A Canadian Cat

Another mad minute in the town: Unfortunately it is my infantry that come off worse this time. Because of this guy in the middle of the town: And this guy: My infantry managed to get in some licks but basically they were the subject of a lot of MG fire. Over one the town’s right flank a Shrek team scored a direct hit on the apparent Immobilized Churchill. As is par for the course this battle it had no effect. On the other hand my Stug near the farm is now 2 – 0 against the flanking Churchill tanks. They brew up nicely when you get them from behind.

Excellent news - including the bit about people taking time off in the summer. Awesome news. There have been a couple of threads about keeping CMBN up to date with new changes recently. It seems that your plan to keep both products game engines moving forward and up to date has resonance. Could you comment on how you feel you will be able to scale that going forward? Reading your post it hit me once you have Bagration and Black Sea out you will have four games using the new system and plans for more. Do you plan to keep all of them up to date with engine improvements? Do you feel that your first step in this direction went well - from an internal point of view?

You are quite correct - oops. I did watch a video AAR yesterday where a human player was defending against an AI attack. But now that I check back it was *not* this one. My mistake. Since your referenced review does not state the name of the scenario. Since he does describe a few items it should be possible to deduce it but that will have to wait until I get home tonight. Thanks

Check out this thread: http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=110700 I posted (#6) about how the games have been progressing and leap frogging each other. In a nut shell: yes they play like they are the same game. Occasionally the tweaks and bug fix differences are detectable but no very often. The biggest difference is the environment as @Zebulon Pleasure Beast II (I feel dirty just typing that:-) said about hedge row hell brings up a point. The environment for the two games is very different. I think there are lots of scenarios in CMBN that are not as claustrophobic as some but it is a different environment. If you like CMFI I feel sure you will like CMBN.

I believe you are correct. Steve has said so on several occasions. Quick search found this: http://www.battlefront.com/community/showpost.php?p=1231058&postcount=147

For reference - which scenario was that? I watched the video and I could not see which one it was.

That tactic only works when fighting bears in CM Bamff

There are already differences between the training levels. Elite troops and crews spot better, react faster, have a higher rate of fire, make better decisions about cover and fire more accurately when compared to lower levels of training. Seems like BFC has this covered.

Now that sounds like a good idea.

Interesting. These three keep coming up. That must be a clue or something Yeah, that would be pretty cool I agree.

That would be how I think it will go too. I agree with that 100%. My personal preference would be for BFC to self fund or use kick starter and have us pay for it an interface to allow this kind of operational game to be hooked into CM. Creating ways for a community of apps and services to be developed by their users. Then we would see what the various existing operational layers would play like and see what @choppinlt comes up with. But he have already heard Steve's take on that so I guess we have to hope that @choppinlt's game is kickass and BFC sign up to cooperate with him to integrate. Fingers crossed. I have even been shopping this project around to my friends with game development experience.

That is so true. Thankfully one of my first experiences was with a friend in real life (which means we can punch each other if we do stupid stuff like that). I now have three regular partners that I trust to play blind and it is great. Plus several more that have proven themselves good players too. There have been a few annoying partners but I fired them . Since I always have several good games going I can afford to test out new people now and then. If they surrender like babies after the first time I draw blood or throw a hissy fit and rage quite after I take out a tiger - I just don't play them again - ever. Heck even one of the top guys on the ladder I play on, who's turn rate slows to ridiculous levels when he is loosing, is fired - I have politely declined games with him and will do so for the foreseeable future. None of that really bothered me much because I had multiple good games on the go at the time. I'll admit taking out that Tiger was such an effort that I was actually looking forward to the rest of that game to see if I could hold on. But ah well.

I am seeing an error "Sorry. This person moved or deleted this image." for each of the images in your posts.

Wow, if that is you being friendly I don't want to meet you in a dark alley I will put my effort where I think I will get the most benefit for me - thank you very much. At the moment I am finding *any* AI programming work extremely challenging and I am having very little success. I hope that changes with some of the very helpful design threads that are going on at the moment. But even once I get some traction I will not be concerned about "limiting what I can achieve" and nor will I be "not making an effort". What I will be is clear about how anything I finally achieve can be played.

Hee hee I am sure we could discuss this round and round. BFC have stated that Green means proper training but no combat experience. Regular means proper training and some combat experience. I think we should just go with @noob on this.

I think that sounds reasonable - go for it

Ah, I see. Thanks for the briefing. Sounds like there are a few issues and the argument (errrr discussion) about what an operational layer should be comes in a bit too. The total openness would also be an issue. I don't think any of us want something that can easily be exploited - just flexible.

Which gets back to the part I do not understand. PzC is open enough to allow you to integrate it with other games already. There is no involvement needed by the publisher if their input output format is open for use by the gamer. If BFC creates an ability to take input (in a format / method of their own choosing) to create a battle and produce output from the results of a battle they they will have an open game that allows it to be hooked to an operational layer. What COO is proposing to do is create a new operational game with an open interface to allow tactical resolution using a game like CM. on top of that @choppinlt is planning to do that without any firm commitment from BFC that they will create what is needed in CM. To me it seems that just gets us to the exact point were already are right now. Like I said it feels like I am missing something here because what I have outlined above makes very little sense, and I know for a fact that the people involved in this discussion are pretty damn smart. Please fill me in - what am I missing?

+1 here Exactly.

Someone said it before me on the forum - I did not take it to seriously nor did I mean it too seriously.

Well, Chuck Norris could do that. So you never know. Steve does own a tank.

This is what I don't get. I feel like I am missing something. If I am please let me know what it is. From what I have seen we have a Op level game which is able to take input from a tactical level game to resolve its battles. All transferring to and from CM is manual but the op game is automatic. This is precisely what @choppinlt is proposing to spend time and money to build. What we need to complete the loop and make this viable is work on the CM side that BFC has not given a firm commitment to do. So, I really feel like there is additional information that I am unaware of. Now that I would get behind totally. Interesting problem. I think I would be pretty flexible there. What I want is more and better context for my CM games. I am not really particularly interested in an op game for the sake of the op game. By that I mean I would most likely never play the op game stand alone but only ever play it to create CM games for me and my opponents to play. My personal estimation is that if there was seamless (or at least only file copying needed) integration between the layers I would probably play 50% of my games using the op layer. With manual jiggery pokery to setup CM battle after CM battle that would be reduced to experimental once or twice level.

While I think for the purposes of an operational layer for CM it would work much *better* on a PC, I can see it working on a tablet. You can - right now setup drop box on your tablet and your PC and have a folder sync between them (and your opponents). I could then sit on my couch and play my op turn which could say spawn files for 2 CM battles. Before going to bed I could flip over to my PC fire up CM and get my part of the CM battles going and have H2HH send files to my opponent. As long as the op layer can save its output files to a device folder then this can work pretty seamlessly.

LOL so true - well the "too busy to post" part not the Paris Hilton part.

Yes, it is a dramatic view when they do it. I personally like the way the animation works for Bren Carriers.