C. Hecht wrote:
Is there any advancement of you character?
That you get quicker in loading or more steady when aiming?
Nope, this is a pure skill game. You lean how to shoot and melee. Generally practice improves your effectiveness considerably but only to a point.
The game is really about cooperative tactics. Officers have an important job in the game even on the skirmish level which is limited to 64 total players. Officers are armed with pistols and swords which makes them better meleers. A well coordinated force puts the rifleman in a double line if they need volume of fire or an open line if they are in a long term fire fight. They stay well behind the line an continually move about watching for flank attacks. They usually take out any lone wolf attacks or warn the line of a large flank attack.
If you have players who know what they are doing as officers you can take on a larger force that doesn't.
In the game all local orders are by voice (game has its own in game voice channel. It is localize and falls off with distance so an officer can only control a rather short piece of line. It has a text message system as well but I am not sure the enemy can't see it too. Although, I haven't checked into this. I know the keyboard commands for it include "Enter" for chat text, "comma" for global chat, and "Period" for Team Chat but they may not be fully implemented. Also, not sure what will happen if players start using TeamSpeak to coordinate actions across the field.
The game is intended to fight like historical. It has flag bearer's to act as focal points for large lines. For people who form "companies" which are the equivalent of guilds in other online games, they have non-commission officers who are suppose to act as line anchors on the flanks.
Also, the uniforms if you look in the pictures I have so far posted are very hard to tell apart. As you play it gets easier but just yesterday I got shot point blank by one of my own side. In spite of choosing the most "Yankee" looking uniform I could. Guy must have been color blind. But I did almost the same thing later in the day when I came on another Union soldier using on of the "green" uniforms that side has. Unfortunately for the quality of my shooting, I missed at 10 yards. Then I tried to bayonet him and missed too. He chewed me out for that. Asked why I could "see" his buckles which apparently are unique for that uniform. I didn't ruin his day by telling him if he keeps wearing that green uniform with out some "blue" people around he is going get shot every battle by his own side.
Embarrassing thing: The game messages only announce one kind of kill. When you shoot someone on your own team and does it globally so everyone knows how stupid you are.
They haven't brought the "drill fields" back but they are badly needed. You can't tell in game if you are hitting anything at 100 yards. At 10 to 20 you can see the person fall but at 100 you need to know whether you are sighted correctly and for that you need the drill field. Melee is also difficult to master. That is because you can't kill someone just because you have a bayonet. You have to stick them with it by a left click. For it to strike you have to be the right distance from the target and in melee mode. This is really hard to do in an actual melee. Bayonets work well when making a frontal attack but are very hard to use once everyone gets mixed up together and to close. There is a non-bayonet mode where you swing your rifle which is better for these close encounters. But the officers dominate in close contact because their pistol can be easily used at short range and their swords don't have the draw back of requiring almost a ten foot separation from your target to work.
Other little bits of realism in the game are if you mount your bayonet your shooting suffers. The gun aiming becomes difficult due to motion limiting you to hitting at only about 100 feet. You have to take the bayonet off if you want to ever hit anyone at 100 yards.