Demuder
Posts: 9
Joined: 3/21/2014
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After researching the game for a couple of weeks, I decided it was worth the 76 euro and bought it last Friday. As an added bonus, the 1.03 patch came out the same day. By the way, you should ask Matrix's marketing team to advertise a little more aggressively, me and a couple of friends have been looking for a worthy replacement of the original Harpoon since... well, Harpoon, and I only stumbled on CMANO by accident a couple of weeks ago. And if it weren't for Baloogan's dedication, I probably would have passed it by as another Harpoon wannabe.
So, I decided to dedicate the better part of my Sunday to playing with my new toy. What follows is some remarks and suggestions I took note of while playing. I am guessing this is part AAR and part bug report / feature request / overall review, so if this is the wrong place, please feel free (the forum mod that is) to move it wherever you might think is appropriate.
Of course, I chose the biggest baddass scenario I could find, which was Operation Lightning Strike. The 692 active unit count did put a strain on my old QuadCore, but nothing I couldn't live with. I had to turn "high fidelity in 1:1" off, otherwise 1 sec expanded to 6-7 sec in real time. By the way, I could find no reference in the manual about what that "high fidelity" does other than it impacts performance. I ran the scenario twice with moderate success, the first time trying to do a surgical strike with minimal aggression towards Pakistan using the Baghram air assets and the second time where I mobilized almost everything, with multiple task forces and staging areas and stomped my way all the way to the captured nukes. My hat off to the scenario author for allowing the player more than one way to skin the proverbial cat.
I was impressed by how well everything worked. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of room of improvement, but considering the amount of stuff that works right, the game is truly impressive. Patrols work, refueling works, target interception and engagement works just as well on auto as manual, I was not once unpleasantly surprised by a unit going crazy.
The interface is also impressive, maybe it's not the best it could be, but for the sheer amount of features it encompasses it is quite brilliant. I was able to do everything I wanted intuitively and had to check the manual and google only a couple of times.
Overall, a huge thank you to the developers for making a game of this scope. It will be with me for a long time.
All that being said, here's a list of things I noticed that could do with some work.
a) There should be TTG and DTG on every unit in the F2 (throttle/altitude) dialog. I noticed that in units that are on ferry mission, returning to base and on cruise missiles under way there is no such info. Moreover, and maybe more importantly, every unit should have an effective range estimate in that dialog. That is for how long in can stay aloft (since this is mainly important for aircraft) given its current fuel consumption. I know the loadout indicates strike range, but not every mission is staged from base and there is no such data on effective range on AAW loadouts. 200minutes on 200nm CAP is useful only for patrol missions, I can't tell if those fighters can escort my strike craft. Adding effective range to all database entries for every loadout would simply be ridiculously time consuming, so I think the best way is just let the player know for how long the aircraft can stay aloft based on current fuel consumption. That's also in the databse but it's to hard to collect all the right bits of info and damn right impossible when the aircraft has already spent some fuel on it's way to the staging area. Time to bingo fuel would be nice as well.
b) I'd like to be able to group different units or units with different loadouts. I sometimes wanted to move several different aircraft to a staging area and since they are all in different groups their speed and TTG was different.
c) RoE seems to work pretty well and it does add flexibility to how one can instruct their units to do what they want, but maybe having a "weapons hot/cold" toggle in the mission options would help even more. I could go into detail about it, but hey, just take my word, it would be handy to have it if possible :-)
d) I would like to see a log entry for when a unit completes refuel. I was impressed to see that an air group when given the order to refuel from a tanker would disengage only after all planes in the group refueled, but I had no way of knowing when that was other than checking up on them all the time.
e) It would be nice to be able to turn the map imaging off. I was using the relief layer exclusively and when panning and zooming I could see that the game first loaded the terrain imaging and then applied the relief data over it. I think being able to turn that imaging off (and maybe have just black terrain / sea as an homage to Harpoon classic) would help some with the map performance.
f)I know very little (if anything) about programming an AI, but I think that the patrol mission AI could use a tune up. The Pakistani ship would try to intercept and identify my Orions that were flying 50nm to 100nm away from it. On a second note, I had an interesting moment where an unidentified bogie entered my Baghram CAP, my F16s intercepted and identified it (the RoE was fire only on hostiles) and they escorted it outside of the CAP area. Problem is, they kept escorting it quite far out until I ordered them to disengage. Not a big problem for the player, but the AI side might have trouble with that.
g) I also noticed a bug that may have to do with the AI and bingo fuel on their aircraft. Or it could be specific to the scenario, I couldn't tell. The Pakistani ADZ North had about 14 aircraft drop out of the sky because they ran out of fuel. I found out by checking the losses and saw that Pakistani AD North had lost 17 JF-17s while I only had downed 2 or 3 of them. Investigation of the log file showed entries like this several times:
2/7/2014 1:08:32 μμ - Pakistan AD North-HQ: Thunder-Peshwar #8 (JF-17 Thunder) has run out of fuel and crashed!
I only noticed quite a bit after they dropped so I couldn't load a previous save in the editor and see what was going on. However, out of two playthroughs I only noticed it in the first where I was as little aggressive as possible (and as it turns out, there wasn't much to be aggressive to when I started my attack run). In the second, I killed enough JF-17s straight away so maybe the bug didn't have time to show up. I am attaching the log if it is of any help. I have the save games but I think they are too far apart from when the planes crash.
So that's it. Overall, I had a great gaming day. I had the game crash (become unresponsive for a long time that is) a couple of times when my strike forces unloaded a lot of weapons on a lot of different targets but with the autosave feature that didn't really bother me and admittedly the game had been running for hours before that.
My only real gripe is that there not a lot of such large scenarios like Operation Lightning Strike. I understand why, but I would like to see more of them :-)
Again, thanks for making this great game. It was something missing from the genre for a very long time now.
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A weekend deployment debrief - 
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