Combat Mission: Shock Force 2 - at Steam
 

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4GoC7Glvq...18-12-07-1.jpg


Just wanted to let you all know that one of the probbaly best tactcial ground combat simulations soon will be released on Steam, in two weeks from now on.

The game is a rewiork of the first title, broght to their latest engine.

All three modules for it will be available, too.

Battlefront is often criticised for their PR, I read. Their business model is their biggest handicap, they really did what they can to find themselves not more customers than was inevitable. I could not order from them at all, since it seems they only accept payment by credit card, and I have given up on that, and preloaded cards are not available over here anymore. No paypal. (For the same reason I do not have the latest version of Steal Beasts anymore: they too only accept credit card).

For all who had this or other reasons why they did not want to buy from Battlefront directly, Steam is the elegant solution. Price is not announced yet. Unfortunately I cannot benefit from the massive price drop for oweners of the first version this way. But okay, I can afford it, and the game is really solid.


I played the first one extensively, best tactical ground combat sim I ever played. Not flawless, but good enough.

Unfortunately, Combat Mission: Black Sea is not listed at Steam. I would be interested in that one, too.


https://www.battlefront.com/shock-fo.../?tab=features


https://www.slitherine.com/news/comb...on-august-25th

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1...Shock_Force_2/

yes, great game, I have both 1 and 2. CMSF2 has basically the same content as 1, but brings all the engine improvements done over the years, many graphical improvements and most of the new toys from "Black Sea" like drones, so it actually feels like a new game. It is the best simulation of modern tactical combat out there IMHO.

The scenarios and campaigns have also been upgraded to take advantage of the improvements.

Note that if you own 1, you can get a huge discount on 2 by buying directly from the Battlefront website.

Only CMSF2 is coming to Steam, but I would expect all the other titles to eventually be available.

Yes, but with all three modules (British troops, Marines troops, Dutch/German/Canadian troops). Each comes with not only new units and wepaons, but its own campoaigns and single missions. Plenty of fodder.

Has the interface changed? One review also complaine dabout the AI having single entities in panci mode running headlessly inc ircles until getting put down, and some other AI issues, but that was after release 20 months ago.

I wonder which mind had the great idea to imagine the Germans would ever engage in strength in a ground war in Syria. Will not happen, never. LOL

The main game 2 costs 60 dollars and each module 35 dollars. Idf you order at BF and can convince them that your account is still valid and you have serial numbers from game 1, you can get game and all modules for I think 65 dollars (instead of 165 dollars).


The Steam release is on August 25th, btw.

Interface is the same. As far as I can see, pretty much all AI issues have been fixed. There was a bug regarding how infantry behaved under artillery fire, but that was fixed in the last patch.

The NATO forces involved, i.e. U.S.Army, USMC, Germans, Canadians and Dutch was based on who was active in Iraq and Afghanistan when the game was designed, i.e. 2005-2007 ish, since it was easy to get info on how the comabt groups were deployed in actual combat operations.

For example, the Canadian Battle Group in CMSF, basically a reinforced infantry battalion, was a carbon copy of the BG deployed to Afghanistan. They also used the Princess Patricia BG because that was the one due to rotate to Afghanistan in mid-2008 and the one most likely to have been involved in the fictional invasion of Syria.

re: the Germans. Part of the reason they were chosen is because everyone loves to play with German forces. It's a holdover from WW2 games. They also have some cool equipment! :ping:

I was a beta tester on both CMSF1 and CMSF2 so have a lot of hours in that game.

That argument for the Germans is understandable, but still: Germans in a major war operation with tnaks and such in the ME: totally unrealistic. Zeitgeist and history would never allow that. They went to extensive intellectual distortions to not call the Afghanistan mission a war at all.

Anyway, I think I will go for it at Steam, I am in the mood for having another go with it all.

I would also like to see Combat Mission: Black Sea at Steam. Everbody loves to play as the Germans, you say. Well, everybody also loves to fight the Russians. And I would expect them to be more capable a force than the Syrians. Plus Ukraine geographic ambience (Eastern European wood- and famr lands i nstead of arid desert places).

For those not knowing the games, don't be alarmed: both games were designed BEFORE the real world wars in Syria and the Ukraine broke out. They did not intend to profit from the real world events.


I hope the Germans handle better than in the firts game, I vaguel reclal that I found severla bugs in them, related tio how to make them going for Panzerfaust reloads stored in their PCs, and such things. It made playing them am excercise in painful micromanagement, and bug-related failure at times, the Panzerfausts did not work as is to be expected. I found it very difficult to play as the Germans, their force strucxture did not match with my ideas.

Hi, the bug with the panzerfausts had already been fixed with one of the last patch for SF1.

Black Sea and Shock Force are different of course, the Russians are generally better trained and have better equipment than the Syrians. Syrians were generally equipped with older equipment and the Russians did not export their latest technology. Intrestingly, it was easier to get info on what the Syrians had and their capabilities based on the fact that most of the equipement had been acquired many years before and a lot of the same type of weapons had been used against Israeli and NATO forces. It is harder to get a handle on what the Russians can do since they keep their best stuff under lock and key.

