Guest BigAlMoho Posted February 9, 2005 Share Posted February 9, 2005 Hello, Moon said in a "Tips and Tricks" topic: "You ARE supposed to give orders to each of your units, and plot all of this." This stance needs to be reevaluated. Having a "follow" order is a very good idea and it should apply to any unit following any unit on any terrain... So you can have a column of infantry snaking along a twisting and turning path through the countryside or a column of vehicles down a road or anywhere... Having a "follow" order still means having to give each unit orders and therefore is still in the spirt of having to command each unit... I cannot imagine any reason for not implementing a universal "follow" command unless it is "just too difficult" for the company to program... and, that would really be a sad thing... I am looking forward to hearing the definitive company stance on this irratating issue... Al 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alkiviadis Posted February 9, 2005 Share Posted February 9, 2005 Originally posted by BigAlMoho: Hello, Moon said in a "Tips and Tricks" topic: "You ARE supposed to give orders to each of your units, and plot all of this." This stance needs to be reevaluated. Having a "follow" order is a very good idea and it should apply to any unit following any unit on any terrain... So you can have a column of infantry snaking along a twisting and turning path through the countryside or a column of vehicles down a road or anywhere... Having a "follow" order still means having to give each unit orders and therefore is still in the spirt of having to command each unit... I cannot imagine any reason for not implementing a universal "follow" command unless it is "just too difficult" for the company to program... and, that would really be a sad thing... I am looking forward to hearing the definitive company stance on this irratating issue... Al Concur, strongly 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Elmar Bijlsma Posted February 9, 2005 Share Posted February 9, 2005 Indeed 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Halberdiers Posted February 9, 2005 Share Posted February 9, 2005 agree 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Philippe Posted February 9, 2005 Share Posted February 9, 2005 I don't really have such a big problem with plotting every inch of the move of every vehicle in a column, though I'm not too fond of it. I'm primarily a CMBO player, so though this is irksome and annoying, in CMBO I can live with it. I've actually become fairly good at micro-micro-managing the speed and driving maneuvers of each vehicle as it wiggles its way around the curves in a long road while keeping its position in column, and not rear-ending or getting rear-ended by anyone. The problem is that procedure, which didn't work too well in CMBO, got even worse when it moved to CMBB. I'm aware of some of the little tricks and I've probably used them all, but the problem isn't my micromanagement skills, the problem is that using those skills has become very difficult because of the command penalty, not to mention the fact that I shouldn't be micro-managing something that boring at all in the first place. I have a funny feeling that that the drain on system resources and programmers' time from putting in place a truly effective follow command would be prohibitive. So at the risk of intentionally offering a second-best solution, I would propose that whenever a vehicle waypoint touches a road or track it sets off some kind of flag in the system. After that, for each contiguous waypoint that also touches the same road (defining that will be a bear without tiles) the player should be given the option to pay or not to pay the command penalty for the extra waypoint. What this would do is allow the micromanagement that prevents you from creating unrealistic and artificial traffic jams when you start crashing into things that in real life you would slow down to avoid. An alternative would be to program an intentional deceleration before a vehicle hits something (instead of after), giving a column a chance to slow down around a bend without giving itself spasmodic fits. And yes, I know that tank drivers aren't all from California and don't think it's normal to drive 70 kmh bumper to bumper. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sgt Joch Posted February 9, 2005 Share Posted February 9, 2005 Originally posted by BigAlMoho: Hello, Moon said in a "Tips and Tricks" topic: "You ARE supposed to give orders to each of your units, and plot all of this." This stance needs to be reevaluated. Having a "follow" order is a very good idea and it should apply to any unit following any unit on any terrain... So you can have a column of infantry snaking along a twisting and turning path through the countryside or a column of vehicles down a road or anywhere... Having a "follow" order still means having to give each unit orders and therefore is still in the spirt of having to command each unit... I cannot imagine any reason for not implementing a universal "follow" command unless it is "just too difficult" for the company to program... and, that would really be a sad thing... I am looking forward to hearing the definitive company stance on this irratating issue... Al I also concur. Trying to move a lot of vehicles down a winding road is very time consuming and an exercise in frustation...although in our current PBEM game, Big Al only has one tank left and a straight road ahead of him, so I don't think it's a big issue there 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Chapuis Posted February 9, 2005 Share Posted February 9, 2005 I just discoverd that CMAK has a 'follow vehicle' command, but that it only works on enemy vehicles. If they would add an invisiblity power-pack we might be able to use to drive a convey down a road. