ShaneO

Me order! Me Blaster! Me run Bartertown!

Absolutely - if there's a hypothetical war in Syria, why not in Northern Ireland? I'd love to see this, I think it'd have lots of flavour and a slightly different spin on the same general idea.

I started out with the 1.07 demo (the currently available one) and liked a couple of the missions in it, particularly Going to Town which taught me the fun of playing as the Syrians. I took the mission file from the demo and dropped it into the Scenarios directory of the full version when I got that, but it won't even appear in the list of available Battles when I start the game up, nor can I load it into the editor. Does anyone know if there's some coded-in reason for demo scenarios not to work in the full game?

This reminds me of something I'd been wondering about... is there a reason you can't yoink weapons from fallen enemies? The weapons seem to be modeled separately from the people, since they can fly through the air and lie on the ground by themselves. People can already get weapons from friendly casualties so that's in the game, animations are presumably tied to weapon and not to soldier so anyone could start using the animation for an enemy weapon when they get it, stripping a body of weapons and ammo rather than providing first aid is in now with the instant death status, and the game already has a feature for reduced ability with unfamiliar weapons. "I don't know much about this kind of thing, but it seems to me..." It's something I'd love to see, though. For those scenarios where you're cut off, help is some time away and you're running low on ammo. I played one like that where it'd have been great to be able to send half my remaining guys holed up in a building into the street to loot the corpses they'd shot down - the sort of tense and nail-biting situation Combat Mission does so well!

I've been getting this too, on an original MacBook Pro with Windows XP. Same deal, if it freezes up during a save, that save file will bring things down if I try to load it later. I was thinking memory leak too because of how it runs okay at first but after a few turns starts to really bog down. I tried stripping out all mods but the difference it makes is minimal. I have found that saving all the time seems to keep things chugging along a bit better - having had to play the same mission from the middle at least three times I started saving after every minute of WeGo (save file 001 when I'm quitting for a while, 002 for an even-numbered minute and 003 for an odd-numbered minute, so even if one freezes up I only lose a minute - I call it "bounding overwatch saving"). The fact that constant saving makes each save happen fast and smooth and helps keep the game running had me wondering if unsaved information is kept in memory or something... I don't know enough about the topic to guess at what that means though. Artillery is the worst for slowing things down, I found.

Right, I've been using my MGSs a lot more carefully since reading all this, and am having plenty of success with them. Thanks all for the advice!

That seems a little self-contradictory - if computer wargames are a solo pursuit, then high review scores (and other impersonal marketing) are exactly the way to entice newbies into trying them, since they're not going to be playing Magic: The Gathering or whatever in the corner of the room and wander on over because you look like you're having fun. However, my own experience of Combat Mission is different. The vast majority of my play has been Hotseat and while due to the fact that one person's hanging around while the other's concentrating and vice versa it's not as sociable as, say, Guitar Hero (which is great, even when you're old enough to know better), it's still not without some of the tabletop atmosphere. And some of its own, like one person hunched over the monitor going "Come on... come on... ROTATE THAT TURRET YOU USELESS [hot-dog\felafel\sausage\garlic\cabbage\maple syrup\nice-cup-of-tea-and-a-biccie] EATING CRETIN..." *boom* *crunch* "YES! YES! UH!" and the other person sitting in the room sighs and says "I assume that means you found my vehicle-question-mark." People still play table-top wargames too, of course. And certainly the kids-these-days card doesn't do anyone any favours. Tell people they should play your favourite game instead of theirs because yours is better makes them defensive. Telling them they might like it because of the similarities, and extra cool stuff, and because you like their game too so your tastes are obviously similar, that's far more effective. In fact arguably it was a variant of that which got me into Combat Mission originally, and it's how I've been working on getting folks into Shock Force.

Either their own unit or another allied unit that stops in the same place as a casualty will generally have someone get down and start making with the bandages. If you select that unit, you'll see in the bottom left of the game window that someone's activity changes from, say "Soldier: Spotting" to "Soldier: Medic" and if you zoom in on them you'll see him hunched over the casualty, poking and fiddling. If this isn't happening after a minute and the unit isn't being shot up or busy, you can try moving them about a bit in the area. When it's done, the casualty will disappear from the ground and his unit listing ("Soldier: Casualty"), which is the abstraction part. I think the main reasons for doing it are to deny victory points to the opponent by reducing his chances of becoming a KIA when the game calculates such things after the scenario, and to take his ammo and weapon, if it's worth having. I don't know if they might come back within the duration of a campaign, and I don't know how they decide whether it's worth swapping out their own weapon for the guy on the ground's.

I've never been much use with vehicle tactics, and the MGS just baffles me. As it currently stands, being an MGS driver assigned to my command isn't far short of a death sentence. Furthermore, during their brief lifespan, I can't come up with anything useful for them to do. They don't pack the ammo load to pound away at static defences from long range, but naturally putting them up against tanks head-to-head reduces their battlefield role to being a decent place to toast marshmallows. I'm pretty new to Shock Force, and have just started experimenting with having one follow each Stryker infantry platoon, so the infantry go up front with their Strykers covering them and the MGS covering those. Due to the way they're typically assigned by platoon though, I suspect that this isn't how the pros do it. Any suggestions?

Will this mean needing to download and install it again?

Yeah, it would actually. I was in the pub the other night with a group that included a bunch of the people I'd gotten into Beyond Overlord back in the day and I started on about Shock Force, and people who didn't know what we were talking about asked about it, and I noticed that the stuff that people were telling stories about wasn't what units are included, or what battles recreated or any of that, but the cool little things. The way your guys would misidentify enemy units, or how troop quality would affect how they respond to different situations, or how you can ride a small team on the deck of a tank. It's those details that make a good game great, and from the looks of things, that make the sale by word of mouth. I think I've got a number of old Beyond Overlord fans on the hook now, I just need to reel 'em in and I'll have a good stable of opponents in the area. Anyway, my point is that I agree that adding in something like long bursts when morale is down isn't necessarily just a worthless bauble - it's the kind of thing that people describe enthusiastically in the pub. And that's one place new players come from!

The scenario to which he's referring is actually called Going To Town - I haven't seen it in the full game but it's one of the three missions in the demo. A Stryker company (I think) starts on the outskirts of a town with three objective buildings \ compounds to clear, but there are some ATGMs out the other side of town with a bit of a line to your starting vicinity (well, Blue's starting vicinity, it also plays okay as Red). However, many of the same tricks will work, of course, the only major difference from Al Amarah is the lack of non-urban area to play around in beforehand; Going To Town lands you right on the outskirts when you start. This is my first post by the way, and I'd like to take the opportunity to say a BIG THANK YOU to Huntarr for the excellent illustrated tutorials, they really helped me start to get my head around modern tactics. It sure ain't Beyond Overlord!