Dissapointed by CMBN

[womble]

Boy, I wish that statement was true, I might have played 40 battles by now in cmbn. But even though I really have no issue with it, there is events happening much more in the CMX2 engine than I never saw in the CMX1 as to first to shot kills that do not feel right.

You do know that this statement is meaningless to anyone else, right? First, you're comparing the two generations of the game, and assuming that your ingrained expextations from CMx1 should be, for some reason, fulfilled in CMx2. Why do you think that? Second, unless you were a tank crewman in WW2, you can have no idea whether your gut feeling about the accuracy or otherwise of the shots in game are correct in the circumstances which you are seeing. You're not firing enough shots in controlled enough circumstances to draw any conclusions as to the verity of the model.

Your example leaves out so many variables that could affect the result that it's meaningless.

[MengJiao]

HEY, I am not knocking that a person can make the AI into a good competitor.

I'm sure human players are much better competition, but I'm backing off of making big committments to fixed amounts of gaming time. I have one guy I play PBEM with and he's as irregular as I am and these days we are playing WitPAE.

I should say, not from a competitive angle, but from the point of view of pure entertainment, CMBN provides a lot of things such as the map editor and the AI tools that can repay 10 minutes of idle fiddling with hours of pleasantly gut-wrenching horror.

Anyway, I don't understand taking a negative view of CMBN. It takes a classic and yet never-before-well-simulated topic (that's great in itself) and gives an elegant play experience to go with it. The editor is as flexible and comprehensive as any I've ever seen and the results can be surprising and enlightening. What more can you ask for in a game?

[ClarkWGriswold]

Limiting the ability of tanks to fire on the move will not have a major impact, its been in all CM games since CMBO and most players did not even realize it.

Limiting the effectiveness of fire on the move is not a problem. In fact, it's a good thing. Outside of very close shots, tanks generally shouldn't be very effective at making shots on the move. The problem is that CMBN does not give you tools to effectively control whether or not your tanks will stop and fire effectively. The ONLY way to force your tank to stop and take an aimed shot is to use the Hunt command. Unfortunately, that has the nasty side effect of canceling ALL movement orders for the entire rest of the turn.

In all three of your broad examples we should see a reduction in a tanks ability to deliver lethal effect and movement at the same time. This should slow tank manoeuvre as it will force players to Hunt-to-Stop more often as oppose to racing from A to B and still be able to spot-hit-kill effectively. In effect for armour vs armour the advantage will swing towards the stationary vehicle.

And how do you propose a player is supposed to perform this Hunt-to-Stop movement effectively? You can't simply use Hunt because your tank will stop as soon as it is engaged, then will not move for the rest of the turn. It takes ages to get anywhere because your tank is constantly stopping and doing nothing for half (or more) of the turn. You can't use Move, Pause, Move because there's no way to prevent firing during the movement phase. You're just as like to fire on the move, then pause during reloading, making yourself a sitting duck. Vehicles need to be able to move, pause to fire, neutralize the threat, then continue with their orders. That's not as good as the "short halt" behavior that Steve talked about several pages back, but it's at least what we had in CMx1 and a huge increase in flexibility and control over what we have right now.

[Georgie]

I play most games solo. I work on getting the AI to do sensible things.

It's really more like fine carpentry than necrophilia, I think. I know nothing about either, but that's my take.

Hear Hear. Solo players are Battlefronts bread and butter. PBEM players are just along for the ride. Survey anybody?

[slysniper]

You do know that this statement is meaningless to anyone else, right? First, you're comparing the two generations of the game, and assuming that your ingrained expextations from CMx1 should be, for some reason, fulfilled in CMx2. Why do you think that? Second, unless you were a tank crewman in WW2, you can have no idea whether your gut feeling about the accuracy or otherwise of the shots in game are correct in the circumstances which you are seeing. You're not firing enough shots in controlled enough circumstances to draw any conclusions as to the verity of the model.

Your example leaves out so many variables that could affect the result that it's meaningless.

Give me a break, no one in their right mind can justify what they see in the game as to tanks firing on the move and spotting while they are at it, you can test away all day long. but I am not At the moment the stationary tank is not getting the advantages in a duel that should lead it to getting first shots. Dont need much of a gut to feel that.

Where as I mentioned just like in CMX1, that tanks never had fire accuracy that should have been there for short ranged duels (No real life tank would miss enemy tank 3 times in a row at 100 yards with neither moving. It could in CMx1!

