Quote:
Originally Posted by Bilge_Rat
the CM series is not perfect, no game is, but if you are into simulations, the market is very limited. CM offers the best 3d tactical land simulation IMHO, which is why I keep coming back to it.
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I agree in principle, but there is not enough new from one title to the next to compel their purchase. I am a campaign player and if campaigns were given some sort of priority I might have bought CMFB. But what did it ship with, was it two campaigns? If you search the usual suspects for downloadable campaigns you might find two or three more. Combat Mission is not really made for me despite it's suitability. CMBN and CMSF2 are the best in this regard, they have the most content. But the other titles suffer from this lack of content. And will continue to as long the same laborious process is required to make it and is left to the player base to produce it.
I may be cherry-picking an extreme example, but one of the best (and certainly longest) campaigns in CM is Paper Tiger's Road to Montebourg for CMBN. I read one of his posts and he stated it took him 800 hours! to make that campaign. It is very long, so that is part of it, but until that can be trimmed to 20 minutes (set up a generated campaign) the series will suffer from a lack of campaign content.
Single scenarios and even the QMB leave me cold. It's funny, but in CMx1 games I had a lot of fun with the QMB. But they inexplicably took away the Combined Arms setting, meaning AI force composition is all out of whack. And while I could pick the enemy forces that's no good as I would already know what they have, removing any sense of the unknown, which is vital for a game like this.
PBEM is fun, but unless you have a friend to play with I find that opponents' enthusiasm is directly proportional to their success. Rare is the battle that reaches the end before the turns simply stop coming.
There are only a few titles I do not own, so like I said I have enough to keep me playing when I feel the urge for some CM. What I think is needed in a general sense is a core engine where every module plugs in to it, allowing cross-play between them with a way to easily generate campaigns to ensure endless replayability. Remove the tether to the anemic supply chain and let me produce content custom-tailored to my taste.