Ranger33

It wouldn't be quite so bad if the AI was smarter about knowing when to use which weapons. Most grievous examples being tank hunter teams firing their rifles willy nilly at infantry/tanks, and AT guns using their last 3 AP rounds on an infantry squad that is 400m away. Hopefully we will see some adjustments to these with the patch. Similarly, the spotter in sniper teams firing before and more often than the sniper does...

I don't know what you guys are talking about, it's not very fast paced at all. The maps are massive and it takes a couple minutes just to move reinforcements to the front lines. Of course, I managed to get to the gold league in Starcraft 2, so that might bias my opinion. You could play an entire SC2 match in the time it takes for the battle to actually get going in this game.

Any opinions on Unity of Command? I like the style and apparently it has really good AI, I just wonder if there is enough content to justify spending $30.

You guys don't have to blog all the time, but it's been half a year since the last patch, and we have no idea what to expect with the next one. Obviously you guys have some sort of "Known Bugs" and "Fixed Bugs" list around the office, would it be that much trouble to give us a peak on occasion? Sometimes there will be a post about some issue, that goes on for pages, and then finally you or someone else will pop in and say "We will look at it" but then never give any sort of feedback later. For example, the vehicles bogging on the edge of roads bug, what is the status of that? I just had it happen to two armored cars in one scenario, they barely made it out of the setup zone before becoming immobilized.

Really? I see that in almost every game.

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showpost.php?p=1337408&postcount=35 It's definitely in there, in some form. I'm totally fine with it, but wouldn't mind a more thorough explanation of how it works, how long the delay is, etc.

Well, Mojang did just raise half a million dollars for charity, along with various other charitable activities in the past. That tends to get you some pretty good PR. Also, Notch has a magnificent beard and a silly hat. You guys are totally slacking in that department.

They have some kind of unwritten rule about post titles never being more than one line (why, I don't know ), which makes it a bit hard to squeeze "Combat Mission: Battle for Normandy: Commonwealth Forces" into any kind of phrase or pun that would fit.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/02/21/combattlemissnormanwealthforce-videos/#more-95326 I don't understand why they didn't review CMBN. They previewed it extensively, all of their writers seem to be familiar with the game and it gets mentioned often on The Flare Path (the wargame/simulation specific post every Friday). Anyway, it's a very popular site for PC gaming so hopefully this draws in some newbies.

I've played Operation Star some, and it's not really quite the same thing as what CMx2 offers. It wins in a few categories like battlefield scale, dynamic campaigns, strategic layer, graphics, and in some respects AI. Probably the coolest thing is how in CMBN you might see a road labeled "To Town X 500m" whereas in OpStar you can actually see the town 500m over there, and then go take it if the battle goes your way. You can also have your infantry squads spread out in a realistic manner, worry about supplies, and some other little cool things. Anyone calling it a "click-fest" has not given it a chance. The battles are usually even slower paced than CMBN due to the size of the maps. On the other hand, the level of detail and control isn't quite there, or isn't as apparent. The arty and air support system isn't half as good. The UI is just as wonky overall. There aren't specific objectives or detailed briefings, the tactical situation is always either take that zone or defend this zone. The maps are big but as not detailed. Then of course no multiplayer and if there is a mod community I have yet to find it. They are two games in the same ballpark, but not really the same thing. In my dream world, BFC and Graviteam would join together to make the ultimate WW2 wargame, but that will likely remain a dream. Disclaimer: Not meant to be an advertisement, just offering some discussion. No banhammer por favor.

SS and Luftwaffe ground forces, no Fallschirmjagers until the next module (Market Garden).

I've read an account of some US airborne blowing up themselves and the captured crew of an 88 when they tried to turn it around and fire at some retreating Germans.

Vulture's post is spot-on, and doesn't even include the difference that the vehicles make between different forces. The Brits get a smorgasbord of light and medium vehicles, while the US Army is mostly just Strykers and HMMVs, with different variants providing flexibility. The Marines on the other hand have frakkin' LAVs as recon vehicles and big AAVs hauling around those massive squads. With the NATO module the variety gets out of hand, I don't think I've even seen all it has to offer. I have full faith that the modules for CMBN will add just as much as the CMSF ones did and be worth every penny. I just worry about the massive amount of time between base games. With the engine pretty much stable (unlike with CMSF), I think we all expected to be playing CW and talking about Market Garden by now. Maybe that's where some the frustration is coming from?

