Demo Review

[hellfish]

Originally posted by Dirtweasle:

Any of the old CM hands have any comments on the demo so far?

I like the game! It's definitely not the usual BS swarm & rush game normal RTSes are. I like the detail a lot. Graphics are excellent (I had a little schutzen fire his AT weapon at a T-34... very neat to watch!).

[Dirtweasle]

Thanks. How are the mortars working out?

[seppDieter]

im kinda disappointed for now,

i have the minimum specs, and still when i play the sp mission in medium settings (makes game look horrible) the camera movement is outrageously laggy, maps take +5 minutes to load, when you are not zoomed in close to the ground the game looks rather cheap, when you arent paying attention to a tank, then its crew finds it funny to drive toward the enemy and get destroyed without you ordering them.

im gonna try and retry to play it and search for tweaks, but again it misses the WOW-factor. and i dont really feel "there".

i really hope i can find better camera settings and performance tweaks, but for now i dont think im gonna buy it.

[Guest Panzer Boxb]

The tank wandering can be fixed by giving the unit a "Hold Position" order.

I only had time to play through the mission once last night. It was intense and I made many stupid mistakes but that was mostly due to my unfamiliarity with the mechanics and controls.

[Sneaksie]

Note the difficulty levels - only the hardest is realistic. On easier levels your munitions inflict more damage than enemy's. Also morale can be switched off on easy and medium levels.

[Kalibri]

For those of you, who is so dissapointed in Tank/vehicle movement not following the roads but hitting trees, I will give a hint, there is a command that, sends all vehicles, soldiers, etc, to follow only roads. What you are probably choosing is the command which will choose the shortest route from point A to point B.

There is a lot more to this game than just a little demo, version.

You need to be familiar with real world tactics to succeed in any of the battles here, even when figting an AI!

Options are there, and don't forget, you are the man with the gun:)

[Pvt. Ryan]

Originally posted by Dirtweasle:

Any of the old CM hands have any comments on the demo so far?

My initial reaction is the same as crazylegs', but I'm not giving up on it. I think I may need to turn off the dual core to speed things up.

I think I know what he is talking about as far as LOS. At one point I was trying to target a tank with an AT gun. I got a message that there was no LOS, which is fine, but I had no way of knowing what specifically was blocking the LOS, when I could expect the tank to come into LOS, or what I needed to do to get LOS. With CM you have the LOS tool so you know these things.

I'd really like it if you could rotate the screen with the mouse. Maybe there is a control setting I can change.

What I see isn't nearly as nice as the screen shots someone posted and I have a pretty good computer and graphics card.

[Guest Panzer Boxb]

Pvt. Ryan, without changing settings my system allowed me to rotate the camera by pressing the scroll/middle button.

[Pvt. Ryan]

Thanks. I'll try it when I get home.

[Scipio]

After playing with training missions:

- No problems running the game (Gefore 7900 GTO @ 1280x1024, AMD X2 4200+)

- Graphics not up to date, but okay

- I will need some days til I'm used to the camera. It's a bit different from CM. I'm missing (or haven't found yet) a 'quick jump' key to jump to a map location

- Sounds okay, but the barking dog sucks. Do somebody know how I can shoot the dog?

Won't go into the details so far. In short words, the game feels a bit like to good ole Close Combat in 3D

[Guest Panzer Boxb]

Scipio, you can click on the mini-map to move the camera to that spot. Keep in mind, it moves the camera to that spot so if you want to control a certain unit, click away from them in the opposite direction your camera is pointed. If you click on the unit it will probably end up underneath the camera and therefore outside your view.

[W583]

I donno, I think some of you guys expect too much

just like Scipio said, it reminds me of close combat

and I love that game

[ironviking]

this is my first post. i've been monitoring this site for months. i;ve been playing cmbb and cmak for the past 3 years.

ToW demo= Awesome. love it. i pre-ordered but this is a nice comrpomise. being the former owner of a software company i know the problems that come up.

The full game would do me no good until i've mastered the interface. they gave us a demo with jagdTigers for [petes sake! my machie is dual core 2.86, 4gb of ram and a 512mb vid card so it better urn well and it does. hopefully i wont be back here griping.

Godd work BF!!!!!

[RavenouZ]

I think the demo is pretty good, nice idea to put the tutorials in the demo to make the new players get a clue how the game works, ppl that think this is a rts like C&C 3 and Warcraft will for sure be up for a cold shower

As for performance go i can´t understand ppl with highend gaming rigs to have such high framedrops i run it on my laptop (AMD Turion64 x2 1.6ghz 1gb DDR2 ATI X1600 512mb) and i use 1280x800 and all MAX and i havent have any realy bad framdrops at all.

GREAT GAME GUYS i will buy this for sure.

Thanx from Sweden

[MikoyanPT]

Hey guys Reichenberg just posted this..

"But as soon as the either objects shadows or self shadowing is selected, I get a picture show at around 2-5 fps. I have reinstalled my graphics drivers (newest ones!) and directX 9.0C but to no avail. My rig is a Athlon X2 4600 with a ATI X1950pro, 2GB and on Windows Vista....."

