CM Red Thunder page is up

[Keunert]

wow thank you. so there is no disadvantage to play this on mac.
what's the opinion on Fortress Italy? i am interested in the theatre.

[z1812]

wow thank you. so there is no disadvantage to play this on mac.
what's the opinion on Fortress Italy? i am interested in the theatre.

It is excellent. But you can try it for yourself. Link below to Demo.
http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=301&Itemid=513

[Zonso]

wow thank you. so there is no disadvantage to play this on mac.
what's the opinion on Fortress Italy? i am interested in the theatre.

No, the caveat again being I'm not a Mac guy; my understanding from the BFC forum is it plays quite nicely on the Mac due to natively being 64bit and better handling of OpenGL. As suggested try the demo first. Even if there is a glitch, I have found the BFC tech support and community support to be very helpful in resolving issues.

As for Fortress Italy, I think it is great with the addition of the Gustav Line module. You get different nations (Italians play very different and are a challenge to use) and TOE in a very different terrain set from Normandy, and you can play with some early war kit (ie '42/'43), if that's your thing. I didn't have much interest in the theatre initially, but I found it a refreshing 'break' from the usual Normandy fare, well worthwhile.

[Keunert]

i treid the demo yesterday and it looks great and worked well. i just printed the manual as i have last played CM1 intensely. looks like there are some things to learn new.

[Grim.Reaper]

For those interested in this upcoming game and the other titles, looks like they will be playing this on twitchtv every Saturday....missed yesterday:(

"From exclusive beta previews of the upcoming Combat Mission Red Thunder, to storming the Normandy beaches in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy, to kicking Jerry in his underbelly in Combat Mission Fortress Italy - join one of Battlefront's producers, Chris Nelson, at his new Twitch.tv channel every Saturday night at 5 pm EST!"

www.twitch.tv/ChrisND

[Grim.Reaper]

although he did post some of his videos from yesterday...here is one

http://www.twitch.tv/chrisnd/c/3729757

[SgtRock]

From what I saw, it looks like tank commanders still die faster than the red shirts in the old start trek show! I still don't know why something that's so unhistorical that's still in their games?

[ComradeP]

The beta AAR shows exactly what I feared and why I'm not inclined to buy the CMx2 titles.

One of the challenges when simulating tactical combat for the Soviets is modelling their tactical inflexibility, but unfortunately that is often not handled very well which gives the virtual Soviets a big advantage over their historical counterparts (similar to how simplified logistics tend to give the virtual Germans an advantage in operational and strategic level games where lack of fuel would normally limit operations).

Bil Hardenberger's moving his units with Western-style flexibility. There's no (significant) delay in commands it seems, no pre-battle plan units need to stick to, all of his commanders are competently handling their troops and showing initiative in responding to situations. He already said his armour is advancing in an ahistorical manner.

The map is forested, and Soviet forces have a lot more submachine guns than the Germans. The Germans need defences and distance to make the superior weight of fire of their MG's and mortars work. Even though the Germans are "defending", they have no real defenses so it's basically sort of a meeting engagement around a village. Foxholes being very easy to spot seemingly (unless this was recently changed in a patch) would make defending positions difficult in any case.

Bil Hardenberger carefully checks possible kill zones and once something big fires, he'll use the turn replay feature to see where the shot came from and respond to it immediately. If the German armour fires first, they might at least have a use. If they don't, like in a number of other AAR's, this is going to be over fast.

At this point, I'm not seeing any Soviet tactical handicaps at all. It would be interesting if the Soviets would be forced to play in chaotic real time, whilst the Germans would play in turn-based mode so they can give more detailed orders. Still, considering how much the map already favours the Soviet equipment, and considering the difference in skill, it's almost annoying to read the AAR. It doesn't feel historical, it's like a pet map where the Soviets place the Germans in a bad position with limited forces and then just crush them. As casualties quickly increase to ahistorically high levels, you really need some mechanics to slow the pace down, particularly for a rigid army on the tactical level like the Soviets. 1944 isn't 1941, obviously, but I'm not buying the Soviet behaviour thus far as being "historical".

[Keunert]

i just played the Fortress Italy demo. it has 4 very different scenarios and it is a lot of fun to play. the game is quite unforgiving. Comrade download it and give it a try. on the first scenario you attack a small village held by german para's with some light tanks. the german at gun will kill your tanks before you even know what happens. the attacker really has to be cautious and you have to take your time. it feels like light tanks are very easy to take out.

it is a great game. just a little too expensive for my liking right now.

i also played the unity of command demo. playing a demo beats reading an aar by far.

[ComradeP]

As I posted before, that's another thing I don't really understand: the campaigns seem to be very difficult with the defenders in well-prepared positions that require detailed planning to take out, yet the AAR's are more like meeting engagements which show the limits of tactical wargames when it comes to representing historical situations.

I'm assuming one of the goals of posting such a beta AAR is to show the game to potential buyers, so I'm just not really sure why they're so different from scenarios and campaigns described in the regular forum posts.

Let's say I download the demo and find a challenging and enjoyable scenario, and then I go to the forums and read an AAR by a experienced forum regular that shows almost a completely different game. What am I to believe?

This is the only series I can currently think of where the presentation in the AAR's seems to be so different from the "meat and potatoes" of the game.

