Pelican Pal

The reason I avoid walking in any sort of combat situation is that your men react to fire very poorly and tend to take more casualties than they really needed to.

Over the weekend, given enough time, I'm gonna work on an Official List of Rules for this and post those so y'all can have a firmer idea of what I imagine. I just wanted to know if there was any interest in playing something like this before I spent time on it. I guess the interest to me is not just that you have multiple players playing on the same team, but that there is communication friction. The core idea here is that players do not have free reign to talk to each other. So if the CO sent 1st Platoon off to do something and the 1st Plt. RTO was killed and radio destroyed you suddenly have a Plt. out of contact. Until contact is reestablished the player in control of 1st Platoon, can't talk to anyone on his team (and in the best case scenario can't see what they see). Without that communication friction I don't see the point of having multiple players on the same team. I imagine the role of the referee to be adding some garbling of radio messages based on how firm the radio link is (if you go in and out of contact with HQ every 10 seconds you won't get the whole order), and if nothing else post a sort of 3rd part AAR to peanut gallery.

Well, this thread got big. Personally I think that the AI (both tac and strat) would be leaps and bounds better if it were exposed to the community. There are people with talent and time who would have an interest in making the AI in CM really good. Issue is, once again, that you can't just magically open the AI up for users to mess with. (technically you could, but I always got the feeling that BFC worries a lot about DRM and piracy) Point is though. You can't just say "here is the ai" you need to have it exposed in a logical way to the user. Civilization does this via LUA scripting, and while I think a similar setup would be beneficial for the CM AI. It can;t just be magically be done. It requires work to do that. However, I also don't believe that CM needs a dynamic Strat AI. I;ve designed 3 scenarios and with the tools we have now you can do some pretty complicated stuff and get the AI to act pretty intelligently. The farther down this road we go the better the AI will get. Right now we have triggers which gives you a ton more power and the more robust that system gets the more interesting things scenario designers will be to do.

It means a ricocheting bullet went into an opening in a vehicle. In a recent game I had an F-16 drop a 800 lb bomb into the hatch of a T-90. "hit: opening" was a bit of an understatement. Also if you look at the CM:RT screenshot thread you'll see a T-34 catastrophically exploding after a burst of MG fire into the open driver's hatch detonated the ammo.

Lets not forget Javelins.

So in the "Graphics Suck?!!?!?!" thread someone mentioned multiplayer with players controlling different formations working together. The idea sounds really interesting to me and additionally it sounds like it is something that could actually be done with a number of honest players and a referee, although it will be relatively labor intensive. So I was wondering if any folks would be interested in trying it out. The idea is for a small 30 minute battle, just as a proof of concept/ to avoid going too far down the rabbit hole, With maybe 2-3 platoons per side. Each platoon would be commanded by a player and one additional player would act as Company Commander. There would be a single save file that is passed around and each player would get it and give commands to only their units, without looking at the commands of friendly units. They would then save the file and pass it to the next player (or possibly the ref to ensure purity of the save). The players would also be able to communicate with each other, but only through written order. Depending on the C2 link between that player and who they are communicating with the parts of the message may become garbled. Any thoughts or suggestions?

That isn't strictly speaking true. If you had a i3 clocked at 4.00 Ghz and an i7 clocked at 2.00 Ghz I strongly suspect that the i3 would be preferable since so much of the advantage of a multi-core processor is the use of multiple cores.

If you check the hotkeys menu in game I believe that alt-[ or alt-] will increase and decrease quality on the fly. IanL, the issue is more that CM is bound to a single core. So while my PC has a fancy I7 with 8 cores CM only uses one. If you wanted the best CM computer ideally you would have an absurdly powerful single core. Unfortunately that isn't really a practical option. Paddyusmc, This is currently doable although I think you would need a ref and some honest players. Essentially each player is assigned a part of a formation and would pass around the save file from each other to the ref. With all communication done through written reports that are sent to the ref and then sent to the target player. You could also check for a C2 connection to see how much of the order went through.

That isn't the issue. Like sure BFC could use Unity, which would have a plethora of pre-made scripts and will handle a lot of stuff for them. However, they still have to code in the tacai, stratai, pathfinding, weapons, ballistics calculations, map making, logic for the terrain, logic for boarding vehicles, logic for spotting, optics, IR optics, penetration of materials, spotting algorithms, C2, support call ins, Anti-air simulation, ai aiming, morale, fragmentation simulation, ammunition resupply, ammunition sharing, ERA, APS, SOPs, logic for onboard artillery, airburst weapons, canister shot, flamethrowers, fire, water etc.. Right now you can load up a quick battle and within minutes get a decent game going with another opponent and have a U.S. SBCT up against an MRR. with firefights between vehicles at 1km +, javelins flying through the air, and at the same time have infantry fighting at grenade range. There is a lot of complexity there.

This map is actually cut by a couple hundred meters. So on the full sized one C3k should be deploying on the other side of a wooded valley/in a wooded valley.

A number of the current QB maps are actual from CM:RT already. So BFC does this stuff internally already.

Grunt, here you go: http://community.battlefront.com/topic/118223-cmrt-maps-in-cmbs/

I'm actually a super big fan of modern. I bought CM:BN and CM:RT, but I never had as much fun as I did with CM:SF and CM:BS is a return to that.

And the Source engine has code from the original Quake.

