Missing This Feature. Extreme FOW. I Hope It Is Back In CM:N!

[Lanzfeld]

I just played a quick battle in CMBB to satisfy a WWII thirst I have had. I played extreme FOW and I have to tell you I really hope this gets put back into CM:N.

I was defending as the Russians against a German attack and I had this German "light tank" creating a headache for me most of the game. Not too bad but he would always pop up out of the light woods always when I didnt want him to. Anyways, near the end of the game, I noticed that he had crept up next to a long stretch of woods near a flag that some of my troops occupied. I had two squads in there in command and both had a bunch of molotovs so I decided to go for it and attack him. Not the best AT weapon but what the heck. Anyway....lots of smoke and confusion later and the game ends as my troops get next to the tank (ceasefire). I review the battlefield to see the heros and imagine my shock to discover that the "light tank" was a Flammpanzer II!!! Good thing the game ended as I did not want my squads near that bad boy when he spat!!!

This REALLY made me miss these kind of surprises. Please tell me they are back in!

[panzermartin]

+1 to that. All these nice features made CMx1 a better game experience overall.

[Lanzfeld]

Yeah the "instant" ID of the enemy ala CM:SF was a little bit of a buzzkill. Have we had any word on if this has been added to CM:N?

[noxnoctum]

Signed. I really miss this and sound contacts.

[MikeyD]

Let's remember what theatre CMSF is. What would anyone accidentally mistake an Abrams for, a Lada taxi? And mistaking a T55 for a T62 is the tactical difference between 98% kill probability and 98% kill probability. But there are some vehicles where misidentification would be logical. BMP-1s for 2s, MGS for infantry Stryker or TOW LAV for LAV C2.

[Lanzfeld]

Good point MikeyD.

I am not at my gaming computer right now and I cannot recall...in CM:SF do we instantly know the quality of troops as well? This at least should be hidden.

[Pvt. Ryan]

Knowledge of the quality of enemy troops depends on the difficulty level.

[Lethaface]

I think the difference between a early T-72 and a Turms-T can be quite deadly Although in WWII it will be much more important since spotting devices were not so advanced in those times.

[Vark]

In 91, US troops mistook Iraqi armour for their own, in the attack on Khafji and in 2003 a Challenger II knocked out another Challenger. The image of a target in a thermal imager is not all that clear and if CM-N is to be realistic, unidentified target icons should be liberally used, there might, as another poster has suggested, even be a 'everything's a Tiger/88' syndrome' probability, depending on training and morale state.

[gibsonm]

Let's remember what theatre CMSF is. What would anyone accidentally mistake an Abrams for, a Lada taxi? And mistaking a T55 for a T62 is the tactical difference between 98% kill probability and 98% kill probability. But there are some vehicles where misidentification would be logical. BMP-1s for 2s, MGS for infantry Stryker or TOW LAV for LAV C2.

Sure but mistaking a Bradley or a Warrior for a BMP still happens, especially if you are in a AH-64 or an A-10.

[Sequoia]

Well for one thing we have no rain or snow in CMSF. What we do have is night conditions where visibility changes with phases of the moon. I would think with a dark moonless night we already have extreme FOW, and when they add weather we will have another factor where FOW can become extreme due to conditions in a much more sophisticated way than what we had in CMx1.

[Alan8325]

Let's remember what theatre CMSF is. What would anyone accidentally mistake an Abrams for, a Lada taxi? And mistaking a T55 for a T62 is the tactical difference between 98% kill probability and 98% kill probability. But there are some vehicles where misidentification would be logical. BMP-1s for 2s, MGS for infantry Stryker or TOW LAV for LAV C2.

Don't forget infantry. In CMSF all infantry squads and teams are instantly identified as well. Realistically, if you see a man with an RPG in a window you wouldn't necessarily know if he was in a 2-man team or the AT member of a 9-man squad.

[gibsonm]

Don't forget infantry. In CMSF all infantry squads and teams are instantly identified as well. Realistically, if you see a man with an RPG in a window you wouldn't necessarily know if he was in a 2-man team or the AT member of a 9-man squad.

Well I don't know what level you are playing at, but they certainly aren't in "iron".

[Lanzfeld]

Well I don't know what level you are playing at, but they certainly aren't in "iron".

2 things I have to point out here.

First is that the instant you see an enemy even in iron mode you can immediatly ID him as, say, a "2nd Battalion HQ" and that is not realistic.

Second, and this is a bit of a cheat, there is the old "Icon Bug" that puts the icon over the "average" location of all individuals in that squad so that if you see 1 guy with an icon over his head you know he is alone but if you see 1 guy with his icon way off to the side then you know that he is part of a larger group. This way you can more easily ID a 2 man RPG squad for instance. I guess you could just turn icons off but a better fix would be to put icons over only spotted men.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

You are mistaken there, gibsonm. The instant ID is on every level.

While it doesn't literally give you the amount of men in a sighted unit, the unit name will let you make that conclusion.

[TheVulture]

I'd like to see enemy units of unknown ID back in the game, along with possible misidentifications (and I'd like the floating icon to appear on the weighted position of the visible units, rather than the whole unit, if possible, since that does sometimes give useful information that you shouldn't have).

