Infantry needs a lot of work...

[Dragon67]

Okay, forget the M113 and I can't really believe that stupid thread went to over 200 posts anyway and has not gotten anywhere...

All the real problems focus around infantry tactics anyway as the threads and posts the last few days all seem to point out.

Slow crawling and ending up in unrealistic positions in enemy LOS are serious game hampering issues.

My opinion is that this is all the result of CMBO line of using three figures to represent the entire squad has lead to no real work in the area of squad behavior/AI.

This is all going to get worse and frustrating when the Marines 13 man squads arriving by truck with the new mod.

Forget all the crud about vehicles and weapons and give us infantry that can survive a typical firefight by behaving realistically with survival and smart formation behavior. Give us quick and simple cover and facing options. Other games like JTF have implemented this.

[hammelman]

Welcome to Battle Front, you are wrong! Yet so right. There's about 10 Billion threads that relate to infantry behaviour. I assume you got the game recently, and if my assumption is correct then i can tell you it used to be a lot worse. It seems they've gotten better infantry AI step by step, but there is a lot of work still needed obviously. Either way, i dont think there is a magic fix or it would have already happened. Though who am i to talk, i uninstalled CMSF months ago and don't plan on putting it back on my computer in the near future.

[Thomm]

Expect improvements regarding some of the points you raised in the Marines module and the 1.10 patch.

Best regards,

Thomm

[Dragon67]

Originally posted by Thomm:

Expect improvements regarding some of the points you raised in the Marines module and the 1.10 patch.

Best regards,

Thomm

Hope so and sorry to get all hyper.

[Battlefront.com]

Dragon67,

Forget all the crud about vehicles and weapons and give us infantry that can survive a typical firefight by behaving realistically with survival and smart formation behavior. Give us quick and simple cover and facing options. Other games like JTF have implemented this.

Remember that all games have their own issues relative to their own feature sets, so it doesn't mater what other games do better or worse than CM:SF. Also I've never played JTF, therefore I can't even put this comment into context.

What I can say is that the infantry behavior is very good as it is. Perfect? No, and it will never be. Can it be better than in v1.08? Yup, and that's what Thomm is implying. We can move forward on more than one thing at a time, so no worries there.

Hammelman,

Though who am i to talk, i uninstalled CMSF months ago and don't plan on putting it back on my computer in the near future.

Then why waste your time making a post that can only possibly waste people's time reading? Whatever version you last played (v1.05 or earlier, I suspect) is irrelevant now. Might as well say that the Empire State Building is the tallest building in the world while you're at it

Either way, i dont think there is a magic fix or it would have already happened.

Sure, there is no magic fix. Complex behavior in a complex simulated environment doesn't just code itself. The same situation existed when we put out CMBO, yet in both cases things still improved despite the lack of faith by some. Having no faith is your right, but that doesn't make your comments relevant or of value when they are so clearly outdated already and yet you show no interest of reevaluating your position. Again, that's your choice... just not one that has much value to anybody here.

Steve

[Dragon67]

//Though who am i to talk, i uninstalled CMSF months ago and don't plan on putting it back on my computer in the near future.//

Could you please elaborate on why you believe the game is such a big waste of time ?

[Dragon67]

//What I can say is that the infantry behavior is very good as it is. Perfect? No, and it will never be. Can it be better than in v1.08? Yup, and that's what Thomm is implying. We can move forward on more than one thing at a time, so no worries there.//

I will disagree with you here, the infantry behavior is not very good. Nothing is perfect but in CMBO it was something the player could deal with as the squads were meant to be represented by the figures. In this game however, you have individual soldiers and you really cannot tell exactly what is going to happen when you send them somewhere. They ussually end up doing something foolish like coming under fire because they formed a circle behind the wall instead of a firing line or lining up behind it.

[TheVulture]

Originally posted by Dragon67:

//What I can say is that the infantry behavior is very good as it is. Perfect? No, and it will never be. Can it be better than in v1.08? Yup, and that's what Thomm is implying. We can move forward on more than one thing at a time, so no worries there.//

I will disagree with you here, the infantry behavior is not very good. Nothing is perfect but in CMBO it was something the player could deal with as the squads were meant to be represented by the figures. In this game however, you have individual soldiers and you really cannot tell exactly what is going to happen when you send them somewhere. They ussually end up doing something foolish like coming under fire because they formed a circle behind the wall instead of a firing line or lining up behind it.

