Paper Tiger
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Posts posted by Paper Tiger
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I've only got an 80Gb hard drive so that would be a luxury for me.
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There is also the angle that if there's no real interest in a campaign like this, I can put it aside for a while, design some more maps and make it into a large 'multiple path to victory' job. Just design it at my leisure.
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That looks sweet man. What are the dimensions? Incidentally, are you planning to make it a map or a scenario?
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gibsonm
I know it looks like we're a bit impatient. However, the low wall bug has already been fixed. Steve said that Charles fixed it some weekend before the Xmas holidays so we aren't waiting for them to fix it. It's a pretty major bug if you're playing scenarios with low walls, ie urban which is the game's main emphasis. It also renders most of the user-created content on CMMODS pretty useless too. Apparently, 'Hammertime', the most popular user created scenario to date, has been spoiled by this bug so it's a biggie.
Steve also said that he wanted a 'quick turnaround' on 1.06 and not let it turn into another monster patch like 1.05.
Incidentally, how do you uninstall a patch? Wouldn't you have to do a complete reinstall of the game?
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"I find the spotting problems extreme in the other direction. In one scenario with "scarce" civilian density, my bmp-2's promptly identified and dispatched an entire forest hilltop battalion defense from the setup zones. Spots were acquired in seconds flat at ranges in excess of 300 and 400m on men laying prone if foxholes under trees... just because they were in LOS."
I had to laugh when I read this. That sums it up nicely. I have see this instantaneous spotting so many times. It seems that you have to 'Hide' your forces to prevent them from being spotted immediately. It's almost as if when they're not hiding, they're waving and shouting "coo-eey".
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SgtMuhammed:
Don't worry sir. I am wholely designing this for my own pleasure.
I agree with you, if it is fun and exciting for me, then it will be so for others too. I'm only asking because I happen to find this an interesting topic for discussion. And, of course, I'm trying to create a bit of interest in this project. Since it's red on red campaign, it will probably only appeal to a few people. It's not helped by the fact that they're mostly desert/hills maps too however, they are nice maps. It also makes them playable with the low walls bug present.
At the moment, the battles are quite large, the player controlling one reinforced mechanised company, and later, two but by then, your core units should be reduced somewhat. The computer controls a battalion sized force in most of the scenarios. I find the AI manages large forces quite well. I can manage a company sized force in Real Time without too much trouble and that fits in with the force ratio of 3-1 in favour of the AI attacker.
The scenarios are DEFINITELY not puzzles to be solved. I suppose I gave that impression in my original post but what I meant to say is that I found an AI plan that really optimised the AI forces to present the maximum challenge for the humam player. This means looking at the challenge the AI would face if it were a human player and create a plan that plays to it's strengths. If I can't beat that AI plan then it means that the scenario is too unbalanced and needs to be adjusted. Since I can, I feel that it's playable.
Of course, there are other AI plans for that situation too and if you're lucky, you'll get one of the easy ones and cruise through with zero casualties like I did before I devised this plan.
As for multiple ways to win, that would require a VERY big campaign. :eek: The campaign scriting allows us to do this but you are looking at 10+ scenarios, probably a LOT more to do this properly. The challenge in this campaign is to stay in it and fight yet another situation before you are given the order to withdraw. Screw up big time in the first two engagements and it's "pull out" time. After that, you may get dumped into a 'survive this one and you'll get a victory of sorts' ending but that's not in yet.
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Okay, somebody had to ask.
Sometime before the end of the month I hope? -
I'm currently about half way through designing a campaign and I'm curious to know just how difficult you guys like it to be. I admit that I'm designing it solely with MY enjoyment in mind but I'm going to share it when it's finished so I thought I'd ask. It's a Red on Red campaign and it's definitely combined arms with some substantial tank action. Presently, there's one HUGE tank battle but I'm not sure if it'll stay in.
The first two missions are solid now, the third is almost finished while the fourth and fifth require a lot of playtesting. I don't want it to turn into a monster so I'm looking at 5-6 missions with maybe one or two optional 'stuff-up' missions tagged on which most of you will never see I suppose.
