Pelican Pal

What continental defenses are needed? The only case I can imagine where the United States Air Force needs to defend the continental United States is one where ICBMs are also flying across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Hey, if y'all still want any help with a CM:RT campaign I would be up for helping.

I'm pming each of you guys individually, but generally what I am hearing is pretty in line with what I've expected. If I can get a few more bits of feedback I think I'll try to knock out an imroved V2 version this weekend. Thanks again everyone for the help it is really appreciated!

I had an experience similar to Chudacabra although I managed to get a victory. I moved forward and wrapped around the bottom of the map with my men. Creating an L shape around the HQ. I managed to kill the Russian officers and trucks with fire but was unable to mount an assault. As I was preparing for the attack on the HQ when the reinforcements from the top of the map advanced against me, and although I only lost 3 KIA to the fighting and hammered the enemy troops the weight of fire needed to keep them off my position prevented an attack on the HQ. I began pulling back from the top of the map and was going to retreat as my ammo was getting low when the second group of reinforcements appeared at the bottom of the map. This caught a number of my men essentially in the spawn of the enemy troops. I lost another 3-4 KIA here and ran almost out of all of my ammo. I made a frantic retreat to the exit zone losing another 2-3 KIA on the way. Final points was 900 some for me, and 500 some for the enemy. I would recommend marking the top of the map as *Enemy reinforcement route* or something similar so the player knows where they are coming from and can prevent them spawning on top of his troops. I mostly found the unknown spawning of reinforcements disconcerting because I supposed i had sufficient coverage with the Raven to give me a heads up on any advancing enemy. Alternatively adding another 100-200 meters to the reinforcement edges of the map would allow the player to see them coming. Personally I really enjoyed organizing the retreat and a couple of counter-attacks to give buddy-aid to wounded troopers and think the scenario has solid promise.

I am almost certain that the names do not reflect unit size and if I were making a scenario I would at most give a separatist unit 100-150 fighters for a particularly large "all in" operation. I made a scenario with separatists in it and I used that list to get an idea of the naming conventions for Separatist forces. I then made up a unit with a similar name. In this case I called them the Lysenko Battalion. I personally didn't want to use a real unit name for a fictional battle, while at the same time I wanted the immersion of having a unique unit name for the force. Lysenko is actually the last name of a Ukrainian Biologist who was born sometime in the 1890s and died sometime in the 60s if I recall correctly.

The only times I ever do is if the game path-finding does something weird. Although that is only on the rare occasion that I 1. have a save and 2. have a path finding problem. Both are rare so it is even rarer that they happen together. Recently I loss a squad because the hedge in front of the men looked like it had an opening, it in fact did not, so the squad ran onto the adjacent street which was being swept by automatic fire and explosives. They all promptly died. I had a save so I reloaded it and changed the order. I personally avoid reloadingfor things that the game simulated (like spotting).

Send me a link, and I'll play it.

I'll take a look at it tomorrow evening and see if I can't figure it out.

lol

So I finished playing the scenario and I sent feedback to TeaReks, but I figured I oughta post about a cool occurrence. The F-16 came in for a strike on a vehicle that was previously destroyed (so the hatch was open). The f-16 dropped its bomb into the hatch of the vehicle.

Ah, I thought the issue was that because QBs have unknown forces the ai setups had to allow for a wider variety of units. And therefore you couldn't say "all infantry should be in these buildings" because you don't know what will be on the map. What I've seen is that men abandon building more often in a lull in the firing. So after chucking 3-4 75mm HE shells I stop firing and the enemy will take the opportunity to vacate the position. If you have sustained fire they are much less likely to.

Repsol, that is a scenario design issue. The AI chooses locations based on the strat AI the designer uses.

You might want to consider using this on Ukrainian troops. I find that their equipment is better suited to representing Separatists.