This, for me, is where I have issues with infantry sometimes. Even knowing how the commands work reasonably well, it is often impossible to know exactly what the results of a command will be.

I've had squads take a beating becaise a waypoint that is several meters short of a corner puts a few men around the corner and draws fire and HE badness on the whole squad.

I've had infantry squads be taken out of a fight for five minutes (in WeGo) because I keep trying to position them near a sharp slope (or the lip of the top of a berm) but they insist on taking up positions that are just far enough back that the lip of the slope blocks their line of fire to the targets. Eventually I figured that there was no way to get them to do that - they were either too far back so the lip intruded, or over the lip and fully exposed. So I had to find a completely new position for them. (Scenario designers: beware of trying to position units on cliff tops).

And one minor bug/gruntle: when giving movement commands to infantry, the cursor doesn't change to 'forbidden' when over marsh, unlike for vehicles. So I managed to get a get a squad killed by giving them a movement order over marsh without realising it, and instead they went around it into the firing line... but that's a pretty minor problem once you know about it. Conversely, changing to the right pointer icon over marsh for infantry is probably a pretty minor bug fix.

It's not that there is anything wrong with the way that infantry position themselves around an action point. It is that the player doesn't know where the troops are going to end up. It would have been easy for me to give a waypoint another 3 meters shorter of the corner in my first example if I had known that one fire team was going to wander into trouble.

I would dearly love to see something that indicated roughly where your men will take up positions at their final waypoint (adjusted for the face command naturally). For my money, that is the single biggest improvement that could be made right now. If players can predict exactly what results their orders will have (barring unforseen events) then problems of 'realism' become much less important - people are ingenious at finding ways to use well-defined commands to achieve what they want (witness some of the mixtures of fast / move to contact in CMx1 to get troops crossing open ground to rush into cover and stop there to return fire if they are fired at). Make it so that the results of a move command are entirely predictable, and half the complaints about 'stupid infantry behaviour' will go away. Because 'stupid behaviour' usually means 'something I didn't expect'.

The 'crawl of death' ones will never go away of course...

[Combatintman]

'Stupid infantry behaviour' or any other arm for that matter is a fact of life. I have lost count of the number of times I've ended up miles from where I should be because some clown can't read a map. One of the best ones was my vehicle packet in a Brigade move going around a roundabout 4 times because somebody forgot to put a tac sign showing which exit we should have taken - oh how we laughed at that one.

I remember being on PVCP duty on the border in Northern Ireland and the multiple commander telling one of the privates at one end of the checkpoint to get into cover - every 5 minutes - yes the guy was a dumbsh1t. Or me coming off a VCP in Londonderry - running up the road to pile into the snatch landrover - as soon as it pulled away I fell out the back - I was lying in the road on my own for about 2 minutes hoping like hell they would notice I fell out and come back for me. Once they stopped laughing they did.

Its called friction and it is one of the fundamental rules of warfighting - many of you should know the Von Moltke quote about 'no plan survives contact with the enemy' or in modern parlance 'sh1t happens'.

So just because somebody doesn't line up exactly behind a wall in the game is not something to get too worked up about - its usually only one or two guys and at the end of the day nobody actually dies as a result. Live with the friction and lets get back to asking for the M113!

[Pandur]

@Combatintman

most of the time i have problems i order them no further than 50 meters, verry often less than that. and i hope that should be "findable". its not like i send em 5 kilometers through the mountainside into some vally somewhere.

is like quiet some people belived the broken pathfinding in the verry early versions to be "realistic".

something, at least partly "broken" in a game, cannot be explained with "realism".

no plan survives contact with the enemy

to say it like this, "no plan survives, even with no contact to the enemy".

and this also functions as sort of a test. if i have problems with infantry functionality while in enemy contact, thats not abnormal.

if i have problems with infantry functionality while "not" in enemy contact, than there must be something wrong and it defenitely wont get better when enemy contact is made.

so if they dont line up somewhere, or leap over the corner again or what ever, and even do it bad without any enemy in sight than i call it broken and not realistic.

i call it realistic if it is forced by enemy action, but it isnt, they mess up on their own too.

so, however. it is said that the next patch or update wich comes with the marines should bring some change in this area.

lets expect the worse and hope for the best!

