The Timer

[FaLX]

It seems this game, for some reason, has attracted a lot of teenagers that complain about the timer. This particular group of players have grown up in in the gaming equivalent of 'safe spaces' and have little to no comprehension of analytic qualities of particular game elements. Therefore, let us discuss the timer, which has several purposes.
Firstly, it provides you with limited immersion - a roleplay factor. Being a commander means you are part of a larger plan and therefore you do not have infinite time to execute orders at your own fancy. You proceed as expected and hope you don't get massacred.
Secondly, timer limits the available tactial options thus preventing AI from being over-exploited. The main issue of many an arcade game in Total War series, Paradox interactive games etc. is that the AI is just retarded. Due to lack of constraints there are so many ways to exploit the game there is little space for 'experiencing the game as it should be', like the old days of doom where you literally go room to room as intended. None of that open world and arcade stuff we find these days. So the timer basically constrains the player and allows AI to function much better than in other titles within the strategy games market.
Thirdly, creates a challenge. Now this is the positive part, I've played the campaign limited amount of times and mostly as South thus I haven't found the meta of the game. Yet, the timer constraints push to make use of your troops in accordance to tactical necessities. Too often do you see threads about 'kill boxes' and '10:1 K/D' boasts, forgetting that when you are thrown into a new setting, where most of the chess pieces move themselves, you have limited space in which to act and therefore are presented with an 'experience' of the game. You cannot replay the same mission so many times as to maximize K/D or whatever factor to perfection thus each play is a combination of experimentation and authenticity. And this is possible due to the constraint of time. Without timer this game would be a jerk off contest without any meaning to it.

In conclusion, I really fail to understand why people thing that timer is objectively bad? I've seen a lot of arguments that people dislike timer, but it's just salt being thrown around without showing that timer is inherently bad for this game. I get frustrated by lack of time, but it's more frustrating to find time to play this game in the first place rather than running out of time in a mission.

[Koro]

Well summed up I think. Much of the game functionality comes from the timer. Without the, a complete redesign is required.

[Operation Iraqi Freikorps]

I enjoy the challenge provided by the timer. With out it, I may have been wiped out in some defense battles or just sat with unlimited ammo shelling the enemy without risking any infantry. Overall I enjoy the timer, and despite playing the campagin several times, am still shocked by the sudden change in the battlefield as more men suddenly join.

[Spicy Camel]

There are couple of things I don't like about game timer:
- if you complete objective before timer runs out, you receive next objective and another 2 (or whatever) hours, no matter how many unspent time you had before
- overtimes. No indication if there will be overtime and how long it will be. Stones River for example has huge overtime, like 6 hours (maybe even more).

But I agree that saying timer is bad is the same as saying that limited money/recruits/weapons is bad. Whole point of the game is to take objectives in limited time with limited forces.

[Koro]

Originally posted by ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥:

There are couple of things I don't like about game timer:
- if you complete objective before timer runs out, you receive next objective and another 2 (or whatever) hours, no matter how many unspent time you had before
- overtimes. No indication if there will be overtime and how long it will be. Stones River for example has huge overtime, like 6 hours (maybe even more).

But I agree that saying timer is bad is the same as saying that limited money/recruits/weapons is bad. Whole point of the game is to take objectives in limited time with limited forces.

There is definitely room for improvement in timer functionality :).

[Hat8]

"It takes a high IQ to play to Ultimate General Civil War"

[[TFM]bobcat]

As I have said in other threads on this topic I have never been unduly inconvenienced by the timer. It is very possible to win any othe battles at most ideal k/d rates well within the time frames of the battles

[🍁 Seb]

Originally posted by AerialTank:

It seems this game, for some reason, has attracted a lot of teenagers that complain about the timer. This particular group of players have grown up in in the gaming equivalent of 'safe spaces' and have little to no comprehension of analytic qualities of particular game elements. Therefore, let us discuss the timer, which has several purposes.
Firstly, it provides you with limited immersion - a roleplay factor. Being a commander means you are part of a larger plan and therefore you do not have infinite time to execute orders at your own fancy. You proceed as expected and hope you don't get massacred.
Secondly, timer limits the available tactial options thus preventing AI from being over-exploited. The main issue of many an arcade game in Total War series, Paradox interactive games etc. is that the AI is just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Due to lack of constraints there are so many ways to exploit the game there is little space for 'experiencing the game as it should be', like the old days of doom where you literally go room to room as intended. None of that open world and arcade stuff we find these days. So the timer basically constrains the player and allows AI to function much better than in other titles within the strategy games market.
Thirdly, creates a challenge. Now this is the positive part, I've played the campaign limited amount of times and mostly as South thus I haven't found the meta of the game. Yet, the timer constraints push to make use of your troops in accordance to tactical necessities. Too often do you see threads about 'kill boxes' and '10:1 K/D' boasts, forgetting that when you are thrown into a new setting, where most of the chess pieces move themselves, you have limited space in which to act and therefore are presented with an 'experience' of the game. You cannot replay the same mission so many times as to maximize K/D or whatever factor to perfection thus each play is a combination of experimentation and authenticity. And this is possible due to the constraint of time. Without timer this game would be a jerk off contest without any meaning to it.

