Samz

Signal Ops is a game that can best be described as a somewhat more simplistic but properly stealth focused Strike Force that I've started properly playing and am a few hours in:

https://www.gog.com/en/game/signal_ops

https://store.steamp...770/Signal_Ops/

Strike Force has more stealth than it's reputation claims but it's mostly 1-Commando missions when being sneaky which is my biggest complaint.

In Signal Ops, you play as an officer commanding your agents out in the field from a bunker (which also means you can see every view of every Agent at the same time on various TV screens.)

In addition, you get to control up to 4 agents at a time.

That said it's an indie game, so it's a bit less in-depth than Strike Force:

Combat is very simplistic, every character has infinite ammunition for their guns and most guns are inaccurate to encourage stealth. (In addition don't expect enemy vehicles, as far as I've played there's only regular troops and the occasional truck that drops off more troops if the alarm is raised.)

In addition you still can't move bodies, you can "hold up" enemies by interacting with them from behind, which makes them surrender which doesn't raise the alarm if another enemy finds them. (which is a bit odd but it does at least give it a purpose.)

You'll also encounter Civilians, they don't pay attention to unarmed Agents/Agents carrying tools like Wrenches or the Powerfinder but if they're visibly carrying a weapon then they'll run to the nearest alarm if you don't hold them up or kill them.

You can actually order Agents you aren't playing, to tell them to attack specific enemies, move to locations, follow you or even use their special abilities though the pathfinding is a bit bad. (and leaving an Agent aiming down their sights will put them in a guard state where they'll shoot all enemies they see automatically.) 

Agents are also pretty simplistic with them only having 1-2 unique abilities though each Agent has their own stats for health, speed and effectiveness with each individual firearm.

For instance:

Bolt carries the team's radio and has a "powerfinder" that can discover power sources to keep it charged that doubles as a taser.

The Spy can talk to enemies to distract them and is a seemingly harmless old man so all enemies ignore him but he's also a bit too old for fieldwork and doesn't remember how to use guns, making him purely distraction/scouting. 

Wrench carries a wrench for wacking enemies and can unlock/lock doors/manholes to let the team break into areas.

Scope can throw melee weapons to kill enemies silently at a distance and carries a sniper rifle, he will also automatically aim (but not fire) his rifle at enemies with a dedicated button to make him fire.

Demo can turn dropped weapons into bombs, either to place as mines (With enough weapons upgrading the bomb with a motion sensor and a luring device) or booby trap doors.

Oddly, you can have Agents die and the game continues, each map (So far at least) gives you 10 reinforcements who can be deployed after a cooldown to replace an Agent though there is an achievement for keeping everyone alive in every mission and it's a mission failure if all Agents are dead/arrested at once.

The game is also a bit janky as expected of an indie game but I do think it's a decent (for the most part) attempt at an FPS version of Commandos.

A mechanic that you will either like or hate is the Radio, you can only see what each Agent sees as long as they're in the radius of the radio, (You can actually give orders to Agents outside of the radio range but you can't see on their screen.)  if the radio is drained in the middle of transporting it, you can press a dedicated retreat button to have "Bolt", the Radioman, retreat to the nearest power supply to recharge it (or have non-Bolt Agents retreat to the radio radius if they were outside of it.)

You can also setup the radio at a power station, allowing Bolt to move around while keeping it charged and stationary as well as alter how it works as the game's one difficulty settting. (Hard is the pre-patches experience where it works as you expect, Normal makes it so areas you previously got radio coverage in still work even if the radio is dead and Easy gives you full map coverage from the start essentially making it redundant.)

There is also one mission early on about finding items via reading notes that I found a bit annoying, there is a steam guide for it thankfully but it was definitely the low point so far.

In addition the Police enemy type can sometimes I feel arrest your agents unfairly (which causes them to drop their weapons and be uncontrollable until another agent interacts with them) though "Military" enemies cannot do this thankfully.

I've started a Cutting Room Floor Page for Commandos Strike Force:

https://tcrf.net/Com...s:_Strike_Force

It's a site dedicated to documenting cut and unused content left-over in the files of games. (And Commandos 2 actually has a small page) 

I've started uploading my findings with the extracted game files to there and I welcome anyone who's found any unused content themselves to contribute to it.

For instance, it appears Resistance would have actually had all three Commandos be playable at one point. (There is unused subtitles for the German troops to start executing civilians as well as sequences with both the Green Beret and Sniper.)

If you've played C3/C3 HD on original difficulty, you have no doubt encountered the dreaded medikit bug:

Watch as a Commando get shot by an MP40 once and somehow the 5 mediktis he was carrying vanish into thin air, as seemingly all 5 medikits were used once.

However 3H on the new Rookie difficulty fixes this, presumably unintentionally or they'd have fixed it for original.

My theory is that once they realized C3 was either A: too short and/or B: how kinda overpowered guns were in C2 (After all, they nerfed ranges hard) that they nerfed medikits as either or both a way to discourage combat and make the game longer.

BUT the game's "auto-heal" system is (my theory, I haven't checked the code) seemingly checking just if "Commando health is lower than Medikit's maximum healing".

