Paper Tiger

What a pleasant surprise. I installed the 1.06 patch and nervously loaded up 'Passed off' and watched the frames as the action unfolded. Not only was there no slowdown but I got an overall improvement in fps. There was the usual intense firefight when the two infantry forces found each other and, pre-1.06, I was falling to 3fps for a minute or two because of the volume of fire. The same action with 1.06 never fell below 6-8 and stayed mostly in the double figures. Then it was time to load up and try "Buying the farm', my favourite scenario. Wow, that really rocked! The Militia Company was slaughtered in short order by the attacking AI. They attacked the farmhouse and the workhouse victory locations and cleared out the die hards who were in the buildings. WOW! Then, when the Special Forces arrived, there was no slowdown at all. Frames stayed steady. Before, reinforcements slowed down my frames drastically for about 1 minute. Hopefully, that's all in the past. Other than that, I got no actual work done today but I know that I'll be getting to work on 'Strong Stand' tomorrow, another Special Forces situation on a medium sized farm map at night. There are lots of trees and LOTS of low walls so that should be a lot of fun. It looks like I'll have to revisit the 'finished' situations to see how the new vehicle AI changes things. The BMP-2s seem to fire their AT-5s at tanks instead of their cannons and that will change the way some of them play. I might have to give the AI MORE tanks!!!

Finally, the not so long wait is over and it's up and running on my computer. I playtested a couple of my own scenarios to see how bad the performance hit would be and, to my surprise, the scenarios ran even more smoothly. FPS never dropped below 6fps even in the midst of a large firefight. I seem to be getting better fps overall with 1.06 which is an extremely nice surprise. I suspect it's because fewer units can see things and fewer units are firing. I'm going to have to redesign some of my situations because units can no longer see and fire through the ground. The Red resupply option looks really good, they even get some RPG rounds. I'm looking forward to playing around with this more. The TAC AI seems to be performing even better, my BMP-2s are firing their AT-5s at tanks instead of using their cannons, very nice. So far, I haven't seen any split squads either. Tomorrow, I'll try out some night actions to see how that's improved. Overall, my first impression is that this game ROCKS! Thanks for all your good work guys. ps. agree with Rokossovski, I want to see the AI artillery system improved in 1.07.

Well, I've refined the AI attack plan in "Passed off"' very thoroughly over the last 24 hours and, this morning, it beat me. When I playtest, I always 'pretend' that I don't really know what the AI is going to do and set up to be strong in one area and weak in others but never ALL in the one place where I know it's going to go. It meant playing and playing and playing many times over and observing the AI's behaviour and timing very carefully. But it's finally done and with good fps too. Now I have to create a second plan as I think people will feel a lack of satisfaction with their result and will want to replay to get a better one. The other plan, already being sketched out, will be drastically different from the other and have equal weight of being selected so that reloading won't give you any guaranteed advantage. I'm very happy with this situation as the AI doesn't have a large material advantage over the human player, slightly less than 2-1 actually. The human player has more than enough than he needs to win the game so there's no cheating, just making the AI use it's assets as effectively as possible.

Yeah, that's testing for you. It appears that they has a choice when fixing the low walls bug; re-introduce the 'shooting through the berms' bug which everyone hated or add the new ELoS system. Apparently, the low walls bug is fixed by the new ELoS system and Steve posted in another thread that the 'stuck infantry' has been largely fixed as well. Of course, there are going to be some new problems with 1.06. But as long as it fixes what it purports to fix and doesn't introduce anything horrible, I'll welcome it.

Yeah, it's a very important part of the game if you play the game against the AI which most of us do. The current system, 'fire everything after 30 secs and then that's it folks' isn't really very good and it doesn't provide a challenge for the human player. It's never going to be as effective as artillery in the hands of a human opponent but a good scenario design might make a player think twice about his game plan if the AI could use it more effectively. Since the designers obviously intend it to do what it says in the manual, it would be nice to hear when they are going to get around to fixing it. If it were WAD, it would be a very good system.

Skelley -The patch was supposed to focus on a few areas (low wall, stuck infantry). Why so big of a list?- The initial impression I received shortly after 1.05 was released was that they would get the low wall bug fixed a.s.a.p. But when they 'fixed' it, apparently, they reintroduced the 'shooting through berms' bug. Therefore, the 'fix' to the problem was the new ELoS system. It's not hard to understand why that would require a lot of testing to get right and why there's as long list of fixes.

