Eugen Systems Forums

Well hello there.

So, I got certain email and I noticed something:
"Admire the 600 historically-accurate units in the brand new Armory, allowing you to check out every little detail on each model, check every unit's statistics and compare each other. "
And I thought to myself... You really went there... again? I really want to see people getting crazy over turret rings not being correct shape. Let me call it before it happens (if it didn't already)... tanks have wrong fuel barrels.

Read that PC gamer things. Why am I getting RUSE-ish vibe from it? This might be interesting if it is more than just a vibe. Knowing that I have about as healthy relationship with Eugen games as a drug addict with her drug dealer boyfriend... I will probably get it the game straight away even though I said I'm not buying any more Eugen games until they are 2 months after release. So I'm hoping for the best.
Gib keys plox.

Also, will we get women soldiers?
With face paint.

Also IS-2 and SU-85 having Berlin Operation white quick recognition stripes... not a biggie, but I would prefer them being just Russian generic camo

praslovan wrote:Also, will we get women soldiers?
With face paint.

For historical authenticy!



(Limanskaya is slightly OoTF though?)

Recreated games: A meticulous fail. As you talk about it, I get a short story up to my mind. I first go a bit off from your topic, but then it comes again to your units! You will like it (because it goes deaper):

I lost my good Grafics card ati hd 7870 this summer, and I have no money for a new one. Better said: I invested into a geforce gtx 1060 3gb but it didnt run the drivers, so I had to refund it and decided to wait until I have determined the right one (not too hot and not too loud and fast) now I have a cheap Radeion r5 230 in my gaming pc, as a temporary substitute.

Now I am impressed: I can run Red Dragon on FULL resolution (2560x1440), and Steel Division almost (a bit low frame rate, must be at 20-30 fps, still playable), but I can fully run the game and enjoy, no drama if I have to reduce reso a bit. And the Sellers of those cards always tell you need a buck for 300€ or something for smooth playing. Nough said.

But that can even play ELEX on minimal details, minimal resolution and visualisation reduction from 100% to 50% the game looks like Giana sisters on Commodore 64, But I CAN PLAY ELEX, smooth and fast! On a Cheap Grafics card for 30 bucks!

I am really scared that it is not really a difference to play on low quality, because you also like pixel graphics. It JUST means a short period of getting used to, and your fine! And you can scale up a few months later, when you handled the life situation!

THAT is meticolously!

All it needs is a change in your mind for the things and it makes love the games that they hate. The 600 units are indeed drugs, because it was the key for European escalation for me, because I played the old RTS games when I was young and wondered why just 30 units per side to play, why is it everything the same, its NOT that difficult to build in just a few more pictures into the row and you multiply the value of the game, sell just 30 other units into a Extension and you have money for a new game, was my thought about the developers.

I am really scared that NOBODY did SEE how valuable it is to have a smooth selection of units! NObody can say that 1400 1800 units in wargame were enough for me! I can play the game for years, while I must stop other games within few weeks because it gets boring. I dont have a problem with those by itself, but It makes that you cant escape from restricted balancing which was a nightmare in starcraft2, because you had a tightly pre-commanded machine that pressed you into a unforgetable ghetto you were your keyboard servant. How can someone DO THIS? Its an absolute NO-GO to skip such a giant mistake!

Its a glaring gap that you smile about, but I feel unforgetable tricked. if that would not play like the donkey on the tracked running machine with the orange banana in front of your snooze, I might have (could) understood how many people like it.

But in fact, those things that you call meticulous, are the absolute (and below) requirement of a game, and the games before were just even worse, and you love the p(l)ayground if you are a child and dont know the better, and like the playground if you are an adult, but having the new scale, or the 'full' game is just not the same as playing the child playground as an adult, NOT knowing that small things could be better.

There is a BIG gap in the society about tiny things, that cut through the crowd like a big lightening, even though there are only forgetable differences between a game in low/high quality, or low/many units. For other people, those gaps are their LIFE!

