Enigma,
my post was not meant funny.
If we think about it from a business point of view, it's really not good, if customers must encourage other customers, who try to give the game a chance, to adopt a certain positive attitude to cope with the problems they discover.
I am wondering, if I look how small the fraction of CM realtime players is, how much customers have been lost and among new customers are being lost constantly, because of the huge limitations the idiocy to go realtime is responsible for?
Almost every day someone in their forums pops up and complains about a spotting, targeting or LOS problem. The amount of players that give up but wuld have liked to play, must be huge. The relation of the size of the community in CMx1 days to the current number of CMx2 players, despite the continuous development and updates for older games, probably gives a good estimation.
For example lets take the 7 second spotting cycle. How many problems still are reported because of it!
Or let's take the problem how spotting works when aiming at buildings. If the centre of the building is not visible, then it's not possible to area fire at a visible part of the building.
How many new players, for example experiencing how their units are mowed down by a unit in a house, have a tank available and want to shoot at the visible part of the building only to recognize, that they cannot, although they clearly can see half of a huge building? The new customers has no clue about the inner workings, that the geometric centre of the building must be visible. He just loses his unit because of a problem of the game. This really can kill games for players! How many will be frustrated - additionally to the steep learning curve! - but try a second scenario or a third and then uninstall the game and walk away in frustration?
Or let's take the 8x8 m action squares. That they cannot be reduced in size is also because of the CPU restrictions thanks to the realtime mode.
All that is because the engine must be able to handle all calculations in realtime.
And that probably also is the problem, why the software cannot use additional CPU cores. If it would be a true WEGO-software, then the LOS mechanism would be used during plotting mode without any action. No need to be ready for tiny timeslots to update the graphics and everything all the time. In the calculation phase the game engine would have all the time in the world to calculate the action phase.
It is never a good thing, if the developer of a software prefers to use the software in a mode that 100% of the customers did not even request for (before CMSF had been released there was no demand from the wargaming community to have a realtime mode). And still almost 10 years after introduction, probably 80% of the customers do not use this revolutionary brilliant mode, that brought us genius like things like relative hotkeys - but these 80% of customers are constantly reminded in every game and sometimes every turn about certain shortcomings because of the CPU limits, which are purely a result to make it realtime capable.
I can understand the frustration of players who see strange things happening and I believe it can only be overcome by adopting a strictly positive attitude. Otherwise the CM community would shrink even more. Therefore my post was really not meant scarcastically.
I don't think there are any realistic chances, with a developer on such a high realtime horse and with no idea what WEGO wargamers would need (i.e. hotkeys can be assigned to units, but the assignments are not saved with the turn
), that the WEGO mode would ever receive the calculations that are necessary to deliver the best results and in fact a round based simulation deserves, instead of the quick workaround calculations that are necessary to make RT possible.
But if they could accomplish that - or maybe even admit, that the whole realtime concept did result in a dramatically decimated CM-community and that RT was not able to compensate at least a fraction of the customers that were lost, I think CM could attract a much wider audience again.
Not only because the calculations could be made as exact and detailed as it pleases them without paying attention to CPU overhead, which probably would make 90% of all of the severe complaints go away, but by getting rid of the realtime calcs the won CPU power could even be used to improve the look, which could attract even more people.
Therefore I can understand Weasel or old CMx1 players, because they IMO correctly see, what would have been possible without the awful design decisions - and these decisions are hunting EVERY player all the time. If one thinks about it and where the game could be in the meanwhile, it's really not so easy to keep a positive attitude.
But sadly there is no alternative and the only thing to cope with the severe limitations thanks to the "greatness" of realtime mode, is by developing a positive attitude. The glass must be seen as half full.
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99% of my battles are against human opponents. Against the AI I start only sometimes a short battle to test something.
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