no probs - Seasons Greetings

[Phoenix100]

I started to try again with the 'award winning' CMANO, to see if I could get it to work 2 patches later. I bought it first day it was out and have been disappointed in many ways. But most crucially, it will only start about 50% of the time. Loaded the patches, same prob. Their support now seems to have given up on me and suggests I get a refund off Matrix. That's cool, I guess. But if I forget the close-in blurred map graphics (they're really poor graphics at the coastline if you need to zoom in to read the writing on groups etc)and if I can only get it to start, then what we have is something like Harpoon, but with better functionality and the beginnings of a friendly AI that might grow into something good - so I would actually like to keep and play it. But thought I would just post here in case we are inclined to think that BFTB has issues. It doesn't!! Go check out the forum for CMANO, which costs around £80. Take a look at the tech section and just see how many pages of bugs and queries and issues it's already generated. Incredible. We have it lucky in here. No doubt about it. This game works, basically, with very few 'bugs'- issues that are now mainly about refining it. Merry Christmas and a great New Year to all at Panther. This is still - for me - the best game I've ever played on a computer. Hands down.

[navwarcol]

I have CMANO as well, and have never had any issues with it. It is a simulator that is attempting to push the envelope in many ways, and at those edges is where most of the "bugs" have been, and each one has been squashed near-instantly. The dev team are great guys with a solid history of performance as well.
Sorry to be an "ad" for a different game, but just wanted to set the record straight. CMANO and Command Ops both have gotten a great deal of play time for me as my real life day job had been some affected by budget issues in the USA until the past few days anyway. I love both of these games, but both are very different, and appeal to 2 different styles of play.
Edit: Phoenix, I hope you stick with it. I have seen how much of a help here you have been, and I am sure you could be on the other as well!

[Fred Sanford]

I agree that CMANO pushes the simulation envelope, but I'm kind of in the same boat as phoenix. I'll let it 'mature' a little longer and circle back around. In the meantime, I've been getting my naval game fix by playing Steam and Iron. They just released a Russo-Japanese War expansion (stand alone). It has much the same philosophy as Command Ops- you focus on being a fleet commander. I'd love it if there were a way to combine the two and have a naval-ground combined ops game with a functioning chain of command so it's not a micromanaging headache.

So I officially recommend Dave give the NWS guys a call about a collaborative effort. I smell blockbuster! [:D]

[dazkaz15]

ORIGINAL: Fred Sanford

I agree that CMANO pushes the simulation envelope, but I'm kind of in the same boat as phoenix. I'll let it 'mature' a little longer and circle back around. In the meantime, I've been getting my naval game fix by playing Steam and Iron. They just released a Russo-Japanese War expansion (stand alone). It has much the same philosophy as Command Ops- you focus on being a fleet commander. I'd love it if there were a way to combine the two and have a naval-ground combined ops game with a functioning chain of command so it's not a micromanaging headache.

So I officially recommend Dave give the NWS guys a call about a collaborative effort. I smell blockbuster! [:D]

Yeah and give Google a call about using Google earth for your map overlays while your at it [;)]

[Phoenix100]

So I officially recommend Dave give the NWS guys a call about a collaborative effort. I smell blockbuster

I think there are countless games that could be made good by Dave's collaboration. Dave seems to me to be the only dev actually thinking about developing a proper AI.

[Perturabo]

ORIGINAL: phoenix

So I officially recommend Dave give the NWS guys a call about a collaborative effort. I smell blockbuster

I think there are countless games that could be made good by Dave's collaboration. Dave seems to me to be the only dev actually thinking about developing a proper AI.

Or rather the only one that has abilities to do so.

[Phoenix100]

Yeah and give Google a call about using Google earth for your map overlays while your at it

If they used google earth I'd be happy, Daz. In fact, this is what a randomly selected part of the coastline of Norway looks like from about 6km up. And this is with all the 'bells and whistles' applied.






Luxurious detail, right?

[Phoenix100]

Looks great from 25km out. And this was the kind of view I saw most often when it was in development. But you can't see much when there are many crowded contacts from that height. So you have to zoom in and get the blur.



But I could put up with this, I think, if I could get it to start properly, because, as Navwarcol says, it has potential and it has some nice features. they are trying with the AI. It's not at the heart of their effort, I think - as it is with Dave - but they are trying (I think the database is probably at the heart of their effort). So I bought it.

[Phoenix100]

Phoenix, I hope you stick with it.