I just cant understand why someone would make such a big difference between a big wargame, and a big steel division, because all that matters is that you have another game! It maybe takes time to get used to the other mindset, like for low graphic quality, or to the many units, that developers are not used to (others), but I find it meticulous that you spit away Generals 2, embarrassing that a BIG publishear does not seem capable to make another game after now 15 years of a very successful command& conquer - I find it really not easy to avoid it for so long time! to make a good game upon a succesful one - so hard, that you are lost to stick to eugen, to have at all a strategy game. Of course I know also all the others. But the time doesn't fill with all the old ones. I am really curious how this drug-state that you mentioned will affect on the people.

Eugen can fail, and still be succesful. Because othears failed worse. A meticulous fail.

Three points:

1) I've been running Red Dragon on an integrated (to Intel CPU) graphics card and it ran fine. Amazing! (Cities Skylines refused to run at all.)

2) Problem with games like Total Annihilation, Battlefield, World in Conflict, guess CC too is that units don't have a personality! You have just the generic light - medium - heavy tank, or worse, just a MBT. In better games you have things like T-72B - it's a good tank but not the best by any means, but there is a good ATGM on top too, and it fills a particular niche in the whole of the meta, partly because it can tell a history where the designers considered available advantages and drawbacks, and tried to match it with corresponding equipment in the west. Games like Wargame or Steel Panthers capture this richness because they partly replicate the historical situation, but also say M.A.X. is successful because it just develops a great combined arms meta where it situates the initially generic and bland units - even ARMA3 manages to make its units individual, partly because it also dares to open the box of asymmetric balancing like some of the games based on history.

3) And I guess that is also why companies like EA fail - they violate the #1 rule of game development: sell the players something new. And it could be something which Eugen also feared when they didn't make WarGame 4 - how can you improve on something which is already great and has built a ton of player expectations? Going to WW2 at least is a fresh breath (also you could argue, a setting without much risk) and it forced Eugen to rethink several things (and helped even to improve on things not obvious at first). The problem to us WarGame players is that we have a preference for cold war era equipment and the technology in use there (eg. helicopters, ATGM etc).

Ok, who was drunk posting here?

I don't really care about the setting of the game, as long as it is this type. I played Wargame and RUSE before and I must say that I prefer WW2 setting if I have to pick.

No room for improvements?
Well, games are badly optimized. During Wargame era I noticed this indirectly by people lagging out 2v2, 3v3 and 4v4 games, however SD is where I am the one lagging out 3v3s. Granted I have an older CPU, however it is over-clocked and has no issues running more complicated games like PUBG (which is known for its poor optimization) or war thunder.

Netcode is also something they should look into. Reason stated above.
Regarding game as a whole. Neither wargame of SD don't have enough players. WW2 might be setting without risks, however, what kind of risks? It has risks, look at how bad player retention is. Let's not even mention that fake C&C that failed miserably.

I think Eugen managed to distinguish SD from Wargame nicely for the most part. SD is not as supply oriented as Wargame is, smaller but not too small battlefields are also nicer. New game mode is step in the right direction, however it suffers from the same problem Wargame had as well; you can easily get away with doing not much but just enough to have that +1 that will eventually lead to victory.
I think there is more room to do some additional enhancements on what is a decent start.

Those 3 stages of battle also need some though. 1st stage is too long and 3rd stage is too short. You can't have this with restrictive thematic decks the way Eugen implemented them. Wargame was better in this because it let you mix any units together, at the cost of less availability. Perhaps it would be interesting to see if recon units in 1st stage don't have to travel to the front line, but are able to spawn there at the beginning. Especially if they are some sort of infantry/paratrooper recon.

Decks the way they are are IMO the biggest downfall of SD. Yes it lets you do DLCs, however as you can see... people are not digging it. Some decks are really hard to play in 1v1, where you mostly need a well rounded deck because coming back from being pushed off the maps because you simply can't hold it with what you have is no fun. You do workarounds by being crafty and tactical only to certain degree and in certain situations. On the other hand decks that are OK to do 1v1s with are not fun because they don't let you put in that one or two units you really like to play with. People in far larger numbers prefer to play the game not to roleplay the game. You can definitely set up "role-play" tournaments, but you can't set up "people enjoying the game in bigger numbers" tournaments, and the latter makes salaries not being late and Eugen being well off enough to afford to improve and innovate at higher level.