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JonS Posted February 10, 2005 Share Posted February 10, 2005 Originally posted by JC_Hare: </font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by BigAlMoho: Hello, Moon said in a "Tips and Tricks" topic: [snips]I also concur. Trying to move a lot of vehicles down a winding road is very time consuming and an exercise in frustation</font> 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boo Radley Posted February 10, 2005 Share Posted February 10, 2005 It's always annoying to me, to see at the beginning of a scenario, that I have a dozen or so vehicles that need to move down a twisty road with woods on either side, and INVARIABLY, I'll have a veteran somewhere in the pack, behind two greenies. I think to myself, "Well, this will take half the game just to get them out of here." 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RawRecruit Posted February 10, 2005 Share Posted February 10, 2005 Originally posted by David Chapuis: I just discoverd that CMAK has a 'follow vehicle' command, but that it only works on enemy vehicles. If they would add an invisiblity power-pack we might be able to use to drive a convey down a road. Hmmm...IIRC CMBB has this too. Surely the coding for a 'follow the leader' command can't be that divorced from the current follow order? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
McAuliffe Posted February 10, 2005 Share Posted February 10, 2005 I designed a couple of CMAK maps - so far for personal use - where I tried to solve the problem of extended and complex plotting for vehicles. I made a 4.5 km x 2.8 km map of the Stoumont area and with one plotting step, I can make drive a jeep (or any other vehicule for that matter, but that was the test vehicle) from the west edge to the east edge, following the roads. The map was conceived in such way, that where the roads pass through dense forest, the tacAI keeps the vehicle automatically on the road. In open country, all the roads are lined with scattered trees, but the corners or turns are lined with wood-tiles. This avoids, that your vehicle looks for the scattered trees on the straight stretches. (IMHO, the AI hugging of the road edges is the most dumb new implemention in CM) Where I suspect, that the tacAI might take a shortcut through the fields, I have put some tiles with soft ground. This also discourages the tacAI to leave the road, but you can also use rough ground tiles or march fields. The advantage of such design is, that you're not penalised with delays for the number of plottings and you can easily group plot a column of vehicles. When vehicles are in column, I use also the method of pausing each following vehicle with 10 sec. When advancing in "unknown territory ", I use most of the time, the move to contact command anyway. In this mode - or the move command - all vehicles have the same speed. Watch out, when using the simple move command: When first vehicle gets blown up or hits a mine, all other following vehicles will bump into the wreckage and start the dance of death. However, when you need to move quick a task force from one flank to another, you will need to sort your vehicles first, depending on experience and top-speed of each vehicle. Just to point out, that with some clever map design, you can make the tasks for the players more enjoyable and let them concentrate on tactics instead of being occupied with boring repetitve plotting. (Why did they invent computers anyway?) And if you think, that this problem was not discussed earlier, my sig is approx. 4 years old BTW, I want to congratulate Samurai Man with his piece of art. See his operation Pied Peiper He not only made skillfully use of Pyewacket's sublime map converter to link some of my old CMBO maps, but also designed himself very accurately the Ardennes environment. Unfortunately, my poor ACER lap top choked on turn 3. No better example showing the need of a follow the leader group command! [ February 10, 2005, 11:44 AM: Message edited by: McAuliffe ] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest BigAlMoho Posted February 11, 2005 Share Posted February 11, 2005 Well, it has been a day and a half with no response from the company... I guess this loyal customer is being ignored... I thought I deserved better, but I guess that's what I get for thinking... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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