Are towns going to get any better II?

[REVS]

Prior to the release of CMAK I posted a question about the improvement of town boards, and at the time your admin chaps replied with a very juicy looking screenshot of towns with much narrower streets.

Seemed OK at the time, but now I realise that all of that was a bit of a sham. I've been able to reproduce the screenshot, but it doesn't reveal the limitations of town design in CMAK, which remain profound.

The problem is that only large double-storey buildings are available in towns, and that when you try to set up some typically higgledy-piggledy Italian towns, they all butt up against each other and the effect is hopeless.

I've noticed that in the scenario designer in CMAK there are numerous 'blank' black tiles that do nothing, so how about some single-storey buildings on pavement, and also how about a few more road types for paved towns other than the right-angled straight line selection available?

To cut a long post short, towns are basically just as crappy as they always have been, and the invention of 'buildings on pavement' tiles is mostly a disappointment.

How about it BFC? Towns are a weak point in your otherwise excellent game system, and there are plenty of blank, unused tiles in the scenario designer for you to institute some reforms.

There was a lot of town and city fighting in WWII, but I don't think you're remotely close to reproducing anything like that terrain.

Friendly criticism, but what's your response?

[Le Tondu]

Likewise, I'd like to see some buildings for towns (one and two story) that can be set at the diagonal instead of just the cardinal points of the compass.

Hopefully with the rewrite, scenario designing will be something wonderful.

[SFJaykey]

One thing I suggested months ago was to create something like a "Casbah" tile, Where the whole tile would simulate small rooms and corridors. As an alternative to the current arrangement of having "buildings" sitting on top of open ground or paved tiles, in which case you get the wide alleys.

Compared to Woods, a Casbah tile would provide more concealment and cover, and much less vulnerability to air burst artillery, while slowing movement slightly more or about the same. Compared to Large Heavy Buildings, units would be able to move from one Casbah tile to the next without stepping into the street.

I was thinking of North Africa but "Casbah" is probably not the right name, since such a tile would also be useful for recreating European mountain towns where building share common walls and numerous corridors and passageways exist. If you want larger alleys you can mix in some small buildings, too.

[gunnergoz]

Kinda makes you really want to see the next CM engine, doesn't it? I'm sure the guys will "fix it or somefink" in the upcoming version.

Hopefully, we'll start seeing some threads...if not an entire forum...dedicated to ideas and suggestions formally put forward for the next engine.

[Slappy]

Actually, I think that the best solution is relatively simple. 10m tiles would solve almost all of your worries and not significantly change the mechanics.

[dugfromthearth]

I am working on a map - Apennines to the Adriatic - a huge map something like 3600 x 3600.

I already suspect I will never be able to finish it.

At 10m per square (which I admit sounds lovely and a scenario designers dream) I really would never be able to finish it.

[flamingknives]

All houses save the large, heavy type can be set with doors N, S, E, W, NE, NW, SE, SW.

The major fault at the moment is that tall, light buildings on pavements cannot be oriented with the door facing N or S.

[Le Tondu]

Originally posted by flamingknives:

All houses save the large, heavy type can be set with doors N, S, E, W, NE, NW, SE, SW.......

Yup, that's what I'm talking about -large, heavy types. Unfortunately, not all city streets went north-south or east-west like CM assumes.

[flamingknives]

I get the impression that the CMX2 engine is going to be a whole lot different, but with the CM1 engine, you're restricted to N-S or E-W squares for terrain, which means that square buildings that fill the whole terrain tile are going to be N, S, E, W oriented.

For CMX2, I think that it may go a little more free form (as in not limited so much to tiles for all terrain.)

[Moon]

Hi Revs, thanks for the friendly criticism.

There was a lot of town and city fighting in WWII, but I don't think you're remotely close to reproducing anything like that terrain.

Friendly criticism, but what's your response?

I think you're quite frankly wrong. CM has not been made to simulate house to house fighting between individual soldiers. Yet many of the requests and suggestions (not only yours in the post above, but also from others in the past) with regard to towns and cities aim in that direction.

At the scale CM has been created for (squads, platoons, companies), it does reproduce very similar problems and experiences as the real units faced when trying to battle their way through a town or a city in WW2. The suggestions people make would mainly improve the visuals, by adding more (and certainly cool) variations to the terrains, but would do fairly little to really improve the core simulation.

So I don't agree that towns are a "weak point"in our "game system". They might be in the visuals, but definitely not in the core simulation. But if in the above quote you mean that a town in CM might not automatically look like an Italian town in real life - well, yep, I agree.

We've had to limit terrain choices to a number of basic variations. This is mainly due to two factors:

firstly, the game engine needs to calculate lines of sight through each and every alteration of terrain "shape", cover and obstacle values and so on. Each variation multiplies the amount of number crunching needed for the simulation engine.

Secondly, to give the player the ability to create custom maps from scratch means that terrain elements have to "fit" seamlessly. This limits the amount of terrain variations right there, especially in a 3D environment.

Couple these two with the fact that CM has to work well on the intended scale first and foremost (which means that certain abstractions are allowed, like e.g. the exact placement of doors and windows or trees etc.), we came up with the basic types and shapes of houses you see. And to be honest, I think they work very well, and the screenshot I had posted some time ago that you mentioned was meant to show the flexibility of what we got.

Obviously it would have been great to add more buildings/houses/terrain types, and if we could have added more we would have. More is always better from a player perspective Game development has to set certain borders however, and it's the skill of how you set your priorities which turns a mediocre game into a great game.

Anyway, rest assured that we'll try to add more stuff in the new engine. Our team learned a lot of good stuff through CM1-3 which will be put to good use in the new engine eventually. But at the same time, we're quite happy where CMAK got to when you look at its beginnings in CMBO

Hm, I better stop before this turns into some kind of annual New Year speech...

Martin

[xerxes]

I would really like to see tall stone walls (8-10'). A "casbah tile" that looks like a bazaar and acts like rough/scatter trees would be very cool. I bet someone could mode that up.

[Michael Dorosh]

I think the letdown in terms of urban combat is once again tied to the modelling of the engineering aspects.

Mouseholing - as has been discussed before - is not allowed in CM. But given the abstraction in the buildings, perhaps this isn't necessary.

Other "nice to have" features would be rooftops and belfries that are accessible to infantry. A good way to take a building is from the top down where possible; blow holes in the ceiling, drop your grenades in, and work your way down...

And of course the ability to model hilly towns - ie buildings on uneven ground, split level buildings, etc...