Some disappointment

[PDiFolco]

Well, after a long game, I end up rather disappointed with several game shortcomings. They all fired up during the same session...
It began as being quite cool, I generated a Rand campaign pitting the 1st German ID on the road to Vitebsk in June 41.
First thing was my heavy weapons were 37mm ATG and 75mm IG : I tried to tow them to no avail , the game doesn't feature gun towing...They were then pretty useless.
As I shifted my trucks to HMG teams transport, I realized the pathfinding wasn't very good, the trucks kept wanting to avoid road and enter woods whatever the path setting.
They also stopped as soon as they were fired upon, which resulted in more harm than if they kept rolling, the sensible thing to do. Units also never withdraw to cover, they just go back a bit in the open !
The game developed, and endless hordes of russkies appeared and never seem to give up and rout :the morale model seems a bit off for 41. At the end I think I had killed 3 companies or more, they kept fighting.

I then stumbled on the untakable building : the unit inside never revealed, even with my guys 10m away, area fire from a whole platoon + a couple HMG was totally useless, buildings aren't destructible, and it seems you can't enter occupied buildings ! Eventually most of the platoon was killed due to these design flaws much more than my tactics.
OTOH, artillery rulez, and the 105 and 150mm barrages resulted in unrealistic losses, dead units covered the battlefield where the shells landed.
I don't understand why or when orders are cancelled. You order a squad to move 100m, sometimes they stop anywhere on the path, sometime the order is kept. It certainly has to do with the platoon orders system.
These platoon orders, plus the weird behavior of units in buildings, who can't move, are a pita : no way to move a squad when the HQ is in a building or truck, even normally you can't order a single squad to move if the HQ doesn't ! Pretty bad design - I know it has been so since PCWS, it's still bad.
No ceasefire/end battle command : this resulted in a fight which dragged on for 10s of turns, as I had not enough men and support remaining to attack in force, and the defender still held even though they suffered horrendous losses.
Eventually at turn 60 the game just crashed...
Overall I enjoyed let's say the first half of the game, but in the end I really regreted CMBB...
Graphically PCO is better (still the ground is blurry, and there's not enough trees in woods...), but gameplaywise it's still inferior...

[junk2drive]

Alt + Q surrenders the game but a cease fire button would be nice.

HQ order Engage> plus something while in a building will allow giving Engage>Move orders to sub units.

[Mobius]

Wow, at 60 turns many guys should be out of ammo.

[Erik Rutins]

Hi PDiFolco,

ORIGINAL: PDiFolco
First thing was my heavy weapons were 37mm ATG and 75mm IG : I tried to tow them to no avail , the game doesn't feature gun towing...They were then pretty useless.

Yes, as discussed in the other thread unfortunately this does limit them on offense. They are assistance for the jump-off line, but not very useful beyond that. In the campaign you will be on defense a lot though too and there they will be much more useful.

As I shifted my trucks to HMG teams transport, I realized the pathfinding wasn't very good, the trucks kept wanting to avoid road and enter woods whatever the path setting.

A lot depends on where you are sending them. Pathfinding is much better than it was in Kharkov, but I would value looking at a save to see where you were plotting them and how they were pathing to see if we can improve it further.

They also stopped as soon as they were fired upon, which resulted in more harm than if they kept rolling, the sensible thing to do.

Were they stunned? Did they fail morale? What was their SOP? Normally one of those things would need to happen for them to stop.

Units also never withdraw to cover, they just go back a bit in the open !

I've certainly seen units withdraw into cover, but the primary goal of the automatic withdrawal due to SOP or routing is to avoid the enemy, so that takes priority over cover if the cover is in the wrong direction.

The game developed, and endless hordes of russkies appeared and never seem to give up and rout :the morale model seems a bit off for 41. At the end I think I had killed 3 companies or more, they kept fighting.

Ok, I'll give the 1st Infantry campaign a try and see if I have the same experience. Soviet morale was worse at the operational/strategic level than at the tactical level where they were often quite tenacious. With that said, their morale is worse than the German morale, but even their Green squads will try to up a fight.

I then stumbled on the untakable building : the unit inside never revealed, even with my guys 10m away, area fire from a whole platoon + a couple HMG was totally useless, buildings aren't destructible, and it seems you can't enter occupied buildings ! Eventually most of the platoon was killed due to these design flaws much more than my tactics.

I would definitely like to see a save file for this. The unit should have been revealed. Area fire is not very effective against buildings. Had the unit inside revealed you should have been able to target it and you would have seen very quick results.

OTOH, artillery rulez, and the 105 and 150mm barrages resulted in unrealistic losses, dead units covered the battlefield where the shells landed.

In what way were these unrealistic? Infantry in the open under a sustained artillery barrage would take losses and the artillery was designed based on historical performance. Artillery was a major cause of casualties in WWII.

I don't understand why or when orders are cancelled. You order a squad to move 100m, sometimes they stop anywhere on the path, sometime the order is kept. It certainly has to do with the platoon orders system.

I haven't seen that. Could you post a save file that shows that for you? I'm certain there must be a cause you are missing as to why they stopped. Morale and SOP are the two most likely that come to mind. In my experience, orders are always kept as long as the unit does not fail morale, react due to SOP or is stunned (for vehicles).

