thelmia

This is good. I recently got a new computer, bought the British mod, and BAM, all of a sudden crashes. Made me very unhappy, since I'd thought the crashes had been ironed out. I have a 4870 card and XP. I'm not willing to roll back my drivers since my newer games need them, so I hope this gets worked out. EDIT: I did a rollback to 9.3 and played for an hour. No crashes. I'll go back to the new drivers now. Pity ATI broke it.

Ach, I was just going to say, "yes, it needs it's own forum." Then I saw the drama spam. Yikes. It's just a game. Shock Force is a good game now. It sucked at release. Good job fixing it. I've been playing the vanilla campaign and it is totally different then at release. That being said, I'd like to read about Shock Force on the Shock Force board, not yet another WW2 game that I'm not terribly interested in. No offense, I'm sure it will be a good game, but I'm tired of WW2. There's a zillion WW2 games out there. Men at War just came out. It's not a wargame sim, but it's close enough in the same way that the Total War series is close enough. Personal taste. I just can't get interested in 70 year old warfare anymore (we're as far away from it as the Civil War was from WW2) when we have two wars going on right now and who knows what in the future. There used to be a lot of modern what-if wargames about NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict, or Gulf Strike, or something like that. Now there's just WW2, WW2, and more WW2. ZZZZ. Here's a hint: the Allies won. I get a kick out of gaming hypotheticals to see what happens. I remember sitting down with Gulf Strike in 1990 and realizing that the Iraqis were screwed before Desert Storm ever happened. That was cool. Shock Force taught me more about the current capabilities and limitations of US forces then I could learn from watching Discovery Channel for a decade. The M1 is not invulnerable. The main advantage of the US Armed forces is precision firepower. AK-47s and RPGs work just fine if you get too close. That's cool. How about some more armies for Shock Force, or its successors? The Chinese, maybe? Israel? I know this has all been settled, and it's not happening, but if no one says it nothing will ever happen.

Syrian tanks being blind as bats is annoying. Today I blew up an APC by area firing HE at it since I couldn't see it 100m away. Ridiculous.

Good idea. CMSF should be a modern war sim, and Predators are part of it.

I'd like to see it. I already have scenarios with 15 BM-21s doing preplanned bombardment. It's fun to watch. It's like the naval artillery in CMBO. Not terribly useful, but very cool. I understand dev time is limited, but a modern game should have modern weapons. CMSF is a game unto itself, not just a stepping stone back to WW2. I'm tired of WW2.

I don't get the problem, since in RL Blue tends to crush Red over and over. Western armies have been kicking around Arab armies for a very long time. If it's a sim, then Blue being better isn't a problem. This isn't a reflection on the individual worth of Syrian soldiers (who are often quite brave, as Israeli and American soldiers will tell you), or the relative worth of their country. It's just reality, and it's caused by a number of factors that entire books have been written about. I recommend "Arabs at War", by Kenneth Pollack if you want to understand why Arab armies do so poorly, especially compared to Western forces. Basically, there's a leadership deficiency. Imagine Red always being controlled by a badly scripted AI and you get an idea of what they are like in RL. Tactical leaders are discouraged from showing initiative and there is little realistic training. There's lots of anecdotal evidence from soldiers and Marines who served in Vietnam and Iraq (like Bing West) that the Iraqi army was not as proficient as the NVA. A lot of the problems suffered by the Iraqi army in 2003 are chronicled in "The Iraqi Perspectives Report," by Kevin Woods, with excerpts from the Official US Joint Forces Command Report. Very interesting reading. Mostly, the Iraqi leadership had no clue what was actually happening. Prewar training and expectations crippled their army. Now for designing a scenario, balance this by giving Red lots of advantages, like numbers and position. I like playing Red, and I do pretty well. It's a game of avoiding fights you can't win. Don't get into long range shootouts, since Blue is better at those. Don't expose your tanks to Blue antitank weapons. Use the unique weapons you do have, like IEDs. Hell, I put IEDs into about every scenario I make. Don't let the Blue player ban them as "cheap," since they are the number one RL threat to Blue forces. If I'm going to play a bunch of jihadists armed with nothing but AKs and holy zeal, I want my IEDs. RL insurgents don't play by Blue's rules, so why should I? Snipers, mad Taxi bombers, and spies all help you keep an eye on Blue and make them pay for invading your homeland. Seriously though, good scenario design makes a good game. Give Red a shot of winning, even if they have to take horrendous casualties to do so. Punish Blue much more severely for any losses. That reflects reality. Even if Blue wins, Red should have a lot of fun with taxi bombs

IEDs are the same. You can spot with a bomb buried under the ground. Pretty cool, huh?

Yes. Vocal and repetitive =/= right. So many games are ruined by people who post more than they play. This forum is pretty good about that. And yes, the people who are really unhappy just leave. I loved CMBO when it came out, and I loved RT for Shock Force. Nothing wrong with either. RT Shock Force is not a normal RTS because it's closely based on real units, not some made up rock/paper/scissors. It's a good game for people who want more realism but don't want a traditional wargame. Why not broaden the hobby a bit? Some of those people will get drawn in. It's win-win.

I get 1:3 KIA/WIA unless a lot of full vehicles get RPG'd. Even as Red the worst I get is about 1:1. I always make buddy aid a priority. It's funny that one little feature with little gameplay importance influences my actions. They're just pixels. Great feature.

Yeah, but what about when I tell the vehicle to go straight on a straight road but they drive into the weeds anyway?