Well, I am sticking with it, at the moment, Navwarcol, and it influences me that you endorse it, to be honest, as I value your comments in here.

[Perturabo]

CMANO?


I bought Steam and Iron: RJW today. It plays a bit weird because ships from that period are very hard to kill weapons from that period with the only weapons capable of quickly sinking a battleship being torpedoes.
This game really begs for a crew number stat and a bodycount.

[Phoenix100]

Many thanks for the mention of SAI, Perturabo. I hadn't heard of it, looked it up, bought it, think it's great. Got me reading all about Jutland too.

Did you try the SES game Jutland (they previously made something called Distant Guns)? Was wondering what it's like. It has 3d graphics, which always suggests to me that they might have had to cut corners on silly things like the AI, just to get the graphics done.....but you never know. Anyone any experience of this game (Jutland) and how it compares to SAI?

[Perturabo]

ORIGINAL: phoenix

Many thanks for the mention of SAI, Perturabo. I hadn't heard of it, looked it up, bought it, think it's great. Got me reading all about Jutland too.

Did you try the SES game Jutland (they previously made something called Distant Guns)? Was wondering what it's like. It has 3d graphics, which always suggests to me that they might have had to cut corners on silly things like the AI, just to get the graphics done.....but you never know. Anyone any experience of this game (Jutland) and how it compares to SAI?

I don't know because STORMPOWERED!

[Fred Sanford]

ORIGINAL: phoenix

Many thanks for the mention of SAI, Perturabo. I hadn't heard of it, looked it up, bought it, think it's great. Got me reading all about Jutland too.

Did you try the SES game Jutland (they previously made something called Distant Guns)? Was wondering what it's like. It has 3d graphics, which always suggests to me that they might have had to cut corners on silly things like the AI, just to get the graphics done.....but you never know. Anyone any experience of this game (Jutland) and how it compares to SAI?

Very pretty ships. AI is horrible, and the sighting/gunnery IMO is much too easy, especially against small ships. I steamed the German BC's right into the Harwich force in the middle of the night. IRL, risking big ships against a large force of DD's at night would be a terrible decision. I sank the entire Harwich Force in about 15 minutes- as fast as I could switch targets. The last straw was when I was playing as the Germans, and encountered the entire Grand Fleet with a lone German DD in daylight. I came from behind, so the Brits had to reverse course to come at me. The resultant collisions between the uncoordinated British divisions sank about a dozen ships, and damaged who knows how many more. Did I mention the AI is horrible?

[Phoenix100]

Ah. Thanks Fred. I'll concentrate on trying to master SAI, then. Do you play that, and have you found the AI better there?

[Fred Sanford]

ORIGINAL: phoenix

Ah. Thanks Fred. I'll concentrate on trying to master SAI, then. Do you play that, and have you found the AI better there?

yes to both. see post 2. I post over there as well.

[Phoenix100]

I see that now, Fred. Thanks. I'm enjoying SAI a lot so far. It is very like command ops, I think (you're right), though much simpler in many ways (at least, it feels like that). You can either play quick or really slow (real time) and peruse a wealth of info as you go. Like CO it's turned me to the history.

[wodin]

SAI is a great little game. I agree would love to see a body count aswell..mentioned around release but it was a no go.

Flashpoint Campaigns Red Storm for me has been the best wargame released in years. The only thing on the horizon that can beat it would be the CO East front game;)

[Fred Sanford]

ORIGINAL: wodin

SAI is a great little game. I agree would love to see a body count aswell..mentioned around release but it was a no go.

Flashpoint Campaigns Red Storm for me has been the best wargame released in years. The only thing on the horizon that can beat it would be the CO East front game;)

One neat thing SAI does is allow for you to gain a few VP's by rescuing survivors from sunken ships. If you sail by them without rescuing, after the scenario ends you'll sometimes see a "protest" message along the lines of "the International Red Cross is disturbed to learn that survivors were callously left behind"- or something like that. There's no game penalty for it.

Also, there is a crew quality stat that affects gunnery, damage control, etc. Ranges from -2 to +2. In the campaign games, you can send your ships out to training to try an improve their quality.

[chemkid]

.

