List of improvements needed (Battlefront please read)

[SGT_P]

List of Bugs/Improvements needed for Combat Mission: Shock Force

CMSF is a great game and I am enjoying it a lot. However there are several major items that need to be fixed in order to make it the game it should be. I fought in Iraq 2004-2005 just outside of Fallujah and Ramadi as part of a combined arms task force. My comments are based on my personal experiences.

-Infantry behavior: Infantry needs to go prone and seek cover immediately once they come under fire. When you are getting shot at, you do not continue to run mindlessly across the kill zone. Currently the infantry does not have a good sense of self preservation in the game, which is very unrealistic. Especially troublesome is having infantry enter buildings. In the game the infantry will run around the building to the door, even if it means exposing themselves to heavy fire. In real life, you would just go through the window or use a breaching charge (this feature does not seem to work properly). If you can't get into a building without running through heavy fire you will use smoke first. But generally people have the good sense to not run across open areas in direct view of automatic weapons fire.

-Armored vehicle behavior: Under fire a vehicle will not stand still. Even the mighty M1 will attempt to make itself a harder target and will pop smoke. In general, in real life people do not sit there and say "well this is an RPG7 so it does not have a reasonable chance of hurting me so I will not move". All incoming fire, be it small arms or 125mm is taken seriously.

-Returning fire: All units should return fire when being shot at, even if there is no clear target. The unit should just pick the most likely source of fire and starting suppressing it while taking cover/ evasive action. No one sits there just because there is no clear target, you try to generate a volume of fire.

-Force firing a certain weapon system: There should be a command to force a unit to fire a certain weapon it has available. For example, a TOW missle is a great way to shoot snipers in buildings.

-Add "hide" to the end of a movement command. THis ties into realistic infantry behavior. Infantry stays alive on the battlefield by remaining unseen and/or behind cover. No one stands upright on a roof when they are "in Indian country".

-Pathfinding needs some work. You tell a Stryker to go 10 meters and it drives half a klick away and then turns around.

Overall I really like the game and it is the best one so far in terms of presenting modern combat realistically. With some changing to the unit AI's sense of self preservation, it will be much better.

[FinnN]

I'd like to see more granulated difficulty settings. For example if you choose elite you can't issue orders whilst paused. I don't want that, but I would like all the others - however it seems to be a case of all or nothing.

Have fun

Finn

[Darkmath]

You summarized quite well the TacAI issues, which mostly includes self preservation behaviour and pathfindings issues.

Some others things that needs to be fixed IMO :

*Commands : orders on a specifical waypoint (like hiding, face, or put a pause on a waypoint before continuing if other waypoint plot after) , which as for now are featured but doesn't seem to work.

*QBs:

-Fix the no enemy or enemy in setup zone bug.

-Fix the passive AI problem (does exist too in some scenario)

-If random map aren't featured, so at least bring an import map function.

-In the future releases (especially WWII), let the player purchase units.

*Physics engine:

-A collision model is needed as vehicles can overlap each other . It is especially unrealistic in convey.

*LOS/LOF calculation:

-fix the LOS/LOF through edges and walls.

If these issues are solved, then te game would be almost perfect!

Err, I forgot something :

Where are the on map mortars? :mad:

[Speedy]

All good points SGT_P and welcome to the forum.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

Good post SGT_P but perhaps better posted in an existing thread. This way BFC and testers can more easily ignore all suggestions at once.

[Guest]

SGT_P, great post and welcome. I doubt that BFC has been ignoring suggestions at all, but well-reasoned, supported, and frankly doable suggestions like yours are exactly what they're looking for, I think.

The fact that they're supported by your experiences and not some fat wargamer's (by which I refer to my) intuitions make them all the more compelling.

Cheers, thanks, and welcome again.

[MarkEzra]

SGT_P Welcome to the forum. My deep, personal thanks for your service. A very thoughtful presentation of improving the tactical AI. I'm sure BFC will take notice.

[Ala11_Kal]

Good post Sgt_P.

Thanks.

[KNac]

I would add a better selection of ammo usage, when to use HE/HEAT or whatever, when to use main gun or secondary mgs, etc. That needs some rework too.

