Artkin

Thanks for giving it a try I have tried lots of scenarios by this point, forced my opponents into this cult... Infantry and tanks do well. Some units suffer: AT guns can fire as slow as 2 rounds a minute and then stay prone for a long time, I've actually managed to temporarily break a 88mm flak 36 in a related way, forcing them to area target the ground resolved their issue I believe. Snipers can use a boost as well, their aim could be better (Seems to be an issue regardless) but sometimes the conscript snipers wind up surprising me with some good kills. Usually a lot of ammunition is wasted for them in particular. Javelins on conscript take around 30s to fire, so no more instantly picking up the AT and killing. Recent videos of Ukrainians using the system shows something similar. I haven't noticed if AT-4 or RPG-26 is more delayed or not, but if it is, I would be happy with the change. There are quirks and a few small drawbacks to playing conscript, but the end result is better IMO. I like the drawn out firefights. I can't see troops getting to the front and instantly getting shredded like we normally do with regular troops around here.

I am very satisfied with the current level of performance. I was once able to open Rad-Full 2, a 5.7x5.7km map. I opened it in CMCW with the NTC setting set. I havent been able to get it open since. That is a benchmark in CM performance if you ask me. Otherwise I can comfortably play games with a couple battalions on each side of a massive map. I can load one of the CMRT Berlin maps and navigate close to lag free. It's absolutely possible. Once I start using regiments for both sides (3 vs 3 battalions) then things start lagging in CMRT. I think CMCW would go further since maps are less laggy despite being the same one converted from other titles. I have always found CMCW, CMFB, and CMRT to be the top performers in the fps department. Cmcw being the fastest

Also I went with Nvidia because they have better opengl performance. I came to my conclusion after using this website: https://gfxbench.com/result.jsp you can filter everything out except for desktop OpenGl, so you can get a pretty good idea of how well the graphics card will perform in CM. Additionally, I would recommend a high end set of ram, because now it makes a huge difference in fps. A set of G Skill ram with their tight timings can make your system 10-20% faster in games. It's not about the speed of the ram, but instead the "timings". One more thing: I dont pay for my own electricity. I also like my home heated in the winter. Therefore I bought Nvidia. If you want to have a card that wont rape your power bill, AMD is the way to go. They have mastered efficiency. Their chips are actually MUCH faster than Intel or Nvidia chips watt for watt. This is extremely important to think about

Yeah amd seems to give you equal single core performance no matter the chip (Ryzen 5, 7, and 9?). The benefit of buying the better amd chips will just give you that extra multithreading performance. I would give a look at cpubenchmark.net either way, and compare scores. Single core score in particular is important for CM. High scores on the leaderboards are averages of multiple systems tested. I have no doubt that most of those systems were overclocked. But whatever they can do -you can do too. Higher clock speeds seem to affect the single core performance a lot. I know I can feel the difference in CM when I bumped my i5 9600k from stock (3.3?) to 4.8Ghz

Thats a fantastic idea. Simple and can be extremely powerful. It would help when combining maps too.

I totally agree, with a couple shading techniques the current game looks perfectly good. Of course it could be better, but there are times where you can get near photorealistic shots. Ironically it often looks best with lots of smoke, one of the most simple things in CM. Pushing more performance out of the game however it is done will probably lead to better load times. So I look forward to Engine 5. I also agree focus should be on quality of life improvements. Some dont bother me as much, like a convoy command, but certainly it would be a step in the right direction having it implemented. The CMFB master maps come to mind. I'm hoping for at the least an external tool that can (at least) vaguely translate maps to whatever new format. If they can pull that off then CMx3 will be a hard hitter from the start. I feel as if the hardest part of map design is doing the suburb work. You dont want things to look the same but you know you have to place a few hundred houses. I think a random suburb generation tool would save a lot of time, at least for me. I get tol focused and try to hyper simulate everyones house by staring through their gates on google maps. Sorry Donestk residents.

Indeed those MTLB-6BM with the autocannon turret do seem pretty rare in this conflict. I think we have seen way more BMP-1AM. They always were very strange to me, and Galloping Horsefall (IIRC) was a weird scenario to play.

Of course if you wish, you can pretend Elite troops are navy seals. I don't connect with your point. Scenarios in CMCW come loaded with crack and elite troops. That's not reasonable to me. The way troops perform at the conscript level is much better. Combat actually feels drawn out, and firefights are better. Troops shoot at houses 20 seconds after they lost the spot

Really I just meant all the mapping work. Imagine having to do it all over again.

