Kevin2k

Pretty much all the design and marketing decisions of the CM2 games make sense to me, even before you explained them again the past days. Yet this family specific behaviour of the 5 CM2 games leaves me wondering why. Some examples: The terrain and building features of each game are not identified unique. Meaning that if you put such gamedata from another game it will mostly overwrite the appearance of terrain, yet not enterily; some things are unique. As if Battlefront copied the whole CMBN game over to CMFI, then started to paint over the existing bitmaps and such. I imagine this as the fastest way to get results, but this way ensures that that game cannot be unified. At least not without redefining all the terrain textures. In Final Blitzkrieg there are quite few new terrain objects, like fences, but they are not present in CMBN v4. I imagine in a unified workflow this would automatically get ported over, but seemingly not in CM2. The UI graphics in CMFB are a little different from CMBN. One cannot copy over a UI graphics mod from one to the other. Tank riders are supported in only some Engine 4 games. Then I guess terrain specific logic, like bocage properties, could also be in the same codebase with if/switch-case statements. Or different code defines for includes. But I have no way to percieve that in the end product. Another thing, and this is unavoidable: there is the legacy that intitial release of CMBN has all the gigs of data installed, and a developer may want to reorganize that, rename things, relocate things; but then all customers have to reinstall. Though I have seen smart patches from other companies do such a reorganisation: not one datafile looked like the same after. I am talking about the Strike Fighters 2 game/sim from Third Wire, which is also very nice example of how to make 5 games seperate yet mergable. The above is just me wondering, maybe a lack of understanding. While I am putting effort to write this I might as well put this here too: 1) Why no support for PNG, TGA or DDS instead of uncompressable BMP images? BMP is an obsolete image format, and alpha channel BMP cannot be used in Photoshop (In my old version 6.0) So I have to copy-paste over from a program called Pixelformer for that reason. 2) As I said earlier, Please make the quick battle 'mix' force a force with mixed infantry and armor, at all times. Or add another option to give just that, in case you feel there is a misunderstanding about the meaning of a 'mix' force. It is annoying to fight a 'mix' force only to find it could not stand a chance with what the game came up with, afterwards. Quite a few times there is not one infantry unit in such a force, and I actually have to dismount some AFV crew to have at least some people to occupy a building. It gets tedious. And I think part of the essence of the Quick Battle is to be able to provide a game that is less tedious and time consuming. Sorry for that complaint, but I want to state it as clearly as I can.

Great to see all the new content that is in the works. Yet I am just a very casual player and have not even finished a single campaign in any of the games yet... Personally I am more interested in improvements to the game engine (especially for use in quick battles) compared to more late war content. CMSF2 is a very exciting prospect in that regard. I assume it will feature the quick battle unit selection dialog and some more agressive quick battle AI. At the delayed release of CMFI engine 4, it was hinted that there were some unit data fixes that could be applied to CMBN as well, in a patch. Then maybe tune the unit behaviour under artillery/mortar fire, especially for the CMFI gameplay. Is such a patch still planned?

Glad to hear that it has been improved, I use it for the brief time that I have to play a small battle. You have a good point with the KG Peiper. It raises the question though; what does a 'Mix' force mean exactly? In my imagination it meant part infantry + part armor. What you describe for KG Peiper could be called a 'Historically Random' force. Would there be no infantry around these King Tigers at all? My personal aim for a quick battle force is at least 1 tank with at least 25 infantry. The rest can be whatever. Otherwise things get tedious and prolonged. Either the Armor cannot recon enemy positions or the infantry has no mobile heavy support. Usually there is armor in the force. I am not sure if I ever got 100% infantry in a Engine 4 Mix force game. So that is good. But I still hope for a >=25 infantry check added to the 'Mix' force auto-picker. Restarting is not much of a problem in case you don't like your own force, but preferably the enemy force is an unknown to the player that has to be discovered through playing.

I would like to use the auto picker. But using 'Mix' tends to regularly give combat forces that almost exclusively consist of Panzerjager marder II's. That is in Italy 1943. In CMBN it often does the same with Tracked Flak 38s, Hummels and Sturmtigers. It is kind of a waste, since just a little extra infantry would make it a much more usable force. The auto picker 'Mix' setting seems to like german units consisting of special purpose armor. For the allies it works better.

I am sure the developers are aware of the their announcement and the current date. So this is what it feels like to follow a kickstarter project Doesn't matter to me, will just play the other games until it is done.

Eh no, maybe poor english? I am referring to the very last german eastern front offensive actions. Soldiers encountered evidence of atrocities (by russians towards the german civilians), which gave rise to the sentiment that surrendering to russians was no longer an option. I can't say how rare or widespread that was, the point is that such things matter for the decision to fight on or surrender, no matter which side one fights for.

I figure there is another factor: in WW2 German soldier fighting spirit was affected by (Russian) treatment of prisoners and treatment of civilians in German territory etc. Or at least the perceived treatment.

We need a volunteer to have those 'tracking balls' attached to his joints, then do some cool war moves with a wooden gun. Karate belt required for the melee part.

I figure the bundle is only good deal in case you upgrade at least 3 Combat Mission games to v4.0. For 1 or 2 CM games it is still cheaper to just buy the separate upgrades. Though you never know in hindsight. Like in hindsight I could have saved myself money by purchasing the CMBN complete bundle, instead of gradually paying for modules and packs in the past year.

