Kineas

No. Not my cup of tea.

The smoke effects are a bit overstressed in the hex based engine, and this is the time when the Russians don't have thermal imaging. This would be more balanced in the CM engine. Other than that there are no imbalanced technologies just wrong purchase prices in QBs

A project like this even have a little chance for success. You don't need to reimplement CMx1, 5 years passed, so you can implement/design new features. (Blue-on-blue, team games, full game replay, individual ammo tracking etc.). Of course not the 1:1 representation but the good old abstract type. The game has to be moddable, cause more person could work on the content that way. It's still a tremendous work.

the "Under the Hood" debate...good luck guys!

...erm..why don't you just sell the code without any support? I don't really get this reasoning. (But it's clear the possible new products would mean competition for you, so I don't see the incentive either.)

When I wrote my answer your 2nd post wasn't available yet. Apologies in advance if I miss the point again. My answer is that it looks hopeless to compact a whole "training" into a single quantity (firepower). If I had to design a similar system, I'd use skills (maybe a dozen) and a rule based system to capture the training, probably this is what you mean by "drills". In that way you could capture simle rules (down-crawl-observe-fire etc.) You don't even need difficult rules, because the drills have to be simple even for humans, for well known reasons. If you want to simulate a training within the degrees of freedom provided by the CM:SF engine, then I don't really have tips.

All of the thing you mentioned can be programmed into an AI, be parametrised by a certain set of skills (not necessarily independent), be parametrised by player commands issued runtime etc. It's a lot of work, and I don't have a clue where are the magic boundary required by the 1:1 representation to offer a good playing experience. Human intelligence can be never achieved, or even approximated, so your troops probably never employ feints in close combat or use the latest karate kicks. The point is to get a good playing experience in spite of visible 'abstractions', shortcuts, oddities from your pixel individuals. They are just tanks in different skins and with a different tacai, maybe we need more time to accept this. To get an understanding what can an "1:1 AI" perform check out an FPS game, I think the Battlefield 2 demo will be good for that.

Not really because you could form a super-tight pack and they could shot trough each other, making the fist-tactic unrealistically strong. I call 1:1 what FPS do. Every polygon, every visible object counts. (Well, almost...)

Don't confuse 1:1 representation and micromanagement, because they are too different things, though the first seems to imply the second. 1:1r. is not a problem, it's the future. In addition to making wargames spectacular, it will also enable a lot of real tactics and abolish unnecessary abstractions. You can advance your inf behind your T34, and 5-6 HE grenades will clear a trench. You can check some of the elements in CMSF already. A lone machine gun will stop a squad in the open even at 500m, and bullets will have deadly trajectories not just hit chances at a particular grid location. You don't have to get lost in the details, but a very strong tacai needed, especially for infantry fights in urban areas etc. Is it possible? Yes, launch a Battlefield 1942 cooperative game with 64 bots on a 4 year old PC, and realize their behaviour is not that bad at all. It's possible to simulate very much detail, and if you don't need realtime, you can pretty much simulate everything. (Which is not really important, of course). Regarding design for effect: I see your point. If you will be in disadvantage unless you micromanage every individual in your battalion the game will be unplayable. If you don't be in a disadvantage then what's the point in simulating that at all? Maybe having the option for a small micromanage-boost at the decisive location is worth it? A wargame should have some depth too, if we abstract out it to rock-paper-scissor it's just not fun enough.

Please everybody read this again.

Or they should play wargames (~battle chess) not Company Commander Simulators. I guess such products exist (POA2 ?), not to mention the real stuff used by the military.

Thanks for the update rune, btw, do you know what the "Orosz" means in your name?

Maybe he is an n-th generation Hungarian (0 < n < 10)

I doubt...I don't even know if he is the same rune who posts on the forum regularly...

As a fellow Hungarian, my advice to you: do not go there

The only thing what really put me off was that the wego mode in the demo contains bugs which must have been caught in the first hour of testing. So either you didn't test it all, or the guy was reading the forums instead.

Doable, by complicating the system. The first thing would be to enable moddable-downloadable scoring-schemes. So if someone doesn't like something he could create new one and share it on the internet. There could be multipliers for handicap (already is), for map balance, for mission balance etc. You could use different prices for purchasing and different for losing the unit etc.

Actually CM:SF made me to search after ASL a few months ago (I didn't know anything about it), and I like it very much

You are basically right, but the wargaming market is so small that we should be happy they make packaged software. This (industry standard) price is actually very small unless you sell one hundred thousand copies or more.

I'm not disappointed now, I was in the last few months when it became evident from the dev's comment where CMSF is heading to. If you read the forums carefully I think you can extract the statement for yourself. RT and the new gaming experience is the way to go. Maybe we can expect some fixes for wego, but they won't write another game (see my reasoning above) you can be sure about that.

RT would not kill wego in itself. But this game is just one game not two. True wego wargame would require different UI, different commands, probably different tacai. We can't blame the developers that they didn't make two games at the same time. They didn't even have the resources to test it properly. [ July 29, 2007, 10:56 AM: Message edited by: Kineas ]

I'm not sure if the CMx1 fire effects were more realistic. Remember the LMG effectiveness? Try now advance in the open in front of an LMG team. In this world a lot depends on the skills of the AI soldiers, more precisely on the implementation of these skills. But that's another topic.

I have only seen the demo so far. My impressions: Positives: - the game is very spectacular. Watching the action unfold is just awesome, I didn't really care about the mission objectives, just set up duels and firefights. Probably the 1:1 representation will mark the beginning of a new age for wargames. This also has implications for the realism factor, a trench will no longer withstand dozens of HE hits, and people will fear the mortar too. - The best physical engine what I've seen, and I've seen a couple. - Arty Wizard is superb - thanks for the excellent zoom function - camera controls are good - performance is great an an old rig (P4 2.8, 1.75G RAM, ATI X800). Smooth as silk, at least for the 2nd demo scenario. - no crashes at all on that machine - I loathed the selection icons but start liking it now - sounds are very good - tracers are very spectacular too Negatives: later, another day

Found a way to play the demo without too much annoyance. Don't touch the keyboard except for the command shortcuts. Camera control keys, zoom caused the problem for me.