[Combatintman]

Pandur,

I go back to my story about the guy on the PVCP - he was an infantry soldier and will have spent 24 weeks in his Phase 1 and 2 training he would also have done training in his unit and would have received a specialist Northern Ireland Theatre orientation package which could have been anything between 2 weeks and a month - during which the subject of staying in cover would have cropped up once or twice. After all of that he still needed a sergeant to tell him ... and I am not kidding ... every 5 minutes to 'hard target' or to get in cover. This was in Co Tyrone where there were 339 casualties during the troubles and in 1993 when there were 88 casualties that year which you would think would focus the guy's mind.

Now I admit that infantry AI ain't perfect but there is a tendency to get bent out of shape about it sometimes - so if 2 guys don't line up behind a wall just because I clicked the mouse there then personally I can get over it because I know in real life that if I tell private f*ckwit to do something I have a pretty good idea that he won't necessarily do what I want him to do because he is stupid/lazy or both and I therefore have to make sure I am checking up on him all the time.

Also lets just remember what is being modelled here - this is not a First Person Shooter so there have to be compromises or you will have to select every individual and give them their own paths and to be honest many First Person Shooters are not perfect - ok I haven't played anything recent but I was a big fan of Operation Flashpoint and that was recognised as being pretty damned good - even in that it was quite often a struggle to get some of the guys in a squad to take proper cover even after you specifically ordered them to in the command menu - and this was a game designed to allow you do that. CMSF is not in that genre so perhaps a little perspective is required.

[Pandur]

its allways fun to see from what sides players looks at the same things.

i see you tolerate this behaviour becouse you know and accept that there are "idiots" in reality so they end up beeing in virtuality too.

i for my part would think that "critical" points in a order would be comunicated without any other interpretation to it than what the commanding guy meant. means if i tell em to go in that garden and line up "behind2 the wall, wich is critical becouse we suspect the enemy on the other, i cant belive there are such idiots wich still hop over the wall.

the same in the game;

i place a waypoint "behind" a wall or befor a corner, half the squad leaps over the wall/corner to the other action spot they want to take.

we can asume they know they will face opposition at some point and "not" go over the wall to the enemy side.

so now to the side from where iam looking at that.

for me this is still a bit more wargame than simulation. also the game does simulate many things but it does not simulate my infantry beeing unitelligent or idiots. so i expect a certain degree of contolability, wich means for me, i can tell verry good if my man will end up there where i want or not.

if iam really lucky this game will get long therm playability with TCPip wego(with replay ), while right now i only play the AI.

if that will happen, it will be a much more competative(sp!?) environment where such a failure isnt tolerated. i could pretend its "realistic" for me, but i know its "not perfect" or better said not even close and that bugs me.

so i see that from the point of view of someone wich want to play the game against other humans and i cant use idiots in my troop

EDIT:

i forgott, yes flashpoint had sereous problems with AI, and its not soo much better in Arma as example. but that all not so interesting when you play multiplayer. there are hardly any bots around to command.

you could compare it as if "you" the first person guy, does not what "you" want. you hit "W", he moves backwards. you want to go prone, you crouch instead. you could compare it that way.

[ May 22, 2008, 08:39 AM: Message edited by: Pandur ]

[Combatintman]

Pandur,

Indeed it is interesting to see other viewpoints - I'm easily pleased me

[Dragon67]

//this is not a First Person Shooter so there have to be compromises or you will have to select every individual and give them their own paths//

Not true. This is something I don't want to even see and not what I am advocating. In the JTF game you click the weighpoint and it provides a highlighted circle briefly that shows where the members will end up. So, if you see that members are going to be exposed- you simply adjust the weighpoint. The second option in that game would be to select the individuals as thet are approaching the weighpoints and deal with them individually. But in SF you could see ahead of time if the entire squad would even fit behind the cover you are maneuvering too- and if they won't, then you know to split into teams.