Then there is the problem of too many options. Too many units that are downright useless and not played at all. I really hope Eugen can somehow get the metrics regarding what is used and what is not. This is true for both SD and WG. Another thing is 10v10s... laggy, boring and frustrating. Not a lot of people know 9 other people they can team up with and find another team of 10 people to play properly in a way that you get inner satisfaction because of teamwork after well executed battle. While game up to 4v4 can be sand boxes 10v10s would need some sort of motivation for players where complete strangers can meet and understand what is going on without communicating... like dynamic objectives to capture this, capture that or retreat from there.

Another thing is that 2 gamemodes make the game well... meh. New game modes have to be fine-tuned, destruction game mode however has to be either cut out or completely reworked. I can't remember how many times I won in WG because of mindless turtling, since attacking is too risky. And while veterans can navigate through what are good game modes and what aren't... newcomers aren't which can lead to frustration and therefore refund/abandonment which does not help other players because they get less people to play with/against.

The problems with Destruction mode were obvious already 6.5 years back. Even the experimental conquest mode in WG:EE was much better in my mind. But attacking in WG is very scary and there is customer demand for Destruction. Just make Conquest the default mode in match maker and things could be tolerable.

But I guess OP is straying a bit off-topic here

praslovan wrote:WW2 might be setting without risks, however, what kind of risks? It has risks, look at how bad player retention is. Let's not even mention that fake C&C that failed miserably.

I thought along the lines: game companies follow the competition and see what eras they make games for, possibly even learning from their mistakes and successes. (At least: if something is a hit lets make the same stuff!)

Think if it had been Korea for example, like suggested by many I think yours truly as well. The average player would be: What?? There was a war in Korea? It was not in Fox News? Or French Indochina (I think also suggested by Y.T.) - maybe not much games are made for that setting, just Rising Storm 2, but not a popular topic for movies either (there was a large documentary recently though) - and these examples cover only a short period on the theater (the heavy U.S. involvement).

Ah yeah I get you. Yeah Korea is not mainstream history apart from "it happened". From the perspective of Eugen though... it is not really interesting. You have what? Cold war gone hot with ww2 equipment more or less minus cool German stuff. It is like they would make desert storm or something modern after Wargame instead of SD. Game setting would simply be not distinguishable enough for people to care perhaps. WW1 on the other hand might not fit in well with what Eugen does. Might be interesting to try though.

What wargame players want and what they need is not the same. What they need is enough people to play with, not some, although interesting historically, obscure war somewhere. Maybe Emu wars might be interesting to make a game after.

varis wrote:2) Problem with games like Total Annihilation, Battlefield, World in Conflict, guess CC too is that units don't have a personality!

I disagree on TA since you have a wide variety units. For the CORE you had the Pyro, which you could use to burn trees and damage near by bases with burning forests. You also had the Dominator which acted as a walking Scud launcher and could fire projectiles over tall obstacles like a mountain. As far as goes, WiC a lot of the units felt a bit samey.

For Wargame though I do like having a wide selection units, like the difference between the M60A2 Starship and the Leopard 1 was like night and day, however there a number of unit variants which only created clutter in the armory which made game harder to access for newer players. For example you had Six types of T-80 to chose from, eight t-72s to chose from, and 5 types of T-64 to chose from. To someone not familiar with military history or soviet weapons all three tank series look rather similar in appearance and performance, plus you had all their different upgrade variants many of which don't see much use do the five point increment pricing schemes of the game. Meaning that some variants will be more optimal to use over others because of gun/speed/armor/range/fuel in terms of a five point difference. You could argue that you have a large tool box to work with, however there are always units that too gimped or redudant like the T-80B or A series when other variants are more cost efficient or aren't overlapped by similar series of tank. For a new player it can also be confusing. Where as a new player in a game of CnC can quickly learn the difference between the light tank and the Mammoth or the Tesla tank.

I do think there is a place for unit variants, however the changes with each model should be significant to justify being included in the game. Like with the Panzer IV there is a big difference between the short barrel version and the long barreled version, or the long barreled version with additional armor skirts. The variants in between, not so much since the changes would be harder to model in due the scope the game or hard to justify a 5 point increase for one or two simple changes.

I agree, variety is nice, micro-variety not so much.