Other Means: -"I'm playing all the right notes, but not, necessarily, in the right order."- Eric Morcambe to Andre Previn yeah? classic stuff. Given infinite cash... I like that idea. I have enough to buy something decent. A dual core would be no problemo but it's better to buy something with a longer life because I'll actually save money in the long run when I finally upgrade to a Quad core, maybe next year. I'm going to stick with my single core for a little while longer and see how bad the performance hit is before pushing on with a new processor. About the RAM, I've been told that it's not going to help game performance very much, ie fps. But I want it anyway.

I wonder if I'm permitted to ask the beta testers if any of them experienced a significant performance hit with the new ELOS? I'm anxiously awaiting the release of this patch. As an aside, I'm wondering who will be first to find and report something that 1.06 broke? My money's on Adam1. Happy hunting sir.

Yup, can't argue with that. What would I rather have, dynamic lighting at night or AI artillery WAD? Dynamic lighting! What would I rather have, ELoS or AI artillery WAD? ELoS! What would I rather have, improved TACAI or etc... Still, I'm hoping that some importance is attached to this aspect of the game. If it were working as the manual suggests it should, I could be doing some pretty cool things with it in my scenarios.

I found this in a review of the Intel quad 6600 processor posted by DriverHeaven.net "Many of you by now are probably reassuring yourselves that Quad core right now is “overkill”, however support for threaded applications is gaining momentum all the time. If we look at the next generation consoles (Playstation 3 and Xbox 360), both of these systems use multiple cored processors and game developers are already praising the potential in such an environment. With the release of Supreme Commander (which utilizes as many cores as you can throw at it), I noticed gains over dual core systems when playing larger maps near the population unit limit cap, specifically when playing against multiple (and high level) AI opponents. Other forthcoming games (among the many) which will apparently use Quad core will be Unreal Tournament 2007, Half Life 2 Episode 2 and Alan Wake. As you can see these are high quality AAA list titles so the future is positive for Quad Core in a gaming environment." Just for your information.

Wiggum: Thanks for the encouragement. So far, all the scenarios but one run on my rig at 12fps+ minimum except in a few instances when one side receives reinforcements and the processor suddenly gets hit with a large number of fresh calculations (everything's fine again after about a minute). Or when there's a particularly intense firefight. That's what happened in the above situation. So I'm hoping that 1.06 isn't going to make too many of them unplayable. As a further note, I replayed the save game of 'Heavy Metal' last night, this time more carefully, and I got a total victory so I'm not going to change anything with that one. Because you get dumped from the campaign if you lose a phase 2 battle, it should make the player a bit more cautious about how he uses his core forces in the 'easier' early scenarios.

Other Means: -AIUI, no game works with Quad core, in fact very few applications do. It will make a difference in creating video or some specialised applications but nothing more than that.- yup, that's what my computer 'man' tells me too. He thinks I'd be better with a dual core. But I read on Amazon (I think) that it's only a matter of time before new games take advantage of the new technology. And some of the guys with quads appear to be very happy with them. At the very least, a quad core can't perform worse than a dual core?

I expect there will be a lively debate about this very shortly after the new patch arrives. Without a system upgrade, the new ELOS has to reduce the game's performance on anybody's computer. I'm currently pushing my system to the limit with some of the scenarios I'm designing and it's a safe bet that they'll perform worse with 1.06. I've not been worrying about that too much as I am able to upgrade my system but if I do that and I don't see any improvement, then I'm going to be pretty depressed about that. I'm actually glad that I'm a Paradox customer and I'll have to wait another couple of days before I can get 1.06. If there are lots of people complaining about the performance hit, I might not bother for a while.

OMG! This is very disappointing to hear as I'm in the process of ordering a new Quad core processor. I posted a couple of weeks ago in the Tech forum about this and got told that the game really runs super smooth with Vista 64 and quad core processors. Perhaps it would be helpful if we had a test scenario and posted our kit specs and our fps with the opening screen. Perhaps 'Allah's fist'?

Classic88 Depends on your operating system. With Vista, you'll need to download FRAPS to get screenshots. All you get when you try PrtScr is the desktop. Good luck.