Disclaimer: I am essentially just spitballing here. OpenGL is pretty dead in the water as far as engines go and going from single core/32 bit to multi-core/64 bit isn't without its problems. It would probably require a rewrite of a number of the underlying systems that make the CM games work. So it isn't an insignificant upgrade and it might be better for them just to go on towards engine #3. Of course I don't know their situation so eh. I guess my point here is I suspect that everyone wants nicer things. Its just that CM is a technically complex game so reworking the foundation isn't an easy thing to do. Even if that is just adding multi-core support. Hell for all we know they could be building up to some sort of multi-core release overtime, or they could be spending all of their time getting new stuff to work in game. This is increasingly becoming an issue of workflows and how things are done in BFC. Does a new vehicle need a programmer to make it work, or is there a streamlined process for any person to say "it has a 75mm gun with X velocity, and let me change the density of this piece of armor" without getting into the code, or are each of these vehicles hard coded. Right? Does one of the programmers need to go in and make this vehicle work or is there a process they have setup? So like, yes, we all want nice things, but it isn't a question of wants, but a question of capabilities. We don't know the capabilities. Edit: Going on the Arma tangent for a bit. Arma and CM don't really do the same thing. However, you can setup a sorta of command system with only what is shipped in the game. So I setup a understrength platoon attack on an enemy position. I was sitting at a truck with a map and planned out the attack and sent my men off. I kept track with a UAV and the map. It was a really interesting situation to not have total knowledge of what anyone saw (even if the anyone is the kinda sloppy AI). At one point I couldn't understand what was happening on the battlefield so I had to run on foot to the location of the squad, dodging bullets on the way, to give orders with a better view. So I'm sitting behind a wall with bullets and explosives landing around my position ordering squads around.

I would have agreed with up to Arma III. Which is just leaps and bounds away from OFP, Arma 1, or Arma 2.

I think this post is a really nice summation of the community split here. Is CM a replacement for your table-top collection or is it just another game on your hard drive. Personally I would never consider buying models (back in Highschool i played tabetop 40k and I will not be doing that again). So to compare CM to a tabletop game is absurd to me. Anyway, yea wargames are getting more mainstream. Arma 3 can be played as a Plt./Coy commander if you do it right, btw thewood could you PM the mods you use are something? Wargame does a good job of a wargame at 1 level up from CM. The bit that you are all overlooking is that this current iteration of Combat Mission is based on a engine designed by BFC sometime in 2005. It has matured since then, but at its heart it is still at 2005ish engine. It only has single core support, I suspect it doesn't utilize video cards very well, it is a 32 bit process which severely limits the amount of RAM available to it. These are hard limitations to what the game can do. So while Wargame or Arma can look better their engines are more modern and are able to access more power. BFC just can't magically make things better, just like you can't drive your car across a marsh. A road needs to be built. The infrastructure needs to be there. My computer has a GTX 780, 8 CPU cores, 10 GB of ram. CM can only use 1 of my 8 processors, 3 of my 10 GB of ram. There are hard limits on what it can do. What Steve was alluding to early was that at this point to greatly increase the capabilities of the Combat Mission series a new engine would need to be built. The last time this was done it took something like 5 years before the customers saw any new product, and even then Shock Force had unpleasant teething issues for another year or two and I would say that it was only with CM:BN that things got smooth. So essentially 8 years of development. To get another big leap would require another big engine push and how many years to get it up to speed. Edit: We aren't waving magic wands here. On top of all this, while I have a pretty state of the art computer, not every customer has a super powerful PC. So releasing the game with textures 2x the size of what we have now means the game will be prettier, but someoen isn't gonna be able to play it. Wiggum, the base model is HP based but I believe some of the more serious mods take it more seriously.

There is also a scenario based on the map. Bridgehead at Karalhyk.

Yea, my computer can be brought to a crawl with a few graphics mods attached to a CM scenario but can play an understrength company sized battle in Arma 3 fiine.

Graphics become more important as detail levels increase. Right now CM is ostensibly 1:1 so expectations are increased as to what things should look like. If the game kept the CMx1 stylization and had a decent art direction (I highly doubt that it would, but) it could look absolutely beautiful. BFC took a trip the uncanny valley though so graphics and animations become more important and every subpar visual more apparent.

My perceived issue with units like Stryker Brigades is that the vehicles are not capable of fighting on their own. The infantry have all of the punch and to engage effectively with their equipment you need to dismount and move relatively slowly. So you are trading a certain amount of speed in order for that force to work effectively against heavily armed enemies.

The scenario didn't take much time and I would be fine with attempting a revised version.

yea, it is. The areas around the checkpoints have been messed with and it was cut by a couple hundred meters on the far end of the map, but otherwise it is the stock map. Am I to assume it is your original map from CM:RT? It was going to be listed as a BFC stock map on release since I didn't see any designer info attached to it. If you want I can put your name on it though.

Your software updating would almost certainly not cause an issue. However, your antivirus software running a scan could definitely cause issues depending on how powerful your PC is.

This is one of those things that we don't need, but the arguments for not having them get weaker as the technology gets better. CMx2 is getting increasingly capably of modelling more area and time to the point where "it knocks out a 1KMx1KM area off the map doesn't cut it because the maps are capable of being quite large and games quite lengthy. Same goes for a lot of the behind the pointy edge of the spear stuff, like tank commanders remounting subordinate vehicles and more robust resupply and refit actions.