I definitely don't speak for myself since @Codreanu already hit the nail on the head with a much more concise post than mine. Not for nothing, but do you guys really even get much feedback in the first place? The Steam feedback is probably not worth as much as the feedback you will get on these forums.

I thought this was going to be a repeat of another video posted in this thread previously, but nope. I think this is the second time I've seen a clip like this

Definitely a benefit of having a tighter community is having respectable opponents, though I believe I did blow up quite a few of your houses unprovoked in our game, which wasn't so nice. For sure I won't drop CM, because it does so much. With all the content in CMx2 currently you can achieve nearly anything in WW2, and you can cover a lot of conflicts thereafter. To me it is a complete shame to limit such an expansive series, where hundreds of thousands of man-hours have been spent developing content. If CMx3 comes along, it MUST be able to import CMx2 scenario and map files. To have everyone's near endless work eventually go to waste would be beyond tragic. PBEM is fine, but finding opponents for it isn't. Having to seek opponents on a forum outside of the game itself is recessive instead of progessive. And then the delegation that follows just to start a game in the first place is far too time consuming. Weeks can be spent on this process. The PBEM+ system doesn't really solve any issues that were had before. Ok now you don't have to use Dropbox. Small plus. It'd be nice to have a lobby and a short description of the game maybe, etc. Coop support could be as simple as moving save files from user to user like we already do manually..... A better multiplayer would lead to good things for CMx2. The games that weren't ever loaded up might have been bought on sale, or at least a large percentage of them. I have plenty of games that I bought at full price that I don't touch anymore. In terms of hours of enjoyment to hours, Garrys Mod takes 1st place, followed by Combat Mission, and then Assetto Corsa. Two of those are heavily multiplayer games, and one could be so much better if it was more fleshed out.

No it absolutely is not. My Steam library is full of games that I haven't played in a decade. That doesn't mean I play any of them, nor would I buy any of their new games. Multiple games that I've bought from on Steam alone that I won't be buying from again: Age of Empires I DE, Age of Empires II HD, Age of Empires II DE Arma 2, Arma 2 Arrowhead, Arma 3 Company of Heroes, Tales of Valor, Opposing Fronts, Company of Heroes 2 Men of War (Wasnt on Steam yet but..), Men of War Assault Squad 1, 2, Call of Arms Metro 2033, Metro Last Light Wargame European, Wargame Airland, Wargame Red Dragon. See all those games? I will never play them again, because they kind of suck. Age of Empires released unfavorable updates around early 2021 and killed the revival they had Arma went full life sim company of heroes sucks men of war sucks but had potential, call of arms exploited it in the wrong way Metro is a purely single player experience, played it once or twice each, sucks wargame is just terrible. they are snobs. game could have been good but noooooooo --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The only real way you can tell is by gameplay hours being racked every 2 weeks. Steam will tell you that. Your own proprietary systems probably don't. The amount of games you own has absolutely no correlation with the amount of enjoyment you get from them. $60 is not a lot for a game. We were paying that for plastic green cases with a CD inside that said Xbox360. Console games are not worth $60, but games like Combat Mission are. And I'm sure the people know that before they buy. Combat Mission x2 has been around for a very long time. Of course you will sell plenty of copies over this course of time. Also, I would argue that the recent popularity spike associated with both Steam and the CMCW release has sold you an unusually larger amount of copies than normal. This is speculation of course, and does little to prove my point alone. Give me some real analytics, copies sold is absolute nonsense. That is your paycheck. Interest level can be anywhere. Ask my copies of CMFI, CMBN, and especially CMFB how they like feeling cold and unplayed since I bought them. The cheapest, ****tiest indie games can have lavish support for multiplayer. Games that people buy and play for 10 minutes. Like Among Us. Terrible waste of money. On the flip side games like MAG which released in 2010 were pushing the limits of multiplayer. Everyone knew that connectivity was important. No single player game lives long. If it does, it's probably a tool and not a game. Combat Mission is this weird, undecided inbetween creation that falls into neither category. That isn't a good thing IMO. Not really a surprise. Most people will probably be too anxious to jump into a game, not wanting to get stomped out and embarrassed. I remember my first PBEM was like that, and I know others feel the same from reading many other forum introductions. You can't expect more people to be playing multiplayer than singleplayer. The only games that function like that are dedicated multiplayer games that have singleplayer tools... I.E. War Thunder. A majority of your players won't be playing multiplayer. Especially with how difficult and non-intuitive the current systems are. But you can grow a community by having the proper framework in place. The community creates itself, but you can't have a system that makes it difficult for this to happen in the first place. People need an easy way to connect. I'm not saying add a CM Buddies list ingame, because frankly that would be pretty lame. But having a server browser or similar will allow people to easily see new games and connect to them. It would be nice to connect to a real time lobby that way. It would be significantly easier to hook up new games if they were actively displayed in a server browser, indicating that the host is at their keyboard, ready to play a game. The current systems is only PBEM, and you literally have no idea who you are playing besides a name, a scenario description, some time and weather conditions which doesn't really matter unless you are playing a quick battle. If you are playing a scenario? What does that tell you? Not much in practical terms. None of what we have going on currently in 2022 is practical. It really doesn't seem like this. As said before, this seems like a band-aid on a booboo. Multiplayer is important, but I still have to download hamachi to connect to my opponents. I'm a little technically illiterate since I stopped caring after my A+ certification, but I imagine all you need is one server that connects peers to each other, through a server browser. Then the games themselves are played p2p, after the connection was made. So the upkeep to Battlefront is negligible to have a coherent multiplayer experience. Yeah I'm not sure, thanks for explaining. I swear it used to frequently log me out. And I don't think I closed out the game because CMCW in particular takes ages to start up with my modpack.

