CNC: 4 Announced

[Stark]

Part of it is likely that strong veterancy throws off their micro - you have to pay attention to not be surprised by rapid fire missiles from veteran choppers for instance, so when they see you fire and think 'ho ho he's out' and pursue only to be klled, they complain because they feel they 'should' have won.

The WiC community has people who think AAA units are overpowered because it takes two air units to reliably kill them and you might lose one without micro. The way the games built so that tanks or infantry take out AAA and that all AAA can do is kill aIr is lost on them.

[Phillip Hone]

World in Conflict is an amazing game, but it's really hard to find servers to play it on most of the time. And the servers that are available tend to play the same one or two maps (the Space Needle once, for instance) over and over again. Still, when you can find servers, it's loads of fun because it cuts out most of the annoying crap that plagues tends to RTS games. The battles are about tactics and team work, rather than who can click the fastest.

As for Command and Conquer: IMO the first couple of games were good for their time, but the series has more or less stagnated since then.

[Stofsk]

Veteran units is truly something I feel is lacking in RTS games. Total Annihilation was one of the first RTS games I ever played, I remember after every battle I'd get all my veteran units, group them in a separate group, put the factory fresh units at the front and veterans behind them, and kept each battle going like that; the new recruits would either perish or survive and may even become veterans themselves, while the reserves would increase their skill and thus their value.

This was frustrating to do however, because TA still had you treat your units in a disposable fashion, and the difference between a veteran unit and a green unit wasn't all that noticeable. But it was wildly different to games like Dune 2, CinC, StarCraft that I actually thought it was a step in the right direction. Boy how wrong I was. About the only other strategy game I've noticed veteran units in is Rome (and presumably Medieval 2, I have both but I've only played Rome so far), and IIRC GalCiv 2, which isn't primarily a war game anyway!

World in Conflict sounds like a game I can really get behind. It just seems so insane to play a strategy game without a process whereby your units gain experience and become better at doing their jobs (and thus, more incentive to keep them around, or sacrificing them to some strategy becomes painful).

[Laughing Mechanicus]

EndWar had a really good veterancy system, the best one I have ever seen in an RTS by far. IT worked as follows:

The units which made up the players army were persistent throughout the campaigns (both in single and multiplayer) which meant individual units gained experience slowly, but as they increased in ranks (levels) they gained not only the usual damage/health (etc) stat improvements but also a wide array of different special abilties and upgrades (which the player purchased) which could be used to customise them quite a bit.

To facilitate this system unit death was also handled differently: if a unit was "killed" in EndWar it would always leave some survivors who would automatically be picked up by a rescue helicopter - if this was successful then that unit would "survive" the battle and be available to the commander for the next game with full veterancy and with all purchased upgrades. However the enemy commander could choose to keep attacking your evacuating unit and outright destroy it - meaning you lost that unit, and all their experience, forever.

On top of this each unit had a unique name and voice which was kept consistent between missions, meaning after a few games you did really start to identify individual units - you remember who your best units are and can give them more difficult areas to capture, whereas you will use the less experienced units more conservativley so they have a chance to gain experience.

Even the voice overs changed to reflect unit experienced - so more experienced units were cooler under fire on the radio, whereas newbies would sound panicky if the fight wasn't immediately going their way. It really was just very well implemented all round.

Obviously this relies on an MMO infrastructure to track your units stats etc... but I think without such a setup it would be quite difficult to implement real meaningful care on the players part for their units - who cares about some random unit if you are only ever going to see them for a 20 minute game?

[Sea Skimmer]

On a purely philosophical note, I also strongly dislike the game mechanism which encourages players to think of their units as disposable cannon fodder. It would be interesting to make a game where unit morale was affected by heavy casualties or tactical choices which clearly place little value on your mens' lives.

