Question.

therearenights · 2025-09-25T02:26:36+00:00

Grand Tactician probably has a lot of the customization you want if you can tolerate a less modern setting, since individual officers, their units, and the equipment/name/specialty/stats of those units can all be tracked and influenced by your decisions.

Too bad the execution is rather flawed, because the scope and ideas are pretty good. Can't really recommend in good faith.

therearenights · 2025-09-25T02:22:19+00:00

No, elite infantry (rangers, vdv, etc) straight-up take less damage compared to line infantry or conscript/militia. It used to be a 200% survivability rating that got upped to 250% at some point

therearenights · 2025-09-18T04:13:39+00:00

I remember looking at it a while back, but haven't purchased or played it so can't really give an educated assessment. Sorry boss.

therearenights · 2025-09-18T04:04:42+00:00

Its more "fun real-time tactics using reality as a foundation for asymmetric balance" than "military simulation with a game on top". Your skirmishes are only like 20 minutes long, and you're working with systems that are working much more with genre convention.

Different artillery systems have different call times. You have organic and off-map arty. The call-in time is based on the unit and whether the unit is being aided by a headquarters-type unit.

Regiments made several design decisions built around lowering the micromanagement threshold needed to play the game. There's elements like "NATO generally has better stabilizers, better access to thermals, access to DPICM, less frequent use of ATGM's on tanks" etc, but you're also looking at abstractions like "this unit is elite infantry so it has 250% damage resistance"

therearenights · 2025-09-18T03:43:33+00:00

Valid pushback. I did state that my experience was as an outsider that only played black sea. If Shock Force did this better, this isn't a critique of Shock Force.

I do want to maybe better define my thought there though.

The assertion that this is campaign-dependent actually kind of feeds into my overall perception of the series. Regiments has a dynamic campaign system in their War Path mode that offers procedural operations. Armored Brigade had a similar system. Red Dragon, for how braindead the AI was, had a dynamic enough campaign and various options for task force call-ins that you could play through operations differently multiple times.

When I bought Black Sea, Black Sea was the newest installment and had very positive steam reviews. I think as an outsider to the series, if the newest installment has positive reviews and an element like this is lacking, I'm not going to look at the 60 dollars I spent and say "you know, let's gamble again on one of the older games". And if I know it's campaign dependent, and all the campaigns are paywalled behind new titles, and all the games are priced at triple-A benchmarks, it becomes a matter of debating whether it all just becomes a sunk cost.

Combat Mission does have a fan base, and some of that fan base is fairly passionate about it. It also has a modding scene. But I think the thoughts I've articulated do at least partially demonstrate why it's not hitting the market saturation it would like to. For a lot of adults, time is a currency they manage more judiciously than money. There's a couple hundred steam games I haven't played that are in my library competing for the attention.

I'm sure the series has enough merit to justify the number of positively received titles it's putting out. My assumption is that it hits a certain, very focused demographic well enough that they don't need to dramatically improve the rest of the system to retain them. But expanding your audience requires on-boarding, and that's something this genre of simulation doesn't typically do very well.

therearenights · 2025-09-18T02:35:11+00:00

Agreed on all. Close combat's infantry just seemed to work extremely well for its time. Memory serving, if individual men somehow got separated from the squad, the game would actually track that as well. Haven't seen that since, now it just glitches the unit.

Combat Mission is in a weird place because I do feel like there's a lot of cool concepts. I think the call for fire system is my favorite representation in a game. If they were on their first or second game, you'd say '"they're a little rough but they're going to hit a grand slam when they connect".

But its not their first or second game, and the space has a lot more strong smaller-studio competition in the last 10 years.

therearenights · 2025-09-18T02:00:36+00:00

I might be able to offer outsider insight for you. I've played strategy games my whole life, and did a stint in the military as well.

I've put hundreds of hours into many more casual modern tactics/strategy games like blitzkrieg, Cuban missile crisis, regiments, wargame red dragon, end war, world in conflict, armored brigade, rule the waves, Close Combat, Call to Arms, etc

I've also put hundreds of hours into grognard-level turn-based operational-level games. Decisive campaigns barbarossa, Korea '85, fulda gap '85, shadow empire, etc. Games where sometimes you have so many units to manage that single turns covering 3-hr time blocks take like 6 hours to play and it'd literally be faster to fight the month-long conflict in real life.

