dakuth

Reading this made me wonder about Combat Mission. I seem to recall that Battlefront's model was something like ... no DRM what so ever on the game, but you needed to register your game to get forum support. Patches and the like. WAIT. No. Sorry, that's Paradox. Still. Battlefront seems to have some of the suggested features of this "single franchise model." Building a rapport with their customers. Building off of the same franchise with sequels (you could either say "tactical wargames" is the franchise and the individual titles are the sequels, or "Combat Mission" and the modules being the sequels), digital delivery, etc. So I'm curious to know what Steve and the rest of the Battlefront team think of this article and piracy is general? Would a rock-bottom pricing structure work? For example, imagine it's priced at $5. Obviously anyone that reads these forums are going to buy it for that price. We're literally salivating for it now at any price. But consider we could say to all our friends "this is the greatest strategy game EVER, and it's only 5 bucks!" I know a chunk of my friends would pick it up for that price just to check it out. Now here's the real kicker: Most of them will not like it. Too involved. Too hardcore. But there would be SOME that would become converts. Perhaps they never realised that tactical warfare could be modelled so accurately? And now you have a long-term fan, and all your later modules are getting snapped up by this new fan. The question is - especially poignant for a niche title - would a rock-bottom price work? And taking that a step further... with no DRM you'd have to assume there is some "borrowing" going on. Does this help or hinder the game? If I've guessed right (no DRM, but register game for support and patches) then this seems like a very clever idea. Battlefront ahead of their time a bit? Discuss

I'm just asking around my gaming group to see if anyone else wants to come with me. If I get a small group, I'll probably come - some company for the trip and such. They're all keen gamers - some more interested in CM than others... but a good preview could lead to more customers

I'm another potential customer who has given up. I could never get the demo to go higher than 12 despite squeezing everything possible. As soon as a bit of action started it dropped to 1 or 2 FPS. I actually think it is CPU bottlenecking, but regardless, I've not seen anything around the traps or in the patch notes to make me think this problem has be solved, so I'm not forking out. Fortunately, CM:BN looks like it is not too far away.

lol! I'm new. But even I know that the only thing you have assured is that it is definitely NOT going to be released on D-Day.

I'm *interested* but I couldn't say definite. 19th is less good for me - I have something on, but honestly its something I can rearrange. You see, I'm from BrisVegas, and a couple mates and I were thinking of going to Melbourne GP. A bit of a trip and all that. But it's looking like it's going to fall through, so maybe I could suggest a road trip to Syderney to preview a game? It's possible.

I'm a fiddler and a tweaker, and part-time programmer. I've heard of Glovepie and yet I've never really been inspired to install it. Why? Because I find I can do all the tweaking I desire just with the game interface, 99% of the time. Perhaps it's one of those things that once you start using, you never knew how you went without? Afterall, it IS frustrating when there are unmappable keys in a game. With GlovePIE, there would never be unmappables. The voice commands sound cool, but again I think I'd save that for star trek or submarine games. Combat Mission seems to be more a "clicker" to me

I keep coming back here hoping that the crippling slow downs are improved so I can buy this game (

Really? None of those seem like very serious obstacles. The answer to all of them is: Yes. How would it be different from vs MP at all? i.e. realtime: yes email: yes wego: yes How would players find a server: same way they do now guilds: who cares? clans: who cares? etc. Certainly there would be some coding required - and the devs may decide the effort is not worth it, but the design seems straight forward.

Just thought I'd necro this thread for two reasons: 1. As I predicted it made no difference. Well, no difference is harsh. With fcc's suggestions and turning off my sidebar... in fact turning off basically everything... I was able to squeeze and extra couple of frames out. But nothing that would make it playable. 2. Do any of the patches improve performance? I'm not seeing it. I'm still not convinced that the performance problems are due to lack of power. I think there may be a shortcoming of some sort, but I don't think anyone has identified it yet. My friends who had similar rigs ran the game smoothly. I am, at worst, slightly behind them - but my performance is not slightly behind - it is unplayable. I'd like to buy this game, but I can't justify it off the demo performance.

Ahh, performance problems. I have a decent computer, runs most things just fine... but the kursk demo just killed it. Unplayable. I haven't had a game "unplayable" for 10 years or more (I keep my computer up to date.) My friends have no problems though, but I'm not buying it with the performance I had in the demo (and campaigns are supposed to be worse??) Without me buying it, neither are my friends. I wouldn't go so far as bmackay to try and warn people away, but I HAVE been warned away by my own experience with the performance.

I had/have the same problems with the demo. Towards the end of the demo missions, my framerate would have dropped from 20-30 to <10. I have 2.4-ish core 2 duo, 4GB RAM, 4800 series ATI. I have heard Sneaksie say that the more units there are, the more CPU power needed rises exponentially. Calculating all the hits and angles and so forth I imagine - probably a good amount of visibility calcs and so forth even if they're not visible. Regardless of what I do, planes make things a slide-show. For these reasons, I did not buy the game. I have tweaked my ram and so forth, but I think there is some sort of conflict with CPUs or similar, that does not seem to be related to graphics.

and for facing, press and hold the right mouse button for 2 seconds. (The icon will change.) ... and the icon is called "retreat". It will make the vehicles reverse. ... and I personally haven't got shift-waypointing to work. If it works for you, please let me know.

heh. I will just make a prediction here, before I do it, and go ahead and say it won't make a difference. I'll turn it off and let you know.

Awesome reply fcc! Now you mention it, I think I might have doubled my RAM -- those specs were from my original purchase of this box. I probably doubled my page file to go with it, so you general rules still apply. I'm certain I did now, because the main reason I went to 64-bit was for the 4-GIG-RAM issue of 32-bit OSes. As a matter of fact, I have real-time memory reporting that I run in my vista side-bar on my second monitor. I don't stare at it, so this is from (fuzzy) memory -- please correct me if it sounds off. So, assume I have 4GB ram, and 8GB page file. I think this is true. What I find is that firstly they don't jump around like my CPUs do and that on boot, both are about 30% utilised. When I go into games, they generally both jump up to about half. The page file might fill up some more. Some games (I can't remember my specific example) seemed to use up more and more page file over time. I remember this created really long load times. My physical RAM, however, never really fills up. Should I be reducing my page file so more physical RAM is used? Should I try and reduce the page file so that when I'm doing intensive things my physical RAM is filling up and only spilling into page file a bit? It's entirely possible that what I use to track RAM usage isn't that granular as well -- it's not it's primary purpose. I think it just pulls the info from Vista's performance monitoring, or something.

Hi Guys, Kursk is my first foray into the series, and based off it I would consider also buying TOW2:Africa... a couple friends and I anyway. Problem is, for me, I get FPS consistantly lower than 15fps, and in more intense battles such as towards the end of the German demo mission the fps drops down to around 5fps. Having read these forums a bit I noticed some people having problems that appear not to be related to graphics. I think I have that, because there doesn't seem to be much difference even if I go on low settings, run it in a window, turn off my second monitor, have a static page file (4GB)... etc. So... it seems to be CPU throttling due to the intensive calculations, yes? I'm surprised... I would have thought I had enough grunt for that, but if I don't find a way to run the demo smoothly, there's not much point in buying the full game. Does anyone have a solution? My specs: (can grab a dxdiag if that helps, it's just I'm on my work computer atm.) Intel S775 Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz CPU Gigabyte S775 GA-965P-DS3 Core 2 Motherboard DDR2 2GB G.Skill 800MHz PC6400 RAM Kit NR Albatron 8800GTX 768M PCIe Video Card Windows Vista 64-bit