(Old Bone from) CMx2 Fog of War Options.. Steve said something like.... (??????)

[aka_tom_w]

You are not lost

there are some things Steve has not commented on at all and to the best of my recollection of all the "bones" and hints I have read there has been neither confirmation or denial about anything with regard to terrain fog of war as you have mentioned.

I hope it is in or AT LEAST an option. The only good thing to report is they have (to the best of my knowledge) NOT said it is OUT or impossible to implement in the game.

hope the helps

-tom w

Originally posted by Halberdiers:

Developers or someone please (maybe I'm lost the post):

There will be in CMX2 an unknown information about the battlefield TERRAIN ,for example an unknown destroyed bridge or unknown steep slope?. Or in other words , the Terrain can change during the battle and these changes could affect the LOS?

possible?

[dalem]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

Dale,

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Of more value would be the following:

Yes! Let's get down to it, shall we? I'll have a large pizza with fetta chesese, black olives, and onion. No rush on that order though

I am assuming that Area Fire is getting "conceptually rebuilt" from the ground up? i.e. we will be able to pull a box or an oval within which we want a unit to direct fire, with the larger the area the lesser the overall effect, or something like that? I hope?

There will be more options for Area Fire, yes.

Steve </font>

[dalem]

Originally posted by Philippe:

Fionn was an asset to the community and will always be missed. Perhaps when cooler heads prevail someone will institute an annual Fionn's again awake event, in the hopes that he has learned to master his temper.

Fionn is a choad and got more fair treatment than he deserved. Good riddance.

-dale

[Becket]

Apologies if I've missed this before, but with 1:1 representation, will we get soldier by soldier morale? In other words, will morale apply at the soldier level or the squad level?

*Note: not sure yet whether I think soldier level morale would be a good thing.

[aka_tom_w]

Originally posted by Becket:

Apologies if I've missed this before, but with 1:1 representation, will we get soldier by soldier morale? In other words, will morale apply at the soldier level or the squad level?

*Note: not sure yet whether I think soldier level morale would be a good thing.

I believe Steve has said morale is planned to be (if I am not mistaken) on a 1:1 basis and the individual soldiers can panic and rout and leave the squad on their own.

I think that is what I read somewhere anyway.

-tom w

[Becket]

It could make for some spectacular situations in game. I first started thinking about it reading Rokossovsky's memoir, as he describes men running individually from the line until the whole group was in rout. Similarly during that event, a single soldier (noticing the General had not routed) recovered his wits and ran back to the line; others followed and order was restored.

The potential for spectacular results is certainly there; my only concern is micromanagement, but I have faith that normal games won't turn into To the Volga level of unit management (I'm one of those crappy players who often moves whole companies with a single move command).

[Battlefront.com]

Lee,

It sounds very much out-of-character for him to go off on a tirade on the folks at BTS.

Sadly, it was totally in keeping with his character. And I will go no further on that subject. I've had a nice two years not thinking about him and wish to not get back into that. Dealing with his problems was a very emotionally draining experience.

Becket, there were some parts of the 1:1 discussion that went into more details about individual morale and what it means for the game. The quick story you related from Rokossovsky is one of the things we talked about being totally possible in CMx2.

No 1:1 control, so don't worry about the micromanagement stuff

Steve

[Becket]

Thanks, Steve. I swear I did a search and couldn't find it. I'll look again.

[aka_tom_w]

Originally posted by Becket:

Thanks, Steve. I swear I did a search and couldn't find it. I'll look again.

Don't worry about it

it would have been very easy to miss because there were lots of bones and they really sort of all got mixed up in the big bone pile (and noise ) in a few different threads.

-tom w

[Halberdiers]

Yes helps.Thanks Tom for the quick answer.

there are some things Steve has not commented

OK.

[kipanderson]

Hi,

Steve commenting on my lobbying for a Cold War based game,

“You're a an optimist if I ever saw one ”

Of course.

Surely all sane people dream of 3rd Shock Army crashing through the Fulda Gap… light snow conditions, wind hollowing, light fading as T72s manoeuvre and Saggers snake across the fields. (Men in white coats crash through the door and start of drag me away… )

All the best,

Kip.

[Becket]

If anyone is curious, I've blogged the story that led me to ask the morale question here: http://cross.phpwebhosting.com/archives/2005/03/rokossovsky_at.html

[hoolaman]

Hello everyone. It has been a long time since I have seriously waded into a CMX2 thread, but I thought I would put forward a couple of little ideas.

Firstly, from a GAME perspective I think it is essential to allow the player to watch the whole movie through as an overview so they only have to watch it once to get a reasonable overview of the situation on the battlefield.

