BlackAlpha
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Posts posted by BlackAlpha
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Well, my download just died completely, 0 KB/s. Guess you might be right. I'll try again tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, depending on when their servers decide to work properly.
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Three/four hours until download is done.
... Oh well... 
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Let me rephrase that. Here's the basics of combat: Whatever you do, make sure there's a safe route for you to retreat, because in combat unexpected things often happen, forcing you to retreat and try again. If there's no safe route for you to retreat, you should reconsider what you are doing.
So, in the case of that video, you do not want to run down the hill into the open because if you get caught in the open, you have nowhere to go and you'll die (it looks like at least one of them got hit once or twice, so he'll probably die, the other guy got very lucky). It's better to stay behind the hills. And that's what they did at the end, after getting shot to pieces.
But hey, they were probably untrained which is why they just drove down that hill thinking it was perfectly safe.
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Do you see any forests they could've used as concealment and cover?
Yes, there were hills.
Suiciding will just get you needlessly killed. You either try something else or you run away to live another day. I recommend in game you don't try the same those guys did, you'll just get your units killed. That video shows how effective ATGMs are against vehicles.
Large open areas = deadly.
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But instead it insists on trying to carve off parts of a sovereign country through fake terrorists that it has armed, all in the interest of forcing a political situation the Ukraine rejected wholeheartedly while lying about it even existing.
I'm not saying I support what Russia is doing, but that's another thing that everybody does these days (in one way or another). So, I'm not really surprised.
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My objection isn't military adventurism, it's lying about it and hypocrisy. Which are some things Russia is certainly pretty good at.
Don't take it so serious. It's all part of information warfare. It's just the same as when Kiev says they never bombed any urban areas. You can get worked up over it, but then remember that lying is simply part of the game. Russia isn't the first one to lie during war and won't be the last. Everybody does it. Such is war.
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Pretty clear you don't want to be in view of any ATM's, especially if you're in an armored car.
I am amazed that one of the vehicles survived the first shot, AND two guys got out after the second hit. Crazy stuff.
I don't think they survived the first hit. They were going at a fairly high speed, so when they get hit, they'll keep on rolling for a while, even if the vehicle got knocked out and everyone inside is hurting bad. It then may look like the vehicle is still up, but it's actually knocked out at that point. The vehicle (it's hard to see, armored car, BRDM?) doesn't look like it can survive even a RPG, and I'm fairly sure they fired ATGMs at it. The guys who got out could be bleeding badly, for all we know.
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I prefer real time because a lot of stuff that would be on a platoon leader to figure out becomes your problem in the game. So when in reality giving some broad intent would get a wider selection of stuff done, in game you really have to make nearly all the choices, and the minute long blocks of gameplay are just too long for my tastes in terms of trying to plot stuff like that out.
Ditto. The AI is unable to make tactical decisions (or in gaming terms, micro), so you have to do it for them (you have to micro them) to get a somewhat realistic tactical response. A minute delay in between each tactical decision is just too long and will get people killed needlessly and slow things down too much. Maybe that was realistic in WW2 without the radios and much lower skilled soldiers, I don't know, but things are a lot more dynamic in modern warfare. Certain tactics are also simply not possible using the turn based mode because they require more micro than is possible with the turn based controls.
That said, the replay function in turn based mode makes it excellent for creating videos.
If in the future add more than one player for the party to MP, it will be possible too in Real-time.
Like co-op? Yes, please!
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“The F-35 is double-inferior,” John Stillion and Harold Scott Perdue concluded in their written summary of the war game, later leaked to the press. The new plane “can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run,” they warned."
Does that even matter? The link in the quote doesn't work. Any idea how they came to the conclusion that the Chinese would supposedly win? Did they out-range the Americans with better missiles and then ran? Did the stealth not make any difference? Is the Chinese stealth better, making American missiles ineffective? I don't get it.
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It's amazing that after having been captured 6 or 8 months ago how brand new this equipment looks. Those separatists must have a lot of spare time on their hands to keep these things looking so nice during the middle of a war.
Steve
Didn't you know? They take their cleanliness very seriously:
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From the OSCE Observer mission site (latest 21 January report)
"A Ukrainian soldier in a hospital in government-controlled Konstantinovka (56km north of Donetsk) told the SMM that he was being treated for injuries sustained at the Donetsk airport on 19 January. He said 80 Ukrainian soldiers in total had suffered the same injuries, manifested in uncontrollable muscle spasms, vomiting and difficult breathing. Some, he said, had become unconscious. Eleven of the soldiers had been transferred to a hospital in Dnepropetrovsk, he said."