[The_Capt]

And how do you propose a player is supposed to perform this Hunt-to-Stop movement effectively? You can't simply use Hunt because your tank will stop as soon as it is engaged, then will not move for the rest of the turn. It takes ages to get anywhere because your tank is constantly stopping and doing nothing for half (or more) of the turn. You can't use Move, Pause, Move because there's no way to prevent firing during the movement phase. You're just as like to fire on the move, then pause during reloading, making yourself a sitting duck. Vehicles need to be able to move, pause to fire, neutralize the threat, then continue with their orders. That's not as good as the "short halt" behavior that Steve talked about several pages back, but it's at least what we had in CMx1 and a huge increase in flexibility and control over what we have right now.

You are correct, you either play very cautiously and have tanks halting a lot or you move them and when they shoot they have very little chance of hitting. Either way compared to what you have in V 1.00 all of my points are true. Even if BFC dropped everything and coded a Shoot-Scoot order, it would still slow tank manoeuvre and favour the stationary platform as they will normally spot first (movement being a key give away to movement in game) and will normally get off the first shot. It would open up interesting tank team tactics (move and cover) but you can still play those right now albeit in an abstract manner.

At the end of the day this will make tank play in the game harder but nowhere near a "drastic" overhaul as the terrain already favours the stationary weapon system.

In fact, I would be concerned that if anything it may make the game even harder for some players who have already voiced frustration at the learning curve as now they have to worry about another orders combination and how to effective employ it on a battlefield made even more lethal to armour.

Finally, how about those occassions when the AI gets it wrong? Now your tank may stop when it spots an enemy, the enemy drops out of LOS and your tank gets nailed. Hell a decent opponent will set that up. So you have a tank at a short halt under the guns of an opponent who just stopped for nothing. Or the tank stops and picks the wrong target, or three tanks all stop at once or none of them do because an AI C2 balancing targetting control is somewhere out there with quantum computers.

Everyone put up there hand who screamed at that T-34 in CMBB because it was shooting at the wrong target.

SAHD is my unfortunate diagnosis here.

[StellarRat]

Actually, picking the best target out of a group of known targets is relatively simple AI programming. It can be done with weighting algorithms. The tricky part is picking a target when you don't have complete information.

[Steiner14]

Enemy tank 600 yards out moving through terrain with woods and hedges, hard to get clear view. Stationary tank for reasons unknown never seems to get a view and able to lock on target. but moving enemy tank seems to spot my tank in woods and brush, while on the move, aim and fire within some small window of terrain that my unit could not even spot them at for some reason. That is why people are complaining, something is wrong. How many times have I seen that type of thing play out. Maybe 10 times already, stopped counting because I JUST EXPECT IT MIGHT HAPPEN NOW. You can say it always has been a problem, but it was hard to notice, likely because of the fact MY CMX1 tanks could miss hitting a target at point blank range even when they were not moving and firing more than once. So my issue has just changed from one to another.

It's fascinating, how fanboys ignore such a good explanation and observation.

Fanboys, do think it is good for the game, if you ignore such things?

[Sgt Joch]

Limiting the effectiveness of fire on the move is not a problem. In fact, it's a good thing. Outside of very close shots, tanks generally shouldn't be very effective at making shots on the move.

Agreed. No one here is saying otherwise. v. 1.01 will further degrade the accuracy of moving tanks.

The problem is that CMBN does not give you tools to effectively control whether or not your tanks will stop and fire effectively.

Not true at all. The game gives you an infinite variation of orders you can string together depending on the tactical situation. I do it all the time. You are only limited by your skill and imagination.

The ONLY way to force your tank to stop and take an aimed shot is to use the Hunt command. Unfortunately, that has the nasty side effect of canceling ALL movement orders for the entire rest of the turn.

No one here is arguing that having the old CMx1 type "Hunt" command in our toolbox would not be a good thing.

The only disagreement is with your statement that bringing it back and/or introducing the movement orders Steve suggested will have a "Drastic" effect on gameplay. It will not.

[StellarRat]

Yes, all these claims about how drastically some of the bugs are affecting the outcomes of peoples games are completely overblown IMO.

[herr_oberst]

Yes, all these claims about how drastically some of the bugs are affecting the outcomes of peoples games are completely overblown IMO.

To say nothing about the fact that it ISNT 'hey mine do this while yours do that". If everyone is playing with the same software abilities or liabilities, then deal with it, adapt your tactics, use your grey matter.