The question is, what do you allow the player to see so the benefits of relative spotting are not wasted away.

I can imagine the most common situations raised by relative spotting will be:

* Two (or more) units spot the same unit but identify it differently. eg. 1 tank, spotted by various units as tank? PzIV Tiger? etc.

* Two (or more) units spot one unit moving from cover to cover, and each spots it as a separate unit markers, so it appears there are more than one unit.

* Two (or more) units misidentify the position of a unit, or get sound contacts in different locations for the same unit, producing a scatter of markers and sound markers for only one unit.

Now as far as I can see, the player will have all this info available to them one way or another by cycling through his units. With this in mind, I think the movie should be played back with ALL of these contacts and misidentifications appearing at once. Sure this would make for a very cluttered and confusing picture, but isn't that the point? A real world commander would get many conflicting reports and have to then go through and assess the info.

The only problem would be where multiple units got the position of an enemy correct, but not the identification. To solve this you could diplay the "lowest common denominator" during playback, and if you click on the enemy unit you could see a list of the two (or ten!) different reports of the identity of this unit.

[Tankist]

Between all these "realism" debates, one feature of CM always was "sheer fun".

And, to be honest, that makes or wrecks a game.

I have no idea how CMx2 will "feel", but if Steve tells me it will be better than CM, he is probably right; after all it's Battlefront!

As long, as they do not make me a spectator, instead of a player, CMx2 will be ordered blind.

Tankist

[hoolaman]

Sorry to post consecutively, but I promise I won't do it every time, or post four times in a row! (EDIT: Damn tankist slipped a post in there )

How about, to reduce the reliance on the movie, the functionality of the generic unit position marker be increased.

Imagine, instead of a star or maple-leaf, a "last position" unit marker could give more info to the player such as:

*Direction of travel (little arrow)

*Time since disappearance (12 secs ago)

*A "trail" showing the path it took during the turn.

*Number of men spotted (with 1:1) eg. "I think I saw ten men sarge"

etc.

This way, every generic unit marker becomes a little "report" to HQ. This method saves the information for when you click on the unit, making it less neccesary to witness the action during the movie. Naturally these reports may suffer from varying degrees of inaccuracy.

It may even be possible to have two types of movies, one overview movie, and many unit specific movies. Then instead of analysing the 60 sec movie from all angles, you watch a battlefield overview movie as detailed above and then simply go around and start giving orders to your units. Every unit you click on will show a range of unit marker "reports", and if you see a unit that looks like it did something important you can then choose to watch the movie for this unit only.

This would save time and reduce awareness for the player, who may misinterpret the situation and not watch a unit specific movie at all and miss out on important info.

[Battlefront.com]

Fun is of course a top priority for us. When we developed CMx1 games we always had fun at the top of our list, right along side realism. But it is like "cool", "awsome", and other such goals... you can't bullet point features that will make a game "fun" while you can make a list of thigns that yield "realism".

The way I would look at this if I were you guys is this... we knew what we were doing when we made CMx1. The end result was three great games. The same guys are making CMx2 under better conditions and with more experience than CMx1 enjoyed. So... we should do OK by you

Steve

[Tankist]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

Fun is of course a top priority for us. When we developed CMx1 games we always had fun at the top of our list, right along side realism. But it is like "cool", "awsome", and other such goals... you can't bullet point features that will make a game "fun" while you can make a list of thigns that yield "realism".

The way I would look at this if I were you guys is this... we knew what we were doing when we made CMx1. The end result was three great games. The same guys are making CMx2 under better conditions and with more experience than CMx1 enjoyed. So... we should do OK by you

Steve

I have no doubt; you always delivered!

Tankist

[aka_tom_w]

Excellent Post!

I agree with those thoughts completely!

ALL of it!

-tom w

Originally posted by Hoolaman:

Sorry to post consecutively, but I promise I won't do it every time, or post four times in a row! (EDIT: Damn tankist slipped a post in there )

How about, to reduce the reliance on the movie, the functionality of the generic unit position marker be increased.

Imagine, instead of a star or maple-leaf, a "last position" unit marker could give more info to the player such as:

*Direction of travel (little arrow)

*Time since disappearance (12 secs ago)

*A "trail" showing the path it took during the turn.

*Number of men spotted (with 1:1) eg. "I think I saw ten men sarge"

etc.

This way, every generic unit marker becomes a little "report" to HQ. This method saves the information for when you click on the unit, making it less neccesary to witness the action during the movie. Naturally these reports may suffer from varying degrees of inaccuracy.

