Alchenar

Having installed my gog.com copy of CM:BO the other day for notstalgia purposes I can't quite believe that anyone would genuinely want to revert from the freeform camera to the old-style camera.

Sorting out your shop is like cleaning your bathroom. Yeah it takes a bit of time and a bit of effort and it's an under-appreciated job, but it should probably happen more than once a year! On a more serious point: this kind of version housekeeping is something that Battlefront conspicuously lets slip (see: the poor guy in the Shock Force forum trying to work out what sequence of patches he needs from a clean install). I literally can't think of any other game that I could buy only to discover that I didn't have the most recent version.

I think there's something to be said for the argument that the closer you get to 1:1 simulation, the more obvious the differences between the simulation and reality get whereas previously those differences would have been naturally accepted as part of the abstraction of the design. Thus the better your game gets, issues arise that always existed latently but which people wouldn't have thought to raise earlier: see the ATG discussion currently going on.

That's really good news! I do understand that it's a bit of a time drain and I appreciate that incorporating patches into the demo is a step above and beyond what anyone else does. I'm not sure however it's fair to imply I'm being impatient when it has literally been a whole year since 2.0 came out!

On the topic of patching CM:BN: whatever happened to the plan to update the shop version to 2.0? I get why it makes sense for the 2.0 upgrade to be charged for existing users (I happily paid for the Shock Force upgrade back in the day) but I made a decision way back to hold off on buying until I could just pay list price to get the most recent version... and then it never happened and the game just dropped off my radar. It's really weird that I can't just buy the most recent version of the game straight up, because despite being more interested in Normandy than Italy, CM:BN has a $10 premium on it. ... except on closer inspection when you take into account the ongoing $20 discount on CM:BN then it comes out $10 cheaper than CM:Italy. Which all just begs the question: why is the store set up in this horribly counter-intuitive way?

Also bear in mind that if you are a committed fan then you've spent almost five years grappling with the CMx2 interface. Of course it isn't that bad to use now.

Slight problem with your logic; a) the vast majority of users never post anyway; and dissatisfied users don't generally vent on the forums, they just put the game away and never play it again. I would stick by my assertion that (while this is all a matter of personal opinion and therefore fundamentally subjective), when you get a preponderance of professional reviewers from different backgrounds all agreeing that the UI is difficult to use and poorly designed then that's as close as you will ever get to objective evidence. e: ps. sorry Phil. e2: also that last paragraph about grognard sneering wasn't about you but more generally - it's happened earlier in the thread

Well given the problems of data gathering it would seem useful to look at an aggregate of review scores. Metacritic only has 4 for Normandy, but a few more for Shock Force, which is useful for our purposes because they share identical UIs and not that much has changed between them in terms of accessibility. http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/combat-mission-shock-force 62% average from 15 professional reviews. And that's with a 95% outlier balancing the rather critical 45% from Gamespot. If you look at the summaries, virtually all the the yellow (read:mixed) reviews mention either the lack of a real tutorial and the abysmal interface. When everyone starts saying the same thing you have to accept that while you might not agree, you may not be right. @ Phil: from the link I posted earlier (and have quoted already) This! You are this guy, you see! I know it's really trendy in grognard circles to sneer a bit at the mainstream as 'kiddies' games (much the way the mainstream PC audience sneers a bit at the console audience), but the main thing to remember about mainstream games is that by their nature they need to be thinking about accessibility all the time, whereas wargames developers already have their audience. That's why in say, the Command and Conquer series you can see the UI getting more streamlined with every iteration, whereas in wargames we have a UI that's arguably gone backwards while being part of a simulation that accurately models how a shell from a Panther will impact on a particular varient of Stuart tank.

Ever played SWAT 4? Nobody's ever done it better than that.

Well this is completely untrue. The way you interact with your units is entirely dependent upon how and when the game presents information about them, and is a fundamental part of UI design. Right now the game requires you to interact with units in order to receive critical information about them. The proposed change almost completely removes the need to do that in the majority of cases. That's the critical difference and improvement. Firstly, I think I need to to at least concede that you're position is probably an outlier and that most people find hotkeys extremely useful. The problem with CM is that a) the hotkeys are not intuitive and so require memorisation (you'll notice in the mockup that as far as possible keys are assigned to the first letter of the order, and where not possible - eg. with 'cover arc' the designer chose 'v' - the key that looks like an arc; and hotkeys change depending on what (terrible) command tab is selected. The problem here is not with hotkeys per se, but with the fact that hotkeys are implemented in CM:N in a way that completely negates their theoretical advantages.

