BletchleyGeek

Seconded. No bocage, fully mechanized forces, plenty of different approaches available, night time... While I'm not a fan of the "meeting engagements" genre, I just love this one.

Some people in the thread weren't understanding the OP, I think I did, and just offered my interpretation. Is that really bad, GaJ? 1) I don't understand what do you mean with this one. 2) From what I gather from playing the game, reading Steve answers and reading the manual there's no spotting "bonus" - i.e. there's no such a thing as a magical +3 to a "die roll". I think it depends mostly on how wide is the arc. My guess is the following: The "spotting" guys are scanning his environment, that is, rotate head to bearing 270º, look for some time, rotate head to bearing 290º, look for some time, etc Each of these actions or activities take some time to do (simulation ticks). With no arcs, in order to scan the whole 360º arc, he takes a number N of ticks (which might well dependant on training, morale, being under fire, etc.). With a restricted arc, say 90º, in ideal conditions (highest morale and training, not being under fire, etc.) it would take him N/4 ticks to complete the "scan". Or in other words, he would be able to fully scan the arc 4 times, increasing the chances of spotting anything accordingly. 3) Are we sure they don't ever? Steve is not going to post here the TacAI routine, but this would involve certainly how the unit in question is perceiving its environment. Does the unit know of other enemies - either by visual contact or sound contact - in the vicinity? Does it perceives these other as more important threats than the one we know he can spot? Does the unit believe it's going to get a shoot good enough to kill/supress the threat? Is it low on AP (or HE) ammo? Motivation surely also plays a role. Some of the discussions we have on threads like this one contain a lot of useful info for new players (and certainly, not so useful discussions). I noticed recently that someone setup a CM:BN wiki http://combatmission.wikia.com/wiki/Combat_Mission:_Battle_for_Normandy perhaps we should start using it.

Yes, indeed some "context" might make it less "wishful thinking". But you wouldn't be guaranteed anything, at all, unless you could have perfect information on the situation (it could be the platoon being ambushed, but if it's an unspotted infantry gun or tank the one pounding the platoon moving across open ground, well, overwatch will not help you one bit).

More telling than the bar is when you hear a sound effect (explosion, shot) just after it completes Gaming the turn resolution progress bar? This is funny. First, if you're not the side doing the computation, you can't just "exploit it". Let's say there's just an event being resolved, which has 50% chance of going either way (as tossing a coin). The distribution of Heads and Tails results might be like: H H T H T H T H T H H H H H T or T T T H H H T T T H H H T T T or H H H H H ... 1 million times ... T T T T T ... 1 million times It's like having a blind man making bets on coin tossing, when only being able to listen the "clink" the coin does when hitting the ground. Unless you have some knowledge that relates the blue bar progress - the sound the coin makes - against or favoring your interests, pretending that you can "influence" the outcome in any predictable, meaningful and useful way is wishful thinking. This is very much like me staring hard at the moon one night and expecting it to blow into pieces the next second. That it actually happens doesn't mean I had any influence whatsoever on the event.

Thank you for the clarification, Steve. One of the things that sold me into CMx2 were that units perception was modeled in a realistic way (tank crewmembers have to actually look into a given direction to spot something, and that might lead them to not spot something else). However, having them "forgetting" about their goal (they track to kill the target when they get a fire solution, which is mediated by crew experience, training and psychological status) when the target gets out of the arc is at odds with what one would expect from actual people. Therefore that people raise their hand and say "this AI is braindead".

I second that. It has worked very well for the developer of World In Flames (you can imagine how high could get the flames in the forum with the delays and the discussion on how to properly implement the rules from a game system with nearly 25 years of existence). People don't feel off-the-loop and the discussions - in a separate thread - are focused on concrete issues. PS: Off-topic but not so regarding the thing with keeping people on the loop. I was moved when I learnt from that thread that Shannon, WiF developer, had developed a particularly crippling variety of eye cancer. That's a very straight way of handling people who have been waiting for years something which might well never get finished.

Quoting from the manual. From the tutorial Page 84, where the command is described in depth No mention of the Morale and Training effects on this, of course. But I do see where 76mm expectations might have originated.

