Thewood1

ACE has absolutely nothing to do with it. ACE is the most basic mod. Look at MCC Sandbox, HETMAN, or maybe even something out of the box like Zues. If you aren't using any of them, you are only using a small % of what ARMA is capable of.

My point is if BFC doesn't do something, in anther 10 years we will still all be sitting here debating this. The very same people with no one new. And instead of the average age being 45, it will be 55.

What ARMA does is open up is AI to modifications. Some community guy still has to do it. Its not easy and takes a long time to build a mod and then understand how to use it. CM is much easier to build scenarios with. But is much, much more limited in what you can do. YOu have to have a very committed community and be committed yourself to learn and use the game. ARMA is full tactical simulator at this point. Anyone who thinks it is just a shooter is speaking from complete ignorance and a lack of following anything going on with the game.

Again, ARMA is not just a shooter. There are a number of people that use it at the same level as CM is at. It was discussed several pages ago. Not saying it better or worse than CM as a game, but the amount of ignorance around what other games can do is frustrating and I am worried will slowly allow those games to draw people away from CM. In fact, looking at the number of new people coming to CM highlights that.

C&C AI was and is very poor. Can anyone say "tank rushes"?

A better comparison would be the strat AI from the original CM1 games. It needed no set up. But it was single minded...objectives. It would be nice to have a default AI plan like that sets up regardless of map. But I think the better direction is where BFC is heading...more features for the current AI planning tools. In CMSF, a designer's hands were pretty tied with the tools available. Now there are some useful and flexible tools for designers. But it would be nice to have a default AI that you could use right off the bat.

I have a really hard time finding the hit decals with autocannons. I see .50 cam MG sometimes, but not 25mm decals.

I think there could have been, but CMSF wasn't exactly the best foot forward to introduce everyone to CM2.

The games are different and can't be compared feature for feature, but ARMA can be made to accomplish the same thing...higher level tactical command. The argument is there is no game out there that compares to CM. And yes, if you narrow it down enough you can make it correct. But there are games out there that will tend to draw people away from CM because it might be considered old school. Two products can accomplish the a similar thing and have completely different development paths and features and functions.

I think this discussion is like people arguing over TV vs streaming. Its a demographic thing. I suspect the age here is twice what the average age is over on the BI forums. Those are people that will look at how a game is built and judge it on that. Even if ARMA is only 80% of what CM is, people on that forum will stick with it.

But you can spin that the other way...in ARMA you have to set up firelanes and worry about friendly fire. Very rarely is that a consideration in CM. Again, there are good and bad about both. I am not trying to sell people on one over the other. I like both games. But a lot of people here have blinders on thinking that CM is the only game in town. Just look at the activity on BFC's forums compared ro ARAM. Its an entire world of tactical gaming. Its hard though. CM is so much simpler to play. But if you have the ambition, you can get ARMA to do about anything.

My point is ARMA, especially ARMA 2, has grown to the point that people use it for similar activities as CM. No, its not a direct competitor to CM, but when a game that sells hundreds of thousands of units, adds features that will scratch a similar itch as CM, you now have a solid alternative to CM. Is it a direct feature to feature clone...no. But real-time company-level in ARMA with morale and suppression modeled...yeah it can do that if you knw what you are doing. Does it do everything CM can do...no. But it does some other things that CM can't do. SO if you are one of those hundreds of thousands of players playing ARMA, and you want to try your hand at platoon or maybe even company-level command, try Hetman add-on in ARMA 2 or CM. Hetman is hard to get a handle on, but quite a few people play it and other add-ons that allow higher level command and sandbox play. I don't want to portray ARMA 2/3 capabilities in the CM space as easy to use, they aren't, but some of them are becoming official and standard parts of ARMA and might keep those players from ever considering CM.

I don't want to compare which game is better...this is about people saying there are no alternatives to BFC and CM. There are. And dismissing a game because it doesn't fit a very restricted definition of how a wargame is defined is a good way to watch your market get eaten away. There are alternatives out there and people are playing them. ARMA II/III is a tool box that will let you do almost anything you want if you have the time and experience. I come back to CM when it comes to wanting a more simple experience that doesn't make my brain feel like sludge after a week of setting it up and playing. Anyone who dismisses ARMA as an FPS alone, has not played beyond the basic level. btw, as to armor hitpoints...we don't even know what BFC uses. Has anyone actually seen the armor values being used. At least in ARMA, its open and changeable.

No, there is a real Armor mod that converts most units to real armor values and makes sure modern ballistics are used. Even the vanilla system is not just hit points.