Nope: "and the Upgrade mega pack with all 5 Families covered (including CMFI)"

Quoted from the battlefront.com front page: Italian Vacation! CMFI News Friday, 23 December 2016 Due to some technical issues on our end, Fortress Italy sales are on holiday until mid January! This gives us the time needed to properly to finish transitioning the code for this fine product to Game Engine 4. For those of you who are currently using the orignal (Game Engine 2) version of the game, Upgrade 3 remains available for sale at the new discounted price of $5. Upgrade now and be all set when Upgrade 4 is released. Last Updated ( Saturday, 24 December 2016 )

Someone more into this should answer. But my suggestion would be: 1) Don't make strings larger then before. 2) If you insist, you can try making them shorter, but the unused characters should be filled with hex value '00'. So the new string together with the '00' characters behindit, is the exact same size as the original string. And then just try if the game accepts that, or not. I don't know.

I never hex edited things for this game, but for other projects I use xvi32 or HxD. I suppose HxD is the better one https://www.mh-nexus.de/en/ If you keep the string size the same you can't really go wrong. The resulting file size will then remain the same as well. Like change the string 'tank-turret' to 'tank-turre2' or 'tankturret2'.

1) I agree the Dev could have tried harder to get game exposure. Around 2012 I suggested that fans of the series better stop whining and instead try to expose the game more themselves, by posting articles or youtube video's ( too little, too late ). The dev did not think Steam was viable financially. I don't know his stance towards Good old Games (GoG). Besides some old CD releases, these games were only ever sold in the ThirdWire store**, and since the switch to mobile games the PC games are actually hard to find on the website. Rather Strange... (**Strategy First had a contract for 'Wings over Europe' and published it on CD and seemingly also on Steam) 2) I figure your friends did not really try to map out their options regarding other available Jet Sims. For example, if they frequented SimHQ before 2012 they would have noticed the Strike Fighters reviews (at that time SimHQ actually had material to cover ). Besides the 90's classics there are just three AFAIK: Lock-on DCS / Strike Fighters / Falcon BMS. Some game-specific forums hardly ever mention alternatives; Like on the closecombatseries.net forums nobody cares to write about 'Combat Mission'.

That I can agree with

Well, I am not at all worried about PC games popularity in general or niche PC games for that matter. But still, even though the market in general grew a lot over the past decades, Military Sims show a trend of dumbing down, going half fictional, or just closing shop. I cannot get what I want in the current market: I wanted a proper 'close combat' but that development is just painful, I want a new 'Strike Fighters game' but it is in limbo, I want an ArmA without fictional hardware and an 'Iron Front' sequel, I don't ever wanna see a health bar going down 33% when a tank gets a hit. On the other side a new IL-2 exists and DCS is still going, which is appreciated, but they sacrifice variety for graphics detail, so I stick to the original IL-2 and Strike Fighters instead. There is the Tank Sim Steal Beasts Pro, but it took them such a long time to add ground shadows to their tanks that my confidence was rather low. In another forum where I discussed some classic Space combat games, it surprised me that these are clearly more popular then Combat flight sims. In addition: Fictional spacecraft cannot be argued about historically, which makes it a lot easier for developers.

There is no easy way IMO. It is like in the Combat Flight Simulation business: I was following the progress of the Strike Fighters series. These games were awesome, though obviously on a small budget and kinda casual. So they released their North Atlantic game in 2012 and almost had to close down because of poor sales versus increased development cost. Go figure, it was the only Jet-era Survey sim on the global market and still it sold poorly. After that, they climbed back up with mobile games. Now these mobile games suck IMO. The only thing that keeps you playing them is the greed to unlock planes. Yet with those they are doing much better financially. People throw money at it. These people are not the same combat flight sim enthousiasts from before, they are casual gamers that won't ever buy a joystick and have less patience.

Nevermind, I took the plunge and purchased the 4.0 upgrade big bundle already. Got through the installation process without problems and enjoyed a few quick battles.

Excellent! I will be patient until one of those demos is available.

Question: Will one of the Free Demos get a refresh to v4.0? So one can actually see the new AI routines and effects in action before investing.

I hope the QB AI force selection of both sides will be improved in the future. Initially I set both sides to a 'mix' random force, but the results are often kinda weird. Either too much infantry or very little. The germans hardly get general purpose tanks, but instead a group of Hummels, SturmTigers, FlakPanzers 38t...

Hmm, seems like that part of history is also a mess on the web. So may not have been a good example.

Regarding the swiss issue, I won't go into details, or state an opinion, until I finish at least one book from the other side of the story (between the Alps and a hard place). As to WW2 politics in general, what should I reply? it seems to be a mess, unsurprisingly. For an example close to home, Start with Gen. Patton's last days. Or don't, which is a good choice too.

They settled, which implies the swiss banks were not technically found guilty, and they can't be sued again on this matter. But as $1.25 billion is involved: it seemingly still matters which transcripts are (de)classified and true/false. If the transcripts mentioned were released in 1999 it may even have a relation to this trial. It is just one of the many stories. As for me: There are too many stories to judge. I will leave them on the pile marked 'unverified / still politically loaded'.

Swiss banks were sued in relation to WW2 as late as the year 2000. They settled it, with $1.25 Billion.