[BletchleyGeek]

ORIGINAL: phoenix

I started to try again with the 'award winning' CMANO, to see if I could get it to work 2 patches later. I bought it first day it was out and have been disappointed in many ways. But most crucially, it will only start about 50% of the time. Loaded the patches, same prob. Their support now seems to have given up on me and suggests I get a refund off Matrix. That's cool, I guess. But if I forget the close-in blurred map graphics (they're really poor graphics at the coastline if you need to zoom in to read the writing on groups etc)and if I can only get it to start, then what we have is something like Harpoon, but with better functionality and the beginnings of a friendly AI that might grow into something good - so I would actually like to keep and play it. But thought I would just post here in case we are inclined to think that BFTB has issues. It doesn't!! Go check out the forum for CMANO, which costs around £80. Take a look at the tech section and just see how many pages of bugs and queries and issues it's already generated. Incredible. We have it lucky in here. No doubt about it. This game works, basically, with very few 'bugs'- issues that are now mainly about refining it. Merry Christmas and a great New Year to all at Panther. This is still - for me - the best game I've ever played on a computer. Hands down.

ORIGINAL: navwarcol
I have CMANO as well, and have never had any issues with it. It is a simulator that is attempting to push the envelope in many ways, and at those edges is where most of the "bugs" have been, and each one has been squashed near-instantly. The dev team are great guys with a solid history of performance as well.
Sorry to be an "ad" for a different game, but just wanted to set the record straight. CMANO and Command Ops both have gotten a great deal of play time for me as my real life day job had been some affected by budget issues in the USA until the past few days anyway. I love both of these games, but both are very different, and appeal to 2 different styles of play.
Edit: Phoenix, I hope you stick with it. I have seen how much of a help here you have been, and I am sure you could be on the other as well!

Thanks for the kind words, Peter, but I must say that I think you're being a bit too harsh with CMANO. Those technical problems you're seeing are mostly related to the version of the .NET framework they use (4.5 if I recall correctly). I had some trouble with CMANO on Windows 7, as quite a few very important applications (like Visual Studio) depended on .NET components which cannot be overwritten (here there is Microsoft to blame, as they don't provide a way to have several .NET runtimes installed, as they do for the C++ runtime). I find that relying so heavily on .NET is a risk - given the little qualms Microsoft has when it comes to discontinue product lines - but that was CMANO dev team call.

Regarding the graphics, what you're seeing is quite reasonable since CMANO is using (I think) the SRTM GIS database to represent the complete surface of the Earth. That's the biggest and most detailed 'map' ever used in a computer wargame to this date. That database, at the default resolution, would probably require something like 500 Gigabytes of storage. Therefore they had to 'decimate' it, in order to have a reasonable install size (and CMANO is quite huge already). The obvious drawback is that, as soon as you zoom really close in, you'll get a very blurred image of the terrain (think of scaling a screenshot of an old DOS game like Secret of Monkey Island into a Full HD display). The only way to really solve that - and requiring you to have half a terabyte of free hard-disk space and 32 GB of RAM for smooth scrolling isn't a solution - would be to go and use a fully vector-based representation of terrain (as Command Ops does). The problem with that is vector GIS databases - like those based on VMAP2 - are either very limited in scope, are considered to be military sensitive assets (and hence not available to civilians) or cost a fortune. Command Ops requires to plot the maps for a good reason - although using raster data to 'quickstart' the maps is an option and something that Dave keeps reminding me about.

I second navwarcol when encouraging you to keep faith in CMANO. Where I disagree with navwarcol is that CMANO is qualitatively different to what CommandOps is at the moment. At release, it was a purely attritional war game / simulator. Over time, they have been adding 'soft' factors which are important (like crew proficiency), and I think they will be following that path, modeling command delays, fatigue, etc. Note that behind Command Ops there are almost 15 years of development, and twice that much of game design experience.

CMANO friendly AI is quite good and has a remarkable ability to simulate different levels of command (via the Mission Editor). CMANO missions are very similar to CommandOps Player tasks in principle, but at this stage they require much more input from the player in order to achieve something. I find personally somewhat more difficult to setup effectively missions in CMANO than in CommandOps, but it's also true that I know much better the latter [:)]

Let's say that CMANO is very much like CommandOps, where the player can define units to be, on the fly, as small as one sub and as big as a complete Backfire regiment, minus the higher-level friendly AI functionality and the - not perfect but quite impressing - friendly and enemy AI situational awareness and ability to formulate complex plans. Note that in CommandOps you can exert a degree of control over units similar as you do in CMANO, but this control is only strictly necessary in certain limited circumstances (like when performing reconnaissance, securing supply lines, etc.). I'm confident that given enough time and support, CMANO devs will be getting it to very interesting places.