Terrain Contours altering in game.

[Mark Ladley]

Hello

I used to play Beyond Overlord and Africa Corps for years, then had the Anthology I think it was call had three games in it. (They all got robbed!} They all let you change the contours in the game, so you could have them smooth or exaggerated. I found it made the game more playable, trying the find hull down and cover. Does this function still exist in Cold War? If so what is the key command to do it. May thanks for any help with this.

[Karp_K]

Holy-moly. I know what they say about assumptions, but can I assume that you have not played in a long time? As far as I can tell, I don't believe that there are any buttons like that in the current engine of the game system that allows for contour smoothing/exaggerating.

However! You'll definitely have already seen the -HULL DOWN- command in the movement tab. It is a bit finicky as things will be ingame, but it may at least help with finding good firing positions to pop up and down from. Essentially move your vehicle perpendicular to the crest of a hill, and you have two options. Either A: Place the hull down command across and past said crest, targeting wherever you want your vehicle to be hull down from. It will automatically stop once it reaches a point on the hill that is hull down from the actual endpoint of the hull down order marker. Barring this is option B, which allows for greater fine tuning of, er, hulling the vehicle down. Place the command at the top of the crest, and then select the order marker that was just placed. Place a -TARGET- command wherever you want the vehicle to be hull down from, and it will automatically stop when it reaches a point in the movement that it is hull down from the targeted position.

If all of this looks like word soup, then I'm confident the engine 4 game manual has a description of the command that is multitudes better at explaining it than my grasp of english. If you have cold war, you likely have the engine manual in the installation files somewhere.

You may already know all of this, at which point the only thing I can say is that I'm confident there is no button to make contours more visible. There is, of course, always the time-consuming method of just lowering the camera as far down as possible and inspecting the crests and contours by eye. Hopefully this has helped.

[Dynaman216]

There is no command to exaggerate the contours in CM2 (all the titles since Afrika Corps are CM2).

 

[Ultradave]

What might help your is that there are mods for gridded terrain, that help you see the subtle contours of the ground. Some people like them, others prefer to crawl around the map. Check the repository at The Few Good Men and look under the terrain headings. 

Dave

[Mark Ladley]

Thank you all for the replies, looks like I shall have to go without my old first act of altering the terrain. Karp_K you have assumed correct, it is a very long time since I played CM. Probably as long ago as some here are old, which makes me feel so.

[Blazing 88's]

56 minutes ago, Mark Ladley said:

Thank you all for the replies, looks like I shall have to go without my old first act of altering the terrain. Karp_K you have assumed correct, it is a very long time since I played CM. Probably as long ago as some here are old, which makes me feel so.

You could open up the editor, take a screen capture of the map with the elevation numbers that are on each map tile and then print it out or use another monitor to view the image. Ugly, but effective.

As mentioned, a grid mod is helpful too.

[Vacillator]

1 hour ago, Mark Ladley said:

Probably as long ago as some here are old, which makes me feel so.

I'd like to see the age demographic for CM players, but I'm guessing it's biased towards 'older' gentlemen.  Which introduces gender, but not many ladies play CM to my knowledge.

[Thewood1]

Back in the CM1 days, an informal poll was done and the average age on responses was late 40s was not surprising.  My guess is we are 18-20 years later.  Do the math.

Edited March 31 by Thewood1