Some design suggestions

[SumpterBeast]

These are just some suggestions I had for the designers. If anybody has already come up with any of these and posted them here already, I apologize:

1. It's difficult to see some of the squad special weapons illustrations in the game. You may want to go into more detail on item #12 on page 23 of the PDF manual. It's easy enough to make out grenades, satchel charges and panzerfausts but some of the other items - I just am not certain what they are.

2. Include smoke grenades for some infantry units.

3. Simulate Time On Target (TOT) allied artillery barrages. This was where an entire battery or several batteries fired at the same instant on a designated target, resulting in an instant hail of shellfire.

4. It should be possible to view an entire battle as a movie at the end of a game. It would be great to save the movies of memorable battles.

5. Include a simple statistical player database, which would record your wins and losses in single player and multiplayer battles. It always seems a shame to win a great victory, look at the stats for the game, click "back to main", and the achievement is gone forever. Players could see their ability increase over time.

6. Include a campaign mode, where a player would assume the role of a company, battalion or brigade commander and fight many battles or operations. Maybe you would be promoted or fired based on your performance. If you were at the company level and were promoted to battalion, you would have a larger pool of units to select from when choosing units for a battle and have more access to higher-level artillery. Individual units that survive battles would go from Green to Veteran, etc.

7. Let us see the aircraft when they attack. Showing a shadow is kind of a cop-out and is not nearly as exciting as it could be.

8. Let players order crews to abandon immobilized vehicles or heavy weapons that have expended their ammunition. You wouldn't always want to do this, but there are occasions in which you would. For example, if a halftrack or jeep bogs far from the fighting, you might want to use the crew as scouts.

9. Allow rallied gun crews to return to abandoned weapons.

10. Allow elite units to use abandoned enemy guns, mortars, etc. There might be an element of chance involved here too that would permit this to happen - is there any ammo left, was the weapon scuttled or spiked before the crew abandoned it, or maybe it's boobytrapped...

11. Incorporate the use of starshells in night battles.

12. Allow team-size or smaller units to use church steeples. Currently you rely on abstraction for this, counting these kind of buildings to be several stories for the purposes of LOS, but you can abstract too much sometimes at the cost of features that players want.

13. Give some trucks AA MGs. you have already done it with jeeps, why not trucks with a ring mount .50?

14. Allow artillery guns to be placed in buildings (ground floor) at set up time. I understand why you shouldn't be able to move them into structures during the course of a battle, but you should be able to place them there at setup. It sure would add some spice to uban battles to have things like AT guns hiding in heavy buildings surprising tanks as they round the street corner.

15. When scaled down to their smallest scale (doing a shift-C in the game), infantry squads should show all the men. At larger scales it obviously isn't very practical and the three-man depiction makes sense, but at 0 scale it would be nice to see them all. Just another abstraction that detracts from the game experience.

16. Allow battlefield promotions. It's easy to simulate - just give the affected squad command abilities like a HQ unit has and change the prefix from Sgt to Lt.

17. Allow one vehicle to tow another bogged unit out of the mud. It would be identical to hitching and then unlimbering an artillery piece, which you already model. In the real world, stuck tanks are not just left to rust, especially when they are not exposed to enemy fire - they are yanked out of the mud. I realize that tracked vehicles may throw a tread, but when a bogged vehicle becomes "immobile" what abstract events are you factoring into the equation? And jeeps don't throw treads - a squad of men should be able to push one out of the muck.

18. Allow use of artillery spotter aircraft. It would be just like a fighter-bomber, but instead of straffing you would get an artillery concentration. The existing rules pertaining to aircraft mis-identifying friend from foe would apply.

19. Include napalm after the summer of 1944.

20. Include "City" as a terrain option. Currenty you can go up to "Large Town", but what if you want a purely urban environment?

21. Design games that fit together, rather than as stand-alone games. I suspect you are considering the pacific theater as the next logical choice for the next Combat Mission game, but I would discourage this in favor of revamping the basic engine and sticking with the European theater. CMBO is a few years old now and can be done better, and you could offer a bunch of add-ons seperately later. I think it would be better to have a basic core game and add on terrain models, other units, etc. in expansion packs. I would suggest further that expansions be kept small and downloadable from Battlefront.

I personally was not interested in the Russian campaign and didn't buy CMBB, and I read quite a few posts on the Battlefront forum that said the same thing. I probably missed some new German units that you had in there and thought some of the new game concepts were neat, but the eastern front always struck me as very bleak and depressing so I waited for CMAK. I have a suspicion that the pacific theater is not going to generate the same level of interest as the European thater did in CMBO, but Japanese units, US Marines and island terrain could be sold in an expansion. There are so many units, nationalities and terrain types that ideas are almost limitless. I can think of partisan units from Yugoslavia, Crete, France, etc.; regular army units from Finland, Greece, India, and so on - all that would be required is the 3d modelling artwork and to tweak the stats for their weaponry a little.

Just my $.02

[Holman]

Is this a troll?

I ask because this list is a nearly exhaustive collection of everything that people (usually people who haven't done a search...) have asked for again and again. In each and every case, the official answer is, "No, not with this game engine." We must wait.

However, since this list is so exhaustive, and since people too often don't do searches, perhaps this message should be stickied.

[Michael Dorosh]

As far as special support weapons, the icons for this are easily modded - check my ASL Interface mod at www.cmmods.com for example; I too had trouble seeing them in the stock artwork.

[flamingknives]

5) Why do you need this? Can't you remember? I f you must recall a glorious victory, you can save it

6) Zzzzzz. I mean really, Zzzzzzz.

9) This would require that an routed crew would often destroy the weapon. Deliberate abandoning (that doesn't break the weapon) should also be a feature, IMHO

16) Possibly for Ops, but I can't see this happening in a single battle.

[stikkypixie]

2. The reason that infantry smoke grenades are not included is because BFC couldn't find any evidence of its use on a large enough scale to include in the game, read the manual.