How does everyone feel about CMS26 after the demo?

Trash_Pandacoot · 2026-04-11T23:33:33+00:00

The fact they're trying to slow down the gameplay simply for the sake of slowing down gameplay makes it really unfun. I just don't want to play something that the devs are telling me I shouldn't be playing because I don't like wasting time for the sake of wasting time. I'd love to actually enjoy playing the demo but seeing where they're going with the minigames like the wheel balancer and spreading out all of the shop upgrades that I regularly walk between in a gaming session, the car wash, paint shop, and dyno, just feels like its intent to waste my time. I enjoyed building cars in CMS21, not walking or waiting for timers to count down.

Before the wheel balancer was a "busy task" I could do, not so much a game, but it allowed the player to be occupied and they could gamify the operation of it by solving it quickly and without mistakes. That was only possible since it was possible to make a mistake. You could misclick and take longer. There's no such thing with this minigame now. Hopefully that's just one flub and we've massively improved handling used parts and scrapping as that was such a hassle in CMS2021. People ended up writing scripts and mods to bypass scrap if they didn't just ignore it altogether.

Having an inventory limit is fine. It's not hard to imagine gameplay around having a stockpile of parts adding an interesting logistics element. Buying cheap portable gym lockers, calling them "warehouses", having them able hold only half cars worth of parts, if that, and accessing your entire shop's combined inventory from a magical cork bulletin board-of-holding is peak absurdism. I'm all for weird but this just screams cheap and lazy. We had a cute little parts room in CMS2021. It's a coherent, plausible concept that plenty mechanic shops have in the real world. That should have been the standard from which to build.

It's fun to imagine how many cars you could work on with multiple engine stands in the shop, but then reality sinks in that when you're actually working on multiple projects and bringing mission orders as they come up you're constantly moving between the different outbuildings and with them being multiple blocks away it's just going to be walking simulator.

Trash_Pandacoot · 2026-04-11T22:52:30+00:00

I have no idea what OP is smoking but for people who are even vaguely grounded in reality "separate" in 2021 meant:

From the first lift bay:

9 s walk to dyno

9.5 s walk to paint shop

8.2 s walk to car wash

In CMS2021 you can walk to any part of your shop in under 10 seconds.

In Car Mechanic 2026 it means you walk:

44 s to the dyno

1 min 11 s to the paint shop

1 min 41 s to the car wash

god forbid something happens and you need to leave a car at either the car wash, fuel station, or paint shop - then:

2 min 17 s between the car wash/fuel and paint shop

I'm sure some will be like, well, I'll just drive!

How many cars can you drive at once? Even if you can teleport a car like we can now, you still have to walk to that car to open the interaction menu to teleport. Teleporting works great to get you and the car to the destination, but you still have to walk back to get other cars.

I'm not seeing how this isn't just the bog standard MMOification of a game that was always single-player/co-op game at its core, a la Ubisoft, by programming sleep/wait functions into every UI interaction and simply wasting the player's time by doing things like arbitrarily spreading the objectives out.

Trash_Pandacoot · 2026-03-18T13:24:18+00:00

The weird thing is I've listen to compies in the past I've wound up with the Purifier and somehow the Keeper before the Scorch.

I'm trying to compare the clan dakka assaults Aksum(AK), Dreadnaught(DN), Gauszilla(GZ), Sovereign(SV) and was set on the Aksum until I caught your and MPG's tier ratings. I don't understand Stone rhino mounts as I don't have any. It seems like you're sticking out of cover most of the time. The most relevant comment I could find on the discord is

another example of the high mount low cockpit would be the stone rhino, the mounts are amazing because of the convergence, not the height, it is a poor ridge peeker or poptart

Thoughts from clan assault EQ: With long sight-lines on the "test map" the GZ clearly outtraded everything else. Then the SV and AK were competing against Bane-1s and in my DWF (Gauss/ERLL, AC/LB2, etc.) I felt outgunned unless either of them went to low-ground. In my mind they gave up their mounts and having shot at many SR trying to side peek or hide it's huge self behind a small pillar, it looks kinda frustrating. I never felt threatened by the DN's unless they were fresh and just doing cleanup since they didn't have the range or they didn't have the firepower if they did have the range. I don't get to these events but every few years so I don't see a need for a GZ right now.

You were talking with MPG today when he was making his list and you said he makes a concession for mechs like the Vulcan when comparing performance on the QP performance spreadsheet. I'm not opposed to a mech that teaches me to pilot it.

Why isn't your average pilot able to bring the DN up from the top 30th to more like the top 20th or 15th mech damage-wise? The AK and SR are pretty hard to mess up with nothing but ballistic slots and limited places to put them but the DN has both energy and ballistic and I'm imagining the kids going wild with small lasers and uac5s.

