Few Questions

[Heirloom_Tomato]

On 10/30/2020 at 8:09 PM, Titanius Peck said:

Quickly it does say in the advertisement for Operation Red Thunder:

• Expansive simulation of "soft factors" such as Morale, Experience, and Leadership

I wonder what they mean by "Expansive?

The editor and Quick Battle unit purchase stage, have various options when selecting the units participating in the battle. Morale ranges from poor to fanatic, Experience from elite to conscript, leadership from -2 to +2. There is also the opportunity to select equipment quality, supply, headcount and fatigue level as well. Also keep in mind the TO&E differences between the different formations in the game.

As you can well imagine, and based on you mod work on experience levels in ARMA, a company of +2, elite, fanatic, fit, excellently equipped, fully supplied, and full headcount SS Volksgrenadiers will be far more difficult to push out of a small village than a -2, conscript, poor, weakened, poorly equipped, scarcely supplied, 50% headcount Volksstrum company.

[Titanius Peck]

5 hours ago, Ultradave said:

Fire and Rubble is not yet released. It's in Beta testing/development. Red Thunder is there which is the base Eastern Front game, and Fire and Rubble will be an add on to that, with more scenarios and campaigns, more unit types.

On the Battlefront web site, on the top right select the Games menu, select Red Thunder off of that, presto - there's the CMRT Base Game. Not sure where you ended up, but that will get you to Red Thunder, if that's your choice. 

Your other question about hilly terrain and city fighting...  Fortress Italy has LOTS of hilly terrain, and there is a slew of content with both the add ons, Gustav Line, and Rome to Victory, which add even more mountainous terrain, snow, more units, more nationalities, lots more scenarios and campaigns. There's a lot of content there. There is some heavy town fighting, but nothing like what will be in Fire and Rubble with fighting in Berlin.  Same path for Fortress Italy, except there you will see a bunch of options for just the base game or bundles with one or both of the DLCs.

Pick one. You'll probably get addicted, and then by the time you've collected them all, you'll have all the kinds of fighting you want.

Advice given to most like yourself who are wondering which to get is to pick the one of the theater that is most interesting to you, and that's what you'll have fun with. Saying that, I wasn't much interested in Italy at first but Fortress Italy and the add ons made me a convert. Interesting terrain, long time span of operations covered, and now with 2 DLCs, loads of content. 

If Normandy is your thing, the full package there has probably the most content per $ spent (might be a tie with Shock Force there if you have everything for both). D-Day, breakout, Market Garden, the addition of Commonwealth forces. Just tons of content. 

They all have a large number of user created content as well, and each has a Quick Battle generator, with unique maps to the title, terrain conditions, pick your forces, plus the scenario editor to create your own based on that particular title/theater. 

Dave

Cool man and good tips. Yeah funny Italy was one that DIDNT jump out at me  -probably just because im just not very knowledgeable on that theatre of WW2 but that terrain does sound right up my alley. Would most likely commit but i am really curious about the Fire and Rubble module for Red Thunder -itll come down to one of these two.

Edited November 1, 2020 by Titanius Peck

[Titanius Peck]

3 hours ago, Heirloom_Tomato said:

As you can well imagine, and based on you mod work on experience levels in ARMA, a company of +2, elite, fanatic, fit, excellently equipped, fully supplied, and full headcount SS Volksgrenadiers will be far more difficult to push out of a small village than a -2, conscript, poor, weakened, poorly equipped, scarcely supplied, 50% headcount Volksstrum company.

Sadly this is untrue for Arma -hence exactly why I started my private mod of true AI disparity. In vanilla Arma -a Line Cook is as effective as a Marksman as far as AI is concerned -I have a good 1000+ hours dedicated to only studying AI routines, animations, skillsets and behavours (yes its sad). You could say im kind of an AI nut. The problem is that they (Bohemia Inter) never properly calibrated the AI subSkills so that they are all way too accurate -i needed to take skills like aimingAccuracy down into deep decimal land ie 0.00081 just to gain the proper disparity between say a Private Rifleman and a Seasoned Tac op. In their defense, it is far harder to calibrate these type of things in a real time 1st person shooter especially one as lethal as Arma (1 bullet can kill) as just the slightest delay, slow or improper animation etc means your higher tiered guy's advantages just flew out the window. A strategy game doesnt have these same extremely tight constraints as they arent actually tracking exact location down to the millimeter of every bullet in real time -its more just calculated dice rolls.