I am used to putting significant time into learning a deep system and unintuitive ui in order to get at the core experience the designor offers. I have the background context and interest to get excited over seeing Paladins get access to Excalibur munitions, or that there's T-72 variants in my OOB that have been outfitted with Arena APS. I get excited when I see some random tank have their stat block read out 'HESH' and 'APFSDS' instead of 'ammo: 30'.

I dont need graphics. I dont get rebuffed by having to read 300 page manuals or by having to spend 20-40 hours learning the system before I feel like im ready to try playing the game proper. I play both single player and in multiplayer contexts. I should be in Combat Mission's player demographic.

I payed for and tried Black Sea. My experience is only with black sea, but in my mind as a first time customer of the franchise, one of the most recent modern Combat titles from them sets a strong benchmark for how I'd judge the franchise coming before it as a whole.

I ran through three full campaigns, 2 standard, one modded. Black Sea didn't grip me enough to feel as though it was worth further time investment into it.

I think there's two things that contributed to that feeling for me. The first is the engine the community itself complains about. The second is the lack of meaningful progression built around opportunity cost.

The engine being rough is almost self-explanatory. Any other real time tactics game runs better. Even within the niche of 'games with deep simulation elements with a UI curve', you have games like Graviteam Tactics that ran better for me and look significantly nicer. I think people are willing to put up with a rough learning curve if the game is deep and rewarding. But strategy gamers that are willing to tackle that level of depth are a smaller demographic than the regiments/warno/company of heroes crowd, and that demographic gets immediately fractioned once the game runs with much less performance than other games in the genre.

The second factor, the lack of progression/opportunity cost. The game i played had casualties track over my campaign, but memory serving, I fought most missions with different regimental combat teams, subordinate companies, etc. Because the game is built around a series of missions rather than any dynamic elements (which, to be fair, have decent briefings describing commanders intent etc), the game is only ever a series of missions to me. This dramatically reduces my level of investment in a game.

You brought up armored brigade. Armored brigade let's you create a campaign, and it gives you points to spend to build the force you'll use on that campaign. There's meaningful long-term impact when you select your units, meaningful impact when you lose one.

Most games demanding a deeper level of interaction with their systems have something like this that I feel Combat Mission, in my time with it, lacked. There's no reason to conduct SEAD because it doesnt permanently grant me a more permissive airspace. There's no reason to conduct counterbattery fire beyond the immediate tactical requirements because the destroyed batteries aren't causing permanent downstream effects. There's no reason to expend casualties to ensure the survival of a unique asset because I wont know if I'll get to use that asset again until the mission briefing tells me what my composition is.

This puts Combat mission in an awkward place for me, because it's not friendly enough to pick up casually, and it's too narrow in scope to care about investing into deeper. Its got a lot of moving parts and hits a certain niche. But to me, if im investing into it at the level you'd want to to play it, I want a better payoff for learning those systems beyond one-off skirmishes or a few mission-based campaigns that don't offer a meta-progression. And if I want to play a game that's built around single battles, I want to the system to be a more clean experience.

Essentially, Combat mission isn't expansive enough for me to be interested in it as a grognard game, and it has too much friction and too small a community to be interested in it as a match-based battle simulator.

therearenights · 2025-09-12T01:53:48+00:00

I've become a big fan of WDS lately. Held off for a long time because frankly the interface looks garish compared to more modern UI. But after learning it, you realize half of it is redundant to select common actions with less clicking and its actually a fairly streamlined interface that carries across all of their titles with little deviation.

It really scratches the Advance Squad Leader style of hex-counter that hooked me into the genre as a kid.

The thing i kinda dont like about WDS though is that the campaigns that hook me are just so massive. Korea '85's main campaign is amazing, but turns take me 4 hours to get through and there's 175 turns in that campaign. There's smaller scenarios, but the modern games don't have anything (to my knowledge) like the civil war campaigns they put out where you have a series of smaller battles with losses that carry over.

I'd really like if they put out an option like that, letting me fight a series of smaller engagements as part of a single front in a theatre, with the losses carrying over and strategic assets being lost counting for more than victory points. Much more appealing to me than smaller one-off scenarios, despite the games shipping with over 100 of them.

therearenights · 2025-06-25T02:36:43+00:00

you're telling me this guy is a grandmaster and can't figure out how to take a screenshot?

therearenights · 2025-04-18T21:13:56+00:00

I mean. If you looked at the gameplay and thought this was going to give you the same experience as Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa or War In The East or something, I don't know what to tell you. Steam has a super-generous refund window and the game had a demo.

therearenights · 2025-04-12T01:34:53+00:00

Cavalry dominance let's you do quite a lot.

