Jump to content

El Hombre

Members
  • Posts

    63
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by El Hombre

  1. 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.

  2. 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. smile.gif Without direct download I would have probably not bothered (a mistake smile.gif ).

  3. 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.

  4. 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".

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

    2493636107aa7d182d66bf7.jpg

    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.

  8. Originally posted by C'Rogers:

    </font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Wow there, I wish to respectfully disagree.

    c.f. Close Combat III.

    Greater scope, nowhere near as good.

    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>

  9. Originally posted by C'Rogers:

    Wow there, I wish to respectfully disagree.

    c.f. Close Combat III.

    Greater scope, nowhere near as good.

    Greater scope often takes away from the feeling of completeness/thoroughness, which is critical. Make the game span the whole Great Patriotic War and every one of your 20 scripted missions feels like a drop in the bucket.

  10. 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...

  11. Originally posted by John Kettler:

    CNN showed fighting in Lebanon today. And what did I see in one still? The front sprocket and nose of an M113. Interestingly, it was green.

    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.

    Originally posted by John Kettler:

    El Hombre,

    Interesting idea, but are the Lebanese still running 90mm armed M48s, or are they the M48A5s sporting 105mm guns? I believe the South Vietnamese had the former when they shot the NVA T55s up from such range that the NVA tankers thought they'd hit an antitank minefield, being unable to conceive of taking deadly fire from in excess of double their own combat range.

    Regards,

    John Kettler

    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.
  12. 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.

    :D

  13. 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 smile.gif

    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.

  14. 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?"

  15. Originally posted by LarsS:

    I found this thread and can't help to wonder if there actually is any profanity in the game. I've never noticed any (don't speak Arabic). But my Paradox edition has the PEGI profanity (or bad language, as they call it) rating on the box.

    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).

  16. 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.

×
×
  • Create New...