Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations ("The Harpoon that Never Was")

Looks cool, love the idea of more sub focused missions.

Can we scroll the map smoothly yet? :)

That is coming too, just not as soon.

The scenarios of The Silent Service - Part 1: www.warfaresims.com/?p=4701

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Looking forward to this!

The Silent Service rises from the depths on March 1st

Launch trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wikzTukjK4o

That was a good episode. But it was kind of a funny place to draw the line at something being “realistic” or not, simply because what you’re doing in the game would ordinarily be done by dozens (or hundreds) of others in real life. The game is attempting to realistically model the elements of your forces - do your Tomcats engage a MiG the way they did in Top Gun? - it isn’t a command sim where you sit at a desk and get reports from people on what is happening.

There were some interesting comments about this on our own forum: http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=4437295

Typical responses that anyone who does not enjoy a complex system simulation must just be dumb.

RTFM or GTFO!

That seemed to be the attitude there anyway. But then I saw that some of the game supporters acknowledged that the documentation had some problems. So, they want you to read something that may not help you?

Tom Mc

i think you guys had a very valid point that CMNAO lacks direction. that is criticism that should not detract from the games’ value. its the nature of the beast. DCS and ArmA show the same lack of direction.

This thing grew organically it seems, unlike an authored game that got built by an author.

Much like some other simulation sandboxes, the thing itself isnt a game, but a world where games can happen. Like you guys said in the cast, much of the onus of game design such as pacing and guidance lies with the scenario designer.

I think the lack of direction is something that can decrease the game’s value for me. Michael made a great comment that CMANO lacks just about everything I value in a game: focus, elegance, design direction, etc. That doesn’t make it bad. But it certainly means I’m unlikely to enjoy it. The dumb thing is when this is interpreted as a desire to be “spoon-fed” or an inability to engage with the game. You can only comment on a game from your own perspective. You might as well yell at me for liking Alban Berg more than Kurt Weill.

To each their own I guess.

You added to the value of the game by looking critically at it. Showing a different,intelligently articulated perspective on it. And I thank you for that. Some kids dont see that, to them a critical look detracts perceived value. Dumb kids, fuck 'em, educate 'em or just ignore 'em. :P

That said, there’s plenty spoonfeeding to be had in CMNAO. Some of the tutorial scenario sets are pretty damn good at that.

The scenarios of The Silent Service - Part 2: http://www.warfaresims.com/?p=4718

I find it hard to believe when grognards take a shit all over CMANO for any reason. It’s the best version of computer Harpoon ever. I would have sold body parts to have had something like this when I was a kid

I got triggered around the halfway mark of that Three Moves Ahead podcast where someone remarked that you couldn’t use something like CMANO to accurately model how well a 5th generation fighter like the F-35 would perform in a given scenario. A lot of the how to, button pushing aspects of 5th generation fighter systems will be off limits to the public for a very long time, but as Leonardo da Vinci once said, Son, you can’t classify physics. With the laws of physics you can model radio waves and radar cross section to see how close an F-35 can get to an S-300 before it’s detected. With a platform like CMNAO you don’t need to model such minutia like what does OBS button 12 do in the F-35’s stores management page like you would if you were making a study sim for DCS. Dimitris could better expound on this I’m sure.

As an aside, I would be surprised if any of us lives to see the day of an F-22 or F-35 study sim. A lot of the stuff we played in the Microprose and Jane’s days were based on planes that were conceptualized in the 60s and produced throughout the 70s and 80s. The same applies today with DCS study planes and Falcon 4 BMS. Anytime someone asks the DCS or Falcon 4 BMS devs if we’ll ever see AESA radar upgrades for the F-15 and F-16, the answer is always no because there’s no publicly available documents detailing the modes and sub modes of those radar sets.

I bet Robert Shaw’s Fighter Combat: Tactics and Maneuvering is hopelessly out of date when it comes to BVR tactics of the Raptor. Someone in the CMNAO forums linked to video of a Raptor pilot comparing 4th generation vs 5th generation fighter tactics the take away was that there was a huge paradigm shift between 4th and 5th gen fighter tactics. Speed is life applied to 4th gen and prior fighters, but with Raptor’s and Lightning II’s, information trumped speed. The sharing of data between platforms, low observability, seeing your target well before he can see you, changed everything. I wish I could find that video because it was damn interesting and gave me a new appreciation for the F-22 and F-35.

We won’t know until we fight a symmetrical conflict using 5th gen fighters. It reminds me of the early 50’s, when everyone was saying how IR and RH missiles made dogfighting (e.g. Shaw) obsolete… and it kind of didn’t turn out that way.

So I’ll hold my opinion on how obsolete lead and lag turns are until the wonder days of “see an enemy, kill an enemy” are proven for the 5th gen fighters

It reminds you of the early 1950’s? Dude, you’re a lot older than I thought!

Reminds me of when I played Falcon 3.0 with a friend. I was always telling him, Come on. Head to head, Winchester. Let’s see who the better pilot is. And he always bitched that it wasn’t realistic. That’s not what they do now!

I tore him up in knife fights.

I think unless a way is found to negate head on missile shots, the era of the merge is over. All too often it results in mutual destruction. Theres just no avoiding those monsters.