Kineas

I find it curious that noone mentions the best thing in wargame communities: the tournaments. Like the ones organized on the strategyzoneonline.com. Without the pbem option I doubt these can be organized. A wargame without pbem? Naaaaa...

Yes, you can't always weight them meaningfully, but it's a close approximation. At least I can't think of any better now As for the reports: I meant to consider it after the CM:SF release. Reports are easy to done and definitely add to the game experience. Ammo level report, Unit Status report, etc. and the 'Event log' what I mentioned. Only if there is a demand.

Maybe you can assign an importance value to the (FOW affected) messages. And in any given secundum you only display the most important message, if any. Btw have you thought about an end-turn report window in wego mode? It's easy to miss events even with the replay feature. Later, of course.

My idea: just report everything, and give the player filters ('log levels' if you like) with an UI so during gameplay he could change it anytime. A scrollable text window would be fine. Or an autoscrolling 3 line and an 'event viewer' dialog. Sound messages are ok in the CMx1 way.

I can do 0D modeling. (Painting colored dots)

decision games = mathematical model + fluff

I agree. It's a nice trick for the brain to have more visuals/eye candy in the game experience. Just think about the weapon icons on the CMx1 HUD. They could have use texts there, but it looks better this way. I like those icons a lot A nice picture in the 'Asset Wizard' would definitely add to the gfx value. But feature creep is the root of all evil (or was it premature optimization? ) so I don't lobby for this.

In the small bone topic I listed possible exploits in the RT system. If game experience will prove me wrong I'll be happy about that. Nevertheless I'll play wego. I spend the most time with reviewing the turn animations. I like to know what happens on every section of the front. You'll surely miss that in RT. (Well, that's the challenge). Consider it in an abstract way. Better micro can never be a disadvantage. Players can only gain on that. The game design can minimize this gain, but the micro difference could be potentially infinite. (Average 30 apm compared to 100-200 apms). So the gain itself can still be huge.

Maybe you can help, how can I run CM on a 1280x800 screen? (Laptop LCD). It starts the enumeration from 1024x768 200Hz, and can only go below. I even tried to hack the prefs file. (Please BFC next time give us the chance to set the resolution manually, sometimes it's useful)

Not as such. That would involve a massive amount of AI work and we don't have time or money for that </font>

A wargame publisher company, similar to BFC categorizes their games by "play style". They have 4 categories: - turn based igougo - turn based wego - realtime - realtime pausable The 4th is a distinct genre, and you can check the cool games using that design. I don't know whether it can work in multiplayer.

The CM equivalent of dancing will be the going hull down and reversing movement on a slope with a tank. Okay, maybe I'm too sceptical. One thing is sure: if there will be any trick in the system which gives you advantage in exchange for a few extra apms it will be quickly discovered and widely used.

Oops, sorry. My opinion about this that technically it's cheap (well, to an outsider) to allow plotting during pause. So unless the "conceptual integrity" of the design prohibits, it would worth an option in single player.

If you mean the apm-limit it was just a suggestion for an option. Of course the nolimit option would be still there, I thought of just another battle parameter like the battle points or the game length. No constraints intended at all.

Just some additional thoughts: - when I played Rise of Legends I was happy when I reached the 40 apm range. Hitting hotkeys with left hand while using the mouse with the right. You can download the demo and measure your speed. - CM has a slow combat speed, but doesn't include building or teching. So the importance of the micro is still there. - Let me give you a CM example. You have the decisive battle on the left side of the map. It fully engages you but your opponent has some free apms ("time share") to manage a single tank on the right side. That tank will rampage against your tacai, with predictable results. Will you ignore the tank or risk the decisive battle? - That's why I said earlier a choosable apm limit would remove this issue entirely. I'd choose something around 30. - Realtime mode is good, probably will help to sell more copies and make more wargame fans, but I'll play wego.

It's not that simple. If you average around 20-30 apm (action per minute = click per minute) and a guy comes with 120 apm sustained knowing this he will attack you on 2 or 3 sides of the map simultaneously. You just won't be able to keep up with this and there you go your fronts collapse. It's a perfectly valid RTS strategy.

Realtime games have a macro management (strategy, tactics) and micro management aspects. More clicks means better micro. You can't compensate for your lack of micro over a certain degree. Newer RTS games put strong emphasis on avoiding the clickfest but they can't really remove this factor. I see only one solution: limiting the actions per second from the engine itself. You don't want to know how fast the pro RTS gamers click

erm... X-Com 3 but it doesn't really count

Actually this can be done easily with an external tool. Only thing you and your opponent need is a true random number

As you can read above there is a small chance that the map format will be open, so you can have a fan made random map generator. The problem IMO is that random map generation is applicable for 'tile-based' games, and the CMx2 maps will be rather FPS style maps. Like what you can see in the Battlefield series. Writing a random map generator for those is quite challenging, and the quality gap between the human made maps and the generated maps will be far wider.

Random maps need not to be randomly generated but randomly picked from a builtin list. (Like in the Rise of Legends RTS game). This way you can randomize the outcome so there would be no cherrypicking for a known map.

We want PBEM in. Very much so. We fully understand the importance of it. However, we might (and I stress MIGHT) run into technical issues that nix the feature. We don't think this will happen, but we don't want to promise something that we aren't very sure we can deliver. The whole problem with the previous debates is that people, emotionally, wanted us to promise that no matter what it will be in. And that is something we can not do. I can't imagine that it won't include pbem. In that case I can't imagine why should I change from Combat Mission...

Maybe the number of grenade bundles and the attacks are abstracted out? So one throwing would represent a complex action like in the case of the small arms fire. Just a guess. But the numbers of the bundles per squad imply the nonabstracted version. And why would the molotovs be different? What's with the panzerfausts? Are they simulated individually?

I guess hiding means an absolute defensive-evasive stance for any unit ingame. Unhidden snipers are hard to spot, they act like a specialist

I suggest a tactical withdrawal for you, Sigrun.