The Close Combat series had that. You controlled men as squads or individual tanks, but each actual character in the squad or tank crew had various bars of how skilled he was, how tired and what his moral was among other factors. Taking enemy fire, and having men around a guy killed steadily lowered his moral until they’d no longer obey orders, and if they got a chance, break and run for the rear. What’s more, since you fight individual battles, but also have a campaign aspect in which you move your various battle groups, any losses you take can only be replenished from a very limited reserve pool. Losing all your tanks early might mean you can only replace them with low quality rifle squads, or nothing at all. If things got bad on the defensive you could even flee the map (you'd suffer an automatic 30% additional losses in the process, but that beats 100% wipe out) and try to make a new stand on a different map. If you won however, a certain number of knocked out tanks and artillery peices (about 40-50%) would get repaired and returned to service, but the crewmen would have lower stats to reflect the fact that they are green replacements.

You also had certain weapons like towed anti tank guns, which you had to preposition before a battle began, and after that they could only be very slowly dragged by the crews (the heaviest weapons like 88mm flak could not be moved at all). That meant planning a attack strategy or defensive strategy before the battle even began was important.

Of course, that would get in the way of the "I can click/spam/hoard faster than you can" style of gameplay, so it MUST NOT BE DONE!!

Well… in close combat you still had to micromanage the fuck out of everyone, but it actually counted for something. Since they had 3-D terrain (but shown 2-D from top down) you could exploit cover and even lay down smokescreens with grenades and mortar fire to minimize your losses. Taking up positions in buildings actually provided cover depending on if it was a stone or wooden building, and higher buildings increased the units LOS. Best of all, if your side was defending in a given battle, your men and equipment started out in trenches and gunpits in the locations you had them start from. They could get out of the trench, and reenter it but you didn’t get to dig new trenches during the battle. So once more, preplanning counted.

[Darth Wong]

That sounds pretty cool. What were the game's principal annoyances? Every game has some.

[Sea Skimmer]

The main annoyance to me was that the maps are just not really that big, though not all maps are the same size, and the size of the battlegroups wasn’t too huge either. Enough that you could not really fight a battle over the whole map you had normally. Also it needed some kind of time compression to make sneaking tactics more appealing. You could order men to walk, run or sneak in which they’d half crawl half walk, and at that rate it could literally take them ten minutes to cover a modest distance. But that’s what you’d do in real life. They needed bigger maps and an ability to put two battlegroups on them at once, or even 3 vs. 2 senarios.

In the early games these limitations could be explained as being primarily driven by the computers of the time, but by the time of the last two games it certainly wasn’t a problem. I think they just felt like more then IIRC the limit was 20 tanks/squads would just scare away players as too much micromanagement. Additionally, while 20 tanks and squads is a lot, certain units like two man Bazook or machine gun teams, or a single sniper each take a full squad slot. I think they could have improved on that, and they also could have provided a way to ‘split’ a squad into two teams if needed. That way you could have a machine gun squad with two machine guns, then split in into two one gun teams to cover mulitpul angles, or so one could cover the advance of the other. Suppressing fire worked well in the game.

Another problem was, men had limited ammo, as real life. That could mean a guy with a rifle only has about 80 bullets and a couple grenades. That’s fine… except they gave you no way to replenish ammo during a battle which was annoying. Though to make things even more strategic, units had to be resupplyed. If a unit was cut off by enemy troops controlling the surrounding maps (during the passing of a strategic turn on the strategic map, positions on the battle map don’t matter, then it would have less and less ammo and no replacements in each battle until it was destroyed or relieved.

Also, the game had a couple kinds of ‘off map support fires’, air strikes (which could be one of several different planes), mortar fire (multiple mortars firing together, you could have individual mortars on map to command, these are the ones that also shoot smoke) or in the last game you also had naval gunfire. You assigned these support functions to battlegroups before each turn (each strategic turn you can move a battlegroup from one map to an adjoining map, a campaign could be anything from 1-21 turns depending on how much of the strategic map is being used, you could fight single map onoff battles) and then fight all the battles that will happen in the turn in succession.

