SgtHatred

This is a good idea, but I am sure it won't be popular here. I disagree with the assertion that I've been rude, but I will stop here.

If Slitherine needs to spend a month testing whatever their DRM/launcher issues are before publishing then their process is bad or their design is faulty. I know it is a matter of will, not technology.

Are you suggesting that you make a patch, test a patch, deploy a patch to users, then send it to Slitherine and they repeat the testing process? That doesn't seem reasonable. I have both CMSF2 and CMBS on both Steam and through Battlefront.com and I can see the differences in file structures. It isn't much. Slitherine moved the userdata into the install folder (bad move) and added their launcher while removing Battlefront's incorrectly configured uninstaller (not useful for the Steam version). I've been doing software deployments far more complicated than some game for more than a decade now. I've seen processes take weeks when they should take minutes before. If I was the King of Slitherine and the process to take Battlefront's output and turn it into a Slitherine Installer/Steam product wasn't something that can be done by an intern in an afternoon, heads would roll into the unemployment line. Sounds like Slitherine needs a solid kick in the ass. A month to add their wrapper and drm? I don't believe it. I'm sure it sat in someone's inbox for most of that time.

The process of uploading, distributing, and patching games with Steam. They've made it pretty simple, they even do delta update for you so you don't have to shovel the entire game down the pipe for every update. Uploading changes to steam and then deploying them to users is like a 3 click process. There is no magic or complexity here.

It's painfully simple. I could could teach my dog to do it. Probably why there is so much garbage clogging up Steam these days. Anyway, it looks like they made a bit of progress today. https://steamdb.info/app/1502380/depots/

Hopefully future patches won't take so long. The delay was pretty absurd given how simple the process is.

... that's what I said. 2 player turn-based multiplayer exists without PBEM.

OK, that makes sense. It sounded like you had uploaded a build to Steam and were just waiting for something that has no wait time, but if it is going through Slitherine first then I suppose that makes sense.

There is no delay between uploading a build to Steam and Steam distributing the delta patch. Do you mean you sent it to Slitherine and they are sitting on it?

One thing with dragons, and really any missile in CM games, is how easily tracks are damaged or destroyed from turret hits. I'm not an expert, so maybe that is completely reasonable, but it seems to me that with a missile impact on the turret, the hull of the tank would protect the tracks from feeling the effects of the missile impact. I've had several T64/T80 forces disabled by multiple Dragon hits on the turret breaking their tracks.

Aircraft in Combat Mission are extremely vulnerable to AA. I recently saw a F-15E Strike Eagle shot down by an igla in Shock Force. Unlikely. Combine that with planes doing single bomb runs making pass after pass? Even low-threat environments are deadly.

Being able to set point values for both sides would be the holy grail of Combat Mission quick battles. Modding the point value for some units would be a nice second. I find it surprising that at the lowest levels of exp/motivation, the M113 is only 10pts less than a BMP-1. The M113 is a battle taxi with a tac-ai that seems to want to avoid battle, which makes sense. Makes it difficult to do a US attack with mech forces.

Wait a second. I always considered the Soviet Union to be the "Empire" during the cold war? Is that crazy?

Well, that may make sense on a global level, but if you are an M901 commander and you are pretty sure soviet tanks are pointing their big guns at you, you'd hit the smoke launchers too.

I saw this explained in another thread. The ability to guide TOWs through smoke isn't something that happens until the TOW 2. With an ITOW or TOW, you can see the enemy, but you cannot shoot a TOW at it.

Ah, that makes sense. Only one of us ever really uses bunkers so I always assumed it was related to a bug from a few years ago where trenches and other obstacles would fly or sink. Bunkers are something I generally frown upon in CMx2 games. I've had Pak40s in bunkers hit directly by AVREs, leaving comically large hit decals on the gun shield but having no effect on the bunker, the gun, or the men inside, but I've also seen british rifle sections credited with kills on a bunker from 600m while still having their full load of grenades and piats, as if sporadic rifle fire at max range somehow was able to kill every man inside the bunker. The machinegun or general purpose bunkers are less problematic, and I assume those are the only types that exist in Cold War. I've not checked.