There were more issues with the Panzerfaust back in those years. The reload-from-PC bug was cured, I now recall, you are right, but it remained impossible to get the troops firing them from off a roof, even if it were just second floor roof. There was one (night, I think) mission where I depended heavily of getting my Panzerfaust shooters into good positions and elöevated places, and when they reached them in one piece I always learned that they refused to fire from there (roofs, windows), I had to order them back on the ground, leave the house, since shooting from windows also did not work I think, and then they got put down my small arms fire, of course.



Such things can ruin such a match, game, mission easily, and I often was frustrated or furious. I stopped playing with the Germans then. After all, playing with the Americans always was the easiest, and their equipment names simpyl is more familiar. The British did not help me that much, since I could not make sense of the many uncommon names and abbreviations for vehicles and weapons, I did not know what they were and what they can and cannot do.

The issue there, and there were a lot of heated dicussions about it in the forums, is that some of those weapons like the Panzerfausts or RPG or bazookas can kill or injure the shooters if fired from a small room due to the back blast. Javelin ATGMs do not have that issue since the missile is first expelled by a soft launch and then fires when clear of the building. At the time of SF1, BFC took a hard line approach and just prevented the AI from firing those weapons from inside a building.

Since then, new research was provided, especially on the use of Bazookas in WW2. Now the approach in CMSF2, and CM games generally, is that all those weapons can be fired from inside a building, but there is a chance the shooter can be wounded or suffer a morale hit (i.e be rattled or pinned for a few minutes).

p.s. - you can find a lot of videos of untrained fighters firing RPGs from inside small rooms and basically destroying everything in the room from the back blast.

Okay, I thought of that blast myself considering rooms, okay - but roofs? Not even on small, low buildings? Its the ideal shooting position for such weapons: targetting the vehicles vulnerable top, and maybe benefitting from limited uowards viewing of the target, and limited upwards engagement angles of the vehicle's weapons, namely huge gun barrels (the Russian tanks in Ossetia 2008 suffered from that problem: to not being able to engage targets in very close, nearby high block buildings that fired on them from the upper floors, both main gun and coaxial were affected by the elevation limit, they lost quite some tanks due to that, I recall).

It was my impression in that bscenario that it was the building itself, the low walls around flat roofs, that confused the AI. Even more so since I had US troops very well shooting from roofs. The AI did noit even shoot at far away distance, with the laucnh trajectory and view being almost horizontally, and not steep down. The sam eunit ma yhave fired with small arms fire at the same time the sam epsotiin wa snot used by Panzerfaust Shooters.

But anyhow, maybe I get carried away, its a 13 years old game, and playing it is years ago for me, so - forget it. I get the new version and see how it goes.

if you liked SF1, you will love SF2.

I only hope the letter size in the texts and menues is bigger, I get eye cancer from the microscopic symbols in the first part (at full HD on 24"). :) Smaller is not always better. Often it simply is too small, with reading glasses as well as normal glasses. Habe started to read the manual again for the first games, I needed some refreshing.

btw, forget to mention, but if you want to try out CMSF2 now, there is a FREE demo, link:


https://www.battlefront.com/shock-fo...game/?tab=demo

All Combat Mission games come with free demos so you can try first before deciding to buy.

Another plus is that there is also a Mac version and it is not a second class port like you often see, but a native Mac program. The lead developers are Apple nuts so they make sure the Mac version is first rate. I use both, a windows version on my PC and a Mac version on my Mac Book Pro.

Now I feel dumb. I knew there is a demo. Why haven't it come to my mind to try it out...?!

Will do now, thanks.

BTW, do you know a way to also free campaign missions from their time limits? Campaign missions, once baked, cannot be edited like single missions (in CMSF 1) , I tried to use the save game file and changign the index from .bts to .btt, but it did not work.
If there is one thing I totally dislike in any and every sort of game, than playing with time limits, no matter what. It has been like this since 30 years, and it probably will not change in the coming 30 years. :arrgh!: :) I even stopped tournament chess and switrched to correspondence chess 25 years ago, due to this antipathy. Don't rush me, never!!

re: campaigns, no in game editing tool, but there are third party tools developped by users that allow you to edit, although I never tried them.

However, a lot of the newer campaigns often give you 1h30 to 2h30 to complete missions.

I am not aware of any editor that lets you edit baked campaign files, you need the original files of the individual missions to redesign them, and then bake a new campaign. Also, googling for such a campaign editor, leads me - nowhere. I tried three search termini and checked four pages deep each result. I had searched for that already years ago, again with no result then.

The ingame editor only allows you to edit single missions. Not baked campaigns.


