The Relationship between Soft Factors, Morale & Fatigue

Thanks for testing and sharing your findings. I've known about the basic "telepathy" for a long time, but never really looked deeper into it.

I guess the reason they made it like this is to prevent players from gaming the system by placing squads out of contact on purpose to prevent them from feeling morale effects.

But I would have preferred if they had just made the negative effect of being isolated much bigger, cancelling any benefits from spreading squads too thin.
 
Bulletpoint said:
Thanks for testing and sharing your findings. I've known about the basic "telepathy" for a long time, but never really looked deeper into it.

I guess the reason they made it like this is to prevent players from gaming the system by placing squads out of contact on purpose to prevent them from feeling morale effects.

But I would have preferred if they had just made the negative effect of being isolated much bigger, cancelling any benefits from spreading squads too thin.
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It depends on the nation played I think.

For instance playing Russians I find I need to keep them more or less bunched up, despite the extra target practice they then make. Being out of contact of each other and losing one guy has a bigger morale hit then a few extra men killed while in contact. I guess the NKVD detachment has a bigger impact then team spirit. :LOL:

Thanks for testing @Stafford , great info.
 
Bulletpoint said:
Thanks for testing and sharing your findings. I've known about the basic "telepathy" for a long time, but never really looked deeper into it.

I guess the reason they made it like this is to prevent players from gaming the system by placing squads out of contact on purpose to prevent them from feeling morale effects.

But I would have preferred if they had just made the negative effect of being isolated much bigger, cancelling any benefits from spreading squads too thin.
Click to expand...

I think this does exist to a minor extent?

I recall seeing minor isolated units such as scouts become nervous or even rattled after being out of C2 for a long time, even without coming under fire, particularly those with low quality or low motivation.

I'll run some more tests on this and post the findings here.
 
Stafford said:
I recall seeing minor isolated units such as scouts become nervous or even rattled after being out of C2 for a long time, even without coming under fire, particularly those with low quality or low motivation.
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I think that was just due to the telapathy you discovered. The scouts' platoons took casualties.

Never saw any ill effects on any squad simply from being out of contact.
 
Bulletpoint said:
I think that was just due to the telapathy you discovered. The scouts' platoons took casualties.

Never saw any ill effects on any squad simply from being out of contact.
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You're right. I just ran a test, put a couple of conscript -2/-2 scouts out in the forest on their own for over an hour and they were still 'OK' at the end of it. So yeah, the telepathic link is what is causing it.

Another mystery solved! (y)
 
I wish they would update their morale system to include things like:

  • How long have we been out of contact?

  • How many friendly units can we spot?

  • How many enemy units can we spot?

  • Are we low on ammo?

  • Are we getting flanked? Are we surrounded?
 
That would be a pretty cool addition, and since those factors are quantifiable, they are programmable - probably within a certain factor of randomness, due to different pixeltruppen reacting in slightly different ways, or to lesser or greater severity.

But I'm sure BF has quite a few well known bugs to squash first. :p
 
Concord said:
It's a very common gripe with game companies. You can see it all over Steam reviews.
I assume the game companies need the profits that new content brings.
But improving quality has huge long term benefits. Reputation and customer loyalty.
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Ideally, a game company should do both new content, fixes, and improvements. BFC seems to have chosen a business strategy where they almost only focus on producing new content, at the expense of improvements. It's clever, because it's cheap when fans do most of the work for free. Low ambitions = low risk.

It's just a damn pity, because I strongly feel Combat Mission is a games series that both needs and deserves fundamental fixes and improvements. If I compare to something like Mius Front - which constantly gets fixed and updated - it's not the same. I haven't played Mius for a long time, because even though I think it's interesting, the fundamental gameplay just isn't there, in my opinion. So I don't really care if they tweak all kinds of algorithms to take into account LOS when calculating terrain gains and losses, etc.
 
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Unfortunately Combat Mission is in a small and niche market, there really isn't a direct competitor for them, so long as this remains the case BFC can pretty much do what they want.
 
Stafford said:
Unfortunately Combat Mission is in a small and niche market, there really isn't a direct competitor for them, so long as this remains the case BFC can pretty much do what they want.
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Even if they got a competitor, I don't think they would raise their ambitions. Steve would probably just cash out by selling the property rights and retire comfortably. I think he's close to doing so already. But that's of course just speculation.
 
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