First Impressions

[Sirocco]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

The problem we have with the popup menu is that in RealTime it is impractical.

What makes it impractical?

In fact, I never used the popup menu in CMx1. Always keys.

I think for most it was the opposite. And perhaps this is the root of the problem.

[juhhe]

Hi to all.

I have been following these forums for some time and been waiting for this game like the next guy here. Well, when the day came I bought the Paradox version of it and have been trying few battles and QB's. I thought that I might chip in my owm first impressions which are naturally just my own opinions and some of those are already mentioned before.

1) sounds are amazing again. They are really well done and bring a lot of depth to the combat.

2) I would say that the graphics are fine once the problems with the flickering and jagged shadows are gone. Currently I am having some slight flickering problem in the upper part of the screen and if I disable the shadows then the whole screen flicers.

3) action is quite impressive (when the pathfinding and AI works well)

Then there are unfortunately the not so nice things that I am going to write here too. I do hope that is doesnt seem like I am whining, I am just writing down my own experiences. I have some hours now with the game, not much but perhaps to notice some things.

1) Pathfinding can be VERY frustrating specially in cities where there is a lot of staff and roads are narrow

2) not very convinced about the AI. I am not a good player of these kinds of games even I like these but CMSF it seems that you cannot loose (okay, playing the the basic training difficulty)

3) UI is, plainly said bad. Now I know that this is harsh but let me explain. If one chooses the commands with mouse there is a lot of mouse surfing around screen to make a chain of commands.

Then again if one uses hot keys you still have to make sure that you are on correct tab as several orders use same key. So if you want to move with U, make sure that you are not on c -tab. And finally, this combined with the fact that if you after selecting a command, click on a impassible terrain the command is reset and you have to choose it again. VERY frustrating. This clicking on a impassible terrain seems to be quite easy to do (at least on the one battle where it was Syrians vs Syrians and blue force tries to conquer the goverment building, do not remember the name of the battle). I might be wrong but is it so that if there is a fence, a stone wall there it takes up a complete terrain tile instead just the space the wall requires?. I mean that the tile could be sand for example but then on it is the wall blocking movement and LOS. This wall could be for example 1 yard wide and tile as wide as they normally are. Because if it is so that one terrain is always one tile, there is some REALLY tight squeezes between walls.

It seems so as when there is a wall running in 45 deg angle there is a jagged line of impassible terrain and clearly the terrain is more lighter than the road beside it. Even they should be the same road. Hard to explain, hope you can see what I mean.

4) LOS. I am not at all convinced that this works as should on all the occasions. On few occasions I have moved my troops 13 meters away from a FIRING T72 (for example) and still they could not see it. No smoke or other staff blocking the view when I took the camera to unit view. I checked this so, that I brought more of my troops around the enemy and some can see it and some cant. Same enviroment for all of them. One more occasion was that my tank was standing in the middle of the road aiming a long the road. On free parts of the road LOS ended after about 90 meters. But when I moved the target tool 15 deg to right so that the line went THROUGH a destroyed T72 I got almost enless LOS. Endless as the map ended.

5) Enemies appearing out of nowhere behing my troops. And I do not mean the feature where the enemy is only visible when some body actually sees it. I mean that on the excact same point that I drove my tank through appeared an enemy T72 5 seconds later . And no it did not seem to have driven to that spot on the same instat. It just appeared there.

6) When I try to send my infantry behind a corned of the wall, part of the guys stay on the road and not taking cover behind wall. Naturally they got slaughtered there. It seems that the normal US squad of (I think it was 9 men) takes too big space of the map in relation to other units. Might be a spacing problem inside the unit.

7) bad performance. I mean really slow. And I have Intel 945, XP SP1, ATI 1950 and 1,5 Gb DDR. And the flickering of the screen is annoying.

Like said, had been waiting for this game anxiously and feel at this point a bit dissapointed. Cannot understand the decisions on the UI, do not feel confident that the game is not cheating, dont trust the LOS.

I do not want to hurt anybodys feelings and can understant that this has been a enormous task to built up but still my feeling is that the release might have been delayed a bit, engine optimizes a bit better, maybe few things should have been found during the Beta testing and fixed before release.

