kraze

OK, started playing the Battle Pack 1 with single battle called "Honor". ****SPOILER ALERT!**** And I have to say it kinda sucks - and here's why. It's a US Stryker company assault on 3 compounds held by russian motorized batallion(?) together with a support of two T90A platoons. Now the worst thing about this mission is that it does not make sense from the tactical standpoint. Russians are heavily outnumbering Americans and to assault an enemy position you need at least 3:1 advantage realistically (and 8:1 if it's a town - which it is - ideally) - but not only that - they also possess tanks and some MANPADS - which are impossible to spot with drones (and you have to get lucky to guess the position to begin with). And if those MANPADS get to your only Apache... well... And, yeah, CMBS is a game and 3:1 advantage for US perhaps will make the mission too easy, so I'm not arguing in favor of that. What I'm arguing for is to balance forces at least somewhat adequately. Ask yourself a question - will NATO command even consider sending soft-armored company to deal with such a major entrenched force armed with tanks? Yeah I did get 'tactical victory' on my walkthrough so I did win - but at what cost? http://i.imgur.com/CcrA1g6.jpg

A few people I know run sandy bridge (that's 2nd gen) i5/i7 at 4.4 GHz or more since the moment they bought them when they were new. Which is about 8 years now. Intel CPUs are sturdy and buying a K intel and not OC'ing it will be a large waste of its potential. It's like buying a Lamborghini and driving it only on busy city roads within speed limits. Keep in mind that you can do a ~1 GHz OC of CPU by using multiplier only - this doesn't increase voltage, only temperature (and not by much, single digit numbers) - meaning that with a good cooling it doesn't hurt lifespan at all. Gamers love K intels for a reason. Especially in the land of ever poorly optimized niche "serious" gaming.

Then you should notice a difference At least going from a Phenom II to Haswell i7 netted me about 50% FPS increase with everything on max in CMBS Same goes for Athlon XP to Phenom II during CMSF era. The game really loves itself all the CPU power it can get. Once again do overclock your 7700k (with a good cooling system). It's a guaranteed ~25% free performance increase for all CPU as you should be able to achieve 4.7-4.8 GHz fairly easily and can push for more if lucky.

Wait... is this a new game while Mius Front is still nowhere near content-wise compared to Operation Star?

Ah here begins yet another quest of finding a working proxy to purchase a puny $10 DLC because all 3 different ISPs I use are blocked from accessing the store.

My ass is pure magic like that

For CM you need the best single-core performance. Sadly. Get i5 that ends with K (save money, don't get i7 which is exactly the same thing + hyperthreading which doesn't help with gaming), get good cooling, overclock i5 (recent ones can go up to 5 GHz per core if you are lucky) and enjoy. As for storage... I've tried running heavily modded (meaning more stuff to load) CMBS from HDD and SSD (850 EVO which is quite good) and didn't notice any difference. It still took quite a bit to load. Something else might be the bottleneck when it comes to loading.

Steel Beasts AI is good - tactical-level that is. Much like its counterpart in CM it will take care of much of "micro" stuff. Better than somewhat passive AI of SABoW that's for sure. Strategic-level... well much like CM it depends on waypoints and scripting. Saying that playing single-player is fun, improved by the in-game editor that for example lets you quickly change vehicles you want to control in a given mission for a different kind of play (and in-depth features with more effort of course). Now when it comes to single-player content that comes with the game it's a different thing. Being a training software SP content was always on a backburner. Most missions you will play are community-made (there are a lot) and many are good, with best included into Personal Edition itself. And recently the ability to have branching campaigns (similar to Combat Mission) was added with one made by devs based on Yom Kippur war. I've played M1 Tank Platoon 2, but it's far behind the fidelity of SB Pro PE now.

Steel Armor BoW is the game that made me shell out $125 for SBProPE because I've realized I like virtual tanks a lot.

As a fan of real-time play in CM games I enjoy Graviteam Tactics a lot. Yeah it's realtime (which again is a non-issue for me, on the contrary) and in some ways simplified compared to the tactical depth of CM - namely infantry. And no you don't miss most of the action - in that regard GT is way slower than CM and battles do take time - not a bad thing, just different. The major thing that sets GT apart for me is its dynamic campaigns. You choose where to fight, when to retreat and resupply and all losses are persistent. Yeah it's possible to fail after several pyrrhic victories. Plus vehicle damage system is quite nice visually, you can really see bits and pieces fall off tanks and APCs... Now you may have noticed the word 'visually' - yeah in that regard CM simulates vehicle system damage to a much deeper degree, just doesn't represent it as well. Granted visuals may be due to Graviteam Tactics having a really nice tank simulator spinoff - Steel Armor: Blaze of War. Highly recommended if you are into tanks and even if you have Steel Beasts Pro - since it's quite a different beast. I think GT shouldn't be treated as an "competition" to Combat Mission really. It is actually heavily inspired by Close Combat and in many ways plays really similarly, except in full 3D. Now another question - which one to pick - Operation Star or Mius Front. I own them both and, well, MF is quite raw at the moment. Content-wise it's far behind Operation Star with all DLCs and is mostly a (very nice) UI overhaul instead of a proper sequel. They even resell you the same map DLC from Operation Star without any change. So if you can stomach a cluttered UI of GTOS (and we wargamers do love horrible UIs, or so all those devs think) - it's a far better choice right now, especially since it goes on sale quite often with all the additional content. Mius Front needs time and sadly doesn't offer many new things... I'd say even less than CMFB vs CMBfN.