[Battlefront.com]

There will be many of these improvements in v1.02, which should be out Wednesday if all goes well with final testing. Other things will take a bit more time. And TacAI improvements will be a long term thing for us to tweak/fix.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

Forgot to add a "welcome SGT_P" greetings

Steve

[Bradley Dick]

Not to discredit you in any way, Sgt. P. But my personal experiences tend to be slightly different. I wouldn't say we completely disregarded small arms fire on our tracks, but we didn't take it TOO seriously. I was in Iraq from 2003-2004 and 2005-2006. We often would get "plinked" in cities, especially the nastier areas. We never repositioned in the face of small arms to be sure. Now heavy artillery, rockets or large mortars, would move us. Or anything that looked like an anti-tank weapon would get our FULL attention ( I was on a Bradley after all). In Tal Afar 2005, we were issued new body armor and fitted with protective shields for commanders popping out of the turrets (due to some sniper activity involving armor piercing rounds). I don't think I've ever, in two tours, popped smoke. For one, most of the time the launchers didn't work or weren't loaded. And for two, we were busier trying to find who was attacking than we were worried about taking a hit. It seemed to me that our biggest concern was letting them get away, and not self-preservation. But then again, by the time I got to Baghdad all of the enemy armor was abandoned or burning. I've never been in a major force on force mechanized environment.

[Roter Stern]

While the points are valid, I honestly don't understand the need to go into a total panic-mode. Especially calling it needed improvements and demanding attention from the devs Let BFC do their thing and patch the game up, geez.

And personally, when I see "troops getting shot at, and continuing to run", I think discipline, not a game bug

[Guest]

Well, The Louch, for some folks this stuff breaks the game. Demanding attention from the devs is what BFC expects of us. As long as we do it politely, I think that people reporting bugs are helping to further the game.

In this case, how can you expect to win an infantry battle where you need to micro-manage every fire team just so they won't be killed by an enemy they could have shot ten times over?

Get beyond a platoon or two and this becomes impossible, which is pretty frustrating. I don't see under what circumstances this wouldn't be a game-breaking issue, especially for the WEGO crowd, who need to rely in a larger part on the tactical AI.

[Battlefront.com]

Bradley_Dick,

Yeah, this is one of the things we had to choose up front; do we simulate COIN ops or something more-or-less conventional. While the equipment is largely the same, the soldiers exactly the same, and the doctrine slightly different... the nature of the enemy and operational goals mean the fighting itself has a different character. Or at least has the potential to be different. As you say, you never had to worry about a BMP coming around the bend or a T-62 somehow managing to get the drop on you. So when you found yourself getting pinged by small arms fire your ideas of what to do about it naturally went down a slightly different road than they would in a conventional environment. Perhaps not a lot different, but perhaps enough to have some tactical effect.

As you say, popping smoke means you generally have as much difficulty identifying and shooting at the enemy as he has shooting at you. If your mission is to clean a neighborhood of badguys, this tactic is largely self defeating since you've got the upper hand because you're in armor with the ability to make the "LOS works both ways" equation work in your favor. Or so I would imagine! But in a far less predictable environment with a full spectrum of threats? I would guess smoke would be seen more frequently. But maybe not!

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that we've designed CM:SF to be a conventional warfare simulation with a fair amount of asymmetrical warfare included. Therefore, by definition, it doesn't fully support COIN ops fighting in a direct way. That influences how we look at things like TacAI behavior.

Steve

[ August 07, 2007, 04:06 PM: Message edited by: Battlefront.com ]

[GreenAsJade]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

There will be many of these improvements in v1.02, which should be out Wednesday if all goes well with final testing.

Steve

Will the demo be patched (sorry if this has been answered elsewhere)?

GaJ

[Battlefront.com]

GaJ,

Yeah, we'll do that too, but it won't be concurrently.

Steve

[thelmia]

Multiplayer lagging and crashes! This is a great new way to play, and I wish it worked right!

