Russian Designers ? ?

[Skirmisher]

Originally Posted by Double_Deuce

Alot has to do with the level of detail. Most times it becomes overly complex as many of the harder core players want more detail which keeps their interest up BUT I believe also drives away the more casual players who just want to play and not have to spend several hours a week with planning, creating orders and coordinating with others on a strategic level. I also find you have players who end up playing the same people over an over especially if they have assigned units. That can also lead to boredom.

I think Red Snow's success also had something to do with the fact you were using SPWAW. I haven't figured out why, but ALOT of steel panthers players have a love affair with that version.
I never will. I don't forget so easy.

The major Matrix Games steel panthers failures. (Yup here we go again)

1) Steel Panthers:Modern Warfare. They proudly anounce this on thier website circa 2000, and within about 12 months pull the plug.

2) Steel Panthers:Moderna After thier SP:MW dibacle they anounce that they are going to re release Ija Vahra's SP3-Moderna
mod and greatly improve it. Soon afterwards they ran into "roadblocks" which obstructed them from finishing.

3) Combat Leader- This was to be the "Next Phase" of Steel Panthers gaming. This was actually being slated for a mid 2003 release date. Vebber and Heath just never got it together.
They talked about this game for years until finally failing to produce it.

Three strikes, Matrix is OUT!

If you look at say the blitz ladder,almost everybody plays or will play SPWAW or SPWAW H2H.

Now dispite my revultion for Matrix, the TCP\IP feature used to be nice. There was really nothing like playing online.
I haven't actually played online since SPWAW 4.5 (2001?) and SP3 Online 1.0 (2000)

Sorry about the rant.

[DRG]

Originally Posted by Skirmisher

I haven't figured out why, but ALOT of steel panthers players have a love affair with that version.
I never will.

If you do figure out why let me know. Early on I figured it was windows vs Dos thing . Later it seemed to be a strange affection for screwing the AI over more easily with the selective opfire or some deep seated belief that because armour is rated in mm instead of cm it's "more accurate" or maybe it's becasue Matrix was perceived to be a "big company" and we were just "part timers " but really...... IDK.

In the end though we set out in 1998 to improve the game and we're still at it and one way or the other SP "lives on" in both versions. "Something for everyone" I suppose.


Don

[EJ]

Don,
The only thing missing from Winspmbt and spww2 is being able to play it live over tcp\ip. Any chance of this happening in the future someday? All other things aside I like this game a lot and look forward to each and every patch. I own both cds and would buy them again....

[Imp]

If you do figure out why let me know. Early on I figured it was windows vs Dos thing . Later it seemed to be a strange affection for screwing the AI over more easily with the selective opfire or some deep seated belief that because armour is rated in mm instead of cm it's "more accurate" or maybe it's becasue Matrix was perceived to be a "big company" and we were just "part timers " but really...... IDK.

I suppose the armour in mm is more "atmospheric" bit daft with modern stuff mind. Plus you had to look at slope as was not worked out. The only other thing I can think of is again atmosphere not game play related is that it has a better sound map.
So I would say it appeals more to mainstream gamers except the graphics fail so go figure. Has rarity to but its so bad its a joke forget tanks one game bought 3 regular squads before all I could buy was SS & Paras
The only other thing I can think of is an English version OOB for WW2, have to admit playing a minor power you dont use often takes a while to see whats what & considered knoking up OOBs with Formations in English.

[DRG]

Here's what I don't understand about the "allure" of live on line play.

Even on this thread it was mentioned that getting players to commit to a PBEM is hard and a stock PBEM allows players to pick the time they have to play a turn. On line co-ordination would seem to me to be a few orders of magnitude more difficult to keep on track especially with a large game.

The lack of TCP/IP has really only been brought up a few times in all the years we've been doing this and by "few" I mean the two times it's been mentioned on this thread might make up 1/3 of the times I recal it being mentioned. From where I sit this doesn't seem to be a top issue with the majority of players

Don

[Imp]

Originally Posted by EJ

Don,
The only thing missing from Winspmbt and spww2 is being able to play it live over tcp\ip. Any chance of this happening in the future someday? All other things aside I like this game a lot and look forward to each and every patch. I own both cds and would buy them again....

Would you actually finnish a game then?