Yes, that's true. There might be quite a few individuals like that. But I find a gross exaggeration than a game like CM can become a "job". If something separates wargames and sims from the rest of the game industry is that the more time you invest into them, the more you get from them. They become a hobby. This is at odds with the "instant gratification" paradigm which has installed in the minds of major game development studios. It's got really silly, even in RPGs. What's that thing of "unlocking achievements" one gets in Dragon Age - a game by Bioware which used to be the "hallmark" of RPGs - by doing stuff, like, picking some rare flowers, killing a rat or being nice through dumbed down dialogue options to an NPC? That's absolutely ludicrous. It's not that different from people who make drugs: I'm frustrated after a hard day at work, just argued with wife over something silly, ok, rather than going to the neighborhood dealer to get some cocaine, one logs into a MP server, pulls out a virtual weapon and starts blowing other people avatars' heads. Ahhh, it feels so good. Steve is worried about how troublesome wargamers can get asking for features, making criticism and all that. He seems to me that he cares about the people that plays their games. He also cares about his business. I don't think Battlefront is producing "beer & pretzels" wargames, nor catering for the "instant gratification" junkies. These people might buy a copy of CM, but they'll be shelving it as soon as the next pseudo-historical RT buggy half-finished crap from Paradox comes out. "Instant gratification" and "constant novelty" usually go together. Can Battlefront keep the pace of this people? Who's more troublesome at the end of the day, the wargamers or the non-wargamers?

This was quite a discussion that went on for years... Some thing with Grigsby's games never change. Now we have WitE and some very few and very vocal individuals are complaining they can't fine tune German war production as they could do in War In Russia. A Japanese player could optimize plane production yes, but that didn't mean he couldn't lose all his carriers in a single engagement next to some quite useless piece of rock right in the middle of the Pacific. And the Japanese Home Islands - along with all those carefully nurtured airplane factories - would be reduced to the Stone Age by waves of B-29s. Or in Eastern Front terms, yeah, sure I got the Panthers and Tigers rolling out in May 1942. You can feel big, surely you did devote a lot of time to optimize thing to get them your way. But that doesn't mean you can't get trapped in the middle of the steppe by vastly superior forces on your flanks and see, reduced to tears, your elite force being entirely wiped out.

Does that mean we're going to eventually get WeGO TCP/IP? Pausable RT over TCP/IP? If so, man, let's throw overboard those SOPs! Are you referring to the code? If it's the former, well it happens. You'll eventually find the time to fix/change/refactor that. You already did that when you got decoupled sim resolution from visualization in CM:SF and we got the "blue bar" back. Or to your vision of what CM should be? If so, then since this is your show all I can say is "Fair enough". The very nature of MP wargaming entails some sort of tacit or explicit agreement on being a "good sport". The players can abide to whatever "house rules" they see can agree to "set the playing field even". Obviously, this is a matter to what "Wargaming Culture" do you belong to. You can set two "broad" groups, the ones that play just to win and the ones who play to have a good challenge. Over the years, I've found a lot of players in both groups. People in the first group, when winning, usually go like "LOLZ I pwn y4. Yr utt3r cr4p! Im s0 l33t LOLZ" or some other way less full of crap. The others when winning, thank you for the game - even if you actually were utter crap - and some might even make polite remarks about what they think you did wrong. I tend to ignore the former and stick to the latter. They'll usually be up to coach you into mastering the game system. This applies even to hexwars.com, where the most popular game is Napoleon In Waterloo. It's eerie to find this also in MMORPGs so unforgiving for the new players such as Eve On-line. Perhaps it's something not intrinsic to gaming, but of human nature It talks very well of you as a person that you care about the happiness of your customers in such a holistic way (there's no irony here, I'm writing this with a straight face). But you're a good game designer and I think that also a pretty good project manager. You're expected to produce good wargames. You're not expected to be our therapist. See my reference above to the "blue bar" thing (what a misleading way to refer to an architecture problem). You've done it before, I wouldn't be surprised you would do something like that in the future. I think that can be worrying from a project management perspective but also satisfying. It means that people care about your product. You're right that there it seems to be tendency in this CM community of flaming you guys, which leaves me dumbfounded. Indeed it can get out of hand. But you're the captain, and in a ship no sailor daresays the captain. You'll always have the final word. Well, it would be nice to be able to give a certain kinds of commands in certain situations. I'm certainly not expecting it to work exactly as expected everytime. It's warfare being simulated, not playing tic-tac-toe. I know your butts are on the line, I appreciate your work, so I support it by buying your products. You sound like being under immense pressure by something unknown to me. All I can say to you is that I hope the best for Battlefront. I'm only trying to help you doing the best you can by sharing with you my opinion. Perhaps you'll change your mind some time in the future and see things more like my way. Or perhaps not. I'm patient, I'm not expecting to bend your mind with my ungodly powers and get this with the upcoming Commonwealth and Waffen SS module