[Battlefront.com]

Well, the opinion of how good or how not good infantry behavior is doesn't really do much for anybody. What we need to do is agree on where the problems are and seek to fix them as best as possible. It will never be perfect, nor should it be. Combatintman is more than a wee-bit correct that soldiers do stupid things in combat. In fact, this is one of the primary reasons for getting units out of combat for prolonged periods of time. Even elite troopers lose their edge and get sloppy. Also, the heat of battle produces a lot of bad behavior that often winds up not resulting in catastrophe by dumb luck.

One story I just read was a 1st person account of a Sherman/Pershing gunner in the final months of the war in Germany. He was a replacement crew member for a new crew formed from other recruits and were tasked with moving at night as their first real tank experience. They were scared so they drove REALLY fast and wound up hitting a parked column of Shermans. One guy was ejected and landed on the back deck of the Sherman in front of them. They were lucky to not have been killed, but he Sherman was out of action.

When they got the Sherman fixed after spending all night ALONE with marauding Germans all around. The next day they drove out all on their own and bumbled into the wrong town. They were quickly surrounded by several HUNDRED German troops. They thought that on their first full day in combat that they were going to be POWs because they screwed up some road directions. But as it turned out the Germans were happy to see them and promptly surrendered to the PFC who wrote the book. The GERMANS told them where to go to get back to their parent unit!!

Anyway, the point is that a certain amount of screwups in the game are not only unavoidable on our part, but in fact add to the realism in a way that we can't deliberately duplicate without months of programming.

Having said that, some of the things people keep seeing cross the line and must be fixed. Some already are We're working on more improvements too.

Steve

[Lethaface]

One thing that bugs me, why people keep uninstalling games they get tired of (for a moment) and posting that fact on the very same forum of that game. If it bugs you, buy a reasonable HD and there is no need for uninstalling anything you intend to play in the next year orso... Otherwise, what are you doing on a forum of a game which was worth so little to you, you can't even allow it to take up a few GB's???

This information is not of any value to anyone that is in the CMSF forum

I never uninstalled CMSF, keep two seperate installs but yet didnt play it for 4 months. Oh, I did uninstall COD4 recently and Blitzkrieg2 about 2 years ago. And [...] was uninstalled X years ago. Anybody interested in that type of info??? I can e-mail you about everything I installed and uninstalled the last 2 years. EUR 22,50 per e-mail, payment up front.

[Battlefront.com]

I also find people bragging about having uninstalled CM:SF a bit strange. For me, when I play a game I don't like I uninstall it and move on to something else. I don't go to the developer's Forum, or any other for that matter, and talk about the game I didn't find interesting enough to play. If it's not interesting enough to play, I should hope I've got more interesting things to talk about!

BTW, I forgot to add that if we simulated (on purpose) either of the two Sherman tanker stories I just relayed there would most likely be a LOT of complaint threads. So one way to look at CM, in any of its past, present and future forms, is that there is generally something that is unrealistically perfect to counter balance the things that are unrealistically imperfect. The difference is players rarely complain about the unrealistically perfect stuff

Steve

[MikeyD]

Some people on the board seem to be having much more trouble with infantry than me, and I'm not exactly known for my sterling generalship. Are we looking at a learning curve problem? I can easily imagine a green player purchasing the game, playing it a little, dying repeatedly during charges into mg fire, then they put the game aside in frustration and complain about the experience for the next 6 months. If others are having fun with the game and you're not maybe its not entirely the game's fault.

[hammelman]

Then why waste your time making a post that can only possibly waste people's time reading? Whatever version you last played (v1.05 or earlier, I suspect) is irrelevant now. Might as well say that the Empire State Building is the tallest building in the world while you're at it

I played until 1.07 and i was actually trying to defend you with saying there is no magic fix, but in my own way. Did i need to add the comment, no, but i did. I kept the game off my HD cause it frankly got boring for me - thats certainly not BFC's fault, i think its a great game and i am excited for the WWII version to come out. And if my post was irrelevant why did you comment on it?