I was annoyed because if you did not use a support fire given to one unit, you couldn’t reassign it until the next strategic turn. Also these supporting fires just usually didn’t accomplish much, because they had a high level of (realistic) inaccuracy. But in real life you can fire and adjust.. and call on more then one plane ect…. Cant do that in close combat. You can have one of each support function assigned, and that is it. Player mods did reduce inaccuracy, and increase the firepower of the strikes though, partly solving the problum. Still its damn annoying when you have five mortar barrages you can assign, but you can only give one of them to a paratrooper battlegroup that is about to face down Nazi SS Panzer troops with Panther tanks.

So yeah, Close Combat is pretty much the best blend of micromanagement and realistic gameplay I’ve ever seen in a strategy game, and very high on the realistic fighting in general. This of course ensured the series died, but then it died around the same time the whole company SSI kind of fell apart. They did great realistic wargames… which too few people bought. As I recall Ubisoft bought them and gutted them.

Also, the AI was a major limitation. It wasn't real dumb or bad to play, but it was a bit lacking on its ability to place its units before battle, and tended to get too suicidal making attacks. But you could play against humans too and even save campaigns so you did not have to play them all the way through at once, just the individual battles. That's one thing you sure don't see in games anymore! SSI however loved it, legacy of its war games being purely turn based like Panzer General.

If you can find a Copy of Close Combat 5: Invasion Normandy online, it’d still be worth paying even twenty bucks for to me at least. That’s the last one, made in 2000, but it was actually good enough that the USMC had a modified version made around 2005 as a training tool.

[Prannon]

I played Close Combat: Invasion Normandy, and I corroborate all of what Sea Skimmer says. It's a very well made game if realism is your thing. And I'd point out that the slow game play is actually an advantage since it's a micro intensive game. You have time to think when you're micro-ing all of your various units. One of my favorite aspects of the game, more of a fluff thing really, is that your units that performed well actually got medals. A very few of my men actually managed to get Medals of Honor. Plus there are simple things like Purple Hearts and Accuracy Medals.

Sea Skimmer also neglected to mention that if your men ran out of ammunition during the battles, they could actually scavenge arms off of dead enemies. I kept a number of men in the battle using that method.

The AI really is lacking though. That was probably the most frustrating thing for me. It was often far better to just get into a defensive position and let the computer run into your open arms (even if you were the one attacking) than it was to actually attack. The enemy never actually established defensive positions and stayed in them to resist your moves. IMO, those didn't ruin the game, and I miss playing it quite a bit.

[Uraniun235]

Would veterancy maybe work better if it didn't require scoring kills to gain veterancy? I mean, it's not as if a squad of infantry has to annihilate another squad of infantry to gain combat experience.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Would veterancy maybe work better if it didn't require scoring kills to gain veterancy? I mean, it's not as if a squad of infantry has to annihilate another squad of infantry to gain combat experience.

Company of Heroes does this to an extent. While units do gain experience from getting kills, just generally being in the vicinity of combat helps them, too. British units in particular work this way - since only their officers gain (direct) veterancy, they're almost completely reliant upon their nearby troops to get any veterancy (who in turn are then reliant on the officer to give them the benefits).

[Baka^Ni]

I still remember there was one particular RTS idiot fanboy here who accused me of opposing RTS micromanagement just because I lack his awesome micromanagement skills: an argument which implicitly assumes that I actually want to play a massively micro-managed game and am simply crying sour grapes because I lack the ability. I don't actually recall his username, but he was emblematic of everything wrong with the genre today.

That idiot fanboy was probably me. At the time I was playing quite a lot of Blizard 'RTS' games and I was very good at them. As far as I knew, they were the definition of RTS and anyone who complained about an aspect of them was just yet another noob whiner who just wasn't good enough to play.

