Ranger33

This all sounds great, I look forward to taking the Brits into action once more!

I don't know, I lost the Panther to a side hit at long range on that one. One shot bounced off, then the next hit knocked it out. Maybe you're just having bad luck.

It's not CMBN on an iPad, it's more like a relatively simpler take on the same gameplay, at a smaller scale. Most of the missions only give you a handful of troops and vehicles, but usually a pretty big map to work with. It's pretty cool for what it is, but it doesn't hold a candle to CMx2 on a proper computer.

It's Saturday night on a holiday weekend, I'm thinking just maybe they are off the clock

Well, since I was visiting home for Easter, and my mom has an iPad2, I of course decided to try it out. Very nice presentation and features. It's a bit frustrating to see some of the things we've been begging for in CMx2 in a $5 iPad game, but I digress . The game is fun, has a very "mini-CMBN' feel to it and offers the same sort of tactical decisions. My only problems are how the zoomed out infantry sprites always seem to point in the wrong direction, and that the camera is difficult to wrangle with. It always wants to turn when all I want to do is zoom in/out.

Don't worry, the AI is not even close to being clever enough for that sort of thing. The TacAI will react to things just like your troops do (like taking cover, tanks popping smoke if fired upon, etc), but if say, the AI spots your AT gun, it won't change it's plans to drive a tank right into the AT guns sights.

The "?" for destroyed tanks will be there even if the tank was knocked out before the scenario starts (ie just there for decorations). This always make for silliness when your men can see friendly abandoned vehicles on the other side of the map, but not a previously knocked out enemy tank that is slightly obscured but sitting right next to the setup zone.

What's even worse is that the ?'s convey exactly zero information about what is so interesting there. Sound contact? Infantry movement? How long ago was the sighting? It would be nice if you could click on them and get that sort of information, at the very least whether it is a vehicle or infantry. As is they are only mildly useful at best.

Would probably be a lot simpler to encourage map makers to give us larger setup zones. I don't get why they are so restrictive in some of the QB maps, especially the ones that force you to start from one corner.

Not surprising really, it's an awesome looking (no iPad here so can't play it) turn based strategy game on a system crying out for such games. Not to mention for a great price. I hope you guys have massive success with it and it brings more attention to the "real" versions.

I'm no expert on the hardware, but my Kindle Fire runs games like Dead Space and Dungeon Defender's just fine and they look just the same as on my mom's iPad 2. I guess that might not translate to the larger scale of things in CM Touch. If not, it looks like they are coming out with a new bigger and badder Fire this summer, with the Tegra 3 chips and 10 inch screen. You guys should try to get in on that as a featured launch title or something.

Looks like a great idea to me, brings in cash flow and a whole new audience. I just hope it comes out for Android as well, the Kindle Fire specifically. Being able to auto-match and play some small scale CM on the go would be awesome.

Kindle Fire por favor! I would be all over this but I don't have an iPad. I thought this was totally fake when I first saw it this morning, but it seems it might actually be for real. Great business move, or cruel joke, but brilliant either way.

Haha, I have been resisting, but I just constantly find myself thinking "This just isn't possible to do all at once!". It takes away from the fun when you have to choose between either constantly jumping back and forth between points of action or focusing on one spot and crossing your fingers about the rest. Like you said, its partly a side effect of the average scenario size gradually increasing. For CMSF and CMA though, I could never give up RT. When you can lose a whole squad in the blink of an eye, it just makes more sense to be able to pause. Plus the force size is generally smaller.

I think I posted in this thread before, but my opinion has changed a bit. I like Wego for multiplayer as RT without pause is just chaos above 2-3 platoons. I agree that RT would greatly benefit from a UI improvement in regards to feedback. Other than briefly flashing icons, the player gets zero notification when something happens. For SP I still usually go RT, but I've found with the larger battles it becomes very difficult to keep track of more than one "front" at a time, even with frequent pausing. A great example would be the third or fourth mission in the Engel campaign, where you defend against a combined arms attack (then counter-attack), ambush a convoy, and have skirmishes going on in a forest, all at the same time! You only have a medium sized force, but due to the terrain and objectives they are sprawled across the map. Besides that, the replays add something special to the game. Being able to watch those big moments again, not having total control for a full minute, it just becomes more memorable than the constant stream of events in RT.

