If you want to engage in a discussion about what happened on some other forum several years ago, then sorry, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not even clicking on those links.
Fair enough.
Fleischer said:
what I meant with "Battlefrontish" was what happens when you spend a great deal of time documenting or reproducing a bug, and the response you get is the fanbois jumping in trying to explain it away with anything they can think of. From what I remember, Arjuna did fix that particular lockup, but it was far from the only one. In fact, I did try the game again not long ago, and the first thing that happened was a formation lockup in the Höfen scenario.
Well, in my opinion the problem was that the AI routines handling the maneuvering and behavior of logistics echelon normally attached at the Regiment / Division level and portrayed in the game weren't certainly very robust when it came to handle situations where they could be inside the fire envelope of enemy units weapons. In that case, what happened is the whole of the regiment was waiting for the logistics echelon to deploy, but the logistics echelon had chosen as a location for deployment, one which was being ruled out by the code assessing self-preservation. There was a dead lock, which in reality would be solved by appealing to common sense and staying in place. Dave had to code that "common sense" which was missing.
What the "fanbois" were trying to explain to you was that one could "help" the AI to navigate around that by being "more specific in your orders". That is, rather than just giving an attack order to the Regiment like that, you could be more precise and detach the Regiment logistics base, deploying it in a safe location out of sight. Which is indeed some micro-management, but one which I - personally - find not to be a deal breaker.
On the other hand, I agree with the need to add in the engine facilities to report similar situations to the player, so he can take action accordingly. Or in other words, to make more visible (but not too much, to avoid overwhelming him) the planning procedures going under the hood.
Fleischer said:
If Dave spent most of 2012 overhauling the game, then I wonder how they could market it as a "Ferrari" that was "virtually bug-free"(paraphrasing). That was the gist of the words used to explain the extraordinary high price. And if I recall correctly, Dave has had this as a part-time project besides his 'regular' job, since COTA, hasn't he?
As he has stated publicly elsewhere, Command Ops has been his sole occupation since early 2012. And to be honest, yet with all due respect, to buy statements such "virtually bug-free" at face value is a bit naive. You can have software which is bug free on the set of test cases you're using to leverage its stability and soundness. That doesn't rule out that there's a number of situations which nobody has come across or tested in a thorough way.
Fleischer said:
I find that equally tedious, if not more tedious. At least you don't need to babysit units as much in BftB as you need in CMx2. IMO, I think the main error made with the Command Ops series was that they made it bigger instead of focusing on making the details, which are the game's strongest side, right. With several divisions on the map at the same time, most people simply won't have the time to explore and take into account all the details which are modeled in the game.
What you call an "error" for others is the way to go, indeed. Bil Hardenberger has been working for some time on a set of scenarios done on the Command Ops engine, covering battles at the - tactical level - for the 1940 France campaign. One can make scenarios at the tactical level, he just needs to do the research and work with the available tools. Something which I find surprising is that people miss the point that taking the engine to the limit is an incentive for further development, as that highlights problems and shortcomings in the engine. So if those scenarios you feel too big for your taste, they're there because there was people with the stamina, time and interest to develop them. If there's an scarcity of smaller scenarios, that's because there's less people interested in doing the work for those.
Regarding your assessment about "most people" not having the time to go into depth and try to understand what's going on. Well, at least you have the choice to do so if you want to, which is quite different of what I reckon is the norm at computer-based war gaming at the operational or the tactical level. Most systems are very opaque, or rely on - also opaque, although for different reasons - CRT or To-Hit tables.
Fleischer said:
And you really don't have to either, because it usually boils down to artillery and who has the greatest sum of 'combat power' counters.
That statement gives me a hint of the reasons for your frustrations with Command Ops, and I find it to be wildly inaccurate. In this engine you'll find an actually realistic portrayal of what's called force-to-space ratio. You can't have three divisions massed to attack along a 10 kilometers front without the whole thing becoming quickly chaos. Artillery is fricking lethal, you know, because it is. If you bunch up your forces trying to push too much across too little space you'll be ending with heaps of corpses and units which have lost their cohesion and ability to function as an organized military force as command and control collapses.
Indeed, at the operational level, artillery and concentration of force are important. But these are mediated by force-to-space ratios.
Fleischer said:
All the details are drowned/irrelevant in the simulation of 'the bigger picture'.
Seeing that you're so fond of ARMA, I sort of understand some of your insatisfaction. For me ARMA campaigns - for all the realism depicting the world and physics - devolve into a ridiculous war movie as soon as one realizes that the role and contribution of single - no matter how skilled - individuals might well be just a small footnote in a quite complex affair, involving divisions, whole carrier battlegroups and significant numbers of aviation squadrons, all of them acting in concert to bring down a conventional opposing military force. And the - huge amount of - "realistic" scenarios/missions done for ARMA strike me as incredibly tedious. I can't find any fun to spend half an hour sitting on my hands in a lush 3d environment waiting for something to happen and then see how my avatar gets its virtual throat slashed by a fragment of a virtual mortar shell going off some meters away. I can't find any interesting to play a game where I'm driving a Humvee for quite a while - and hey, it's not easy to drive those things without getting them into a ditch - to just drive over an IED and have my avatar legs blown off because some retarded-level AI NPC hadn't been able to do its job.
Yeah, that's war indeed. But boy, how fun is that?
The point is that the bigger picture is a direct consequence of all the details. What Command Ops achieves in a startlingly way, for a very broad number of situations, is to portray those situations with a high degree of plausibility. If one wants to dig into the details, he's allowed to do so. If one wants to focus on the 'bigger picture', he can do that. But if one wants to 'snatch the body' of one of the thousands of simulated soldiers, to smell the cordite and see his mates blown up in a variety of gory ways, well, he isn't allowed to do that.