The symptoms look suspiciously like a chemical agent weapon of some sort was used in Donetsk airport, more so when some 80 soldiers get the same symptoms more or less the same time. This, if true, could mean a significant change in the conflict with potential larger ramifications if found to be true.
I really hope this is not the case because the ramification of chemical weapons being used potentially can throw all previous political and military assumptions out the door.
Please post a link next time. It's important because there are lots of people going around the internet making stuff up. They post quotes that are made up. So, if you take the trouble to properly quote, then please post the link as well.
Here's the link:
http://www.osce.org/ukraine-smm/135671
I won't rule out a chemical weapon attack, but it's important to note what kind of spasm those soldiers have. If it's muscles near the eye or throat, then it may be white phosphorus (or similar) related.
Also, I'm not sure what the symptoms are of that Russian type incendiary/WP artillery rounds that were supposedly used a while ago by Ukrainian troops. Maybe Russia is using a similar chemical/incendiary weapon.
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By coincidence I just read a report stating that in the past day Russian(?) tanks had assaulted the extreme left flank of the Ukrainian Pisky defense line following a massive shelling but the attackers were repelled and forced to retreat. The report claimed that two MT-12 guns of 5th battalion were instrumental in the defense. Apparently the gun's not quite as harmless as we've been assuming.
Well, I think it may be the same as when people mention the AK-47. Sure, it has its flaws and something more modern may be better. But it still shoots bullets that hurt.
Basically, even older gear can be used effectively under certain conditions. As long as you stick to those conditions, the older gear can still be deadly.
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There are no civilians in the game, so you can use WP anywhere you want without having to worry.
Technically, you are not allowed to use it in civilian areas (with a few exceptions), but technically you are also not allowed to blindly bomb civilian areas using any kind of artillery or airstrike, and technically there are a few other things you aren't really allowed to do. But you can still do all of that in CM, the game doesn't punish you for performing war crimes of any kind. So, I don't see why WP wouldn't be allowed in game, at the very least it can be used to create smoke screens or weaken enemy concentrations as is its use in real life.
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You continue to show you know NOTHING about this. You have also not read much of anything I wrote. We do have an idea of what Steam's terms and conditions are and working with APIs is something we do all the time so we aren't nearly as ignorant as you are about us.
I bow to your superior knowledge and exit this "conversation". You so clearly know so much about everything.
Steve
That is not what you said previously:
""Serious research" of any worth takes a lot of time and energy. That comes at a cost. Why on Earth would we want to spend our precious resources on something that we don't think is going to work?"
EDIT: Certain things you said in the past (some in this thread) about Steam seem to be simply false, which makes me think you didn't really look into Steam or you only did half the job (you only got half the facts) before making up your mind already. Bleh, I'm going to call it because you are quite stubborn. -
"Serious research" of any worth takes a lot of time and energy. That comes at a cost. Why on Earth would we want to spend our precious resources on something that we don't think is going to work? Pardon me, but I think that's a pretty stupid approach.
It certainly doesn't help that Steam will not let us view their sales agreements and APIs without them first approving a product for sale.
Ahah, that explains everything. You never looked into it, you never considered it. And thus you do not know what you are talking about. Seriously, at this point you are as qualified to talk about this subject as any other person on this forum who has read the publicly available text on Steam's website.
Instead of people asking you to go to Steam, they need to ask you to do your research and consider it (after doing the research). And no, you will not go broke by doing this sort of research, a freaking intern can even do this sort of work. I'm not asking you to commit to anything, you simply gather all the information you need to come to an informed decision on whether you want to commit.
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This might require completely rewriting our multiplayer code for all I know.
Yeah, so I keep getting the impression from you that you guys never seriously looked into it! Why not do some serious research and figure out what exactly the pros and cons are? You might change your mind!
It wouldn't be very different than buying it from Battlefront except you'd be paying Steam and we'd be losing ~30% gross revenue.
Either more people will buy it than they would've using your store and you will make a profit, or you won't make a profit and you'll pull the game from the store.
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Rather than ask BF to take the risk, put up some money and you take the risk for them. Yes I am kidding
You don't have to be kidding about that in this day and age. They could very well try a crowd funding campaign. It can also double as a survey to find out the potential of their product.
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I don't claim that I know how good BF is standing financially, but if they say that they don't want to take the risk because they think that they might drown... Well. I believe them.
Well, Steve is giving us the impression they are "healthy", not drowning and won't be drowning in 3 months either.
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Thought experiment : The trouble is not the $100 or whatever, it's the work that would need to be done to get CM in synch with Steam's method.
Say it took 3 months ( made-up figure of course, but unlikely to be a trivial amount of time ). That's 3 months of work for HALF of BFC's programming staff ( assuming 1 person could do it ). That's time they're not spending releasing new game, be it Black Sea or Bulge or whatever's next or patching bugs or adding new features. Maybe they can't financially factor in that kind of extra non-productive time - in that scenario, already the Steam experiment HAS to work or they're in deep do-do.
