Some Thoughts

[z1812]

I bought the game today and have had a good bit of time to play with it. I read through the manuals for the game and editor and played 1 tutorial. I then played the first 4 scenarios.

I like this game. The board game flavour makes it quite enjoyable. Unfortunately it seems to be quite a resource hog. I installed it first on my game desktop that is AMD based with win xp. It was so sluggish, even with the lowest preferences, that is was virtually unplayable. Bear in mind this computer easily drives games like CMBN at the highest options without problems.

I ended up installing it on my Music computer which is an intel based quad core with 8G of ram. Even so, to have it run and scroll smoothly, I had to lower some of the preferences. Once I sorted that out the game is now fun to play. I wonder why it is so resource intensive?

There are a few small things I don't care for. The flashing blue hexes. I find the flashing annoying. Same with set up squares. Why do they need to flash?

The counter art is quite nice close up but at any distance it appears a bit blurred. The part of the in game interface that shows the unit qualities is not placed well and can interfere with play.

After reading the scenario editor manual I don't think there will be many user made maps or scenarios. I hope to be wrong but it seems to be quite an involved process.

This is only the second game I have bought in the past 3 years. It attracted me because of the board game element and the different approach to some things such as the turn sequence. I am glad to have it and am looking forward to some online play.

[Erik Rutins]

Hi z1812,

ORIGINAL: z1812
I like this game. The board game flavour makes it quite enjoyable. Unfortunately it seems to be quite a resource hog. I installed it first on my game desktop that is AMD based with win xp. It was so sluggish, even with the lowest preferences, that is was virtually unplayable. Bear in mind this computer easily drives games like CMBN at the highest options without problems.

FWIW, that's not normal. We've run this on AMD test systems that would struggle with CMBN and COH runs great, even more so if you turn down the settings.

I ended up installing it on my Music computer which is an intel based quad core with 8G of ram. Even so, to have it run and scroll smoothly, I had to lower some of the preferences. Once I sorted that out the game is now fun to play. I wonder why it is so resource intensive?

This is a surprise. It scrolls smoothly on much lower end systems in our testing. Is there something else common to your systems in terms of either video driver settings or other software that could be causing an issue?

What kind of video card do you have on these systems? COH is more GPU dependent than CMBN from what I've seen, so perhaps that may be the difference?

This is only the second game I have bought in the past 3 years. It attracted me because of the board game element and the different approach to some things such as the turn sequence. I am glad to have it and am looking forward to some online play.

Glad you are enjoying it and I look forward to seeing you online!

Regards,

- Erik

[ericbabe]

The map editor has a bit of a learning curve, but I have taught my eleven-year-old twins the map and scenario creation process, so I think it is not too difficult. That it involves a paint program to create the height map and a basis map may be intimidating at first, but it actually makes the process easier once one gets the hang of it: there are a lot of great tools inside programs like GIMP and Photoshop that we wouldn't be able to reproduce inside our map editor. One can actually use the map editor to do everything except set heights, but having done it both ways for many maps, I have found that the editor alone just isn't as efficient as creating the import maps in Photoshop.

We've been discussing having a sort of scenario-of-the-week feature, for which we would release new firefights on a regular basis that could be incorporated into multiplayer. I'd need to hire someone to do this, I think, and it's not clear yet whether we will make enough money in sales to hire someone for this, or even how much it would cost, or whether our beta testers will remain active enough to test the firefights thoroughly before we would release them.

[Joram]

Not if you want me to remain married.

[ericbabe]

See, lots of important considerations [:)]