Thoughts so far...

[Leutnant_von_Hausman]

Just finished the Vietnamese Campaign on hard, and have played some of the adversarial MP games too. Just wanted to record my thoughts:

i) Helicopters, at least in first mission, are silent. Is extremely odd, and pretty annoying.
ii) Mission 1, and the mission involving the patrol boat, are utter grind-fest pains to complete. I've done them both, but they're just horrible. (Spoiler: easiest way to deal with copters in mission 1 is to get to the unmanned guard tower NW of helos, and get on the machine gun. It kills them in like 3-5 hits).

iii) Adversarial MP is pretty horrible at the moment - North Vietnamese plays like stripped-down Russians, or maybe Japs. Was expecting far more ambush/stealth options, laying booby traps etc. On a related, buggy note: all the troop types in the English version are displayed as something akin to ???vietcong???. I don't know why.

iv) The defense mission is way too easy.

v) In the final North Vietnamese mission, it would be great if you could plant all dynamites and have them explode, as in that first stealth mission in MoW. I ended up running around AFTERWARDS with the dynamite, but it would have been far cooler to sneak up behind tanks and blow them up with it.

vi) Knife seems silent only in some situations (useless to kill officers in mission 5, as others hear, set off alarm - in fact best way for this is silenced AK, which goes against everything from MoW1).

vii) I wish we could control helicopters, and where's the NAPALM?!? Helicopter and jet call-ins in multiplayer would be a great addition, would add to fun, and probably not upset balance too too much if priced correctly (certainly not in comparison to officer arty).

Missions overall don't seem that short, but some are arbitrarily long because they are an annoying grind.

viii) Multiplayer is rife with connectivity issues.

ix) If you're going to force so many stealth missions at me, giving me a guy with an MG and a guy with an AK is totally pointless, as I will (and did) never use them. Which means I'm basically using two guys (sniper, and silenced AK for when I need it). Potentially, one character could carry both. This is supposed to be a strategy game, not an FPS.

x) Your sniper is RUBBISH, he never hit anything, unaided. And often just fires without aiming, seemingly randomly.

xi) Turning off the ability to highlight characters in such dense jungle terrain is incredibly annoying, especially as the men are still represented on the radar. I STILL can't see them, after several minutes of looking, even though I know they are there. This is just annoying. Yes, their camoflage is good. You made your point. Now let me highlight them damn it! Disabling the button's effects are just lame.

xii) Cameras et. al don't work well inside - as a result, please stop putting bits in missions that require fiddly control in areas with roofs (i'm thinking particularly of the two officer objectives in mission 5).

xiii) My steam achivements aren't showing up when I go to "View Achievements" in Steam, nor are they displayed (except for the last one I earned) in the main steam page for the game. Possibly this is a steam issue, I don't know.

xiv) Could you please make it so that completing (or having completed) a mission on hard, you don't have to go back and do it on easy/normal to get respective medals? It seems counter-intuitive to have to.

xv) The rocket launchers provided really struggle to penetrate the Chaffe, so the mission on the bridge is rendered extremely hard, even when firing at engine (engine damaged/turret damaged results are common, but that doesnt seem to do anything). I actually ended up killing crew of second one, when they came out to repair broken track, because i simply couldnt destroy it.

EDIT:

I've just begun playing the first US mission, and this is SO MUCH BETTER than any vietcong mission. It would also be a FAR better mission to start with. I dunno if anyone is listening, but seriously, CHANGE THE ORDER OF THE CAMPAIGNS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, BECAUSE YOU WON'T PUT SO MANY PLAYERS OFF.
Just a few examples of why it's better:
i) In Vietcong campaign I had no idea what booby traps looked like, so no idea what I was looking for. The first US mission shows some being built, and after that I was able to spot them. Until this point, I just suffered random deaths in the campaign.
ii) The first mission for Vietcong is pretty much: Do this, do this, now KILL EVERYONE. The first mission for US is far more awesome and tactical. Taking out the bunkers is just fun sauce, as is the counter-attack afterwards. Far more realistic, and what I imagine Vietnam was like (rather than 4 guys ramboing the entire US army) Yes, 8 men still kill loads, but it actually feels like proper squad combat now, rather than exploiting AI to win.
iii) Pace, amount of units, and annoying jungle cover are a lot lower in the first US mission.
iv) Far more of an idea what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and what it's in aid of.


Also, it's quite a minor point, but opening inventory, and then drag-dropping a knife just onto the ground kills the infantryman dropping the knife, presumably because it's counting the knife as thrown.

[Fred DM]

Originally Posted by Leutnant_von_Hausman

xiii) My steam achivements aren't showing up when I go to "View Achievements" in Steam, nor are they displayed (except for the last one I earned) in the main steam page for the game. Possibly this is a steam issue, I don't know.

the game has achievements?!? there's nothing on the Steam Store page...

[HotdogMan]

i totally agreed with everything you said, are they going to be updating this game to have MOW:AS quality models? Also, I did not like the way they were all Special Ops missions. Was like a 3rd person view of CoD:Blackops for me. Which had a terrible campaign IMO. I was expecting something like the movie Hamburger Hill, or We Were Soldiers. (I have also seen a few documentaries about Vietnam battles, so don't think I am only making movie references ) in these movies it is not about a 4 man team killing up to 100 or more enemy soldiers single handed, but rather 2 divisions fighting where there are 100's of soldiers at a time in the fight, like a lot of the original MOW campaigns.

[Sneaksie]

Leutnant_von_Hausman
Hello, what version of the game you're playing?
What sound card or buil-in sound chipset you're using? Developers are investigating the issue with helicopter sound loss and sound is OK on their PCs.

[reggs]

Ill have to go back and play the US campaign coop or something. I found the game pretty dissapointing and a far cry from what I was expecting from a war RTS.

I will never understand why they made it so you almost never get to order units and when you do it's few and far between. The game feels disjointed and barely playable. I beat the end of the third mission without even doing anything because most of the troops where controlled by the computer.

This will be the last game I ever preorder from this series.

[Leutnant_von_Hausman]

Hey Sneaksie:

I'll have to go back and check, because I think I may have heard copter sounds at other points, but not sure.

Soundcard: Creative X-Fi (generic one).

Version: Special edition

[Arjuna]

I also have silent helicopters, using a realtek audio chipset badged as creative x-fi. I'm using the steam regular edition.