Hey, Obviously it wasn't made for me. One thing that I have very clear in my mind is that I just own a copy of your game. That certainly doesn't make me a shareholder, but certainly makes of me a stakeholder And I indeed trust you, guys. I bought your games! If I ever become multi-million dollar worth I wouldn't mind to invest 1M into you guys. But I would get SOPs, wouldn't I? Regarding the UI, I can understand some people feel it's pretty full, especially the bottom "command & status bar". 2/3 of it is devoted to depict data on unit attributes and status in a summarized form. There's a lot of info being presented by pixel. I see it to be also very focused on individual units, and very little on giving info on the overall situation. Browsing through the OOB is done in a way which is not really "standard" and makes a lot of sense for someone trained as a programmer (you're navigating through the command and control tree, one node at a time) but hardly to someone with such training or acquantaince with discrete mathematics. I don't play CMx2 on RT much, or ever, because I find it very hard to find out about important events happening to my units - a unit being routed, or under fire - and track the general status of the force. I find Panther Games approach to this problem to be right on spot, with their event notification system and filtering. Since I have to pause the game every 30 or so secs, I prefer WEGO, since I can cope up with the amount of info being presented. I also find some aspect of CMx2 daunting. If you want some radical thinking, I'd have done away with the tabs and button boxes, and just use the space bar - or right-click - contextual menu and hotkeys, freeing up real state on the screen for other purposes. What's not? Even missing someone's name on the credits can have cascading effects :eek: I agree with you that wargaming has been deemed for a too long time "stuff for nerds, stuff that matters". Making "popular" board-based wargames has been a long sought after chimera pursued by many publishers, which have basically failed - in my opinion - because they dumbed so much game mechanics and the results were so much like those obtained from playing Risk, that people just say "why bother with this five page booklet" and go play Risk inventing the rules as they play. Computer wargaming offers a way to escape this so often beaten path into oblivion. Why? Because you don't need to dumb down anything. Software development is mostly hiding the details from the wrong people: the one that will be either confused or misinterpret or abuse such details. The problem is that having systems layered like that - with layers being rendered transparent being optional - are fairly complex and time consuming programming projects. Are we on the same page on this Steve? Wargamers will be the most exigent, because they have previous experiences with other game systems which they hold dear because of enjoying them. But they're important: are the only ones who will invest time into really learning the game, and will usually spot things that are off first. Wargamers is indeed a small fraction of the general populace, but they're really close-knit and word-of-mouth works really well selling a product. They're also the ones who will mostly contribute scenarios and campaigns to the game. They'll be extending the longevity of the game, which is bad for new titles, but good as well, because you can put a higher price because CM:BN isn't a game that it's over after a weekend (which is sadly true with SO many AAA titles). Non-wargamers who play wargames either become wargamers or go back to whatever they were doing before. So wargamers, while a notoriously unruly bunch, will always be spotting bugs, creating content for your game and urging you to "push the envelope". I've seen that cycle, mostly on board wargames. There it gets much worse. Have you tried to play Flattop or Pax Britannica? I find surprising you haven't been able to escape from this cycle, especially when you have a reasonably sophisticated AI (because if the AI can control that, why can't a user? It's the matter of providing a uniform interface to send the proper messages to certain objects in the simulation engine). Hahaha, indeed I can ace it. Wargamers. People who already know why it does a difference not to shoot with the main gun infantry at 250m when you can shoot at the same infantry with a machine gun. But non-wargamers, if they like the game enough, will learn eventually learn this as well! I've been mentoring for a few years CompSci students in a course whose programming project was developing a RoboSoccer team for the 2D Simulated Agent league. You can check here the base code I provided them: http://staff.science.uva.nl/~jellekok/software/index_en.html here the agents (soccer players) have limited information about their environment and have to deal with a lot of uncertainty in the outcome of their actions. One common problem I had to deal with were with the young guys trying to write their controllers for very general tasks - such as conducting an attack to score a goal. If there's one thing true when writing an AI is that the more circumscribed is the problem, the simpler is to solve it. I had to patiently coach them so they saw the truth of this, and eventually they come up with the tasks to be hierarchically decomposed. Some of them even came up with procedures for handling soccer-like "cover arcs", especially when defending their own goal line (does the guy have the ball? should I tackle? should I position myself between the ball and the guy? etc.) Since I know you made CMx1 I know you know better than my young students. So what are SOPs? They're basically decision procedures to provide context to individual units / or agents and trigger some behavior (which might or not be generated in an on-line way). So we have Cover Arc in CMx2. Which accounts for: 1) Restricting spotting and awareness to a particular sector. 2) When a hostile is detected: a) If within specified range i) If "soft" target, engage with weapons able to score a kill. ii) If "hard" target, engage with weapons able to score a kill. If you have cover arc, and you've been developing the whole thing in a "bottom up" fashion, providing with a Cover Armor modality to the users would just amount to add a submenu to the space bar invoked context menu to the appropiate order. Another thing is that you have a discrete button interface where "modalities" can't be easily accomodated in a consistent way. I'd suggest to keep the buttons as they are, yes, but a guy not caring/knowing would hardly bother about the space bar context menu. Indeed, and are the assumptions built in in the decision procedure which do not hold water for substantial numbers of users. But there's no need to make everyone to deal with the backend details: you've already packaged them into a reduced set of high-level commands. People wanting this would even buy a solution based on invoking a console and entering the command by, oh anathema, writing it. I agree with generalized SOPs to be possibly a long shot for the scope of CMx2, I was just teasing you a bit. But I'd ask you to consider what I say in my answer above. Thank you again for answering and taking the time to discuss this.

