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All Forums >> [Current Games From Matrix.] >> [World War II] >> Steel Panthers World At War & Mega Campaigns >> 4.0: First comments

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4.0: First comments - 9/9/2000 8:20:00 PM

Fuerte

Posts: 314
Joined: 6/14/2000
From: Helsinki Finland
Status: offline

I decided to finally learn the Command & Control system. I saw the ID FLAGS ON option in preferences, but it didn't seem to affect anything. The new HELP button says that ? key switches ID flags on or off, but in my keyboard it just opens the same help screen. Also when trying all possible keyboard combinations, I found a strange feature: pressing Shift+` and then � (the key left of backspace) makes a tank fire three smoke rounds in the front of the tank, without losing any fire turns. Is this some kind of testing feature left from the debugging build?

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- 9/9/2000 8:47:00 PM

ollittm

Posts: 49
Joined: 9/3/2000
From: Espoo, FI, Finland
Status: offline

I just finished nice 4-hour session with ver 4.0

I noticed the Finnish scenarios (frozen hell, buying time) are screwed .. Finnish Jaegers appear as T-34s of all things! Install program said it was going to replace all of the old scenarios .. I quess it didn't. y/n opfire gives you sooo much control over what happens in the sandbox! I love it! "No no, Kurt, you mustn't spend your shots on those dinky soldiers 20 hexes away, wait until the nasty B-7M moves and blow it away!"

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-Olli

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Post #: 2

- 9/9/2000 9:05:00 PM

Red Baron

Posts: 423
Joined: 5/7/2000
From: Denmark
Status: offline

I have send the kids and my wife on a exstended weekend, bought me self 5 gallons of coke and ordered 10 Pizza�s.. Now i�m getting ready for the fight of my life!!! Thanks Matrix!! Your hell of a crew...;0) Regards..Red Baron.

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Post #: 3

- 9/9/2000 10:00:00 PM

Paul Vebber

Posts: 11430
Joined: 3/29/2000
From: Portsmouth RI
Status: offline

There looks to be a bug in the unit ID flags...ie they aren't appearing. We also noticed a bug in surrendering during online play - the player who surrenders can carry on against the AI... Keep sending these bug reports...we'll add them to the list:-) The strange key combo seems starnge the key I have next to the backspace is +/= - but what youare triggering is smoke dischargers, which normally is triggered by the D key. ITs only a bug if it happens for units that don't have a "smoke discharger 1" Do you have a country specific keyboard? The Finnish problem is due to the number of huge changes in the Finnish OOB - there may be a few others we well. We'll compile a list of old scenarios that got "confused" by the new OOBs. The looks to the OOB vice the scenario file for some values and this caused the wrong icons and other data to be "mixed together" because the OOB slots changed.

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Post #: 4

- 9/9/2000 10:50:00 PM

Fuerte

Posts: 314
Joined: 6/14/2000
From: Helsinki Finland
Status: offline

Yes I have a Finnish keyboard. The functionality really is the same as the D key, which is not documented properly, not in the help screen or in the manual keyboard shortcut list. It is documented in manual, though, I wonder how many players have found it!

Still isn't it strange that it does not use any fire turns? Perhaps not. Now that I have played the Tutorial (only the first turn!) with Command & Control enabled, I have found several things that should be improved as well: 1) Clicking the M8 Greyhound (which is a recon unit) does not display the movement radius, until I click some other unit first, and then the Greyhound again. 2) Setting objective keyboard shortcut is ; which requires the use of Shift key in a Finnish keyboard. This should be changed to O, for example, which is not used for anything (documented) in the play mode. 3) Cancelling the objective setting mode with Escape key without setting any objective still uses command points. This can be fatal, if you have first accidently selected some unit other than the command unit, and want to set the objective for the whole formation. 4) The default values for different delay settings are bad. The message delay is only 10 (milliseconds?). I changed that to 100. Live delay is 200, I changed that to 50. The movement delay is XXX, as fast as possible, and I found that this is OK. I wonder if this option was in 2.3 already. OK, there are some good things as well...

1) There seems to be a picture on every unit information window!

2) The scrolling messages to the right of the unit information area is a good feature, and F5 is suberb. I'll post more when I get to the second turn!