In conclusion, I really fail to understand why people thing that timer is objectively bad? I've seen a lot of arguments that people dislike timer, but it's just salt being thrown around without showing that timer is inherently bad for this game. I get frustrated by lack of time, but it's more frustrating to find time to play this game in the first place rather than running out of time in a mission.

Excellent article and good reflection/comments on which I completely agree. We have to see it a bit like a game of chess. ♖ With a timer ...

What disappoints me from this game is the absence of multiplayer & Co-Op modes {really both}. Period.

The game would have taken an epic dimension with these two modes. Epic with an "E" of Majesty, I say. 👑

[Ninjasquirrel]

Why can't people just accept that time is an important (if not he most important) factor in military planning? I'm frustrated when people say their plan works but the stupid timer just won't give them enough time to carry it out.

[🍁 Seb]

Originally posted by Ninjasquirrel:

Why can't people just accept that time is an important (if not he most important) factor in military planning? I'm frustrated when people say their plan works but the stupid timer just won't give them enough time to carry it out.

They are more comfortable with games in which they can plan slowly {🐢 turtles speed..} all of their movements on a battlefield. It's normal and it happens a little to everyone, depending on the type of game.

In my case, I'm not very good in FPS type DeathMatch games, but I was very good at DeathMatch in X-Wing Alliance (yes I know, I'm an 43 old timer gamer no need to remind me, lol 😄).

[Soap]

Originally posted by AerialTank:

It seems this game, for some reason, has attracted a lot of teenagers that complain about the timer. This particular group of players have grown up in in the gaming equivalent of 'safe spaces' and have little to no comprehension of analytic qualities of particular game elements. Therefore, let us discuss the timer, which has several purposes.
Firstly, it provides you with limited immersion - a roleplay factor. Being a commander means you are part of a larger plan and therefore you do not have infinite time to execute orders at your own fancy. You proceed as expected and hope you don't get massacred.
Secondly, timer limits the available tactial options thus preventing AI from being over-exploited. The main issue of many an arcade game in Total War series, Paradox interactive games etc. is that the AI is just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Due to lack of constraints there are so many ways to exploit the game there is little space for 'experiencing the game as it should be', like the old days of doom where you literally go room to room as intended. None of that open world and arcade stuff we find these days. So the timer basically constrains the player and allows AI to function much better than in other titles within the strategy games market.
Thirdly, creates a challenge. Now this is the positive part, I've played the campaign limited amount of times and mostly as South thus I haven't found the meta of the game. Yet, the timer constraints push to make use of your troops in accordance to tactical necessities. Too often do you see threads about 'kill boxes' and '10:1 K/D' boasts, forgetting that when you are thrown into a new setting, where most of the chess pieces move themselves, you have limited space in which to act and therefore are presented with an 'experience' of the game. You cannot replay the same mission so many times as to maximize K/D or whatever factor to perfection thus each play is a combination of experimentation and authenticity. And this is possible due to the constraint of time. Without timer this game would be a jerk off contest without any meaning to it.

In conclusion, I really fail to understand why people thing that timer is objectively bad? I've seen a lot of arguments that people dislike timer, but it's just salt being thrown around without showing that timer is inherently bad for this game. I get frustrated by lack of time, but it's more frustrating to find time to play this game in the first place rather than running out of time in a mission.

I don't get it why there is a need to tell people how to play a single player campaign.
If i wanted to add 100000000$ to my game, how it's this affecting your game?

Many roads lead to rome, but you make it sound like you want to dictate how people play, or how and what they should enjoy.

Sure the AI is dumb and is being exploited, so what does a little more hurt?

I personally think that this is one of the better games to come out in a long time, but there are things i would like to see added or changed.

The game is very playable, but at times i feel all tactics are abandoned, and it becomes a red army bum rush.

I prefer big scale organized attacks, some may call it turtle, and they are welcome to it.

When i play Steel Division multiplayer, and want my game quick and brutal.

But when i play Ultimate Commander Civil War, i want to be able to move my troops around, probe for weak spots, lock dont some units so I can move on the flank and around.

So if the DEV added no time limit, or add more time in the options, i might use it from time to time, since that's how i want to play UCCW.

Well that's my two cents, and its comes down to this, in single player games give the gamer as many options as possible so they can have the best time they want.

[[TFM]bobcat]

I am not the OP so I cannot speak in their stead but as I understand it the purpose of this thread is not to tell you how to play but merely to state that timers are a reality of the game that the player has to adapt to. Some games pride themselves on offering the player the widest range of options to allow them to play in whatever way they choose to. Other games, however, are designed to provide a very specific kind of experience that precludes the same degree of choice found in the previous type of games. You can feel free to edit the game yourself in whatever way you see fit for your own enjoyment through available modding programs that I have been told are fairly easy to use but the vanilla experience is and will remain the way that the developers intended for it to be because it is in line with their vision of how the game should be.

