El Hombre

you know one thing that would be cool is to be able to designate certain tiles to be one-way tiles only. So you could walk one way, but the other way you'd have an "invisible wall" (or translucent or similar) kind of thing for troops and vehicles (but not for ammunition flying around). This would enable the scenario designer to restrict fighting to a certain area, but enable reinforcements in another.

Well I for one am quite happy you swore off retail. I stumbled somehow upon the game (last time I'd checked battlefront was when I played way back the original CM) and wanted instant gratification. Download, and a couple of hours later I was playing it in Beirut. Without direct download I would have probably not bothered (a mistake ).

I have that problem as well in my map. It's a village on a mountain face, and the attacker is supposed to fight from the bottom, but will get reinforced from the mountain pass at the top at some point. How can I make it so the defender doesn't camp the mountain pass point in expectation of the reinforcements?

I'm in the middle of designing a high elevation map (about 300m height on 600m distance), and I noticed some really weird behavior with vehicles: when a vehicle (in this case an uncon pickup) gets shot at, sometimes it very rapidly zips around a 50m diameter circle and gets back to its position. It goes really fast and doesn't care about the underlying geography at all. Has this bug been raised already? It looks like the calculations for how to reverse under fire get screwed by very high elevations.

Command-line editor.... oooooooh!!!!! You know what that means: vim syntax highlighting and free copy-paste!!!!

I know exactly what he's talking about and I felt the same way until I figured out how the command worked. Say you're paused in the game with a squad facing a building to the north. You want the squad to walk around the building clockwise in 3 waypoints and at the end, have the squad face the building again which will be to its east. Now if you think "I'll need the squad to face east, so I'll click east of where the squad is now" then it doesn't work. You simply have to click on the building itself to tell the squad "wherever you are, face the building" In effect the "Face" command isn't "Face a direction", it's "Face a landmark".

When using the Face command, don't click on which way you want the team to face. Instead, click on exactly the place you want the team to face. As an example, say you want your team to run around the periphery of a mosque. Select the Face command and click on the mosque itself. Upon arrival, the team will face the mosque. Don't bother thinking about angles or anything else.

Hello, I'm wondering if anyone has made mountain battle maps. I'm working on one myself right now, and would be interested in any pointers. I'm working on something a little bit different than the normal stuff: my first map is going to be an attack on a mountain pass that simulates last week's "skirmishes" between Hezbollah "regulars" and Druze villagers in the Barouk region in Lebanon. Think steep elevations, small clusters of low buildings nested on the mountains, a few narrow passages and lots of trees... Small arms, RPGs and mortars only. High morale on both sides. For now I am keeping the map rather small, probably around 600x300m so frame rate stays up whatever happens. Pointers and thoughts much appreciated. Thx.

On my way to the office this morning... sorry about the bad quality, but you know how it is, snapping picts when you're not supposed to. The 2 M113s behind the wheeled vehicle have a standard MG on top, and the one on the right has a double-barreled AAA gun.

I am curious about this statement, though maybe you are just reading the sentence out of context. Would more scope actually make a game worse? The issue to me is cost. After a certain point scope loses relevancy to game improvements. It is much quicker to me than others (I think) and I would far rather see the things on Steve's list added before 1, 5, or 10 units. But does scope actually detract from a game? If Charles could snap his fingers and add the M113 it would make the game better, but only marginally so. At least I think so, can't see how it would be worse. </font>

Seconded. This makes for a lot of micromanagement. But then again, MOUT is all about micromanagement until we get AI that's 3 generations ahead of what we've got....

Seconded. This makes for a lot of micromanagement. But then again, MOUT is all about micromanagement until we get AI that's 3 generations ahead of what we've got....

Seconded. This makes for a lot of micromanagement. But then again, MOUT is all about micromanagement until we get AI that's 3 generations ahead of what we've got....

Hey if we get the King Tiger, I want the Jagdtiger too! I mean how hard can it be to just change the top of the model? right? right?

It's definitely mirrored, but I still can't make out what it says. (mod looks awesome, I agree)

A nitpick: the arabic doesn't seem right on the UAZ's door. Is it supposed to say "Iraqi Police"? Right now as far as I can tell it's gibberish.

Steve, I said lullabies, right? Ponds are scary.

For the record my suggestion of "expanding" CMSF to the Lebanon setting was some sort of a localized joke (local both in time and space) considering I was sleeping to the lullabies of RPGs a couple of days ago. Anyway... I fully agree with Steve that the M113 isn't going to change anything on the battlefield, as opposed to the Shilka which is incredibly dangerous in urban setting. So yeah, M113 or ZSU-23? ZSU-23 fer shure. And then one could argue about a dozen other things in the same way. I'm just happy playing a game as designed and that's about that. Now if only we could get a Red platoon to surrender instead of fight to the last man even when surrounded by 2 bradleys, 1 Abrams and 4 infantry platoons...

There are (and have been since I was a kid) M113s at every street corner. I barely ever glance at them. Almost all of them are green or green-brown camouflage. Remember that Lebanon doesn't have any desert, it's all green(ish) mountains. Only in the upper mountains (over 1,500m) does it get all rocky and in the passes there I saw a couple of brown M113s. The LAF (Lebanese Armed Forces) has both the A1 and A5 version as well as some T55s for good measure. Supposedly also some Leopard A1s but I've never seen those up close.

Well I for one wouldn't mind including Lebanon in that little theatre of operations. You'd make JasonC happy with M-113s, open wheel fanboys happy with the Willys and other French ATVs, and you'd get the good old M48 together with or for symmetric warfare against the T55. Basically a free vietnam campaign in mountainous settings. Imagine the following scenario: Hezbollah takes over west beirut and starts attacking the mountains with Syria's help, putting pressure on the Lebanese Army which splits along sectarian lines. US decides on a 2-pronged invasion: from the East (the current CM:SF) and from marines landing in the Christian areas north of Beirut (the marines module). There you go, everyone happy. You get to play with M-113s, you get to do symmetric battles with early vietnam-era stuff, and you get to use huge numbers of small super-effective AT teams with excellent communications.

By now I'd have expected players to have learned their lesson... After all, some of us have been playing computer wargames since the days of SSI The basic issue here boils down to one of the core tenets of computer gaming (and probably gaming in general): Do not, ever, prohibit the player from doing something that might be construed as meta-gaming when there's a decent chance of it not being the case. It's better to leave the meta-gaming in than alienate the non-meta-gaming player. In other words, if you can't know for sure wtf the player is thinking, don't bother acting on it.

I might have been the one suggesting a flashing icon of some sort. Some kind of notification is definitely badly needed, especially in large maps, real time or WEGO. There are two options, mainly: A visual notification of a flashing unit icon on the side of the screen, and/or a textual notification in some kind of a running log. The problem there is basically how not to flood the user with redundant notifications, i.e. "when should we NOT notify the player?"

No Arabic profanity that I heard. It's mostly the usual "hit the dirt", "stay low", etc... The accents are relatively correct for the region as well (there are many different accents even within Syria, so it's a bit tough to state with certainty).

In general in Lebanon (probably syria's the same) construction is concrete + hollow blocks. A low roof parapet would be the continuation of the outside wall, therefore reinforced concrete. Of course you'll get the odd cinder block parapet but in general it's part of the outside concrete wall. IMHO the roof guys should be much safer than they are now. This goes for the balconies as well, which are always reinforced concrete.