One thing that bugs me, why people keep uninstalling games they get tired of (for a moment) and posting that fact on the very same forum of that game. If it bugs you, buy a reasonable HD and there is no need for uninstalling anything you intend to play in the next year orso... Otherwise, what are you doing on a forum of a game which was worth so little to you, you can't even allow it to take up a few GB's???

I formatted my disk and didnt it put it back on, again not because i didnt like the game - i'm an avid fan of the series, i just got bored with it, why would i keep something on my disk that is idle. Did you keep a copy Doom on your computer this whole time? it only took up 3 megs of space.

On a further note i like this forum a lot, i love the banter and the updates to the games, and i love the way steve is involved - thats why i stick around. The game is irrelevant in my eyes. I'm sure in a few years i'll get back to it, but right now i've moved on - I dont see a crime in that.

[ May 22, 2008, 02:30 PM: Message edited by: hammelman ]

[Dragon67]

//Did you keep a copy Doom on your computer this whole time? it only took up 3 megs of space.//

This is why I always buy retail and not download and make certain I keep passwords in three different places. If I do not use a program I have disk for over two weeks I remove it because eventually your system is affected. If you are like me you probably have a lot of storage eaten by media and every little bit helps.

//BTW, I forgot to add that if we simulated (on purpose) either of the two Sherman tanker stories I just relayed there would most likely be a LOT of complaint threads.//

I don't even understand the whole point of this^. I am talking about infantry behavior and placement. As the game is now it is the opposite as it should be. Because of the lack of ability to place the infantry into good firing positions and cover- I find that any move I make with infantry has (and mean absolutely has) to be covered by a vehicle popping smoke. Because there us too little control on where the infantry is going to go or behave. I don't think anyone thought I was speaking about a tank straying into a town where the town surrenders and the krauts cheer.

You know, to your credit the vehicles behave and respond very well. But armour cannot operate without infantry support- so any realistic simulation has to be infantry based, not armour based.

[hammelman]

I download games pretty exclusively now - as i just got tired off all the boxes. i keep all my needed files backed up on my second computer and i also back them up on a portable HD which i keep turned off when not in use for an extra layer of protection. I put all my game keys in an excel file which i have backed up in all those places. I dont keep games i'm not playing installed as i dont like the clutter on my desktop, or on my HD for that matter.

[Dragon67]

Originally posted by hammelman:

I download games pretty exclusively now - as i just got tired off all the boxes. i keep all my needed files backed up on my second computer and i also back them up on a portable HD which i keep turned off when not in use for an extra layer of protection. I put all my game keys in an excel file which i have backed up in all those places. I dont keep games i'm not playing installed as i dont like the clutter on my desktop, or on my HD for that matter.

I run two computers also. I find that my Vista can be really stingy as far as doing a lot of things in modification and security. Sometimes I have to download onto XP and do modifications and then transfer files by quick cable to Vista. I find it very annoying that Microsoft is trying to micromanage my activities.

[Battlefront.com]

Hammelman,

OK, that's a good explanation. Thanks,

Dragon67,

The examples I gave are to illustrate that bad stuff happens in real life and yet the game doesn't simulate such things. That was what Combatintman's point was too. In other words, units (infantry and vehicles) basically do exactly what you tell them to do, whereas in real life they don't.

I do not agree with your assessment of the infantry. It needs some fairly minor tweaks, some of which have already been done (current development version). If the behavior was as bad as you say the game would be completely unplayable. It would also likely mean that massive recoding effort would be needed to see improvements. Neither are accurate.

Your assertion that you MUST have a vehicle popping smoke to move means you're doing something wrong. Tactically, probably. It just isn't possible for the game to be to blame for this because if that were the case EVERYBODY would be saying the same thing. They are not. Gripes, complaints, etc. about suboptimal results at times... sure, but either you're overstating the problems you experience or there's something else going on that we're likely not ever going to fix.

Steve

[Guest Guest]

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[Battlefront.com]

Obviously it all happened in your head since there is no mention of popping copious amounts of smoke. I guess you've now graduated from vicious critic to brown nosing skidmark in our underwear

Steve