First, what about difficulty? As it stands just now, the very first mission will be a killer until you figure out how to beat it and maybe this isn't what people are looking for when they play a campaign game? It's a meeting engagement that takes place at night and it was an easy start for the player until I devised a new AI attack plan yesterday and it's a toughie! After a few play throughs, I manage to get total victories twice in a row against this AI plan so I feel that it's finished. That's how it worked in 'In Harms Way' and that's how I'm planning it to work in the campaign too.
My plan is to create a dynamic mission with different possible outcomes depending on your success in each mission. The branching structure allows me to do this so it just means that I have to make several different versions of each later scenario.
Also, what about game length. I've seen people post that 'a' scenario isn't long enough for their tastes. In fact, some are lobbying Battlefront to extend the maximum game length from 2 hours! Two hours is a very long time for me to play a scenario and I admit, I often quit a game when I load it up and see that it's 2 hours long. However, this is more due to the fact that I like to devote most of my playing time to designing my own scenarios. Once I finish this baby, I'm going to take a 'holiday' and play webwing's two campaigns for sure.
Having said that, there is one mission at the moment which is 1 hour 15 mins with a variable ending in the campaign and I admit, it feels tight. But that's my intention. Throughout the campaign, the player is operating under time pressures in the campaign, which are fully explained and justified in the briefings, and so it's not a contrivance forced on the human player just to make the situation difficult to accomplish.
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SgtMuhammed:
Point 1
I'm assuming that the squads and the Bradleys were part of the same group, right? Did you give that group an Assault order? I've noticed that vehicles in combined groups that are given an assault order tend to stay in place.
Point 2
Yes. that happens a lot. However, I once lost a mission to a vehicle crew that 'touched' a VP location after their vehicle was destroyed. There were other vehicles coming in and I forgot about the crew. :mad:
Point 4
Yes, this is a big problem. All Syrian infantry (not sure about Special Forces though) are completely blind at night. Visibility is down to a few metres and they get slaughtered. We need flares to help them out. I'm sure they'd have a few flares to use during a conflict.
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Probably a bitch to code them in I suppose. But perhaps, functionally, it's not all that different from a grenade launcher and we've got them already. BTW, for the record, I have absolutely no idea what I am talking about here.
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Cheers for the heads-up on that one. I haven't got any mods installed yet. That sounds like a useful one.
Yeah, flares have been around for about 100 years. If Battlefront hadn't added dynamic lighting effects in 1.05, I'd never have dreamed of asking for this. To quote Paul Stanley (badly) 'when they're giving you something that you like say "GIVE ME MORE!"'
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Steve
"For example, the v1.06 patch has significant new TacAI behaviors included."
Woo hoo! Bring it on. Any ETA available yet?
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Everything that is in my first post is suggested by my reading of the manual. therefore, I am a little surprised that none of these features appear to work as designed. Of course, if it's already noted and is going to be corrected sometime soon then that's fine by me. It'll be a pretty good system if it works like the manual says it should. For example, if the 'valid spotter' thing worked properly, I could do some clever things with this system but it clearly isn't. I always make sure that NOBODY has LoS to the target zones in my experiments.
Thelmia:
Wow, what can I say. I've never seen AI artillery fire later in the game and I've tried a few experiments of my own too. I sometimes wonder if some of the problems we see in the game are not so much bugs as problems with our own individual kits. We've both got the same game, patched to 1.05 and I've never seen that happen. My experiment was done on Saturday morning and the artillery fire was intense man, no change as far as I can see.
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I have the Vista 64bit operating system and an Nvidea 8600GT graphics card and Shock Force runs just fine for me. I have all the graphics settings maxed out and I can play some pretty big scenarios with those settings. However, I CAN'T run any CM1 games on my desktop so if you want to upgrade to Vista, say goodbye to CM1. (I still have my 4 year old trusty Dell Inspiron laptop with XP to play CM1 though)
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I'm wondering if/when we're going to see flares introduced to the game. I love this new unanticipated feature and I'm really hoping that you'll be able to expand on it in some way for 1.07.