It's just not as simple as "just sell something on Steam".
But if a three month down time will kill the company, then I'd say they are borderline dead and they need to start looking at new ways to make more money to stay afloat.
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Steve,
We spend allot of time postulating over whether or not steam can make you money. Wouldn't it just be better to cement this in fact. Try selling a game on steam... I can't imagine selling one, older platform, is going to break the bank and what if CM sold like hotcakes. I mean all of this speculating - the uncertainty could be capped in fact. You would know the terms for potential future dealings, you would greatly expand your advertising footprint, and you could finally put to rest whether or not 100M gamers want to play CM.
von Luck
That's the thing that perplexes me about this whole thing. Why beat around the bush? Why hasn't Battlefront done more research into this whole thing and actually tried to sell something on Steam to see what's up?
I just can't take the whole "Steam is death" argument seriously...
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Say whaaat? That's like 1.4x Ukraine's population. Or 1.51x actually, excluding Crimea
More like times 2. Steam has "100 million active accounts" according to Valve:
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Infantry have straight up hit points dependand on squad numbers, which is modified by cover and weapons being fired at them.
Not exactly. Each men gets 1 HP (anything can kill it), that's true. But the primary weapons are simulated on each person in the squad/team. As their numbers drop, their anti infantry capability decreases. So, a 15 men squad is more effective at killing other infantry than a group with only a single person (everybody else in his group died) or a two person sniper team (at AR range).
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Well, a turn-based game will never qualify for the "R" in RTS, will it?
Pre-game selection is hardly "Real time Strategy" either... even CM QBs have that! I did play a demo of Battle Academy, and it seemed to be more firmly grounded in reality than the EE game looked, though, as I said, I was watching a video, rather than playing: do EE units not have "hit points"? My recollection of BA is that it had things "killed" or "not killed" by any given attack, rather than ablative HP, which EE seemed to have. Also, BA tended to look at least a bit historical, in that a given scenario gave you contemporaneous options to choose from, whereas EE seems to blur force composition across the decades, with, again only limited data, it looking like you could field US forces composed of M113 APCs and top-of-the-line near-future Abrams, for example, with the older, less capable kit being there only to broaden the potential range of points spends. It just looked more artificial in its structure and abstract in its mechanics than what I wanted. Note, I didn't buy Battle Academy either And all this is just my impressions of the two games from the material I found about each when I was looking to see if there were any competitors in CMx2's niche.Battle Academy is as firmly grounded in reality as the Wargame series is. The unit compositions in that game are not realistic either. A kill or no kill system is not realistic, it's too simplistic.
In Wargame they use hitpoints, armor and different kind of damage values to somewhat simulate armor and such. Generally speaking, if something can kill a unit, it will kill it; if it can't kill it, then it might damage it which will impact morale and/or the functionality of the vehicle. If no damage at all is possible, it might still impact the functionality (for example, grenade launchers fired at a tank). It results in more than just a kill or no kill. It's a bit similar to what CM has with partially damaged vehicles and morale but in Wargame it's way more simplified, of course.
That wasn't the game I was assessing. That had base building and that's where your units spawned. Perhaps this was the first generation, or a later one... It was a couple of years ago, I think, now.
But it is a wargame and it has no RT elements whatsoever.Not sure what you mean with the first line...
It's pretty interesting to see what people define as a wargame, there's a lot of variations apparently... May I remind you that the following games fall into the RTS/real-time category: Combat Mission, Command: Modern Air Naval Operations. Yet, they are pretty hardcore wargames. Real time doesn't exclude a game from being a wargame as you can see.
Personally, I would never put Battle Academy in the wargame category. It's merely a turn based strategy (TBS) game. For me, a wargame has to resemble real life in at least a semi-realistic fashion. With that, I mean it has to have somewhat realistic engagements. I wouldn't put many so called wargames into the wargame category for that reason; they are merely turn based strategy games that are overly simplified and they are not realistic enough for my taste.
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Not sure what you mean. A standard RTS mechanism is building a base and then building the units. You don't do that in the Wargame series. You have a limited amount of units available that you can send in as reinforcements, they arrive off the map and you then gain control of them. Which by the way makes the game fit in the real time tactics category.
Battle Academy is not hardcore, at all.
... Oh well... 
UA doesn't use Grads in 2017?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted · Edited by BlackAlpha
You don't have to be precise when saturating an area. There are quite a few success/horror stories about Grads in the real life conflict. So, they are being used successfully.
As for counter battery fire, like with any other artillery piece, you fire and reposition.