Maybe there are some kind of inompatibilty whith the shadows that are making poor framerates in some high end sistems.

[Hpt. Lisse]

Alrighty then.

> All smooth with 2.6 GHz Opteron dual core (without having to disable the 2nd core, but my system does have the AMD dual-core patch running.) and 7900GT at 1680x1050 WinXP.

> Camera is taking some work, but getting there.

> I think the graphics are great, esp. for a realistic real-time simulation. And I haven't tried anti-aliasing yet, etc. AFV's are sweet, pieces flying off from hits, some neat animations.

Issues:

> Allied locator tabs need to be changed to a different color than green (blends in with the trees, etc.)

> As others have noted, CM's and TOW's ballistics and damage probabilities aren't even in the same ballpark - I have no idea which is more realistic. To wit: There are waaayyyy too many gun hits occurring in TOW (again, at least compared to what the CM series taught us.) Every time I play the demo battle, the JagTiger and first Pather's guns are knocked out within 1 minute of the first shell being slung. Every time. Even when the reinforcing armor arrives... their main guns become useless very quickly.

> Oh, I noticed that tanks w/damaged main gun but working co-ax MG refused to engage infantry targets with it. (Yes, the turret was still rotating, no one wounded, etc.)

TOW greatest moments (which may be is greatest weakness, too) are when you're down there with your troops. Grabbing a couple of guys and having them man an abandoned IS-2 - ha,ha,ha, eat this 122mm shell Ivan! You! And you! Pull out your anti-tank grenades and close assault that T-34/85! Blam! Tears of joy, I tell ya.... but 'ol Hpt. Lisse can't be everywhere at once. And wherever I'm not, the men (or machines) suffer.

So can it be made manageable, is the question. Can I assign groups, hop around, hit the pause button, and micro-manage the hell out these troops. With practice, I'm sure the answer is "Yes," I just hope it remains fun to do so.

I'm glad that everyone at 1C stuck it out, and that Battlefront brought it home.

[ April 18, 2007, 03:46 PM: Message edited by: Hpt. Lisse ]

[PeterLorre86]

Originally posted by MikoyanPT:

Maybe there are some kind of inompatibilty whith the shadows that are making poor framerates in some high end sistems.

I think your right, just turned off shadows and now it runs smooth on my psuedo high end rig.

[Hpt. Lisse]

It's a Vista issue.

[RavenouZ]

Performance Tip: All ATI owner download latest omega driver or else the game runs like C**P, and all Vista user get dualboot and run the demo on XP, just tried the demo on Vista (2.2ghz AMD64x2 2gb DDR2 7800 GTS 256mb) and i can say that it was not a nice experience, i will test the demo on some other computers at work tomorrow and see if i can work out why some ppl get so poor performance.

[CoolColJ]

Originally posted by jiggles:

I think the camera system is great ... though maybe it needs some fiddling.

I've remapped the camera left/right/forward/back to the standard WASD keys used in FPSs. By default they're mapped to the arrow keys which seems like a strange choice to me.

Ha! I usually remap WASD keys to the arrows in other games

[MikoyanPT]

Originally posted by Hpt. Lisse:

It's a Vista issue.

I am runing with vista with no problems, i would go for video drivers issues.

I updated my ATI drivers recently, so i am fine, but people with top notch videocards are having trouble.

[Hpt. Lisse]

Are you running the latest Omega drivers?

[cinacchi]

I don't agree with the rewiew. As I wrote in another post, I was very pessimistic before to install TOW, because of my old system:2 pentium 4 xeon at 1.7 Gh. So, 2 processors (real) but old. Then plenty of RAM (2 giga) and a new but not so expensive graphics card that i bought just for the game (an ATI x1600 with 512 Ram, prices 123 euros, vat included).

I run the game at 1600 x 1200 on a 21" monitor at 70 Hz. I had to spend some minut fine tuning the graphic settings (deleting as suggest by Madmatt the user folder) . Frame rate is excellent, animations are fluid not jerky,. Maybe not the last hollywood design animations, but I liked them. Camera controls: the first minut a little disapointing, that i fine tuned them with the options menu, and now I must asmit the interface is very great!

Until now, my only small disappointing :

-some random crashes during plauing (I don't complain: it is still a demo, my machine is not standard, i had only 3 crashed on 7 hours).

- I DONT FIND ANY COMMAND TO GO BACK TO THE MAIN INTERFACE from inside a battle (maybe I am just blind, sorry).

- SOUND: I MISS THE ARGHHHHH sound of CM when a solider was killed-inkured... It helped me to realize that i was having losses. Now I loss 10 man withouth to realize it...

But globally, well done guys: as first hour BF customer (since the first realize of BO), I am once more satisfacted and prod of you.

***Luca

[CoolColJ]

Just press trhe escape key to bring up the menu and options etc

[Guest Panzer Boxb]

I just played the mission for the second time, this round on hard. My tanks actually did something although my infantry got mauled badly. As soon as I unpaused at the beginning, artillery dropped directly on one squad hiding in a trench. First volley = half dead. Those SU-100's are still a serious thorn. They were taking out everything with no losses until the King Tiger showed up.