At the moment Syrian infantry is utterly helpless at night. Thay can't see anything at all except when it's REALLY close, ie within a few metres. I find it hard to believe that their squad leaders or company commanders don't have a few flares stashed away for night operations.
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Seabee:
I think it's Cool Breeze working his anti-atgm magic.
hmm, so it's some kind of Jedi mind trick? "This is not the weapons system you're looking for."
For the record, my BMP's are stationary so it's not that. I'm not sure what's going on because I saw it happen again in a different scenario this morning, same problem. I don't remember this being a problem in this scenario before. But then again, I had a wicked idea for an AI attack plan this morning and I REALLY need those ATGMs to counter it. It would be a shame to have to disable this AI plan as it's lethal. Until I put this one in, the scenario was a cakewalk for the human player. Now it's too difficult
I agree that it would be good to have some more control over which weapons our vehicles use. CM1 allowed us to select 'Use Main Gun?". Since we've already got a 'target heavy' and 'target light' command, it surely wouldn't require a massive amount of coding to put that in. That or thewood's vehicular target covered arc.
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[bump]
I'll give this one more try and then I'll post it in the Bugs thread.
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vincere:
Unfortunately, I doubt we'll get formations- Steve already said it's not the way they want to go.
Hev
Did steve realy say that?
Yeah, I read this too. It came up in another thread not that long ago and Steve stated his reasons too. I can't give you a link to that post because
a) I don't know how to
, and
I can't find it but it's there.
However, I'd at least like to see a 'Form Up' command to reintigrate split squads. It should be implimentable even when the squads are far apart and would go a long way to helping us cope with the split squad problem until they find some way to fix it.
Has anyone done any tests to see when the unwanted squad splitting most frequently takes place? I've found it happens more frequently when I use 'Quick' movement commands, especially when they're moving through trees.
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Nemesis:
hmm, reading your quote, you seem to be taking issue with the fact that he never tires of the game. I'm sorry that you're not enjoying the game but it shouldn't be a problem for you if we are.
You are entitled to post in any number of "this game is broken/bugged" threads that we see every day on this forum. I occassionally post there too so I don't think that the game is perfect but it's still my favourite. Posting your concerns there shouldn't attract any hostility. Posting it here just seems like sour grapes and will draw you some negative responses.
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Okay, I've been playtesting a scenario all morning and I can't get my BMP-2s to fire their AT-5A HEAT missiles at tanks except when they are VERY far (800m+) from their targets.
Instead, they fire their 30mm cannons at the tanks, HE shells too mind you, and what I'm left with is a line of burning BMP-2 wrecks. Ranges they're not firing at are between 600-700m.When they DO fire them, they are often quite effective against tanks so surely it would make more sense for the Tac AI to choose them to engage tanks and not the cannon?
AI controlled vehicles seem to be using their ATGM's more wisely than player controlled vehicles.
What is the game official range for the AT-5A on the BMP-2? I can't find the info in the manual and I've searched for info. There's a thread in the tactics section that suggests that it's about 100m FWIW so it's probably not range that's responsible.
If this is WAD then fine, I can work around that. But if it's a bug, then it's going to make a very big difference to my campaign if it's fixed later.
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Good question mate. Yes, it's doable as long as you keep it small, no more than a company. (My project was with two US Styker platoons attacking a small village.) This allows you to create more AI groups, split the infantry from the vehicles and use ALL of the available orders. Then you have to playtest your creation quite carefully to watch the results.
The major obstacle to Urban Ops with the AI as the US player is that they can't use area fire. This means that it is quite easy to ambush them when they are approaching your buildings. Once you open fire, the units in the building will get hit and killed pretty quickly but there's usually one dead US squad in the open so it's not particularly good at attacking while keeping casualties low. If you can accept that then it's playable. Just don't handicap the AI further with an unrealistic low casualty VP condition. Up it to 25% - 30% and it works.