But anyways, we now have this and with time it will propably become a great game. I just somehow in my fantasy world thought that Battlefront would be the one exception on this business who do not release products too early. During the last few years I have grown a bit tired of patching unfinished games after release.

Sorry this got to be so long but I tried to explain my first impressions with my poor english and to do this briefly is not easy.

Thanks Battlefront for still doing these games. If you would not do these then who would?.

P.S. I understood that the Battlefront version is delivered with 200 pages PRINTED manual. Is this correct?.

If so then why is the Paradox version equipped with skimpy 70 page one with nonsense about e-licensing etc. Battlefront shoud make sure that every version should be provided with same "accessories". I just HATE reading the manuals on screen.

[gstelmack]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

The problem we have with the popup menu is that in RealTime it is impractical. In fact, I never used the popup menu in CMx1. Always keys.

Steve

Here's the problem then. I used the popup for everything in CMx1. And in Close Combat. Which was real-time. And very practical. And in any other tactical / strategy game that had one.

Maybe once I spend weeks getting used to it, I'll like the 2-stage approach to giving orders, assuming I ever get used to remembering what page I was on as I analyze a battlefield, and trying to get used to overloaded keystrokes for each order. But I've never been a keyboard guy unless I had to be, and then only when there's a handful of commands to remember, and certainly not a 2-stage approach. To give you some idea, I'm a programmer, and I almost never use the hotkeys in my editor. Not something I ever get used to, as I have to use a command over-and-over to get it burned in, and with an editor there are only a handful of commands that fit that bill (copy-and-paste is about it for me).

And having to look down at the panel to remember what page I was on and try to learn the keys breaks immersion and seems less practical in the heat of real-time combat than a right-click menu in the place I'm giving orders that just has what's legal right then.

Anyway, before it sounds like all I'm doing is whining here, I should also give some positives, because I AM enjoying the game despite the difficulties using it. I love the icons above the units, especially for targeting. Makes it very easy to target a specific unit. I love the look of the soldiers, helps immersion tremendously over what we had in CMx1. I love the real-time option, as the battles go much faster / smoother than WEGO, where I didn't much like the 60 second chunks that kept breaking things up. I love the sound effects, the tracers and explosions, and the smoke.

I'll add my weight to some of the pathfinding problems mentioned elsewhere (I just need to get used to what throws it off, as it's not obvious just yet what will cause a vehicle to go through contortions to try and move a few meters forward to a hopefully hull-down position), and the game is harder to use than it should be, but the rest of the game seems fairly solid so far and a ton of fun. No performance or video fits here for me, installed it and it just worked.

[PFMM]

Finally finnished fooling around with the Demo.

Runs fine on my HT P4 3.0,1GB RAM and 9800PRO, with graphics a notch below maximum. Some lag from time to time but nothing intolerable.

Visual impressions were initially good, but after a while I disliked the washed out look everything has. The icons made that dislike worse as I found they contrasted with the background to much. Feel that TOW has it done better, though I think SM:SF has far superior audio effects.

I found the menu more cumbersome than that of CMBB, and the easy way I slid into CMBB without worrying about which key I was pressing was not there. More keys to press to get things done as well worries me.

Played the missions against the computer, and, as usual found nothing special in the gameplay or the decisions of the computer. Predictable and easy to beat, with odd beahaviour here and there. Then Played online against a friend, which was better but not that exciting. We both thought that the gameplay may be too tactical with little in the way of strategy, and didn't feel like repeating the effort either.

Overall, I was disenchanted. The gameplay I found limited and boring. The real time did not add anything for me or detract from it either. The other considerations are of minor concern and would probably fade with time. As I'm a fan (not an expert, just a fan) of modern ground combat and all it's toys I'll be interested to see how this develops. This product, however, is not for me.

[SgtMuhammed]

Things I learned playing with the Demo.

1: The M1 is not invulnerable if you get it in a bar fight with an entire Syrian Tank/Mech team. It sure is a tough mother though.

2: The Javelin is awesome and it seems can be fired by nearly everyone. Actually this isn't too far off as we used to cross train everyone with everything.

3: The Mk19 is like a magic wand against trenches.

