Rocket-Man

Does the global moral number change during the turn?

The reason I would like to have this is because I could keep an eye on the causality counter during a replay and could notice if a particularly heavy firefight was occurring during the turn. The running total would let me know at a glance how beat my forces are.

An interesting idea, but I would gain more information than I desire to know.

There is not even a debug feature you can turn on?

Is there any way to find out the number of casualties that have occurred in a turn and/or total? And on a related note, is there anyway to find out which individual casualties are KIA vs. which ones are wounded? [ November 24, 2006, 11:27 PM: Message edited by: Rocket-Man ]

That had to have been one hell of a ride.

I planned on doing a review and a mini AAR at The Scenario Depot like I did for SB 1 Pz Div Obscurity 1940 scenario SB 1 Pz Div Obscurity 1940 Discussion ( Warning!!!!: link goes to AAR and discussion with spoilers!!!! For scenario description only go to SB 1 Pz Div Obscurity 1940 Scenario Description), which is an excellent scenario, but I didn't think that was the place to do a full AAR. I think I will do a mini AAR at The Scenario Depot and provide a link to the full one in the thread. Unfortunately, due to other constraints on my time, I probably will not get to start the AAR until next weekend. [ November 20, 2006, 11:20 AM: Message edited by: Rocket-Man ]

Thanks for the help John and Askovdk. I want to write an AAR report for a number of reasons - 1) Playing a scenario that I plan to explain to others will should help me better plan my strategy. 2) Hopefully I can get some feedback from experienced players on my play. 3) I want to learn how to use one of the image hosting services, and an AAR would be a good reason to start using one. With the last point in mind, any recommendations on which image hosting site to use?

I am currently working on an AAR for the scenario SB 1 Pz Div le Petit 1940 and I have a couple of questions. 1) Is there a special forum on Battlefront's site to post these to? 2) Is the Battlefront forum the best place to post these or is there another forum that is better suited to AARs? 3) Is there a limit to the length of posts on the Battlefront forum? Thanks in advance for the help.

With all the arguments and debates about PCs and Macs, that is the very reason I have always used PCs. My computer is a tool, and one of the things I expect it to do (probably the main thing I expect it to do) is play games. And unfortunately Game Companies offer better support for PCs than they do for Macs.

More of a first person shooter game then, not really my cup of tea. It did add an interesting flavor to the program though. Thanks for hunting down the information John.

GreenAsJade, Thanks for the "High Contrast" terrain mods! It is the closest thing to a topo map display I think you can get with the CM engine.

I saw some of that program the other day, but unfortunately couldn't watch it for very long. Showing computer animated footage of the soldiers was definitely an interesting choice by the director. Do you know what program they used to create the computer animations?

Good advice Vergeltungswaffe. I never intentionally post my email address directly anywhere on the net. If I have to post it, I use the types of tricks you mentioned.

JoMc67 - I am interested in the "step by step procedure for Mutli Player" as well, and perhaps a PBEM game too. I am also sending you an email with my request, I hope you don't mind.

Thanks COG! I downloaded some files last night and it was a lot faster than before.

Down again.

Congratulations on your son! I have three kids myself and I hope your son brings as much enjoyment to your life as my kids have to mine. Although, as GillFish said earlier, your time to play games has just become severely limited for a while. I have really enjoyed your cartoons and I hope you can find the time to do more of them.

I played ASL years ago, but I haven't pushed around cardboard counters in quite some time now. And my prospects of doing that again anytime soon are nil. My three kids would absolutely love messing up any game I actually had to keep set up for more than three minutes.

It seems to me that the functionality for determing line of sight blockages is already present in the game engine in the Line of Sight feature, but again I am not a programmer. [ November 06, 2006, 07:42 PM: Message edited by: Rocket-Man ]

I didn’t know a single programmer wrote all the code for the Combat Mission games. That’s quite a bit of work for one person. My question “why did they leave them in this game for so long?” was really more rhetorical than anything. They obviously didn’t fix them because they choose not to. I don’t write software for a living (I just design rockets) nor do I own a profitable software company that sells games, but Battlefront does. They obviously make money on the Combat Mission series of games or they wouldn’t have made three iterations of the series. They have also been in business for a while, so obviously they make a profit selling computer games (at least I hope they do, I would hate to see them go under). With those two points in mind, it is hard to question their business decision to not fix the problems I have pointed out. Could they have made even more money if they had fixed them? Who knows. However as I said before, it is a shame that these problems were never fixed (and probably never will be) because the game fails to live up to its potential.

I know no game is perfect, but I believe in the saying "don't let perfection be the enemy of the good." These issues have been around a long time. While I hope they fix these issues in future games, the question remains - why did they leave them in this game for so long? It is not only walls, it is the fact that the TacAI doesn't take into account elevations either. For example, I had a unit on on the back side of a hill. When it was fired upon, instead of retreating a few feet back down the hill (or just laying prone where it was), it crawled over open terrain on the top of the hill to reach some rough terrain on the front side of the hill facing the enemy. Now I know I can take the stupid TacAI into account when planning my turns, but it is extremely frustrating for me to think in the manner the stupid TacAI does. Which brings us back to the purpose of my original post - How the game engine makes the game more frustrating than it needs to be.

Not to belabor the point, but games are supposed to be fun to play, not frustrating. I know a lot of people are frustrated that X vehicle is not included in the game or that the armor rating of Y vehicle is not what they think it should or that the range of Z weapon is wrong, but those things are secondary to the game being fun to play and should be left to modders to fix (and why Battlefront didn't make better mod tools for this game is beyond me). Why can't game companies follow three simple rules? 1) Make a game that is fun to play. 2) Minimize player frustration and micromanagement (don't even get me started on the poor UI's in most games). 3) Provide good mod tools for the players. [ November 06, 2006, 09:26 AM: Message edited by: Rocket-Man ]

I don't "hate the game" like Rollstoy, but I definitely don't enjoy it as much as I could. The bottom line is that I have a finite amount of time to play games (3 young kids and a full time job) so I tend to play games that don't frustrate me. [ November 06, 2006, 09:26 AM: Message edited by: Rocket-Man ]

I played the demo of CMBO years ago and wasn't impressed. However, I have been reading some World War II history lately and I thought it might be fun to digitally reenact some of the battles I have been reading about so I purchased CMAK a couple of weeks ago to do just that (I know CMAK has been out for quite a while). It didn't take me long to find out that CMAK was better than CMBO, but had two fundamental flaws. 1) I can not believe that units will run away from walls when the "TacAI" takes over. This obviously is an old problem, but come on, how long has it been around now and still no fix for it? 2) The lack of topographical lines for the maps (and I know battlefront says their engine can't handle them) makes it much harder than it needs to be to figure out the terrain you are fighting for (and I also know you can use gridded terrain to mitigate this problem). Searching through the forums shows that these two issues have been discused for years, but obviously a fix has never been implemented by Battlefront. With Battlefront now working on other games, these problems will probably never be fixed, which is a real shame because CMAK could have been a great (as opposed to a better than average) game.