

Never mind, I disabled the associated service (license control service) and that took care of it. PoE

How do I get this program to quit loading into memory after I've unlicensed and uninstalled SMSF? PoE

It appears as though the game is having trouble drawing the palm trees. Is there any way to turn them off? PoE

Enjoyment factor? I own all three of the CMx1 games, but played them very little. I find turn-based, computer games frightfully boring. That said, I didn't troll the forums dedicated to the games, either. This thread is one of a half-dozen, or so, that have found themselves cemented to the top of the forum since CMSF was launched. The common theme throughout the series seems to be, "if only BF had listened (to me), this entire fiasco could have been avoided." Well, I'm not experiencing the fiasco. I like the game just fine, thank you. The armor portion of it appears to work better than the infantry, but that was true of the discontinued series, as well. The interface has received a much-needed update, and the RT option has delivered me from those nasty old turns. There does appear to be a problem for 8800xxx users in that the game needs to be set to "balanced" graphics settings to be playable, but BFD. I play RT and were I to spend a scant second or two mourning the modest difference in eye-candy, I'd get slaughtered. But, I digress...the subject is "what the hell were you thinking? I'm thinking that I paid over $150 for three games that I might of spent twenty hours playing, IN TOTAL. I'm also thinking that I never felt the need to filibuster their associated forums with endless, circular-rants detailing BF's BETRAYAL of everything that's sacred to REAL WARGAMERS (me). Give it a rest. Go post something constructive in a forum dedicated to a game in which you are actually interested. BF gave you demos. If you didn't like them, you shouldn't have bought CMSF. As is, you just sound like you've got an axe to grind. PoE

Thanks for the linkage and prescriptive fix, but I'm involved in considerable non-game-related software development, and Vista is looking more forbidding all the time, at least as a host environment for applications such as yours. I STRONGLY suggest that users who are forced into adopting the new OS consider an alternative, dual-boot configuration in the short to intermediate term. IMHO, anything else is simply courting frustration and/or disaster. PoE

I'm so delighted with the impact of patch 1.03 on the game, that I just ordered a second copy (deluxe edition) as a birthday gift for a friend. Great work Battlefront! PoE

I actually had CMAK installed on my system for a month or so. I was using the game and a brigade-sized scenario as a means of testing/stressing a new quad-core CPU. I formatted last week and re-installed Windows, however, and, while CMSF was the first game that I loaded, the older games rest pitifully on a shelf behind me, likely for eternity or Ebay, whichever comes first. PoE

Ahh, the tech support forum appears to indicate that the problem is with Windows Vista. Your post didn't indicate such, but I have to assume that this is the case. While I don't have a fix for you, I can offer you hope. This very well may not be an Nvidia problem but one that's owed to M$. If so, perhaps their Service Pack 1 for Vista will fix it. If not, I'd suggest the following: 1) Create at least two partitions on your HDD 2) Install WinXP to the first 3) Install Vista to the second That setup will hold you over for a LONG time. I realize that this is off topic. Then again, the entire thread is off topic. That it hasn't been moved is likely a sign of the respect that BF has for it's long-service customers. That so many of you have continued to heap mud on BF is likely a sign of how little respect that you have for them, UNLESS OF COURSE, BF BENDS TO YOUR WILL. Were they to do so, some folks might be more favorably disposed towards the developer and publisher, but I'd hardly characterize the relationship that ensued as one that was born out of respect. PoE

I've CMAK installed on the computer that I'm writing this on. The video card is an 8800GTX w/WinXP and 162.18 drivers. The game runs fine here, with AA. PoE

Oh, let me guess where we're headed with this... Websites and publications that go hatin' on CMSF are more righteous than those that are positively disposed to the game. The former are "more trustworthy and authoritative" than the latter, those that cater to the "stoopid-RTS-clickfest" types. And to whom does a wargamer turn when he wants THE WORD on a new title? Why GAMESPOT, of course, the target demographic of which is male console gamers, ages 17-34. Poopers on that. PoE

From individuals, no. Rather, what we have here is a collection of advocates. A vocal minority has taken up the banner of a now-defunct game system in what appears to be a sort of "the south shall rise again" fashion. Likewise, if my comments in support of CMSF are overly punchy, at times, it's a function of my desire to drag the discussion back toward the middle. There's a method to my madness, which is to say that it's, nonetheless, madness. PoE

While I agree with Michael that the page-per-page suckage at AG is pretty much on-par with other such websites and publications, I found myself somewhat compelled to make note of Mr. Levandowski's three-page article, therein. I did so, in the first case, because so many of our peers seem convinced that critical reaction to CMSF is all bad, and, in the second, because of the deafening silence which the link seemed to evoke among the ranks of our membership. It's not as though this was the first positive review of the game, now is it? It's also not the first to have been ignored and/or dismissed by folks who want to talk the new game down. Like many of you, I don't put a lot of store in reviews, good or bad. That some of CMSF's most vocal detractors have turned to reviews in their attempt to undermine public embrace of the game doesn't much trouble me, not much at all. My only concern is that an element of balance be evidenced in the discussion, hereabouts, hence the linkage. My sober self, PoE [ August 19, 2007, 06:59 AM: Message edited by: Prince of Eckmühl ]

While I certainly agree, it's difficult not to be bemused by the lack of response to "good news" surrounding CMSF, albeit a simple game review. Could it be that an element that's native to the site's other forums has no interest in that which doesn't reinforce their view of the game and/or validate their over-arching sense of betrayal? PoE

Devoting scarce development dollars to WEGO is a waste of resources. Continuous play is the to go. Folks that want to play turn-based games can always do so across a board or tabletop, AS I STILL DO. PoE

http://www.armchairgeneral.com/articles.php?p=3527&page=1&cat=59 PoE

One of the reasons that I never really got into CM x1 was because of the camera controls. They were way too cumbersome to use. I can't exaggerate the extent to which I prefer the new ones. PoE

One of the reasons that I never really got into CM x1 was because of the camera controls. They were way too cumbersome to use. I can't exaggerate the extent to which I prefer the new ones. PoE