[DRG]

Originally Posted by Imp

The only other thing I can think of is an English version OOB for WW2, have to admit playing a minor power you dont use often takes a while to see whats what & considered knoking up OOBs with Formations in English.

That may be an example of adding more " historical accuracy " biting us on the bum. It was thought by some members of the team at that time that this would be a good way of adding "atmosphere" to the game. The theory was the players who would never play as Hungary for example wouldn't care and the ones that would play as Hungary would enjoy it.. We did switch over Hungary a few releases ago to all English formation names but left the unit names " Hungarian". AFAIK nobody, and I mean NOBODY ever noticed and if they did they didn't say a damn thing about it.

The issue if switching back to "All English" has been discussed internally a number of times but where to draw the line ? MOST people understand German military terms and abbreviations and I personally don't think changing JagdPz Zug/4 to TD Platoon/4 is going to win over new players ( most likely just piss off a lot of old ones, me included ) . We changed Hungary simply because it was so different and so difficult to understand at a glance ( and the restrictions we have to abide by in regard to name length means that we end up abbreviating things which makes them harder to understand for everyone ). Since we have had zero feedback on that change there has been no reason to further consider others. Admittedly it may not be clear just what "Sec Ametraldora" means when you are buying formations from the Republican Spanish OOB but clicking on it will show it's a combined MG and Infantry unit. That said I know changing ( at the least ) all formation names in the majority of the OOB's to English some people happy but IDK how many hard core " Spanish Civil War " gamers we'd annoy by changing it all to English who would feel we've " sold out" to make a few people who don't want to learn happy.

We've had these " On one hand ........and on the other hand " debates many times over the years and generally it stays the same because first off it's a mother of an amount of work to change over ( I know because I changed over the Hungarian OOB ) and second, for everyone we make "happy" do we make a long established player " unhappy ". However. If anyone can present us with evidence that the national naming issue is what's keeping players away from the game we certainly will consider change. ( I know Andy would be happy...... Like the TCP/IP issue it's not something I've heard from people as being the reason they don't play the game but then that's probably a discussion that would never occur on our forums since what we are dealing with is the committed player

Don

[Skirmisher]

Originally Posted by DRG

Here's what I don't understand about the "allure" of live on line play.

Even on this thread it was mentioned that getting players to commit to a PBEM is hard and a stock PBEM allows players to pick the time they have to play a turn. On line co-ordination would seem to me to be a few orders of magnitude more difficult to keep on track especially with a large game.

Don

I can totally understand this perspective. It would probably be very hard to find opponents that were willing to sit down for 3-6 hours and PLAY a TCP-IP game.

I ask people if they want to play SP3 Online and there's really NO interest.

I've even copied the CD several times and sent it out to some people,hoping to pick up a game. It hasn't happened.

[Mobhack]

Originally Posted by Skirmisher

I can totally understand this perspective. It would probably be very hard to find opponents that were willing to sit down for 3-6 hours and PLAY a TCP-IP game.

I ask people if they want to play SP3 Online and there's really NO interest.

I've even copied the CD several times and sent it out to some people,hoping to pick up a game. It hasn't happened.

Most players of these games live in different time zones. Even in the same time zone, some may work shifts etc.

So as well as getting someone to commit to probably a 4 or more hours solid chunk of time to play an involved game - you need to be on the same clock cycle. Or someone in say Finland has to play in his wee hours of the morning with his eyelids propped up by matchsticks against someone wide awake and fresh on the other side of the world.

PBEM totally rules out the problem of having to commit to any large single block of time, plus it completely removes the time zone problem.

Andy

[wulfir]

Originally Posted by Skirmisher

If you look at say the blitz ladder,almost everybody plays or will play SPWAW or SPWAW H2H.

You won't have any probs getting winSPWW2/MBT games on the Blitz, in fact game offers for SPWAW seems to have become rare.

I switched to WW2 back in 2003. At that time almost everbody at the Blitz assumed you wanted to play SPWAW, today people seem to more or less assume you want winSP.


SPWAW had a slight edge in eye-candy (building icons etc) back in the day and that's about it. SPWAW is also much much more arcade style and while some people might enjoy that I consider it a drawback... and SPH2H was created to remedy some of the failings of SPWAW.

Today, there's no doubt in my mind SPWAW has been eclipsed by winSPWW2.