It may even be possible to have two types of movies, one overview movie, and many unit specific movies. Then instead of analysing the 60 sec movie from all angles, you watch a battlefield overview movie as detailed above and then simply go around and start giving orders to your units. Every unit you click on will show a range of unit marker "reports", and if you see a unit that looks like it did something important you can then choose to watch the movie for this unit only.

This would save time and reduce awareness for the player, who may misinterpret the situation and not watch a unit specific movie at all and miss out on important info.

[Noiseman]

I'd like to pick up on DrD's idea of limited movie playbacks for a moment.

Maybe it would be an interesting option to allow a player only something on the order of ten minutes of movie playback. By this I DON'T mean that the player has only ten minutes of real-life time to watch the movies. There would be two clocks. One counting from 0 to 60 seconds like we have now, and one that would count down from ten minutes to zero as movies from different perspectives play.

For example, a player could watch the full one minute turn from unit A, 30 seconds from unit B's turn (from any point in its turn), and forty seconds of unit C's turn. Total elapsed time two minutes and ten seconds (60sec+30sec+40sec=2:10) which would be subtracted from the ten minute clock which would leave 7:50 left to watch movies from other units perspectives.

The interesting facet to this is that the time coming off the 10m clock could be made relative to the command level of the unit the player is watching. For example, time could move at a 1:1 pace for a squad, but at 3:1 for the god like-view of the overall commander (even if this is just a notional unit). What this means is, if you view the full minute turn from the god-view of height level 5 (which only a senior unit commander would be allowed to do), you burn off 3 minutes from the ten minute movie viewing total. A full turn from a squad's point of view only takes a minute off the clock. All spotting would be relative to the unit the movie is 'watching' for.

The beauty of this concept is that the god-like perspective is elegantly balanced by the fact that the player is limiting the amount of information he can receive because time will be burning away faster from this higher perspective. But it does not effect his planning time or move plots.

This is a difficult concept to explain briefly, but I hope most of you can follow it, despite me poor communication skills

I don't want to get into minutia, but let me make a few comments for the inevitable flat-earthers. Of course you will be able to click on each unit during the orders phase and see it's perspective. No, ten minutes is not absolute (I picked it out of thin air), and of course would have to be adjusted for point values of forces etc. The time ratios and allowable view levels of command units would of course have to be well playtested to get the right balance. Yada yada yada. The important thing here is the concept.

Whether this idea would actually be practical in CMx2 or is simply pie in the sky, who knows? But its fun to dream up.

[Wartgamer]

Many people criticized the Close Combat series as being a click fest rewarding people with fast relexes,etc.

I really don't want some memory game either. Rewarding those with Rainman tendencies. But I suppose it can also be an option.

And I don't want to read what appears to be a weathermap either.

Why is it that it is OK to limit/restrict/time-out/etc MovieTime but anyone can just jump around and view orders-snapshots (unit view during the orders phase) unmolested? Why would it possibly be OK to jump to another unit in the orders phase, harvest that info, and then come back to a previously viewed unit's view?

This has nothing to do with Fun. Its all about reality.

[ March 02, 2005, 07:01 PM: Message edited by: Wartgamer ]

[hoolaman]

[

Originally posted by aka_tom_w:

Excellent Post!

I agree with those thoughts completely!

ALL of it!

-tom w

Hey thanks .

One issue is whether relative spotting and C&C limitations will make the concept of the "movie between orders" almost obsolete. I know it is at the heart of the WEGO system, but I don't envy BFC having to come up with a WEGO system that is 1. fun to play, 2. fun to watch the 60sec movie and 3. Realistically impedes the GOD and BORG. Diminishing what the player sees in one go seems useful only if there is no other way for the player to get the information. If cycling through units provies just as good of a picture of the battlefield, why restrict the movie?

Does anyone else think using generic unit markers to "report" what a unit has spotted during the turn is a good idea? This marker would include info such as speed and direction etc. This would allow you to watch the movie ONCE in an overview form, instead it will present the info of the movie to the player during the ORDERS phase rather than during the movie.

Originally posted by battlefront.com:

As for the concept of locking certain units into their own sectors. This is tricky for a number of reasons, so we aren't likely to do much with it. One of the things you have to keep in mind is that the senior commander of a force usually (not always) had the ability to move assets around as he saw fit. At least ones directly under his control. But it is harder to redeploy stuff in real life than in CMx1. There are some reasons for this...

Does this mean that my pet C&C idea of using "command-zones" that can be altered during the battle by HQ's as a kind of like a large waypoint corridor is not going to be featured? That's sad

[aka_tom_w]

still interesting