I tend to play step by step, also so that I can observe action taking place individually, its more entertaining this way. Thats why I do not like time pressure to artifically raise mission diffioculty. Often I have reached good progress without losses worth to be worried by - and the jst take risks that amssacre my troops becasue time is running out. In realit,y this simply would not be accepted, and it ruins the entertainment I get from the game.

see here:

http://community.battlefront.com/top...paign-editing/

I have not tried it, but apparently it works, it unpacks the campaign into individual scenarios, you make changes and then recompile the campaign.

Thanks, I did not know of this.


Unfortunately it does not work, maybe its broken or it is a W10 thing. It "fails to load" (error message) just every .cam-file (campaign file) I direct it to, also .btt- (single scenario) and .bts- (saved games) files do not get imported.


Not your fault, thanks nevertheless. :salute:

Bilge Rat,

do you know a mod that replaces the interface with a bigger one, with bigger symbols and fonts? I test-played the new game in the demo, and find the interface worse to decypher than in the first game. They really seem to try to make it as small as techncially possible, leaving big black boxes of unused spacein the left and right bottom corners, and colours have been taken out of much of their symbols, making the thing even more difficult to see due to the low contrast, steel on steel colour.

Sigh. So many game developers have good ideas and do good games - but on ergonomy many of them have no real clue. Tiny windows. Tiny. fonts. Tiny buttons. Tiny, tiny, tiny, as tiny as possible, please - as if that is a quality in every case. It isn't. Sometimes not smaller is beautiful, but bigger is beautiful.

I have read in the manual what they listed in the beginning on added details in the game. Some of that is okay - but I wonder whether it really is that big a deal. I played two missions of the five, and played them again in the first game, and honestly said I fail to see a big difference in gameplay. The squads still love to form big flocks at one window to get taken out by one salvo or grenade if you do not micromanage them and split them and distrubute them - and then after some time they rejon once again anyway. Vehicles still often refuse to travel in diagonal lines different to 45° angles, but approach their destination in strange first-vertical-then-45°-diagonal fashion like knights in chess, which often is not supporting my intentions, but puts them in harms way. They still brake too much or come almost to a standstill when their attached route calls for a slight chnage in direction, making them sitting ducks for s seocnd or two, trcks mroe so than wheeled ones. The textures on vehicles and uniforms are crispier, yes, and some more vegetation in the landscape, but at a distance the structure of land tiles looks more blurry, making it difficult to read elevations. Finally, in the Wargamers I read that they had updated - at the time of their review - only the default missions, but not those in the modules. Any word on whether that has been done meanwhile? Possible that I do not know some of the changes they claim that have done under the hood. But then, if changes under the hood do not make themselves felt in ordinary gameplay, then I am a little bit unconvinced of the need for them in the first.

I am disillusioned a bit, I must admit. For something switching its title from version 1.0 to version 2.0, roughly one ten years of time between both versions, I expected more substantial improvements, honestly said. Version one came I think in 2007. The new one in late 2018, or not?

For newcomers to the game, this is not to say its not a good sim, it is still a very good one, and I recommend to buy it if you do not have it But for those like me who already have version 1.0, I am not so sure about the need to invest money into version 2.0 It looks to me as if there is too little improvement. And the graphics engine alone does not cut it for me either.


Maybe they add a steam workshop. So that downlaoding and integrating missions becomes absolutely a breeze. That maybe could hook me on a bit.


That interface is a real problem for me, I have 5-6 diopters on both eyes, and am 53 years of age, and no matter whether I wear my usual or my reading glasses, too much of the texts and labels and symbols I cannot read, when I really need to see the right tiny microscopic detail I end up taking off glasses and moving close until my nose almost touches my 24" screen at full HD resolution. Even the mission briefings are in this 25 years old single-pixel-sized micro font lettering. :k_confused:
Thanks for reminding me of the demo option, I had completely overlooked it. Obviously it paid off for me to use it - just not for the result I hoped for (and that you maybe expected: but that is not your fault). :06:


P.S. I will try to reduce screen resolution. this kind of prehistoric workarounds should not be needed anymore in the year 2020, but maybe it works to increase the interface and font size. Of course the world then becomes more pixilated, too...

hi, yes UI is an issue, no mod unfortunately.

They are still updating the campaign scenarios. The updated USMC, Canadian and Dutch campaign were released last year and the British campaign should be released in a few months.

Re: changes. Yes, a lot are under the hood, improvement to artillery, AI, tweakinf weapon effect, etc. The simulation is a lot deadlier now if you do not use proper combined arms tactics.

Interface size and font size can be increased by lowering general resolution, I found. But on wide screens, the ini file must be directly changed with a proper 16:9 res, if one uses one of the three default resoluaitons in game menu, one gets a slightly distored image (round wheels are mild ovals...).

They really should have improved that. They keep 15-20 year old tech standards there and sell that as a revamp?

Anyway, workaround kind of works. 1360x768 works good for me. Scratch one off the list for the time being. General image quality is a bit softer, and contrast, also of fonts, is diffused a bit, but the interface finally is recognizable again.