 

As far as the Squad parameters like Morale/Vet Level/Fatigue Level/Fanatic - thats all really good stuff. Again though it would be sensational to be able to transfer and adapt these as Dynamic variables from one mission to the next thereby creating a Dynamic campaign - I know I know i get that this isnt likely ever on the table to happen but honestly i cant see it being that difficult to implement should the Devs pursue it.

Edited November 1, 2020 by Titanius Peck

[MikeyD]

Inflation keeps going up-up-up but the game price tag stays the same. In real dollar terms CMRT is much cheaper now than when it first came out. Disney tried recently to charge people thirty bucks to watch Mulan online. Compared to that CMRT is a steal.

[BFCElvis]

On 10/29/2020 at 11:16 PM, Titanius Peck said:

- Why is there no blood? Im not a gore nut but a certain level of violence is needed to convey warfare. Are there mods that remedy this?

I apologize that I have not read this whole thread and if someone already mentioned this. 

Way back when the original Combat Mission Beyond Overlord had a public beta demo released, before the first CM game was released, there were no bodies in the game. Battlefront did not want to put anything that might be considered unnecessarily blood thirty in the game. There were a lot of forum discussions about it and Battlefront ended up including bodies because it was important to gameplay. Knowing where soldiers were engaged and lost had a place in the strategy of playing the game. Having them be bloody doesn't add anything to the strategy. That's why it isn't in the game.  

[Titanius Peck]

1 hour ago, BFCElvis said:

I apologize that I have not read this whole thread and if someone already mentioned this. 

Way back when the original Combat Mission Beyond Overlord had a public beta demo released, before the first CM game was released, there were no bodies in the game. Battlefront did not want to put anything that might be considered unnecessarily blood thirty in the game. There were a lot of forum discussions about it and Battlefront ended up including bodies because it was important to gameplay. Knowing where soldiers were engaged and lost had a place in the strategy of playing the game. Having them be bloody doesn't add anything to the strategy. That's why it isn't in the game.  

An understandable sentiment for circa 2000 -albeit far too conservative for this day and age. Its almost so brazenly missing as to feel war is too sanitized. Heck my kids lego games have beheadings and dismemberment -im not vouching for tasteless, obsessive death porn -but bloody pools of sprite seems about right. Well at least mods do exist.

[wadepm]

On 11/1/2020 at 8:58 PM, Titanius Peck said:

An understandable sentiment for circa 2000 -albeit far too conservative for this day and age. Its almost so brazenly missing as to feel war is too sanitized. Heck my kids lego games have beheadings and dismemberment -im not vouching for tasteless, obsessive death porn -but bloody pools of sprite seems about right. Well at least mods do exist.

I don't think that sentiment applies any less because it's 2020.  Why would it?

[Titanius Peck]

24 minutes ago, wadepm said:

I don't think that sentiment applies any less because it's 2020.  Why would it?

Because in the earlier days of video gaming - violence, no matter how minimal was still being hotly debated as "damaging to our youth" thereby leaving many developers in a conundrum of contributing toward the argument. Context, amount or how gratuitious was really not being taken as an excuse  at that time but in our times it very much is. A War Game (tabletop strategy being exempt) is expected to have at least a mild sort of resemblance of violence and a small pool of blood wouldnt raise an eyebrow ANYWHERE. If you know of any such present day critic please direct me to their sites im honestly curious. That is why the sentiment applies less in today -its all about context of the present day society.

 

Did you miss my Lego Game dismemberment and decapitations as an example? these are simply different times

Edited November 3, 2020 by Titanius Peck

[wadepm]

1 minute ago, Titanius Peck said:

Because in the earlier days of video gaming - violence, no matter how minimal was still being hotly debated as "damaging to our youth" thereby leaving many developers in a conundrum of contributing toward the argument. Context, amount or how gratuitious was really not being taken as an excuse  at that time but in our times it very much is. A War Game (tabletop strategy being exempt) is expected to have at least a mild sort of resemblance of violence and a small pool of blood wouldnt raise an eyebrow ANYWHERE. If you know of any such present day critic please direct me to their sites im honestly curious. That is why the sentiment applies less in today -its all about context of the present day society.

