Men of War

[wautd]

I can't wait to try out the multiplayer. Sadly, I had to order it from Amazon and the delivery time is at least a month. In the mean time I got a 'demo' that keeps me occupied with the single player content.

Overall I'm enjoying this game greatly. You get some really good value for your money. Honestly, I don't get why people are willing to pay more than twice as much for a steaming pile of shit game like the latest Red Alert.

Some remarks:

Not only does it have shiny graphics and a neat physics engine, it's also running very smooth on my PC. Short loading times are always a bonus as well.

Wonderful level of detail in detail (damage models, map designs,...). Finally a strategy game where you can loot corpses.

Single player missions have enough variation between them to stay interesting. Some levels are of the stealthy squad based types, in other levels you're doing a full scale assault or defence with quite a large force.

The AI: highly scripted. Don't expect the enemy to do a suprise flanking attack, because they'll either defend or attack using the "send pricks from point A to B"-tactic. Somethimes the enemy AI seems a bit passive when under attack, but I've seen worse in other games.
It's not all bad though. Thankfully your own units show a good level of initiative to shoot back, take cover or lob a grenade when needed so the chances of it becoming a micromanaging nightmare are slim.

Manual aim is fun, especially when you're up against a lot of soft targets and you got a sweet sweet 20mm.

The voiceacting is pretty dreadful overall. The narrator during the campaign intros is sleep inducing, the voice acting during the Russian cutscenes ripped a part of my soul. Offcourse, it's not the most important thing you're looking for in game like this.

[Tolya]

Oh, so you don't like the "Bill & Ted Excellent Adventure on antidepressants" feel of the voices of the soviets;)?

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

The German ones are priceless.

And the British... hooo, the British.

At least the American ones are the usual stereotypical stuff you expect from a game like this. "Gonna burn a lotta our fuel!"

[Steel]

The voiceacting is indeed terrible. There are some sections of voice acting that sound worse than flashpoints AI speech. OHNO.... thEre... theyARE !

I think part of the problem with tank MGs being able to mow infantry down so quickly is the short ranges. I mean you would have to be blind to miss people at 20m in real life with an automatic weapon, but as here thats 2x AT grenade range, infantry get a pretty rough deal. In order for them to make it so that you had a decent chance of missing at the ranges here they would need to make bullets come out at about 45 degrees to the barrel, which is what a lot of games do, but that sucks shit, so I'm in a way glad they didnt go too far down that route.

[Tolya]

Funnily enough, this is probably the only game where I skip all the cutscenes and still have great fun in-game.

Oh, and the game is moddable. So maybe we will have a real-warfare mod in near future. Or maybe one of the SDNers could make such a mod;)?

[Steel]

Pretty sure I've seen plenty of realism mods out there. I havent inspected any myself, but i'm sure there'll be quite a few decent ones soon.

What patch version are people using? I'm still on the 1.02 as i didnt see a full release of the 1.13 version and couldnt be arsed to get the multi one and then continually cut it out. Are there better games with on servers using the 1.13?

[wautd]

Anyone got trough "The trap" bonus mission? This one seems near impossible

[Steel]

Anyone got trough "The trap" bonus mission? This one seems near impossible

I've managed to complete all the missions on normal difficulty, although some are just ridiculous.

That mission I took the 2 squads left towards the damaged destroyer, waited for all the infantry to assault and get killed. Then when the half dozen Shermans turned up i snuck a guy up to take out the nearer one or 2 of them. Then nabbed the destroyer and one of the damaged M4s. If you use the destroyer and only target the turrets you can always capture the tank and repair it.

Some of the missions are just stupid to the point of being shit. The stevastpol evacuation mission took 5 hours in slow motion. I eventually managed to win it without even retreating to the second line, but the mission is certainly not winnable. I say that because in order to win it i had to save and load several hundred times and play at minimum speed. Basically every single time the enemy attack theres about a 50% chance they'll destroy one of your guns, and if they do that then you will lose the mission the next time they attack. The only way i managed to hold them off was to disable tanks by only shooting the turret, have a poor sod jump in and then drive it behind my lines and then repair it. Otherwise your shitty infantry are masacred from beyond your gun range by the enemy tanks HE and the enemy infantry will then overrun everything.

