Is CM dying?

[Steiner14]

kineas,
although I like the 1:1 representation, I agree. I somehow have lost that out of sight. It was not necessary and nobody in the community has asked for it or lamented about the three men representation.
To make 1:1 work, they needed lots of manpower for it. And now they have the problem, that they don't have enough resources to keep the 1:1 anmimations up to date!

If they would have stayed at their roots and kept the symbolic representation, imagine what they could have done graphically to attract new players without destroying the grown traditional fanbase!
This 1:1 thing probably is the reason, why many highly wished features cannot be done: 1:1 seens to be the reason why the filesize was blown up so dramatically. And that has a direct impact, how easy it is, for example to make full battle replay work. Or that online multi-multiplayer takes too much bandwith, while symbolized action would take only a part of it.

If I recapitulate the consequences of 1:1:

No action spot system or much smaller ASs - The AS were a problem for me but I got used to, but from the many comments of CMx1ers, it seems to be an important reason why a decent portion of players was lost only because of that completely undemanded "progress".

Better animation - with today's cheap possibilities to make motion capturing on your own, we would already have hand to hand combat. If they would have been clever, they would have developed a system that allows the community to make the animations. They would have been able to just provide some necessary stuff, while the community would have turned it into eye candy. What huge amount of manhours that would have saved?
But cool animations are so attractive for the broad mass - and we hardcore wargamers also enjoy them, when watching the replays, don't we?

Full battle replays. Imagine the impact on an already much bigger community, if full battles could be shared - and analyzed! Want to see how the winner of tournament or the leader of a ladder plays? It makes me angry, if I think about that destroyed possibility thanks to this unwished and unnessesary 1:1 thing.

No replay for realtime mode.

Turnbased multi-multiplayer in PBEM with 5, 10 or 20 players - and probably even online.

An interactive UI, that takes newbies by the hand and leads them into the complex system. Generation Facebook doesn't read manuals.

Probably higher framerates giving room to

Graphics effects like depth of field, haze, maybe even HDR?



Count the impact for the average customer of all this together, and it's obvious why the community has been shrinking.

Thinking about it brings old memories back, why I was fascinated from CMx1 in the first place: not it's realism! That was experienced later, when I got interested. What made me interested was the - for that time - incredible graphics that made me visit their homepage. I did not come from board gaming. I believe it was a winter landscape screenshot with a tank that blew me away.

So if that was already a big factor in 2000, nice graphics today matter even more.

And all that without any costs of less tactical realism, without worse ballistics! Much more time to focus on developing the game firther instead of making the 1:1 thing even work. Until this day.


That 1:1 design decision was awful and you are probably correct, it broke the camel's back. The more I think about it 1:1 seems to be the a key element, why the community has been shrinking instead of growing. It has been eating so much resources to make it work and now it's like a concrete block to keep the graphics up to date. The graphics of the tank riders are the proove, that they lack the resources to make it look good.
What would impress new potential customers more: the non existent animations for tank riders and the feature "tank riders", or a cool animation of symbolic three men climbing on a tank or jumping down?

If I put myself into the shoes of Charles, the programmer, this must be hard. Really hard. You have a designer who almost all important aspects did get wrong or has made decisions that are a huge burden to develop the game further easily (realtime, 1:1, user interface). But then in the forums he is lamenting, what he wants in the game and has ideas for coming decades, but sadly all that takes so much time or is not possible as "Charles told me".