How well is infantry handled?

[marcusm]

One of the reasons I never got the predecessor, was the armor heavy focus.
Does this version make pure infantry combat as interesting as say CMBB? I would like
to see some videos showing off armorless situations.

Also. How much freedom does the scenario editor allow for? Can you remake ASL scenarios with any similarity?

Yes. I know it's called "Panzer" command but what I really want, is a more modern CMBB.

[Erik Rutins]

Winterstorm was extremely armor heavy and infantry was given short shrift - largely because the historical campaign was extremely armor heavy, so for the first release we focused on what we really needed for that campaign.

Kharkov is different. Infantry is now more durable and we have the full range of infantry and weaponry, including rifle grenades, panzerfausts and smoke grenades. Trenches and foxholes are now in, as is smoke from artillery. On-map mortars and infantry guns also add to infantry firepower. Sighting was also overhauled, which makes infantry much more difficult to spot now than they were before. Updated terrain movement and cover modifiers and more terrain types also help.

All of this combines to give infantry a lot more options than they had in Winterstorm and a good player can do a lot more with infantry now than was possible in the original release.

Regards,

- Erik

[ravinhood]

I never asked before, but, what is the max limit of units on the map PER SIDE at a time? Also what is the max limit of units INCLUDING reinforcements per battle? Or is there a max at all and we can have unlimited and infinity amounts of units on the map per side? (somehow I don't think this will be answered with a yes lol)

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: ravinhood
I never asked before, but, what is the max limit of units on the map PER SIDE at a time? Also what is the max limit of units INCLUDING reinforcements per battle? Or is there a max at all and we can have unlimited and infinity amounts of units on the map per side? (somehow I don't think this will be answered with a yes lol)

No max limit, but if you put in a huge number of units, obviously performance will likely slow to a crawl.

[ravinhood]

Amazing no max limit. That's great. I can run 25,000 units on the screen when I play the old MTW with 2D sprites and well over 10,000 playing RTW with 3D graphics on my system. Will be interesting to see how many I can field with Kharkov.

[junk2drive]

Does MTW and RTW have relative sighting for each of those 10,000 or 25,000 units?
 
marcusm, there is a winter battle that Erik created, at the trainstation, almost all infantry and plenty of it. Very challenging scenario.

[Erik Rutins]

Well, there's now a full random campaign from 1941-1944 based on the 1st Infantry Division as well.

[ravinhood]

ORIGINAL: junk2drive

Does MTW and RTW have relative sighting for each of those 10,000 or 25,000 units?

marcusm, there is a winter battle that Erik created, at the trainstation, almost all infantry and plenty of it. Very challenging scenario.

No, but, they both have real time live action movements from the start to the end. I think that would take up a lot more power than mere relative sighting activities. Remember in the total war series each lil man is modeled for running, walking, throwing, shooting and also his morale, fatigue and combat animations. Quite a lot for 25,000 lil men on a screen.

[big poppa pump]

How about surrender?  Will individual infantry units surrender when the situation is hopeless.  I'm referring specifically to individual squads and such rather than a game terminating surrender. 
 
One of the best "immersion" features of CMx1 (CMAK in particular) is after a long hard fought battle individual squads call it quits.  It really relays the sense of self preservation. 

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: ravinhood
No, but, they both have real time live action movements from the start to the end. I think that would take up a lot more power than mere relative sighting activities. Remember in the total war series each lil man is modeled for running, walking, throwing, shooting and also his morale, fatigue and combat animations. Quite a lot for 25,000 lil men on a screen.

Actually, no, that's MUCH easier than having them all do individual spotting.

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: big poppa pump
How about surrender?  Will individual infantry units surrender when the situation is hopeless.  I'm referring specifically to individual squads and such rather than a game terminating surrender. 

Yes, squads or platoons that fail morale and are in a hopeless situation will surrender.

[ravinhood]

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

ORIGINAL: ravinhood
No, but, they both have real time live action movements from the start to the end. I think that would take up a lot more power than mere relative sighting activities. Remember in the total war series each lil man is modeled for running, walking, throwing, shooting and also his morale, fatigue and combat animations. Quite a lot for 25,000 lil men on a screen.

Actually, no, that's MUCH easier than having them all do individual spotting.