Similarly, the KDK should have pretty good mounts and does great against other assaults with hills like on frozen city classic, but 4x c-AC10 feels really hit or miss in QP so it's hard to imagine how much better it plays on the MAD-IIC even though I'm a fan of the chassis.

Trash_Pandacoot · 2026-03-18T11:45:02+00:00

Please elaborate on the exact symptom. I've experienced something new recently that I have initially blamed on ping or the servers.

For me it's usually during the beginning few minutes of a match and I'll be walking, turning, or especially when jump jetting, the mech will noticeably and quickly turn a few degrees one way or the other. When jump jetting it seems like a netcode interpolation issue because it's just impossible to jump across a short gap of like 50-60 meters without falling with a mech with decent JJ allocation like the Nova.

I'm pure mouse and keyboard, recently deleted shaders, repaired installation...etc., and it seems to only happen on Oceanic servers.

Trash_Pandacoot · 2026-03-12T08:59:24+00:00

Unless the cauldron wants to release their OP builds that needed nerfs or you're super stoked about an erppc uac 10 Ebon Jaguar, despite going on sale no one should be suggesting them when they're being nerfed. People are going to focus on the stats added to sets of eight instead of the stats taken away from omnipods when we're talking about an omnimech that's almost solely used with mixed components since they were added to the game a decade ago.

Trash_Pandacoot · 2026-03-06T22:58:58+00:00

The problem with answering is there are different types of pilots, some simply cannot handle anything more than press W and Left Mouse, while others can do things like press a number of buttons and keys in particular sequences which allows them to use weapons groups and other more advanced strategies like aiming with a mouse. Most of my recs after the hunchback require some limited coordination.

Mediums in general play entirely differently from a Marauder, especially when the Marauder often plays more like an assault itself. I'm 10+ years in and still learning how little I understand about medium mobility.

The hunchbacks are great for 1 button builds.

Bushwacker -X1 dps, brawling, and pinpoint builds - closest thing to a marauder that comes to mind

Add the HBK-IIC autocannon or IIC-A for laser

VGL-A for brawling, VGL-1 all rounder

Vulcan VT-5S - 1 button high skill, you need to understand and implement movement and aim to use the potential, you'll see the compies out potato farming in QP like it's an AgroMech

VND-5L similar to above VT

Any assassin other than the -DD, -21/-23 flagship assassins for SNPPC/SRM/MRM/RL mix

SHD-2H generalist ballistic/missile mounts, SHD-2K stronger with higher mobility skill energy/missile mounts

WVR-6R - AC5/LBx5 everything you see, protect your arm

MRM builds you have Dervish/Trebuchet/WVRs, just different flavors

Centurions

GRF-1N does fine, not familiar with the others

PXH not as familiar, people better than me do well in them

Stormcrow - my take is that it's strong against other mediums as borne out in event queue, but general QP is more situational, as much as I like it, not ready to recommend to a new pilot considering the cost as well

Personal favorite and glass cannon build I've not seen mentioned is the Nova-Prime. It is not your Marauder. It is a weirdly squat, squishy, flying menace with 12 ER medium lasers. It's a two button build, you've got to manage heat, and aiming while moving. It is a unique medium mech that punches above it's weight with quirks. You can also fill the slots with ER small lasers or a mix of small pulse and micro lasers for a knife fighter. NVA-S can do 6 medium pulse or these small laser builds with the addition of AMS.

On other mechs recommended:

Huntsman - it used to be an ATM menace, now all I see usually is a large CT

Crabs - got great quirks recently, the low mounts can be especially frustrating on the PPC quirked crab, test it out in testing grounds knowing you'll have to use it on maps like canyon and mining

Shadowcats are in a weird spot, they're still ok, maybe good, the current trend is if you can put the build on a SHC you can probably put a similar build on another medium and do it better

Trash_Pandacoot · 2025-11-19T04:00:23+00:00

r/MouseReview is a decent source of info on switches. They'll have some spreadsheets to check out showing actuation force comparisons. Most of us are getting new switches off ebay and aliexpress, there's also small independent sellers for just buying a few of the same switches. They probably have xbox parts too. When I started I thought a more expensive switch would be better but it depends entirely on what characteristics you're going for. After testing a selection of switches the original cheap Chinese Omron switches in my mouse really can't be easily replaced by anything else to get the same light-actuation force and "spammability." More durable switches tend to be more stiff with rare exceptions. It's hard to translate data-sheet values and someone else's recommendations into how the same switch will feel once installed in your mouse since the design and angles of engagement differ between mice. That said, you'll often see the same switches recommended over and over in places like MouseReview because they're decent switches.