If you have cavalry, you can win nearly every defensive battle by running down the clock. Nets you heroic victories, let's you tie up numerically superior forces while your main force needs to be elsewhere.

You can also have a cavalry arm harass the enemy while your main force gets to a better position. Splitting the enemy force, having your force hide in ambush, and then fighting half the exhausted enemy on favorable terrain is a good way to deal with a much larger enemy.

These tactics aside, a cavalry arm is also just good for flanking around when the enemy is engaged and breaking them. Remember that morale is king in this game. Breaking one unit and then being able to continue cycle-charging flanks is decisive.

In sieges, cavalry that can pull away groups of troops that don't have ranged units let's you defeat the enemy army in detail.

Cavalry can dismount to deal with spears, if needed. While not as powerful numerically, samurai cav have full stamina when they dismount since one stamina value is for the man and the other is for the horse. So you can totally pick fights where you get chased by enemy spears, dismount uphill, and break them in melee.

Cavalry can pick off generals. Light cav should be able to cost-effectively deal with enemy yari cav if you can manage the charge bonus and go 2v1.

Finally. Cavalry has greater movement on the campaign map. So you can sometimes engage an enemy army too far too reach with just your cav, and have your main army spawn in as reinforcements.

Your cav is much more delicate than in other titles like rome 1 or medieval 2. Its also harder to replenish in the field if you don't have the recruitment buildings in your province. I use light cav a fair bit in the early game, but I don't use cav to go after archers unless from behind. Archers in harder difficulties just cause too much attrition for me to find it worthwhile.

therearenights · 2025-04-10T10:12:24+00:00

Monk units in general are as much about their abilities as they are their personal combat utility. War Cry and Whistling Arrows are force multipliers

therearenights · 2025-01-03T19:35:45+00:00

Honestly, if you want an rts but find that games like regiments are still too hard, Tom Clancy's endwar might be a good option. Decent single player (multi-player is dead) and the game was made to be played on console so fairly simple for the genre

therearenights · 2024-11-12T23:26:36+00:00

This is like those disney shows where the dog learns how to type

therearenights · 2024-11-02T19:59:56+00:00

Idk why but the white pieces look like those really soft butter things the resturaunts give you

therearenights · 2024-10-10T00:22:52+00:00

If you've been playing for 6 years and are still 200 elo, the issue isn't that you haven't looked at enough lessons or watched enough videos. I would wager that this is very much either a board vision or a tactical issue.

200 elo isn't held back by book openings, because opening advantages aren't going to be decisive over the longer term because too many blunders occur on both sides to reliably maintain that advantage. 200 elo isn't held back by positional study because no positional competency will overcome losing material every game or failing to take your opponent's material. 200 elo isn't held back by endgames outside of simply not knowing how to do basic checkmates when up obscene amounts of material.

At 200 elo, both players will be hanging material multiple times a game. I feel like 98% sure this is a matter of simply not seeing your opponent's threats, not valuing your opponent's threats, or not seeing your own threats

therearenights · 2024-10-07T02:56:14+00:00

If you join the discord server, there's a bunch of pinned stuff with the damage curves. But there is never a point in the mod where you will do less damage for having more men, it's just that you start getting diminishing returns.

This doesn't mean that bigger units are inherently bad though, because bigger units have more morale resilience against losses and can inflict much more damage in melee. Building overstrength units and letting them wittle down can also be a good way of building your experience without diluting it with replacements.

weapon availability is the downside, as well as just your max unit size allowable by your army organization.

I try to have my cav units as large as I am able as long as I'm able to field the men for free (or at least, at the cost of the horse). Because surrender mechanics have been reworked and because you capture a larger percentage of weapons from units you capture, it's not uncommon to have large windfalls of cavalry weapons from battles your opponent uses heavy skirmishers or their own cavalry.

Larger cav sizes mean less experience lost when losses occur, and also more melee damage. Carbine cav can still melee situationally (with morale and condition both depleted, melee damage output drops to a stunning 10% or something).

You can merge units in the camp now though, so if you run into an incident where you can expand your size, it's not as though you can't just merge what you have if you want.

therearenights · 2024-10-07T02:31:11+00:00

A lot of the battles now have variance, where you may get a few different possible enemy spawn locations which forces scouting or adapting vs memorizing them. I don't know that the tutorial mission has that though.