[ClarkWGriswold]

Not true at all. The game gives you an infinite variation of orders you can string together depending on the tactical situation. I do it all the time. You are only limited by your skill and imagination.

Sure, you can string together all sorts of commands. But you can NOT string together any sort of command that will cause your tank to stop when an enemy tank comes into view, fire, take out the enemy, then continue. You can either stop and shoot OR you can manually put in pauses which most likely will not coincide with the timing of shots. It is IMPOSSIBLE to do what the old Hunt command used to do just fine.

The only disagreement is with your statement that bringing it back and/or introducing the movement orders Steve suggested will have a "Drastic" effect on gameplay. It will not.

We'll have to agree to disagree on what constitutes drastic. I am positive that I could have a situation that would turn out one way 9 out of 10 times in CMBB could turn out *completely* different in CMBN. Not because of some random factor or "programmed by design" changes, but because we no longer have the control that the simple Hunt command gave us before. Drastic changes in the ability to control vehicles = drastic changes in potential outcomes. That's how I see it.

[vonRocko]

Everything is fine in "fanboyland". This game can't possibly be improved. Feel free too make suggestions, the beta testers and fanatics are here to tell you why you are wrong.

[JonS]

a list of the ways that people of different professions or walks of life might answer the question "Is the glass half full or half empty?"

The government would say that the glass is fuller than it would be if the opposition party were in power.

The opposition would say that it is irrelevant because the present administration has changed the way such volume statistics are collected.

The cynic wonders who drank the other half.

The worrier frets that the remaining half will evaporate by next morning.

The hostess would say that the glass is half empty, but the guest would say it's half full.

The husband would say to his wife, "Are you going to drink the rest of that?"

The philosopher would say that, if the glass were in the forest and no one was there to see it, would it be half anything?

The economist would say that, in real terms, the glass is 25% fuller than at the same time last year.

The banker would say that the glass has just under 50% of its net worth in liquid assets.

The entrepreneur would say the glass as undervalued by half its potential.

The psychiatrist would ask, "What did your mother say about the glass?"

The obsessive compulsive would postpone the question until the level is checked, and checked again, and again, and again....

The phobic would say, "Yuck! Someone drank out of it and left their germs on the glass!"

The algebraic simultaneous equation theorist would say that, if the glass is equally half full and half empty, then half full = half empty; therefore ½ x F = ½ x E; therefore (by multiplying both sides of the equation by 2) we show that F = E; therefore Full equals Empty!

The grammarian would say that, while the terms half-full and half-empty are colloquially acceptable, the glass can technically be neither since both full and empty are absolute states and are therefore incapable of being halved or modified in any way.

The engineer would say that the glass is twice the size it needs to be.

Credit.

A friend of mine once put it thusly:

* For some people the glass is half full.

* For some people the glass is half empty.

* Some people can't decide whether it's half full or half empty.

* Some people ordered a cheeseburger and are just sitting there wondering what all this talk about glasses and water is about.

* And then there are those people who ... bugger. I dropped the glass, and it's smashed all over the floor. Damn, I cut myself. Oh god, I'm bleeding! AAARRRRGHHHHH!!! I CUT AN ARTERY! SOMEBODY CALL AN AMBULANCE!!!!

I'd say Rocko was from the last category, while strelok is from the fourth

[The_Capt]

Everything is fine in "fanboyland". This game can't possibly be improved. Feel free too make suggestions, the beta testers and fanatics are here to tell you why you are wrong.

Hmm, you know the term "fanboy" is one I find very offensive. Like many beta testers I have over two decades of military service and multiple tours in warzones under my belt. I (and I am not the apex trust me) have done what you see in CMSF except it was for real with very different stakes than those sitting pretty pretty at home.

Let's try the term "fantatic men" or "fanmen", most of us have earned that much at least.

Beyond that, the "fanboi-land" argument is the inevitable fallback position of anyone who is unwilling to rationally debate their position.

"I am right, you disagree...you are a fanboy". Aristotle would be proud.

So let me open the curtain, just a small crack. Some of the most vocal and active voices for change reside in what you broadly paint as "fanboy" land. They wrestle with the more conservative voices for the soul of this game.

Steve and crew forge what you see from that chaos in what can only be described as a "creative process". One that has stood the test of time for over a decade.

[ChrisND]

Everything is fine in "fanboyland". This game can't possibly be improved. Feel free too make suggestions, the beta testers and fanatics are here to tell you why you are wrong.