I even used some of my limited status to cry in the forums about little tweaks that might affect the 'skill' of the game, eg. zooming all over the map and babying each unit with exacting detail at great speed.

Then of course the inevitable happened, I met someone who could click-spam faster than I could. All of sudden, my knowledge and experience were completely useless, the realisation dawned that all these games I had loved playing, just boiled down to who could micro-manage faster. I stopped playing soon after and I haven't really touched a 'RTS' since.

I'm actually quite embarrassed about my idiot fanboy past and I would to apologise for the drivel I spewed, epecially if insulted you about your lack of clickfest spam skill, I imagine you must of laughed out loud.

[[R_H]]

Has anyone here played the JTF game?

From what I remember it, the vehicles (among other things) were interesting because they could be captured, and because each vehicle had a crew. Which means that if the vehicle is heavily damaged or destroyed the crew can bail out. The heavy vehicles were airdropped in (you had to capture an airstrip before being able to do so), and the infantry/light vehicles were choppered in.

There were a couple of different types of infantry. I remember there being marksmen, engineers (which did demolition), medics, and soldiers (could be equiped with C4, AT, AA, hand grenades or grenade launchers, this all increased cost). The number of units was capped by how successful you were in the game, each objective you completed earned you more money. The vehicles had a limited amount of ammunition, which only the repair units could replenish. Infantry had infinite ammo for their rifles, but a limited amount of grenades etc. I don't remember how their ammo was replenished.

When in groups, the formations could be changed, the infantry could go prone, and vehicles could be buttoned up which meant the crew wouldn't use weapons that were only accessible externally (ex. Humvee's machine gun).

[Stark]

CC Invasion Normandy was pretty cool, but due to it's 'realism' the idiosyncracies really stood out as crazy in a usually quite grounded game. It's a shame they stopped making them.

[Vympel]

Close Combat 3 (the Russian Front) was the pinnacle of the Close Combat series, IMO. Not only because, hey, it's the fucking Russian front, but Close Combat 4 (about the Battle of Bulge) had annoying, predetermined forces that you couldn't customize in the campaign, and no mission builder as far as I can recall. Even though there were supposed to be King Tigers and Tigers in the game, I never saw them! Not once.

I never even played CC5.

One of the coolest custom scenarios in CC3 was the Reichstag map. I would often fill the Reichstag with German infantry and send crack Russian infantry across the open sqaure to try and take it, it was great.

[Stark]

Heh. I don't like the Normandy scenario, but I couldn't get CC3 working on Vista.

Thing is, CC5 seemed more like a slightly larger version of tactical games like Silent Storm, but more generalised for the scale (squads etc). It was better than Sudden Strike, but hey, that's not hard.

[MKSheppard]

It's a shame they stopped making them.

A Semi-rebuild of Close Combat: Normandy (CC5)

A semi-rebuild of Close Combat: Battle of the Bulge (CC4)

Re-release and refresh of CC3: The Russian Front to run on newer computers, with a few new enhancements

Close Combat Modern Tactics - Based on Close Combat Marines, which is used as a USMC training simulation

The big problem with Close Combat was basically it relied on very hard to make maps; thus ensuing a limited number of maps for the game; which meant you'd end up fighting over the same ground over and over in a short time.

[Stark]

That's a problem true of met modern game; increased levels of detail and size leads to fewer maps.

[SAMAS]

Part of it is likely that strong veterancy throws off their micro - you have to pay attention to not be surprised by rapid fire missiles from veteran choppers for instance, so when they see you fire and think 'ho ho he's out' and pursue only to be klled, they complain because they feel they 'should' have won.

I think Dawn of War(CoH too?) got it partly right on an alternative with the Squad and Morale systems. A unit with no Morale has to be pulled out because it's simply no good until it regains it's nerve, and a squad short on manpower is best pulled out as it's usually less expensive (and faster) to restore that unit to full capacity than to retrain/build up a new one from scratch.

