Pelican Pal

I do know that CM:SF had trouble getting a lot of multiplayer traction. Whether that was because of the modern setting or that the game sucked for a long time is the question. Wargame definitely has a steep learning curve. A lot of it has to do with the mixture of real-time, large map size, and giant unit pool. You have to know what a Sheridan is, then know the relative range of all its weapons. Then you have to be able to physically handle controlling a multitude of units across 10s of kilometers. Which takes a bit of getting used to because your gut reaction is to have as much stuff on the field as possible. When the best course of action is to design your deployment around the mental capabilities you have. In CM you have relatively small unit pool and many units are practically speaking the same. Ranges are also much shorter to the point where your heavy hitters will all essentially be in range. CM is secretly not very demanding of the player.

Personally a SOP system would be absolutely improve my experience with the game. Tactical Ops has a very nice one and is available here if you want to see the demo in action.

The topic has wandered, and personally I find this path much more enjoyable. Like Steve said every game will have some sort of abstraction. When does that abstraction lead you from wargame to RTS is a gray area. Generally I think that games (not all, but quite a few) have a lesson that they want to teach, or a key point that they feel is important. That the game will emphasize one thing at the loss of detail in other areas. A way to put is "What is this designer trying to tell us, what do they think is important". Wargame (and if you pick one up I would buy Red Dragon) is a game about strategic maneuverability. It doesn't care whether the guy with the RPG is on the second floor looking out the rightmost window to the west. It does care that your platoon of tanks is out of position by 3 kilometer or that you didn't properly provide for anti-air coverage for the 10KM of supply lines from your board edge to the battlefront. On the other hand CM emphatically cares where that private with the AT4 is, or whether a squad is out of position by 50 meters. Flashpoint Campaigns thinks that command and control is paramount. Does it matter if you have a company of M1 Abrams if you can't contact them? Unity of Command says that supplies lines are critical. It doesn't really matter what is in this panzer division. What does matter is if you can get them ammo, gas, and food. Anyway. A one size fits all definition of a wargame isn't particularly useful.

I'm not sure what the BMP-3 has in it. However, the ATGM from the BMP-1 and BMP-2 are dismountable. Edit: Not in game. A ground mount is carried in the vehicle which allows the rifle squad to remove the ATGM and take it with them.

Even though modern combat does punish staticness to a great extent it doesn't mean that you are always moving. Your armored vehicles will not be moving constantly and it would be better off for them to be dug in than not. The way some of you are talking it sounds like these vehicles should always be moving. An example of a perfectly good use of dug in tank positions: You have a platoon of Mech. inf. in a deeply wooded area. You have some scouts at the edge of the woods providing observation and empty prepared positions along the edge of the woods. When the scouts spot enemy troops advancing your IFVs and infantry squads move from the safety of the deep woods to these prepared positions. They would now have 2-5 minutes of fighting time with an almost certain guarantee of not being engaged by indirect fire. You could even have secondary positions that you move to after a few minutes. I also wouldn't use either Gulf War as a reason to condemn static defenses. Iraq was a perfect storm of conditions for a modern army to trounce a 3rd world one. Mildly highjacking the thread. Will we see improved infantry fighting positions in the base game or any of the modules? Reinforced houses, overhead cover, thermal cover, and more complex defenses in general would be nice to see. While Modern definitely doesn't favor sitting a squad in a trench all day. I don't think static fortifications are useless. Its just that the simple trench from Red Thunder looks more and more like a death trap.

BlackAlpha, I was referring to Wargame when refrencing the map size. I also thought they you can currently link orders (up to 3). Unless I'm misunderstanding your feature request. I do know that they are working on a new game called Southern Storm which has a focus on Southern Germany/Austria and will have a wider array of forces and more engine upgrades.

Does the overwatch team still share suppression with the bounding team?

GoG sells modern games now. They just originally focused on old (pre 2005ish) PC games. Wargame is less Combat Mission and more Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm, which I recently purchased on Steam. The maps are gigantic and are essentially the scale of 3-4 (or more) larger CM maps. So you will commonly 2kilometer+ engagements with multiple independent engagements happening at once.

I calculated using a 30% cut. You will lose a percentage of your customer base to Steam once your product is on Steam. I can't be helped. There are too many advantages that Steam has to make buying from BFC's webstore worthwhile.

Lets have some numbers to play with. current customer base (CCB) is 1000. Price of CM is $50. Currently BFC makes 50,000 dollars for each release. They go to Steam. Now half of their CCB also goes to Steam. price remains the same. BFC makes $42,500 Lets say they get 100 new users on Steam. They now make $46,000 because they cannibalized their own user base.

http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/ " Welcome to Steamworks. Now your game can take advantage of a gaming platform that has over 40 million players worldwide and spans multiple systems. Whether you’re looking for matchmaking, achievements, anti-cheat technology, in-game economy systems with microtransactions, or the next big feature in gaming, Steamworks has what you need. It’s free: There’s no charge for bandwidth, updating, or activation of copies at retail or from third-party digital distributors. It’s freeing: With Steamworks you avoid the overhead and delay of certification requirements—there are none. Distribute your game on your terms, updating it when and as often as you want. "

There are a lot of free to play games on Steam, mods, and the ability to link games through Steam even if you bought them elsewhere. Steam doesn't require that you make them money to be on Steam. I can buy a game off of the Humble Bundle store and then register it to Steam. Steam gets no money from that transaction and probably loses money because they pay for server bandwidth to allow me to download the game. At this point Steam (Valve) is competing more for mindspace than actual sales. Na Veske, Personally I would prefer it. I would probably play CM more often, own more CM products, and enjoy my time with CM more than I currently do if it were on Steam. But at this point Steam is much more than a storefront for me.

