Changes to game breaking older campaigns

[skeletonboi]

I picked up CMO a few months ago, and have been thoroughly enjoying myself.

One problem, though, is that the changes to the game engine often end up breaking older scenarios. As an example, I was just playing Mission 3 in the Chains of War campaign, 'Push', and it seems that the CZs which used to exist before (as can be attested by the various Chains of War AARs discussing them) just don't exist in this scenario anymore because of changes in the game modelling.

I tried playing the scenario 'fair', and then playing it with God's eye view on, and it seems that without CZs the Chinese SSBNs are undetectable unless you're RIGHT on top of them, even when your SSNs are creeping at the right depth.

Another example would be booting up the CMO-Live scenario Broken Shield 300, and finding out that the weapon stores for all the Israeli airbases are empty (meaning you can't arm your strike packages). I'm still 90% sure that's a bug rather than the scenario working as intended.

Don't get me wrong: I'm still enjoying the game immensely and I'll just skip Mission#3 and move on to Mission #4 in Chains of War, but it leaves a bit of a bad taste that these are DLCs that I'm paying for. I sometimes am unsure if a scenario is tough because it's designed that way, or if something got broken from one version of CMO to another.

[gennyo]

All recent published builds are beta builds, so the developer not always update all the official scenarios to the newest sim feature and latest database. If you are playing official DLCs I think the latest "stable" build v1.04.114745 should work well.

p.s. This is why I bought CMO from matrix even I have it on Steam, it's easier to get to a specific build if you kept the installation files, and I have a good collection of them.

[Easy301]

I picked up CMO a few months ago, and have been thoroughly enjoying myself.

One problem, though, is that the changes to the game engine often end up breaking older scenarios. As an example, I was just playing Mission 3 in the Chains of War campaign, 'Push', and it seems that the CZs which used to exist before (as can be attested by the various Chains of War AARs discussing them) just don't exist in this scenario anymore because of changes in the game modelling.

I tried playing the scenario 'fair', and then playing it with God's eye view on, and it seems that without CZs the Chinese SSBNs are undetectable unless you're RIGHT on top of them, even when your SSNs are creeping at the right depth.

Another example would be booting up the CMO-Live scenario Broken Shield 300, and finding out that the weapon stores for all the Israeli airbases are empty (meaning you can't arm your strike packages). I'm still 90% sure that's a bug rather than the scenario working as intended.

Don't get me wrong: I'm still enjoying the game immensely and I'll just skip Mission#3 and move on to Mission #4 in Chains of War, but it leaves a bit of a bad taste that these are DLCs that I'm paying for. I sometimes am unsure if a scenario is tough because it's designed that way, or if something got broken from one version of CMO to another.

I too wish there was more of a focus on cleaning up a lot of the scenario bugs. Since these are DLC scenarios that customers pay for and official content used to represent the game, I'd hope the priority is pretty high to get these fixed, so hopefully we see some positive changes in the next update when it's released.

Sometimes it gets to the point where I and others I've spoken to in the community go into a scenario, be it official-standalone, DLC, or Community Scenario Pack and are surprised when everything works perfectly "out of the box", which is far from an ideal player and customer experience.

Of course there's substantially more scenarios that work flawlessly than those that have issues but it can feel worse than it is sometimes as a lot of users won't play every scenario that's available but will be pretty selective with the scenarios they play, playing the time period, conflict, etc, that interests them.

I totally understand the bugs in the CSP. Those should be left up to the original scenario creators to keep updated and fixed when things break and not up to anyone else. Having a lot of the DLC broken on-top of that though is frustrating. Especially when there's bug reports in some of the DLC forums from a year ago or more that have yet to be fixed. Though to be fair, those were not reported in the proper place and were most likely missed as a result.

I'm sure they'll eventually be addressed though, the entire CMO team does a really good job with keeping up on and addressing bug reports, and they do have their hands pretty full at the moment it seems like, all things considered. Adequately reporting these is probably one of the more important factors in getting these issues fixed; making sure they are reported properly in the correct place. The team can't fix what they don't know is broken.

Hopefully we see some of the bugs reported during the past few months in a few of the DLC and stand-alone scenarios corrected after this update. I believe all the scenario bug fixes are done by one gentleman as well so it'll probably just take some time.

[gennyo]

It may be a good idea for developers to consider binding newly introduced simulation tweaks to new database releases, like using a tag in a new database to inform the program to enable new tweaks. This will save a lot of time to adapt old scenarioes to new version.

[skeletonboi]

It may be a good idea for developers to consider binding newly introduced simulation tweaks to new database releases, like using a tag in a new database to inform the program to enable new tweaks. This will save a lot of time to adapt old scenarioes to new version.

That’s a good idea.

From a new user perspective, could I suggest starting with the tutorials? When I first started last September, one of the naval tutorials (I think it was one of the submarine ones) kept talking about non-existent CZs, and as a brand-new user I was convinced for a week I was doing something wrong and failing to enable a map overlay.

[BDukes]

I get the angst but you got to set them up for success. Displaying what's broke and where saves a ton of time and gets a fix faster (hopefully).

Mike

[KnightHawk75]

It may be a good idea for developers to consider binding newly introduced simulation tweaks to new database releases, like using a tag in a new database to inform the program to enable new tweaks. This will save a lot of time to adapt old scenarioes to new version.

Tags have existed for this at times in the past via the capabilities table in the database instance, but i imagine it only helps and can be used so much to address issues.

Overall though don't mix older scenes with newer betas as a rule unless you are prepared to find and report the problems found. That's not to say DLC etc scenes with official 1147.x don't occasionally have problems even if recently rebuilt and released, or just play differently than in the past due to changing mechanics that were not factor when the scene was originally designed.

[skeletonboi]

I get the angst but you got to set them up for success. Displaying what's broke and where saves a ton of time and gets a fix faster (hopefully).

Mike

Fair point: I’ll post any issues I’ve encountered in the tech support forum as separate tickets. I guess part of the problem for me is that I am sometimes unsure if something IS a result of changed parameters, or if it’s just the scenario working as intended, like the aforementioned Chains of War issue (which I only figured out because I found some AARs to follow).