Yup, I remember reading that post somewhere too. I know they're super busy getting 1.06 finished but this thread's been around since the beginning of the month and I get no replies from Steve. I really hope to hear something as this is a very important part of the game.

I spent the entire day reworking 'Passed off' because I had an idea for a killer AI plan. Yes, it worked as I expected but my fps dropped to 1 or 2. Clearly, that wasn't going to work so I reduced the AI forces and worked on developing a new plan. This was a bit more challenging because the attacking AI doesn't have a significant material advantage anymore. Nevertheless, by the end of the afternoon, I think I've found one that will provide a significant challenge for the human player, at least until the reinforcements arrive. A word of caution for anyone editing maps. I was reducing the 'Hill 142 Part 2' map and before I started, I forgot to erase the AI artillery missions and as a result, some ended offboard. This resulted in a great loss of frames when the artillery was firing. I have to re-do Hill '142 Part 2' as it's very unlikey that it will be playable post 1.06.

-I think i will have to make map more tunnel like, restrict player's movement to avenue of approach.- That's not really necessary. You can get the same effect by leaving areas of the board without cover. And it will look better too.

Yeah, I'd prefer to see Strykers as there's more vehicular diversity than the Bradleys. I didn't know you could get rid of the javelins entirely with 'scarce' ammo. As long as there are no javelins, you should have something that works there. You can add both ATGM and MG versions as reinforcements and do away with the M1 and that will fit in with your premise too. Looking forward to seeing it.

Hmm, if I were looking for a SL campaign experience, I'd rather go with the SASL system. You have your company and you shepherd it through a number of scenarios. Units die and sometimes get replaced, some units improve in quality/experience, especially if you win, while other degrade if you lose. I used to love following the progress of my Russian 1941 infantry company and see how long I could keep a working company together. I kept a spreadsheet with all the unit stats which was updated after each situation. I once got one through to about Feb 1942. I got through a LOT of replacements but had great fun doing it.

Let's give it another try. Probably a waste of time but this question matters to me.

I've never had any problems running CMSF with Vista that I'm aware of. I get reasonable frames on large maps with all the graphics settings maxxed out. I can't play CMx1 games on Vista though but I'm not missing it anymore. Single processor, 64 bit Pentium 3Ghz with a GeForce 8600GT graphics card and only 1Gb of RAM. I am considering upgrading the processor if I get a significant performance hit from 1.06. I guess Vista isn't the platform of choice for games but then, neither was XP when it first came out. In spite of it's teeathing problems (1 year on) Vista is probably the future though. I really like it and find the XP system on my laptop and the computers at the office look very flat and dull by comparison.

Yeah, I use the zoom function to get screenshots from the action, like this... or this... I have better ones but I haven't 'done' them for photobucket yet. You know where to view them

So far, no problems with ammo but the Special Forces are attacking in 'The Farm'. I haven't started to playtest the other SF situation because it's at night and it has lots of low walls. Today, I did some work on the Saudara map and set up an AI plan. It seems to play very well but I was a bit concerned that it was very easy. That was because I was playtesting with Blue's full OB. So I compiled all six Republican Guards scenarios and played them through to see how Saudara played. . That proved to be very interesting. The first two situations were quite easy and my casualties were light. 'Hill 142 Part 1' played through okay too but I was a bit impatient to get it finished and took a few more casualties than I should have. So far, so good. I was actually thinking that it was too easy. Boy was I wrong. The 'Phase 2' scenarios, 'Heavy Metal' and 'Hill 142 Part 2', were WAY too tough. My forces got slaughtered in 'Heavy Metal' (the new 'Valley of Death') and normally, that would have dumped me out of the campaign with a loss. But I scripted it to be non-dynamic just to see what happens to reduced core forces. I didn't even bother playing Saudara as I had nothing in the way of a starting force. Although I got slaughtered in 'Heavy Metal' I don't really want to change it because I was only playing it half-heartedly and didn't really use the infantry very well at all. And it was a very close thing too. I'll replay the game save again later and see if I can get a win and if I can, then that's fine. So, the upshot of all that is that I'll have to rework the two 'Hill 142' scenarios so that the player has a chance of getting through to Saudara.

Oop, posted THAT one twice. Here's what should have been there