Will it be possible to have vehicles come onto the field with a certain percentage of their subsystems damage in some way? With the increasing number of subsystems attached to modern vehicles it might be useful to have a number of them degraded at scenario start to represent previous contact with the enemy.

I think you are pushing it quite a bit there. There are definitely CM players who do care if it is on Steam or not. Anyway, I would find it but the search function appears to be not working for stuff posted on the old forum. Anyway, in the before time there was a post in this post this was detalied: BFC contacted Valve about putting CM on Steam. They got to look at the contract and found that what was being offered wasn't better than what they had now. They decided to continue with the current system. AFAIK that situation has never changed. There are also considerable risks to putting CM games on Steam. Some of these include: #1: Coding time to hook the games into Steam. This requires that projects that are sure to make money are put off. #2: Cannibalizing current customers at a lower price point. Right now 100% of money paid to BFC goes to BFC (not their own backend costs to support the store front). With Steam somewhere around 70% of the money paid in makes it to BFC. They need to make sufficient new customers to cover the loss of revenue from current customers going to Steam. #3: The team at BFC is probably pretty old. The first game was announced in like 1999. So lets be generous and say that they were all 25 at the time. That would make them something like 40 years old. Financial they individually probably cannot afford a setback at this point. There are solid financial reasons for BFC to maintain it's own store front. Personally I think a few of y'all can afford to calm down and stop throwing vast generalizations around.

The ability for infantry to knock out armor was present in CM:SF. It just tended to happen less often because of the terrain, enhanced sensors, enhanced lethality, proliferation of AT rockets, and general disparity of Blufor and Redfor. Grenades may also have gotten less of a bonus back then, but I do know it was possible. Infantry currently have a bit too easy of a time close assaulting armor. The basic idea of the abstraction is fine. Tanks should be vulnerable to infantry. However, these "AT" grenades maintain all the physical capabilities of the normally thrown grenade. So it is possible for an "abstracted close assault" to be thrown 25-30 meters, bounce, and then destroy a tank. Which is an absurd situation to have happen.

What he is asking for and what TRPs do are quite a bit different. A TRP is preplanned and in the game something that you would set to a location during deployment. Remembering target points would create dynamic TRP by calling artillery on the point during the game. So if, for example, I call a barrage of off map artillery on a forested ridge to knock out some ATGMs. The first artillery call would take 10 minutes to come in on target because the FO has to send all that info to the battery. However, if I find that after the shoot there are still operational ATGMs I could call down a repeat of the previous mission in a much shorter time (lets say 4 minutes) because the battery already has all that information.

The game has a "saving throw" system. Where when a soldier is intersected by a bullet. There is a chance that the bullet doesn't hurt them at all. This chance depends upon the terrain the soldier occupies. The problem is that eventually a saving throw will fail. So it allows weight of fire to kill off any infantry in any position given sufficient time.

You forgot to add "going to ground when a twig snaps loudly"

Which makes the assumption that entertainment can be rated on dollars per hour and be accurate, or more generally that entertainment can be translated into a single "currency" so to speak. Take two hours of CM, a movie, and a bar. Are they all equivalent? Comparing how much time or whatever you get out of something and then comparing it something else seems flawed from the outset unless you have a way to quantify things like fun, memories, social connections, etc... This all assumes near infinite time too. As for scenario design. I'll agree with Umlaut. Feedback for most work is pretty barren. Which isn't surprising really. Any single CM scenario can take people weeks to finish and while someone might play it at some point that could be months or even years from the date you released it. I also wonder about the actual drive that new content brings to scenario design. Especially smaller packs like this. At minimum I would guess 6-10 scenarios to fully use all the content in the pack. And beside some quickly made scenarios and La Fierre causway I don't see a jump in output.

Like others have said there are only visual and audio mods. As such, there aren't any really go to mods. Although I would highly recommend Juju's transparent tree mod. Which greatly aids readability of situations. http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=115052&highlight=trees http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=115256&highlight=trees For multiplayer you can always play via email which fixes most of the problems with living in Australia. If you do intend to play H2H via email I highly recommend using the CM head to head helper. Which streamlines the process quite a bit. http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=104387 If you are interested in trying out a H2H match shoot me a PM and we can set one up.

Apparently memories don't go farther back than a page.

If you're not previously familiar with the editor the whole system can seem kinda convoluted. Especially with the availability changing on date, and I think location.

It isn't... It is just an anecdote about those CM:SF copies that Paradox published. Sorry, boardgames.

I'm not sure why you are going on about the free demos, but okay. Why would you even make the comparison? "appreciate this product because model tanks are expensive!" why on earth am I buying model tanks, and why am I comparing that to CM?

One of those $5 mall copies is why I started playing CM. In the end it netted BFC: $170 total I think. With $60 of that being CM:SF modules. I still can't figure out why mentioning how expensive board games and model tanks are is supposed to make CM seem less expensive to people who think it is. They are board games... and model tanks....