In what size increments are you comparing this Erik? Are you saying 50 lil units in Kharkov takes more calculations to spot than 25,000 units in Total War to do all it's animations and movements and keep up with fatigue and morale? Sorry, I find that hard to believe without proof.

Also, I just recalled that in TW there is spotting as we could hide or the AI could hide in the woods and you didn't see them till you could see the whites of their eyes sometimes.

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: ravinhood
In what size increments are you comparing this Erik? Are you saying 50 lil units in Kharkov takes more calculations to spot than 25,000 units in Total War to do all it's animations and movements and keep up with fatigue and morale? Sorry, I find that hard to believe without proof.

Per individual. Animation is much less costly than computing real line of sight through a combination of rays for each individual unit as well as terrain calculations.

Also, I just recalled that in TW there is spotting as we could hide or the AI could hide in the woods and you didn't see them till you could see the whites of their eyes sometimes.

I would guess that it's done at a level above "individual soldier" or calculated based on something other than an actual 3D ray LOS check. There are simpler and less realistic ways to check LOS. For true 3D LOS, it takes quite a few computations.

Regards,

- Erik

[ravinhood]

So in comparison to 25,000 TW men how many men would that be in Kharkov in power consumption or actual calculations per second do you think?

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: ravinhood
So in comparison to 25,000 TW men how many men would that be in Kharkov in power consumption or actual calculations per second do you think?

I'm really not sure. I'm sure their engine is overall more powerful give the development resources they have, but I'd be surprised given today's hardware if theirs could handle much more than twice what ours can, especially given theirs has to run in real-time.

Regards,

- Erik

[jomni]

Actually my tanks are having a hard time flushing out the infantry in buildings.
They can't spot properly at times. And they will get destroyed quickly with a lucky shot at the flanks.

[Deride]

ORIGINAL: ravinhood
So in comparison to 25,000 TW men how many men would that be in Kharkov in power consumption or actual calculations per second do you think?

Fascinating question -- one I can't answer in any sort of even ballpark way.

But, to understand what TW is doing in terms of optimization is important. When you are looking at a close-up of the 3D models, they actually have a much more detailed model of the soliders than when you are zoomed out. For most 3D games like TW, you are looking at roughly 500 polygons per soldier in the most detailed view and as few as 2 in the zoomed out view. For animating 25,000 soldiers -- which would be a very far out view indeed, you are probably in the neighborhood of 100,000 - 250,000 polygons being animated on the screen.

In PcK, the tank models have been optimized, but for the level of detail necessary (especially with wheels and other round pieces), you have 1,000 - 1,500 polygons per tank or infantry unit. The lower detail models have been implemented with software emulation instead of multiple models (again, TW has a lot more resources that Koios / Matrix, so they might even have 3 or more models to depict different levels of detail based on how far away the camera is from the model.) So, even when you are watching animation of 75 tanks / infantry, you are looking at roughly 80-90% the same amount of animation that TW has (including terrain, trees, etc.)

Now, all of that sort of stuff is interesting in and of itself, but drawing 3D polygons to the video card has been greatly optimized by video card companies and Microsoft. So, comparing drawing polygons to the screen isn't all that fair vs. other types of calculations.

So, let's talk about relative spotting, simulated tank physics (for ground manuvering), etc. in terms of calculations. Since PcK is using a complete in-memory 3D model to shoot out vectors to each potential enemy unit, you are looking at a lot of work for the CPU to handle. This is not being done in a virtual grid (like what TW is doing) but instead, you are looking for buildings in the way, trees, distance, smoke, weather conditions, etc. That's a lot of computer math going on in the background, and it hasn't been optimized across so many machines with things like specialized video cards. (Consoles, btw, do have specialized physics chips for just this sort of thing. From a performance perspective, I would love to require all customers have a physics chip installed, but I doubt we would want to only have that market available to buy the game [:)]).

(BTW, we initially implemented spotting only using a virtual grid -- based on the terrain map that each level must provide (the ugly looking bitmap that has lots of white, red, brown, etc. on it.) That spotting wasn't good at all, so implementing the ray-based relative spotting was essential -- even through it would lead to some performance degredation.)

Sorry for such a long response, but it is certainly some interesting things to discuss -- at least for us developer types who are responsible for thinking through the best solutions while balancing against memory, performance, etc.

Deride

[jomni]

Better to use computing power for the gameplay and AI than graphics.