[undercovergeek]

i think the majority of AARs and PBEMS are meeting engagements because of the force multipliers - everyone wants to play with the new toys and doesnt want to suffer the rigors of force multiplication, especially when youre playing a PBEM over weeks and weeks, you ideally want to know that your forces have some kind of parity, ahistorical? Yes but fun for both sides

[Bletchley_Geek]

Let's say I download the demo and find a challenging and enjoyable scenario, and then I go to the forums and read an AAR by a experienced forum regular that shows almost a completely different game. What am I to believe?

This is the only series I can currently think of where the presentation in the AAR's seems to be so different from the "meat and potatoes" of the game.

These AAR's are meant to be to show new units and features, and sometimes make little to no sense as a tactical situation one could find during the exection of  a historical operation.

Regarding the concerns you have about Bil: he's handling his troops like that because CMx2 doesn't impose any direct constraints on what you can order your units to do. Indeed, in CMx2 it can happen that you're moving a tank section and one of the tanks receives some fire from the side. Regardless of historical levels of command, control or communications, nothing will prevent you - the player - to have the other element of your section to maneuver into a position to attack the newly found threat, right away, radios or not and regardless of what can possibly the other tank crew be aware of. I have no notice of any tactical war game, board-based or computer-based, where players are subject to such realistic constraints. Maybe it's a convention of the genre, but vehicles are always directly controllable by the player.

Command delays would help with this. But how long should be the 'command delay' for a similar situation like this: a infantry squad gets fire by an MG, the player moves forward a mortar section to do direct fire on the MG position? Unless the relay of information is properly modeled - either by a runner, or because the event was observed by a platoon or company commander - any delays imposed will be quite arbitrary.

None of the above is hardly addressed in a satisfactory way - command delays in CMx1 were quite arbitrary, to be honest - by Battlefront. They're focusing on other things at the moment. As we discussed a couple of pages before, there's some room to be filled by a more 'command-oriented' tactical simulation with more powerful - i.e. capable of autonomy - friendly AI and more realistic modeling of control and communications.

What I'm expecting to see in the AAR is that 1) Bil will have important problems to control his forces when they start to rack up casualties and 2) fire control will be problematic, with the unexperienced Russian units firing at targets prematurely. The second one can be bypassed by the use of the 'cover arc' commands to some extent, but I reckon units can override those depending on morale status and training/experience rating.

Of course, if the German player can't cause enough casualties or suppress the Soviet troops for 1) to kick in, I can't see Bil losing this particular match. For whatever reason, in the public DAR's he's never met someone with a similar take on the game, my impression is that his opponents come from the kind of CM player who has cut his teeth on ladder or casual play.

[ComradeP]

In all honesty, there are also some AAR's that show the challenging parts of the game, such as the recent KG campaign AAR for CMBN, and there are lots of interesting videos on Youtube as well. Meeting engagements might be fun and quick battles might allow for a relative parity in forces (although that is debatable in some ways: ~1000 additional points for the attacker is quite a lot) but if the campaigns involve costly operations to remove defenders from well-prepared positions, why show mostly a completely different side of the game?

As to the command delays: all tactical wargames that I've played struggle with this, and only some have tried to limit orders in some way. However, in terms of gameplay it doesn't have to result in unbalanced situations.

I felt the Close Combat title I played, Cross of Iron, handled this fairly well. I also felt Panzer Command: Ostfront handled it fairly well because you're using bigger units so you have both more men to maneuver with and the ability to absorb some losses. If you lose a handful of squads or particularly AFV's in CMx2, you lose a big chunk of your combat effectiveness it seems. That's probably why I feel I enjoy tactical wargames with either a small amount of units (CC) or company or so unit sizes (PC:O) or potentially even larger scale ones like SP:WWII to a middleground like CMx2.

[Bletchley_Geek]

why show mostly a completely different side of the game?

Never underestimate the appeal of tank and uniform porn. Very much like as is the case with actual porn, there's money to be made by "showing off".

As to the command delays: all tactical wargames that I've played struggle with this, and only some have tried to limit orders in some way. However, in terms of gameplay it doesn't have to result in unbalanced situations.

I felt the Close Combat title I played, Cross of Iron, handled this fairly well. I also felt Panzer Command: Ostfront handled it fairly well because you're using bigger units so you have both more men to maneuver with and the ability to absorb some losses. If you lose a handful of squads or particularly AFV's in CMx2, you lose a big chunk of your combat effectiveness it seems. That's probably why I feel I enjoy tactical wargames with either a small amount of units (CC) or company or so unit sizes (PC:O) or potentially even larger scale ones like SP:WWII to a middleground like CMx2.

It's hard indeed. What bit of CC3 do you think accounts for what we're talking about?

My point of view is that all of these examples are, for me, a thing of the past. I really don't look forward to any remakes of Steel Panthers, for instance. Yet there might be a KS project in waiting, I wouldn't be surprised. The future lies I think on the more beer and pretzels stuff like Battle Academy, the full board game conversion with a taste for cinematic antics, like Conflict of Heroes or Lock'n'Load, or the more hardcore stuff, like Graviteam's or Battlefront's stuff. Those are the cards we have been dealt with in the 2010's.

[ComradeP]

It's hard indeed. What bit of CC3 do you think accounts for what we're talking about?

Even though in CMx2, both sides play at the same speed in terms of unit movement, the attacker seems to have a significant advantage in these meeting engagement like maps, also because the defender is limited in where he chooses to fight. In CC, I never had the feeling that I was moving so fast that what I did couldn't be countered. There were still maps in the "obstacle course" category of units placed at certain positions to slow you down instead of one big coherent defense, but overall I felt the pace felt good. Too bad I ran into serious issues with the pathfinding.