thelmia

The Guardian can do good journalism, but like the NY Times it often chooses not to. The NY Times had John Burns, for instance. The problem is that all its other war reporting wasn't John Burns.

I am getting 1/2 as much artillery fire out of the AI as I used to. I had a scenario that tested AI fire, and I ran it in 1.05. It was obvious that the volume of fire was drastically reduced. Instead of firing everything at the start of the scenario, the second half didn't fire for about 15 minutes, when the AI troops were at the objective.... Pretty funny watching the fratricide, but not what I had in mind.

I still follow the same formula as I did in WW2. Use infantry to find the enemy, then blow the snot out of them with direct fire and artillery. High explosive is still the best way to clear buildings, and there are a lot of ways to deliver it. Tanks, APCs, ATGMs, and so on. Small arms shootouts are for the birds. It's way too fair I use infantry teams to spot, then it's time to call in their friends. The Syrian tanks are wonderful at infantry support. The big 125mm guns have plenty of HE ammo.

I'm a bit annoyed at cover not mattering much. Troops out in the open seem about as vulnerable as those in trenches or behind trees. I know that's not 100% accurate, but that's my impression. It's bizarre to me that a machine gun shooting out a window will repeatedly miss a prone man lying on the pavement two stories below and 20 meters away. Then that same machine gun will kill enemies 200 meters away running across a street. I get that running in the open is bad, but aren't stationary targets easier to hit? I get that troops taking cover should be harder to shoot, but lying on the pavement underneath a machine gun should not count. I am beginning to come to the conclusion that the abstracted infantry fire in the original Combat Missions was closer to reality than the more detailed model in CMSF. I hate to say it, but it's a case of a simple abstraction being more accurate than a complex one that leaves out too many variables. The problem is that the increased detail invites questions like the machine gun that misses at 20 meters over and over, where a more abstract system would be less frustrating. Like maybe there's a big rock there, or something else we can't see. With a more detailed 1:1 model, we want to see the rock. More detail makes the game feel less realistic because it invites more comparisons with reality. It looks more like reality, and suffers for it. This is all impressionistic, and I'm sure that it can be tweaked so that it doesn't feel wrong. I'm not against the way that CMSF does things, just how I'm continually reminded that I'm playing an imperfect simulation of reality. [ January 02, 2008, 01:13 AM: Message edited by: thelmia ]

Has anyone else noticed that the 'arab' vocals are the same as one of the songs on Medieval 2 Total War soundtrack?

This happens to me all the time. ATGMs move and redeploy on their own, when I just want them to stay put and wait.

Heh. Tanks can see better with the commander opened up. He can still close the hatch. So why not have the option to button up the air guard? It's obviously just a bug that you can't. I imagine they'll get around to fixing it.

See Max Boot's "War Made New." The Soviets were masters of Second Industrial Age warfare. Then the Information Age came along and they fell behind. If you want to see how the Russian military fights a war, see Chechnya. Afghanistan and Chechnya are just as much wars as a war against NATO would have been. Remember that the Soviets successfully fought a number of insurgencies, including the Russian Civil War that founded the USSR in the first place! Their defeat in Afghanistan was a result of decisions made by their political leadership- not enough troops, poor doctrine, poor training, and a failure to adapt to Afghan conditions. Trying to terrorize the population backfired. For one guy's take on what would have happened in Central Europe, see Ralph Peter's "Red Army." In the real world, conditions changed and the Soviet Union did not change to meet them. For a while, say until about 1980 when the US Army started recovering after Vietnam, they had a chance. After, probably not.

No, I have twin NVidia 7800GT 256MB cards. </font>

Blowing up buildings never gets old. Add JDAMs until your symptoms improve.

I was into WW2 before it was cool. I'm tired of it. War, even modern war, has been going on a long time. Please something else. I know the market seems to be WW2 happy, but I don't think I'm alone in being tired of it. I'm glad CMSF wasn't WW2. I don't understand why people seem more interested in a war that's been over for 62 years than the one we're in now! It's not just games- movies, books, TV, everything. I don't get it. I get that WW2 was a much 'closer' war, but at the tactical level who cares?

All changes are fine if the final product is a good game on its own merits. I'm no longer expecting anything, and have long since moved on to other things.

I've posted about it dozens of times. It's never worked right for me since release- I've always had sync problems. In 1.04 it always crashes. I don't play anymore because of it. BF knows about it, so hopefully they fix it. Well, 1.05 isn't out yet, so I'm off.

Yeah, I started complaining about it back in July, and there just weren't that many people who cared. Now that it's completely broken hopefully they will fix the lag and sync issues. I don't play anymore because I don't like the WEGO PBEM at all. I understand that a lot of people do, and that's fine, but the RT game was a lot more fun. I check back here a couple times a week to see if 1.05 is out, but that's it.

Multiplayer broke. No buy until fix.

Saggers briefly worked in 1.02, then became broken again in 1.03. In 1.0 and 1.01 they would not fire on their own. In 1.02 they did, and worked pretty well. Then with 1.03 they started crashing 150-200m in front of their launchers and lost about 75% of their effectiveness. I made a scenario with Saggers in it, and I played it on all versions. Instead of an average of 4 enemy vehicles destroyed by 6 Sagger teams it became 1.

I play CMAK because CMSF multiplayer is broken.

I've killed SACLOS ATGM teams and their missile still hits.

I'd rather have functioning RT than WEGO. Given a choice between broken RT and working WEGO, I'd take WEGO. It's really irritating to the point that I don't play anymore.

Some shooters may be mindless, but try Red Orchestra in a clan war and you may just revise your generalisation. </font>

33- used to play Panzerblitz and the old Victory Games titles. Gamed out Desert Storm with Gulf Strike. Wargames draw a certain kind of person.

That, and RT is laggy and broken.

That's the one I did by simply shelling everything. Didn't fire a single round other than 155.