Évaluations récentes de Kåt Tsun

One of the rare cases where a Slitherine published title makes me feel it's actually worth the full paying price.

I haven't played the game in a few months and there's already been a ton of updates, adding different planet classes, keeping the player base informed of modded art packs, and intelligent space alien empires. One of the most requested updates, custom unit OOBs, has also been added.

The starting conditions can be changed so much that each game felt fresh and new. A game where your empire is mostly miners and railroad builders? Yep. How about one where you're becoming cannibals while living in an isolated glacier power plant that's slowly running out of energy, food, and water due to population growth? Yep. A game where you scavenge the ruins of a planetary sector capital, eeking out an existence as techno-miners and salvagers/prospectors, because before the Armageddon War the population was over 20 billion souls? Yep.

Is your army nothing but militiamen raised from levies and volunteers like the DPR? That can be done. What about post apocalyptic bikers riding around on space Harleys with submachine guns and flak jackets? Sure. Motorized infantry in trucks with little light tanks armed with 25mm machine guns? Yep. Powered armor troops with plasma guns, laser rifle jetpack infantry, and atomic shell shooting supertanks the size of a house? Yep.

Wildlife, climate, and terrain are generated at the start of each game, so you can roll dice to change how much water (or local planetary biosphere equivalent), how many mountains (or ravines), and how many flat plains there are. Terrain types influence the cost of infrastructure, so if you start in a planet with glaciers in the equator then good luck, you're not going to be able to build railroads for a while. And heaven forbid your only road or railroad to a frontline is cut off because a migrating flock of giant, 10 meter tall spiders decided to make a big nest nearby.

Anything about the game can be changed aesthetically, so if you don't like the creepy default faces you can replace them funny anime faces. You can also draw new cards and replace those. New backgrounds. All art assets are open and free to modify if you have patience and a raster editor like MS Paint, Paint.NET, or GIMP.

Also you don't need to read the manual ignore those nerds. A true grognard just plays the game and figures it out.

it didnt literally produce for me a mizuumibb-style femboy male wife with mantis blades and a 12 inch cyberschlong

terrible and completely unplayable

This game taught me that all the tanks and MICVs in the world are hopeless against the power of "Sven and Ole in the 5-ton with the LAWs and 60mm mortar".

It is well balanced as of review post date since AIUI it went through a couple balancing patches to tone down like 3 missions.

A solid 16-20 hour game for an average player of Advance Wars or whatever.

>walkman finish tape

it's rewind time

the best part about the game is the kemono friends memes that showed up 2 years after it dropped

also the gameplay is fun

story bad but it's metal gear no one plays it for the story lmao

it's only good with the hf patch

but you need that anyway so yeah

it halo

The rudiments of a game are present. Still. It has some gameplay, some scenarios, a few campaigns, and at least a couple of them (Northern Inferno and a couple scenarios) have some really annoying bugs. But that's not the problem, because that was true in the original game too.

It's mostly the original game. With a Tacview addon script. Because I guess that's necessary. There is also a dark UI, and some really basic Steam Workshop support that is actually badly implemented. The new launcher looks simultaneously quite ok and is actually extremely amateurish. It has no options menu or settings, it's animated, and it just replicates what the old game basically did with a tiny box that didn't take up the whole the screen. It also really hates alt-tabbing. Upon inspection, it looks like what a person who doesn't play video games might think a game menu should be, and acts like it too. When you alt-tab with the scenario selection screen open, it disappears behind the launcher when you click back. So don't do that. Which means if you're reading a scenario briefing or description, and alt-tab for whatever reason, you have to exit the launcher and open it back up to get back to the scenario you were reading. It's really annoying.

I don't know how the TacView stuff works. I imagine it looks pretty much in my head how the game world looks: stuff moves around in really odd looking and unnatural paths and doesn't behave like a fighter aircraft would in, say, an actual flight simulator like DCS. Except with slightly better shapes and airplanes instead of grey dots. Based on the Slitherine preview of F-14s trying, and somehow failing, to hit MiG-31s in geometries that in actual real life would pretty much assure a kill (assuming the pilot was using a reasonable radar mode, like Boresight or PLM, with the AIM-7F, based entirely on me doing it regularly on GAW in DCS with the F-14A) because it is pretty much the ideal geometry to engage a target. But CMANO has conventionally massively overvalued the benefit of countermeasures in air combat (conversely they're undervalued in naval combat and hardkill defense is massively overvalued) and undervalued the benefit of conventional missile defeat measures like notching, beaming, and use of energy and impact point manipulation to put rockets into impossible intercept trajectories. Oh, none of that is modeled in any actual way, it's all still dice rolls modified by "generations" which in turn have maluses and bonuses to other generations that are newer/older. Or for aircraft, as far as I can tell, it just modifies some things like the turn radius and G-tolerance. It isn't really clear what constitutes a "generation" for equipment or aircraft in the database, but we get to see the dBsm of stealth jets and stuff. This is all forgivable since CMANO isn't an actual flight simulator, but it's not really what Tacview is designed to do (it's designed to review ACMI recordings of flight sims for AARs), and it looks weird and is a overall weird choice since CMANO never felt like it needed a 3D view. If anything, it needed far less view of the battle than you always had.

