Anson Pelmet

There seems to be a new option in the RT menu, to play a network game, and when I click on it it asks for a password of some sort. Is that new? Can anyone direct me to info re. how to use that? I've never played human opponents because I found descriptions of the old PBEM system too intimidating!

I've been playing continuously since CMBO and would love a major upgrade in ways of playing (eg, live hotseat battles against humans online, auto-generated careers, replayability of battles so you can follow one unit's progress from start to finish) and in graphics (better battle damage to vehicles, more realistic soldier movements) but having said all that I still find Combat Mission miles ahead of any other tactical wargames I see online in terms of realism of play (Post Scriptum and Hell Let Loose look gorgeous but play like kids running around randomly shooting each other). It's a bit like watching a 4k video on a huge new TV versus a VHS on a small screen - if the movie's crap no amount of graphics will make it good, and a good movie will always be good despite mediocre graphics...

Has anyone suggested this before? The ability to select a quick battle, choose the forces, set up a fiendish defense full of ambushes, target arcs, and keyholed armour-killing guns, save the game, then when you open up again to play (after a long interval so you forget what the forces are) the ability to choose to play as the attacker.

Totally agree!!

I think there are some ideas there that CM could use. Brass Brigade (like all first person war shooters I've seen) lacks the essential element of teamwork, and soldiers and vehicles behaving even remotely realistically, which makes the whole thing into a silly arcade game. But imagine conducting a CM game and then being able to replay turns and go down to that level of detail, and have vehicles explode into pieces, and soldiers react appropriately when hit by various weapons, such as HE shells, sniper's rifles, or HMGs. No need for cartoonish buckets of blood, or the GI in the Normandy game shooting 20 feet into the air when a German grenade explodes under him (which was fun, I must admit). But better animations at ground level (and even the ability to replay a whole game and follow one soldier or unit all the way through) would, IMHO, be a great addition to the next generation of CM.

No teasing about my name please. It was made up by my brother when we were kids, as the name of a character who was a test pilot in a comic book he was writing. And he wasn't even trying to think of a silly name. I found it funny then and have since...

"In principle I think the principals of a firm should explain their game design principles." Exactly! A clever way to remember the correct use of those words.

"Really? I haven't seen that but I'm fairly new here. However, I nearly always play CM as the Germans (not necessarily Nazis), so maybe that puts me in the frame " I mostly play as the Germans too, cos it's more fun to play with cool equipment against superior numbers (although I recall a quote attributed to Stalin along the lines that "Quantity has a quality all of its own"), and I don't think that puts me or you in the frame of the Nazis I was referring to. I'm thinking of a tiny number of contributors who've said that because the Allies committed some atrocities that made them morally equivalent to Nazi Germany - but let's not open that can of worms here!

Don't want to seem like a grammar Nazi (or like the other sort of Nazi you come across occasionally on this site) but a mistake I often see on these pages is in the use of its and it's, even from very competent writers. A useful trick I learned is that it's is always short for it is or it has. So if you apply that rule to "it's becoming clear that..." you can see it works perfectly. But if you apply that rule to "there are problems with it's performance..." you can immediately see it doesn't work, and you should instead be using its.

Yes, I agree that based on viewing youtube vids a lot of player spend almost all their time half-a kilometer up in the air, and play with objectives on, which totally spoils the game's delightful aesthetics, in my humble opinion...

I'm shocked to hear you say most people play the game from high up in the air and rarely look at the game close-up and see its visual detail. To me Combat Mission's most appealing aspect is the ability to watch events unfold on a macro scale in WEGO, then repeat the go 1, 2, or 3 times and watch interesting events unfold from the perspective of single vehicles and even individual soldiers. For me that's the core of its uniqueness and charm.

I used to play a lot of East Front 2 and recall a self-generating campaign mode, in which you could buy a core force (including yourself in a kubelwagen) and then you'd be plunged into a randomly-chosen battle, and given a few non-core forces to play with too, and you had to fight that battle. And the interesting thing was that sometimes you had to attack and the defending force would be too strong, and you had to realise that and mimimise your losses, and opt for a 'defeat', and then what was left of your core unit would be transported to the next randomly-chosen battle. Between battles you'd be awarded some replacement points, which could be used to buy new units for your core, or reinforce existing units in the core. Units would start off as 'green' or 'regular' but as they got more combat experience their experience level and effectiveness would increase, so long as they didn't get too denuded in battle. If you lost too many battles (2 or 3 in a row) you'd get a notice relieving you of your command and ordering you to report to the Gestapo, or something like that. Or if your commander unit (the name of which you could choose) was killed in action, the campaign automatically ended. I wonder if Combat Mission could one day have such a function. I remember it keeping me amused over 10-15 battles before my luck ran out...

But not opposite sides?

Excuse my woeful ignorance, but will Steam allow me to play live CM games against real opponents in real time, as if I had a hot-seat opponent in the same room with me? This would be a huge advance for players like me who'd love to play against a human opponent but lack the patience and technical smarts (or patience to learn the technical smarts) to master PBEM!

Thanks for the extensive and polite response, which I've just found. I share the frustrations you list with the CM second generation games, but I don't see a viable competitor, perhaps because I don't play or investigate other games very much. Having said that, it was on an online games forum that I first heard about CM and its unique WEGO turn system, and I liked the concept so much I bought Beyond Normandy, more than 21 years ago, and I've been playing constantly since. So I'm not a newcomer to the game, I just don't post very often...