There have been significant functions added over the years to allow you to use ARMA as tactical simulator. There have been armor mods to make armor more realistic and whole game versions around you being a commander vs a shooter. It is the only way I play it and I play it a lot. I have played with several hundred soldiers on each side and scripted to perform actions that can be adjusted in real time. There is morale and suppression that has been added in. Radio communications are modeled. Artillery and air support. I have built and played as a sandbox game as complicated scenario as most you will see in CM. It is not easy to learn how to do it and took me years of experimenting. It can all be recorded and the mod community is huge. Combat Mission's main benefit is they do WW2 very well. The play is a lot easier. And you can manage large battles easier. But for fidelity in commanding company-sized engagements, ARMA has some good/bad spots and CM has some good/bad spots. Building a scenario is a lot of work and testing in ARMA...much more so than CM. As to Wargame, you can set it up as a sandbox to some extent. You'll never have the fidelity in scenario building as a sandbox like CM. The real point is that the market is speaking. There are few new people coming to CM. ARMA has hundreds of thousands buying everything they can.

And I don't think we are talking cross over of genres. My concern is that BFC gets squeezed out from multiple sides as newer wargame players get their tactical fill through those other games that many people on this forum dismiss.

The point being missed in the back and forth is that old genres like wargame, RTS, and FPS are converging. Go and look at ARMA and Wargame:RD discussions. They are having the same types of discussions about equipment and tactics as at BFC. I play ARMA not as an FPS, but as a wargame. I play Steel Beasts the same way. In fact, both of those games have added functions specifically so they can be played that way. Wargame added pauses specifically as feedback from traditional wargamers. To dismiss any of those games as simple Command & Conquer type games because they aren't turn-based shows some pretty solid ignorance. You can play them as a clickfest, but you can also play them in a nice comfortable session at your own pace.

Ditto on that. That is an excellent perspective.

The funny thing about Steel Beats is that even with all of that work, they only now look as good as CM's vehicle textures. But LOD and terrain stuff is better. And Steel Beats's infantry is lacking, even with recent updates. But they do combat engineering better than CM. That is the one big operational issue I have with CM. It really glosses over the role combat engineers play in modern war.

I think the part that frustrates a lot of players who complain about straight up "pretty graphics" in CM are sometimes complaining about the illogical nature of how CM works. Its that with the current graphics, high-end PCs should be smooth as silk. Instead, you get this mish-mash of hardware combinations that seem to work very well with CM, while top end GPU/CPU combinations can sometimes be a slideshow. I could easily live with the graphics, if I know I can get good results from a PC I buy. It sometimes seems to be a crapshoot.

Steel Beasts did a major graphical overhaul last year and it made a huge difference in the overall quality of the game. But it sure looked like a long and painful haul for eSims. I think sooner than later BFC will have to do it as well. OpenGL is not a standard with a very bright future and I would think it makes it difficult to do some of the basic things that most gamers expect out of the box in a game in 2015.

to add...I would ask for some UI improvements before a major investment in graphics. Compared to CMSF, CMBS is almost completely different game from a UI perspective. But, I would like to see a lot more standardization within the game and compared to the libraries available to a typical windows developer.

Just for reference, I am running an i7-4710 at 2.5GHz on a laptop with an nvidia card and win8.1. I am getting 20-30 fps on best/best with AA of 8 and no vert synch. That is on a large map for First Clash. I also have shadows on, shaders on, and high trees. I should also point out that I have never seen the CPU below 3.3GHz even on the most demanding apps. That is because the cooling system in my MSI is awesome. Based on cpu benchmarking my i7 is about 8000 on the benchmark. It puts it about 1/3 from the top of CPUs. Your CPU gets a 6363 (still pretty good in raw multi-core power) on the list and it falls about half-way down the list. I am not sure what your clock speed is for the 6300. I would say that you would see anywhere from 15-20 in heavy scenarios to 30 in medium scenarios. I personally see map size and complexity a bigger issue in CPU impact than anything else. The big caveat is the interaction between the GPU and CPU, as well as bus speed and HD speed. btw, I still think there are issues with the AMD and ATI chipsets that inhibit OpenGL performance in games...but that is uneducated observation.

If you just look at graphics, yeah, I can see that. If you see ARMA 2/3 all up, it looks almost real. You can make CM look really good depending on the angle and height of the camera, but the LOD is a visualization killer, along with soldier animations. I am not complaining, but I can see where someone would think that CM is subpar. Let's face it, BFC is squeezing the last dribs out of a dated engine on a standard (OpenGL) that is not well supported by the two main card producers. I actually don't have a problem with the graphics. That is maybe 20% of why I play. But I play a lot of ARMA and even a six year old ARMA game beats the latest release from BFC. Some of my ARMA friends can't believe I play Combat Mission and Steel Beasts because of some of the graphics in the games.

I used to run Il2 Forgotten Battles in OpenGL on my old laptop with an ATI and it started having a lot of glitches and performance issues about 3 years ago and I had to switch to DirectX. Il2 gave you the option.