Steve's recent CMx2 Bones

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by stinkypinky:

Bah, I live in belgium. I can get him any Belgian beer he wants.

They sell beer to minors in Belgium?

Michael

[Battlefront.com]

Hoegaarden... mmmmm.... one of my favorites!

We are indeed very close to spilling the beans.

As for Martin's comments... hmmm... not sure how hard I should spank him for that. Even though he made his comments back in December 2004, I know Charles and I were thinking early 2006 at that time. Bit of a SNAFU I guess

Steve

[hellfish]

Define "very close".

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by fytinghellfish:

Define "very close".

"Sometime this century. Maybe."

Michael

[WineCape]

Patience = virtue. Wanna see how your new French Barrel (@ R5000 a piece) will interact with your grapes juice in 18 months time with battonage?

[aka_tom_w]

Battlefront.com

Administrator

Member # 42

posted August 23, 2005 11:21 AM

Quick definitions of what is displayed about each Soldier:

Weapon - the primary personal weapon of that Soldier.

Speciality - designation of special position within the unit, if any. For example, someone who is trained on an AT weapon will be identified as such. Squad Leader and Team Leader are obvious designations. Radio Man, Assistant MG Gunner, etc. These things are important to show because it tells you what the unit is inherently capable of. If a mortar round comes and takes out your AT specialist, you'll still be able to have that Squad go after a tank, but it will do so without the optimal choice. So you might want to have another unit do it.

Condition - This is simply a state of being. Right now we have 4 states, but that could change. The states are Healthy (including superficial wounds), Minor Wound (still functional, though less so), Major Wound (out of action), and KIA (completely out of action). This status has an effect on combat capabilities within the game, but it also has meaning for scoring and campaign play. Guys who end up with Minor Wounds might come back for the next battle, might not. Guys with Major Wounds will not, and could possibly be tallied up as KIA. KIA is obvious.

Onto other things...

The 1:1 representation is the way to go. We do not think there is any viable in between for a game of this scale. If the soldiers are moving around and looking like they are portraying individuals, people will be confused and pretty upset if that isn't the case. In CMx1 the soldier figures were obviously abstracted and even then we had tons of criticism for not showing every soldier (which was technically impossible at the time in any case). So there is no use whining and complaining about it... the decision was made 3 years ago, it is the right decision, and it isn't changing.

We don't know what the upper size of a CMx2 battle will be so we don't want to overpromise. Over time it can certainly go larger thanks to hardware improvements. But for the first game we are focusing on a "task force" type of organization of roughly 1-2 companies in strength. Less than a company should be viable, more than 2 companies... we aren't sure. For those of you who remember CMBO's early days we were saying the same thing, though by the time we were finished battalion sized games were possible for those with decent hardware.

The amount of animations our little guys will have comes down to time. We've got all the basics in there already, but we're not sure what more we'll put in. We could spend months putting in stuff. Unfortunately, we hit the point of diminishing returns on development effort pretty quickly since we don't have multi-million dollar budgets and a huge development team.

Steve