Retro Concrete

How do you deliver it properly or release it at the right time? Are the LGBs actually making an effort to aim themselves toward the laser target? Or do you prefer to do it the good ol' "Well, if I'm moving this fast at this altitude, and my target is a certain distance away and traveling at a constant velocity, then..." method?

In response to Epyon's picture. Oh, yes, that occurance is such good fun. There's a single player mission that involves you gathering your tank crew that's at another base for an assault. I picked up my tank crew, and on my way out of the base, I made the fatal mistake of brushing against the metal guard tower. The tank made the obligatory metallic collision sound. I don't know exactly what happened after that, but the front end of the tank apparently raised itself for no reason along the guard tower, and the moment afterwards the tower was clipping right through the middle of the tank. Additionally, the tank was floating several meters in the air, as well as pivoting around it's new guard tower center. And it kept making that metallic collision sound over, and over, and over again, too! In Status Quo, I found the T-55 and made another fatal mistake of driving it too fast into a town. I was on a rampage, and I felt particularly angry towards a stationary tractor parked next to a farmhouse. I came in from an angle and sandwiched the tractor between my T-55 and the farmhouse. The tractor was smashed, but the T-55 somehow ran into clipping problems with the farmhouse and the tractor (which suddenly appeared right in the middle of the tank, again). In an instant, the T-55 was oh-so-irritatingly upside-down. If you looked from the driver's seat inside the tank, it was upside down. I ran my T-55 into a tractor, and somehow there was a clipping problem, and boom! I'm irritatingly stuck with an upside down tank. I had smashed a honkin' lot of cars on the island, and whenever I checked the map, my tank appeared as a red "enemy icon". Earlier, I was trying to ram a civillian truck driver, but I missed. The truck driver made every effort to avoid me (by swinging out of the way each time). Aces.

Is it the pilot AI that isn't hitting the target correctly, or is the problem within the laser-guided bombs themselves? Either way, it's quite a sight to see an A-10 drop a bomb "over" (where "over" means a good 200 meters off) where your "painting" while it's flying too low. What happens is that the too-low flying A-10 is caught in the large bomb blast, and the plane is destroyed (and the pilot is killed, evidently, as he doesn't eject). Anyways, the now-destroyed A-10 with its dead pilot does a lazy climb upwards as its smoking from the tail, and eventually plummets to the ground. Heck, I even just use the laser designator to watch inept AI pilots blow themselves out of the sky doing lazy upward loops.

A trigger? Don't you think a trigger that causes a BMP to suddenly know there's a problem from ACROSS the island a bit unrealistic? Honestly, what kind of trigger is that? That's even more ludicrous than the other AI soldiers not noticing the other dead bodies not more than few meters away, yet the noisy BMP suddenly does! And how can it be returning to base from a patrol and know the exact bush I'm lying down in? I've tried it from different spots in the base (different clusters of bushes), and as if right on que a minute after, it's "Hello, my good BMP! I see you've come to the exact bush I'm hiding in!" A trigger that causes the BMP to spontaneously know there's a problem in the base over a kilomter away is NOT a very good "trigger", nor is a very good "patrol". The trigger that is NEEDED is for the three OTHER soldiers in the base to wake up, after they see their comrades dead, or at least to look at the coding. Then again, there just might be an ESP Antenna "feature" on the BMP, and that the helmets the Soviet's wear are "too thick" to hear anything. Yes, very good features, indeed! No intention of fixing them, right?

Remember the mission where you had to destroy the three Shilkas on Kolgujev during the middle of the night? I had snuck into the first base and was hiding in a bush not more than ten meters from a T-72 crew. I shot the crew as well as two soldiers patrolling nearby. Now, across the base is the first Shilka you need to destroy, as well as its crew milling around a fire. Oddly enough, the crew continues to mill around with their weapons on their backs despite their being five dead soldiers in the base. Yeah, right, I suppose the answer is "Um...their helmets are, er, too thick, so they couldn't hear the rather loud dying screams of their comrades. Yeah, that's it! It's not unrealistic, it's a...feature! Also, we have no intention of fixing this." "What? Those five dead guys over there? Oh, heh, they were always playing dead with those bloody gaping wounds on their foreheads! No reason to worry, ace! We'll be just fine standing around a fire." So, while the Shilka crew mills around oblivious to the dead nearby, a I can hear a BMP rolling into the base about 1 minute after I killed the T-72 crew. Somehow, the BMP knows the exact bush I'm hiding in, and irritatingly parks itself right next to said bush. Why couldn't the Shilka crew get in their Shilka, and patrol around? I also knew that there were two other soldiers patrolling around in the base that I missed; why weren't they running around, looking for me? Wouldn't that tend to, well, make more sense? Yes, I'm sure that BMPs in 1985 had been equiped with new "Extra-Sensory Perception" antenna. Right. Over the idling of a BMP engine, as well as sitting IN the BMP, the crew instantly knows there is trouble within the base AND knows to park itself right next to the bush I'm hiding in? Well, I'm sure BIS has "No intention of fixing this'. Wouldn't it make more sense for the soldiers within the base to wake up after seeing five mysterious dead bodies of their comrades, and THEN a few minutes later they "call in" a BMP?

Like many other people who have played this game, you might've noticed that David Armstrong a) Has a distinctive voice of his own, and b) David Armstrong is NOT a black soldier. Yet whenever I use the radio to order my squad around, Armstrong's radio voice does NOT sound like him, but like that of a black soldier. Everyone else voice sounds fine. For example, Gastovski has an approriate voice, Sam Nichols sounds like an outrageous hick in is own way, etc. Example: "Hey, Sam, this should be pretty routine, right?" "Nothing's ever routine around here, meeyan!"