So with the low healing where several doses are needed to heal above this threshold this seemingly causes the game to instantly use several medikits instantly. (which HD Rookie fixes by having Medikits healing almost all your health.) 

That said, I have discovered a workaround that works in Both C3/C3HD for allowing you to always make maximum use out of medikits:

Find either a box or enemy corpse and store your medikits inside it and then after you take damage, take a medikit out individually (By holding shift) and then close your inventory after sustaining damage.

If you've sustained enough damage, it'll be auto-used, now repeat this process with the remaining medikits until they're no longer auto-used then put any remaining medikits back in the box.

You can test this yourself in "Stop the Train", kill the MP40 Gestapo near you at the start with your pistol to lure him in, place the medikits on his body and then have the nearby worker punch the Green Beret to near-death then kill him, if you take the entire stack off the body, they'll all be auto used for minimal health but if you take them out one at a time closing the inventory after each medikit, it only actually takes 3 medikits to nearly fully restore the Green Beret's health.

While it's not very well documented, Strike Force's difficulty options actually changed the missions slightly.

How much depends on the mission (Most of the missions are honestly pretty just changed in damage/health values) but some missions actually saw some decent changes such as:

The defense mission "White Alamo" goes from 3 boxes of 2 mines each (Easy) to only 1 box (Unlockable Commando difficulty) of mines. (Meaning you have to destroy at least one of the armored vehicles yourself with Panzerfausts as there's no longer enough mines to destroy them all and in general the combat heavy defensive levels have less pickups for grenades.)

The Spy loses his starting PPK in a few levels and there's generally less ammo for the PPK laying around, for "Trapped" and "The Wolf's Den", this actually changes the level decently as the Spy no longer gets the PPK at all in Trapped meaning you're reliant on his garrote for stealth kills. (Replaced with a Luger on Hard but no sidearm at all on Commando until you take a Luger from a dead enemy.) and in The Wolf's Den the one PPK mid-level that you normally use as an ammo pick-up is now the only PPK you get. 

The level "Cat's Eyes" on lower difficulties has a (how long depends on difficulty) alarm timer if you get spotted in the stealth section, allowing you to either kill the enemy that spotted you before he alerts the rest of the map or rush for the enemy radio station and take it over as the Spy before they manage to radio for help and fail the mission however Commando difficulty removes this timer, turning this part of the mission into complete stealth as getting spotted at all will fail the mission. (Outside of when the Spy is in the radio area just before going to the action-heavy part of the mission.) 

While not alot, I would love to see the actual RTS games adopt this mindset towards difficulty settings and expand on it:

Such as more armored vehicles you have to deal with in certain missions like if the Stalingrad mission in C3 got additional enemy tanks you had to deal with.

Reducing the amount of resources available such as less grenades to wipe out groups of enemies, less poison for the Spy's syringe and less sniper rifle ammo. 

C2 already lightly did this but to my knowledge mostly the difficulty levels did was just add additional regular enemies (which Strike Force also did), it never went as far as reducing your available resources or adding enemies that were more than just ordinary soldiers.

Commandos 3 was clearly a bit unfinished when it was released. (As the Publisher Eidos was in financial trouble, a similar issue happened with Tomb Raider The Angel of Darkness by the same publisher released the same year.)

Anyone else wonder if the Thief was cut from Stalingrad?

Most of my evidence comes from the last mission but there are a oddities in Protect General O'Donnel to get out of the way first:

The second half of that mission involves several empty buildings and an armored vehicle that weirdly guards one of these out of the way empty buildings instead of the plane, I may be wrong but it wouldn't surprise me if there was intended to be an objective here. (such as maybe finding the Thief here if he was intended to be here but this is a pure blind guess.)

Regardless the level I am actually convinced he was cut from is Kill the Traitor:

First off, in the Hotel with the Sniper Rifle as if you go to the top floor, there is an Officer and if you search his inventory you can find lockpicks which only the Thief can use.

 20231015204510_1.jpg   60.76KB   13 downloads

Secondly, once O'Donnel leaves his safehouse, you can actually enter it and find a small area with an office.

 20231015212051_1.jpg   69.96KB   13 downloads

My theory is that the Thief was at some point present, either captured alongside the rest of the team in Stalingrad, tagged along with the Spy for the rescue mission or was captured in a different mission with the Spy already in Berlin to rescue him. (After all this Hotel has a basement area that's pointless, perhaps he was trapped in there somehow.) 

After all, C3's tutorial teaches you about opening safes with the Thief, which never comes up again (Not even the locked boxes from C2 appear.) but what if O'Donnel took secret documents with him when he came to Berlin and we actually needed the Thief to unlock the safe they were stored in before making our escape?

As for why he was potentially cut, aside from the possible usual suspect of them not having time to complete it:

This would highly "favor" both the Sniper method for O'Donnel as you'd have to enter the hotel anyway to complete the mission and the "unorthodox" grenade method (Where you climb to the rooftop of the building and throw grenades down to destroy his car and kill O'Donnel and all the nearby Gestapo members.) since you'd be clearing out all the Gestapo that guard the building.

Of course, this is all speculation but I thought I'd share it.