Hey Steve, thank you for your answer. I understand your concern about getting work done in stuff which is not going to be used universally, hence the quite minimalistic UI in CMx2 (Elmar, it's not overcrowded by a far margin, man). However, I am curious about what problems did you find integrating the concept of SOP - cover arcs are very minimalistic kind of SOP btw - into CMx2. But I think it would help if we could separate "logistics" problems from "logical" problems If you could describe the problems you found in practice - and assuming you had human resources enough to tackle the issue - in an abstract way so you don't have to give away details you don't want to, perhaps we could help you and I'm sure it'd be appreciated.

While I tend to agree with Thomm regarding the command system flexibility, I also think that it wouldn't hurt that the UI also had "meta commands" or "macros" built in, based on feedback from players and beta testers about the most common combinations and the like. What would really be perfect is that we could design those SOPs, or plans, ourselves, store them and recall them for later use. The closest example I have in mind is the Formation Editor tool from Harpoon 3. It was hard to master it, indeed, but as long as you didn't click the button you could pretty much do without it. Yet another thing is that it was of key importance when handling, say, a CVBG. Another much simpler example of a similar tool is the Mission Parameters editor from Panther Games operational RT wargames. The mere existence of a certain feature on a UI doesn't force anyone to use it If that fits or not Battlefront schedule, is something up to you to decide, but I think the idea has indeed some merit.

I read this as if people thought there were no abstractions whatsoever in CM:BN. There are: 8mx8m action spots, C2 links via runners "abstracted", malfunctioning radios, artillery delays, ability to fire through active vehicles, etc. It's about finding a sweet spot regarding fidelity, playability and computational tractability The definition of a "wargamer" is more like "someone who is open up to the possibility to have fun with metaphors of war with dice and counters and a board or with a computer" than anything else. And I've been surprised often by people I couldn't imagine enjoying - and becoming - wargamers. Regarding the original topic. I'm fine with the modules marketing approach and all that, it's not that much of a problem. Being the models - not only the 3d but the actual thing model - so faithful I don't think we'd ever see anybody reworking the full TO&E's for the US Army. Just too much work for it being a hobby. The one thing I'd certainly love - and I'm not sure it qualifies as "modding" - would be the ability of loading from the editor topographic data in some way. Optimally some sort of watered-down GIS-like layered representations of topographic maps, values in each "cell" being mapped to a certain CMx2 engine terrain element - minus flavor objects, possibly. That would allow anybody to programmatically generate maps opening many interesting kinds of possibilities to generate on-line communities around CMx2.