Excellent. It is by far the most serious bug I've encountered in CMx2 for the last couple years. While you are running this up the flagpole, I figure I will mention a few other multiplayer bugs I've encountered in Cold War, but they are not limited to Cold War. 1) Sometimes weapons get duplicated for the Client player. I used to think this was a result of reloading, but I have noticed it happen without reloading the game. I'm not sure what gameplay effect this has, but it producing some interesting visuals. Heavy weapons teams are most common, like double Dragon men, but I've seen men with extra LMGs or rifles. It seems pretty random. https://i.imgur.com/TSPnXGg.jpg https://i.imgur.com/nwhTjwP.jpg In the first 2 images, you can see Double Dragon men. At no point did either man have an opportunity to pick up the extra dragon, nor should they even if the opportunity presents itself. The last one is from Italy, which is a little off topic, but it's the same deal. Men with extra weapons for no reason. In the Dragon examples above, they lose their small arms. 2) If the Client player is defending and places mines, the mines will sometimes not have a game effect or be present for the Host player unless the game is reloaded. This one seems random and related to map size, with larger maps being more likely to have this happen. Other fortifications don't seem to have this problem. Save/Reload fixes this. I've reloaded the game to find large chunks of my force inside a minefield, which is painful. We now have a policy to save/reload after the first turn is played if a defending player has brought any mines. 3) If the Host player is the defender and places any fortifications, like mines, trenches, barbed wire, or anything of the sort, the Client player cannot see them but they do have a game effect (units struggle to pass trenches and drive around obstacles.) Mines however do not have an effect until the game is reloaded. The video below shows this. Saving and reloading seems to correct this. 4) You can also see in the video above that during turn playback a player (Host or Client) is able to cheat by grabbing and moving waypoints, when players are not supposed to be able to issue orders. This can be solved with a gentleman's agreement, but it should not be possible. 5) Bunkers placed by the Client player seem to have random elevation issues when the game is started. The Client player places a bunker, and it looks normal, but when the game starts after deployment phase suddenly the bunker has sunk into the earth. https://i.imgur.com/3UQJEmv.jpg Not as bad as when Trenches would fly or sink to hell but it can be frustrating after spending 45 minutes in a deployment to hit the start button and see your bunker sink to the point that it no longer has line of sight to the ground just in front. 6) Hills-Rough (1200 x 1424) 101 Attack.btt suffers from the same texture bug it had when Black Sea first launched. Many buildings are missing sides. Not only are textures missing, but you can see right through them. 7) Bridges with central supports seem to be impassible by vehicles in multiplayer turn based mode. An example of these bridges from Town-Water (1504 x 1008) 152 Attack.btt can illustrate. In singleplayer, this bridge is not a problem. No obstacles were placed on the bridge. 8 This one is not multiplayer specific, but if you play singleplayer realtime or multiplayer turnbased you'll notice that possible contacts bouncing and blinking, an effect that does not seem to happen during a WEGO singleplayer game. It's not game breaking, but it can be distracting. 9) During Map Preview, in turn-based multiplayer, the Client player is bombarded with the game Pause sound from realtime mode if he and the Host player are both using Map Preview. Not a game buster, but it is loud and annoying and forces the player to turn off sound until game start. The sounds then play aggressively for several seconds as if they've been queued up, but then they go away. 10) This one is more of an AI issue, but I have noticed repeatedly that when the Dragon AT guy is tasked as part of an assault team entering a building, he will enter the building with the Dragon in hand. I admire his willingness to try and use the Dragon for room to room fighting, but I think he'd be better off with his M16. 11) Despite being unsupported, you can set reinforce groups for Quickbattle units in the quickbattle setup screen using the 1-5 keys. They all appear at the 5 minute mark but are not bound by quickbattle setup zones, so they can appear in some pretty exciting places. Again, the simple solution to this would be to just not do it, but it shouldn't be doable. 12) This one I can't replicate and only happened once, but we had a Client player with a Strela team spawn without ammunition. Not sure why that would be. Other teams on the map had their ammo. 13) If a Dragon attempts to fire at a tank while it is charging the Dragon's position, the team will fire the missile even if the tank is only a few meters away, and the missile will wrap around the turret of the tank and fly off into the ground somewhere. I don't think this one is multiplayer specific, but I have only really played multiplayer. I would expect that if a tank enters minimum range the team would not fire at the tank. Maybe this is expected behaviour and the way it is shown is just funky? I didn't get a video of this one unfortunately. I've been meaning to write this up for a while, myself and several of my friends have played an absurd amount of CMx2 multiplayer through the pandemic, and Cold War is the best yet, so it has finally convinced me to get off my ass and do it. The save/load crash bug is by far the most important, as most of these other ones can be worked around or laughed off, but it would be nice for some of these bugs to see some care and attention. If you need any elaboration or save games I can probably provide. Despite these issues, CMCW kicks a lot of ass.