Thanks for clarifying. I have no problem waiting for the rest of the titles. Because they aren't given an easy opportunity to find opponents. The opponents finder section of these forums is pretty dead, and FGM really isn't much better. Life is not really growing in the multiplayer sphere. It's the same 50-100 people, and a few new faces every now and then. Well now with Steam you might even have more detailed analytics. I bet you will find that people put the games down after playing them for a couple hundred hours at the most. They will probably pick the game back up and slowly play a little afterward but I doubt you are getting anybody hooked with the Steam version of CMCW. I think it's easy to buy into the CM series at first, but it's pretty easy to get bored of it too if you don't explore the potential ... like map converting. Copies sold doesn't really tell you enough about the interest level of your customer. They bought the game. Okay, do they like it? When was the last time they played it? How often do they play it? What can we do to make them play it more? How can we make our games more fun while not making changes to our core beliefs and structure? It's easy to see this niche series and say wow! That game looks cool as hell, sure $60 is pennies here in the USA no problem! Selling copies really doesn't indicate enjoyment. You aren't the only one. Official AAR's are typically done PBEM from what I've seen. There needs to be some sort of focus on this from Battlefront. People are calling for cooperative team games. If there are enough people to want friggen Fortress Italy, or CM:A, then undoubtably there are twice as many people who would appreciate a Multiplayer system that was fleshed out, and didn't feel like it was slapped together in a month. Maybe this was solved in an update? Call me crazy I swear it used to log me out every time.

I would also like to say I'm very happy something was done in the first place to try to fix the problem of multiplayer. When I came around in 2017 I was definitely calling for an improvement there.

This is different, if it's a technical limitation beyond what is feasible then how can anybody argue with that. I would suggest maybe an external tool built into the CM launcher since we're kicking it oldschool anyway.

I have never tried the game so I can't attest to how fun it was, or even if the MP system was good. I have no clue. But in the case of CMx2, think how many more copies would have sold, if people were just able to play the game multiplayer easily*. The AI in CM can't make choices on their own with exception to the TacAI mechanics like retreating under fire. So eventually you play up the fun stuff and you're left craving more. This is the part where you lose most of the audience. Others hook up on websites like TheFGM and get opponents lined up. Having to agree to preset rules and yadda yadda. It takes time. I remember reading on these forums that there can be weeks delay in software development teams due to communication alone. I don't know if they meant in particular instances or over time, but still something to consider. I understand Combat Mission is a tool by nature. In games you can totally and mercilessly annihilate your opponents by setting waypoints and target commands at the end of them, shooting at the first spotting icon you see. I can have troops 300 meters forward, and have a ww1 tank drive up 300m and instantly blast that squad on a dime. That kind of stuff kills the current experience. You can be a Slime Ball, or a humble commander with the current system. Maybe in the next iteration there can be an option in the multiplayer screen where players can have a ruleset predetermined. So my opponent can't abuse the CM mechanics and rape my forces. I didn't come to this community nor buy into these games for that kind of experience. That's not realism. It's better when you've known your opponent for years. These kinds of things strangle an already pretty tight community. Anyway I forgot why I went on this tangent. This is the description built into the default battles. What if you create your own scenario but don't fill in the scenario description box? You can't really tell much about the scenario you are playing either way. That is unless you pull it up manually yourself. It's a shot in the dark. Yes, I have barely used the system. From what I remember, it instantly logged me out when I had gone to the main screen and then back. I haven't tried using it since. I will also check it out again, since it has been a while. If it can't be done now, then it should be done for CMx3.