Point to a post in this thread where someone, anyone, denies there are any problems or improvements to be made.

Couldn't find one? Thought so.

Some of you need a serious lesson in perspective. I had thought in the last couple of years, during CMSF, that this community had matured past the point of conflating small issues to be analogous to the apocalypse, but I guess I was wrong.

[Sgt Joch]

But you can NOT string together any sort of command that will cause your tank to stop when an enemy tank comes into view, fire, take out the enemy, then continue.You can either stop and shoot OR you can manually put in pauses which most likely will not coincide with the timing of shots.

It does the way I play ...

..but then I never expose my AFVs unless other spotters have already determined the exact location of the target I want to take out.

Other players like to lead with their tanks.... to each their own.

I use to hate the old CMx1 "Hunt" command precisely because your tanks would keep going, usually driving even deeper into the enemy kill zone. The only reason it worked well in CMx1 is because with BORG spotting, as soon as one of your tank spotted a target, all other tanks in the troop would also spot and engage the same target.

With CMx2's relative spotting, you can have one tank spot a target and the rest just keep driving on, oblivious to the threat, like hogs to a slaughter.

[hoolaman]

You are correct, you either play very cautiously and have tanks halting a lot or you move them and when they shoot they have very little chance of hitting. Either way compared to what you have in V 1.00 all of my points are true. Even if BFC dropped everything and coded a Shoot-Scoot order, it would still slow tank manoeuvre and favour the stationary platform as they will normally spot first (movement being a key give away to movement in game) and will normally get off the first shot. It would open up interesting tank team tactics (move and cover) but you can still play those right now albeit in an abstract manner.

I'd suggest that having to employ tank tactics in an "abstract manner" in a game like CM is completely contrary to what the game has always prided itself on: being a detailed and realistic armour sim. The hunt and shoot-n-scoot orders from CMx1 did provide a lot more flexibility in WEGO that is now absent.

There are definitely issues there, obviously they bother some people more than others, but Steve has basically already said that it is a problem though it won't be fixed.

I've also seen pleny of the funky stuff that slysniper described a bit earlier, where trees seem to not be WYSIWYG and the tank that logically should have the advantage in a particular situation consistently seems to lose. Saying thinks like you need to be a WWII tanker to comment is fairly ludicrous.

[WineCape]

It's fascinating, how fanboys ignore such a good explanation and observation.

Fanboys, do think it is good for the game, if you ignore such things?

Steiner14,

While I don't doubt what slysniper has observed is not true, it will only come to pass to change anything or something of CMBN within a controlled tested environment. What part of 350 tests run on a moving shooter having a hit% success rate of initially, ranging between 5-15% only, don't you understand is currently the norm for v1.00?

5-15% hits out of 350 shooting contests? That's roughly 35 hits average out of 350 tests? Still too high? Some would say yes, and BFC is again in agreement and tweaked it even lower.

Or what part of BFC's stated position that they have tweaked it even lower for patch v101 is beyond comprehension?

Nobody is disagreeing that ultimately we can even have less hit% from a moving shooter. Maybe BFC has now tweaked it to a 2%-5% hit probability? Or 0,5%. Who knows.

So spare us the hyperbole of making out anyone having an argument against any position taken, as being accused of as "CM fanboys", as much as you are being (not) accused of as a "CM-hater, which I'm sure you are not, as nobody are silly enough to do so.

For Inbetween these two extreme positions lie rational discussion based on big sample tests to get things changed.

Further changes have been made to the engine code, despite your allegation of "fanboy" discussion influencing the opposite effect.

[slysniper]

Oh no, I am a FanBoy, but now the Anti Fanboy's are using my comments, I am getting so confused. Which side of the war do I want to be on, that is what it is, isnt it. Just a war of words.

The sad thing is, all these issues and comments have already been voiced. the game can be adjusted, but to some extent things will change, but the game is going to continue to play somewhat like it does, no matter what.

So you can either learn to accept it, like all good fanboys do, which is what I do. making comments hoping for change down the road.

Or you can act like a jerk, attack the game, programmer, designer, grandma, and god as to why it isnt perfect and hope for the silver bullit to hit the programmer and make everything right

[womble]

Hoolaman, Slysniper and Steiner.