Phil, just curious if you guys would consider a very limited version of his idea. Something just to avoid the silly looking things like having a tank fire through itself: I'm thinking, instead of using the exact realistic angles, just limit it to less than say 80 degrees (or whatever) where the tank only needs to back away from high priority targets in the same manner as they already back away from AT threats, or even a shorter distance. They could just ignore regular infantry, since they wouldn't be able to see them at that angle anyway (in most cases). Just enough to get the tank fire at a non-ridiculous looking angle. It would be enough to make narrow streets dangerous for tanks and safe-ish for infantry. Just spitballing here. This issue is fairly rare in my experience, BUT when it does happen it is totally immersion breaking, not to mention gameplay breaking.

Amazing! I tried my hand at making a scenario back in the summer, but the mind numbing tediousness of creating a map while flipping back and forth looking at Google Earth turned me off pretty quickly. It also made me wonder how the more prolific scenario designers around here manage to maintain their sanity...maybe they don't Just imagine how many more scenarios and campaigns will see the light of day thanks to this cutting down on the most time consuming part of the process.

I really wish it was like this: Go to campaign screen -> select a campaign -> Displays list of save games for that campaign plus "Start Campaign" option. Same for the battles and PBEM matches. It would really cut down on the massive clusterfrak that is my current saved games screen. All they would have to do is have the game create a folder for each one, then stick the save games in it. Hopefully the promised UI revamp in Bulge includes an update to the front end of the game. Plus, a delete button for saved games. I mean, come on, how hard could that possibly be to implement. At this point I'm thinking it must be some kind of inside joke.

The whole thing could be solved by simply allowing all infantry AT weapons to fire from inside buildings. This was a nice compromise in CMSF that made for great urban battles, I know some of those weapons were designed for that, but some weren't and could still do it. Sending in vehicles without infantry support was suicidal, but with some good combined arms tactics, they were highly effective. In CMBN, defending urban terrain against tanks, with just infantry, is borderline impossible, especially in WeGo. Your only options are sitting your AT guys at a corner, then crossing your fingers that a tank rolls by, or running them out in the street to take a shot, which is usually suicidal. In the name of game balance and fun, I would gladly take a small reduction in realism (bazookas/etc from indoors, which is arguable anyway) to balance out the complete disregard for the laws of physics (bullets making a 90 degree turn out the barrel of a MG).

Wouldn't a simple fix just be to give the tanks a minimum range on their guns? That might make for an unrealistic moment if the tank is on some kind of crazy slope with a target right in front of them, but I would take that over tanks firing straight up a 6 story building or through their own engine.

Same thing will happen with tanks, be careful using them for covering fire over hedgerows that your men are using, they will always manage to find that one tree in the hedgerow and do their absolute best to destroy it, even if the company commander is clearly sitting right under it.

If anything, mortars doing direct fire should be less accurate, take longer, etc. Even when playing RT against the AI, a direct fire mortar can wipe out half a squad before you even know what's happening. For game balance, I have grown to not really mind the long delays. Combining the omniscient spotting of the player with shorter delays would make mortars even more deadly than they already are. I know, in WW2 mortars and artillery accounted for most of the casualties, BUT the guy calling it in wasn't seeing the battlefield from the sky and generally didn't know the precise location of the enemy. My only combat experience is on the paintball field but even there, chaos and confusion reigns supreme. You're lucky if you can even keep track of your teammates, much less being able to see exactly where the enemy is.

Ah, I was thinking people must have really been chomping at the bit for this if they were downloading at work or stayed home for it or something

Wow, the mod's only been out a few hours and already closing on 1500 downloads. That must be some kind of record. Thanks for the hard work Juju! It really brings the game up a notch.

Make sure you get the updated Animated Text mod, if you use that. The old one will mess up all the names for everything. Other than that you will mostly just see incompleteness more so than the mod not working at all.