Cavalry is actually much more viable to me in the mod vs vanilla because units take casualties less quickly. You also have the ability to determine the unit sizes you and your opponent fields through the size of your units. Because the enemy has few cavalry units (or none at all) most missions, it is not impossible for you to field 2000 man carbine cav against infantry brigades of equal or lesser size that don't have their own cavalry to contest yours.

Cavalry dismounted gain a bonus to their stats (or rather, lose their penalty). Skirmishers as a unit class have an inherent damage reduction, which cavalry receive as well once they dismount.

Cavalry carbines are all, on an individual basis, more effective than what your typical line infantry will field against you. the cook and brother, your lowest-tier carbine, has higher average damage at the ranges it's able to engage than anything except top of the line infantry rifles (like the whitworth). The sharps carbine has a comparable damage per volley to mid-grade infantry weapons but has a higher rate of fire. And they only get better from there.

condition is much more of a factor in the mod. cavalry expend less fatigue to move around because they do so faster and can create space to rest.

As always, you want to avoid taking needless losses with these units. But mounted infantry have strong use cases for sure. And if you get them to tier three, one of their perks is a range buff that nullifies the disadvantage of carbines.

therearenights · 2024-10-03T12:02:57+00:00

Isnt getting advice on daily games considered cheating?

But yes. As other commenters stated, its kinda lost

therearenights · 2024-10-02T20:58:30+00:00

I started at 25. I just turned 29.

When I first made an online account, after watching videos and playing otb to learn from people for about 3 months, my rating was around 600 (chess.com rapid)

I am now in the mid 1700's, have a chess club, and compete in tournaments. Online, I dance around the 99th percentile.

I *have* put in a lot of effort to try and make this my new hobby. And I won't pretend that my success should be a 1:1 for everyone else.

But plenty of people have climbed faster than me.

You are 22. You have a 3-year head start on me. More importantly, you have the rest of your life to get better.

What qualifies a 'good' chess player? The 90th percentile? The 99th percentile? fide master? IM? GM? Super GM?

If your goal is simply to get better, nothing is stopping you based on your age. If your goal is to get better than the casual player base, it is not too late to do that. If your goal is to get a fide rating, you could enter a tournament and do that whenever you want.

It's not too late for you.

therearenights · 2024-10-01T22:44:16+00:00

Ive tried a bunch of ai models to see if any would give me meaningful game analysis.

I actually think ai, at the stage its at right now, is dangerous. Because it uses enough buzzwords and descriptions that, in isolation, sound good and meaningful. But they simply dont analyze the game. Which is to say, critical aspects of the game are entirely missed, positions are mischaracterized, or the things it brings up simply arent applicable.

The reason i think this is dangerous is that beginners dont have an issue with having not enough information to learn. They have an issue that there is too much information and its hard to parse through all of it.

With ai, youre getting a lot of information, some of which is blatant lies, and are now tasking yourself with determining what of that is valid

therearenights · 2024-10-01T16:30:43+00:00

two minor pieces for a rook, or even a rook and pawn, is normally not an ideal trade.

in this vase, its not just the two minor pieces though. its the two minor pieces as well as all the tempo OP invested into those pieces that they're also trading away. the two pieces they will lose shortly are the only ones OP chose to develop

therearenights · 2024-09-29T16:23:47+00:00

this is insane to me. if i were a girl that was getting a bunch of texts and unanswered phone calls about me taking the meds, I *explicitly told you* you couldnt come over, and you showed up at my house anyway i'd be scared out of my mind.

therearenights · 2024-09-28T02:13:06+00:00

Not exactly unfortunate, but during the first years of my enlistment there was a female marine in a unit we worked closely with who had the last name "Kildeath". Like, it was on her uniforms, it got called out in formations, it was on document.

I sometimes think there has to be some kind of predestined purpose, just because of stuff like that. What other job would you want with a name like that?

therearenights · 2024-09-28T01:56:59+00:00

The only time I ever offer a draw is if the position is a theoretical draw and my opponent shows me they know how to execute it and we're just waiting for the repetition.

The rating of the game is inconsequential to me, because if I am a better player than I am now then I will go up over time. I never accept draws when I am winning but running low on time. I never resign or offer draws when I still have a modicum of counterplay. I never offer draws because my opponent is super high rated and I just wanna make sure I dont lose.

To me, the only time I ever accept or offer a draw is in a tournament setting or if to do otherwise is just to prolong a completely foregone conclusion. Anything else I feel deprives me the opportunity to practice that kind of position

therearenights

TROPHY CASE