My Review

[sabre1]

Icekill,

Have no fear man, they are going to support this title for a LONG time. I have a feeling there will be just as much stuff coming out for it just like Field of Glory, if not more.

[junk2drive]

I have a feeling that this game is going to do well at Christmas and next year we will have a whole bunch of new people eager to try their creative skills.

[hank]

This game looks like a lot of fun. I never played Combat Missions but did play SPWaW; and I recently downloaded the demo of Win SP:MBT which is a lot of fun.

The art work is great. Reminds me of the days when Sgt Rock and GI Combat were the hot WWII comic book series. I bought dozens of those comics when I was a kid. I especially like the haunted Stuart M5 tank stories.

I may have to jump on this one.

[Grim.Reaper]

ORIGINAL: hank

This game looks like a lot of fun. I never played Combat Missions but did play SPWaW; and I recently downloaded the demo of Win SP:MBT which is a lot of fun.

The art work is great. Reminds me of the days when Sgt Rock and GI Combat were the hot WWII comic book series. I bought dozens of those comics when I was a kid. I especially like the haunted Stuart M5 tank stories.

I may have to jump on this one.

Ditto for me. I had all those comics, with Sgt. Rock being my favorite. Family purchased this as a gift for me so I still have a few days before I can give it a go...hope not to be disappointed

[V22 Osprey]

ORIGINAL: Iain McNeil

The point is that user content is a lot better than generated content and as you say user content while great cannot compete with the hand crafted missions and assets produced by professional artists and designers who have far more time to create it. Any fully random generator would end up with repeatable and indistinct missions and all the flavour you love would be lost. We'll do our best to create as much content as possible for you guys. We have a lot on the go but there are a lot of technical issues with getting a system to distribute it in a user friendly way which we're ironing out. Once that is sorted we hope to be able to deliver things more rapidly!

If the generators has enough customization and features then it won't lose flavor. I recommend you download the free version of WinSPWW2 and WinSPMBT. There is absolutely NOTHING you can't do in the those generators. Then you have Generated Campaigns. You can even load custom maps and battle on them without it being a scenario straight to the generator. I rarely even play the human made scenarios anymore. In a few seconds I could be doing a Huey Assault in Vietnam 1970, and in a few minutes be battling soviets in the Soviet Afghan War, all from the generator. Considering BA is a rather simple game, A generator shouldn't be that to add to the game.

[IainMcNeil]

BA is a lot more complex than Steel Panthers. When you say anything can be done in SP its not really true as you are heavily restricted to what the designers set up.

Look at what you can do in BA and this is still only scratching the surface http://slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21073

The engine is almost a wargames construction kit.

[V22 Osprey]

ORIGINAL: Iain McNeil

BA is a lot more complex than Steel Panthers. When you say anything can be done in SP its not really true as you are heavily restricted to what the designers set up.

Look at what you can do in BA and this is still only scratching the surface http://slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21073

The engine is almost a wargames construction kit.

Again, please use the WinSPWW2/MBT generator and then say that it's "heavily restricted". Let's see, the designers set up the generator to generate any map I want, any terrian I want(Set to my OWN parameters like more trees, less buildings, a river, etc), I can edit the objective locations, I can load a custom map, I can set up defenses(Barbed wire, trenches, etc), the list goes on. I'm sure the game engine itself is more complex because you are working with 3D. Gameplay wise though BA is a more simplified game. I mean, it's not like in BA you are having 100+ units on screen at once with a map that's 200 x 100 hexes big like in SP.

[IainMcNeil]

Yes of course, SP is a very complex game, much more complex to play than BA but the SP engine is a lot simpler than BA. The BA engine lets you do pretty much anything you can think of. However it means that a lot more hand crafting is required to make it do all this clever stuff.

[rich12545]

Iain, I think what V22 Osprey and some of us over the last several months are saying is although the clever stuff is nice in hand crafted scenarios it isn't necessary for random scenarios.  That what the game needs is this option.  Be able to set parameters for the map, the units, the victory flags etc with a few clicks and bingo there's a scenario.  He simply used Steel Panthers as one example of what we're all looking for.  There are LOTS of games that have this feature and there's really no reason BA can't have it too. 

[IainMcNeil]

I completely understand but the issue is that it is not possible

In 2D you just place a terrain type and maybe edge it, throw down the VP's etc - easy. BA maps are built from many different layers and objects and this approach isn't possible. We're not being awkward How many 3D games that are not just generic rolling hills have it - I doubt there any.

[Ron]

ORIGINAL: Iain McNeil

I completely understand but the issue is that it is not possible

In 2D you just place a terrain type and maybe edge it, throw down the VP's etc - easy. BA maps are built from many different layers and objects and this approach isn't possible. We're not being awkward How many 3D games that are not just generic rolling hills have it - I doubt there any.

Combat Mission from ten years ago.

[PipFromSlitherine]

Without wanting get away from the main point (which is that we are working on a way to have random maps and battles), Combat Mission is an example of why we're not comparing apples to apples. It's maps are much larger and more generic - basically the rolling hills Iain talks about.

The visual style and approach of BA makes it much more difficult to generate good looking, sensible random maps. Now perhaps we are being a little too perfectionist about it, and a lot of people might not care about some of the visual niceness, and be happy with just the bare bones, but our aim is to make any random map approach equivalent as much as possible to the hand built maps that form the current game maps.

I also hope we don't come across in an adverserial way, as that's not our intent. We recognise that in an ideal world it's a great feature, and we're working towards it. And we welcome all this discussion - I've personally grabbed all the games mentioned here to see whether there is anything that can be gleaned from them to help with our work on random maps. So we're just being honest about why we haven't got this feature which we know is popular.

Cheers

Pip

[sabre1]

Thanks for your consideration, and all of your hard work. I think it's just a matter of we all love the game, and want more of everything.

[PipFromSlitherine]

And so you should - without you guys keeping our noses to the grindstone we'd have, well, really long noses?

[;)]

Cheers

Pip