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pord

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    Artillery Effectiveness against Infantry too high ? tests included

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    You are the commander of all your troops. You are supposed to tell them what to do. Entrenched troops implies they should be hiding as well (i.e. utilizing the entrenchments). If you as the commander do not tell them to hide (use the entrenchments) then the troops sustain high casualties. Makes sense to me.

    As an analogy, say you are fighting a tank battle. You put all your tanks on a 20m fire arc. The enemy does not. All your tanks get blown to bits. You could argue the tacAI should override your orders. But the tacAI cannot be as smart as the human player. As a smart human player, you give the orders and your units try to obey them.

    I suggest you rerun your test, and as soon as you realize your troops are going to be under artillery fire, you order them to hide. Compare your results then, since this is how the game is designed to work IMO.

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    Crucial notofications

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    I like the "Roster" idea as well. The visual aid for keeping track of units would indeed be a nice tool to have. Whether it be visual aids or text aids, anything to help information processing are must have's IMO. As others have said, nothing is being given to the player that isn't already available, but digging through the "menus" (i.e. clicking player units and tabs) is very time consuming and not my favorite part of the game.

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    Crucial notofications

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    @Pak40

    Concerning first contact notifications, I think I'd change my stance and agree with you based on your last argument. Notifications of even first enemy contact would largely NOT be considered "crucial" information. As you said, it would mostly trigger at the beginning of the game when first contact is being made, and first contact is quite often not meaningful contact.

    But, perhaps this discussion is all for naught if it can't be programmed as was suggested.

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    Crucial notofications

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    It's only on the same order of magnitude if you play small / tiny battles. That "15-50 elements" example is an average battle. We can't build a UI around that. I can have multiple battalions running around, each of which comprises dozens of elements. CC had a hard, and very low, limit on number of units. We don't.

    Any adjustments, or filtering, or options only increase the difficulty of getting the system into the game. And, again, with a large scenario no amount of filtering will help.

    You're the programmer, so I would have to defer to your technical knowledge that it isn't feasible.

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    Crucial notofications

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    @Baneman

    I agree it isn't a trivial programming task. Some decisions would have to be made about which events are crucial and which events could be easily tracked. It would certainly take a lot of time, but I am trying to argue that the player would benefit greatly from some kind of notification window. It would take a programmer (not me) to determine if the undertaking would be worth the perceived benefits. Having seen similar notification systems implemented in other games, I'd wager the benefits would be worth the effort.

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    Crucial notofications

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    A casualty alert would certainly be good and probably not too annoying. I actually think it's needed for real time play even though I rarely play real time. However, the original post suggested having an alert every time a unit came under fire, which is absurd even in a small battle. You would constantly be getting alerts, it would be very annoying and ultimately useless. If they got an alert once per unit per game, that might be tolerable.

    I agree. It definitely would not be feasible for every spot or unit coming under fire to be reported.

    Whether it can be done or not depends on which type of alerts you're talking about. The spotting alert, which Zebulan Pleasure Beast II suggested, would completely ruin fog of war (see my previous post). I seriously doubt BF will sacrifice their excellent spotting system on which they spent a lot of time developing.

    I did see your previous post, but I'm looking at it in the opposite direction. Instead of getting an alert each time a new unit is spotted (because how do you know if it is really a new unit or not), you should get an alert each time one of your units makes its first spot. This essentially differentiates the unit from a condition of having made no contacts vs. a condition of having made a contact. This is at least what I envision.

    No, not really close in scale. Close Combat has a max of 15 units IIRC. In CMBN a 15 unit battle is tiny and a typical battle is closer to 20-30 units with the possibility of splitting squads to get 40-50 units.

    It's approximately on the same order of magnitude. Minor adjustments could be made accordingly, or it could be turned off at the users request. I prefer tiny/small battles anyway.

    Also, IIRC, CC didn't alert you every time your units saw an enemy unit and it didn't alert you every time your units got fired upon, which were the suggestions of the first two posts in this thread.

    I agree with this post. I like the idea the original poster had, but obviously not all the details. I'm not trying to program the solution or anything, just trying to say the idea would be neat, and that it has been implemented with success in other franchise.

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    Crucial notofications

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    Well I disagree with you there. Just because it can be done does *not* mean it would be useful. I also fall into the camp that thinks that hundreds of messages would not be helpful at all.

    As I see it, the idea is that it would not be hundreds of messages, but only crucial ones. If a tank gets immobilized or damaged, a squad comes under fire after previously having no contacts, a unit is inactive for 10 minutes, etc. Stuff that doesn't happen hundreds of times per round. I find it hard to say this would not be useful if done unintrusively (a single line text box with small font would hardly be a distraction). And of course, an option to have, or not have the text displayed could be easily given.

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    Crucial notofications

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    I think having in-game unit notifications is an excellent idea and something that should definitely be added. A text log that indicates important notifications and keeps them in a chronological record would be invaluable. If you are playing turn-based games, it is less valuable, but it would still be helpful. In real time is where it would really shine. Having a squad get unknowingly mowed down while you are managing the other side of the map is awful. Blinking icons are great, but aren't much help if you are looking at the other side of the map. Indications like "waiting for orders" would also be great for units who have not done anything in a number of minutes, just to notify you in case you forgot about them.

    For the naysayers who think it just can't be done because there would be too many messages, you are wrong. Sure there would have to be some tweaking to determine what is deemed important or not, but the balance between too few/too many messages wouldn't be hard to find. The Close Combat series had similar messages, and they added greatly to the gameplay IMO. The scale of the battle of Close Combat is also similar to what is seen in CM games. To say it can't be done because it would be too annoying or would not be helpful are not valid arguments. If the programmers can program it, I ensure you it would benefit gameplay greatly.

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    ALLIED : Gustav Line BETA AAR Round Two - Eye of the Elefant

    in Combat Mission Fortress Italy

    Posted

    Thanks for sharing your thoughts so quickly. The map definitely appears very difficult to defend. Without looking at the map in 3d, it is very hard to say what I would have done differently from the get-go. The extreme effectiveness of the tall grass is something that could have been utilized in defense if it had been known beforehand. It seems a few bazooka teams could hide quite well in those weeds. As always, I can't wait to see more.

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    ALLIED : Gustav Line BETA AAR Round Two - Eye of the Elefant

    in Combat Mission Fortress Italy

    Posted

    Thanks for sharing some good pics. The long grass is indeed amazing concealment and seems to be realistically portrayed for the most part. I also enjoyed the AAHT action :)

    How do you feel the battle is going so far? Having any second thoughts about your original plans or unit purchases? Do you feel you are on track for a win, loss, or fairly even...perhaps its just too early to tell? I don't want to state my opinion since I could have insider information (even though I don't). Sorry if you don't like too many questions, but your thoughts help my tactical thinking. I want to see if my thoughts line up somewhat with yours.

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    4 to 6 weeks

    in Combat Mission Fortress Italy

    Posted

    I'm definitely excited to play GL, but while checking for an announcement everyday, I often spend time reading the boards and have ran into some cool stuff around here. Not least of which is the AAR stickied topics by Bil and GreenAsJade (these should be published as suspense novels or something). Lately, it seems like I have just as much fun reading these forums about GL as I will when GL is actually released, so I don't mind the wait.

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