Sigrun

German commanders kept the hatch open and their head out at all times other than when enemy infantry was in close proximity. Soviets almost always kept their hatches closed. This was one of the reasons why the Germans had such a huge kill-ratio superiority on the eastern front (ONE of the reasons. Other reasons include technical superiority of German tanks and superior German training.).

I have no recollection of you. </font>

...why this RTS couldn't be turned into a first-person simulator with a bunch of new code? Interiors, functions and stuff for the player as a first-person character, animations, etc etc etc. Just an idea (that I've been having since the game was first announced as an RTS :cool: ).

Oh man. Memorys of a looooong gone past. Where the hell did your bloody website go, btw? Now that was a cornerstone of flightsim culture in it's days. </font>

Somehow I'm not surprised, Siggi. </font>

I'm sure CQB can be coded to take place, invisibly, inside houses. How do they plan to handle infantry that has assaulted a trench and got face-to-face with the enemy? Whatever the implementation is for that, use it for inside houses. We, as players, are more than happy to accept the tank as an entity in it's own right, without requiring the ability to view the crew whilst inside it. Surely we can accept the same for infantry inside houses. How about if a tank is immobilised and abandoned by it's crew? It effectively becomes a house, ready to be manned by anyone ordered to do so. Isn't it all about perception? Somehow we've become used to the idea that houses should be treated differently to any other entity on the battlefield, and it has led the developers to abandoning them as useable objects. Which is rather a shame. So let's take a step back and ask ourselves if we wouldn't rather have them as simple objects that can be fully used, rather than as opaque cinematic events that can't. And rather than delay the impending release, stick them in an upgrade (along with mortars and rideable armor etc), I'd happily pay for that.

I was allowed to beta-test IL2, and nobody knew me from adam back then. I did know some of the 'right people' though. :cool:

But none of them are sitting, they're kneeling.

Maybe. And maybe they got hung-up, for whatever reason, on thinking the buildings needed to be some kind of special cinematic experience, instead of just another battlefield asset.

Let the AI deal with it, in the exact same way the crew of a tank deals with it. A house is similar to a tank in function...each window is the same as a tank's vision-slot or periscope. A tank has three guns, one main cannon and two MG's (typically), so I guess that would allow three mannable windows in a house? I'm thinking about ease of coding here, where a house is quite literally made to be a static tank. Probably more windows could be made mannable (like adding extra MGs to a tank?). Maybe a simple AI-algorithm for which floors get occupied? And instead of a dot on the roof of the house, have a small number, to indicate how many of your men are in there.

I fully agree. Leave reality alone and let the players deal with the tactical situations, just as their real-life counterparts had to. You have a Tiger, you try and put it where it's long-range superiority has a chance to shine. You're a Russian, with a handful of T34/85s, you use the terrain to try and get in close to the Tiger and take it on close-up. Nerf the cannons and you lose those realistic tactical joys. Really it comes down to nothing more than swapping one bunch of parameters for another, so why not just stick with the realistic ones?

No mortars on the map. Mortars are off board support. They're testing with realistic ranges now and it was all ordnance, not just Axis. </font>

Wow, what a conundrum! :confused: I'm kind of torn on this one. As a grog I want full 100% realism...I want my Tiger knocking out stuff at 2000m (where it can't be hit in return ). But then the map sizes hardly allow the Tiger's range superiority to come into play. Follows that the T34/85s will almost immediately be in the sub-500m range, conducive to killing the Tigers right off the bat. "Unfair!" So what does one get by halving the effective ranges of all cannons? A T34/85 will need to be at no more than 250m to get a glacis kill on a Tiger1? I know one thing...once you deviate from strict reality you're opening a can of worms and inviting disaster from all sorts of unexpected knock-on effects. Tiger1's were knocking out T34/85s in the sides from ranges of 1400m, way before the T34s were within range to return effective fire. If you halve those values you allow armor to get a lot closer to infantry before it can be interdicted (as an example of one knock-on effect of tampering with reality). My instinct is to leave reality alone, and let the Germans deal with the loss of their long-range advantage, at least until the 4km x 4km becomes fully playable on the average PC. As we all know (don't we?) the Russians got in close at Kursk and negated the long-range superiority of the 75mm and 88mm German cannons (and optics). Nerfing the cannons is a bad idea, so at least make it an interface option within the game, please? Let the players choose how they want the hardware to perform.

