nzgunner

will terrain mods work with the demo?

The maps without too many man-made features look good in a lot of the screenshots - but just going from the maps in the demo (in particular Road to Berlin), my gut reaction is that they lean more to abstract wargaming maps on a hexgrid, than simulations of real terrain.

Yes, this is what I was getting at - although horrible might be too strong. I think everyone would agree that PC:O's graphics are a lot worse than CM's - but textures and tree/grass modelling aside, the overall maps can be made to look more realistic (when zoomed right out) because of the flexibility in placing terrain elements. Michael's observations (below) about creating natural terrain are right on the money for me as well. I've always loved maps and studied cartography at university - although this was before GIS kicked in. I also like to play around in an application called Fractal Terrains, just to create landscapes etc - so I am sort of the opposite of the miniature painter (I used to have large armies of 5mm ancients where a few blobs of paint can have really impressive results). My ideal screenshot isn't a closeup of a paratrooper tossing a grenade through a window, it is one zoomed out enough to see the broader context. The other thing to bear in mind with realistic/natural terrain is that it goes hand in hand with the enormous effort put into ballistic modelling. Painstakingly calculating ballistic trajectories and armour angles can be undone a bit by 'encouraging' vehicles into preset angles (eg, always coming down a straight road at 90 or 45 degrees, and taking sharper rather than more gradual turns). I'm not putting this up as something that is broken with CM, just how the 'perfect' game could be made to work.

As I said in the OP, I am no stranger to CM and probably got CMBO* before the vast majority of people here - and I've also played and enjoyed similar games with graphical limitations (despite their age I think CC games with the top down 2d view are actually still visually appealing). I also own Advanced Squad Leader and a few other tactical board games, so I have a pretty good appreciation of simulating this level of conflict, the detailed mechanics that can go into it, and the design compromises that get made along the way. Graphics aren't the be-all and end-all, but they are obviously important to a large part of the player base or there wouldn't be so many graphical mods and screenshot threads. For me, zoomed out views are more interesting than extreme closeups, which is why terrain is more important to me that seeing the SS insignia on a unit model's collar - but again, the content of screenshots and mods suggests that mine is a minority view. In my OP I was mostly clarifying what I understood to be the case with the linear terrain features. I'm assuming that they don't have too much of an effect on game play. And in terms of game play, from what I've seen in different demos and reviews, CMBN is by far the closest simulation and strikes the right command/control balance. Maybe in future upgrades/overhauls of the engine the underlying grid will be made finer to allow for more natural looking terrain. Probably heresy to say it here, but I think CC makes the right compromise between displaying terrain (all hand drawn of course, and a lot more effort) and defining what this means on a very fine underlying grid - so you see nice curved roads, even though parts of them aren't actually road in the engine. * interestingly, when I bought CMBO it failed to arrive, but an email to the guys sorted it out and they sent off another copy at no extra charge - this was in the days of CDs and big printed manuals, and I've always remembered that excellent customer service experience from a small company just starting out

I want to like her, I really do, there is some awesomely good work done on uniforms and vehicles - it's just a shame it makes for beautiful models on passable maps rather than the other way round.

Hi I had the original CMBO and CMBB and really enjoyed them, although I eventually went back to CC and played that more through the mid-2000s. I couple of years ago I was tossing up between the new CM and PCO, and ended up going with PCO, mainly because of scope and content. But recently I've been going back to the CM demo and looking at other WW2 tactical games. So what does this all have to do with terrain? Well, the biggest hurdle for me are CM's terrain graphics - they looked ok a few years ago, especially stacked up against PCO, but they look really bad in comparison to other games like ToW. The bottom line is that the maps don't look natural, and I think this is mostly to do with the way it is created using linear features - roads and rivers in particular. I've seen some good terrain improvements in the screenshot thread (eg Aris' HD terrain mods), but they still seem to be constrained by the linear feature problem - and I assume that this is too embedded to change?