Yes, this thread should be in Scenario Design & Modding. I'd say that the size of the map and of the forces involved matters a lot. Objectives VP count should also take into account player's ability to get reasonable situational awareness (watch assault on the left side, go back to right side, find everyone dead, no trace of the culprit) and response time (not reflexes entirely, also to come up with a new plan for your units when the one you had goes down the toilet).

Thank you for the graphs, GaJ. They sort of match what I've seen on AARs and on my own games (I'm playing right now Carbide Carbide as the US, and I see the expectation in the briefing about overrunning the German force behind a river with a similarly sized American one isn't going to happen). Well, the QB maps were done before release, so it's understandable they don't take into account what we're learning. Regarding the point you make: indeed, DIY is the way to go... if you first know what to do GaJ brought up something that seemed strange, people here have pored over it for a while, and now we might perhaps getting a hint of what might the problem(s). Much of that time is "dead-time". Since one does not get feedback on what happened until you watch the 60 secs movie, it's usual than your units remain stationary - and spotting their surroundings - for a substantial part of a 60 secs segment. You can optimize, but I don't think it would be wise to invest a lot of one's time into devising a very nice plan with timings and at all, when it could well happen that after the first 20 secs it turns out to doom the force executing the plan. Very much like there's with the H2H only/AI only/both tag, a good tag would be Rt only/WEGO only/both. Some redundancy in assets which might be critical (say, an FO) could be a good idea. Especially in CMx2, where you can have your FO 100 meters behind the action, in a covered position and he can be unfortunate enough to take a stray .50 round right between the eyes... I think one needs to be careful with %losses and the like, you might end up penalizing twice or thrice a player for the same mistake. I can attest to that: I even posted a screenshot of the result into your scenario thread. That's the kind of feedback I think scenario designers can get the most out of it. I might be wrong, but I'm under the impression the feedback designers get is low or isn't concrete enough (like a results screen). Well, it also helps that during most of the scenario it's night time. While charging along an American football stadium at midday facing several MGs certainly isn't a wise move, charging along the same stadium at night (lights off, no moon, of course) might be even a shrewd move. BTW, No Exit isn't a meeting engagement at all. I'd say it's more of a US attack/probe Looking forward to that!

I understand that you refer to a "typical CM2 QB". In that case, I agree that forces usually featured on QB's in CMBN are more "brittle" because of reduced numbers.

Nice, and scary, forest Fredrock. The canopy is quite thick, which rules out effects as "having the sun in the eyes" or possible "reflections" (I don't have a clue whether CMx2 takes into account these for spotting purposes).

So skill level doesn't fully account for the win/loss distribution. I find surprising that the influence of skill level is so moderate - by comparing the distributions for CMBO and CMAK. Can you get separate graphs for CMBN scenarios played at least 4 or 5 times?

Indeed, in order to be some "conflict" there must be "mutually exclusive" goals for each side I don't really see - yet, I'm still adjusting the map for that scenario - any reason intrinsic to x2 modeling which would make more likely the extreme result you mention. Do you have anything in particular in mind?

Just took a look at present-day Fôret de Cerisy http://g.co/maps/hh47 it's not a jungle, but there's "some" undergrowth. And nowadays proper forest management prescribes clearing undergrowth, to make fires more difficult. The only places in Europe I have seen forests(*) without some meaningful undergrowth have been those in parks, backyards, orchards and rocky hills on the coastline (northern coast of Minorca, for a concrete example). EDIT: (*) I'd rather say, trees.

There are many ways of 'balancing on a knife edge', one are scenarios like those late 1944 CMBB QB's, the other is "balancing" the scenario so winning/losing probabilities would be 50/50, even with "unbalanced" forces and asymmetric goals. Both kinds of scenarios would tend towards the nice CMAK Gaussian Distribution GaJ points us at. I just wanted to give concrete examples of scenarios - and the amount of work they require - which could lead to such a distribution. EDIT: Indeed, assuming that both players will play "perfectly", whatever that means. Hehe, yes you're right. But it's up to us to prove that true, right?

