Alchenar
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Posts posted by Alchenar
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1 hour ago, warrenpeace said:
Steam is nice because there is no additional book keeping with regards to installing and playing game when you get a new computer. All your games are in one account so you don't have to go back to old emails to try and find battlefront serial numbers. In addition, new patches are automatically installed. Finally, you have a single place to go to buy additional games or DLCs. This is why Steam is so popular. I strongly support the move to Steam and am a bit shocked that Battlefront made the move given their bashing of it in years past.
Don't forget steam workshop, something I'm shocked hasn't been set up because it would instantly replace all of the various map and mission repositories while being much easier to use.
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1 hour ago, BFCElvis said:
No.
Sorry, that was supposed to be playful but text does not convey tone well.
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On 12/31/2022 at 2:46 AM, BFCElvis said:
So close to "very very" that it wouldn't be a bone.
So in Battlefront time I should check back in June?
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Actually what I've really wanted for at least 10 years now is the ability to load a save from within a mission. That would be a quality of life godsend.
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On 12/17/2022 at 6:39 PM, landser said:
No, it's not, but not a statistical impossibility either.
But then, Combat Mission has always been overly lethal in the combat results due to it's nature. It's really like a cage match in a sense.
This. When you are playing the game you have already filtered for the top 1% most lethal contact situations, and then you play out that scenario with both sides typically being far more willing to be aggressive and accept casualties than they would in reality.
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11 hours ago, Artkin said:
I VERY highly doubt anyone in this community wants to play Panther fires 100 rounds a minute.
What people want is content, and theyre sick of paying $60 for a half recycled game.
But If I do want a Panther that shoots 100 rounds a minute...why should anyone care? It's my gaming experience.
e^^ there are a bunch of models. You can open up the game and let anyone mess with the TOE and unit details and throw in anything they want. 100 rpm Panthers. Infantry with power armour. Double Barrelled Mammoth Tanks.
Or you can run a curation service to screen for quality and lock modding access behind that gateway. Given Battlefront already has delivery issues I don't know why they'd want to take on that additional work.
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4 hours ago, BFCElvis said:
There are many reasons we wouldn't do this but the big ones, in my opinion, are the pride that is taken in making historically accurate TO&E. Having our name on that without having a hand in it is scary. Also, and we all know this would happen, the creation of Frankentanks. Fictional AFVs.
I'm totally on board with the answer 'no modding because we need to be able to monetise content' because I think game devs should absolutely be entitled to do that, but 'no modding because someone might have fun' is such a strange philosophy to have.
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3 hours ago, chuckdyke said:
I think they are all incomplete. Discover daily new tactics you can do, and the move tool needs a manual just by itself to be honest. The manuals are just too basic.
Yeah I don't think there's anything in the manual you need once you've read through the different unit commands and crucially the interactions with artillery/air support. The rest is varying degrees of intuitive.
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7 hours ago, Grey_Fox said:
CM's performance is rather lacking, particularly on larger maps with large numbers of units, and especially in the setup phase if the deployment zone is large and you have a unit selected with a movement order.
I'm not remotely qualified, but my intuition is that the real problem is that the game engine is doing something really inefficient every time the camera moves. It's that, rather than anything in the simulation that causes issues.
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Yeah not being a programmer I accept that this is a bit of a 'things that you don't understand sound easy' but performance is the big one. The game engine isn't leveraging multi-threading, modern RAM expectations, or anyone's GPU integrated or otherwise nearly to the extent that it could. I can accept that it might just be too much work to make happen, but as a user I'm just not going to get excited about anything in an engine update that isn't 'the game no longer runs like ass'.
There is one QOL update though that I'd like and that's the option to have artillery/air fire missions where I can pick multiple point targets in order. Or an area target with prioritised point targets.
I should be able to tell a paladin battery of 3 guns 'I want you to precision strike these three points in one salvo'. Or an attack helicopter 'strike this tank specifically and then go after targets of opportunity in this area' as a single order.
e; oh and this isn't quite an 'engine upgrade' but get Steam Workshop set up. That's really not much work at all and would be fantastic for the community. -
6 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:
Dramatic, but how is this related to general discussion about Combat Mission?
Well to do the full runaround - Combat Mission (particularly starting with Shock Force) has wanted to do urban combat but has implemented it in a way that lets the player do MOUT in full warcrimes mode with no penalty - or rather if there's a penalty it's for blowing up the civilian building but not for massacring the abstracted away inhabitants.