Well there is no CMx3 for us to move onto yet. After that, poof. I argue you can get another decade out of the series if there was an easy to use MP system that hooked players up with each other.

But the old system is prehistoric. Real time multiplayer really does not exist to 99.9% of the CM playerbase. It is such a hassle. And even then, I've played a game where my opponent claimed we were desynched. The challenge lobby idea is good, but I remember the system offering me absolutely no information about the game I was going to play in. I don't even remember an option for map preview. Having to log in EVERY single time you enter the pbem+ screen. Even if you dont close the program.

I don't think there will be enough people to use the PBEM+ system to warrant the time spent. I have to log in every single time I want to send a turn. That's ridiculous. The problem is: It's SO hard to find opponents in this game. If there isn't a coherent multiplayer solution which is simple and easy to use then CMx2 will be a dead end series. People play old games. There's no doubt in that. Age of Empires II came back really strong, really thanks to Microsoft, but the game never died despite actually being 23 years old. The multiplayer kept it alive. Only a small percentage of the overall gaming world wants to play singleplayer. Singleplayer games die. Every time.

Thank you, please work on it. I wont even touch the new PBEM+ system, its so bad. The helper tools we have had in the community are SO much better and more advanced, and yet more simple too. Not to bash anyone, but theres no way you guys can release that as the final product CMx2 multiplayer solution.

I don't write anything off quite yet, but I know solar panels have a tax incentive here which is one of the few available to us everyday folk. Otherwise you get a tax incentive for buying houses... so not really much here. Of course if you were to spend your money in any way, Solar would profit for you. Again, no qualms specifically against solar besides the meh returns. I had researched this at one point for a school project. I evaluated the idea of a mirror farm as a high output alternative. Well, each location fried hundreds of birds a year (from what I remember). (Mirrors all focusing energy on a central steam tower)

But you are retired. IMO it depends if green energy is right for you. If youre still paying your mortgage it probably isn't wise to spend all that money on solar panels. Some people have that expendable income, but I would argue most do not have that kind of money sitting around. It's worth it in the long run, maybe. If you just invested your $10-25k cash into something that returns active profit you would be better off financially by the time solar panels paid off. So the benefit for Americans is kind of meh.

If the issue is purely pollution then maybe electric vehicles should wait until all the power stations are nuclear. And if the issue is having more than you need then perhaps we should take note from countries like India or Thailand where a large portion of people use bikes. Switching to EV does not end pollution, it just puts it somewhere else. Just like Carbon settles in the oceans, lithium will return to the ground. On US soil. Ev's are barely part of that problem as a whole though admittedly. My issue is with Lithium. It sucks. Solar panels... not that efficient. Didnt last too long originally, but apparently now theyre better. They definitely wont be solving man's demand for power alone unless you cover parts of the ocean. And even then, there will probably be large ecological consequences. What is the right solution? I'd probably say Nuclear power and solid state batteries to hold it all. But I have limited knowledge on this topic

The battery packs for EVs is nuts. Youre paying as much as if you were getting a high performance ICE. In the case of Tesla, youre paying more for the battery than you would pay for a high performance crate engine. Nearly every manufacturer is producing overly lavish street stallions for the road after seeing the absolute killing Mercedes has been making for the past decade in the US. Full electric trucks do not exist (Not counting the new Rivian), the GVW would be too high with the weight of the battery. Hence the issue with the Tesla Cybertruck. Up the weight with the battery, lose payload to meet highway standards. Thats my understanding. Solar panels don't seem mature enough yet, and they really should at least attempt to replace roof panels with them, like Tesla wanted to do years ago. Probably not enough money in it, or they were already in way over their own heads monetarily at the time. The big question is what to do with the pollution. Put it in the ground? At least with gasoline some of the pollution is absorbed back into the oceans, and the greenery.