It's not a lot, but It's a step in a good direction.

The WiC community has people who think AAA units are overpowered because it takes two air units to reliably kill them and you might lose one without micro. The way the games built so that tanks or infantry take out AAA and that all AAA can do is kill aIr is lost on them.

Wait, they're complaining that the anti-air weapon is actually good at it's job?

[Stark]

That sort of thing is seen in pretty old games; even Kohan had persistent, configurable squads that could regenerate from losses and were limited in combat by morale, Heart of Iron (ugh) has organisation and morale, etc. But PRO players would just say that these ideas reduce their control and make the game play itself, a criticism regularly levelled at Kohan by people who didn't notice it was a turn-based strategy game in RTS form.

EDIT - yes, they complained that heavy AA (which couldn't attack anything but choppers) could kill choppers, when if you attacked a single HAA with 2 choppers you'd certainly win, probably without casualties if you knew what you were doing. 'Pop flares and retreat' was too hard for most players, I guess.

[Samuel]

I think Dawn of War(CoH too?) got it partly right on an alternative with the Squad and Morale systems. A unit with no Morale has to be pulled out because it's simply no good until it regains it's nerve, and a squad short on manpower is best pulled out as it's usually less expensive (and faster) to restore that unit to full capacity than to retrain/build up a new one from scratch.

Company of Heroes didn't have the moral. They did have the squad system and had pinned and suppression. I believe those were added in Dawn of War 2 when they yanked out the moral system.

The cost to reinforce was dramatically cheaper in CoH- DoW didn't really have that feature.

[[R_H]]

I think Dawn of War(CoH too?) got it partly right on an alternative with the Squad and Morale systems. A unit with no Morale has to be pulled out because it's simply no good until it regains it's nerve, and a squad short on manpower is best pulled out as it's usually less expensive (and faster) to restore that unit to full capacity than to retrain/build up a new one from scratch.

Company of Heroes didn't have the moral. They did have the squad system and had pinned and suppression. I believe those were added in Dawn of War 2 when they yanked out the moral system.

The cost to reinforce was dramatically cheaper in CoH- DoW didn't really have that feature.

There's no more morale in DoW2, just suppression (which has pretty much the same effect).

[Pint0 Xtreme]

I think Dawn of War(CoH too?) got it partly right on an alternative with the Squad and Morale systems. A unit with no Morale has to be pulled out because it's simply no good until it regains it's nerve, and a squad short on manpower is best pulled out as it's usually less expensive (and faster) to restore that unit to full capacity than to retrain/build up a new one from scratch.

Company of Heroes didn't have the moral. They did have the squad system and had pinned and suppression. I believe those were added in Dawn of War 2 when they yanked out the moral system.

The cost to reinforce was dramatically cheaper in CoH- DoW didn't really have that feature.

CoH does have a "Retreat to Base" action for all infantry-based units where they just drop up what they're doing and just high-tail it back to HQ regardless of how suppressed they are. It's not a morale system but it's the closest thing to it.

[Sea Skimmer]

Close Combat 3 (the Russian Front) was the pinnacle of the Close Combat series, IMO. Not only because, hey, it's the fucking Russian front, but Close Combat 4 (about the Battle of Bulge) had annoying, predetermined forces that you couldn't customize in the campaign, and no mission builder as far as I can recall. Even though there were supposed to be King Tigers and Tigers in the game, I never saw them! Not once.

It had an editor. The Tigers did exist in the game files, but not any of the actual battlegroups. A huge numbers of mods could change that however, and also a few other things like converting the mortar barrages into howitzer barrages. They could also make the Jadgtiger show up more, and the American M36s which appeared in just two groups stock.

People also did mod it to have an editable force pool, but frankly that is rather absurdly unrealistic, you fight with what you have, not what is 100% ideal for the task. CC5 went back to having one you can edit without mods in an ycase.