I would literally mash together the two mockups in those threads. This gives me some space in the middle-left of the bottom bar to play with. A better fire support window and interface would be nice, for a start you should select the support unit you want first and then the game should highlight the units capable of calling in and spotting a mission for it. Internal edit: This is actually major example in which the interface works in a way counter-intuitively to how the player thinks. The player isn't constantly hovering behind his observers looking for opportunities to use them. The player (or I would assert most players') thought process is: 1. Aha! That's a prime target/area for an artillery strike. 2. What assets do I have available? 3. Ok, now who's best positioned to call in this strike? The game interface forces you to invert stages 2 and 3 unnecessarily as you stumble about trying to work out whether or not it's even possible to strike the area you want, much less with the asset you want to use. That'll still leave some space which could be used for a number of things. Personally, I wouldn't mind a persistent combat log that would notify you of newly spotted enemies, reinforcements arriving and whether or not an objective has actually been accomplished (yes, magically knowing whether or not a factory complex has been completely cleared is not realistic, but nor is being 'defeated' because you failed to spot the one guy cowering in a distant corner). e: on the topic of things being more intuitive, there's massive scope for contextual orders. Left-click to select, right-click to order. Simple. I right click on a location and a menu pops up next to my cursor letting me specify the type of movement order (or whether I want to shoot at that location). Right-click on a vehicle, I get the options to embark, acquire etc etc. Hotkeys usually speed up this functioning in games but they don't in CM:N because of the retarded decision to have keys do different things depending on which command tab is open. e2: And I try to keep it mature but it blows my mind that someone actually sat down and designed that system and didn't realise how awful it was.

Well, before WitE we had WitP:AE, where different teams worked on the land, sea and air components, with the result that all three work in completely different ways with no consistency between them. Those threads that BletchleyGeek is keeping tabs on are excellent and address both the 'information is hidden' and 'buttons buttons everywhere but none I want to press' problem of CM:N. I also wouldn't mind getting a right-click pop-up command menu ala-Close Combat; now that was a game series with a good UI.

Here's the thing: if you were designing the Combat Mission UI from scratch, could you honestly say that you would do it in a way that looks anything like how it looks now? The is the frustration that we come to time and again - the problem isn't spending extra development time on the UI; it's that the time spent is wasted on horrible decisions that make no sense. e: mainly because: "My contention is that it is poorly designed because of a feedback loop wherein the designers never test the games with new players, so new players never play the games, because they are unplayable, so the games are only tested by people whose entire attitude is “As long as it is easier than pushing 600 cardboard chits around a paper map, it’s a massive improvement!, so the designers never realize the games are unplayable."

I rather liked the PC Zone descriptors of the scoring brackets: 90-100% meant a game that literally anyone within reason could pick up and enjoy without being a fan of the genre, 80-90% meant a game that was 'top of it's genre' and a must have, and 70-80% meant a game that was alright but had some glaring flaws that if you were a fan you would be able to forgive and enjoy. From that perspective 73% sounds just right. Also everyone defending the Combat Mission interface is insane; it's a horrible, horrible system to use. The fact that many other wargames have worse interfaces is besides the point; all wargames have terrible interfaces and it's a problem that's killing the genre because it puts off new players. It's also especially hard to excuse given that as has already been pointed out - a bad interface takes just as much time to make as a good interface. Also all wargamers should be forced to read this before they have opinions on what makes a good game or not. e: yes, it's about operational level games but many of the rules still apply at the tactical level

Given that the one absolute red-line for the Military was preserving the Imperial Dynasty it seems very arguable that a lot of lives could have been saved if the Allies had indicated that they were not planning to abolish the Monarchy. Certainly when dealing with a culture that placed so much emphasis on honour and 'saving face' that it conditioned soldiers to commit suicide rather than accept surrender it should have been recognised that getting a voluntary peace required offering an 'out' that would be acceptable. Also too many people in this thread are committing the fallacy of viewing nuclear weapons from a post-cold war paradigm. Remember that at the time 'the bomb' was seen by all but a very few scientists working on the project as little more than an exceptionally large and efficient explosive. Too much is also being placed on the political dynamic of what Truman might have wanted. Truman's involvement in the dropping of the bombs amounted to little more than responding in the affirmative when asked 'hey, we have this really powerful weapon that we'd like to deploy, is that okay?' All the operational aspects of bombings were handled at a far lower level. It seems odd living in a world where the US president has a briefcase giving him direct control of his nuclear arsenal near him at all times but the closest Truman was to the decision to drop the bombs was a polite note telling him that they'd probably be happening in a few days.

