Storm in the East - Round 4

[Panzer Lehr]

I understand, I appreciate your candor and - like I said I dont want to come across as bagging anyone here or BFC - I feel I am allowed however, to voice my unhappyness about something in a constructive manner and not feel like I am being attacked for it.

You are indeed allowed and I sincerely hope you do not feel like you are being attacked by me.  Because that is not my intent at all.  

I think Panzer Lehr has hit on something interesting I have been thinking is the root of a lot of people's problems with spotting. More later.

This ant personal on you Cat

Good, cool.

But I find it interesting how you seem to defend ( or ignore )the spotting issues ( having considered all your comments on other posts ) when Steve and the BF staff have never in full clarity actually explained how it works and having read hundreds of accounts of spotting issues on the BF forums nothing has been done or addressed.

I defend what I think is the game working correctly.  More accurately - at least to my intention - I try to explain and communicate to people how the game is supposed to work.  There is a good chance I suck at doing that

I found this strange behavior from BF not looking into this in general.
Its all about new releases and not addressing there current games.
CMBS seemed to get more focus.

Well, outliers and other issues that you and other have found are constantly getting fixed.  However, more expectation setting here, any one developer or tester can only work on one thing at a time.  What that means is the reality is they can only work towards one game getting a patch at any one time.  Yes, it is likely the case that fixes are being done on more then one thing in the same month but for a patch or release.  However, there is, like in all dev shops, one thing that is about to go out the door and a couple of things that are next.  But from the outside it looks like only one thing is happening.  BFC has a long history of releasing a product and then monitoring things to create a patch and then they release that patch - or perhaps a couple of patches (that happened with both CMBS and CMRT).  Then they focus on another project.  CMRT is the penultimate release so it is near the back of the line to get a patch release.  That is just the reality.  It will get a patch but they have fixes they know they want to go into CMBN and CMFI first plus what evernew content they have in the works.

As to absurd spotting

Long list of issues that may or may not be bugs or working as intended that I could not possibly address all by my self. :) I know mean right.

So, stuff comes up on BFC's forum often and sometimes people are not very nice about it - yeah I meant it that way it sounded, the issue finders can be over the top nuts just like the defenders can get carried away.

They fall into four buckets

1. actual bugs
   
2. user mistakes
   
3. stuff that we are going to have to live with
   
4. stuff that is working correctly the some people just cannot accept
   

Thankfully #1 is pretty small and #2 get sorted out pretty quickly although often #3 sucks but what are you going to do quit playing?  (if you they bug you that much, I guess you have to).

#4 is the big nasty one and I think the heart of these massive arguments - more below.

You have found some bugs - if support acknowledged them they are on a list some where to get sorted at some point. No doubt you have made some mistakes (lord knows I have <alt>K and <alt>T being my favourite two) but you probably figured them out before posting about them.  #3 I can see that you have hit some of those from your list.  The big one here is things going pear shaped when units are close together.  My other pet peeve is the problem of area firing at buildings.  #4 is the big nasty poka dotted elephant in the room.

Submitting bug reports all ive been told is it is likely a bug and will be addressed in the new patch

Which is excellent - we all thank you.  I meant it, I do.  And one day we will all see them fixed.  

Remember when LOS was not so complicated 

OK this is a great introduction to what IMHO is the root of when people say "X should have spotted Y" and declare the game broken.  Yes, LOS on a hex board is a yes no question.  Can unit X see unit Y.  We all played those games with perfect spotting where LOS = is it spotted = LOF. 

So the vast majority of us have played those games where there was no real FOW (yes I know fake counters, etc.  but come on you have to admit it was not really FOW).  And the only question was can unit X see where unit Y is.  I am not aware of any game that added "but does X actually notice Y".  And that is the big difference here.  BFC is trying to model the chaos of the battle field.  They are trying to model that soldiers get are not perfect people, that they are looking one way when something important is happening in the other direction, that they get tunnel vision due to stress, that they duck when you wish they would not.  They are trying to model the morale factors that cause people to perform less well and how that interacts with their training level.

So in the hex game above LOS = is it spotted = LOF.  In CM LOS <> is it spotted <> LOF.  LOS is just the first step.  The game figures out what places a unit can actually see then they get some kind of chance to spot the enemy that is in the location they can see.  With all the soft factors that model the imperfect human, the concealment of where the enemy is, etc. etc.  All of which I have read Steve say on the BFC boards.  I may try to find some of his posts but honestly this has taken a while to craft and I need to get to work so who knows when I'll get a chance.

All of which means, that if you expect that everyone of your units that can see an enemy will notice the enemy you will be very sad and frustrated.  Again not trying to be mean or cruel I am just trying to get this idea across. Some of us have totally out of whack expectations of what soldiers can process on a battle field.

So, having said all that I do realize (and so does BFC BTW) that not everything is perfect and there can be bugs.  Those - how the hell does X not see Y when Y is big and sitting in the open are hard to take.  The thing is sometimes people in real life miss important things they "should" see and BFC is trying to model that.

Our choice is to roll with it or go back to a simpler time :)

I decided to roll with it 15 years ago ... my boardgames are relics now