A developer who wasn't righty fearful of the inevitable media outrage might implement the presence of civilians who can become casualties.
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12 hours ago, Childress said:
A minor mystery remains with the three English sailors. Why not lie? Why not simply tell the authorities that they tossed the dead Parker over the starboard side intact and uneaten? With endless time on their hands, they could easily concoct a convincing scenario; there was, of course, no evidence. The men would clasp hands and make a solemn oath never to reveal to the truth.
Would it work? Probably, but some inhibiting factors:
1- The sailors never expected prosecution having trusted- wrongly- in the 'custom of the sea'.
2- The strict, Victorian morality of the era
3- Their evident religious faith.I wrote my law dissertation on this case!
There's lots of subtext that gets missing from most reports, but long story short they probably lied and it's unconvincing that the dead kid actually grew weaker much faster than the others. Custom of the sea was you were supposed to draw lots, they didn't, that's why they went on trial.
The trial judge was a bit of a crusader who basically forced the jury into a factual verdict, then stacked the appeal court so that the answer to the facts was 'this is murder'.
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1. More than 10 FPS when the cameral moves.
2. Actually just more FPS in general.
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On 1/5/2021 at 5:57 PM, Bulletpoint said:
There is a small competitive scene actually - I'm not participating, but it exists.
The rarity points are supposed to keep forces within the general situation of the real war. So since the Germans had fewer tanks generally, they should cost more rarity points - even in a clash of two armoured formations, the Germans would likely have fewer running vehicles than the Allies.
And my retort there is 'the general situation of the real war is the Germans losing'.
Anyway this whole argument would be irrelevant if Battlefront would just open up these values to modding. The community would pretty rapidly come to a consensus view on balance.
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On 1/3/2021 at 8:42 PM, Bulletpoint said:
We largely agree, but I might even say six M4s to six PzIV, with some small pocket change left over for the German player.
However, the German player should pay a lot more rarity points for his tanks.
I think we have a conceptual disagreement on rarity points. To the extent that I think they should exist at all, they should be to prevent someone showing up with 8 flammenwerfer vehicles or something.
If we are positing a meeting between 2 armoured platoons from a US armoured and Axis Panzer division then it doesn't make sense to apply rarity at all. These vehicles were not rare on the Normandy front in 1944 in opposing armoured divisions.
(I also just don't get what the aim of rarity is. Combat Mission does not have a competitive multiplayer scene. If you are playing a competitive QB then each side should get a free hand to construct an OOB from the points they have. If you want a specific historical setup then go ahead and build a custom scenario.
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On 12/26/2020 at 6:08 PM, Freyberg said:
All this stuff about economics and industrial processes is interesting, but I don't think it contributes to how unit points are calculated in CM.
Here's a better question. In a tank-only ME QB, on a large map with typical tank combat ranges (500-1500m), playing against an opponent as good as yourself, with six Pz IVs, how many vanilla 75mm M4s would you feel you need for the game to be properly balanced...?
The game points assume eight M4s, actually not quite.
Seems right.
I'm sceptical. A 1/3 larger force is a pretty huge tactical advantage where neither of these tanks has an advantage in speed, size or firepower really worth writing home about.
I'd say the answer is 'six M4s, with maybe a bit of pocket change left over for the allied player that becomes relevant when we talk combined arms scenarios'.
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The only reason that unit cost should exist is for balancing QB battles. It might be a useful guideline for scenario designers, but it doesn't make any sense to be hardlocking away the kind of scenarios they can design.
If you can agree with that logic (and I really don't think any other way of looking at it is sustainable), the only reason point cost should exist is for fairness. Rarity is useful to to keep MP OOBs within certain parameters and prevent weird cheesy nonsense. This is probably the most obvious instance in which the point costs are obviously very wrong - equivalent medium tanks should all sit in the same cost spectrum and the Pz IV and Sherman are about as close to equal as anything across the sides in the game.
One of the best things battlefront could do for the MP community is open up unit costs for modding. They clearly aren't interested in spending time doing balance passes on point buy, at least let the community develop some consensus options.
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Everything you've quoted seems accurate and fair.
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1 hour ago, Jock Tamson said:
I think the argument was - there is a market for niche wargames among the 95 million Steam users, the games will sell, and the revenue could be used to prevent the usual dichotomy of additional content versus additional features.