I wouldn't mind seeing false 'kills' too, something that CMx1 didn't have either. Where you identify an enemy soldier or vehicle as dead when it actually isn't. There are many examples of this in the real world, of people (or vehicles) playing dead as well of simple unwarranted optimism (recently finished a book on the Falklands war from the Argentine side, and just about every battle featured claims from one side or the other to have destroyed vehicles that the other side's account of the action show was never hit / never penetrated / still functional despite damage).

[gibsonm]

You are mistaken there, gibsonm. The instant ID is on every level.

?????

Well I normally play with the floating icons "off" which is the first way to fix this.

But even if you turn them "on", all I get is a diamond with a "?" mark in it.

Or are you actually clicking on the diamond / the unit?

I never do this.

This is in version 1.21.

[TheVulture]

?????

Well I normally play with the floating icons "off" which is the first way to fix this.

But even if you turn them "on", all I get is a diamond with a "?" mark in it.

Or are you actually clicking on the diamond / the unit?

I never do this.

This is in version 1.21.

There are 3 icon settings: none at all, '?' only, or all spotted icons. If you click on the unit. Units you can see show the full icon (subject to icon setting) and you can click on them to see what the unit is. If you don't do it, that's up to you, but the information is there and it is always full ID when you spot the unit.

[gibsonm]

Well then its your / my choice then isn't it.

I don't want to know so I don't click on them.

But surely you can't complain if the information is there but concealed until you make the decision to click on it.

If you don't want to know, don't click. No one is forcing you to click on the unit are they?

That's pretty straight forward isn't it?

It would be different if the information was automatically splashed across the screen without you "asking" for it (by clicking on the unit).

[Thomm]

Mark,

Please allow me to express my disagreement.

I think this should be changed.

Just think of multiplayer ... one guy exploiting this, the other one not ...

Best regards,

Thomm

[gibsonm]

Sure,

I'm happy for it to be turned "off".

I'm just saying its not a case of:

Yeah the "instant" ID of the enemy ala CM:SF was a little bit of a buzzkill.

or

Don't forget infantry. In CMSF all infantry squads and teams are instantly identified as well.

Its not "instant" at all, because you need to click on it.

[Lethaface]

Well my pixeltruppen spot enemies, I generally don't in CMSF. It is their task to tell me what they have spotted. They do that in a (very advanced) way by making the seen units click-able. For ease of use they include an icon as well.

The fact that this info is always instantly spot on isn't negated by the fact that I don't have to click on it. It is a choice to click or not to click (on spotted enemy units in the game). However this choice doesn't mean that the unit designation of said enemy soldier/vehicle should always directly be available for one of those choices.

In a simulation realism shouldn't be 'a choice' in my opinion. Heck they could include the 'Saddams Undead Camel Battallion' in the game as long as you had to choose to use 'm

In my opinion it is a good feature request, 'partially' or 'wronly' identified enemies. Turning icons off and not clicking enemy units is a technique that will let you have similar benefits as I would gain from partially/wrongly spotted enemy units. Even without me 'instantly' clicking on it, when just I just wait for a couple of seconds, just because I can.

[Sgt Joch]

Maybe we should just step back a second and see how unit identification is handled in CMx1 and CMSF to see what issues need to be adressed or improved.

In CMBB, a Soviet tank may first appear as: 1) a generic tank icon/sound contact or 2) generic Soviet icon. When you click on the Soviet icon, it will indicate the type of tank, (i.e KV-I ? T-34 ?). It may then appear as 3) a misidentified tank, (i.e. KV-1 ?) with a question mark to denote the misidentified status. It will finally become: 4) a fully identified tank, say T-34.

In CMSF, all of the preliminary phases from 1) to 3) will be shown merely by a "?" icon with the deepness of the color denoting how solid or recent is the info. The tank will only appear when it is a fully identified tank in 4).

So the identification system has the same effect in both, only the visual representation is different. What would appear as a misidentified tank in CMx1 will appear as a "?" icon in CMSF. Which system you prefer is really a matter of personal choice.

1) In terms of what needs to be adressed:

1.1. the amount of info shown when you click on an identified infantry unit in CMSF is too great since you can see what type of unit it is (i.e. infantry, HQ, FO). In CMx1, an infantry unit was just listed as a generic infantry unit until you were close enough to make a more accurate identification. This should be a more generic icon. I am not sure there is an issue with AFVs since the amount of info for a fully identified AFV is about the same as in CMx1;

1.2. the "Icon bug" Lanzfeld mentioned above;

2) In terms of what would be nice to have:

2.1 misidentified units as an intermediate step between the "?" icon and the fully identified icon. I presume this would replace the current latter part of the "?" icon process.

I think 1.1 is more of a priority, but 1.2 and 2.1 would be nice as well.

[Lanzfeld]

Exactly Joch,

...and I really miss the misidentification as my OP indicated. What I thought was a Panzer 2 was really a flammpanzer 2.

Also, "not clicking on it" is not a solution IMHO.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

I'm sorry Joch, but I don't think that's actually correct.

Objects in the field of view are either unseen or fully ID-ed. I've never seen the in-between state (indicated by a "?" according to you) for a vehicle that was still visible but as yet unidentified. Nor do I believe that sound contacts have been implemented.

It's been my experience that the "?" marker only relates to previously seen units currently not being spotted, for whatever reason.