Anecdotes like you provide will never prove anything. It's not even mentioned whether you play RT or WeGo. The reason that's significant is because RT offers no chance to go back and look at the situation more closely. The biggest problems with statements that start "I have seen...." being used to support "It's broken..." arguments is that there is no way of eliminating observer error. That error could range from not knowing (or noticing) that the victorious element in a given duel was vastly more experienced/less suppressed/less damaged/better in some other way than the one it beat, all the way to the confirmation bias of the observer noticing the exception that fulfils their expectations and not noticing all the times it works as they might have expected (which isn't malicious, just the way human brains work).

There are a lot of variables involved. And there's a lot of variation anyway. There was some 'time to spot and fire' tests done between two tanks in the open, presented in a thread the other day, and it was possible for neither tank to spot the other in an entire minute. Other times one spotted the other after a single second. When you have such variability there are always going to be "unexpected" situations cropping up which will catch your eye. Doesn't mean they're wrong.

Conflating spotting in a wood with first shot hit chances without specifying what the vehicles involved were, what the ambient spotting environment for each was (how much help from other units), what the experience/motivation/leadership levels of the crews were, whether either or both were buttoned or not, what 'wood' really means, whether there was any suppression etc etc is no argument that a game is broken. I can certainly see how trying to fire on a target that's moving unpredictably in and out of cover might be more difficult than shooting at a target that's sat still while you move in and out of cover. Or it might not. It would all depend.

Me, I think there's plenty to be done to polish the game, and a good chunk that can't be polished, but will be replaced next game.

[theFightingSeabee]

Thanks Capt, I would also prefer "fanman" since im also a proud veteran and don't really appreciate being called a boy.

A far as the beta testers and BFC themselves, we read all of these threads, evaluate the bugs and report them on the "inner" forum. The good Lord knows that I've made my fair share of requests that were never considered for implementation. Discussion and debate have always been a part of the process though. The difference,i suppose, would be that a fanboy would throw up his arms and say its all broken, while a fanman would look for an acceptable alternative or compromise. It took close to 3 years for BFC to implement a suggestion I made... Using the red button as a pause button.

The cm community is one off the nicest and must polite I have ever seen, so some if your attitudes are highlighted and stand out. Anyone who honestly wants this gem's shine to gleem a littlebrighter with well thought out suggestions and bug reports ARE always taken seriously and the people arte treated well. When someone comes in saying the game is broken or unplayable won't be taken seriously because the simple truth is it's not true.

[sburke]

I was checking what's new on battlefront forum - besides, answering in such a fanboy-ridden place is fun Especially when such statements are made:

Well, there is an alternative and I'm bringing it to your attention, as a fanboy to fanboy

I did check out the AP site after your first post. What I found was a game that is very difficult to get if you can acquire it at all and a site that is deader than Salt Lake City's night life. You have got to be kidding me making the comparison. Yeah you may love the game, but to try and compare the two is pretty ridiculous. That isn't a criticsm of AP, just a statement regarding the relative activity of the two communities and the lack of feedback and responses on their forum.

As a previous poster reported it doesn't even support MP at all. Imagine CM not having that...I'd bet this site would have been burned to the ground from all the flaming.

Again it isn't too trash their game, all power to them if they develop something that people enjoy, but you have to admit you are giving them a pass on items you would be trumpeting the deathknell of BFC if CM didn't have it.

[theFightingSeabee]

...and if you do that, you might even be invited to be a beta tester.

[sburke]

It's fascinating, how fanboys ignore such a good explanation and observation.

Fanboys, do think it is good for the game, if you ignore such things?

@Panzer76

A fanboyish behaviour would be based on feelings, not on facts.

In contrast to the "reviewer" i named certain hard facts where CMx1 already shines - not one of these important aspects was mentioned by the reviewer.

So either they disappeared in the new engine, which would turn the beta-testers into liars, inventing things that are not there, or the reviewer simply has no clue, what are important aspects for a realistic tactical wargame.

Ahh how far we have fallen. Once you were on the receiving end and now you throw it around like in ye olden days it was thrown at you.

ooohhh what sad times are these when passing ruffeins can say fanboi at will to old gamers

The only thing that gets ignored is the overblown "this game is fatally flawed" nonsense. There wouldn't be a V1.01 coming if there wasn't agreement that there are issues and odds are there will likely be a v1.02 as Steve etal get time to focus on various things on their list. What you guys don't seem to get is there is a list, things are being looked at and where possible and appropriate they are being adjusted. What exactly more is it you want from these guys?