4: Strykers armed only with a .50 cal have been taken in by the Myth of the M2. It isn't an anti-tank weapon anymore guys, quit shooting at T72s and getting their attention.

5: I can't wait for my student loan check to clear so I can buy the full version.

[Renaud]

I played the Demo and vastly enjoyed it. Played first as the Syrians, then US, elite difficulty.

I did not expect to enjoy CM2 as much as I have and that's just the demo. In fact I haven't enjoyed a game this much since I fired up CMBB the first time years ago (and cmbo before that). The vehicle animations are a joy to behold. The sound is high quality. The ballistics are great. The graphics and sound are very close to the experience of a squadron live-fire night exercise at NTC, except the bad guys are real and we're firing service ammo!

One thing that I wasn't looking forward to was seeing types of vehicles that I served in blown up...it was rather shocking. I actually got a sickening sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when I took out 2 M1's with multiple cross fires from hidden AT-4's. For this reason I would rather play historical settings. Anything prior to 1990 really. The graphics, sounds and immersion are spot on.

I have enjoyed TOW, but this is light years beyond in terms of fidelity and immersion. CM2 also runs a lot smoother. TOW is to CM2 as CC was to CM1.

All that being said, obviously there's room for improvements which I'm sure will be added over time with patches and new 'modules'. I'm just happy someone is making games like this. Everything else out there is fluff (perhaps fun, but still fluff).

[hoolaman]

Can I suggest having the WEGO replay start from the END of the video. That way all you do is skip if there is nothing you want to see.

Saves watching and then fast forwarding through the video.

[Knaust]

I played the demo, but I was disappointed with AI.

I played the Syrians and got a Total Victory, Elite difficulty, against the AI.

---SPOILER---

Deploy Syrian units on the Syrian right side and wait for Blue units approaching.

The Blue AI doesn't have the correct approach to this strategy.

[ July 30, 2007, 01:50 AM: Message edited by: Knaust ]

[SgtMuhammed]

Originally posted by Hoolaman:

Can I suggest having the WEGO replay start from the END of the video. That way all you do is skip if there is nothing you want to see.

Saves watching and then fast forwarding through the video.

Just hit the big red button if there is nothing you want to see. That takes you right to the orders phase.

[Mindfield]

After playing around with the demo:

One scenario (tutorial not counted), quite dark. Not the best promotion

Sound: ok

Graphics: Well, trenches look strange at distant. I was really wondering what those "patches" are, before positioning the camera there.

Gameplay: played the old CM games, especially CMBB, I really like what I see here. Controles will take some time to get used to, but I really like how to call artillry. Missing the right-click menues from time to time. Quite good so far.

BUT:

The realtime mode needs some kind of replay!

I hate what amount of action Im missing due to not being there in time or simply occupied with other things.

During play it would be very helpful to get audio or visual events (console) to what is happening to your troops. I found a whole squad killed, after marveling at the looks and move of my tanks.

I switch to my trops to hear one of my tanks blown up by...well what hit it? I dont know. Its ok to not exactly know what killed it, but after the battle it would be nice to see that information for learning and analysis.

That leads to the need of some kind of replay. I understand that you cannot track everything due to the big amount of data, but what about an event driven replay?

Like: Track results, the cause of kill, maybe narrowing on only big calibers, some special comands. Not animated, but you can click through the events or let them run in a timely manner (only the events) and get a static display on the map. This would be so helpful and getting some feel for the past battle! Not to metion to share it on the web.

There it is: Im missing the individual killborad and some OOB overview display of all of my troops.

And get me a daytime scenario (in addition to the tutorial) for the demo please, though the small arms tracers bouncing of destroyed tanks looks very nice.

Overall: Good, with a "But" and potential to grow!

[C'Rogers]

BFC said

There are a total of 36 possible Commands for a unit (though I don't think any one has all at once). If we had unique hotkeys for every one of them, as we pretty much did in CMx1, even youngsters would have a hard time remembering them all [smile]

A mere 36 keys to remember? What, are you over 30 or something?

Seriously though, after a couple days wish I could say I was picking up how you had laid things out but still continue to give the wrong orders.

