Combat Mission: Shock Force - RMA

[MKSheppard]

After four years, we get a game that is much less intuitive than it's precedessors, CM BB and CM AK, and graphically, falls down.

First up, the UI:



All you had to do was click on a unit, and rightclick to bring up a context sensitive menu of commands in CMBB/AK.

In CMSF, you no longer have that.

Instead: you have to click on the unit; then go all the way down to the user panel at the bottom; hit some buttons to find what movement you want (what genious decided to make "move" have a hotkey of O, when CMBB/AK had it as "M"?), hit it, THEN move back to where you want your unit to move.



It significantly slows down game play.

Also; Turn based play has a significant flaw, in v1.01; you cannot fast forward past the boring bits, you have to watch it all in real time, and then only do you get the VCR controls. Supposedly this will be "fixed" in the next patch; but how in hell do you MISS such a vital component of the game not working right?

Graphically, it looks nice. UP CLOSE. Anything beyond that and it is Blegh.



Note the nice detail up close; this is with the game on it's highest detail setting plus Antiisotrophic settings on my GeForce set to 16x. Far away hills look like drab paint a number things. IOW, they look like ass.

Save your money and just hold on to your old CMBB/AK discs instead. I'm seriously thinking of getting a refund/returning my copy.

[MKSheppard]

damn it! move to G*C please?

[Stark]

I know you were looking forward to this, but every time you mentioned it I'd look at their site again, and it never looked that awesome to me.

At least EB has a return policy?

[MKSheppard]

More to the point, you can't select multiple units and issue a mass "move" order anymore?

What the christ is it with these guys and "oooh ooh, lets throw away features that were in the last game!"

[SirNitram]

Moved.

[MKSheppard]

The big problem is the graphics are so uneven.

They look awesome up down and close; but when you go up to take a look at the big picture:

Link to picture

It looks like a free open source game rather than a professional game

[Stark]

More to the point, you can't select multiple units and issue a mass "move" order anymore?

What the christ is it with these guys and "oooh ooh, lets throw away features that were in the last game!"

This has always bothered me, in any game. Why would you *ever* remove a feature? Sure, depreciate it, make a new 'better' alternative, but why actually remove it?

From your shots the engine looks very inefficient. They clearly need some LODing: it seems to go from 'everything on, high quality' to 'everything off, poo quality' in a single step.

[MKSheppard]

From one of the designers:

Let me explain.

Yes, some of the things that were in a TEN YEAR OLD design which made that TEN YEAR OLD DESIGNED GAME great are not in CMSF. They have been replaced with all NEW things designed to make this NEW game great.

I know its asking a lot for you guys to see CMSF not as a evolution of the old CMx1 games but rather as a completely new design and game, but once you do, you begin to understand the approach we have taken with CMSF much better. Give it time, I helped MAKE this game and it took me a while to see that for myself!

Thats not to say we can't add some of those old great things that everyone loved back in. I mean sure, if it ain't broke don't fix it but that's only applicable if the part being talked about NOT fixing, still fits in the new machine.

Lol Whut!

Excuse me, but if it says "Combat Mission" in it's frigging title, then you can't cheap out and say "something different"

[Vympel]

Didn't they release a demo?

[Andrew_Fireborn]

From one of the designers:

Wow... just wow... I mean, even from the stand point of a lazy hobbiest interest in making games I have to say that's the most retarded thing I've ever heard...

Turn Based Strategy is rather niche anyway (I love it... but with the FPS & RTS AMP crowd being the majority... it's the truth.) and taking things out that the fans loved, or even things that are essential to making it run in a time efficient manner... (Like turning off combat animations. Something that irks me in most RPGs as well...)

It just doesn't strike me as a good business practice...


And I gotta agree with you on the zoomed out LoD... I've seen freeware do better, not even terribly good freeware at that...

[Laughing Mechanicus]

There's a demo out, Worthplaying has it.

[MKSheppard]

Wow... just wow... I mean, even from the stand point of a lazy hobbiest interest in making games I have to say that's the most retarded thing I've ever heard...

But Wait, it gets better!

Steve, can I be honest with you?

I don't care about the elimination of QBs, Random maps, etc. They're annoying, yes, but they won't break the game for me.

What annoys me is how you tossed out a tried and true interface system that worked perfectly for turn based in favor of a system suited best for real time.

I quite literally can only play a single turn of CMSF with the current UI for basic commands before I give up and go play something else.

You really did not need to read the manual with CMx1. You could literally tell people how to play the game in a few minutes.

"What do I do?"

"Well, click on your Tiger and right click"

"Sweet! what are all these commands for?"

"Move makes your guy move. Hunt makes him move, but really slowly and on the look out for the enemy"

"Awesome"

I used rightclick quite heavily for the advanced options like covered arcs (armor or basic arcs), as a sort of "paper cheat sheet" to make the game play much faster for me.