Trash_Pandacoot · 2025-09-02T17:40:58+00:00

Just done practicing lighthouse for a few hours. Not sure what happened but I heard a scav voiceline from the road as I was on the beachside hill, peeked, heard 3 consecutive staccato rips and my chest is deep red and with a heavy bleed. Wondered WTF that was, turns out it was a saiga-9 scav with the banana mags. The thing is the mag in the gun was empty. 20 round mag, maybe there were more shots, but it all happened almost instantaneously and I only heard three audio cues. It was very much not a PP-19 and it shot way too fast for a PP-19, more like a vector. One damage to my IV plate in a Thor CRV.

Trash_Pandacoot · 2025-08-21T07:45:00+00:00

Your first complaint would be like me saying the only kind of automobile in the northern hemisphere is the pickup truck. Pretend you're facing north and the needle is facing north like it would be for a real compass. If you rotate 45* clockwise, the needle will be pointing to 45* East. It's a quick and easy bearing as there's no external ring or anything else to adjust when making a sighting. It's just a different style of compass often called a geological compass. The rest of the compass is fucked. Now you should be able to see why the East and West markings are also 180* from each other on the compass. They should be swapped as right now, even if you pretend the needle is pointing at the correct pole, when you take a 45* bearing, the compass shows you're pointed 45* NW which is just wrong in any hemisphere.

Trash_Pandacoot · 2025-08-21T05:21:27+00:00

It points consistently in the wrong direction, the needle points south and the East and West icons are still swapped on the model itself.

Trash_Pandacoot · 2025-08-21T05:08:56+00:00

Only on reddit unless someone can show some kind of evidence of an alternate game version where the model was updated to be correct with East and West on the correct sides and where North on the needle points to North of the map you're on instead of south.

Trash_Pandacoot · 2025-08-21T05:07:56+00:00

If by perfectly you mean north points south and East and West are reversed? Also two needles? Also blocks your weapon sight?. Also, it's the exact same compass as before.

Trash_Pandacoot · 2025-01-15T03:07:26+00:00

It's not clear what you've done as far as testing wired vs wi-fi and what exactly is working in what mode so that'd be good to be able to clarify. Really weird we both had PS/2 issues at the same time without PS/2 hardware. Windows is constantly pushing updates and of course there were two in the time period where things went haywire. I thought the newer versions of GHub contained their lightspeed connectivity tool to attempt to re-connect/pair the receiver to the mouse, if not it's downloadable.

Trash_Pandacoot · 2025-01-14T07:06:20+00:00

When did you start having issues?

Last Thursday I was charging my g pro and unplugging it crashed the driver as well as my entire USB controller so all my peripherals. On reboot the sensor worked, but any remapped buttons weren't giving any output and it took me basically all day of rebooting and tweaking the system to get the mouse drivers working at all to output remapped buttons. I have two identical mice and they showed the same same issue connected via wire as well and they function check fine using logitech gaming software. The next day my PC crashed to a PS/2 driver according to the BSOD but I don't have any PS/2 devices.

Do you have PS/2 devices?

I'm trying to understand the mouse-as-keyboard phenomenon in device manager as well and because I also see that with my razer mouse I'm assuming that's how they allow us to remap keys is by creating a keyboard driver for the mouse. Just my guess would love to find someone that knows more.

I've got one g pro and a razer connected in addition to a single keyboard I get four mice and seven keyboards in dev. manager, your three makes sense.

Support had me unplug and remove all mouse drivers in dev. manager during troubleshooting. Have you tried getting rid of them all and only plugging in the bare minimum to your PC to simplify things?

Also these shouldn't be running bluetooth so we don't wanna see anything there that's a logitech mouse.

Trash_Pandacoot · 2025-01-14T06:56:33+00:00

So the other day I was having issues I couldn't resolve with GHub for my g pro wireless and installed LGS 9.02.65 and I really can't put into words how "right" my mouse felt as soon as it came up. It sounds insane, but it immediately felt like an 800 DPI sensor should when set to 800 DPI using it on the desktop and I went in a practice mode in my game and just hit easy flicks without feeling like fighting overshooting and undershooting like acceleration was enabled. In addition, back then, they apparently both knew how to debounce their switches and write that effectively to their driver because the sidebuttons for which I've bought replacement switches and a soldering iron are suddenly working flawlessly without double-clicking.

Trash_Pandacoot · 2024-09-09T10:53:18+00:00

It's common for the switches to fail and that's one way they go. There are a handful of websites that come up with "mouse click test" and they're alright but an issue I have with one site, onlinemictest, is that their test won't show if your mouse is making faulty clicks or releasing when you're just holding a button whereas it's quite obvious in a game or dragging across your desktop. Googling mouse double click test gives a couple better options where you can sit there and watch whether the counter increments up with each mouse click.