I am a present day critic.  I think the bodies are more than enough.  

[Warts 'n' all]

I abhor violence. But, maybe severed heads should be allowed in game.

[Titanius Peck]

4 minutes ago, wadepm said:

I am a present day critic.  I think the bodies are more than enough.  

Well like you said -you are one person not a professional game critic. Im talking about societal norms as that is the question you asked. Individually we all have different opinions as the guy next to you might prefer zero bodies or he may prefer shooting balloons instead of bullets as they are too violent or that soldiers disappear into a puff of smoke rather than portraying death.

Edited November 3, 2020 by Titanius Peck

[wadepm]

4 minutes ago, Warts 'n' all said:

I abhor violence. But, maybe severed heads should be allowed in game.

If you are going to have severed heads then legs an arms should probably also be included.  But what about the occasional severed penis you might ask...

[Warts 'n' all]

41 minutes ago, wadepm said:

If you are going to have severed heads then legs an arms should probably also be included.  But what about the occasional severed penis you might ask...

Sorry I should have specified the game. CM English Civil War (Currently in development in a TARDIS somewhere).

[bobo]

Not getting those 5 minutes back...

 

[Bulletpoint]

I must say I never missed seeing blood in this game. And I grew up playing quite violent computergames.

When I look at modern wargames, the violence seems a bit ridiculous and over the top. In Graviteam games, there's a huge spray of blood every time a soldier gets hit, which looks like some 80's action movie, while in Post Scriptum, you see arms and legs flying everywhere (even though if you were that close to the impact of the artillery, you wouldn't see or perceive much in real life...) which makes me think more of Monty Python scenes than of real war.

Even the mods for Combat Mission that turns the casualty marker into a stain of blood look silly in my opinion. Firstly because there's actually not a lot of blood inside a human body, and most of it is dispersed in tissue and doesn't just leak out immediately. Secondly because if you get shot in a forest or a field, the blood will seep into the ground below you, instead of spreading in a big puddle.

Now, I'm not saying your opinion is wrong. Just giving my take on it.

[Erwin]

1 hour ago, Bulletpoint said:

I grew up playing quite violent computergames

Tell me about it...  Donkey Kong and Mario Bros were ferocious and may have contributed to my PTSD.

[MikeyD]

Blood in the game would be like 'Okay, there's blood in the game now', and 10 minutes later you'd stop noticing it. Considering how so many people play at camera level 3 and higher you probably wouldn't be seeing the blood anyway.

Hah, look what I found! A mod I made all the way back in 2011. I ought to drop that into a game just for old times sake.

[Erwin]

And the mod works in all titles.   The only issue is that sometimes it's hard to see in certain terrain and the "medic" can't easily find the WIA guy.

[Vacillator]

Blood or no blood, matters not to me.  What matters to me is knocking out the enemy's armour and if his infantry gets in the way, well they can die with or without blood.

Of course we should remember the sage advice 'if it bleeds we can kill it'.

Yes it's a Friday night .

[Titanius Peck]

Blood sprites are just a symbol of immersion that something deadly happened here. Seeing guys just lying on the ground doesnt necessarily imply "something really bad just happened here". Personally I like this type of immersion and yes - i would always notice and appreciate it. Some people like more particle effects, bullets sparking off metal, smoke vapors on freshly fired guns etc...of course they could all be removed but each one adds a different type of immersion component to the scene. Obviously we all have different thresholds over whats appropriate - i guess mines pretty high for military based games as i owned VBS -yes the $600 Military grade training version of Arma -and its violence was pretty graphic including real dismemberment, very bloody headshots and even children in villages. When i saw a terrorist attack one of these villages or a missile blowing up a village -its had an emotional effect on me and made me want vengeance against its perpetrators. Like i said - im an AI nut.

Edited November 7, 2020 by Titanius Peck