These platoon orders, plus the weird behavior of units in buildings, who can't move, are a pita : no way to move a squad when the HQ is in a building or truck, even normally you can't order a single squad to move if the HQ doesn't ! Pretty bad design - I know it has been so since PCWS, it's still bad.

If you assign the HQ Engage orders while it is mounted, the squads that are not mounted can certainly move. I'm not sure why that would work for me and not for you? If you want an order other than Engage or Defend, you do need to dismount the HQ, but you can remount it on the vehicle or have it enter the building as soon as you've issued those orders. I agree that we can do more to polish the orders system. Work was done on it for Ostfront and IMHO it works pretty well, but until you get the hang of it it can be frustrating and that's something we aim to correct in the next major release.

No ceasefire/end battle command : this resulted in a fight which dragged on for 10s of turns, as I had not enough men and support remaining to attack in force, and the defender still held even though they suffered horrendous losses.

Agreed on the need for that. The victory condition changes contributed to this and we obviously didn't encounter the same kind of battle that you just experienced or we would have tweaked it to account for that. Adding a ceasefire/end battle is something that should be easy to do.

Eventually at turn 60 the game just crashed...
Overall I enjoyed let's say the first half of the game, but in the end I really regreted CMBB...

Well, I hear you and I think some of this really has to do with the Infantry Division campaign, but some of the rest simply sounds different from my experience and we'd like to help find out what happened and what changes or fixes we need to make to improve your play experience.

Regards,

- Erik

[junk2drive]

Do you have SOP turned on in the options screen? Did you accidentally change Pathing to Cover? Default is Direct.

[PDiFolco]

Thanks for all the explanations.
Indeed I didn't think about using Engage to allow independent squad movement- not quite obvious for my defense...I also admit I'm too biased to CM system, and am always surprised when an order given to a HQ also reset the other squads route ! There should be a way of giving "unit level orders" to an HQ.

About artillery results, well, I was bombarding mostly infantry in woods, not in open terrain.
About game ending, there is maybe a loophole for triggering end in "stalemate" situations, the victory gauges in my game never got above 25% on each side, so that may be why the game never ended.
For the rest, here's a link to my savegames (all are in the zips). The hidden guy is in a building by the right of the german front, you'll see a number of corpses close [X(]
!
link : PZCO save
Yet Erik I don't think this thread should have been move to Tech support, I reported a crash but the post was about gameplay issues.

[Mobius]

ORIGINAL: PDiFolco
About artillery results, well, I was bombarding mostly infantry in woods, not in open terrain.

You know when artillery hits trees the shells can explode above the troops showering them with both shrapnel and splinters.

[junk2drive]

You can't play this game with a CM mindset. Take that with a friendly voice speaking. It was hard for me in the beginning too.

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: PDiFolco
am always surprised when an order given to a HQ also reset the other squads route ! There should be a way of giving "unit level orders" to an HQ.

There is, if you are not changing the base order. In other words, if the platoon is already on Engage and you tell the HQ to Engage -> Move or Engage -> Target it will not affect the other squads, unless you use the Shift key to make it a group order. With that said, I agree that this could be more intuitive and in general the way that orders have to be issued when the HQ is mounted and the rest of the platoon is not is definitely something we woudl like to improve. It's quite manageable once you get used to it, but it's a bit clunky and not intuitive.

About artillery results, well, I was bombarding mostly infantry in woods, not in open terrain.

Aha, there's actually a bonus to HE artillery firepower if they are targeting infantry in woods, due to the tree burst effects. Woods are not good shelter against artillery.

About game ending, there is maybe a loophole for triggering end in "stalemate" situations, the victory gauges in my game never got above 25% on each side, so that may be why the game never ended.

Agreed, we'll aim to implement something for that in the first or second update.

For the rest, here's a link to my savegames (all are in the zips). The hidden guy is in a building by the right of the german front, you'll see a number of corpses close [X(]
!
link : PZCO save

Thanks, could you also upload the scenarios that were generated for your campaign? You should find them in the Data\Scenarios folder with names that look like R384327948732.xml If you can zip those up and upload them, we'll be able to explore this in more detail.

Yet Erik I don't think this thread should have been move to Tech support, I reported a crash but the post was about gameplay issues.

There was more than just the crash. The reports about movement suddenly ending, the stalemate situation, the pathfinding question, etc. made up my mind. I wanted to move it in here and bring it to the team's attention so we could investigate each of these potential issues. Some or most may turn out not to be bugs, but I felt moving it here would also show you that we are taking your report seriously.

Regards,

- Erik

[PDiFolco]

Fair enough Erik
But imho I didn't notice bugs, but rather some design or interface issues (at least for me!). I can definitely improve my gamesmanship/game mastery for sure...yet the order interface is pretty counterintuitive and confusing.
Here are the scenarios generated : http://pascal.difolco.free.fr/Scenarios.rar

[Mad Russian]

You better get ready....you owe me turns...[:D]

AND after the way you BEAT ME LIKE A DRUM in PCK I want my pound of flesh back...[:-]

Good to see you active here. I can't wait to play against you in PCO so you can see what you started. [8D]

Good Hunting.

MR

[Erik Rutins]

Thanks! We will investigate everything you reported ASAP and hopefully a better gameplay experience will result. I'm sorry the 1st Infantry campaign was a disappointment so far. I hope the tips we've given you will help, but we're also going to take a serious look at some of the issues and make improvements.

Regards,

- Erik