I think different people might have a different idea about what "good" or expected performance should be. For a game with objectively dated graphics, it shouldn't run at a lower framerate while paused than something like Skyrim or Crysis in motion (both maxed out). However, that tends to be the case on my PC. Not to the point that it is unplayable or anything, but for such basic shadows, with no frills at all, the framerate shouldn't drop as much as it does. Phil hinted that performance has been improved with the patch, looking forward to trying it out.

My problem with the shadows is that while they usually don't drop performance too much for me (depending on the map), they don't work at all on a lot of the vehicles. Shadows casting on both sides of metal plates, zig-zagging lines all over the place, etc. They look nice from certain angles, but are simply broken when you start moving the camera. Could we at least get some options like shadows on static objects only, or everything but vehicles?

Are you sure one of the MG team wasn't driving the jeep? Could just be a freak occurrence, I've never seen anything like that happen.

I already ordered CW and even if it doesn't have any big improvements, I won't mind because none were promised. I mostly just want all the new nations to play around with. However, it creates concerns for the future of the series. Are we looking at another year before the Market Garden module comes out, with no improvements or new features either? I'm a patient fellow, but am I seriously going to have to wait 2 more years for that armor only arc? The peasants are growing restless, our liege has left us in the dark for too long.

I noticed that too and was wondering why it looked weird, then it dawned on me. Would be cool if true, the whole "hey guys let's all stand in this same window together!" thing is annoying. I fully understand that modules are not meant to introduce new features, but in the course of a year have there not been any gameplay improvements at all? Are we strictly looking at bug fixes and new units/scenarios?

It is. I can't remember which one it was, but one of the devs told me this directly in a thread a few weeks ago. I had no idea about it before that. Edit: He didn't say anything about different difficulty levels. I took it as always being the case, except maybe Basic Training

I hope Juju makes a tweaked UI mod update for Commonwealth ASAP after it comes out. The little hand drawn looking weapon icons are so much nicer to look at than the default solid color outlines. Did he make those or are they from some other game?

Came here to say this. The base CMSF stuff is okay, but things get far more interesting with all the goodies from the expansions. The skill of the map makers themselves improved quite a bit over the years as well. Simply taking away the dozens of Javelins you get as regular US Army forces you to change tactics drastically. You have to, like, actually go fight the enemy instead of just leveling every building with a red marker on it

You can get the PDF of the manual from the DCS website for free. PDF's can be a royal pain to read on a Kindle, so use Calibre to convert them into the standard MOBI format (it's easy) and then they will work just like any other book. I think you can set up Calibre to email the file to your Kindle automatically, but I couldn't get it to work so I just use a USB cable. Just put the file in the right folder and you're done.

Watch the sales on Steam, the DCS games pop up every month or two. A-10 has gone for as low as $20. I have the manuals for both on my Kindle and read them between classes. I hope to one day actually engage and destroy a target Any of you guys play Steel Beasts Pro PE? It looks sick but my brain just won't let me spend that kind of money on one thing, and doesn't even have a demo to try it out first. I already have ArmA 2, which is more of a sim-lite in comparison, but at least gives you a taste of everything on the battlefield. ArmA 3 is out this year as well and promises to fix the various problems that the series has carried over from the original Operation Flashpoint. Also, railguns.

They haven't released enough information to answer all of those questions yet, but I forgot to mention the best bit of the whole thing. This is not a mouse and keyboard game, this is something closer to virtual reality. The soldier has a 360 degree screen around him (with 360 degree sound) and can apparently can lean his body to look around corners, manually reload his gun, giving hand signals to others, and so on. The videos are just eye candy to show off the engine, the whole thing is something a fair bit more impressive. I don't know how big the maps are, but the editor is an enhanced version of the one used in Crysis, which is extremely powerful. where they show the editor some more. You can see that realtime terrain adjustments look easy, and new models can be imported and textured.

Extensive modding works if the game is created with it in mind. See for example the Total War series, Mount and Blade, Operation Flashpoint/ArmA. All of these let you easily switch from one mod to another or back to vanilla. Valve pretty much made their fortune by embracing the mod scene of Half-Life. People would buy the game just so they could play Counter-Strike or Day of Defeat.