Tricky question. I refrain from drawing conclusions like "the game engine is imbalanced" with the relatively small set of scenarios we have available. Which is a natural thing, it's been 3 months and a half since release, and we're all still struggling to master both the game and the scenario editor. "Balance" can mean many things, not all of them equally enjoyable. I'd bet good money that on most of the past and existing CMBB ladders, the most often fought QB was a "Meeting Engagement" set in late 1944. That was "balanced" in the sense that both sides had access to equipment which was closely matched, had to maneuver for position and could shoot at each other from 500m and have a good chance to score a kill. The thing that really only mattered was the players' skill to take advantage of terrain and get into a dominating position and knowledge of available TOEs to optimize their force. I, personally, find that to be extremely boring. Now there's the "interesting" kind of balanced scenarios, which might or not, include balanced forces, terrain and objectives. These are really hard to get well done. One of the hardest things, in my opinion, is to come up with forces that allow - not guarantee - to meet the "combat mission" objectives, or the other way around, come up with reasonable objectives for a given force. This is all about playing with the VP allocation. Let me put an example of an scenario I am working on right now, so we have something concrete to discuss on. The scenario concept is as follows. The mission for the US side is to move across a road to get to the form-up position for an attack. Time is limited: they have to make it on time, otherwise the mission - join up with other forces - will be an utter failure. Germans' mission is to interdict this march, causing as many casualties as possible and preventing the US forces to freely march. For this concept, what kind of terrain makes sense? Obviously, it needs to have a road connecting US deployment zone with an appropiately set Exit Zone. I would like to encourage US players to come up with proper flank security, so I need to put terrain that might support a credible threat (say an elevation difference, foliage preventing LOS from the road but not the other way around, etc.). What kind of forces make sense? I want this scenario to depict what I understand as a problem of maneuvering within the reach of the enemy, which is usually modeled by operational wargames with ZOC concept. The German force should be a combat patrol force, light and not very big. Let's say, one German Fusilier squad, a FO, a Sniper and a couple or three Panzershcrek/Tank Hunter teams. It has off-map support from Company mortars and possibly Battalion Heavy Mortars. The US force could be pretty much anything, let's say a full infantry Company mounted on trucks, with a small cavalry force as an advanced guard (one M8, one M20 and a jeep). Now, what should be the time limit for the scenario? A good starting point could be the time a US truck needs to cross the map, on road, move order adding an slack proportional to the number of vehicles in the column. What about the victory conditions? The German side is not interested - and shouldn't - in holding any ground at all. The point is to make losses and hinder column movement. Therefore, German VP's should be awarded by destroying US units and preserving its own force. US side Victory conditions would be defined in terms of how many units make it through within the time allotted. Would this be balanced? Certainly not, US troops should come into the battlefield in a staggered manner, it's a column, and this would prevent to some extent pre-plotted barrages. Delaying the availability of artillery would also help. If TRP's were to be included, they would placed well away from US deployment zone (pre-registered targets are that, pre-registered). Would I get VP's, timings and all that right, after some hotseat playtesting. Certainly not. I'd need feedback from people trying the scenario H2H. Changes in one aspect of the scenario would probably have an influence in other aspects, interlocked in a feedback loop. I'd need to iterate several times, and that would probably take months. Welcome to the world of wargame design: it's hard and takes time to get it right More so when the designers are hobbyists working on this on their spare time. Bottom Line I just think there hasn't been enough time for the CM:BN scenario community to jointly - by designing and adjusting and by playing - develop scenarios with a quality near the best developed for CMx1.

Similar tactics here, though depend a lot on the situation. I tend to use HT's though to provide mobile fire support while the infantry is charging, longer range wider calibers are used as overwatch when possible. Some are lost, but infantry losses are much lighter. The inspiration for the above comes from how AI conducts assaults with mechanized forces in Pather Games' Highway to the Reich and Battle for the Bulge.

BTW, Michael, I think you can add yet another "scalp" to your signature