"Iron" setting in CM ?

[Jobu88]

What does everyone think about the "Iron" skill setting in CM? I find it mainly just a pain in the aft steering compartment. Unless you're trying to play some kind of multi-player game where each player can only view his own platoon or whatever, I don't see the upside of not being able to see all your own units all the time.

[A Canadian Cat]

I am not a fan for the reason you mention - more clicking around. However I have one PBEM partner that is a fan so I have a couple of Iron game on the go pretty much at all times. I can see the argument for increasing immersion because it does give you a sense when your guys are isolated from their own units. I personally don't feel it is worth it but it does make it clearer when C2 is broken for a given unit.

[Lt. Smash]

I use it exclusively when playing single player and prefer to use it with PBEM. I like it for the immersion factor/additional fog-of-war. I particularly appreciate the further FOW enhancements that were patched into CMx2 just before CMRT's release. With that said, if I were a real-time player (which I am not) I would think Iron would be nearly impossible to play.

[Steiner14]

Everything Iron-mode does not show, can be revealed by additional mouse clicks.
Which player playing PBEM prefers to receive losses instead to avoid that by additional mouse clicks?
This mode is ridiculous IMO.

Instead of this useless mode Franko's Iron Man mode had proven to be fantastic and it's only problem was, that it was not hardcoded and needs extreme self discipline by the player.
Those that have not been around in early CMx1 days and know about it: Franko's rules forbid movement across the battlefield and the camera had to be locked on the units at unit height level. Overview was only gathered by using the level 8 or 9 map overview.

I played a few games against the AI with these rules until the bitter end and they were the most intense and difficult games I ever played against the AI.
I still remember today how my Romanian units with a handful German backbones were waiting for the Russian attack at a road in a winter woods - and when the sound contacts of the Russian tanks were appearing...

How precious the tower of a church or a hill can be? These rules make you feel it.

Franko's rules make playing the AI, even when it was attacking, and on small scenarios, really challenging.

But the problem is, that as the chaos intensivies and the difficulty explodes, it demands incredible self discipline not to move around "a bit". And then a bit more...

Therefore it's impossible to playthese rules H2H as a gentlemen's agreement. These fantastic rules would need to be hardcoded.

With the displayed individual soldiers in CMx2 a certain amount of horizontal camera movement could be allowed and therefore some of the problems of the unit-lock-view, e.g. when an infantry unit was positioned behind a tree, could be reduced.

For example the camera could be allowed to move with the mouse a bit, but it would only discretely jump on the coordinates of each individual soldier in the selected unit.

CMx2 is suffering from the duration how long battles take to play. With such a mode even tiniest and short battles against the AI would become interesting and therefore could attract much more players that now simply don't have the time to play games that take one hour per turn.

[HoseJock]

What does everyone think about the "Iron" skill setting in CM? I find it mainly just a pain in the aft steering compartment. Unless you're trying to play some kind of multi-player game where each player can only view his own platoon or whatever, I don't see the upside of not being able to see all your own units all the time.

I agree 100%... It just adds clicks and time, because all the information is available anyway, just not conveniently... My 2 cents...

Hose

[enigma6584]

I use it exclusively when playing single player and prefer to use it with PBEM. I like it for the immersion factor/additional fog-of-war. I particularly appreciate the further FOW enhancements that were patched into CMx2 just before CMRT's release. With that said, if I were a real-time player (which I am not) I would think Iron would be nearly impossible to play.

Agree. I use it for single and PBEM.