callada

I have some thoughts about this news, but you'll have to wait a few months until I post them.

Should scouts or recon units have a bonus, specialized gear notwithstanding? Like, historically, were people selected for that duty based on an unusually excellent ability to "see stuff"? Or did they receive training that would somehow work out to improving their spotting chances significantly?

Boy, is that a strange looking machine. Simultaneously bigger and smaller than it appears, somehow.

I've been waiting for more CMFB. My last attempt at the Final blitzkrieg didn't go so well for my poor little troops. Oh well -- back in your little tanks and trucks, boys. Blame Battlefront. Maybe it'll go better for us this time (it won't).

"I'm sure they've all surrendered over there" "I'm sure I wiped out that squad over there" ^ me before getting blasted by Lone Wolf Rambo Super Trooper, every single time

I like the CM visual style. It's a bit clinical, but still detailed, and reflects the gruesome nature of what's being simulated. It would be easier to convince people to play it if it could look something like it does when zoomed in (higher LOD meshes/textures) while maintaining performance. At the least, I'm hoping for changes that keep the interface snappy even if the framerate drops in the rest of the world. But, I also know how this stuff goes. It's more or less impossible to get a sense for the amount of work involved in making changes like that from the outside. It's probably a lot. So, I will fantasize here on the forums instead.

I've played various military FPS and strategy/tactics games forever -- think Jagged Alliance and Operation Flashpoint. I played CMx1 circa 2006, but never got too deeply into it. It's a bit strange, but I started getting bothered by the extremely distorted volume of fire versus casualties in "simulationist" games along those lines. Usually, only finding your enemy is the hard part. Once that's done, weapons may be accurately modeled by the book, but soft factors aren't, and so there are no sustained firefights. I then remembered CM existed, picked up CMSF2, and was very pleased to see how things had developed. Then I got sucked in. CM often models things in extreme detail, but there's always a purpose. It's at a very particular level of abstraction that I find appealing.

I somehow have never tried it, but have seen the suggestion to play hotseat mode against yourself as a way to get an idea of what each side can see.

You're making me wonder -- are faster-moving units more or less likely to be spotted, given the same movement path? It seems like they'd be less likely to be seen given the way the spotting check runs on an interval, but maybe they're more noticeable on each dice roll. I could see the answer being "it depends".

"Hunt" is tiring and the units move slowly. So "Quick" and "Move" are the only real distance options, in my humble experience.

This is a total mess and doesn't work quite right, so more of a POC: https://gist.github.com/spdral/0afee5917714bf01d4e647a3822d1c77

After a bit of Python fumbling around trying to see how easy the "OCR" process might become (I am a numpy newbie)... This is Avanti! from CMFI (I never win this scenario). I loaded all of the font characters and then directly compared each of them at pixel offsets for one- and two-digit numbers. You can see holes where the buildings are, and also missing holes where there probably should be some. This was redundant, perhaps, but fun. It can spit out elevation data as well, I just chose to turn it back into an image. BTW, the input is currently just a pixel-perfect cropped version of the map at 16x16 zoom.

If the building numbers aren't togglable, then that's a bit of a pain since that means the elevation numbers are OR-ed on to the map image, and we lose information. We know the font, so we know all the possible glyphs. We know the possible locations of all elevation numbers -- at least I think we do. So barring building numbers, it should be "easy" enough to: 1. load the image, turn it into an array of color data 2. set any pixels that aren't (255,255,255) to (0,0,0) 3. AND all one and two digit values in known locations, store matches 4. output For getting rid of building numbers, I'm not sure. Maybe OR together all glyphs, and use those as a mask and discard any other white pixels outside of positions where those characters can be. Tile-by-tile, XOR a clean tile (no elevation numbers) with the cleaned-up elevation version of the tile, and OR glyphs for each digit/number onto that until we find a match. There will maybe be collisions depending on how the font looks. If this works, it would only require a no-elevation-numbers and with-elevation-numbers version of the map as input. edit: the masking part might be unnecessary or even bad... I may take a swing at some of this when I get a moment

How good was Google Docs for the OCR? Was a lot of correction necessary? If so, maybe it'd be worthwhile to look directly at the pixel data if the elevation numbers are all the same unique color. Also, is it possible to turn off the numbers over structures in the editor?

Spoilers This isn't hard, but it is sensitive to your initial move orders or a few things are likely to get blasted by the red team. The M113 on the right, the engineers on the right, and some of the poor fellows in the town in the middle. I found abandoning the right side (M113 backwards over the hill, engineers into the little wooded patch with a short circular arc) and hiding farther left inside the town works well, because you can then dismantle the baddies as they pop their heads over the reverse slope. The infantry attack on the left is a bit easier because their options are more limited. They have a depression just past the woods they can sneak through but if you see that as an early possibility, you can find quite a few positions to stop that short. Depending on your commitment to C2 (house rules, of which I have none), you're likely to have M113s that can back you up effectively. Anyway, once they park their vehicles, they're toast. And the mortars in the back are in big trouble once something that shoots .50 can find them (or has LOS for counter-arty). Interestingly, I tend to get a lot of friendly fire attempts in this. Troops plinking at APC gunners until they realize what they're doing.