That means that no matter how good you are the mission is not possible to win even 1% of the time without continuous save/load. That doesnt make for a good game.

[wautd]

Anyone got trough "The trap" bonus mission? This one seems near impossible

I've managed to complete all the missions on normal difficulty, although some are just ridiculous.

That mission I took the 2 squads left towards the damaged destroyer, waited for all the infantry to assault and get killed. Then when the half dozen Shermans turned up i snuck a guy up to take out the nearer one or 2 of them. Then nabbed the destroyer and one of the damaged M4s. If you use the destroyer and only target the turrets you can always capture the tank and repair it.

Finally managed it as well using more or less the same tactic. At first, I usually tried to rescue those POW's, but by the time you had those guys rearmed, those Shermans started rolling in. Shermans that had realtime satelite maps and thermovision appearantly, because they went straight to my guys, no matter how well they were hidden.

[Steel]

As much as I like the series and as well as it acts as a simulator in some respects it has some major flaws as a 'game'. In a large number of missions no matter how good you get you still won't be able to win. There are so many situations where you will be forced to be exposed to enemy fire and that always carries a large risk of instant death. I'm not saying that's a bad thing in itself, just that the game goes beyond actually being properly controllable and the results of your actions are bordering on chaotic... Not something that is a particularly good trait in a game.

Also, I patched my game and tried some more multiplayer. I have to ask what the he'll is going on with the balance of heavy armour? I've never seen any soviet armour beat a tiger 1,2 or even 3 on 1! Hilariously at 15m the heaviest soviet field gun was unable to penetrate its rear, side or rear or side turret armour. Contrast with having many of the soviet heaviest tanks destroyed by hits to front armour from german AT guns at long range. Every single game I've seen starts with soviets dominate early game then Germans roll out 1 tiger (and have 3 infantry nearby to kill your guys as they take all day to stand still and play with their grenades) and they win. Put out one king tiger if they feel like a laugh, as its complete overkill. Those things can take multiple katyushka barrages on target.

[wautd]

I noticed in multiplayer stats there is also a Japanese army. What's all that about?

[Steel]

I noticed in multiplayer stats there is also a Japanese army. What's all that about?

They're going to be added in in a patch or 2. I'm not sure if theres a campaign for them, but they will be a fully functional multiplayer side. At the same time as adding them, the devs will be putting in more units for the existing armies as well. (Like adding an extra tank destroyer and a super heavy artillery piece for the germans in one of the recent patches, because they werent dominant in those areas already...)

[wautd]

I noticed in multiplayer stats there is also a Japanese army. What's all that about?

They're going to be added in in a patch or 2. I'm not sure if theres a campaign for them, but they will be a fully functional multiplayer side. At the same time as adding them, the devs will be putting in more units for the existing armies as well. (Like adding an extra tank destroyer and a super heavy artillery piece for the germans in one of the recent patches, because they werent dominant in those areas already...)

I wonder how they can my the Japanese balanced. They'll have to be really good at staying hidden because they're pretty much gimped in the heavy equipment departement.

[Steel]

I tried it again and I found that when you actually get a small team that communicates and works together the game really does work quite well. Its satisfying and combined arms actually works when you have one person scouting, the other concentrating on firing etc. Normally games just seem to be everyone puts out a mix of stuff, doesnt talk (or talks in russian which is rendered as moonspeak characters, and worse than useless...) and then theres a big melee and then everyone sits back and it turns into a very boring artillery fest. However, when it works right it works very well.

It does feel that the soviets are somewhat undergunned though and they really need teamwork and coordination to flank the german armour, otherwise nothing will work. Their heaviest tanks are pretty useless as far as i can see, as they dont mount significantly heavier guns than the light tanks and all the other sides have sufficiently powerful guns to penetrate their heaviest armour, so theres no increase in survivability but a massive increase in price.