Yes, it matters. I goofed when making a scenario and had everyone set to "Crack." Total holocaust, no one ran, and they just killed each other. When I fixed it the less experienced troops got pinned and then whittled down to nothing. Where it's really, really noticeable is artillery observers. Even setup planned artillery is noticeably slower with lower quality observers.

Yes. Yes, I would. I want any modern content I can get. I'm one of those people who's been doing WW2 since Panzer Blitz and it's gotten old. Not BF's fault, and I will probably play the next game, but when you can recite Wehrmacht tank stats on sight you need to go do something else... I'd really like the PLA, but that's probably asking too much.

Cool. I miss unit kill stats. That was a great learning tool for figuring out what actually worked best. Since we can't always see directly what is killing the enemy because of fog of war it can be hard to piece together what actually happened. I still don't have a good idea for how effective snipers are, for instance.

Yeah, I always go for total victory if I know I've lost a lot of men or won't take all the objectives in time. Past a certain point, there's no point worrying about more casualties. A Total Victory is better than a marginal one, and it's worth losing quite a few more units to attain that. This causes some gamey strategies. And not just for the player seeking Total Victory. For example, a player with Total Defeat hanging over them may simply hide their last few units to avoid losing. This leads to many minutes of boredom trying to find the last enemy squad. Since so much is riding on it, this makes the end of the game a bit frustrating and turns what should be a formality into a game breaker.

Vehicles do need some hand holding, and they often ignore a straight line move order in favor of a triangle. IED taxis are terrible about that. Watching a suicide bomber swerve back and forth (maybe he's trying to dodge bullets?) down a boulevard is mildly entertaining, but looks silly. Nothing near as bad as it used to be.

Uh, I'd leave command delays for RT optional. Sounds like a good and realistic idea, but actually playing an RT game where units simply ignore orders is innately frustrating. It would feel buggy and wrong, even if working as intended. I can imagine banging on the keyboard and yelling at the stupid tank to back up. In WEGO, that's just part of the game. It works. In RT, not so much. It seems to me the big advantage of WEGO is scale. You can manage much larger battles. In RT every player eventually hits their limit. Mine's about 1 infantry company with support vehicles. Beyond that, units tend to sit idle. With WEGO, anyone can manage any size given enough time. And is there TCP/IP WEGO yet? Sorry, but I just dropped by after many months and I haven't read up. Again, great patch, made me play again.

I'd like to say thanks for the good patch, and thanks to Mark Ezra for all the enjoyable scenarios in the Marine module. I've been unpleasantly surprised in many of them, and sometimes it's like fighting a human opponent.

First time playing "Bad Moon" I lost one M1 to stupidity, exposing its flank when I thought I was done killing all the enemy tanks. One other died from a close range frontal hit. That was it. My strategy? Move forward in a line with the 'Hunt' command. Yeah, I'm a real tactical genius. Even outnumbered 2:1 the Abrams utterly dominated. I'm happy if that's the real life truth. The T-90 doesn't seem very dangerous if it's thrown head on into a mass of M1s. Not really any different than the T-72 so far. Maybe better at hitting with the first shot, but against the M1 that's not enough if it just bounces off. I guess it's another case of having to be smart and careful in how the weapon system is employed...

Hey, great job. I recently had my computer melt down and have been getting by with my ancient backup. I went by the website, saw the new patch and thought "gee, I wish I could run that." On a whim, I downloaded and installed CMSF on the junker computer, patched it, and was amazed. It runs great on 512 MB of RAM and a Radeon 9250. A year ago my much more muscular computer couldn't get over 10 FPS. Sure, I don't have the settings maxed, but it's smooth as silk scrolling around the battlefield. Before, the interface prevented me from enjoying the game. The bugs irritated me. Now, all that's gone and I can just play. I bought the Marines module the next day. Wonderful. Thanks for getting it done. I guess a PLA module would be too much to ask.. but I'll ask anyway.

Well, I tried RT multiplayer again. Loaded the infantry up in my Strykers in the setup phase. Once the game started, they weren't in the Strykers. Except they were- on the Stryker display. On the map, the infantry was where they started in setup, but they weren't. I could tell them to move or dismount, but they wouldn't. I was the guest, and this killed my interest in playing again. Which is too bad. No lag, though. That's good.

This sounds stupid, but have you tried interlibrary loan? Librarians can be pretty good at finding rare stuff like this. I can't access First Search or World Cat remotely, but it's a good thing to try. I used to work for a library, and it was amazing what you could find sitting in a collection somewhere.

Oooooh. Neat. Will get.

Wow! I found out that the 1.06 patch was out and installed it. What a difference! Not only are the annoying clunky interface things gone, but AI behavior is sooooooo much better. I ran some scenarios I made back in August but gave up on. I found the AI forces rapidly and efficiently following their plans and owning me. It was great- before they would drive in circles and run back and forth across a road. They could not win the scenario in 45 minutes even without opposition. Now, the computer kicked my ass in 15 minutes. Small arms combat feels much, much different. Infantry is much harder to spot. Snipers work right. I love it. Finally, I can recommend this game to other people. It's fixed.

You need RAM. 1 gig isn't really enough for an XP machine running games. 4GB isn't really necessary yet. Just get to 2 and it will make a difference. 4 gigs is only fully useable if you have a 64 bit processor and Vista 64.

I beta tested it. It's a blast. It's really an FPS for tanks.