[track]

Played two games (one with both sides) last night of the Allah's Fist. Both ended up in Syrian victories.

- Compared to earlier CM-games AI seems very lazy at moving units???

- Is there a way to draw a box in order to select multiple units?

- Camera is very sluggish to use

I have very mixed feelings at the moment. Have to play some more.

[jomni]

Originally posted by track:

Played two games (one with both sides) last night of the Allah's Fist. Both ended up in Syrian victories.

- Compared to earlier CM-games AI seems very lazy at moving units???

People have complained about this. AI does static defense.

- Is there a way to draw a box in order to select multiple units?

Shift and drag the mouse?

- Camera is very sluggish to use

a lot have complained but you just have to get used to it. using the mouse instead of keyboard is faster.

I have very mixed feelings at the moment. Have to play some more.

wait 'till you discover the poor pathfinding.

Anyway, I find the game decent but the bugs should be really fixed to make it enjoyable.

[track]

Thanks shift drag does it.

You mean that they do not know how to reinforce a faltering position anymore?

CM AI was perhaps lame at attack, but it surely made you pay if you did a sloppy advance on their position and it could reinforce positions by shifting troops.

[Lindan]

Originally posted by Janster:

Arty Wizard - A bit cumbersome yes? not sure why I have to wade through menues just to get some arty off.

In case you actually start playing the game someday, instead of bitching about every single aspect of it:

there are more OPTIONS to chose from than your mouse has buttons.

This may be a strange concept to you. How about playing some Desktop Tower Defense for your wargame fix instead. Really good game. Only one mousebutton and 4 keys needed, too.

[Blackmuzzle]

Indeed, arty calls are so simple in this game, it's really the one part of the UI that stands out and shines. How can you complain about that? Do you have any idea of how complicated this is in RL, or even VBS1 with arty addon or Flashpoint with the artillery mod?

[Ronn]

In case you actually start playing the game someday, instead of bitching about every single aspect of it:

there are more OPTIONS to chose from than your mouse has buttons.

This may be a strange concept to you. How about playing some Desktop Tower Defense for your wargame fix instead. Really good game. Only one mousebutton and 4 keys needed, too.

Could you please stop with this childish

kind of argumentation?

What Janster said was right.

This game is a good game, but need much work

and tuning for usability and gameplay ...

[Steiner14]

Originally posted by Lindan:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Janster:

Arty Wizard - A bit cumbersome yes? not sure why I have to wade through menues just to get some arty off.

In case you actually start playing the game someday, instead of bitching about every single aspect of it:

there are more OPTIONS to chose from than your mouse has buttons.

This may be a strange concept to you. How about playing some Desktop Tower Defense for your wargame fix instead. Really good game. Only one mousebutton and 4 keys needed, too. </font>

[Truppenfuhrung]

Originally posted by dima:

Is anyone having trouble getting Syrian ATGM's fired? I was playing first battle (Abu Susah) and the ATGM (the one that was destroying my guys when I played as US) when I played as Syrians I kept targeting enemy vehicles and during the whole game it NEVER fired one missile.

Same thing here...

[Battlefront.com]

AT-3s have a 500m dead zone in front of them. There was also a bug that we fixed that held the TacAI back from firing on its own. I think that was fixed in v1.02 (if not, it is fixed for v1.03).

Steve

[Truppenfuhrung]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

AT-3s have a 500m dead zone in front of them.

I forgot about that... And about the long 5 minutes to deploy the weapon !

[Lindan]

Originally posted by Ronn:

What Janster said was right.

No it wasn't.

[scottie]

PROS:

game good , it the spirit of CM style tactical warfare.

CONS:

interface is taking sometime to get use too.

SUMMMARY:

good effort battlefront, i trust your vision.

[Gimble]

Originally posted by metalbrew:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Sirocco:

I couldn't get the AT teams to use their last Javelin's against the bunkers in the training campaign.

I had the same thing happen. The ATGM teams quickly engaged the T54s without orders. The I manually targeted both bunkers. One bunker was fired at, the other wasn't. I couldn't compel my ATGM teams to fire on the second bunker. The M249 had no problems targeting the same bunker and there was a red icon above the bunker (unlike the dead first bunker and dead T54s). </font>