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Post #: 5

- 9/9/2000 11:27:00 PM

KGzim

Posts: 25
Joined: 9/3/2000
Status: offline

Sept 44 Battle. Germany delay vs Russian adavance. Left preferrence as default. Noticed after the battle that the Russian forces had better morale and experience levels than my Para units in some cases as much as 15 points. Any thoughts? Anyone experiencing sound problems ie: no vehicle sounds, no gun fire? KG Zim

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Post #: 6

- 9/9/2000 11:36:00 PM

Mjuice

Posts: 9
Joined: 5/20/2000
From: Finland
Status: offline

Fuerte, I don't know if the smoke discharger feature is documented in the lates manual, but it has been around since SP2 so most people propably know about it... Anyway using a discharger isn't supposed to cost either any fire turns or any smoke ammo

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Post #: 7

- 9/10/2000 12:22:00 AM

Paul Vebber

Posts: 11430
Joined: 3/29/2000
From: Portsmouth RI
Status: offline

The new national characteristics degrade the Germans as the war nears the end - a time when the allies are reaching their peak. The new distrihutions used means there is a wider and mre "humped assortment of experience and morale values - you are more likely to have troops "in the moiddle" but now you can get really good or realy bad troops "in the tails". I tried the tiem frame quickly and got movement and fire sounds - is there a specific unit, or just ingeneral?

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Post #: 8

- 9/10/2000 1:38:00 AM

Tombstone

Posts: 764
Joined: 6/1/2000
From: Los Angeles, California
Status: offline

Speaking of keyboard commands.... I know this isn't trivial, but if you guys could put together some kind of keyboard customization option that would be really nice.... Tomo

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Post #: 9

- 9/10/2000 2:08:00 AM

Fuerte

Posts: 314
Joined: 6/14/2000
From: Helsinki Finland
Status: offline

Now I played through the tutorial with Command & Control enabled. I didn't find any major problems, and I think that I understand C2 now quite well. C2 really changes the game quite a bit, for the better I think. It can be hard to grasp for a beginner, though, partly because of the problems I mentioned in the previous message. Still I found a few things: 1) The background noice is a bit annoying. It sounds like a bad speaker or amplifier hissing. 2) The fast artillery is on by default. This is bad... it seems that all the defaults are set up so that the game is as fast as possible, which is a good thing, but this setting hides the artillery effect completely. 3) The new opportunity fire option takes a moment to get used to. At times it can be hard to find out which unit is firing, but on the whole this feature seems to be good, and it adds one dimension to the game. 4) In the tutorial scenario, I ordered a tank to move through the city, where there are clear roads... still the tank crashed a building in the middle of the road, and got immobilized. An another tank got immobilized in the same way, when I ordered it to move to a hex which didn't cost any command points. It decided to go through a building... The keyboard customization option is a good idea, and not hard to implement. Is the smoke discharger in unlimited supply? The documentation seems to be incomplete.

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- 9/10/2000 2:15:00 AM

Paul Vebber

Posts: 11430
Joined: 3/29/2000
From: Portsmouth RI
Status: offline

Smoke dischargers are one shot. We'll take suggestions for new features, but this is teh last najor set of changes for a while. There will ba bug fix, and we may add a couple things, but keep the suggestions coming, just realize it will be some time before we revist SP:WAW again. We need to get on to SP:Modern War and maybe a "paying project" or two , or three :-)

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Post #: 11

- 9/10/2000 2:30:00 AM

Fuerte

Posts: 314
Joined: 6/14/2000
From: Helsinki Finland
Status: offline

Is the SP:Modern War going to be free as well? It would be somewhat logical to make the next SP game commercial, so that you would benefit from all this hard work. Or perhaps the deal with SSI prohibits this.

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Post #: 12

- 9/10/2000 2:58:00 AM

Wild Bill

Posts: 6821
Joined: 4/7/2000
From: Smyrna, Ga, 30080
Status: offline

Concerning scenarios, We upgraded all that we could in the time that we had. The OOBs were being worked on as Paul explained up until the very end and I was not aware of the changes that affect the Finnish scenarios. We will fix those and any others that we find with problems. That will be an ongoing project. Perhaps if there had been more time, we could have checked more. But there wasn't. We did the best we could with the time we had, so no apology here. I guess we could have held up the game a few more weeks or months, but I don't think that would have been a good idea, do you? Wild Bill ------------------ In Arduis Fidelis Wild Bill Wilder Coordinator, Scenario Design Matrix Games

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