Would it be so difficult to implement delays in pre-planned bombardments? A scenario where you have to follow a rolling bombardment that you have no control over would be quite interesting.

Panzershreks?

I think perhaps the most practicable solution is to just accept that Battlefront have limited resources and make a push to do this as a community project. That would require a generally less elitist attitude and more inclusive attitude though.

No, that approach is terrible and does nothing to broaden the base for the reasons given in the video and in the article I linked earlier. Written guides don't work because a) something unexpected might happen, 'show, don't tell' c) the game is fullscreen and most people will buy it online and not have a manual in front of them. It might not be realistic to expect an 'in-game tutorial' but there is no satisfactory alternative that will make the game appealing to new players. I'd also take issue with the suggestion that Combat Mission is more 'complex' than games like Portal. It really isn't, just different. Portal is a game about taking familiar mechanics (everyone understands newtonian physics) and applying them to continuously unfamiliar contexts (portals allow you to do things that aren't possible in reality). Combat Mission is about taking unfamiliar mechanics (no, it is not an acceptable solution to 'go away and read some books on WW2 tactics') and applying them to familiar contexts ('oh, it's a village'). That's why a front-loaded tutorial is so important. Unless you explain why something is happening then it's entirely a hit-and-miss affair as to whether the player will realise that what they are doing is wrong. Hills are a good example. Most people have a vague notion that 'the high ground' is a good thing to have. Unless you explain what 'hull-down' is and show what the difference between being hull-down and silhouetted I'll wager most new players will park their tanks on top of the nearest hill and then get all upset when they die.

Nonononononononono. You are very wrong. The game needs to explain how and why certain things happen or players end up just foundering about in the dark. See here for an excellent article on the problem (that focuses on operational wargames but is largely equally applicable to tactical level games like combat mission). Specifically:

Speaking of which... Company of Heroes had an absolutely fantastic tutorial that introduced all of the significant game concepts to you in a very clear 'show, then do' manner. This should be emulated as much as is practicable and basic combat situations and the basic responses need to be covered.

Way to be a massive dick. Euri, the answer is that the windows you see are an abstraction and that typically everyone can shoot. No idea if a blank wall provides more protection than windows but it certainly provides concealment. Edit: I mean really, wargames are hard enough to get into and it does nothing for the community when innocent questions provoke rude, sacastic and utterly worthless responses. If you wanted to be helpful, dig up the link and offer it. If you didn't want to go to that effort, type up that one sentence that I did there. If you don't want to be helpful, don't post. Saying 'I won't help someone who won't help themselves' is a horribly selfish attitude to take because it just creates a catch 22 scenario where you are never obliged to be helpful because anyone who fulfills your criteria to 'deserve' an answer doesn't need help.

I'm sure this has been asked before but: why doesn't CMx2 track individual kills? It wasn't just fun, it was quite useful to come to the end of a scenario in CMx1 and discover that one unit in a particular place or used in a particular way was far more effective that you realised when playing.

It would be nice to add the option for opponents to consensually extend the time limit, there's no reason to take control of that out of the players' hands. "Okay so you won, want to play out the next five minutes and see how that assault I ran out of time for would have panned out?"

The number of times you come across references on all sides to tankers putting multiple shells into already knocked out tanks implies that the typical disabling shot doesn't actually look like anything. (barring notorious exceptions like the Sherman and T-34 tanks). ...the two most common tanks in the war. Then again those reputations come from the same people who kept putting shells into the tank until they saw that big fiery explosions so they're possibly to an extent not valid as indications as to whether a tank died, just what would happen if you hit it hard enough. edit no 2: there's one obvious way to tell: check for survival rates of tankers. A tank that explodes is going to kill all it's crew. My vague recollection is that 3.5 crew usually escaped a german tank that had been knocked out.