More specifically about the timer, I fail to see how you could not have enough time in battles to perform maneuvers. I long, long ago learned in this game that frontal assaults are a good way to lose the campaign which is why in every battle I fight that has me on the offensive I always attack from the flanks or even from the rear. At no point in any of said battles have I ever found that the timer prevented me from leisurely walking my men into attack position and proceeding to win the battle without any concern that I might not have sufficient time to achieve my objectives. If anything, more often than not, battles will see me having my troops standing around waiting for time to tick by rather than scrambling to finish in time. This is not to say that there aren't battles where the timer can be a bit wonky but such battles are decidedly in the minority.

[FaLX]

OP HERE WITH AN UPDATE

Originally posted by NAF-DEADMIKE-5th.Legion-:

i lose battles because im not willing to send my troops into a melee slaughter,to keep up with the countdown timer. same problem i had with UG:G. i had hoped it was not a thing in this title, but it is :(.


what it does..it will kill any strategic freedom youd might have.
you cant deploy the strategy you would want to,because of the constant timepressure.
it keeps you in a very tight ,narrow "lane" of restriction.
in the last campaign with union,the time restriction kills the game for me, im forced to do an all out assault, not because its the smart thing to do, but simply because im fighting against the clock.
so sad,and the only negative thing i can say about this game.
removal of the timerestrictions would make this game perfect.

If whatever this person posted does not rattle your saber, send you to a field hospital for typhoid treatment or give you dysentery I have yet to give a full account of the importance of time.

Now, this person is demanding nothing less than making this game 'easy' by lifting 'time restriction'. This has an existential dilemma as this person cannot comprehend that the purpose of war is to bring about peace, meaning a swift ending of the said war. Without all the 'narrowing down and "lane" restrictions' we would end up with another ♥♥♥♥♥♥ total war series title where sitting in a corner and camping with catapults is a plausible strategy.
Night follows day, men do not have infinite stamina to 'regenerate' and rations are limited, these are all inherently 'time' restrictions that you cannot possible implement in a game without expanding the scope of the game so much as to break its logic. Yet, you can abstract these concepts and add a 'timer' as a substitute for a tonne of various variables that would otherwise be a nightmare to work with, yet would not provide anything more than the timer does now.

Look at HOI series, it tries to do all these things and the entirety of PI forums look like bug reporting section (especially when a new expansion is lauched and the game % score on steam starts dropping cause of so many bugs).

Watch AoE II streams. In that game some community maps are made so that you have nearly infinite resources and all that matters is your production. So some people spam thrash units and instantaneous production rates and 'overcome' better/gold units. They do this by outspamming them thus slowly pushing the fight into the enemy base and thus 'capturing' objective aka destroying the base. Thus, the player that has a much, much higher K/D ratio loses because he is not playing the objective.

I think that a lot of these complainers play call of duty instead of day of infamy, and therefore should stick to TW series, and not UC series.

[Kim Jong Chill]

I think this game tries to emulate what commanding a battle would be like for this time period. For one you have to think that we already know how this war turned out and maybe bits and pieces of specific battles, but for the general of that battle, he only knows what is happening then and even then his strategic scope is limited. And so those that say the timer limits your strategic flexibility i say that its not the timer, rather your strategic creativity, that limits your flexibility. becuase even in real life there is always a timer that hangs over a generals head, for example if Napoleon had been able to battle Wellington at Waterloo one day earlier he very well may have won that battle and then been able to destroy the Prussian army in a seperate engagement, but he didn't meet that time and thus he lost. So complaining that you don't have enough time to use the strategy you want, you're ♥♥♥♥♥♥ right you don't have enough time so change your strategy and adapt to the situation. Even me for example I'm an excellent defender because i can use strategies like Elastic defense and Hedgehogs to pin the enemy and run the clock, in other words the entire point of a defensive strategy is to buy time. But on the offense I'm nowhere near as good, but thats because I want to have all the information before i make a decision (which is wholly unrealistic) and I can be indecicive means i can have trouble seizing the initiative and gaining the momentum required for an offensive strategy, because the whole point of an offensive strategy is to gain ground or eliminate your opponent. Essentially what im trying to say is strategies don't form time, time forms strategies.

TL;DR the timer is not the problem, you are.

And to anyone who doesn't like sending in their elite troops to the slaughter house just remeber, "Theres not to reason why, theres but to do and die."

[Ninjasquirrel]

Originally posted by AerialTank:

If whatever this person posted does not rattle your saber, send you to a field hospital for typhoid treatment or give you dysentery I have yet to give a full account of the importance of time.

Lol yeah that was the post that frustrated me.

[Caramirdan]

War without time isn't war. Practically the first thing you learn in basic training is there's a schedule for everything (EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and if you are late (whether it's your fault or not) there are consequences.
People who can't deal with time shouldn't play war games.