You can set reinforcements for Quickbattle using the 1-5 key, but they all come it at 5 mins and you can't change that. Also, they are not guaranteed to appear where in your spawn area. Pretty sure it's just a holdover from when they copy and pasted the interface from the scenario editor to create the quick battle editor. This should explain.

34" Ultrawide is a real sweet spot for gaming, including Combat Mission, as long as small text is readable to you. I always thought the 49" monstrosity would be too wide to game with.

Ran into a crash bug in TCP/IP turn based mode. Play the game, save the game, and attempt to reload the game. The reloaded game plays for maybe 30 seconds before crashing. Attempting to save again after reloading causes an immediate crash. I save every turn, and it turns out that every save with that particular game causes the same crash upon load. Of the 8 or so TCP/IP turn based games I've played, this has happened with 2 of them. I've passed the save games around to others who ran into the same crash upon loading the save. It seems the save is corrupted, and every save during that game is corrupted. Attempting to load the broken save file also appears to create a bunch of .tmp files in the Cold War user directory, but that may be unrelated. After this happened for the 2nd time we ran a couple of tests using the last map we played on (Town-Water (1504 x 1008) 152 Attack.btt) and found that if we both loaded with just forward observer sections, we could play a turn, save and reload and keep playing without difficulty, but if we used the same forces from the real game, (BTR force with Shturm and Shilka defending vs a US Mixed Mech force ) playing a single turn, saving and reloading causes the crash. Maybe a specific unit is causing the crash? Haven't narrowed it down yet. Been playing a lot of every CMx2 game in tcp/ip turn-based this year, this is the first time I've seen this, seems related only to Cold War. tldr; TCP/IP turn-based games sometimes corrupt every save made so they can be reloaded, but cannot be played for even 1 turn before a CTD. The savegames : https://1drv.ms/u/s!Amy6LKaJeToDgplZWb7COg2MRhIwvw?e=NXN1aE https://1drv.ms/u/s!Amy6LKaJeToDgplY-pfznaaqKBnyAQ?e=aPFfHi

It's a database problem, different browsers will not magically work.

Steam is pretty good about preventing venue shopping. This is also why it's generally not a good idea to use a grey market key purchase site to get cheap games on Steam.

You can probably use Black Sea as a decent comparison. Black Sea is a solid $60 USD on the Battlefront store wherever you are from (I am pretty sure, I have only been from 1 place), but the price set on Steam has some interesting deviations based on location. https://steamdb.info/app/1502380/ For me, a Canadian, I am actually getting a 6.6% discount if I buy it from Steam at $68CAD, or $56USD. An Australian is not so lucky, paying A$84.95, or $66USD. There are all sorts of reasons for this, but you'll see this pattern with a lot of games on Steam and other game platforms. It's always the same places like the EU, UK, and especially Australia that sort of get boned when games start getting priced in local currency. You are likely to save a few bucks buying directly from Battlefront.

I've been really disappointed with CAS in the few multiplayer quickbattles I've played. Aircraft cost rather a lot in terms of points, but even if limited AA doesn't destroy it or convince it to leave accuracy leaves a lot to be desired, with an F4 making multiple passes dropping only 1 bomb giving AA extra opportunities to shoot it down. Even without AA interference they are kinda anemic.

The cluster variants for US artillery seem to be missing from the Quickbattle setup for any year.