Having an in game encylcopedia would also be wonderful. It isn't quite as bad in modern, but please tell me the difference between the infinite number of German tank variations. A lot of the UI as it is now is definitely what I would call "programmer UX" it gets the job done, but it isn't particularly pretty. Of course UI changes are generally easier than most things. However, this is a home grown engine so coding decisions back in 2005 might be hamstringing how quickly any of this can be done. Or to put it another way. In modern commercial engines UI stuff is relatively easy. I'm pretty certain CM isn't running on a modern commercial engine.

Yea, having the AI exposed in a LUA format or something would be sweet. If I recall the original automatic firearms are weak discussion. It specifically had to do with MGs not doing enough to suppress the enemy. To the point where a squad could just run up on the gun and kill the crew, no questions asked. The one that I suspect is on question here isn't a question of suppression, rather one of lethality. CM squads are unrealistically clumped, but there isn't any real rationalization of that in how shooting is modeled. Explosives are weakened, but bursts of automatic fire aren't. So you have these situations where a single shooter can mow down half a squad in a single burst. I'm sure you;ve all seen it. That conga line of men right in a row. The lead man takes a burst and the fire also mows down everyone behind him. I think it is mostly a result of the 1:1 attempt that BFC made. We are in the center of the uncanny valley which causes the complete lack of MOUT super obvious. When your men are supposedly veteran American troops who fought in Afghanistan and are now fighting the Russians in Ukraine it seems a little absurd when your breach team runs into the building with absolutely no caution. its a limitation of the game, but it is part and parcel when you enter the uncanny valley. These look like real men doing real fighting so every mistake is incredibly obvious. Back in CMx1 you just had the 3 stiff dudes run into a building, you watched some numbers tick down, and someone came out ahead in the breach. In CMx1 your abstracted squad ran into the house and you could imagine this was happening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=gmSYoBoOXvw#t=901 In CMx2 its just 4 dudes running in right after another to be shot by the guy at the far end of the house. Especially when a scene like this in CMx2 looks decently similar:

Haha, I was just saying that reply is a very light example of the "your complaint is wrong. The game is fine. You are just playing badly" thing he was talking about. I mean you essentially just misrepresented his position and claimed he wants the AI to handle everything for him as a way of proving that how things currently work is fine and dandy. Now I haven't read most of his posts, but I think he just wants the tacai to handle things that historically BFC wants the tacai to handle. I don't think anyone is saying the game is broken. Certain things are definitely a weakness. Infantry combat is one of them. I didn't say the game was broken. Seriously, I'm still buying the damn things. No, I do not want the AI to do a complicated maneuver for me. I just want an order that prioritizes shooting someone in the face over running past them. I can't tell you the number of times my men have been moving and seen an enemy within 10-20 meters of them. They run past him as this enemy soldier does that glacial turn, picks a target, raises his rifle, and shoots someone. At any point during this 2-3 seconds they could have stopped and shot him in the face, but they don't cause they're too busy running. Close combat is a definite weakness in the game and while we have a plethora of orders that handle movement/combat reactions we don't really have any geared for CC. An order that says "hey, you need to walk over there, but!, there might be a bad dude with a gun. So if you see him, you should shoot him immediately." would be nice. Now are there ways around this deficiency? Yea, you move a bit slower, use teams, recon by fire, overwatch, etc.. So I do that and it works pretty well. Doesn't mean I wouldn't really love an assault order. I don't think patience means not saying that this stuff needs work. I mean I, and presumably all the folks posting on this part of the board, are still buying the bloody game. If I didn't have patience I wouldn't have thrown BFC $55 a week ago for CM:BS. And I'm not expecting to see any of this fixed in the near future, I'm a computer science major, I understand that this stuff is hard because I've done it before (not in the literal sense of creating a complicated AI that handles combat situation, but I have written AIs and its not an easy thing to do). Frankly I would feel absolutely blessed to see any improvements by the end of 2016. Personally I doubt we'll see anything for longer than that. Although an SOP system would probably be relatively easy so maybe we'll see that by the end of 2016.