Though it is a pretty creative solution to the overall hassle of 3D views, I suppose, and it lends itself to the developer's strengths.

A digression: I'd prefer if Command had went with a "give orders, based on a rudimentary mission planning, tell people to "launch", and they carry it out by advancing to waypoint within certain time limits and altitude regimes as their fuel states and max speeds allow, without your input in something as basic as "how do fly plane" and the AI makes it own calls as to whether it should shoot ARMs at a radar site locking it up". The training value determines the size of their error bar estimates in things like future fuel state, incoming missiles, and ability to stick to the flight plan or address FRAGOs enroute. So SSI's Waterloo with fighter jets and radios. But it isn't. Flippantly put, it's "Harpoon, but Google Maps". Whatever. Digression over.

The issues with satellite mapping like occasional Z-fighting at high camera altitudes that becomes increasingly common as you get closer to ground, and severe pop-in/load times, are preposterous. The Sentinel-2 map just gets overrun by the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ default background layer and you can't tell what you're looking at unless you zoom out and reload the map. Since the satellite map is also streamed, for whatever reason, from a big server, you're tied to that for the future. So when that ever goes down (I think it has been down for a bit, or at least streaming has been slow, and the map had be moved to a bigger server, but I didn't notice or I missed the move) the only serious, big time improvement in the game is also kaput. Since local game install doesn't even allow a limited granularity copy. Some of us have a few TBs lying around to spare for a high fidelity map on local SSDs to improve load times.

It's ok and it's not worth $80 still. The TacView integration might be good or might be bad but I won't be dropping however much an advanced licence of TV costs because it doesn't seem to add much of anything. It's a God's Eye View (the ultimate issue with CMANO is that you have both too much view and too much control of individual aircraft, really) of some things that may not be needed to be seen, and I'm not sure it's integrated well enough to matter.

The Dark UI is pretty to look at but the overall UI is the same as the last game, but with Dark UI stuff. There is a nice list of additional buttons on the unit status bar which can also be collapsed (what kind of monster would collapse it?) and pushed to the side if it's getting in the way of viewing satellite photos of the world or something. On the other hand a bunch of stuff is half-heart on this, since the scenario description box in the actual game is still Light UI and some other stuff is still Light.

Steam Workshop integration, and Steam integration in general, is a big hot mess of problems. Steam Workshop can't restart scenarios inside the workshop, so you have to go to the actual scenario launcher menu and restart it, or exit the scenario entirely, because the game doesn't know where to look for Workshop files. This is bad. The game hates the Steam Overlay and current advice from the player base is to turn off Steam Overlay. This is bad. A Steam release shouldn't have issues with the Overlay unless it's very old, not designed for Steam but gets released on it later in life, or whatever.

Turn off sound effects as soon as you load into a scenario. They're very loud and annoying.

tl;dr Buy it on sale and hope the satellite map still works. -66% is a good price, but $30 is pushing the limit of what it's really worth tbh. It's not enough of an improvement of the original game to justify full $80. It has enough improvements that you aren't missing anything from the first game, except for an actually functional launcher that doesn't go bananas when you alt-tab. Too many quality of life things are pretty broken, though the game itself seems like it runs OK when it isn't being stupid with the remade launcher.

If the satellite map ever breaks don't buy it. Buy the original game or something since it will probably be cheaper, unless it isn't offered anymore. The original overlay is garbage for anything except the most rudimentary planning and custom overlays are too computationally taxing to deal with, honestly (it might be better in CMO, I haven't tried, because the new satellite images are that good once they stream in). I wish there was a neutral option but the price is really steep for what you get (CMANO with a slightly better sat map overlay and a amateurish launcher) so I'll say avoid it unless you know what to expect.

Accurate simulation of Russian capitalist experiment.

How to win: Put Yeltsin and Gorby in the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ground in 85, back moderate Leninists all the time, and then you're fine. Never do imports. Attempting to make Russia into America just results in corruption, disintegration, and coups. Just like real life.

The ideal win condition is basically to halve the military budget, buff all research constantly, buff light industry and agriculture, buff KGB a bit and law and order, nuke all bribes except for state propaganda and republic leaders, and work with the liberals and CPSU moderates until you can get the Interior Ministry and force through referenda.

Then you just gotta land on Mars and you're set. Easy.

15 years later and we get a game that's worse than Red Alert 2 in every relevant mechanic lol.

petroglyph doesnt make them like they used to

guess all the westwood guys left or got senile in old age :(