In the larger maps germans vs soviets can have huge problems as if the germans park half a dozen king tigers next to each other then its impossible to flank them, and they're invulnerable from the front, so its time to either start sneaking round the back with some bombs (so unlikely they'll have left nothing watching the rear) or break out the katyushas, which have about a 1/10 chance of disabling one...

[wautd]

Also, I patched my game and tried some more multiplayer..

This may be a dumb question but where do you find those patches?

Also, there seems to be a lot of jibberisch (eg: 16zfzf@#@#é) in the chat channel. Some kind of bug?

[Steel]

Also, I patched my game and tried some more multiplayer..

This may be a dumb question but where do you find those patches?

There isnt a full patch out yet for the version that everyone seems to be playing (theres some kind of problem with one of the publishers it seems) but you can get the 1.11.3 multiplayer patch from here. In order to use it with sp you just have to cut and paste 2.pat and 3.pat out of the directory and put them back in and then for mp, but it is incompatible with older saves.

Also, there seems to be a lot of jibberisch (eg: 16zfzf@#@#é) in the chat channel. Some kind of bug?

No no, thats just the names of the german vehicles PzKpfwIV!

Well actually its not silly acronyms, I think its just because a large portion of the userbase is russian and our version of the game doesnt render their characters, hence my comment about moonspeak a few posts up. It does render the german doubleS, so we havent been totally short changed on characters.

[wautd]

I just saw a mortar team blowing themselves up by shooting vertically in the air

By the way, how do you reload vehicles? Sending over an ammo truck doesn't seem to do much

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Keep the vehicle selected and then "Examine" the truck's inventory.

[Steel]

Keep the vehicle selected and then "Examine" the truck's inventory.

Given the effort they put into the rest of the game this bit really seems weak. I heard in some early stuff that they were going to significantly improve the ammo/resupply situation. I dont want to fiddle around with 12 guys going to 30 bodies individually to resupply my squad, I should at the least be able to take my men, hit the resupply button and they'll grab all the ammo they can carry within 20m, or possibly be able to zone an area to resupply from.

Small mercy is that very rarely do soldiers live long enough run out of ammo in MP where time is of the essence, but when squads do it takes me by surprise.

Also I hadnt ever seen a "crew confused" message before today, but I saw about 8 in 2 games this afternoon. Mostly when my infantry worked long and hard to actually get behind an enemy tank and lob some explosives at it only so "confuse" the crew rather than the standard result of blowing the shit out of it... I saw several T34/76s actually take multiple AT grenades to cause any damage, which surprised me, although the patch changelog did mention them changing the results of AT grenade hits.

[wautd]

Keep the vehicle selected and then "Examine" the truck's inventory.

Yes but then what? I could get the ammo ou of the truck but not into the tank

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Trade like any other Examine inventory window. I don't remember the short cut off hand, right click? Moves item x from examinee to examiner or whatever.

[wautd]

I love the battlezone games, but I cannot fathom why Combat is the most popular game mode.


Oh yeah, in things I've learned today: parking a katyusha infront of a treeline is bad. Really bad

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

I cannot fathom why Combat is the most popular game mode.

deathmatch lolololololololool

Same reason why the cool game modes are never played in any other game.

[Steel]

Once I started avoiding combat and moved to battlezones my opinion of the game increased massively. I had a great time playing in a bunch of infantry only BZ games as well yesterday. Got schooled when I went back to tanks again today though!

I discovered today that german heavy tanks with massive front armour + edge of map so can't be flanked = death to waves of soviet armour. Miserable that was... Finally took them out with a scout + dynamite, although that required a sacrificial rifle squad so that they all looked away from the very edge of the map.

[wautd]

Last night I was up against a Men of War-God. You know you're getting schooled when you're repairing a tank in your own territory, see an infiltrated squad jump out the bushes the moment it is repeared to kill the crew and drive off with their loot back to their own territory.