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The road ahead... a recap


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CMx2 will head East after the 2nd Western Front Title. The first Eastern Front Title will be centered around Bagration. How much the Modules will expand upon that is unknown at this point. Too early to say. What will happen after Bagration is also not known because it is too far down the road, though it will likely be a second Eastern Front Title.

Wrath of Dagon,

We have no plans to make a large scale "meta campaign" system for CMx2. It's too much work for too little payback. Don't get me wrong, we fully understand and appreciate why some people want this, but from a development standpoint it is outside of our scope. CMx2 is a TACTICAL wargame. We could easily put another 10 years into improving just the tactical elements, so a major shift to operational is not desirable from our perspective.

Smaragdadler,

CMx1 had a full range of weather and weather related effects, such as varying densities of snow and rain. The same will be true for CMx2. Appropriate weather effects are added as we go along.

It's too early to commit to specific stuff going into any one particular Module or Title. I can only repeat what I said above... the new strategy does not preclude us from adding any specific thing. Therefore, theoretically even super rare things like Vampire and what not could be included at some point.

Steve

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Steve,

“We have no plans to make a large scale "meta campaign" system for CMx2. It's too much work for too little payback. Don't get me wrong, we fully understand and appreciate why some people want this, but from a development standpoint it is outside of our scope. CMx2 is a TACTICAL wargame.”

This is great shame… CMX2 is a tactical game… the best there is by huge margin. But the ultimate wargame would be to use CMX2 to resolve the contact battles within a genuine, high quality operational game. But I do understand that there is only so much the team can produce.

We will just have to produce our own… many lessons have been learnt from previous such campaigns so it is certainly doable… :).

Lots to look forward to,

All the best,

Kip.

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Steve,

“We have no plans to make a large scale "meta campaign" system for CMx2. It's too much work for too little payback. Don't get me wrong, we fully understand and appreciate why some people want this, but from a development standpoint it is outside of our scope. CMx2 is a TACTICAL wargame.”

This is great shame… CMX2 is a tactical game… the best there is by huge margin. But the ultimate wargame would be to use CMX2 to resolve the contact battles within a genuine, high quality operational game. But I do understand that there is only so much the team can produce.

We will just have to produce our own… many lessons have been learnt from previous such campaigns so it is certainly doable… :).

Lots to look forward to,

All the best,

Kip.

True that. From my perspective, CMX2 is already almost good enough as a tactical wargame, and certainly will be by Normandy, so I'm not sure why campaign would be less payback than more flavors, but I guess Steve understands his market better than I do. To me the only thing that would be on par with the worth of a campaign would be a truly humanlike AI.
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Hello Steve,

for me CMSF just doesn't work, but now i'm interested in the Normandy title again.

If the ressources of your company are not enough for a campaign-game, why don't you define an interface and just license it's use to another company? Or maybe even make the interface public and sell licenses for a relatively cheap price to the community?

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why don't you define an interface and just license it's use to another company?

CMC?

Or maybe even make the interface public and sell licenses for a relatively cheap price to the community?

Because they'd have to sell it at a cheap price. I don't think it's financially worthwhile for BFC to have Charles work on something that takes development time away from the real money spinners.

Don't get me wrong, I like to see a serious campaign element for CMx2 too. And personally, I think BFC may just be underestimating the interest in a serious campaign element at least as much as we underestimate the effort it takes to make it happen.

I think the only chance for it to be worth their while is if BFC go for it 100% themselves and really put a thing of beauty together and re-use it several times. It's a risky move and not all that attractive if you can sail an arguably safer course. So no campaign for the foreseeable future, I reckon. But who knows, when Joe Public gets tired of CMx2 titles, they might need to spice things up and decide that a campaign layer is what's missing after all.

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Elmar is correct when he says:

Because they'd have to sell it at a cheap price. I don't think it's financially worthwhile for BFC to have Charles work on something that takes development time away from the real money spinners.

It is impossible to just "open the code" to someone. It needs a lot of explanation and work on our part to get anything to a practical state. We don't see this as a wise use of our resources. At least not in the near future. A far better use of resources would be doing something like CoPlay since it also changes the entire game BUT it is within the tactical paradigm CM is designed for.

HOWEVER... let me clarify something.