Waffen-SS FTW.

Quite. Give houses their own right-click menu (or whatever ToW's version of that is), with house-type commands available thereby. I don't quite understand what this transparent house hang-up is (the one the developers appear to have). Sure, if we were talking about a city map it would have some relevance, and that would require a different solution, but on rural maps, where houses are isolated/seperate entities (as opposed to contiguous mass) there is no reason not to treat them as simply another solid crewed object. For my solution to city maps, email me with a large retainer fee.

Ok, I've read the forum a bit and I've noted three compromises thus far: 1) Buildings un-enterable. 2) No mortars. 3) Nerfed Axis cannon range. So I guess the Tiger1 will still have it's disadvantage (very slow turret traverse, rendering it a liability in close combat) but not it's solution to that disadvantage (superior long-range effectiveness). How about armor values in this game, will they be realistic or is German armor to be similarly nerfed? Are we to see T34/85s knocking out Tigers through angled glacis from absurd ranges, in the interest of 'game balance'? Yes, I'm a grog, and I like it real, and if this game is going to be porked for the sake of the arcade junkies we need to know now so we don't waste our money on yet another *add name of your favourite console RTS here*. Therefore, a comprehensive list of all the 'compromises' would be fair and honourable. Thankyou (in advance).

Come on Colonel, where's that long-term vision? There's a hard reality you have to face here, and it concerns money. If you want the full cathedral you can't expect to get it for pennies. £30? That'll get the foundation stones, then expect to pay £20 for each block and £10 for dress stones. Quality requires a synergistic alliance between the purchaser and the developer/publisher, an ongoing exchange of money for work/code. As I've said so often concerning IL2, I'll happily pay £30 repeatedly for new content, even if it's for stuff that "should have been in right from the start". So let's see...£30 for the first add-on, that'll include mortars and crewable buildings. For Waffen-SS units? I'll cough-up £100 easy. Siggi. XXX

After spending a good hour reading this thread I thought I'd stick my two-cents' worth in. :eek: Firstly, as somebody who has first-hand experience of combat, I'd like to mention that rural houses aren't the most popular places to be in a fight. They're fine against rifle fire, and even LMGs, but once somebody brings up an HMG, or a tank with a cannon (anything from 20mm upwards), it's out the back door PDJ. Houses are for sleeping in, or hiding, or spotting/observing from (rural). Having said all that, soldiers do use them, for a variety of combat purposes, and they should be useable in ToW. And the solution, to me, seems pretty obvious (and has been touched upon earlier in this thread). Can we see inside the tanks in this game? Would we expect to? So why do we expect to be able to see inside the houses? If we imagine our real self to be a commanding officer, looking down upon the battlefield from a very high hill, why would we expect to see semi-transparent houses and flashy camera-angles? Indeed. So make the buildings like tanks (immoblle ones of course). No transparency, no 'special privilages', just another crewable object (and clickable like one). If the enemy rush one, and get inside, the fighting inside is invisible. And so on. If all the kerfuffle is about "presentation" and suchlike, do away with it. Have an occupied house get a little neon dot on it's roof, it doesn't need to be transparent anymore than a tank needs to be so. That's the building issue solved in my opinion. Multi-floored? Let the AI deal with soldier placement by floor/window etc, I don't figure that would be particularly hard.

Hi guys; I've been following this game since Oleg announced it a couple of years ago, was disappointed to see Codemasters take it up, both relieved and sad to see them dump it (relieved because Codemasters suck, sad because I feared it would never make release). So anyway, various things have been mentioned concerning it's realism...arcade vs simulation. Now I read in the interview that the game "will not be 100% realistic, some compromises have to be made towards fun" or words to that effect. Previously I read that the German cannons won't have their realistic range superiority, to prevent size-limited maps being dominated by Axis armor. Now I'm worrying that in the interests of "fun" the German armor will also be nerfed. For instance, we'll see the Tiger1 being taken out at 750m through it's glacis (angled) by a T34/85. Or worse. So, in the interests of clarification, and not buying a game that'll turn out to be yet another arcade blaster, can somebody please be specific about the "compromises" that will affect this game's levels of realism? I bought the Combat Mission series specifically because it was a full-on simulator, with no compromises made for "fun" over authenticity, and I had hoped that ToW would follow suit. Thanks in advance.