With Shock Force, this beautiful interface was tossed out in favor of a constantly changing keyboard interface; where "M" is constantly changing according to which tab you have selected.

Perhaps this change is better for a real time interface, but I don't want a real time game. I always get my ass kicked in those; where twitch speed rules and you have to memorize keyboard commands in order to be able to react fast enough to constantly changing conditions (cough, Company of Heroes).

There is also the graphics issue, where things look really great up close, but from a distance, they turn into a really bad blurry mess.

From a dev:

What annoys me is how you tossed out a tried and true interface system that worked perfectly for turn based in favor of a system suited best for real time.

A steering wheel works great for a car, it doesn't work well for an airplane. We changed the controls because we had to. The "tried and true" system simply didn't work with the new game, therefore we changed it. We certainly didnt' change it for change's sake, and we certainly didn't do it to make sure you guys had something else to moan about. And yes, we knew a lot of people wouldn't like it.

What you fail to remember, Ryan, is that very few people like CMx1's controls when the game came out. They wanted us to use systems from other games. They weren't applicable so we borrowed what we could and did the rest ourselves. Therefore, you're not complaining because CMx1's system is the perfect solution for CMx2, you're complaining because you don't want to adjust to something new.

Remember Ryan, with resistance to change like yours we would have made CMx1 using hexes. The identical logic you have expressed was used to try and tear us a new one over abandoning hexes. "WHAT! You guys are NUTS! Hexes have been used forEVER, and now you are tossing them right out the f'n window! You guys are going to fail, and you should because you've screwed the pooch".

I remember it very well. And I am choosing to listen to the parts of this discussion that are relevant, and ignore the knee jerk "I don't like it because it is different" crowd. And if you don't think you are part of that crowd, do you think we should have stuck with hexes, IGOUGO, 2D, and multiple phase turns? Because that is exactly what people were arguing for when we released CMBO. You can't say you're upset with us for not listening to them, right?

Steve, I like how you ignore the fact that I posted a clear usable example of how right click was great; and how you could easily get to playing using CMx1's interface within only a couple of minutes; and as you learned more about the game, you could transition to using the keyboard for the most common commands, like move.

Move was ALWAYS "M", no matter what.

In CMSF it's now "O", which as a bonus is also used for:

"Target Arc"
"Hide"
"Anti Tank Team"

Depending on which tab you have selected.

Which leads to massive confusion.

You're trying to make this into a "CMSF is just as radical and changing as CMBO was" debate, when in reality, for a UI to work, you need the major commands which will be used the most often to be clearly and unambigiously delineated to a single button.

I wouldn't mind having to dig through a submenu to find the little used engineering commands like "plant mines, remove mines, prepare bridge for demo, etc", since they will not be used THAT much.

However, a heavily used command needs a clear and unchanging key.

[Andrew_Fireborn]

... Somehow, I think his response to that second post will be along the lines of: "These controls are context sensitive, and therefore better!"

God, his reasoning so far has been much like the Tallests', "It's not stupid, it's advanced." line, except he believes it...

I mean heck, even Final Fantasy, which seems addicted to change for change's sake, Square keeps a lot of the basic UI unchanged. Even if they've completely scrapped everything else.

(A little apples to oranges, but hey, they're both fruit.)

[Vympel]

Just gave the demo a run through.

I've got to agree with Shep - what in the ever living fuck have they done to the interface? They've made it needlessly complex and tedious to navigate - where in CM:BO, BB and AK (I never played AK, but anyway) you were only one right click away from every single damn thing (nearly) you wanted your unit to do, you've got to go through all this bullshit with different control modes.

In addition, the map is a fucking bitch to move around as well. Whereas BO and BB where easy as shit to zoom around, I felt like I was flailing around in mud - the map controls are completely counter-intuitive and a real chore to figure out.

As to the graphics - I had no problem with them, they were a big improvement over the previous CMs - as they pretty much had to be - and that's fine by me.

The gameplay at its core is still classic CM, but they really dropped the ball on an interface that didn't need to be changed at all.

I played the Battle as the Syrians and won a Total Victory, but at a very high cost - I lost every single vehicle (including all reinforcements) except for two BMP-1Ps - amusingly, these BMP-1Ps took out the last American vehicle on the map - an M1A2SEP, from the flanks, with concentrated 73mm HEAT and Fagot-M fire. It was pretty cool.

Why they made the campaign such a massive mismatch (America vs Syria? Come on!) is a mystery to me, however. The game would be a lot more fun for the Red player if the Red player was actually ... Red. As in T-90As and BMP-3s, dammit.

Not to say it wasn't fun giggling with absolute glee as the Stryker ICVs with their pathetic .50 cal pea-shooters wasted their ammo trying to take out my BMP-1s from the front. 73mm HEAT > Stryker armor, you fools