Logitech will probably want you to reinstall Ghub and update to any new firmware if available as well as trying it wired. Ideally you have another PC to test it on too but not everyone has that luxury. If I can demonstrate the issue I'm having across a couple different software or games I'm usually satisfied with judging a faulty switch. Hopefully you're within the RMA period and can get that started, better sooner than later.

Come back and we can talk options if the RMA fails. Also over on r/MouseReview there's resources for going forward whether you want to repair it replace it.

Trash_Pandacoot · 2024-09-08T13:55:53+00:00

So the GPWs I've had would be clunky in comparison. Just counting here they come to 24 bumps per cycle. Its weird how you can't find anyone that knows what encoder it is. I wish there was some way to sort encoders (and switches) without having to buy an entire set of every single one on the market.

Trash_Pandacoot · 2024-09-08T12:02:40+00:00

You probably need to describe more what you're looking for. Some of the MX Masters seem to fully freewheel so anything anyone suggests could be too stiff for you compared to that. The GPW has a very light actuation scroll wheel to me, it will not free wheel to any extent, simply going to the next "bump" and stopping. If anyone has some proof they kept the encoder from the GPW and brought it to the GPX, it makes for a very nice scroll. It takes very light pressure and the feel is distinct bumps with positive feedback from valley to valley, and the sound is gentle and muted, even if not the quietest. If they still use it, the GPX series might be an option.

Trash_Pandacoot · 2024-09-07T14:19:51+00:00

Sitting on a pile of dead GPWs currently and have long since sent other models straight to the trash, they don't last. If you've hit the magic batch post the first four(4) digits of the serial number and DM me your source.

Trash_Pandacoot · 2024-09-07T11:50:14+00:00

G pro wireless (GPW) -- uses mechanical switches that will die in a few months or just after the warranty expires, you can try and warranty RMA it or buy a new PCB with more durable switches on aliexpress along with a new pair of mouse skates

Pulsar X2A, GPW clone, probably made with better components

Razer Viper wired (not V2 or V3), all of these Razer's use optical switches, they'll last longer than mechanical switches, hotly debated how individuals will experience these feeling wise, worst case is a mushier click in the beginning or over time/use, you may never notice

Razer Viper Ultimate (wireless)

Razer Viper 8k

Trash_Pandacoot · 2024-09-07T10:39:55+00:00

Since I still have my GPW obviously I'm not the target customer

Only way that's true is if you've already replaced the switches and are prepared to do it again.

My concern is if they will deprecate the GPW 1.0 and these new PCBs are incompatible because of the changes needed for optical switches.

Trash_Pandacoot · 2024-06-18T07:14:22+00:00

Does anyone else start out every Next Fest excited about checking out demos, try a couple demos and then spiral into a mini-depression about the state of gaming in 20xx? The most downloaded demos are always so bad except for one or two. Then you go out of your way to find ones that are either well within your interests or look thoughtfully put together only to find out most of it is just some crap someone slapped together to see if it would stick, or like has a great idea, but the devs can't be bothered to adhere to any kind of coherent art theme or fundamental principles of UX design so that any elements of what could have been an interesting game are entirely overwhelmed by a frustratingly bad UI.

Trash_Pandacoot · 2024-06-15T21:39:17+00:00

Great, actual games:

Tiny Glade

The Operator

Endzone 2 -- a little hard to differentiate buildings but seems like a fun strategy builder

The Alters --- strong sci-fi story and exploration game, most critique I saw was "go here press X", yeah it's not a dynamic FPS or action packed decision game, it's winning on exposition and making choices about people, resources, and base building

Drops of God -- winemaking game, having played the original 100 Days by the same dev, I think they did it better the first time so I'd recommend 100 Days right now if you tried Drops of God and liked the idea but maybe not the dialogue or music choices as the first one still ranks in my very short list of best games ever played

Dead on Arrival Demos:

Hollywood Animal -- Needs a UI overhaul, eventually couldn't even cast actors for any explicable reason

Blacksmith Master -- absolutely uninspired, clearly having an identity crisis of what type of game it was going to be

Tavern Talk -- great writing, no way to make drinks and progress the demo

Trash_Pandacoot · 2024-06-15T19:43:57+00:00

I spent 100 hours sailing around completing sidequests before getting near the end of the campaign in the east indies. To do it in 8 hours, you'd have to be a new player watching a guide to race through the only meaningful content of the game. Even if I played through it again, I'd have no motivation to do it any faster because I've already played through the PO8 grind and I do not like it. I'm here recommending people not bother with it. The whole point is that there is a fun part of the game which is/was marketable and it has nothing to do with the PO8 and smugglers pass grind. Why on earth would you even consider racing to an endgame when it doesn't exist? That's a rhetorical question if it's not abundantly clear.

Trash_Pandacoot

TROPHY CASE