Yeah, I don't know where this weird strawman that appearing on Steam would make the game any different comes from (although pushing the buttons to make Workshop integration happen wouldn't be unwelcome!).
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On 8/24/2020 at 1:35 AM, Thewood1 said:
Holy Cow! No huge fan of Slitherine, but you think they, as a company that needs to employ people and make some some money, should provide charity for games? Its some kind of wargame social justice? This is one of the craziest comments I have seen on any wargaming board.
If there is some great social responsibility for wargames, I'd suggest developing one that you think is needed for the greater good that can be released for free to the general wargaming public.
If anything, Slitherine explicitly said in their pre-Steam days that the reason they didn't want to go on Steam or adopt a sales strategy was that only a certain proportion of their catalogue would survive there (because the rest was crap). So War in the East is a $70 game because it needs to be more expensive and less attractive than the bad games they have. Thankfully they've broken free of that mindset.
Also Steam is a shopfront and advertising platform, that's the whole point. Battlefront should be encouraging everyone here to transfer their install on there (numbers attract attention), thinking about running a free weekend promotion (I think Shock Force is prime for that - you can't scratch the surface of content but a full weekend gives people time to decide if they want to open their wallet for something a bit different and janky looking), and then using that community to advertise the hell out of releasing the rest of the catalogue.
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14 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
Hah! I thought 7800 didn't feel right to me either, but aside from not finding math "fun"... I can also be quite lazy when I put my mind to it. Well, I personally would be quite happy with 780,000 being interested enough in purchasing CM so I'm good with that number.
Hmm... some of the changes to the UI please me, some annoy me. I'm curious to see how that shifts after some time getting used to it.
Steve
The quite backfill colour is a bad idea, it makes it difficult to read the text.
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I'm in a group on another forum that does group VS let's plays of Combat Mission and after doing several rounds of CMx2 games the people who don't own copies were shocked at how different CMx1 is. It's actually really interesting to see people react to encountering these games fresh.
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33 minutes ago, Vergeltungswaffe said:
What a shame no other tactical wargame company does that.
Oh wait...
Oh Battlefront aren't remotely on the same level. Just take a look at the DLC list: https://store.steampowered.com/app/312980/Graviteam_Tactics_MiusFront/
Professional customers pay for the game engine but customers pay for quality content, and Battlefront hasn't yet tried to cash in on that front. The silly thing is once you've got your game engine up and running that's the hard and costly bit, you can churn out campaign packs for comparative peanuts left, right and centre (see Command Ops, CMANO, Panzer Corps, etc etc).
Meanwhile in the last year we've had one module for Fortress Rome, and in the last two years Shock Force 2 (which is a rebuild of old pre-existing content). Sure, Battlefront have chosen to spend their time on professional contracts (and I don't blame them, that's good money) but technically releasing something once a year isn't the same thing as what Graviteam or the other major players are doing and I don't think Battlefront would ever claim they were.
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20 hours ago, com-intern said:
Any thoughts on Steam Workshop integration?
The heavily limited "modding" capabilities of CM make it an almost perfect candidate. Command Ops 2 and Armored Brigade are using the workshop to great effect and make it simple to download new scenarios.It's pretty trivial to have a Steam Workshop that just downloads files to a particular part of the install folder, which is all that Combat Mission needs.
I would bet the game will eat a few negative reviews (not the majority) for entirely legitimate reasons. In 2020 it's been unacceptable to require players to read a manual to understand how the game works for about 20 years. Before you 'yes but' me on this consider that there will be people with jobs buying games on steam who were not yet born when the mainstream games industry abandoned this approach. That's how out of pace the grognard niche is. I think the other big one will be performance. CM just doesn't run well, particularly when lined up against it's closest comparator Graviteam Tactics.
e: I think the graphics themselves actually stand up pretty well and it's hard to reasonably ask for more (except maybe weather effects etc). Framerates will raise eyebrows though.
I'm confused who would buy a game from Steam compared to buying from here?
in CM2 General Tech Support
Posted
So I'll agree it depends and there are reasons to not go with Workshop, but 99.9% of CM user content consists of files that go into one of two or three standard folders in the game install directory - it is a textbook example of the most basic implementation being able to completely service the community requirement, particularly as Battlefront is a hard no on ever opening up the games to more aggressive modding.