com-intern

Do you have any evidence that the enhance speeds from an NVME drive are even noticeable/useful at a consumer level?

I went through the whole rigmarole of picking SSD drives a few months ago and I couldn't find anything that supported NVME drives being worth the cost outside of specialist use. SSDs are 10+ times faster than the average HDD (if not more) and I've been unable to find an NVME advantage over standard SSDs that makes it worth the cost.

This is the bug I am referring to. IMO it would be possible to overlook it if CM:Normandy was the only game available. However, with CM:Eastern Front, Italy, Syria, and so on being available I think it makes Normandy an non-starter.

Agree to disagree then. I just find it frustrating enough that I would not recommend anyone buy CM:BN unless they were absolutely married to the idea of playing that first few months of the war. Like I said, I would be more forgiving of the issue if CM:BN were the only game in existence but it isn't.

I might shy away from CM:Normandy as I believe hedgerows are still bugged. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but in a game where they play such a critical role I don't think I could recommend making the purchase.

Honestly this sounds like folks overestimate the popularity of these games. You need people willing to seed and many more popular games lack an established seeding base making the acquisition essentially a non-starter. Really the lack of cracks for the games speaks magnitudes about their lack of popularity.
 
There are plenty of examples of users doing a ton with the current set. The post-apoc. CM:SF1 mod, Heaven & Earth, several fantastic user-made campaigns (the airborne campaign from CM:BN being stand out), numerous well done scenarios and maps of real world locations. There is likely even more out there that isn't on any of the normal online repositories. I know I have 4-5 scenarios that have only ever been privately shared.

Compared to CMx1 the rate of production is lower but the increased time requirements and lack of feedback (seen in some longer threads about scenario design in the past) speak to that.

That is essentially the nature of most development though. Trade offs built on trade offs built on trade offs.

CM natively has a number of them. Mods will obviously have them. The benefit that mods bring are three-fold.

1. Players are better able to make decisions about trade-offs. 1
2. Games survive longer 2
3. Niche content can be covered 1

1 Medieval: Total War 2 has a historic mod that I played years ago (it may actually be Stainless Steel?) and while it definitely made trade-offs and sacrifices they were much different than the ones that the base game made. Personally I enjoyed the mod sacrifices far more than the base-game sacrifices. Additionally the mod existing at all allowed a far more niche take on M:TW2 than the base game would have ever allowed.

2 Yes JA2 1.13 is quite a bit different from vanilla JA2. But its easy to overlook the problems when the base game barely runs on modern hardware.

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Generally I don't buy most of the "community" arguments against mods. I can't think of a single game where a strong modding community has been a net negative for the game's community, while I can think of games off the top of my head that essentially exist because of modding.

Developers aren't making money off of a game that intentionally short shrifts the playerbase with the intention that mods fill the gap. What is actually happening is that the developer is making cost trade offs that rub a minority of players the wrong way. Take the newest Elder Scrolls games. It sold upwards of 3 million copies during launch weak on consoles with no modding capability.

Like I said, the doom and gloom about mods ruining a game is really just a fantasy. At worst you get a unpopular modding scene - games aren't ruined because of mods. Like can you actually think of any legit titles that were ruined by mods?

I might shy away from CM:Normandy as I believe hedgerows are still bugged. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but in a game where they play such a critical role I don't think I could recommend making the purchase.