The scenario I was designing was pre 1.03 as an exp[eriment to see how IEDs work and I haven't touched it since. Once the low wall bug gets fixed I might return to it.
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Okay, nobody wants to reply about changes to the AI artillery system. I can understand if you guys want to keep this under your hat. However, I was trying some experiments with the AI artillery earlier today and it seems that no matter which setting you choose, 'Destroy', 'Damage' or 'Suppress', it's one artillery module per zone. It doesn't appear to affect either the intensity or the duration of the strike.
I got the idea from reading the manual that the 'Suppress' setting would hit one zone first with a few shots and then hit another zone and so on until it ran out of artillery. That WOULD be cool!
So I set this up but it still hammered away at the first selected location until it was all out of ammo. I counted the shell holes and there were about 48 packed into the one target zone, same as a Destroy strike. Further, it says in the manual that the only requirement is that a valid spotter have LoS to the target zone but thais has never worked as far as I can remember. I know that nobody has LoS to ANY target zones in the scenario's I'm working on and the artillery always starts after 20-25 seconds regardless.
Also, it says that any artillery assets not used adainst the support targets are available to the AI to use during the regular course of the battle. Hmm, not quite sure what that means but I interpret that as, if it's not used in the first strike, it'll be available later. It says that further use of artillery is up to the TacAI's assessment of the tactical situation etc etc, but I've NEVER seen it use artillery after the first strikes.
Now, one enormous caveat to all this is that I'm almost always giving the AI mortars to use. I once gave the US AI a battery of Paladins and they fired FOREVER. Well, nearly 20 mins at least
when they were on 'Destroy'. They did fire for a shorter length of time (but not much)when I selected 'Damage' but they didn't then shift their fire to another target.It seems that, at the moment, AI artillery fires off everything at the start and there's nothing for later, even if it arrives as a reinforcement. Are any of these issues on the list of items to be fixed?
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Good review, and I couldn't agree with you more, sir. This game has finally broken my Civ IV habit, even with the BTS expansion. Civ III broke my CMBB habit and now, here we are again, stuck on Combat Mission. The scenario editor is simply brilliant and that's wher I spend most of my game time.
I'm really hoping 1.06 will be out before next weekend.
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Molotov Billy
I am working on a campaign at the moment and it is quite possible for the results in one scenario to have an influence on what happens later. It is definitely possible to create a dynamic campaign, as well as linear if the designer wants to do that.
The campaign scripting allows branches which means that if your company takes 50% casualties in one scenario, easy enough to check with the variety of victory point options we have available, then it won't be available until scenario 6 or 7 or never. It's up to the campaign designer to do the work.
The designer has the options to give the core units full resupply, reinforcements, or any percentage so, in my campaign at least, if you lose a core unit, it's not coming back, ever. You'll get some more ammo but depending on how well you defend at the start, you may get a lot less in the later scenarios.
For me, the scenario editor is one of the very best things I've found in ANY game. It's an incredible piece of programming. And the campaign branching structure means that pretty much everything in your last post about it being linear is just plain wrong. Really, I'm not joking, picking a fight with you or trying to wind you up. Screw up in scenario 2 and you'll be defending in scenario 3, not attacking.
I agree with you, if it is fun and exciting for me, then it will be so for others too. I'm only asking because I happen to find this an interesting topic for discussion. And, of course, I'm trying to create a bit of interest in this project. 
I can't find it 
Instead, they fire their 30mm cannons at the tanks, HE shells too mind you, and what I'm left with is a line of burning BMP-2 wrecks. Ranges they're not firing at are between 600-700m.
The inevitable 'when's the 1.06 patch coming?' thread
in Combat Mission Shock Force 1
Posted
Vista operating system and with Microsoft Flight Simulator X installed. They're both hard drive HOGS. I'd also have to download the whole thing again if I reinstalled. I do miss CD's. But I live in Indonesia and downloading is the only way to get authentic software.