Not sure if I can help you a whole bunch. however. If you have an exit time and trigger whichever one happens first will cause the unit to move on. So if the timer ends before group 3 arrives then group 2 will still move because they got an order to go. The AI groups don't care what gives them the go ahead it just whatever happens first. You might want to use a friendly objective trigger and see if that works. I've not had this issue before and it looks like you are covering all of your bases. Edit: If you send me a download link I will take a look at it from my end and see if I can figure out what is happening.

A bit of that was also the lack of any sort of cavalry tradition in the United States.

Huh, yea I can't get it to download.

CM:FI is the one game in the series I don't own. You are essentially agreeing with my point though. The terrain for each individual family sells looks. It sells immersion. That CM:FI street could be recreated in any one of the games, and it would play the same. I'm not saying the games don't look different. The limiting factor is almost always what seasons are included and what forces are included. Ramadi, for another example, is totally doable in CM:BS. Looking at that image I can only spot two things that are not in CM:BS. Palm trees and the taxis. Technically 3 if you count the Americans that are in CM:SF. The rest of the stuff in that image is in CM:BS, it just looks different.

He could have been lurking and just recently registered. FWIW, I'll throw my hat in with Oakheart on that one. I've seen numerous occasions where the militia rolls out on folks. This is essentially a light version of what he is talking about. Edit: The infantry game in CM is my favorite part of the series. I personally don't enjoy vehicle combat all that much. But I will say that the infantry combat is pretty bad and needs the most work relative to everything in the game right now. There are just loads of problems with it. The tight formations which make automatic weapons absurdly effective, the lack of SOPs which causes the tacai to do stupid stuff like run at the guy who is shooting them, the lack of any decent assault order, etc... You can get around a lot of these issues once you understand the failings and you can generally get things to work out in a positive manner. However, that doesn't mean that just because we can work around the problems the problem stops being a problem.

I use a dropbox account for sharing my scenarios. Since you don't ahve ton of people downloading during tesdting it is a nice place to store it unitl you upload the scenario to the repository or wherever.

I think it is working, but the page just looks super sketchy. I'll give it a run this weekend.

There are a lot of words thrown around by how each family is unique and we need a new one for new terrain or territory. That really isn't true. It is mostly just basic theming that occurs between different families. A family doesn't sell you unique terrain it sells you immersion. (it also sells you tanks and men but right now we're gonna ignore that) What creates the maps isn't that the terrain options in CM:RT are specially made with Eastern Europe in mind (seriously tall grass is tall grass is tall grass) its that the units provided are Eastern Front 1944 German and Russian formations. So it gives a context for scenario creation. I've been doing some map making in CM:BS and right now with the terrain options available I could make terrain from the coast of France to Moscow. I could even do the MIddle-East, I could do the continental United States, I could do the jungles of South East Asia, I could do N. Africa, Italy, Greece, the low countries, Finland, China, mainland Japan, Australia. The thing that would be missing is Immersion, and if I had a guy who could mod up the textures I would have that too. Because at the end of the day what is the playable difference between jungle and heavy woods? There really isn't any. If I made a map that was absolutely covered in dense forest, with a heavy wood tile underlaying that, and then brushed it with foliage I could recreate a battle in Vietnam circa 1965. I could even change the temparature to hot and put some heavy rain on the map. Except that there would be no 1965 Americans, there would be no NVA, there would be no VC, there would be no ARVN. Which is stupid and not wanted by anyone. So yes, while the maps are important they aren't anywhere close to the sellers for the game. Maps are solely interesting terrain to use our toys on and map making is time consuming and tedious work. Edit; I will admit that the CM:BN brought us hedgerows, which I think is some of the only unique terrain we've gotten. We also don't have seasons. However, If say CM:Black Sea was extended throughout all 12 months you could then do all the places I mentioned throughout the seasons and you could even go farther to the North and South and do mountain peaks like the Himalayas.

Yea, the vehcile has to be operation. You could probably use a 1552 hummer, although the issue there is that the driver is outfitted like a normal soldier. If you really want to use an actual crew you could just use the two man crew from a Stryker. Say that the aircaft that was shot down was a helo or a two seater F-18.