I took the original question to mean a "meta-campaign" where multiple people are playing tactical battles within the context of a much larger scale conflict. Much the way CMC is set up to do. This is the sort of thing we don't feel we have time to do and that it is outside of our intended scope.

An improved, and greatly expanded, campaign system within the tactical game system... that's definitely something we're going to do. Much like how Normandy will introduce a much improved/enhanced Quick Battle system, at some point (probably right after) we'll apply the same focused development on the Campaign system within CMx2. This has always been our plan.

The problem for us, as developers, is that you guys what a huge amount of features and to have each one, individually, be the best that it can be. This is simply impossible for us to do all in one go. We've been clear about that for years now. Therefore, with each major CMx2 release we will focus the bulk of our attention on a specific piece, or two, of the game and bring it to the next higher level. Or better yet, move it a few levels higher up at once. As I said, for CM: Normandy the focus is on the temperate environment and Quick Battles. For the next Title we'll focus on something else, then something else for the Title after that, etc.

This is what I mean about an ever evolving game engine. Eventually you will get the game that does most everything and does it equally well in all parts. The great thing about our strategy is you'll get opportunities to play for the next 5 years instead of sitting around and waiting for the "final" version. Or, if you are one of the few that thinks this is one long pay-to-play beta test... no problem. Don't buy anything we make in the next 5 years, then buy the "final" version when we announce it. Problem solved, everybody's happy. Or at least everybody should be happy ;)

Steve

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CMx2 will head East after the 2nd Western Front Title. The first Eastern Front Title will be centered around Bagration. How much the Modules will expand upon that is unknown at this point. Too early to say. What will happen after Bagration is also not known because it is too far down the road, though it will likely be a second Eastern Front Title.

Steve

Any plans for a Pacific Theater Title?

enrico

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Wrath of Dagon,

Actually all I meant was a single player op-level campaign map. I have no interest in on-line. So are there any campaign improvements planned along those lines?

Absolutely! The current campaign system is much better than the one in CMx1, which actually didn't have a campaign system per se. We always rejected that term, in fact, since Operations (as we called them) were definitely not Campaigns. But to say that the Campaign system we have now is the best that it can be, forever more, is definitely not something we've ever said. It's a decent campaign system, but there is room for improvement.

Keep in mind that whatever we do for a campaign system it will definitely not make everybody equally happy. Campaigns are one of those things which can go down several different, and distinct, philosophical paths. These paths are generally incompatible with each other. Since we will never have the time to make several fully fleshed out campaign systems, by definition whatever we do choose will not appeal to some group. It's just the way things go. Therefore, what we have to do is identify the best system we can make that is true to the game's philosophy, our time budget, and which will satisfy the largest chunk of our customer base and do that. Those people who don't like it will just have to suck it up and deal with it because we never have been, and never will be, capable of making everybody equally happy. It's a fools' game that we don't play.

Meach,

While we have already, and will continue, to work some improvements into CM:SF that are earmarked for Normandy, such features will always be made available to the entire customer base through a general patch. However, at this point in time we are basically done expanding the basic capabilities of CM:SF, so there won't be much new functionality added to it over the next year. Tweaks and fixes, yes, but not new stuff.

Steve

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Malaspina,

Any plans for a Pacific Theater Title?

Not specifically, however unlike CMx1 it is a possibility. We do feel the game engine can handle the PTO without radical overhaul, so it could be viable to make a PTO product. For CMx1 it was way too much work for too few sales.

However, as with ANY idea of what to do with the game engine... we have limited time and therefore we must choose what we do very carefully. I can say that at present there are no plans for PTO over the next couple of years. We wouldn't mind that changing, however at present we don't see how it is possible that we can.

Steve

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Steve…

Don’t forget North Africa….

With CMX1 the absolute spotting did hit CMAK quite hard… with me anyway…. open terrain and absolute spotting are not a good mix..;)

However… with CMX2… shame to waste all that desert terrain… North Africa Summer ’42 then a November ’42 module would do the job just fine… :).

All the best,

Kip.

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Flamethrowers are planned. They might not be the most important weapon to simulate from a historical use standpoint, then again neither is half the German stuff we're obligated to include :D

Desert... yes, I think at some point. However, I don't know when. The optimal time to do it would be around the same time as a 1942/1943 Eastern Front game since there is a lot of equipment overlap.

M1TC, do you mean "motion capture"?

Steve

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