[Pandur]

iam back from an "assorted" QB and noticed some verry subtile "unnice" tacAI behavior. with subtile i mean you wont notice it too easy, especially in RT.

good is i saw it

and this is the right thread to write it down, meybe someone else saw it too allready.

ok, we all know the "unpratical" habit of the programm to do a "quick" waypoint somewhere, when canceling a waypoint. wich is sometimes even longer than the original waypoint or in some weird direction.

ok, but now when you use the "hunt" command, and your guys spott some badies in mid turn, they cancel the hunt command and get a quick command to the next action spot(cant name it better).

this can be somewhere around between 4m to 15m in the worst cases.

on top of that, when it happens that the "quick" command is in the opposite direction than the original "hunt" command your guys are straight running out of LOS wich leaves em sitting behind the crest again where they came from, for the rest of the turn, as example.

thats not what hunt is intended for, and i dont know if its knowen allready, but i sure hope there can be something done.

best would be to cancle hunt and plot no other waypoint.

[Roter Stern]

Originally posted by Phillip Culliton:

Well, The Louch, for some folks this stuff breaks the game. Demanding attention from the devs is what BFC expects of us. As long as we do it politely, I think that people reporting bugs are helping to further the game.

I personally feel that to open a thread after thread about the same few repeating issues not only pollutes the forum, but also shows a complete and utter lack of trust in the developers. It hasnt even been two weeks since release yet, so the only things that should be getting reported at this point are BSOD's and CTD's.

Perhaps what BFC should've done is posted their to-do and wish lists. At least that would clearly communicate the difference between features that require tweaking, did not make the release because of time constraints, or were taken out as a conscious design decision.

[Guest]

That would have been an excellent idea. Then we would have known what issues they didn't already know about. Of course, that didn't happen.

Why do you think that only BSODs and CTDs should have been reported? How is BFC going to catch all of the problems with their game -- and prioritize work on known issues, for that matter?

This is an incomplete game. BFC probably has a list of fixes / changes to tackle that's ten miles long. People complaining about specific in-game issues point them in the right directions.

[Thomm]

- I think immersion would benefit from building debris being not confined to the footprint of the building but extending a little bit beyond it. As it is, the battlefield looks a little bit too sterile and well-kept to me!

Best regards,

Thomm

[Thomm]

- I think it would also look nice to make the 'shrapnel pixels' semi-transparent (if that is possible technically), because at present, they also kill immersion a little bit, especially the ones from the airbursts, that fall from the sky with seemingly no initial velocity, as if they are poured from a watering can.

Best regards,

Thomm

[SGT_P]

Bradley Dick-

I was an 11B light infantry and was never the crewman in a Brad or M1 so you are right I have a different attitude towards small arms fire And you are right that generally our armored vehicles were moving TOWARDS the fight in order to engage, not away from the fire. However there were times that I saw Brads pop smoke and M1s driving in reverse and this happened due to the intensity of the fire (volley fire RPGs from multiple directions usually). We spent our entire year mostly on one 15km strech of MSR Michigan so my experiences were different from yours for sure.

Our assumption was always that if we were taking small arms fire, then RPGs were a possiblity.

Just a guess since you were in Tal Afar - are you 3rd ACR? I was in 2 BCT 2 ID at Ft. Carson. We got there right before you all left. If you were with 3rd ACR in Iraq 03-04 then you may have been over some of the same ground FOB Manhattan / TQ airbase on Michigan B/W Fallujah and Ramadi. Some called it Habaniyah, some called it Kaladiyah.

One idea for Battlefront - in TacOps you can set global SOPs for your units in a control panel. Perhaps a similar idea for CMSF? As far as the game is concerned I just don't want my tracks/Strykers to sit there when they start taking fire, especially flanks and/or rooftops.

It's a great game, I appreciate your time and attention to our commetnt. Thanks

[Bradley Dick]

Sgt_P,

Small arms we were pretty indifferent about. But in the case of any shoulder fired rocket propelled device, anyone in a track pays attention. Nobody wants to be trying to exit a burning track. Hell the engagement time on the range is just a few seconds isn't it ?

I did over a 7 months of time running a 60km stretch of MSR Tampa.(both tours combined). They actually moved me into my old AO for the beginning of my second tour when I was with 3rd ACR. I know all about the open country, and the irrigation ditches.

GOD how I hate those ditches. They cut they entire landscape into sections that can't be manuevered through easily. The Bradley just couldn't cross the ditch, so you had to move a mile down the road and find another spot to cross.

Did you ever make it up slightly North of Tal Afar to the mountains ? I didn't even know there were mountains in Iraq until we went there. We went in January to sit on a retrans site for a week, rotating duty. It snowed. In Iraq.