And Russian T72B3 and T90, Vystrels and MTLBms in the hands of "peaceful Donbass miners" are a clear sign they found them inside their mines

Guys you are confusing something here. Let me help you out When some country voluntarily joins NATO (for which it has to jump through dozens of hoops), so not to get strangled by the "brotherly love" of Russia - it's EVIL When Russia invades the country that has not joined NATO and starts raping and murdering people there - it's GOOD. The fact that after each extension of the "helping hand" of Russia more and more countries run into NATO screaming - should be ignored. Hopefully things are now clear, you members of silly NATO countries that for some reason do not like russian 2000lb humanitarian aid.

Battle pack was announced for CM Black Sea, since the module isn't coming any time soon (because CMFI, CMRT)

1.5 mln inhabitants somehow take all the free space and russians have nowhere else to put their tanks and artillery? I guess that's why they have to shell ukrainian positions from inside Donetsk. Oh come on dude, we are on a CMBS forum, you are not fooling anyone here with "local militia" riding T72B3s, MTLBMs and Vympels, while russkies in UN and PACE, who have "nothing to do" with this, keep dictating what laws Ukraine should and should not make OR ELSE. Try forums where people can't tell T72 variants apart or don't know OOBs and are just naive. Nagorno-Karabah - filled with russian "peacekeepers". Transnistria - filled with russian "peacekeepers". South Ossetia and Abkhazia - filled with russian "peacekeepers". Peculiar turn of events - the moment a former USSR country capitulates before "peaceful local militia" seizing some territory - suddenly that territory gets filled with russkie army - like it was never different. Crimea is exactly the same example. Didn't fly in Donbass apparently. Somehow I don't see any "internationally recognized sequence of events" that led to an international acceptance of russian occupation of any of these territories. So better quit repeating the same excuses that stopped working in Afghanistan, we both know how it really is

Trying to remove occupants from someone's soil is nationalistic hysteria? Why even fight any wars then? Simply surrender to foreign occupation - after all occupants are people too. Yeah they kill and rape your compatriots - but not liking that is nationalistic hysteria and we can't have that. I mean just check out history - those were some really great times for everyone who was occupied by Russia during past century. Who wouldn't want to live in such misery today? After all russian occupied territories of Moldova, Azerbaijan and Georgia live in such prosperity now. OH WAI- And Crimea which went from a tourist center of Ukraine into a decaying military junkyard with zero tourism and full economic isolation in under a year. Oh why these stupid ukrainians don't want to reap the benefits?

Always sounds funny when somebody calls an occupation of the territory of another country and murder of its people - "liberation". I wonder if russians in this thread or across the internet even understand how much hatred for themselves they plant into ukrainians for centuries to come by being so hypocritical - or even care

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/01/27/the-flare-path-sequel-this-please/ Check this out, it's a game (mostly) done by one of Battlefront's founders no less. I can say that after reading this and trying the game - its mechanics hooked me up. Because it plays like Combat Mission, except with those things we don't have in these games - combat planes. There's a simultaneous turn-based system and you give orders in advance and then see how it plays out - and since right now I'm playing stuff like Falcon BMS - those orders I give out do make sense and bring predictable results. Not to mention that you are giving those orders using a UI flightstick and a throttle too which looked weird on screenshots but gives a nice sense of interactivity. But the game does show its age. A modern sequel of this using CM engine at least would be really cool.

Yeah, should they abandon the trenches/foxholes?

Russia thus far has paid back US less than 1% of a truly massive land-lease and act like dicks in relation to guys who saved them during WW2 - so I wouldn't worry about that

Can't access battlefront.com - can't buy, sigh

The problem is that the western perception of the conflict is often no better. In many ways thanks to western media as well. For example one could use the term "separatists" if there are ones. But because of the obvious facts of russian occupation with russian nationals being in every single "ruling seat" of fake "people's republics" - it's 'russians' and a fair amount of 'collaborators', not "separatists". It's a russian century-old trick dating back to the war with Ukraine of 1917-1918 when russkies invaded with a massive army but kept telling everyone it's a yet another "People's Republic" rising.

When using term "separatist" one should ask himself what exactly could've separated brotherly peoples of Lugansk and Donetsk Peoples Republics.

You can watch youtube videos of ArmA1 You can watch Youtube videos of ArmA1 vs ArmA2 and conclude that there's no change bar graphical differences. You just aim and click LMB to fire. Likewise you can watch Youtube videos of XCom EU and XCom2 and conclude that they play no different and the only difference is graphics. You just send your guys into cover and click to fire. Sure in CM interface looks the same and you give orders in the same way as 7 years ago and core gameplay is exactly the same across the same series of games - it's a sequel after all, how else should it look on Youtube? But seriously disregarding something that changes the way the game plays in many ways as "duh it's just some new vehicles and forests, rivers? meh" - is unwise at best. If ~7 years of advances in gameplay, AI, features and simulation aren't enough for you, then what is?

This should be up to TacAI improvements, since dealing with stuff like this is it's primary goal. Implementing this would add a lot of unnecessary micromanagement - the lack of which is one of the main strengths of CM. It's already too complex and time consuming when fighting large missions and commander should not be dealing with such minor issues

Except these "negligible" changes make the game play different in many ways vs. Shock Force where a platoon of M1s reliably massacred a company of T90s, air assets were the indestructible weapon of doom (hence their gross underutilization in more or less balanced missions) and defenders had easy time turtling because no precision ammunition came at them after UAV broke their saving fog of war. All this was already present in the timeline of CMSF but not simulated. And yes, tactical (and even strategic) AI was improved greatly, making fighting it a lot more fun than Shock Force. Especially due to triggers, that you dismiss so easily - but they turn stale pre-set missions where all AI plans are set in stone and will never change no matter the situation - into something a lot less predictable. If you dismiss many gameplay changes and new features as "incremental" or "negligible" in a more or less direct sequel - then the question is - what will constitute a proper "difference"?