gstelmack

I have seen the same issue. Actually at the start of the first training campaign mission I can't get the guys do mount up in v1.02 (I thought I could in the initial release).

Agreed. Right now you have to: </font> Click a unit to select it</font>Cycle or click orders tabs to get to your command</font>Press the key / hit the button for the order</font>Move the mouse to where the order should be</font>Click again to give the order</font>Right-click to stop giving certain orders</font> We are proposing: </font>Click a unit to select it</font>Move the mouse to where the order should be</font>Right-click to bring up menu</font>Move mouse to select order</font>Click to give order</font> The top is slightly more efficient for stringing together multiple movement orders for a single unit, but for some of us loses that efficiency in the 2nd and 3rd steps. Plus it's prone to error; I keep forgetting the last step and giving extra waypoints to my units when I try and click on a different one to start giving it orders.

Here's the problem then. I used the popup for everything in CMx1. And in Close Combat. Which was real-time. And very practical. And in any other tactical / strategy game that had one. Maybe once I spend weeks getting used to it, I'll like the 2-stage approach to giving orders, assuming I ever get used to remembering what page I was on as I analyze a battlefield, and trying to get used to overloaded keystrokes for each order. But I've never been a keyboard guy unless I had to be, and then only when there's a handful of commands to remember, and certainly not a 2-stage approach. To give you some idea, I'm a programmer, and I almost never use the hotkeys in my editor. Not something I ever get used to, as I have to use a command over-and-over to get it burned in, and with an editor there are only a handful of commands that fit that bill (copy-and-paste is about it for me). And having to look down at the panel to remember what page I was on and try to learn the keys breaks immersion and seems less practical in the heat of real-time combat than a right-click menu in the place I'm giving orders that just has what's legal right then. Anyway, before it sounds like all I'm doing is whining here, I should also give some positives, because I AM enjoying the game despite the difficulties using it. I love the icons above the units, especially for targeting. Makes it very easy to target a specific unit. I love the look of the soldiers, helps immersion tremendously over what we had in CMx1. I love the real-time option, as the battles go much faster / smoother than WEGO, where I didn't much like the 60 second chunks that kept breaking things up. I love the sound effects, the tracers and explosions, and the smoke. I'll add my weight to some of the pathfinding problems mentioned elsewhere (I just need to get used to what throws it off, as it's not obvious just yet what will cause a vehicle to go through contortions to try and move a few meters forward to a hopefully hull-down position), and the game is harder to use than it should be, but the rest of the game seems fairly solid so far and a ton of fun. No performance or video fits here for me, installed it and it just worked.

I'm old. If you think I'm going to remember all of the hotkeys for all of the orders, you've got another think coming The two-step process to issuing at least several of these commands also gets in the way. The map is where I'm playing, and where I want to give orders, so that's where I really, really want them. Besides, I already place waypoints using the mouse, there is no way to get around overloading the mouse for cameras and orders. Why not integrate it? Use SHIFT and CTRL for camera movement, right-click for orders. I'd say a reasonable compromise is to use SHIFT or CTRL for orders, but right-click is the traditional, trained-into-me-via-every-other-Windows-app key for a menu like this.

My primary issue revolves around giving orders. I agree that the current hotkey setup is very counterintuitive, and I'm constantly giving the wrong orders (and find myself forcing myself to look down at the command bar and click rather than using the hotkeys because of it). I'd like to see 3 changes: 1) Different hotkeys for each order, period. I'll get used to them over the time, with the command bar at the bottom my learning tool. The tabs should be so you can fit them in the UI, not to reduce the number of keys used. I'll look into customizing in the text file, but this should really be the default and not require customization. 2) Use keyboard modifiers instead of mouse buttons for camera panning / movement. CTRL / SHIFT instead of left/right. As suggested earlier in the thread. The key reason for this is to allow: 3) Bring back my right-click context menu for giving orders, please. This would help fix #1 as well. I really miss this from CM1, and it made it easy to do the movement / facing thing. It would also mean I would stop forgetting to right-click while placing movement points, thus entering a waypoint I really didn't want and screwing up all my orders. Giving orders needs to be more intuitive than it is right now. I saw your comment about "early impressions", but keep in mind that new customers will start with the demo and these early impressions are CRITICAL for expanding your user base. You'll have a bunch of people running into these UI issues being talked about here and deciding to buy something else rather than invest the time to learn this. Oh, I forgot suggestion 4: 4) Scrollbars in the shell UI, please. It's the 21st century, why am I paging through order text and scenario lists? And the mouse wheel should do this stepping as well.